Afnan khan

Reality as experience

REALITY AS EXPERIENCE May 5, 2023 Trust what you can remember. There are deep structures in existence, like consciousness or the reality of the external world, that are thought to be philosophical or metaphysical or even just conceptual that in fact can be reduced to generalizations or inferences that people draw from experience rather than as inevitable or inherent. The evidence comes from consulting the experience of early age children as to establish what they themselves are able to find and what can be found about them even without the advantages supposedly offered by psychoanalysis about how the early child’s mind can be accessed. I am thinking of my commonplace observations of what I remember before I was four about things I now know as having already been discovered in the world. I remember, for one thing, learning to drink from a glass rather than from a bottle. I had been a late learner and my mother’s ruse, as I realized it to be many years later, was to say that she could not get down to the village to buy bottles and so I would have to cope by using a glass to drink milk. An accommodating sort, I said I would do that if I drank from a glass in private and she acquiesced and we went into a private space and I drank from a glass and never went back to bottles. Think about that. I already had the ability to feel embarrassed about making what seemed a major transition and I was able to negotiate the terms of my acquiescence.