Philosophy Now Forum

This is another side of my Lebensphilosphie thread...

There are a couple of ways we can have an understanding of the
world we live in.... we have theories, which we call ism's, ideologies,
ideas.. which are assumptions we make about our reality, our existence...
and we have experience.. the actual doing that we engage with every
single day... we experience every single day.. we wake up,
we eat breakfast, we travel to school or work, we see or greet people
every day... every action we take, every day is an experience.. we might
not see it as such, but it is true...

so, what comes first, the experience or the theory?

I believe that we experience first, then we create
the theory second.... so, we go to school, we get "educated" and
the experience comes before the theory...

today we are so conditioned to mix up the theory and the experience together,
that we often combine the two... but make no mistake, experience comes
before the theory...

so, we experience something.. and then we attempt to create a theory to
explain that something...

so let us explore this idea...

we are cavemen... long time ago...
so what comes first, the idea/theory of a god or
the experience of the thunder and lightning from which
the theory of a god comes from?

the experience of death comes a long time before we
can create a theory about it...

let us say, (and as a father.. this has happened to me and my daughter)
my daughter had a pet hamster... and said hamster died.. and I had to
create a story as to why the hamster died... I recall the hamster burial
in some plants at our old apartment... you try to convince a young girl
that her hamster's death was a "good" thing.. that is a very tough sell...
selling the story, or explaining the how/why of death to a small child,
is about creating the story/theory about death... which is why I say,
that the experience precedes the explanation/theory...

in ancient Greek myths, which came first?
the experience of watching the sun rise every day or the theory of
Appolo riding his chariot every morning? It is pretty evident that
the experiences come first and the explanation/theory comes second...

We create theories/ explanations after seeing/hearing/touching,
smelling/tasting the experiences...
Now this argument isn't new... it was the basis of John Locke's theories...
the primacy of experience over theories...

now what happens if we allow theory/explanations to come before
the experiences? We recently saw this with the 2020 election "big lie"..
by all accounts, including Republicans, that the 2020 election was the
safest, least corrupted election in American history...
and yet, millions will take the theory/explanation over the actual
facts/experience.. they are told the election was fake, and despite
the actual experience, the facts/evidence....they still hold to
the theory instead of the evidence....and they acted on the false
theories.. the coup attempt of Jan 6 2020 was based on theories,
not on the evidence on hand...

and therein lies an important lesson... to make choices in our actions,
we must have the correct understanding of our experiences...if we fail
to correctly understand our experiences, we will make the wrong
choices in what we do... the experiences guide the theories...

we see this in the conservative theory that there is no possible change
in human beings.. that if we are born "evil" we cannot, ever, change
to become "good".. change is impossible in a conservative's viewpoint...
and yet, experience tells us that change is the one thing we human beings do...
I am not the same person I was at age 3 or 13 or 23 or 43 or even 60..(I am 63 now)
we change every single day, it may not be noticeable or obvious, but
we change every single day... and in response to the experiences we
have every single day....

in these last few days, I made a new understanding of who I am..
to make a long story short, I discovered that I dislike endings..
be it personal, work, even watching TV shows... I now know why
I have negative feelings about certain people, events, jobs..
because the events or jobs or the people ended in a way that
prevented me from getting closure... I was fired from a job 30 years ago
and I still have feelings about that... I now know why... I hate endings..
and that has impacted me in the fact that I stayed in jobs much longer
than I should have.. several jobs in the past I should have left much
earlier than I did, but I didn't leave.. and I have always wondered why?
Now I know... I still have events in my past, that to this day, that still bother me,
even 40 years after the fact... because of my aversion to endings,
I now know why... this new understanding has explained to me many
my choices and decisions over my life..

this new understanding will allow me to make better choices
going into the future...

and thus we can see why we need to follow Socrates maxim,
"Know thyself"... We can overcome our indoctrinations and
'' education" by an engagement with an understanding of who we are..
I learned about my feelings about endings by my experience with
endings.. I couldn't have learned about this any other way..
I just never was able to connect my feelings about endings until
recently..

and moving forward, I can be better able to handle/deal with endings
by knowing my own discomfort with endings... my experience with endings,
is informing my actions today and tomorrow..

so, in your life, can you connect your experiences with your theories?

and for you, what came first, experiences or theories?

Kropotkin

to follow through in regard to experiences...

I too was indoctrinated with certain beliefs and theories...
From birth, I was indoctrinated with the belief in god, nation, state...
and I held those beliefs until I saw evidence that denied those beliefs...
So, at this point, what do I follow, the theory, the faith or the evidence?

As I grew up, I couldn't find any evidence of god, heaven, hell..
and I couldn't find any evidence of the exceptionalism of America..
that the U.S. was indeed number one...
so, do I follow the evidence, or do I follow my childhood indoctrinations?

As I am an evidence-based person, I choose to follow the evidence...
So, what do you follow? The evidence or do you follow the childhood
indoctrinations, the beliefs, the faith?

My answer is clear... is yours?

Kropotkin

I am going to speculate a bit here...

we have as experiences, a group or a set experience..
by that I mean the common charge that us "baby boomers"
created a world that has damaged, perhaps irrevocably,
the world as it is today.... the theory goes, that by our actions
and beliefs, we have set the world on a course, think climate change
for example, that is pushing our world out of control..

and yet, think about this... we have a group, a set as it were...
but within that set, we have vastly different experiences...
I have a vastly different experience than my sister who is also
a "boomer", actually two of my sisters are "boomers" and we
have very different experiences....to accuse "boomers" of "crimes"
is to accuse all "boomers" of crimes... and that is clearly not possible..

the set, a entire group cannot be held responsible for the actions of some,
few or one... so to broad base attack say, liberals, is to accuse the set
of possible "crimes" committed by one, two or a few...

the experiences of a few, some or one, makes it difficult to
explain the actions or beliefs of some, on the many or all....

we cannot, cannot explain some aspects of existence based on
the whole because at no point can we encompass the whole..
in other words, we cannot ever complete a theory about everyone
because the individual experiences of some, one or the few,
are outside of the experiences of the whole... you cannot judge everyone
by the experiences of the few or the one... you cannot judge all "boomers"
by the experience of one, me... my experience lays outside of the set of boomers..
there is no theory that can explain the actions and thoughts of all "boomers"..
no matter how large a theory you can conceive, you cannot ever encompass
every single "boomer" thought or actions.. some "boomers" will be outside of
any possible theory you can create about "boomers" and that being outside of
the complete theory of "boomers" makes any such theory incomplete and
thus, basically worthless...

thus there is no theory of experiences or theory that can explain all actions/beliefs
of any such set or group... thus, there is no possible theory of people, events, actions
or beliefs that can cover everyone in that set.... we are left without any possibility
to create a theory that will cover everyone, either as a set or a group....

experiences then deny the possibility of thinking about people as a group
or a set.. we are forced to think about people as individuals, not as a group or as a
set...

there is no theory that is large enough to encompass everyone experiences...

thus we can only think of people as individuals, not as a group or set, or subset...

Kropotkin