By Benj Hellie
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People who have weighed in on my earlier post might be interested to check out the MS I’ve just wrapped up: here. Comments gratefully acknowledged.
Experience as action — the paper
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Ok—so if I have this right—an occurance becomes an experience when the occurance is attended to by the agent/attender. And so experience is action.
The entity which pays attention to the
occurance is separate from the occurance–right?
So, we have an occurance and the attender which attends to the occurance
—-but I don’t see what separates the attender from the occurance. I mean
it seems to me the attender and the attending and the occurance could be seen to be just parts of one big occurance. You have an occurance called
the agent or attender and it goes with the attending and the occurance–all one occurance. I guess I just don’t see how you get the entity-agent that attends.
If there is an entity-agent –it looks like a problem to me:
If the entity-agent which attends to the occurance is separate from the occurance–then, it seems to me,the entity can’t be described and we can’t know even if there is such a thing, because any description or sense of the entity would be an occurance—and not the entity itself–since the entity-agent is separate from the occurances. Similarly with consciousness vs content of consciousness.
Seems it can only be insisted that despite the paradox–there is an entity
an assumption, a premise or an intuition or some such. I guess I just don’t see where you get this entity from—and is it really needed? I must invoke Ockham–seems less complicated if the attender-agent is left out.
Why not just say that things arise?
but don’t arise to any entity–just arise. Why preserve man’s ego in all of this–where is the necessity?
Another puzzle: if the attender is separate from the occurance, is the attender separate from the attending? Is attending part of the attender/agent or part of the occurance?
And yet another:If the attender-agent is separate from what is being attended to –the occurance–and the attender sees and attends to the fact that there is an attender and attention and the occurance being attended to—aren’t those and yet the attender must be separate from all those things–then
it seems that another entity-agent must
be introduced to see those things, to attend to those things–but then that
whole thing is just another occurance and so we need yet another attender-agent to attend that whole thing and adinfinitum.
Action? I would go much farther than you and say that being is an act. All things are variations of acts of being–a vase, a tree, the universe, etc. being is action–sustained action. Could say being is universal will or some such–after all we are all part of the universe–right? And so, experience is not needed–only being.