Human Experience Dynamics: The rest of the story…

See the precursor if you like, but it’s redundant to this post: De Parte I

Reader Readiness Caveat: this article is high-jargon, philosophically psychological, and so in need of a glossary addendum. Until then, get your Google ready (readers, start your search engines)

The nature of experience is not dictated purely by the moments of perception that define it but rather the moments of integration and export that evolve thereafter. The mental processing and manipulation of these moments manifest an experience. Only when the person recollects memories and analyses them, can a threshold be met that turns vague perceptions in memory into experience. From this point the experience is inherently dynamic, whether ephemeral or evolving. It may deteriorate from neglect, be intentionally re-construed (for depth, bias, or affect), unconsciously or latently modified, be recollected often by habit or trigger, incorporate new information or perspectives (other accounts, mood based effects, building a lesson from trauma), be spliced with other memory, adapt to narration or detail preference, or in other myriad ways be reproduced by implicit or explicit cognitive and neurological fluctuations in the associated information subsystems.

The most basic physicality of human experience lies in the neural reality and the behavior of cells in congregation. This extrapolates to all scales of the brain from chemical to neural regions and specialized systems, networking and modulation, sensation, perception, worldview, physiological states (acute to chronic), context as social and cultural or non- human, pathology and well being, and even quantum biological factkors. This leaves dynamic flux as norm and consistency as partial or conceptually irrelevant.

With this casual and effective dynamo in mind, the following is a attempt to refine and define critical components to experience. Regardless of subjective or objective limits, this will be a naive highlighting, based on social and physical scientific insights, further based of my own personal experience with experience.

Okay, one more caveat just in case…Semantic Distinctions:
– From memory: memory is only a component of experience; episodic memory is a foundation for experience with semantic/informational memory as an analytic complement
– From colloquial use: pragmatically, experience is simplified to contextual or informational themes for easement of discourse. Be aware the voids you must fill with assumptions -both inferred or from your own schemas- that diminish the internal version by conversion to narration. Further, experience is a universal human trait innately idiosyncratic with intra-individual variance.
– There are always more caveats but we need to move into the dynamic pillars of human experience.

1. Reflexive interiority: placement of self; allocation of agency relative to the self and degree to which the self is understood in the events true to memory, as well as in hypothetical alterations or delusional/erroneous adjustments; adjustments can be based on internal/external variables.
-Prime Factors: self-awareness (it’s accuracy, action level, application), identity, others’- and self-esteem, bias and error, introspective ability and depth, special methods or paradigms (including mnemonics or heuristics)
– Accuracy: deviance from other accounts, memory modification, bias or esteem influence, capacity for awareness (physiological state, cognitive ability, awareness of self-awareness and it’s practice)
– Adjustments: memory degradation or reform, influence of others

2. Hermeneutics: magnitude of interpretation; based on memory of events and abstractions; relationship-making and deeper analysis of the applicable knowledge used to interpret and summarize the events; likely a pre-cursor of narrative forms but also constantly active as long as the experience is actively available to the person’s cognition.
-Main factors: knowledge and paradigms applicable from worldview, memory of event details, magnitude and freq of recall esp explicit introspection, degree of external info applied, emotional and empirical sources, idiosyncrasies
-idiosyncrasies: cognitive bias and error, perception, implicit analysis v explicit, choice of meaningful sources

3. Narrative Formation : a linguistic and ordered version of the experience adapted for intersubjective transmission
-Form factors: context specific or improvised formations may be preconceived or adapted -in situ- to conform to: social norms, interlocutor or listener factors (relationship status, unintended audience, knowledge gaps or fills, desired influence/effect), the individual’s capacity/ability/desire to share, personal openness and reservations (withhold or include elements for functional or comfort reasons); temporal limits/social-time constraints, addendums, reiteration or focus control, corrections of information or sequence, cognitive states (mood, metabolic phase, impairment, context specificity, available attentional resources); and asocially contrived versions (prevarication/deception, concealment, self-serving/preserving intent, effort reduction, survivalism, and other psycho-/socio-pathic type intentions), or prosocial (educational, consolation, bond reinforcement, encouragement, therapy, and other conscientious, helpful, or generous intentions)

These form factors and any subsequent narrative manifestations are inter- related to the “core” experience. Each narrative iteration and performance brings change to the experience by the qualities, of both expression itself, and reactions. The experience is also vulnerable to self-consistency phenomena such as correspondence of action to belief and memory phenomena such as recall memorization (memories recalled are replaced/updated by the newly recalled version or influenced by the actions of recollection itself), also there is “gap filing” (intentional or automatic remodeling of memory to match present knowledge or needs).
-Critical Factors: beyond form factors in general: preparation methods and effort, in the sense of narrative rehearsal, privacy orientation, suppression, or censorship of the expressed experience, intended function, contribution of resources utilized and their quality (depth, relevance, appropriation).

–Some sort of conclusion:–

Fundamental Factors of Experience:
– Education: as it’s influential in the domains of socialization, knowledge, worldview
– Cognition during event (per physiological and neuro-cognitive states/moments)
– Cognitive precision and interplay–(->Ability to manifest perception from sensation and to auto-“correct”[construe] or realize in-situ-metacognition)
– Contextual and/or consistent affects (novelty, habituation or desensitization, emotional or physiological state inherent to the event’s environment, complexity of event, mentality/ideational variation, and other epiphenomenon of human-grade conscious cognition…)

–Notably, there is one more: Other accounts (i.e. learning about other people’s experience via being an interlocutor to their experiential narrative); it is influential, both in terms of the event of your experience, one similar, or one completely novel to you; experience sharing, is experiential, as well as biasing, to your own “deep-rooted” memories of your experiences.

___

Bonus:

“Shared” experience – physically impossible (but theoretically and thought-experimentally possible, with no understandable conclusion) for two brains to share one experience. Practically, experiences with objectively equal context – within proximal spatial and temporal aspects – can be inter-subjectively modified, such that communicably, they are shared, along with information and qualia; and so, enough to be considered shared psycho-physiologically, but not exactly or purely.