From early on in writing the papers for my website, I've always wanted to make something clear but both procrastinated and couldn't find just the right spot for it. I'll clarify it here. It concerns the reductionist approach we seem to take towards experiences at various points throughout the website - at some points decomposing experiences into their parts, at other points showing equivalence relations - but all the while passing over in seeming ignorance the fact that we declared experiences to be the fundamental elements of the universe to which all real things reduce, and beyond which no further reduction is necessary. So I feel this needs to be accounted for.
What was argued was not that experiences are irreducible, but that reduction isn't necessary if one's goal is to find the ultimate basis for things. At no point was it argued that experiences can't be decomposed - they certainly can, and indefinitely. What was argued was that such reduction gets one no closer to a fundamental basis. Albeit, this was the very argument leveled against physical reduction, and was the prime reason for abandoning it. However, the reason why this warrants abandoning physical reduction, but not that of experience, is very subtle. The reason is that with physical reduction, one begins without a grasp on the ultimate basis for the physical phenomena in question - the essential character of their manifestation, the reader will recall, being contingency through-and-through - whereas with experiential reduction, one begins with such a grasp - the essential character of their manifestation being necessity. Thus, in both cases of reduction - physical and experiential - the decomposition of the object of interest into its parts, though easily done, is futile and pointless. In the one case, the ultimate basis for its existence is absent at no matter what level of reduction, and in the other, it is there at every level. In the one case, one can't attain an ultimate basis, in the other, one has no further need to.
Perhaps the best account of this given in my website is figure 3 of The Advanced Theory which shows that we reach an ultimate level of reduction by reducing the physical to the experiential, yet at the same time, one can reduce either the physical or the experiential along physical or experiential lines (respectively) indefinitely. The point we want to get across, however, is that one can do so until one is blue in the face, and one will be no closer to an ultimate basis for anything. If one reduces along physical lines, one gets no closer to the experiential hierarchy of reduction because such a reduction heads in the wrong direction, and if one reduces along experiential lines, one still gets no closer but this time because one is already there. However, if one reorients the direction of reduction - by 90 degrees clockwise according to the figure - one is not only able to reduce the physical to the experiential, but one stops there content to have found where the path ends.
There is also the matter of our epistemic awareness of our own experiences. We argued, at one point, that even those experiences of which we have epistemic awareness can be reduced beyond the level of such epistemology. We argued this on the grounds that their physical counterparts - namely, neuro-chemical phenomena - can likewise be so reduced. But at another point, we argued that anything and everything that an experience can be reduced to must be experienced through-and-through. We said:
Meaning is always beheld - it is always "inside". It must be because, as the core essence of experience, it must be felt... Because there is nothing in an experience that is hidden from the beholder, it will be felt down to its very depths, right down to the fundamental level where reduction no longer holds.But if we lose epistemic awareness beyond a certain point of reduction, in what sense can we continue to say that the experience is "felt down to its very depths"? We can say this in the sense that what an experience feels like is different from our knowledge of it. Our lack of epistemic awareness past a certain level only means we won't be able to identify - epistemically, cognitively - any one detail or component apart from the full collection consisting of every other detail or component. But we can certainly know and feel the whole collection. The thing is, the question of what the whole feels like and that of what the components feel like - that is, the components collectively - is, essentially, the same question. So to feel the whole is, ipso facto, to feel the parts - but that is, to feel the parts collectively - and why should it be any other way? If we carry out our reductive analysis properly, we shouldn't deduce the presence of any one, or any subset, of details or components separately from the rest. The parts we uncover in the final analysis should come along with every other part that belongs to the original experience.
But then the issue is complicated by the introduction of equivalence. Following that concept is the implication that none of the details are there in the original experience. The reason why the original experience feels uniform and homogenous is because it is uniform and homogenous. The only experience that exists therein is the one we are epistemically aware of. But this is not as problematic as it might at first blush seem. Equivalence is a useful concept for understanding the sort of reduction that applies to things whose essential character is semantic as opposed to physical, objective, tangible, or something of that variety. The sort of reduction in question is such that the meaning at every level is the same, and indeed one, but the forms or expressions of that meaning are not only different but not even the same entities. This is completely unlike physical reduction whereby the sum of the components just are the whole - that is, they are the same entity - but with equivalence, the whole is more than the sum of the parts.
So albeit the issue is complicated by equivalence, it is not complicated in a way that proves to be a problem for us. Notwithstanding the fact that one can still trace a path along a reductive line (however much that line is defined in terms of equivalence), the worry over how one feels the components imbedded in one's experience despite having no epistemic awareness of any subset of those components is nicely done away with. It is no longer a question of how one feels these components, for the components aren't actually there. There is nothing to feel but the whole experience - uniform and homogenous - and because any equivalent set of experiences would bear exactly the same meaning, the subject, having only epistemic awareness of the whole, of the singular meaning, would discern not one distinguishing feature between the equivalent experiences. Essentially, what this means to say is that one can't feel any other experience than the one that is uniform, homogenous, and whole, for one discerns only one singular meaning. To feel a whole set of experiences, though it may be equivalent to the single one, would be to discern more than one detail therein - that is, to be epistemically aware of more fundamental components - and indeed this may be the case in certain hypothetical scenarios. For example, we could conceive of brains whose epistemic centers were sensitive not only to whole neurons firing from within other centers, but activity below the level of neurons - activity such as the passing of potassium and sodium ions through channels, or the release and binding of neurotransmitters to receptor sites. We can safely say that whatever experience we think we're feeling - because we are epistemically aware of feeling it - we are not only correct in thinking this, but it is the only experience we're feeling. Any other set of experiences we might reduce it to isn't so much there "in" the experience, but merely equivalent to it.
Having said this, a final word is perhaps in order - a word to address the principle we laid down for the interchangeability of equivalent experiences. We said that:
...there is no basis upon which we can proclaim any one experience as the "real" one and the others simply waiting to pop into existence should there be a need to replace it. Where their realness is concerned, they are all on equal footing...Now it seems we are retracting this statement. It seems as though we are saying that only the singular and whole experience we are epistemically aware of - the one we feel as uniform and homogenous - is actually there. This may be true, but it is not to be taken in an absolute sense. It is true relative to one's epistemic awareness. If we like, we can decompose the experience - or contrive an equivalent set - and treat that as what's, in fact, being experienced - and there would be no error in this - but what we must do in addition is to carry out a similar substitution for the epistemic awareness associated with the original experience. The reason for this become clear when we examine the same maneuver as it applies to the physical brain. Suppose, for example, that the original experience was a visual one, and its neural counterpart was a neuron from the occipital cortex. When we replace the experience with a set of equivalent ones, this move corresponds to a decomposition of the neuron into its parts - say its molecular constituents. But the catch is that it makes little sense to decompose the neuron like this without decomposing every other physical system whose relations to the neuron are relevant to this scenario. In other words, a good rule of thumb to follow in these mental exercises - perhaps a must - is that when we reduce any one component of a system to its parts, we ought to do the same for every other part. In that case, to reduce the visual experience to a set of equivalent experiences, we must also reduce the experience of being epistemically aware of the original experience - we must consider the set of experiences that are equivalent to that epistemic awareness, and at the same level of reduction to which we have taken the visual experience. It follows from this, however, that the experiences we would be considering are not the epistemic awareness we are familiar with. They are a different, though equivalent, set. That being said, we have no reason to expect that the set of experiences equivalent to the visual one we started out with should come along with any epistemic awareness. We would essentially be epistemically unconscious of them.
In brief, the one experience we are epistemically aware of is felt in isolation from any other equivalent set because it is uniquely associated with our epistemic awareness, and the other equivalent sets in question might indeed be said to be "on equal footing" with respect to their ontological standing, but they wouldn't be associated with our unique position in and perspective on the grand system of experiences that is the Universal Mind. Such a position, such a perspective, is defined in terms of human experiences - that is, the experiences we are familiar with. These experiences are what make us human, and without them, we wouldn't be ourselves. In other words, to replace any one with another equivalent set would entail replacing them all, and we would be left with a mind that isn't us - at least, not us as we know ourselves.
Having said such a mouth full, I would like to close this post by addressing one last concern. That concern is the dependence of all experiences on other experiences prior to them - that is, on the experiences that entail them. This might come off as confusing to some because it seems to conflict with the principle of the independence of experience from anything but itself due to its roll as the fundamental basis for all things real. This independence is independence from anything below it in reductive terms - that is, unlike a rock which is dependent for its existence on its constituent atoms, an experience is not dependent on any constituents. Again, though, it can be decomposed into constituents (or shown to be equivalent in any case), but not that it depends on any. When it comes to entailment, however, we are dealing with a different sort of dependence. This dependence is akin to causal dependence - that as, as with physical things, they depend on a prior cause for their present state of existence (though I'm reluctant to use the word 'cause' in the case of experiences as causation is too mechanical a term, and not semantic as is the nature of and reason for the flow of experiences). This, however, is not reduction; it is a manner of explaining the origins of things. It is following a path in time rather than scale. Furthermore, although we may have to concede that all experiences are dependent on antecedent ones, we can say that all such antecedents are still experiences, and thus experience in general is independent from anything save itself.
Read my theory: http://www.mm-theory.com/
