Experience

“Experience” is a term used in a number of different ways in English and, therefore, somewhat vague in definition. As with many such terms it is easier to use - and to understand someone who uses it - than it is to define. The dictionary is not of much help here. It is best to turn to how the word functions in normal usage. We talk of “building up experience,” or of our actions and ideas being “based on experience,” or of having had “a strange experience,” or of people being “experienced” or “inexperienced,” and so on.

We might say that “experience” is “whatever is going on right now.” And in this sense consciousness or memory are not essential. We don't say, for instance, that if someone has forgotten something that they never experienced it. Similarly, we can talk about the meaning of an experience changing when we find out new information about what was “really” going on or when we have a different perspective to it. However, we tend to speak of “how I experienced it then” and “how I experience it now,” without suggesting that we did not have the first experience. We may now have decided we were mistaken in what we thought was going, that we experienced it as if it were one way and now realize it was another, but both were experiences. Therefore, awareness and conscious apprehension are not necessary requirements for using the term “experience” (though there may be disciplines that use the term technically and define it in terms of conscious awareness).

What we are coming to (and, surprise, surprise, it is in accord with our own usage) is that “experience” is, by analogy with fish, the medium in which we humans float and have our being. In some ways it is an interface phenomenon, but it gets sticky when you try to pin down what it is the interface between. While we might more often use the term to refer to things we consider to be going on in the external world, we have no reservation about speaking of internal experiences. For instance, our experiences of physical pain or pleasure are one whole category of internal experiences. Our experiences of emotional pain or pleasure are another. Perhaps all that can be said is that experience is the interface between “self” and the “external world,” in other words, between two conceptual entities that are problematic and groundless.

Meaning

The meaning of “meaning” covers the spectrum from the mundane (What is the meaning of “chthonic?”) to the majestic (What is the meaning of life?). The concept of meaning is also used in relation to value or significance, as when we describe experiences as being meaningful or meaningless. The wide-ranging application of the concept of meaning has led to it being viewed as one of the most significant determinants of life quality and even as a basis on which to evaluate the whole of a life. From that perspective there could hardly be anything more important than meaning. However, this last sense of the word fell out of favor in 19th century academic circles due to the fashion for objectivist modes of description. More recently it appears to be returning to favor, due in large part to the failure of cognitive science (and perhaps especially the failure of artificial intelligence research) to specify human experience without having to invoke the slippery concept of meaning.

Meaning is inherently slippery in that it points to a factor in experience that cannot be nailed down to an objective world. Any situation, thing, or activity will generate a response from us humans based, ultimately, on the meaning it has (we make) for us. No matter how precise our listing of its objective and measurable features, these features do not determine our reactions. Instead it is the meaning we make that moves us and motivates our actions. And that meaning may vary considerably from individual to individual, and especially so when those individuals are from different cultures. The real significance of this is that when we invoke the fill richness and profundity of the concept of meaning we are invoking what may well be the most important factor in human life. If this seems too extreme a statement, consider how our joys and our sorrows are determined more by the meaning we give to things than by the things themselves. When have you changed a life disaster into a triumph by finding “new” meaning in what had happened?

The Pattern That Connects

The process of patterning is unfamiliar to most of us. It is not that we are not responsive to patterns. For example, we pattern across instances of other people's behavior in order to derive our conclusions about their character. We consider someone “trustworthy” if we have sufficient and sufficiently convincing examples of their having warranted trust. We can draw these examples from our own experience of them or from the reports of others. Wherever the "data" comes from we are engaging in a process of patterning when we reach our summation that this person is trustworthy. So it is something we do, but it is not something we tend to do intentionally; we rarely think pattern.

“The pattern that connects” is what might be termed an intellectual slogan for the work of Gregory Bateson. Bateson's interest in pattern did not fit an academic culture based on “things.” While academia was intent on classifying those things into the categories which defined the different fields of scientific endeavor, Bateson's quest for the pattern that connects was orthogonal to the mainstream, and suffered accordingly.

The pattern that connects things is abstract. It is not a thing itself. Pattern concerns the relationship between things. It must have seemed very vague and amorphous a pursuit to those in thrall to the materiality of things. You can see a bunch of things, and grab them; but you can't grab the relationship between them. Nor can you count the different relationships between them as you can count the things themselves. A slippery subject, this pattern stuff.

Having taken Bateson as the preeminent advocate of a pattern approach, it may be useful to see how he separates out his domain, beginning with:

...the underlying notion of a dividing line between the world of the living (where distinctions are drawn and difference can be a cause) and the world of nonliving billiard balls and galaxies (where forces and impacts are the ”causes” of events). These are the two worlds that Jung (following the Gnostics) calls creatura (the living) and pleroma (the nonliving). I was asking: What is the difference between the physical world of pleroma, where forces and impacts provide sufficient basis of explanation, and the creatura, where nothing can be understood until differences and distinctions are invoked?In my life I have put the descriptions of sticks and stones and billiard balls and galaxies in one box, the pleroma, and have left them alone. In the other box, I put living things: crabs, people, problems of beauty, and problems of difference. The contents of the second box are the subject [of my work]. (Bateson, 1980).

The hegemony of Western science has been founded upon its attention to the world of things. Bateson is heir to what he describes as a parallel but hidden tradition in which attention has been on pattern, coursing through the background of history, from Pythagoras to the Gnostics to the alchemists and up into the present, surfacing in cybernetics, systems theory, complexity and a certain stream of computer science.

The pattern approach is tricky because it is neither part of culture nor of education in the West. Today we know we need to be thinking systemically. But it doesn't come naturally. Much of the difficulty of grasping Bateson's work, and the implications it has for personal and social action, is due to its underlying unfamiliarity. We think about things, we might even think about the way we are thinking about things but, far too often, all that thinking is the same kind of thinking. The kind of thinking we are used to using - linear logic. After all, isn't that what rationality means?

Just because we can espouse the need for a systemic perspective doesn't mean we can follow it through in practice. It often feels as if our attempts are like drawing a circle with a ruler. If we make small enough straight lines of linear logic, and angle them, maybe we can get a rough approximation of a circle. Not quite the same thing, though, is it. One can't say it really flows.

Reference: Gregory Bateson. Mind and Nature: A Necessary Unity, Bantam Books, New York 1980.

A Word About Beliefs

In common parlance, to talk about someone's beliefs is often taken as to be talking about their religious, political, or social convictions. In modeling we are using the term in a much wider way, one that might more readily be conveyed by the term “premise” (a proposition from which other propositions, ideas or conclusions flow). The content of premises can stretch from the mundane to the metaphysical. However, the term premise tends to be confined to philosophical discourse. So we are left with the term "beliefs" which, for all its awkwardness, is much more readily understood.

In modeling the beliefs we are interested in are those that form the structure underlying someone's particular ability. People generally express their beliefs as some form of equivalence relationship (“What something is”) and/or causal relationship (“What leads to what”). These are the two ways that people express their beliefs about “Meaning.”

About such matters of Meaning passions can run high. For instance, the beliefs of many people of a fundamentalist religious persuasion do not lie in the domain of Meaning; these beliefs are considered to be facts, if not absolute truths. They are seen, not as matters of opinion or of belief, but as matters of Reality. They are held to be true whether or not we recognize it and whether or not we like it. Ultimately, however, claims for absolute truths (and for the ontology and specific architecture of spiritual worlds) lie as much inside the realm of experience as any other belief.

The essential point is that modeling is about the structure of experience. In the context of modeling, it is important to recognize that even such high-level beliefs Ð such as those about religious and spiritual matters - rest on the same structure as all other beliefs: they are either equivalence or causal relationships. On their veracity, modeling is silent. Such matters are a matter of personal conscience and conviction.

In fact, in the context of modeling, the absolute veracity of any belief is a matter of personal conviction. For example, a particular person has beliefs about what a “friend” is and, though we can argue plenty with that person over what it really means to be a "friend," there is no ultimate way of saying who is right or wrong. Each person's opinion is simply what each person believes.

However, while the “real meaning” of what it is to be a friend cannot be nailed down, this is not to say that all ideas about friendship are equal when it comes to their consequences. A particular individual's idea of what a “friend” is may or may not serve that person well in their close relationships. They may, for instance, have the idea that a friend is someone who “treats me well no mater how I treat them.” It is easy to see that there might be potential difficulties with such a definition of friendship.

So, even though belief seems to float on a sea of relativism, that sea does not drown choice. It does not preclude a choice being made for or against any particular belief. It is only that, within the domain of experience, a belief cannot be ultimately grounded as an unarguable fact. That is why a claim for a belief being so grounded is, in effect, a claim that whatever is being believed lies outside the realm of human experience.

That is also why the choices of beliefs we make are also ethical choices. They are ethical choices in that they have consequences in our behavior, which in turn affect the experiences of others. This remains so whether or not we are aware of having made a choice. And, usually, we are not. We often come to our beliefs as givens, as simple representations of the way the world “is.”However, this no more removes the ethical dimensions of our actions than it removes their legal dimensions (though in law, the question of our responsibility for our actions is, in some cases, qualified).