Can we record human experience?

Ayush Jain

Do you think it's possible to record the individual human experience?

By that I mean, what each of us go through every second of our lives? The inputs to our senses, the thoughts that pass by, the emotions we feel? Our body to a certain extent is able to store these for a period of time. If it can do it, it can be argued that we might be able to parameterize the human experience. If we remove the bias that our genetics create, and assume all brains to be identical at the time they are created, let's assume that point is the moment we are born. Brain kind of acts like a computer, takes inputs from senses, gives output. Whatever principles, values, behavioral patterns we have today, have emerged from our experiences. Deep down all of us have a reasoning for the smallest of actions or decisions we take.

Now, if we actually are able to parameterize the experience, we might just be able to recreate and capture the human experience. Essentially, you will be able to step-in your past, re-experience those moments. We might just be able to time travel in the past, only to observe though.

Do you think this is possible?

Pantagruel

↪Ayush Jain

I assume that this is the entire project of culture, to symbolically memorialize individual experiences such that they can be re-ingested by subsequent generations, creating a kind of continuity of experience. The only way to actually parameterize individual experience is through intersubjectively evolved concepts. There is no truly singular meaning.

Ayush Jain

↪Pantagruel

I am just trying to understand if I can possibly record what goes through within us at every moment. For instance, even when the culture is being passed on to subsequent generations through whatever medium, there's a unique individual recipient, who will understand, digest, and internalize whatever has been conveyed (meaning might be singular this way). In the culture project, we are recording the input of what has already happened in the larger society. I am trying to go a little deeper and broader, and understand if we can parameterize any input whatsoever (essentially, the lifetime) that a conscious being receives.

wonderer1

Do you think it's possible to record the individual human experience?

By that I mean, what each of us go through every second of our lives? The inputs to our senses, the thoughts that pass by, the emotions we feel? — Ayush Jain

If you had stopped at "inputs to our senses" you'd have something somewhat technologically feasible (if not very practical). However, with thoughts and emotions you would be talking about highly invasive measurement of a huge amount of activity occurring in people's brains. It's not at all technologically feasible to measure and record the data that would be needed.

Tom Storm

I am just trying to understand if I can possibly record what goes through within us at every moment. — Ayush Jain

Not sure I understand your ideas here. Memory doesn't represent what happened to us or how we felt. The self is like mercury. What we think we experienced changes which each recollection and evolves, often imperceptibly. The idea of a correct recollection of an event seems wrong. There is how you felt in the moment, which is specific to everything that came immediately before and after. It continually evolves: seconds, minutes, days, weeks, years later. I can't see how your idea would be useful. Rather than nailing down a single meaning and reproducing it over time in an attempt at a kind of synthesis, it might be better to celebrate the multiple interpretations of any event and realize that all we can do is try to make sense of our environment.

Pantagruel

there's a unique individual recipient, who will understand, digest, and internalize whatever has been conveyed — Ayush Jain

But how did that individual's version of whatever "meaning" arise? He didn't create it ex nihilo. It was constructed out of framing elements which evolved through social practices - words with already practically evolved meanings. Individuation and community are the poles of a spectrum, neither of which makes sense without the other, like materiality and ideality.

Wayfarer

Do you think this is possible? — Ayush Jain

No, because experience is inextricably linked with a subject or a being, and recordings are always third-person.

There was a fabulous early 1980s sci fi movie on this theme, Natalie Woods' last film before her premature and tragic death, which occurred during the final stages of filming.

Mww

↪Ayush Jain

Where, in 3B neuroconnections/mm3 in the human brain, would the recording equipment probe be inserted, for recording the experience of reeling in a trophy fish, or, the memory of already having done such a thing?

At what measure of mass density, does the recording device effect that which the device is suppose to record, synonymous with the quantum “observer problem”?

The average human can’t explain his own experiences, so how would he be able to design equipment, to record what he doesn’t know how to find?

Nahhhhh…..a gigantic, cast iron, capital letter “not possible” from me.

Tom Storm

The average human can’t explain his own experiences, so how would he be able to design equipment, to record what he doesn’t know how to find? — Mww

Nice!

Vera Mont

Essentially, you will be able to step-in your past, re-experience those moments. — Ayush Jain

Hypnosis needs to be a lot more precise and controllable. External recording not possible, unless (?until) compatible hardware is perfected and individuals are fitted with a recording device wired into their brain.

jorndoe

For a brief moment, this is what a photographer saw:

But the recording is not the recorded.

Gmak

I think experience need to be differentiate from emotion. And yes, with the technology, I say that even the emotion, can be save. But I doubt it's something common: something for the wealthy maybe.

wonderer1

At what measure of mass density, does the recording device effect that which the device is suppose to record, synonymous with the quantum “observer problem”? — Mww

:up:

At what point in 'sensoring up' a human, have you created something that is no longer a human.

Mww

↪wonderer1

Exactly like one of Zeno’s Paradoxes.….cover half the distance with each step. Sooner or later, you’re gonna get to a point where the distance is measured in terms of outer shell electrons of different things, both of which have, of course, disappeared.

Moliere

Yes.

Essentially, you will be able to step-in your past, re-experience those moments. — Ayush Jain

Consider:

X.

IN A LIBRARY.

A precious, mouldering pleasure 't is
To meet an antique book,
In just the dress his century wore;
A privilege, I think,

His venerable hand to take,
And warming in our own,
A passage back, or two, to make
To times when he was young.

His quaint opinions to inspect,
His knowledge to unfold
On what concerns our mutual mind,
The literature of old;

What interested scholars most,
What competitions ran
When Plato was a certainty.
And Sophocles a man;

When Sappho was a living girl,
And Beatrice wore
The gown that Dante deified.
Facts, centuries before,

He traverses familiar,
As one should come to town
And tell you all your dreams were true;
He lived where dreams were sown.

His presence is enchantment,
You beg him not to go;
Old volumes shake their vellum heads
And tantalize, just so. — Emily Dickenson

Which demonstrates that the record of human experience is deeper than re-experiencing my own experiences -- with the old volumes we can even conjure up the experiences of those before us.

Wayfarer

↪jorndoe

:rofl: Not enough chess jokes in the world.

↪Moliere

Beautiful. I was so taken by the Dickenson poem below I printed it nicely and framed it for my study. This one really speaks to me.

This World is not Conclusion
By Emily Dickinson

This World is not Conclusion.
A Species stands beyond
Invisible, as Music
But positive, as Sound
It beckons, and it baffles
Philosophy, don't know
And through a Riddle, at the last
Sagacity, must go
To guess it, puzzles scholars
To gain it, Men have borne
Contempt of Generations
And Crucifixion, shown
Faith slips - and laughs, and rallies
Blushes, if any see
Plucks at a twig of Evidence
And asks a Vane, the way
Much Gesture, from the Pulpit
Strong Hallelujahs roll
Narcotics cannot still the Tooth
That nibbles at the soul

Arcane Sandwich

↪jorndoe

Amazing. That's the best joke I've heard this month!

Arcane Sandwich

When Sappho was a living girl,
And Beatrice wore
The gown that Dante deified.
Facts, centuries before,

He traverses familiar,
As one should come to town
And tell you all your dreams were true;
He lived where dreams were sown.

His presence is enchantment,
You beg him not to go;
Old volumes shake their vellum heads
And tantalize, just so. — Emily Dickenson

What a beautiful thing to say.

Can we record human experience?

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