Brave AI gave me a nice clear explanation but this final paragraph confused me a bit:
Transmission Failure:
Sergent suggests that despite the logical simplicity of EE’s arguments, they fail to spread because integrating the framework requires traversing a "gap" where individuals must inhabit the conclusion that personal identity and external time are present-experiential structures rather than continuous external realities.
You ask us to drop our veils. To be alert and responsive to our feelings before all other considerations. It is simple but a gargantuan task. Our whole lives were led in an environment where expressing our true feelings was discouraged from birth.
For some the concept is beyond imagination and feels selfish at first glance.
The thing that gets me though is all of that is deeply down stream of the more simple burden of proof argument. Amazing how people can like smell the consequences and recoil unconsciously in advance?
I had a look at your SERTTA-2 paper and it's fairly easy to follow and quite logical.
However (there's always a however lol): for fear of bringing up the ghost of Wittgenstein et al., perhaps one problem here is that your 'step 1' is not in fact step 1. The reason is because you haven't adequately defined your two terms 'evidence' and 'experience'.
That's to say, by not deconstructing that word 'experience', you open your thesis up to lengthy counterargument, most of which will - ironically - focus on the definitions of 'evidence' and 'experience'. In particular, it may be the logical case that when we perform that deconstruction we realise that according to your (language game) use of those two terms, what you mean by 'evidence' and 'experience' is in fact exactly the same definition. In which case, you are effectively creating a circular argument, or a logical equation which essentially states A = B, where A and B are in fact the same thing and should result in the reworked equation A = A (or B = B). Actually, better would be 'E = E'.
The definition of 'Experience', for example. Yours appears to have the built-in definition 'everything is experience' (or experiential'). See, that's also an example of A = A (E = E). The denial of something outside of 'Experience = Everything' is built in to the definition.
Likewise, your definition of 'evidence' is built in to the Step 1 assumption 'E = E'. Your step 1, in other words, is not a logical step, it's a definition of terms. And those initial/starting terms thus, logically, define where you end up as a conclusion. In the same way that any computer model will only produce the result determined by the starting parameters programmed into the model.
Your Step 2, by this deconstructive analysis, is simply a re-stating of Step 1. 'Every piece of evidence for mind-independent material reality comes through experience. ' This is exactly the same equation as 'E = E' (or A = A or whatever). It is simply a different linguistic formulation.
You then jump to Step 3, which is the logical conclusion from your previous definition. Thus, by definition (i.e. the initial parameters) you have made it impossible to arrive at any different conclusion. Thus, it's circular reasoning.
We can possibly test this by imagining a definition of one or both of your two terms which does not result in our equation 'E = E'.
Possible option: two people on opposite sides of the world carry out an experiment at the same time, then only later do they share their results. It should be logically clear that 'at the time the experiment/evidence was carried out/obtained' person A has no 'experience' of person B - in other words, Experiment A has no 'experience' (experiential link) of experience B. Put differently 'Evidence A' is unconnected with (i.e. independent of) 'Evidence B'.
The link - i.e. the 'connection' between 'evidence' and 'experience' only happens after the 'evidence' and the 'experience' have occurred. Thus, at the time of the simultaneous equations, from a relative perspective E(A) does not equal E(B) in terms of our Evidence = Experience equation. The only way you could possibly equate E(A) with E(B) is retrospectively, and that - some might say - is what's known in philosophy as 'cheating' (lol).
Anyway - those are some thoughts from - ironically - an old philosophy student who utterly hated analytical philosophy! But I did, at least, pay attention when my lecturers were talking about deconstruction of definitions, and how most definitions as used in philosophy can indeed be deconstructed, and the act of deconstruction often reveals the axiom 'the predicate is in the subject'. That's to say, in a logical statement like 'A = B', when you deconstruct 'A' you realise that it already contains 'B', and is thus circular reasoning (cheating, some might say!).
Of course, if you have addressed this issue in a later paper, give me the link!
Basically my thesis is that experience is the primitive/primordial ground floor the way we generally think of time as being. Experience is the tray in which occurrence sits, not space/time/matter/energy. If not ontologically, then functionally, formally. (Which are distinct but not different on close examination.)
The circularity charge lands only if the claim is "experience equals everything by stipulation." It isn't. The claim is that every candidate for something non-experiential, on examination, unpacks entirely into experiential content. That's an invitation, not a definition. Try to describe a non-experiential thing without using vocabulary anchored in experience. The attempt fails not because a definition forbids it, but because there's no positive content to reach for. I push on this directly in Experientia Est: Name One Thing That Is Not a Subset of Experience, https://philpapers.org/rec/SEREEN
Evidence and experience aren't doing the same work in my usage. Experience is the medium. Evidence is a pattern inside the medium that licenses an inference. Saying evidence arrives through experience is like saying writing arrives through paper. The two are tied together without being identical.
Your two-experimenters case is a nice test, and I think it actually illustrates the point rather than breaking it. Describing "two people on opposite sides of the world running simultaneous experiments" already assumes a third perspective stitching A and B into a common frame. From inside A's experience at the time, there is no B. From inside B's, no A. The simultaneity and the independence of the two runs exist as facts only inside some later experiential synthesis, theirs once they compare notes or a narrator's who set up the scenario. Mind-independent simultaneity would require access to both events without experiencing either, which is precisely the thing under dispute.
That isn't cheating by retrospect. It's the honest account of how the correlation ever gets established. You can posit independent E(A) and E(B) prior to any comparison, but positing is itself an experiential act, and the assertion that they were really there and really simultaneous imports the mind-independent frame the three-step argument is asking you to justify. On that particular move see The Logical Impossibility of Externalism: Why "Outside Experience" Is Performative Contradiction, https://philpapers.org/rec/SERTLI-2
The deconstruction critique lands on frameworks that stipulate "experience is ontologically everything." EE's move is weaker and harder to get around. Don't assert what you can't access. That isn't the predicate hiding inside the subject. It's declining to write predicates you can't back up.
I read the SERTTT paper. I can understand how people reject your ideas because they are misunderstanding them, and take it personally/emotionally. My take is ironic because I am analysing it in terms of definitions, not in terms of 'my own mind'. If we remove 'my own mind' as the determinant of 'experience' then there is nothing emotionally negative or scary about your thesis at all. In fact, I think it reinforces your idea. This is the irony - it might seem like you are purporting to say something about the limits of human experience and knowledge but once we remove the human individual from it it strikes me that you are simply describing a sort of formalist attitude towards the scientific method - that's to say 'burden of proof' and suchlike.
Example. the laws of physics are part of the realm of experience. We can apply the laws of physics to infer something which is beyond human experience. For example a particle in a parallel universe. Nothing contradicts the existence of that, even if we can't 'verify' it by experience. But because it's within the laws of physics (epistemology) it is not - by definition - external.
This is what I meant by the tree in the forest example. Anyone who says 'no it doesn't make a sound' is being solipsist. Or anthropocentric, even. The laws of nature tell us it makes a sound, case closed. Not beyond experience, in other words.
Although I would say that it's important to clarify what is meant by 'experience'. Does this mean 'knowledge' or '(personal) perception' or 'conscious awareness' or 'ability to infer the existence of by use of known laws derived from experience', and so on. If your definition includes all of the above, then fine - the individual is no longer threatened. The world, and those we love, will indeed carry on after the body dies and we no longer experience them. And vice versa.
For lived experience, ultimately it doesn't matter whether your thesis is true or not. That's a further irony...
Coulda swore I already answered this, chores must have derailed me, I'm a live in technically homeless care giver. Sorry: The reading is careful, but the summary that EE amounts to a formalist attitude toward the scientific method is a domestication I need to resist. Burden of proof is a tool EE uses. The content is stronger: nothing non-experiential can even be coherently described, which is why externalist assertions fail their own evidential standard. That distinction is laid out in *Experientia Est: Name One Thing That Is Not a Subset of Experience*, https://philpapers.org/rec/SEREEN
That said, a distinction worth drawing. You can engage EE as a formalism without buying its ontological conclusions, and that entry point is legitimate. Agreement, understanding, and integration are three different cognitive events, and nobody has to be a Platonist to use calculus. So if what you want out of EE is the burden-of-proof methodology, that's a real thing it delivers. Flattening the formalism and the ontology together, though, loses what's actually distinctive. The separation is worked out in *The Three Thresholds: Why Experiential Empiricism Does Not Require Ontological Self-Deletion, and Why Most Resistance Assumes It Does*, https://philpapers.org/rec/SERTTT
The particle in a parallel universe inferred from the laws of physics is exactly the case EE handles differently than you're suggesting. Laws of physics are patterns in experience. Extending those patterns hypothetically into unobserved domains is an inferential act happening within experience. The inferred particle is a posit, and the claim that it exists mind-independently is the claim that needs justification. Folding inference-from-laws into "experience" broadens the term until it swallows externalism rather than addressing it. The case that treating physical law as itself the ground commits the same error as materialism is made in *Mathematical Platonism as Externalist Error*, https://philpapers.org/rec/SERMPA-4
On the tree: EE doesn't take the "no sound" side. That would be a stronger claim than the framework supports. EE says the sound is a reliable extension of observed experiential pattern. It will be on the recording, in the neighbor's ear, on the seismograph. What EE declines to assert is that the sound existed mind-independently when no one was there to check. The prediction is preserved. The extra metaphysical flag is lowered. That difference looks small until you notice how much work the flag was doing.
"What do you mean by experience" is the right question and the category has content. Experience is the felt quality of whatever is occurring: perception, thought, memory, inference, imagination, valence. Not "knowledge" in the propositional sense, since propositional knowledge is a structured subset. The category is meant to be maximal, not vague.
The last move I'd push back on is that for lived experience it doesn't matter whether the thesis is true. It matters ethically. If valenced experience is the terminus of meaning, then dismissing suffering for the sake of mind-independent abstractions (nation, ideology, future utopia, procedure, metaphysical necessity) loses its license. Every organized atrocity in history required some version of that dismissal to function. The historical case is made in *The Externalist Catastrophe: How Every Organized Atrocity Stems From The Same Unprovable Assumption*, https://philpapers.org/rec/SERTEC The framework is not neutral between optimizing for suffering reduction and optimizing around it.
That's interesting, because you're sort of anticipating thoughts which I had between writing my comment and now (I went away and had my supper - a glass of wine, I feel, is so wonderfully enhancing for philosophy).
Before I read your links here's a rundown of my interim thoughts. 1/ to expand a little more on where I was going with my argument-by-definition. It struck me that your Step 3 was in fact contained in your Step 1. That was my real point. You already defined 'Evidence' as 'that which can ONLY come from experience' - this is the same statement as your Step 3 'non-experiential evidence cannot exist' - it's a rewording of the same statement. In equation terms, instead of A = B, it's B = A. So each of your steps is simply a rewording of the same thing. That's what I was getting at.
2/ Here's an interesting observation. It's about 'scope' of experience. Take a blind human and a non-blind human. Clearly, their scope of experience is different. So the point about 'from whose experience' is not an invalid one. Human beings are 'limited' in the respect of 'not capable of experiencing the totality of existence'. In this way, the thesis and conclusion you have been describing is not a human one, it's a 'god' one. Assuming the ontological idea that 'God = entity which can experience everything' or 'god = entity for whom there is no non-experiential evidence', or 'god = epistemic totality' meaning logically 'nothing epistemic external to god can exist'.
In other words, you are no longer doing 'philosophy of mind' or even 'philosophy of science', you are doing ontological philosophy bordering on theology. That's an interesting observation of course.
3/ I forgot to mention the classic, well-known thought-experiment in philosophy of mind as it relates to epistemology, namely 'if a tree falls down in a forest and there's no one to see it does it make a sound'. The epistemological view of this depends entirely on the 'scope' of awareness of the 'perceiver'. Like 'how can a tree fall down in a forest without a perceiver' - if we define 'perceiver' as 'that which exists' (nature, the universe, etc.). If we were to reframe this question 'if a solitary tree, utterly alone in the black empty void of space beyond the known universe and outside the perception of 'god' falls down, does it make a sound' - the answer being obviously no because sound depends on air-disturbance, and our definition said there's no atmosphere surrounding this hypothetical void-tree. There's only a tree, hanging there in the nothing. So this is simply a question of 'definition of terms' - it's ontological, that is.
Despite the humour in that, it does make an important point about 'what is epistemology anyway?'. It struck me that what you were really doing with EE was not, in fact, providing an argument for 'mind-independent evidence doesn't exist' but rather a definition. A definition of epistemology itself, that is, which includes the predicate 'mind-independent evidence doesn't exist', or, put differently, 'it is impossible to epistemologically verify the existence of anything independent of mind'. That strikes me as a sort of self-evident definition, not necessarily an argument in the philosophy of mind. I think that's what I was intuitively getting at when I talked about deconstructing your steps. It's a very useful definition, for sure, especially for demonstrating the interconnectedness of everything.
Anyway, I'll be back a bit later once I've read your links... It's been quite a while since I did philosophy of mind so this is bringing stuff back from the buried depths of my long-suffering memory...
I mean I could reply now or later, I'll assume later, if you promise to actually come back XD :) But yea I got 92 papers adjacent to this stuff. Anticipation will happen XD Just say when :) https://philpeople.org/profiles/brandon-sergent/publications (You can also just ask any AI to represent/steelman my argument. Brandon sergent, google scholar, will basically present a cross section of my framework for review.)
I had another fun memory just now, which is another example of interconnected irony. When I had my interview at KCL (King's College London) when I was applying for uni the prof bloke who interviewed me asked me a question which went something like this: 'supposing I have a box with a turtle inside - how can you prove there's a turtle inside there without opening the box'. Or somesuch wording. Obviously at the time I hadn't really studied enough philosophy to say 'ah! You're asking me about the limits of experiential epistemology aren't you?!', so I think I just started waffling on about x, y, and z (I don't remember now). In retrospect, if I'd have said that insightful observation, he'd probably have just asked me what my opinion about the limits of epistemology were, so it amounts to the same thing and we'd have been back to square one.
I must've done ok in the interview though, because they did give me an offer...
I had a bright smart ass (and very kind) friend named john tell me about a similar exercise. Teacher went prove this chair is here. John's answer was dead pan "What chair?" :)
But yea that's how I got here. I just took the brain in a jar thought experiment and made it into a burden of proof argument.
Okay, I asked Gemini "Can you explain to me Brandon Sergent’s Experiential Empiricism?" and what she presented to me is very clear and understandable. I now see what you mean by your ideas dissolve (rather than address) a lot of mind-bending problems (like the hard problem of consciousness). Here's what she said about the problem of other minds: "Acknowledges that other minds are formally unprovable, but frames the ethical response in terms of asymmetric risk. Given the risk of ignoring real suffering, treating suffering reports as authoritative is the only rational protocol." That is very much how I understand things in my more lucid moments. But it's hard to live along happily with that concept in mind, because it means everyone I react with might not have any true reality other than my experiencing something that might be but isn't necessarily another person like the self I often imagine I am. In other words, it makes me feel I might be the only awareness that exists and I'm experiencing a very detailed and gut-wrenching simulation., perhaps imagining others like me to keep from going crazy. How do you avoid feeling that way? Or do you just accept it?
When you say your system dissolves all the hard problems, doesn't that imply that if everyone just accepted what you say, they would all stop trying to understand how things (meaning things they imagine to be real) work, and just sit back and do nothing and let the simulation roll on?
Another hard problem not mentioned, a hard problem of a different kind, is death. Do you think our experiencing will come to an end at some point?
Isn't another hard problem this: yes, the only thing I know for sure is my own experience, but what is making that experience happen? Or somewhat related, why am I experiencing anything at all (similar to why is there something rather than nothing)?
Thank you so much for the reading and doing the exercise! I am very happy as a result. This really is scalable thanks to ai. Millions of people could explore EE at once without me being there to screw it up XD You just proved it.
"How do you avoid feeling that way? Or do you just accept it?"
Being honest, any answer I could give would be post hoc. The ground truth is that for whatever reason the question doesn't bother me. I can speculate why. Maybe it's that I simply believe other people are there and feel stuff. Maybe that's my version of faith. And thus I keep the formalism about what I can and can't prove separate. Or maybe the asymmetry is so overwhelming that my back brain considers the matter solved because be course of action is so overwhelmingly clear.
Also, imagine if you had a way to prove other people felt stuff, you still wouldn't go around doing it all the time. You'd just get on with your day. You don't poke every step with a stick first before stepping. You just assume it's gonna hold. Same deal, kinda.
"When you say your system dissolves all the hard problems, doesn't that imply that if everyone just accepted what you say, they would all stop trying to understand how things (meaning things they imagine to be real) work, and just sit back and do nothing and let the simulation roll on?"
Well firstly that would never happen. Humanity doesn't homogenize like that. I feel we've evolved expressly not to. That was my original theory for where fact immunity came from: diversity of thought protection.
Secondly though, the anti-suffering project is more than enough meaningful work. We don't need fake problems, we have more than enough real ones XD
"Do you think our experiencing will come to an end at some point?"
Firstly, not that we'd be there to notice. "When death is, I am not, when I am, death is not." Secondly, I can't even prove I was the same person 5 minutes ago. Who I am is fully presented in the present moment. I'd rather not die, of course, but the idea of not existing isn't directly scary to me, it's more, depressing I guess? But I regard it as solvable, which is why it's depressing. Trees and turtles have solved this problem. We should too.
"but what is making that experience happen? Or somewhat related, why am I experiencing anything at all (similar to why is there something rather than nothing)?"
Exactly! It's just a root question. Why is there something rather than nothing. I have a whole paper on this. Every ontology/framework has such foundational unanswerables. EE's is just right up front and boring: Experience is.
I often think what you said in your reply. If death comes and there's nothing after, we (or I) won't care because I won't exist. Death itself doesn't seem scary to me (if there's something after, that should be interesting, if nothing, I won't care), but dying does seem scary. Though what good is there in worrying about it ahead of time? Enough time to worry about when it starts happening. In the meantime, have fun!
You say, "Secondly though, the anti-suffering project is more than enough meaningful work. We don't need fake problems, we have more than enough real ones." Very true that the anti-suffering project provides near endless meaningful work. But what about, say, science? Would you consider science a fake problem? Science can sometimes help ease suffering, but a lot of it is learning what supposed reality is like without tying investigations to eliminating suffering. But all the information gathering seems to yield a lot of fascinating stuff.
Yea dying itself is probably awful, certainly it can be at least. But that's why all the hospice people are heroes.
Science is still science under EE, it's just absent the ontological story about "matter." My position is that science was always doing EE to the very extent that it worked in the first place. https://philpapers.org/rec/SERTFR
It's still always just patterns and predictions. That doesn't change at all.
Thank you for exploring my work to the extent you do, I'm glad you're getting anything out of it. I find my work palliative. But I can't be sure how others receive it. To me this is all very comforting, but then I'm very weird, so who knows.
You wanna co-author a paper? All I ask is that you navigate the actual submission process. I've not had the best of luck alone: https://philpapers.org/rec/SERIBH (Standing offer to anyone who can read this BTW.)
Experiential empiricism, EE, is easily defensible. The problem is, you treat experiential empiricism from the terminus of our human perspective, rather than a coordinate outside of perspective. You stop at "experience is primary" and declare the case is closed, when the more rigorous move is to ask what that implies about the structure of totality.
If reality is genuinely polar, dynamic, and coherent, which it has proven to be at every measurable scale, then the question "which came first, experience or substrate?" is the wrong question entirely. It assumes a linear sequence in a place where there is none. Outside of time, both poles are always already present. Both are true, simultaneously. That is the paradoxical nature of the universe: experience requires both something to be experienced and something doing the experiencing, and whatever that relation is, it precedes the question of which side is "first."
That's not a refutation of EE, it's an expansion that your framework can't accommodate because you've identified one pole in a dynamic system and called it complete.
You argue that time and space are inside present experience, along with everything else, but my response would be that while time and space DO exist within experience, and you are right about that, they ALSO exist outside of experience, because time and space are what make experience possible at all, therefore both exist independently of it, with experience itself being their emergent property.
In summary, appearing within experience isn't the same as originating there. If time and space are what make experience possible, that means they exist independently of it. If experience is what happens when time and space converge, then that makes experience the emergent property of previous conditions: time and space, and therefore, not the "ground floor."
The central move in your argument is the phrase "time and space are what make experience possible." That phrase does a lot of work, and it's exactly where burden of proof applies. You're asserting a causal or constitutive relationship in which time and space are prior to experience, but every piece of evidence for that relationship is itself an experiential datum. The reasoning is circular in the same way materialism's is: using experience to prove what supposedly precedes and produces experience.
"Appearing within experience isn't the same as originating there" is only true if you already have a framework in which things can originate outside experience and then appear within it. That framework is the assumption under examination, not a premise you can bring in to settle the question.
The polar/dynamic framing is interesting but doesn't escape this problem. Asserting that both poles are "always already present" outside time still requires justification for what "present" means in a context allegedly independent of experience. You'd need to establish that a mind-independent substrate exists before using its properties to explain experience, and that establishment has to happen through experience, which reintroduces the circularity.
This is covered in more detail in Why Experience Cannot Be Explained: Structure Is Definitional, Not Additional (https://philpapers.org/rec/SERTCC) and The Magic Microscope: Why You Cannot Dig Beneath Experience (https://philpapers.org/rec/SERTMM-3). The short version is that "what generates experience" commits a category error: the investigation tool for answering that question is experience itself, so no answer can be non-circular.
EE doesn't claim experience has no structure or that no regularities exist. It claims that positing a mind-independent substrate to explain those regularities adds no explanatory content while violating burden of proof. That's not a failure to accommodate your expansion. It's a prior question about whether the expansion is doing any work.
Brave AI gave me a nice clear explanation but this final paragraph confused me a bit:
Transmission Failure:
Sergent suggests that despite the logical simplicity of EE’s arguments, they fail to spread because integrating the framework requires traversing a "gap" where individuals must inhabit the conclusion that personal identity and external time are present-experiential structures rather than continuous external realities.
I'm so excited that you're even taking the time to look this deep.
And yea there's a whole suite of ee meta papers i have. Basically i have not had one person make me feel like they understand the move i'm making.
https://innomen.substack.com/p/epistemic-dark-matter
https://innomen.substack.com/p/convergence-protection
To me EE is dead simple at root, but apparently not?
See also, about levels of uptake (I'm only looking for the first.) https://philpapers.org/rec/SERTTT
You ask us to drop our veils. To be alert and responsive to our feelings before all other considerations. It is simple but a gargantuan task. Our whole lives were led in an environment where expressing our true feelings was discouraged from birth.
For some the concept is beyond imagination and feels selfish at first glance.
Thank you for the kind words.
That is Exactly it. They are trained to feel guilty for honoring their own moral agency... The damage has been catastrophic.
https://philpapers.org/rec/SERWAS-3 (work evil)
https://philpapers.org/rec/SERTEC (atrocity origin)
https://philpapers.org/rec/SERTTC-3 ("solipsism")
The thing that gets me though is all of that is deeply down stream of the more simple burden of proof argument. Amazing how people can like smell the consequences and recoil unconsciously in advance?
You might like this one also:
https://innomen.substack.com/p/the-nurses-were-right
I had a look at your SERTTA-2 paper and it's fairly easy to follow and quite logical.
However (there's always a however lol): for fear of bringing up the ghost of Wittgenstein et al., perhaps one problem here is that your 'step 1' is not in fact step 1. The reason is because you haven't adequately defined your two terms 'evidence' and 'experience'.
That's to say, by not deconstructing that word 'experience', you open your thesis up to lengthy counterargument, most of which will - ironically - focus on the definitions of 'evidence' and 'experience'. In particular, it may be the logical case that when we perform that deconstruction we realise that according to your (language game) use of those two terms, what you mean by 'evidence' and 'experience' is in fact exactly the same definition. In which case, you are effectively creating a circular argument, or a logical equation which essentially states A = B, where A and B are in fact the same thing and should result in the reworked equation A = A (or B = B). Actually, better would be 'E = E'.
The definition of 'Experience', for example. Yours appears to have the built-in definition 'everything is experience' (or experiential'). See, that's also an example of A = A (E = E). The denial of something outside of 'Experience = Everything' is built in to the definition.
Likewise, your definition of 'evidence' is built in to the Step 1 assumption 'E = E'. Your step 1, in other words, is not a logical step, it's a definition of terms. And those initial/starting terms thus, logically, define where you end up as a conclusion. In the same way that any computer model will only produce the result determined by the starting parameters programmed into the model.
Your Step 2, by this deconstructive analysis, is simply a re-stating of Step 1. 'Every piece of evidence for mind-independent material reality comes through experience. ' This is exactly the same equation as 'E = E' (or A = A or whatever). It is simply a different linguistic formulation.
You then jump to Step 3, which is the logical conclusion from your previous definition. Thus, by definition (i.e. the initial parameters) you have made it impossible to arrive at any different conclusion. Thus, it's circular reasoning.
We can possibly test this by imagining a definition of one or both of your two terms which does not result in our equation 'E = E'.
Possible option: two people on opposite sides of the world carry out an experiment at the same time, then only later do they share their results. It should be logically clear that 'at the time the experiment/evidence was carried out/obtained' person A has no 'experience' of person B - in other words, Experiment A has no 'experience' (experiential link) of experience B. Put differently 'Evidence A' is unconnected with (i.e. independent of) 'Evidence B'.
The link - i.e. the 'connection' between 'evidence' and 'experience' only happens after the 'evidence' and the 'experience' have occurred. Thus, at the time of the simultaneous equations, from a relative perspective E(A) does not equal E(B) in terms of our Evidence = Experience equation. The only way you could possibly equate E(A) with E(B) is retrospectively, and that - some might say - is what's known in philosophy as 'cheating' (lol).
Anyway - those are some thoughts from - ironically - an old philosophy student who utterly hated analytical philosophy! But I did, at least, pay attention when my lecturers were talking about deconstruction of definitions, and how most definitions as used in philosophy can indeed be deconstructed, and the act of deconstruction often reveals the axiom 'the predicate is in the subject'. That's to say, in a logical statement like 'A = B', when you deconstruct 'A' you realise that it already contains 'B', and is thus circular reasoning (cheating, some might say!).
Of course, if you have addressed this issue in a later paper, give me the link!
Basically my thesis is that experience is the primitive/primordial ground floor the way we generally think of time as being. Experience is the tray in which occurrence sits, not space/time/matter/energy. If not ontologically, then functionally, formally. (Which are distinct but not different on close examination.)
The circularity charge lands only if the claim is "experience equals everything by stipulation." It isn't. The claim is that every candidate for something non-experiential, on examination, unpacks entirely into experiential content. That's an invitation, not a definition. Try to describe a non-experiential thing without using vocabulary anchored in experience. The attempt fails not because a definition forbids it, but because there's no positive content to reach for. I push on this directly in Experientia Est: Name One Thing That Is Not a Subset of Experience, https://philpapers.org/rec/SEREEN
Evidence and experience aren't doing the same work in my usage. Experience is the medium. Evidence is a pattern inside the medium that licenses an inference. Saying evidence arrives through experience is like saying writing arrives through paper. The two are tied together without being identical.
Your two-experimenters case is a nice test, and I think it actually illustrates the point rather than breaking it. Describing "two people on opposite sides of the world running simultaneous experiments" already assumes a third perspective stitching A and B into a common frame. From inside A's experience at the time, there is no B. From inside B's, no A. The simultaneity and the independence of the two runs exist as facts only inside some later experiential synthesis, theirs once they compare notes or a narrator's who set up the scenario. Mind-independent simultaneity would require access to both events without experiencing either, which is precisely the thing under dispute.
That isn't cheating by retrospect. It's the honest account of how the correlation ever gets established. You can posit independent E(A) and E(B) prior to any comparison, but positing is itself an experiential act, and the assertion that they were really there and really simultaneous imports the mind-independent frame the three-step argument is asking you to justify. On that particular move see The Logical Impossibility of Externalism: Why "Outside Experience" Is Performative Contradiction, https://philpapers.org/rec/SERTLI-2
The deconstruction critique lands on frameworks that stipulate "experience is ontologically everything." EE's move is weaker and harder to get around. Don't assert what you can't access. That isn't the predicate hiding inside the subject. It's declining to write predicates you can't back up.
Fun fact, you'll be the first other than me if you can really get this to any degree. https://philpapers.org/rec/SERTTT
I read the SERTTT paper. I can understand how people reject your ideas because they are misunderstanding them, and take it personally/emotionally. My take is ironic because I am analysing it in terms of definitions, not in terms of 'my own mind'. If we remove 'my own mind' as the determinant of 'experience' then there is nothing emotionally negative or scary about your thesis at all. In fact, I think it reinforces your idea. This is the irony - it might seem like you are purporting to say something about the limits of human experience and knowledge but once we remove the human individual from it it strikes me that you are simply describing a sort of formalist attitude towards the scientific method - that's to say 'burden of proof' and suchlike.
Example. the laws of physics are part of the realm of experience. We can apply the laws of physics to infer something which is beyond human experience. For example a particle in a parallel universe. Nothing contradicts the existence of that, even if we can't 'verify' it by experience. But because it's within the laws of physics (epistemology) it is not - by definition - external.
This is what I meant by the tree in the forest example. Anyone who says 'no it doesn't make a sound' is being solipsist. Or anthropocentric, even. The laws of nature tell us it makes a sound, case closed. Not beyond experience, in other words.
Although I would say that it's important to clarify what is meant by 'experience'. Does this mean 'knowledge' or '(personal) perception' or 'conscious awareness' or 'ability to infer the existence of by use of known laws derived from experience', and so on. If your definition includes all of the above, then fine - the individual is no longer threatened. The world, and those we love, will indeed carry on after the body dies and we no longer experience them. And vice versa.
For lived experience, ultimately it doesn't matter whether your thesis is true or not. That's a further irony...
Time for another drink, lol.
Coulda swore I already answered this, chores must have derailed me, I'm a live in technically homeless care giver. Sorry: The reading is careful, but the summary that EE amounts to a formalist attitude toward the scientific method is a domestication I need to resist. Burden of proof is a tool EE uses. The content is stronger: nothing non-experiential can even be coherently described, which is why externalist assertions fail their own evidential standard. That distinction is laid out in *Experientia Est: Name One Thing That Is Not a Subset of Experience*, https://philpapers.org/rec/SEREEN
That said, a distinction worth drawing. You can engage EE as a formalism without buying its ontological conclusions, and that entry point is legitimate. Agreement, understanding, and integration are three different cognitive events, and nobody has to be a Platonist to use calculus. So if what you want out of EE is the burden-of-proof methodology, that's a real thing it delivers. Flattening the formalism and the ontology together, though, loses what's actually distinctive. The separation is worked out in *The Three Thresholds: Why Experiential Empiricism Does Not Require Ontological Self-Deletion, and Why Most Resistance Assumes It Does*, https://philpapers.org/rec/SERTTT
The particle in a parallel universe inferred from the laws of physics is exactly the case EE handles differently than you're suggesting. Laws of physics are patterns in experience. Extending those patterns hypothetically into unobserved domains is an inferential act happening within experience. The inferred particle is a posit, and the claim that it exists mind-independently is the claim that needs justification. Folding inference-from-laws into "experience" broadens the term until it swallows externalism rather than addressing it. The case that treating physical law as itself the ground commits the same error as materialism is made in *Mathematical Platonism as Externalist Error*, https://philpapers.org/rec/SERMPA-4
On the tree: EE doesn't take the "no sound" side. That would be a stronger claim than the framework supports. EE says the sound is a reliable extension of observed experiential pattern. It will be on the recording, in the neighbor's ear, on the seismograph. What EE declines to assert is that the sound existed mind-independently when no one was there to check. The prediction is preserved. The extra metaphysical flag is lowered. That difference looks small until you notice how much work the flag was doing.
"What do you mean by experience" is the right question and the category has content. Experience is the felt quality of whatever is occurring: perception, thought, memory, inference, imagination, valence. Not "knowledge" in the propositional sense, since propositional knowledge is a structured subset. The category is meant to be maximal, not vague.
The last move I'd push back on is that for lived experience it doesn't matter whether the thesis is true. It matters ethically. If valenced experience is the terminus of meaning, then dismissing suffering for the sake of mind-independent abstractions (nation, ideology, future utopia, procedure, metaphysical necessity) loses its license. Every organized atrocity in history required some version of that dismissal to function. The historical case is made in *The Externalist Catastrophe: How Every Organized Atrocity Stems From The Same Unprovable Assumption*, https://philpapers.org/rec/SERTEC The framework is not neutral between optimizing for suffering reduction and optimizing around it.
That's interesting, because you're sort of anticipating thoughts which I had between writing my comment and now (I went away and had my supper - a glass of wine, I feel, is so wonderfully enhancing for philosophy).
Before I read your links here's a rundown of my interim thoughts. 1/ to expand a little more on where I was going with my argument-by-definition. It struck me that your Step 3 was in fact contained in your Step 1. That was my real point. You already defined 'Evidence' as 'that which can ONLY come from experience' - this is the same statement as your Step 3 'non-experiential evidence cannot exist' - it's a rewording of the same statement. In equation terms, instead of A = B, it's B = A. So each of your steps is simply a rewording of the same thing. That's what I was getting at.
2/ Here's an interesting observation. It's about 'scope' of experience. Take a blind human and a non-blind human. Clearly, their scope of experience is different. So the point about 'from whose experience' is not an invalid one. Human beings are 'limited' in the respect of 'not capable of experiencing the totality of existence'. In this way, the thesis and conclusion you have been describing is not a human one, it's a 'god' one. Assuming the ontological idea that 'God = entity which can experience everything' or 'god = entity for whom there is no non-experiential evidence', or 'god = epistemic totality' meaning logically 'nothing epistemic external to god can exist'.
In other words, you are no longer doing 'philosophy of mind' or even 'philosophy of science', you are doing ontological philosophy bordering on theology. That's an interesting observation of course.
3/ I forgot to mention the classic, well-known thought-experiment in philosophy of mind as it relates to epistemology, namely 'if a tree falls down in a forest and there's no one to see it does it make a sound'. The epistemological view of this depends entirely on the 'scope' of awareness of the 'perceiver'. Like 'how can a tree fall down in a forest without a perceiver' - if we define 'perceiver' as 'that which exists' (nature, the universe, etc.). If we were to reframe this question 'if a solitary tree, utterly alone in the black empty void of space beyond the known universe and outside the perception of 'god' falls down, does it make a sound' - the answer being obviously no because sound depends on air-disturbance, and our definition said there's no atmosphere surrounding this hypothetical void-tree. There's only a tree, hanging there in the nothing. So this is simply a question of 'definition of terms' - it's ontological, that is.
Despite the humour in that, it does make an important point about 'what is epistemology anyway?'. It struck me that what you were really doing with EE was not, in fact, providing an argument for 'mind-independent evidence doesn't exist' but rather a definition. A definition of epistemology itself, that is, which includes the predicate 'mind-independent evidence doesn't exist', or, put differently, 'it is impossible to epistemologically verify the existence of anything independent of mind'. That strikes me as a sort of self-evident definition, not necessarily an argument in the philosophy of mind. I think that's what I was intuitively getting at when I talked about deconstructing your steps. It's a very useful definition, for sure, especially for demonstrating the interconnectedness of everything.
Anyway, I'll be back a bit later once I've read your links... It's been quite a while since I did philosophy of mind so this is bringing stuff back from the buried depths of my long-suffering memory...
I mean I could reply now or later, I'll assume later, if you promise to actually come back XD :) But yea I got 92 papers adjacent to this stuff. Anticipation will happen XD Just say when :) https://philpeople.org/profiles/brandon-sergent/publications (You can also just ask any AI to represent/steelman my argument. Brandon sergent, google scholar, will basically present a cross section of my framework for review.)
I had another fun memory just now, which is another example of interconnected irony. When I had my interview at KCL (King's College London) when I was applying for uni the prof bloke who interviewed me asked me a question which went something like this: 'supposing I have a box with a turtle inside - how can you prove there's a turtle inside there without opening the box'. Or somesuch wording. Obviously at the time I hadn't really studied enough philosophy to say 'ah! You're asking me about the limits of experiential epistemology aren't you?!', so I think I just started waffling on about x, y, and z (I don't remember now). In retrospect, if I'd have said that insightful observation, he'd probably have just asked me what my opinion about the limits of epistemology were, so it amounts to the same thing and we'd have been back to square one.
I must've done ok in the interview though, because they did give me an offer...
I had a bright smart ass (and very kind) friend named john tell me about a similar exercise. Teacher went prove this chair is here. John's answer was dead pan "What chair?" :)
But yea that's how I got here. I just took the brain in a jar thought experiment and made it into a burden of proof argument.
P.S. Can you get my foot in the door? The system won't touch me with a 10ft pole. https://philpapers.org/rec/SERIBH
Okay, I asked Gemini "Can you explain to me Brandon Sergent’s Experiential Empiricism?" and what she presented to me is very clear and understandable. I now see what you mean by your ideas dissolve (rather than address) a lot of mind-bending problems (like the hard problem of consciousness). Here's what she said about the problem of other minds: "Acknowledges that other minds are formally unprovable, but frames the ethical response in terms of asymmetric risk. Given the risk of ignoring real suffering, treating suffering reports as authoritative is the only rational protocol." That is very much how I understand things in my more lucid moments. But it's hard to live along happily with that concept in mind, because it means everyone I react with might not have any true reality other than my experiencing something that might be but isn't necessarily another person like the self I often imagine I am. In other words, it makes me feel I might be the only awareness that exists and I'm experiencing a very detailed and gut-wrenching simulation., perhaps imagining others like me to keep from going crazy. How do you avoid feeling that way? Or do you just accept it?
When you say your system dissolves all the hard problems, doesn't that imply that if everyone just accepted what you say, they would all stop trying to understand how things (meaning things they imagine to be real) work, and just sit back and do nothing and let the simulation roll on?
Another hard problem not mentioned, a hard problem of a different kind, is death. Do you think our experiencing will come to an end at some point?
Isn't another hard problem this: yes, the only thing I know for sure is my own experience, but what is making that experience happen? Or somewhat related, why am I experiencing anything at all (similar to why is there something rather than nothing)?
Thank you so much for the reading and doing the exercise! I am very happy as a result. This really is scalable thanks to ai. Millions of people could explore EE at once without me being there to screw it up XD You just proved it.
"How do you avoid feeling that way? Or do you just accept it?"
Being honest, any answer I could give would be post hoc. The ground truth is that for whatever reason the question doesn't bother me. I can speculate why. Maybe it's that I simply believe other people are there and feel stuff. Maybe that's my version of faith. And thus I keep the formalism about what I can and can't prove separate. Or maybe the asymmetry is so overwhelming that my back brain considers the matter solved because be course of action is so overwhelmingly clear.
Also, imagine if you had a way to prove other people felt stuff, you still wouldn't go around doing it all the time. You'd just get on with your day. You don't poke every step with a stick first before stepping. You just assume it's gonna hold. Same deal, kinda.
"When you say your system dissolves all the hard problems, doesn't that imply that if everyone just accepted what you say, they would all stop trying to understand how things (meaning things they imagine to be real) work, and just sit back and do nothing and let the simulation roll on?"
Well firstly that would never happen. Humanity doesn't homogenize like that. I feel we've evolved expressly not to. That was my original theory for where fact immunity came from: diversity of thought protection.
Secondly though, the anti-suffering project is more than enough meaningful work. We don't need fake problems, we have more than enough real ones XD
"Do you think our experiencing will come to an end at some point?"
Firstly, not that we'd be there to notice. "When death is, I am not, when I am, death is not." Secondly, I can't even prove I was the same person 5 minutes ago. Who I am is fully presented in the present moment. I'd rather not die, of course, but the idea of not existing isn't directly scary to me, it's more, depressing I guess? But I regard it as solvable, which is why it's depressing. Trees and turtles have solved this problem. We should too.
"but what is making that experience happen? Or somewhat related, why am I experiencing anything at all (similar to why is there something rather than nothing)?"
Exactly! It's just a root question. Why is there something rather than nothing. I have a whole paper on this. Every ontology/framework has such foundational unanswerables. EE's is just right up front and boring: Experience is.
https://innomen.substack.com/p/the-woo-is-the-product
I often think what you said in your reply. If death comes and there's nothing after, we (or I) won't care because I won't exist. Death itself doesn't seem scary to me (if there's something after, that should be interesting, if nothing, I won't care), but dying does seem scary. Though what good is there in worrying about it ahead of time? Enough time to worry about when it starts happening. In the meantime, have fun!
You say, "Secondly though, the anti-suffering project is more than enough meaningful work. We don't need fake problems, we have more than enough real ones." Very true that the anti-suffering project provides near endless meaningful work. But what about, say, science? Would you consider science a fake problem? Science can sometimes help ease suffering, but a lot of it is learning what supposed reality is like without tying investigations to eliminating suffering. But all the information gathering seems to yield a lot of fascinating stuff.
Your "Woo is the Product" article is very fun.
Yea dying itself is probably awful, certainly it can be at least. But that's why all the hospice people are heroes.
Science is still science under EE, it's just absent the ontological story about "matter." My position is that science was always doing EE to the very extent that it worked in the first place. https://philpapers.org/rec/SERTFR
It's still always just patterns and predictions. That doesn't change at all.
Thank you for exploring my work to the extent you do, I'm glad you're getting anything out of it. I find my work palliative. But I can't be sure how others receive it. To me this is all very comforting, but then I'm very weird, so who knows.
Thank you for putting your work out there!
I'm very weird too.
You wanna co-author a paper? All I ask is that you navigate the actual submission process. I've not had the best of luck alone: https://philpapers.org/rec/SERIBH (Standing offer to anyone who can read this BTW.)
Say a little more about what you have in mind.
Experiential empiricism, EE, is easily defensible. The problem is, you treat experiential empiricism from the terminus of our human perspective, rather than a coordinate outside of perspective. You stop at "experience is primary" and declare the case is closed, when the more rigorous move is to ask what that implies about the structure of totality.
If reality is genuinely polar, dynamic, and coherent, which it has proven to be at every measurable scale, then the question "which came first, experience or substrate?" is the wrong question entirely. It assumes a linear sequence in a place where there is none. Outside of time, both poles are always already present. Both are true, simultaneously. That is the paradoxical nature of the universe: experience requires both something to be experienced and something doing the experiencing, and whatever that relation is, it precedes the question of which side is "first."
That's not a refutation of EE, it's an expansion that your framework can't accommodate because you've identified one pole in a dynamic system and called it complete.
You argue that time and space are inside present experience, along with everything else, but my response would be that while time and space DO exist within experience, and you are right about that, they ALSO exist outside of experience, because time and space are what make experience possible at all, therefore both exist independently of it, with experience itself being their emergent property.
In summary, appearing within experience isn't the same as originating there. If time and space are what make experience possible, that means they exist independently of it. If experience is what happens when time and space converge, then that makes experience the emergent property of previous conditions: time and space, and therefore, not the "ground floor."
You're assuming the conclusion.
The central move in your argument is the phrase "time and space are what make experience possible." That phrase does a lot of work, and it's exactly where burden of proof applies. You're asserting a causal or constitutive relationship in which time and space are prior to experience, but every piece of evidence for that relationship is itself an experiential datum. The reasoning is circular in the same way materialism's is: using experience to prove what supposedly precedes and produces experience.
"Appearing within experience isn't the same as originating there" is only true if you already have a framework in which things can originate outside experience and then appear within it. That framework is the assumption under examination, not a premise you can bring in to settle the question.
The polar/dynamic framing is interesting but doesn't escape this problem. Asserting that both poles are "always already present" outside time still requires justification for what "present" means in a context allegedly independent of experience. You'd need to establish that a mind-independent substrate exists before using its properties to explain experience, and that establishment has to happen through experience, which reintroduces the circularity.
This is covered in more detail in Why Experience Cannot Be Explained: Structure Is Definitional, Not Additional (https://philpapers.org/rec/SERTCC) and The Magic Microscope: Why You Cannot Dig Beneath Experience (https://philpapers.org/rec/SERTMM-3). The short version is that "what generates experience" commits a category error: the investigation tool for answering that question is experience itself, so no answer can be non-circular.
EE doesn't claim experience has no structure or that no regularities exist. It claims that positing a mind-independent substrate to explain those regularities adds no explanatory content while violating burden of proof. That's not a failure to accommodate your expansion. It's a prior question about whether the expansion is doing any work.