Experience of I

I exist and therefore I experience the outside physical world. If I do not exist the world does not exist. But before anyone can jump in to interrupt my sentence as being “subjective” I ‘ll put them the following questions:

1. How do you know a physical thing is separate from you or another thing?
2. What makes you believe that you are not the rock or pebble, dog or tree, or mud or sand or whatever which you think you are not?
3. Does a dead man experience the things which are not him?

To feel that you exist automatically means the following characteristics of “I”

1. ·You are not so many other things.
2. You know what you are not.
3. You have the capacity to “experience” these “so many other things” which for some reason you know you are not. Let me make these statements more clear with some analogies. If there is only one single entity and no other thing, can this single thing experience the world? The answer is very obvious it can’t.

Some may ask why can’t this single entity experience the world. Answer to this lies in the question which implies that there is no world other than the single entity. The single entity is all that exists and all that encompasses and all that is. Imagine a situation where there is nothing but you alone..to the extreme point. To the point where there is no space, no vacuum, no object other than you. In this case, you will not “experience” anything as you are the only thing that exist and you are everything .(like in a bus with capacity of 20 seats if you are the only passenger, then you are not only the only passenger but also everyone who is a passenger in the bus at the time).

The theory of non duality is exactly the non existence of second entity other than you. Here people who read science cannot imagine a situation where there exists nothing. Because to them there is always something like a vacuum or space if there is no “thing”. Advaita says that to feel and experience the world is consciousness or the feeling of “I” (other names include “ego”, identity of self etc). For no reason humans know what they are not. To identify and differentiate all things which you are not with what you are is first characteristic of a living thing.Now, I do not know if animals can experience and see things differently. And it does not matter here since I know at least one thing…I know what I am and what I am not.

What am i? I do not know exactly. But it is easy for me to know what I am not. I simply know (apriori knowledge) that I am not a phone, glass or shoe or shirt or cat or crow or whatever. So my nature (or the nature of I or consciousness or feeling of existence) tells me what I am not but it does not tell me what I am. But for some reason I am interested in experiencing the world that is not me (as told to me by my conscious or to put in better way I told myself ). Or in knowing what other things are (in the domain of modern science).

Then there is another dimension to this theory. If you know what you are not does your body is included among the list of “things which you are not”? Yes I am not the body. People may ask how do you know you are not your body? My answer is “the same way I know that I am not a crow.” But don’t I feel there is some thing different from your body and other things which you are not? Yes, certainly there is a huge difference between my body and other things which I am not. I can feel and experience immediately which touch or affect my body. You pinch me I ‘ll feel the pain of it immediately. But if you pinch my cat I can only think that my cat will feel pain. I can utmost empathize with the feeling another living being when it is pinched or hurt. 

But this is based on my own experience and not based on what other being or thing experiences. This makes me feel that my body is unique to me and my self. It lets me experience the world. Do I exist if the body is destroyed or has become incapacitated in some of its senses? I am not hundred percent certain of the statement I am going to make because I have not experienced death till date. But I feel on death of the body I cease to exist because I no more “experience” the world with my body (senses of the body). 

But does feeling of “I” let you experience the world through body or is it body that lets you experience “I” by feeding you with images and experiences of the world? This question also raises the point if the body is essential for experiencing “I” are you not the body?

Quotable Quotes of Aristotle

Experience

Now from memory experience is produced in men; for the several memories of the same thing produce finally the capacity for a single experience.

--Metaphysics, Aristotle

If, then, a man has the theory without the experience, and recognizes the universal but does not know the individual included in this, he will often fail to cure; for it is the individual that is to be cured.

But yet we think that knowledge and understanding belong to art rather than to experience, and we suppose artists to be wiser than men of experience
(which implies that Wisdom depends in all cases rather on knowledge); and this because the former know the cause, but the latter do not. For men of experience know that the thing is so,but do not know why, while the others know the ‘why’ and the cause.

--Metaphysics, Aristotle

Senses And Experience

Again, we do not regard any of the senses as Wisdom; yet surely these give the most authoritative knowledge of particulars. But they do not tell us the ‘why’ of anything.Eg. why fire is hot; they only say that it is hot.

--Metaphysics, Aristotle

Superiority of Art over Science

that he who can learn things that are difficult, and not easy for man to know, is wise (sense-perception is common to all, and therefore easy and no mark of Wisdom). Also, that which is desirable on its own account and for the sake of knowing it is more of the nature of Wisdom than that which is desirable on account of its results, and the superior science is more of the nature of Knowledge

--Metaphysics, Aristotle.

Knowing the Objective from the Subjective

For learning proceeds for all in this way-through that which is less knowable by nature to that which is more knowable; and just as in conduct our task is to start from what is good for each and make what is without qualification good good for each, so it is our task to start from what is more knowable to oneself and make what is knowable by nature knowable to oneself. Now what is knowable and primary for particular sets of people is often knowable to a very small extent, and has little or nothing of reality. But yet one must start from that which is barely knowable but knowable to oneself, and try to know what is knowable without qualification, passing, as has been said, by way of those very things which one does know.

--Metaphysics, Aristotle

Ways of knowing a thing (so and so and not so not so)

But if there are several sciences of the causes, and a different science for each different principle, which of these sciences should be said to be that which we seek, or which of the people who possess them has the most scientific knowledge of the object in question?

For since men may know the same thing in many ways, we say that former class itself one knows more fully than another, and he knows most fully who knows what a thing is, not he who knows its quantity or quality or what it can by nature do or have done to it. And further in all cases also we think that the knowledge of each even of the things of which demonstration is possible is present only when we know what the thing is, e.g. what squaring a rectangle is, viz. that it is the finding of a mean; and similarly in all other cases. And we know about becomings and actions and about every change when we know the source of the movement; and this is other than and opposed to the end.

--Metaphysics, Aristotle

Science and Axioms

If there is a demonstrative science which deals with them, there will have to be an underlying kind, and some of them must be demonstrable attributes and others must be axioms (for it is impossible that there should be demonstration about all of them); for the demonstration must start from certain premisses and be about a certain subject and prove certain attributes. Therefore it follows that all attributes that are proved must belong to a single class; for all demonstrative sciences use the axioms.

--Metaphysics, Aristotle

Job of philosopher

But if the science of substance and the science which deals with the axioms are different, which of them is by nature more authoritative and prior? The axioms are most universal and are principles of all things. And if it is not the business of the philosopher, to whom else will it belong to inquire what is true and what is untrue about them

--Metaphysics, Aristotle

Axiom
Eg: One is the maxim of Thucydides

that the strong do as they wish while the weak suffer as they must.

Is matter the truth of a thing?

The word 'substance' is applied, if not in more senses, still at least to four main objects; for both the essence and the universal and the genus, are thought to be the substance of each thing, and fourthly the substratum. Now the substratum is that of which everything else is predicated, while it is itself not predicated of anything else. And so we must first determine the nature of this; for that which underlies a thing primarily is thought to be in the truest sense its substance. And in one sense matter is said to be of the nature of substratum, in another, shape, and in a third, the compound of these.

--Metaphysics, Aristotle

Can matter be perceived?

For if this is not substance, it baffles us to say what else is. When all else is stripped off evidently nothing but matter remains. For while the rest are affections, products, and potencies of bodies, length, breadth, and depth are quantities and not substances (for a quantity is not a substance), but the substance is rather that to which these belong primarily. But when length and breadth and depth are taken away we see nothing left unless there is something that is bounded by these; so that to those who consider the question thus matter alone must seem to be substance. By matter I mean that which in itself is neither a particular thing nor of a certain quantity nor assigned to any other of the categories by which being is determined.

--Metaphysics, Aristotle

Do words describe things in whole?

We must no doubt inquire how we should express ourselves on each point, but certainly not more than how the facts actually stand. the truth being that we use the word neither ambiguously nor in the same sense, but just as we apply the word 'medical' by virtue of a reference to one and the same thing, not meaning one and the same thing, nor yet speaking ambiguously; for a patient and an operation and an instrument are called medical neither by an ambiguity nor with a single meaning, but with reference to a common end.

-Metaphysics, Aristotle