Observing My Experience
Meta-experience
I used to have bad teeth. I have false teeth now which is better. But for a while I had abscesses and couldn't afford a dentist. I learned to make the pain tolerable.
The technique was to concentrate on the pain rather than ignore it. If I did that I found that the actual pain stimulus from the abscess wasn't much worse than having skin clamped by a clothespin, which was painful but nowhere near as bad as before.
I found that fear of the small pain had my whole body wracked with a larger pain. Perceiving the smaller pain made the larger pain go away.
Lately I came to a new realization about that: I was observing my experience. Or put another way; I was experiencing my experience or having a meta-experience.
I think meta-experiences are more common than we think - we tend to think of ourselves as more unified than that somehow. For instance, I can wake up from a bad dream. The observation comes that this experience is a dream and I can wake up. The dream is an experience and the realization that I'm dreaming is an experience of the experience; a meta-experience.
Once my sense of balance was excellent; not gymnast level but way comfortable running and jumping and riding a bike. Those days are gone. I have a deficit in my vestibular system that upsets my sense of balance a lot.
Once balance was not a thing I experienced. It was an excellent system that I just used without thought. Now it's a thing I experience vividly and also I don't really have words for the experience.
My vestibular deficit is associated with a problem in my left inner ear but the vestibular system itself involves many other systems. It knows about the orientation of limbs. It knows how far away the ground is. When cataract surgery improved my 3d vision my balance improved.
Once, a year ago, there was a heavy snowfall and I went out on my daily errands. The vestibular problem makes walking in the snow tricky. At one point I couldn't get my feet to move forward. My feet just wouldn't step into that pile of slushy snow. Hmm I thought. I asked a man standing at the light if he'd help me across and he did. Smiles all round. But it strikes me looking back at the memory that I had the experience of not being able to walk forward and I vividly observed that.
And the philosopher in me goes "who's this 'I'" (paraphrasing an apocryphal moment between Tonto and the Lone Ranger. In this context we might say that the "I" is the observer.
Thinking in terms of meta-experiences leads easily to a kind of layered structure of levels. The experience is one level and the meta-experience is another level. I think the idea of 'levels of abstraction' is important in understanding how physical reality works. It's not much of a surprise to find the idea works when we experience.
A lot of what we perceive doesn't really get experienced. I walk up through Gastown and back each day and I know I don't experience a lot of what I see. There are 5 dead trees along Water St (alarmingly) but it took me many walks before I was sure of the figure - often when I passed a dead tree my attention was captured by something else even though the tree was there in visual field.
Gastown is the "historic" tourist area of Vancouver - brick tiled sidewalks and all. The sidewalks are always crowded with tourists an locals. We all move among each other without running into anyone. We need a level of awareness to do that but not much - it's more like autopilot.
I speculate that experience has many levels. A higher level is aware of the experience at a lower level. So we'd get (say) a structure like: visual cortex is aware of the info sent by the retina and other parts of the brain are aware of the information the visual cortex provides - like memory and the neocortex.
A structure of experience/meta-experience seems logically to require a top level. This top level is 'the observer'. As Jerry Fodor once quipped, "If there is a community of computers living in my head, there had also better be somebody who is in charge; and, by God, it had better be me."
what do you think?
I present regular philosophy discussions in a virtual reality called Second Life.
I set a topic and people come as avatars and sit around a virtual table to discuss it.
Each week I write a short essay to set the topic.
I show a selection of them here.