Experience is necessarily experience-for, experience for something/somebody; and since an experience cannot be an experience for itself by experiencing itself, it must be an experience for something else, viz. an experiencer that is not itself an experience. Experiences and experiencers/subjects of experience are interdependent but different from one another. A feeling/thinking cannot exist unfelt/unthought and it cannot feel/think itself, so there must be a distinct feeler feeling/thinker thinking it. It is plainly incoherent to accept the existence of subjective experiences and not to accept the existence of (distinct) subjects of experience.Gertie wrote:How do you know for certain? The convenient 'mental grammar' of Subjects and Verbs describes what it seems like, that the Experiencer must a real thing. But the experience of eating an apple makes the apple seem like it must be a real thing.Consul wrote:No, it's not, because you cannot have an experience without a subject of experience (which is not itself an experience). Necessarily, an experience is had or undergone by something different from itself, because experiences cannot be experienceRs and they cannot exist without being experienced by an experiencer.
So why are apples and everything else open to doubt, but not the possibility that only the experiences themselves exist? Why isn't the sense of being a single (maybe embodied or maybe not, maybe relating to a real external world or maybe not) Subject-Experiencer open to doubt?
Even Berkeley acknowledged the difference between subjects and their experiences:
"Besides all that endless variety of ideas or objects of knowledge, there is likewise something which knows or perceives them; and exercises divers operations, as willing, imagining, remembering about them. This perceiving, active being is what I call mind, spirit, soul or myself. By which words I do not denote any one of my ideas, but a thing entirely distinct from them, wherein they exist, or, which is the same thing, whereby they are perceived; for the existence of an idea consists in being perceived."
(Berkeley, George. Principles of Human Knowledge. 1710. Part 1, §2)