Private and Public Experience

 

 

Private experience:

      The senses of colour, light, sound, touch, joyous or sufferous feelings etc. are called private experiences. It is a common mistake by habit that people generally think they can let other ones have her/his own sense experiences if she/he wants to. when one sees a patch of red colour on a piece of paper, one usually thinks one can point that out to others and then others can see the patch of red colour and also can have the same sense experience of a patch of red colour. In fact we can never achieve this. What can be known for sure that people can share with other ones is only the idea of " a patch of red colour".

      If we are still not quite clear, let's take another instance as an example. If you have a toothache, you can tell others that you are suffering from the pain, but you can never let others feel your own pain. We say that the pain in your tooth is your own private experience, you can never share or let other people feel your own private experience the same way you cannot let other people feel "your own" pain in the tooth.

 

                                         

 

Public Experience:

      With our eyes open, we see space and space occupying matters. But in fact what we see is patches of light and colour, it is through our brain's interpretation that we "perceive" space and matter through the patches of light and colour. We say that the patches of light and colour is our private experience while the space and space occupying matter is our public experience.

      Our brain automatically puts our private experiences into a space-time context, we do not aware of this and so people and even some philosophers always mix them up. They cannot divide between private and public experiences although this is already a well established  knowledge in cognitive psychology in which the two are termed sensation and perception respectively.

 

Nature guides our behaviour, how ?

                                   

Through our private experiences

 

Previous

Next

Home