Essay on experience

‘No man’s knowledge here can go beyond his experience.’ Discuss the implications of this statement.

To acknowledge this statement is first and foremost to debunk the existence of a priori knowledge. A priori knowledge, by its very definition, represents a set of knowledge which is claimed to be independent of experience. Examples such as math, and definition, spring to mind: we know that a cube has six square sides, that 1+1=2, and that white is not black. To cut a long story short, a priori knowledge usually describes what we know that is independent of its existence in reality (if they even exist there in the first place!), usually claiming a place as some kind of ‘higher form’ of knowledge: it works in the domain of units, definitions, concepts, contrasts, and the imagination – which many would not define (!) as knowledge, especially in terms of definitions (eg. a cube by definition has six square sides, and that is why it is a cube).

The assertion of mathematical knowledge as an a priori system is contentious at best. For example, tn order to illustrate the arithmetic to the unintiated – such as when you attempt to explain the rules of addition to very small children – you tend to need to rely on physical stimulus, or a ‘live demonstration’. A child will not understand if you scratch out a page of ridiculously complicated proofs for 1+1=2 (and it exists: it can apparantly be found at http://www.mrtc.mdh.se/~icc/1+1=2.htm), and neither will the ordinary person on the street. And yet the ordinary person on the street probably knows the difference between one and two. If you asked them to prove 1+1=2, the odds are that they’ll take two things (say, apples) of identical value (to all intents and purposes) to demonstrate. This most basic and very physically-oriented mode of explaination of such concepts is what is usually used to educate small children, who live entirely on the most basic, sensual level. And all this little experiment really proves is to show that even math, that abstract school of philosophy that supposedly exists without reference to reality – at the most fundamental level, knowledge can only be transferred through empirical means. This instantly undermines all claims that math is strictly disconnected from the world as we know it because it can only be first perceived through reliance on reality. Therefore: we cannot deny reality on our terms even if were are to eventually conquer ‘a priori’ knowledge, meaning that no man’s knowledge here can go beyond his experience?

Moreover: if you asked an ordinary person on the street to prove 1+1=2, he will also very likely think you some kind of simpleton – because the explaination (an apple in each hand) is so elementary, he might say if were probed further. And he would be right. But herein lies the fault of a priori knowledge: increased assumption of its truth. Although these ‘truths’ eventually become the foundation of all our later knowledge, they evolve into what is commonly known as ‘common knowledge’, or, more accurately, canon: accepted, universal beliefs which have, for many, yet to be proved. Everyone knows that 1+1=2, but not everyone has read the Principia Mathematica (by Bertrand Russell and Alfred North Whitehead) in which the explaination for 1+1=2 is irrevocably proved, and few among those who have read it actually even understand it. For most of the few who have even heard of such proof for 1+1=2 they are content enough to ‘know’ (i.e. to be told, by some authority – isn’t this experience as well? We’ll cover that later) that such proof exists, feeling no urgent need to go and really find out for themselves. Can 1+1=2 for them and everyone else (apart from the people who understand the proof) be considered true ‘knowledge’? Without actually experiencing understanding, it should not be possible to say that one truly ‘knows’. ‘A priori’ – in this case – is clearly exposed as a sham. Not very similarly, one knows that black is not white only because one experiences black and white through vision: a person blind from birth could not tell the difference between black and white in the way the sighted can. If he knows there is a difference between black and white it will be because someone has described it to him, and even that is a sensory experience as well.

In fact, nobody can deny that we get our primary information through sensory experience. The eyes, ears, nose, tongue, skin perceive for our brains and obligingly feed it information through a complicated series of nodes, nuitrition, synapses, molecular physics and calcium ions. Given the delicate balances needed for this much underrated background mechanism to function at optimum level, errors are common and information is either misfed to the brain – or the brain itself malfunctions. The brain can also be misguided by complications so that it fails to process and discover hidden fallacies. Therefore we cannot know if the ‘knowledge’ we gather is ‘truth’. However, this is the best we can get – although weapons such as Occam’s Razor and proven logical structures aim to narrow the margin of error. Yet the stimului themselves are served to us on a level we cannot ignore, and we invariably, involuntary take this stimuli and the various almost-instantaneous conclusion drawn from it (in accordance to patterns of past experience) for truth – real knowledge – until second glance at least: this is why it can be said, on these terms, that no man’s knowledge can truly go beyond his experience.

Secondary information we often find through, as it were, second-hand information. Hearing accounts, reading, looking at diagrams, translating codes or understanding braille to absorb the (comparatively) first-hand accounts of the people who are describing such things through any such or similar medium may constitute what I define here as secondary information. And yet we are made by nature to access this secondary information through our senses – in effect experiencing the speaker’s experience first-hand. In learning through the experience of others, you actually experience this learning.

And what scientific knowledge? Many of the things science investigates concern things too big, too small, to deep in our bodies, or too far away relative to our everyday level of conciousness for us to observe. Our insights into such matters thus come mostly from ‘primary’ information obtained through instruments. Examples of two instruments with the same basic mechanics, roughly the same usage and radically different targets are telescopes and microscopes. While telescopes enlarge what is very far away to a fraction of its size so that it is at least visible, microscopes enlarge what is very near to thousands of times its real size or more – also so that it is at least visible. Both instruments are subject to error and the slightest inaccuracy may result in anomalous data. With the possibility for error doubled through sensory inaccuracy, human error as well as mechanical failure, can the act of taking scientific data through these instruments be classified as an experience, or an experience of an experience (by the instrument)? One way of resolving this is to point out that it is the experience of the eye peering down the tube of the microscope or telescope and what the brain makes of this experience that is what truly makes the knowledge, but even so it cannot be certain that true scientific knowledge exists because of the double veil of Chinese whispers. Experience alone cannot therefore validate our knowledge of the world in this sense.

Now comes the difficult part. Does the world even really exist, or have our senses – universally acknowledged to be so unreliable – been deceiving us for the whole time we have been ‘alive’? Solipsists argue that there is no way to know anything but the existence of personal thought because, for all you know, you could be a brain floating in a vat somewhere being fed illusions on reading this essay. Nothing this brain (you!) gains is real knowledge, just random impulses dictated by the almighty controlling device or the mad scientist of your choice. In fact, Descartes most famous quote ‘I think, therefore I am’ makes the same argument in promising no guarantee of knowledge of anything but your personal, experienced thought. His argument ran somewhat like this in a rather truncated form:

‘If I am thinking about whether I exist, the fact that I am thinking about it denies the possibility that my thinking conciousness may not exist – because I am thinking about it.’

Therefore, he concludes, true knowledge only exists in this little cogito ergo sum, which itself comes from the experience of thinking.

The new conundrum is now the difficulty of putting ‘thought’ in the same category as ‘experience’. Rationalists, in particular, insist that the two are distinct and separate entities. However, one cannot deny that one experiences not only thought, but brainwaves, fragments of a brilliant idea, carthartic turmoil, epiphanies. Many of these are not brought about by the conscious mind, but ‘come’ to us – sometimes against our ‘natural’ inclinations, usually due to its implications on impending change or personality. Dreams are another ambiguous proof of illogical, unwanted interference in what would otherwise be an impeccable rational construct as some would have it, and usually described in the same way by the layman as any event that happens to him in ‘real life’. So you could say that they are experiences in their own right. You could just as easily say that they are the culmination of the impulses gathered by the subconscious, which – ultimately – are still experiences, direct experiences, which are indirectly recorded and stored until whatever simulus brings them back out into the light of day in whatever form.

Experiences, it seems, are all we have to go by in the end: the only way to stop gaining experiences and from there, some measure of knowledge, is to become completely unconscious. The implications of the statement that no man is able to transcend this boundary here only echo, amazingly, the layman’s banal point of view in the real world as he experiences it – a point of view ironically probably also gained mainly from experience.


References:
Leibniz
Descartes
http://www.importanceofphilosophy.com/Irrational_APriori.html
http://www.iep.utm.edu/a/apriori.htm
Wikipedia