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Experience
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Experience is the knowledge or mastery of an event or subject gained through involvement in or


exposure to it.[1] Terms in philosophy such as "empirical knowledge" or "a posteriori knowledge"
are used to refer to knowledge based on experience. A person with considerable experience in a
specific field can gain a reputation as an expert. The concept of experience generally refers to
know-how or procedural knowledge, rather than propositional knowledge: on-the-job training
rather than book-learning.

The interrogation of experience has a long tradition in continental philosophy. Experience plays an
important role in the philosophy of Sren Kierkegaard. The German term Erfahrung, often
translated into English as "experience", has a slightly different implication, connoting the
coherency of life's experiences.

Certain religious traditions (such as Buddhism, Surat Shabd Yoga, mysticism and Pentecostalism)
and educational paradigms with, for example, the conditioning of military recruit-training (also
known as "boot camps"), stress the experiential nature of human epistemology. This stands in
contrast to alternatives: traditions of dogma, logic or reasoning. Participants in activities such as
tourism, extreme sports and recreational drug-use also tend to stress the importance of experience.

The history of the word experience aligns it closely with the concept of experiment.

Contents
1 Types of experience
1.1 Physical
1.2 Mental
1.3 Emotional
1.4 Spiritual
1.5 Religious
1.6 Social
1.7 Virtual and simulation
1.8 Subjective
2 Immediacy of experience
3 Changes through history
3.1 Alternatives to experience
3.2 Writing
4 See also
5 References

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Experience - Wikipedia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Experience

Types of experience
The word "experience" may refer, somewhat ambiguously, both to mentally unprocessed
immediately perceived events as well as to the purported wisdom gained in subsequent reflection
on those events or interpretation of them.

Some wisdom-experience accumulates over a period of time,[2] though one can also experience
(and gain general wisdom-experience from) a single specific momentary event.

One may also differentiate between (for example) physical, mental, emotional, spiritual, vicarious
and virtual experience(s).

Physical

Physical experience occurs whenever an object or environment changes.[3] In other words, physical
experiences relate to observables. They need not involve modal properties nor mental experiences.

Mental

Mental experience involves the aspect of intellect and consciousness experienced as combinations
of thought, perception, memory, emotion, will and imagination, including all unconscious cognitive
processes. The term can refer, by implication, to a thought process. Mental experience and its
relation to the physical brain form an area of philosophical debate: some identity theorists
originally argued that the identity of brain and mental states held only for a few sensations. Most
theorists, however, generalized the view to cover all mental experience.[4]

Mathematicians can exemplify cumulative mental experience in the approaches and skills with
which they work. Mathematical realism, like realism in general, holds that mathematical entities
exist independently of the human mind. Thus humans do not invent mathematics, but rather
discover and experience it, and any other intelligent beings in the universe would presumably do
the same. This point of view regards only one sort of mathematics as discoverable; it sees triangles,
right angles, and curves, for example, as real entities, not just the creations of the human mind.
Some working mathematicians have espoused mathematical realism as they see themselves
experiencing naturally occurring objects. Examples include Paul Erds and Kurt Gdel. Gdel
believed in an objective mathematical reality that could be perceived in a manner analogous to
sense perception. Certain principles (for example: for any two objects, there is a collection of
objects consisting of precisely those two objects) could be directly seen to be true, but some
conjectures, like the continuum hypothesis, might prove undecidable just on the basis of such
principles. Gdel suggested that quasi-empirical methodology such as experience could provide
sufficient evidence to be able to reasonably assume such a conjecture. With experience, there are
distinctions depending on what sort of existence one takes mathematical entities to have, and how
we know about them.

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Emotional

Humans can rationalize falling in (and out) of love as "emotional experience". Societies which lack
institutional arranged marriages can call on emotional experience in individuals to influence
mate-selection.[5] The concept of emotional experience also appears in the notion of empathy.

Spiritual

Newberg and Newberg provide a view on spiritual experience.[6]

Religious

Mystics can describe their visions as "spiritual experiences". However, psychology and
neuropsychology[7] may explain the same experiences in terms of altered states of consciousness,
which may come about accidentally through (for example) very high fever, infections such as
meningitis, sleep deprivation, fasting, oxygen deprivation, nitrogen narcosis (deep diving),
psychosis, temporal-lobe epilepsy, or a traumatic accident. People can likewise achieve such
experiences more deliberately through recognized mystical practices such as sensory deprivation or
mind-control techniques, hypnosis, meditation, prayer, or mystical disciplines such as mantra
meditation, yoga, Sufism, dream yoga, or surat shabda yoga. Some practices encourage spiritual
experiences through the ingestion of psychoactive drugs such as alcohol and opiates, but more
commonly with entheogenic plants and substances such as cannabis, salvia divinorum, psilocybin
mushrooms, peyote, DXM, ayahuasca, or datura. Another way to induce spiritual experience
through an altered state of consciousness involves psychoacoustics, binaural beats, or light-
and-sound stimulation.

Social

Growing up and living within a society can foster the development and observation of social
experience.[8]

Social experience provides individuals with the skills and habits necessary for participating within
their own societies, as a society itself is formed through a plurality of shared experiences forming
norms, customs, values, traditions, social roles, symbols and languages. Experience plays an
important role in experiential groups.[9]

Virtual and simulation

Using computer simulations can enable a person or groups of persons to have virtual experiences in
virtual reality.[10] Role-playing games treat "experience" (and its acquisition) as an important,
measurable, and valuable commodity. Many role-playing video games, for instance, feature units of
measurement used to quantify or assist a player-character's progression through the game - called
experience points or XP.

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Subjective

Subjective experience can involve a state of individual subjectivity, perception on which one builds
one's own state of reality; a reality based on ones interaction with one's environment. The
subjective experience depends on ones individual ability to process data, to store and internalize it.
For example: our senses collect data, which we then process according to biological programming
(genetics), neurological network-relationships and other variables such as relativity etc., all of
which affect our individual experience of any given situation in such a way as to render it
subjective.

Immediacy of experience
Someone able to recount an event they witnessed or took part in has "first hand experience". First
hand experience of the "you had to be there" variety can seem especially valuable and privileged,
but it often remains potentially subject to errors in sense-perception and in personal interpretation.

Second-hand experience can offer richer resources: recorded and/or summarised from first-hand
observers or experiencers or from instruments, and potentially expressing multiple points of view.

Third-hand experience, based on indirect and possibly unreliable rumour or hearsay, can (even
given reliable accounts) potentially stray perilously close to blind honouring of authority.

Changes through history


Some post-modernists suggest that the nature of human experiencing (quite apart from the details
of the experienced surrounds) has undergone qualitative change during transition from the
pre-modern through the modern to the post-modern.[11]

Alternatives to experience

Immanuel Kant contrasted experience with reason:

"Nothing, indeed, can be more harmful or more unworthy of the philosopher, than the vulgar
appeal to so-called experience. Such experience would never have existed at all, if at the
proper time, those institutions had been established in accordance with ideas."[12]

These views of Kant are mirrored in the research of ideasthesia, which demonstrates that one can
experience the world only if one has the appropriate concepts (i.e., the ideas) about the objects that
are being experienced.

Writing

American author Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote an essay entitled "Experience" (published in 1844),

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in which he asks readers to disregard emotions that could alienate them from the divine; it provides
a somewhat pessimistic representation of the transcendentalism associated with Emerson.

See also
Customer experience Wikiquote has
Empiricism quotations related to:
Experience economy Experience
Experiential education
Experiential marketing Look up experience in
Ideasthesia Wiktionary, the free
Perception dictionary.
Thrill
Wisdom#Confucianism: Reflection Imitation Experience

References
1. Compare various contemporary definitions given in the OED (2nd edition, 1989): "[...] 3. The actual
observation of facts or events, considered as a source of knowledge.[...] 4. a. The fact of being
consciously the subject of a state or condition, or of being consciously affected by an event. [...] b. In
religious use: A state of mind or feeling forming part of the inner religious life; the mental history (of a
person) with regard to religious emotion. [...] 6. What has been experienced; the events that have taken
place within the knowledge of an individual, a community, mankind at large, either during a particular
period or generally. [...] 7. a. Knowledge resulting from actual observation or from what one has
undergone. [...] 8. The state of having been occupied in any department of study or practice, in affairs
generally, or in the intercourse of life; the extent to which, or the length of time during which, one has
been so occupied; the aptitudes, skill, judgement, etc. thereby acquired."
2. Note for example Levitt, Heidi M. (1999). "The Development of Wisdom: An Analysis of Tibetan
Buddhist Experience". Journal of Humanistic Psychology. 39 (2): 86105.
doi:10.1177/0022167899392006. Retrieved 2010-01-21. "Instead of significant events, however, they
spoke of gradual experiences, such as learning through teachings day by day."
3. Compare: Popper, Karl R.; Eccles, John C. (1977). The self and its brain. Berlin: Springer International.
p. 425. ISBN 3-540-08307-3. "You would agree, I think, that in our experience of the world everything
comes to us through the senses [...]"
4. Christensen, Scott M.; Turner, Dale R. (1993). Folk psychology and the philosophy of mind. Routledge.
p. xxi. ISBN 978-0-8058-0931-2. Retrieved 2009-12-01. "Some identity theorists originally argued that
the identity of brain and mental states held only for a few sensations. Most theorists, however,
generalized the view to cover all mental experience."
5. Kim, Jungsik; Elaine Hatfield (2004). "Love types and subjective well-being: a cross-cultural study"
(PDF). Social Behavior and Personality. Society for Personality Research. 32 (2): 173182.
doi:10.2224/sbp.2004.32.2.173. Retrieved 2009-12-01. "Evolutionary theory theorizes that love is just
one of the emotional experiences which have been selected during the evolution process since it has
helped humans find mates for reproduction [...]"
6. Newberg, Andrew B.; Newberg, Stephanie K. (2005), "The Neuropsychology of Religious and Spiritual
Experience", in Paloutzian, Raymond F.; Park, Crystal L., Handbook of the psychology of religion and

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Experience - Wikipedia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Experience

spirituality, New York: Guilford Press, pp. 199215, ISBN 978-1-57230-922-7


7. Handbook of the psychology of religion and spirituality, New York: Guilford Press, pp. 199215,
ISBN 978-1-57230-922-7
8. Compare: Blumin, Stuart M. (1989). The emergence of the middle class: social experience in the
American city, 1760-1900. Interdisciplinary perspectives on modern history. Cambridge University
Press. p. 434. ISBN 978-0-521-37612-9. Retrieved 2009-12-02.
9. Brown, Nina W. (2003) [1998]. Psychoeducational groups: process and practice (2 ed.). Routledge.
p. 103. ISBN 978-0-415-94602-5. Retrieved 2010-03-06. "Experiential group activities can be effective
parts of psychoeducational groups."
10. Compare: Popper, Karl R.; Eccles, John C. (1977). The self and its brain. Berlin: Springer International.
p. 401. ISBN 3-540-08307-3. "With the advent of computers, simulations can be done to provide for
virtual reality [...]"
11. Compare: Nowotny, Helga; Plaice, Neville (1996). Time: The Modern and Postmodern Experience.
Wiley-Blackwell. p. 192. ISBN 978-0-7456-1837-1. Retrieved 2010-01-21.
12. Kant, Immanuel (1781). "Book 1, Section 1". The Critique of Pure Reason.

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