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.
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.