Idealism seems to me an example of philosophy poisoning. — wonderer1

:up:

Phenomenology seeks to remedy this condition by returning attention to the primacy of being - the reality of lived experience - *not* as something to analyse through science or metaphysics but through attention to 'what is’ - ‘dasein’. — Wayfarer

Heideggerian phenomenology – in other words, privileging secondary qualities over primary qualities by conflating epistemology with ontology. Anthropocentric antirealism (contra Mediocrity Principle) aka "idealism". :zip:

I don't think so. The issue here is that Kastrup would agree that conscious creatures emerged 'later' and the cosmological events or the 'reality' we have detected which predate life, like consciousness, is simply what mind looks like when viewed from a different perspective. — Tom Storm

The issue I have is that our understanding of mind comes from our human experience of "minding", or to put it another way our understanding of consciousness derives from the experience of awareness (or the awareness of experience). and what it feels like and intuitively seems to mean to be conscious. So, the idea of "what mind looks like" seems incoherent to me.

Schopenhauer is easier to swallow because he speaks of a blind will or striving (an idea I believe he got from Spinoza's "conatus") and this makes more sense to me than the idea of universal mind, since we do see what appears to be striving in the natural world, most particularly in the realms of flora and fauna.

Why should even "inanimate" matter not appear as striving, if it is fundamentally energetic? But a blind, striving will cannot explain how it is that we all see the same things in the world around us, unless the will generates real structures that are continually being formed and broken down by real forces. But this would just be a physicalist view, not an idealist one.

The idea of a universal mind is the idea of a container that holds things as constant thoughts that manifest as the objects of the senses, and look the same to us, because of this activity of the "mind at large", and this would be more than a mere "blind will".

The question then is, if this "mind" is not metacogntiive. is it at least cognitive? Is it aware of us and does it have a plan for us. It all seems too nebulous and far out to me to be taken seriously as anything more than a wishful fantasy. There is only one more wishful step up to a Giod that cares about us.

Kastrup is trying to have his cake and eat it too. He talks about evolution as if it is a physical thing, and we've evolved a "dashboard of perception" to navigate the world. But idealism posits the existence of only mind and thought. There is no natural selection or random mutations. Reality as we perceive it is a dream created by a cosmic mind. There is no past for evolution to have happened in. There's only the present moment in the dream we're all experiencing.

It does look like he is trying to have his cake and eat it, but maybe that's how it appears when someone builds a comprehensive account. It's human cognition that puts time and space into it. Natural selection is a process we have interpreted, based on our cognitive apparatus, and our understanding of consciousness, which we have interpreted as physicalism. I understand Kastrup sees evolution as an account of consciousness evolving and changing (our conceptual frame) over aeons.

Why should even "inanimate" matter not appear as striving, if it is fundamentally energetic? But a blind, striving will cannot explain how it is that we all see the same things in the world around us, unless the will generates real structures that are continually being formed and broken down by real forces. But this would just be a physicalist view, not an idealist one. — Janus

Well, I can only answer that here we are trying to project human understanding, our cognitive apparatus upon a highly complex account that requires a lot of text to describe. Since I am not Kastrup, I can only suggest reading him. I don't think you are right about it being a physicalist view - the entire point is it looks like physicalism to us but is mind when viewed from a particular perspective - us. I see no reason why consciousness, if that's all there is (as even the Hindu's believe) would not also appear to us as inanimate objects.

s it aware of us and does it have a plan for us. It all seems too nebulous and far out to me to be taken seriously as anything more than a wishful fantasy. There is only one more wishful step up to a Giod that cares about us. — Janus

These are the very same questions Kastrup poses and I don't think he has answered them. He'd be the first to say that his ontology raises matters for which he has no current account. I am not deep enough into him to respond fluently on this.

I think Mind at Large is a small 'g' god surrogate and occupies a similar foundational space and is the guarantor of being. It doesn't have a plan, however, since it has no metacognition. The idea is there is only mind and from this, all being emanates in various forms - creatures and objects. Object permanence comes via Mind at Large.

. Anthropocentric antirealism (contra Mediocrity Principle) — 180 Proof

The 'mediocracy principle' only exists in the minds of those who propose it.

The question we can ask of this scenario is why did a great mind splinter off and develop dissociated alters over time (as we understand time) is consciousness engaged in an act of getting to know itself? — Tom Storm

Nagel’s starting point (in Mind and Cosmos) is not simply that he finds materialism partial or unconvincing, but that he himself has a metaphysical view or vision of reality that just cannot be accommodated within materialism. This vision is that the appearance of conscious beings in the universe is somehow what it is all for; that ‘Each of our lives is a part of the lengthy process of the universe gradually waking up and becoming aware of itself’. — Dhivan Thomas Jones - The Universe is Waking Up

The reason that I'm not a physicalist is that matter does not act. It is only acted upon. (Interesting etymological fact: the word 'matter' is derived from the same root as 'mother'.) The laws of physics, which for moderns occupy the role once accorded to 'the inexorable laws of fate' (according to Whitehead) can in no way account for the origin or significance of life (which is why eliminative materialism, for instance, has such an absurdly truncated view of the nature of being).

The importance of individuation, and how we individuate, is I think key to understanding the so-called wave function collapse of quantum physics — Metaphysician Undercover

:chin:

Can you provide additional reasoning for why you think "philosophy should provide the ability to explore the matter directly without needing to rely on neuroscientific research." — wonderer1

Because philosophy, the 'love of wisdom', or better still 'love~wisdom' ought not to have to rely on the findings of contingent science. Certainly, any philosophy has to be able to deal with empirical discoveries, and certainly the background worldview of the ancients was hardly scientifically informed by today's standards - but if you consider the main subjects of interest in the Platonic dialogues, many of them - the nature of love, of justice, of wisdom, of courage - are hardly affected by that.

He talks about evolution as if it is a physical thing, and we've evolved a "dashboard of perception" to navigate the world. But idealism posits the existence of only mind and thought. — RogueAI

Yes, but not just your mind and your thought.

The reason that I'm not a physicalist is that matter does not act. — Wayfarer

Action = energy = matter. Wtf, sir. :sweat:

It is only acted upon.

Newtonian laws & conservation laws – typical 'dualist', I guess you've never heard of those. :roll:

Not capable of initiating anything.

Ernst Mayr, one of the architects of the modern synthesis, has been one of the most outspoken supporters of the view that life is fundamentally different from inanimate matter. In The growth of biological thought [15], p. 124, he made this point in no uncertain terms: ‘… The discovery of the genetic code was a breakthrough of the first order. It showed why organisms are fundamentally different from any kind of nonliving material. There is nothing in the inanimate world that has a genetic program which stores information with a history of three thousand million years!’

Certainly, any philosophy has to be able to deal with empirical discoveries, and certainly the background worldview of the ancients was hardly scientifically informed by today's standards - but if you consider the main subjects of interest in the Platonic dialogues, many of them - the nature of love, of justice, of wisdom, of courage - are hardly affected by that.

I'll leave discussion of Plato's dialogs to people better informed than I.

However, I'd suggest some study of evolutionary psychology and game theory *might* disabuse you of the belief that understanding of the nature of love, justice, wisdom, and courage are hardly affected by knowledge of science.

Anyway, I'm letting myself get too absorbed with discussions on the forum. So I'm going to try to resist getting too sucked into this one.

Thanks for the discussion.

Non sequitur. I'll take that as a concession to the points I made in my previous post. You're welcome, sir. :victory:

I have noticed your difficulties keeping up.

I will explain. The idea that life can be explained with reference only to the laws of physics is physicalism, right? Newtonian laws being an example of 'laws of physics'. So to oppose physicalism, is to argue that life cannot be so derived. The quotation provided is from Ernst Mayr, whom I believe is an authority in the field of biology, disputing physicalist reductionism, saying that organisms are fundamentally (I would say, ontologically) different to non-living matter. It's tangential to the OP, but not completely.

However, I'd suggest some study of evolutionary psychology and game theory *might* disabuse you of the belief that understanding of the nature of love, justice, wisdom, and courage are hardly affected by knowledge of science. — wonderer1

Sure, they contribute to it, they might re-frame it. But I think as a matter of principle that philosophy demands a kind of insight that relies on qualities of character and reason, not on contingent facts. // oh, and you're welcome. //

The idea that life can be explained with reference only to the laws of physics is physicalism, right? — Wayfarer

Wrong. :lol:

How so? Got an alternative definition?

I've described my understanding of the methodology this way ...

Physicalism is a paradigm for generating conjectures or models and not a theoretical explanation of phenomena. — 180 Proof

Although I am not sure I entirely understood your post yet, let me try to adequately respond. — Bob Ross

My bad, I didn't really clarify my terminology. So let me try to adapt it to analytic idealism and then some.

Analytic Idealism would posit that our minds are alters of a universal mind, and space and time only emerge as a production of perceptive conscious beings. In terms of analytic idealism, the world around you that you are perceiving is fundamentally the unfolding in space and time (which are synthetic but arguably not a priori in the sense schopenhauer exactly meant it) of eternal platonic ideas. Although space and time do not behave necessarily as we would intuit from normal every day-to-day experience, they are also within the eternal ideas as we are, as evolved emergent perceptive and self-conscious beings, a part of those eternal ideas. — Bob Ross

So I'll use the word mind for localized and dissociated universal mind. And Formless Mind for the "part" of the Universal Mind which is not manifested in spacetime as a measurable form.
So we have the Universal Mind, the Formless Mind and then the localized mind.
Of course this distinction is only for usefulness of explaining and there is no spatial or temporal separation between the three.

Why do I say that our human localized mind obeys to the laws of spacetime?
Simply because the Formless Mind to manifest itself into spacetime it needs matter, in this case a brain and a body, it is "pulled down" to the world of form, which is an excitation of the Formless.
In a human being, the Formless is in a relationship with the form and thus it is subject to different laws, laws of spacetime. The Formless does not lose its nature but it becomes limited by the form.

Enter:

Are you saying that the mind can “switch” (so to speak) between two modes of existence or perceptive capabilities? — Bob Ross

In a sense, but lets clarify.
As I understand it, the human being is mostly subject to the laws of spacetime.
One is born in a body which is conditioned for millions of years of evolution.
One is conditioned by his/her specific genes and then conditioned by society.
That's why it is right to say that humans are social animals but I simply wouldn't end it there.
So far a human being is just a complicated machine.
For some reason humans are born with the potential to realize that Formless Mind which is the original source of his/her consciousness.
So as I see it humans have two options:
1. Live under the rule of the localized mind which obeys laws of spacetime like a machine
2. Realize the Formless Mind in oneself and become subject to new different laws.

If you are familiar with traditional metaphysics and religious texts this may sound familiar.
i.e the no-mind of zen, the anatman of Buddha, the divine double, the nous etc.
These traditions always have called for man to shift their attention from option 1 and live option 2.
Ultimately that is the point of meditation in "negative" religions, or surrender in "positive" religions.

In every metaphysical theory, I find there is the problem of accounting for the inevitable eternal somehow continually “converting” into something temporal—and I don’t know how to account for it adequately under any theory. — Bob Ross

Yes and there is a chance that it cannot be done, at least objectively.

Physicalism is a paradigm for generating conjectures or models and not a theoretical explanation of phenomena. — 180 Proof

Right. Agree. And not incompatible with:

In terms of science, I think that science proper is the acquiring of how entities relate to each other and not what they fundamentally are…. — Bob Ross

Although I will also observe that yours is not a physicalist account of physicalism.

Although I will also observe that yours is not a physicalist account of physicalism. — Wayfarer

That statement doesn't make any sense.

Consider this ...


Your thoughts?

I would need you to explain further what you mean by those terms to give a more precise answer. — Bob Ross

Thank you for your readiness! But I don't think we should get involved in such a quest. Not worthwhile.

Could you give an example of such a detailed description of consciousness? — Bob Ross

I can give you a few references. However, I don't know what you actually expect from this. If you are not involved in the Eastern philosophy, I don't know if what I can refer you to will make much sense or even be useful to you.
They are all refering mainly to experiencing. So, you must not expect scientific facts or even views, although scientific approaches can be applied to some cases.
Also, it is mportant to note that none of the views on consciousness find me totally in aggreement. Maybe I'm closest to Sarvapriyananda's description ("consciousness lighting up experiences".)

So, I have created the following list, prompted by your request! :smile:

Eastern philosophy:

Swami Sarvapriyananda | Consciousness — The Ultimate Reality
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z3cuMEBYm_g
Swami Sarvapriyananda on 'CONSCIOUS EXPERIENCE'
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=01fWVdfIUPs
Life and consciousness – The Vedāntic view
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4802748/
What is Samkhya?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=awFdSi_VD5c
The Monistic Idealism of A. Goswami - A Theosophical Appraisal
(Sections "Materialism and idealism" and "Wave-function collapse")
http://davidpratt.info/goswami.htm

Western philosophy with Eastern elements:

Mind, Matter, and Life: Fritjof Capra
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TFERd65UCh8
Earth Talk: Fritjof Capra - The Systems View of Life
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=If2Fw0z6uxY
Non-duality and the Nature of Consciousness (Rupert Spira)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gRUgkSJZ-8M
Destined to Evolve Our Consciousness (Eckhart Tolle)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a2gtEjtXCTo

It isn’t even apparent that we will one day be able to definitively understand the entirety of reality. — Bob Ross

This is indeed so.

[Re Einstein] one should be able to articulate their position concisely and precisely — Bob Ross

This is plausible too.

If by “explain what ‘consciousness’ is” you are asking how it works, then only via empirical inquiry will we find out. — Bob Ross

Exactly. This is what I'm saying.

[Re: A few I know that have descibed this quite well ...] Could you give an example? — Bob Ross

See my first reply.

For analytic idealism, consciousness is not synonymous with perception. — Bob Ross

I didn't say that consciousness is synonymous with perception. They are two totally different kinds of things. What I mean is that consciousness is strongly connected to perception, in the sense that it is a state and abiity to preceive things outside us (environment) as well as inside us (thoughts, emotions, etc.)
But consciousness is not limited to perception. I would mention that if I knew you would scrutinize my statement! :grin:

“Perception” is used to denote conscious beings that have evolved to have the faculties to represent its environment to itself — Bob Ross

OK, but consciousness a characteristic of all life: Living organisms as well as plants.

The universal mind, for instance, does not perceive ... — Bob Ross

All this is fine. But the "universal mind" is only a concept for me: I have no experience of it.

Think of it like the difference between plants, which will on a basis of very basic stimulus responses, vs. a complex animal (like a dog): the plant is perceiving anything but yet, under analytic idealism, is conscious. — Bob Ross

Certainly. Each form of life has a different level of consciousness, or better, it is consious on a different level, depending on its complexity as an organism, as you say.

Not capable of initiating anything. — Wayfarer

The source of activity in "actual existence" is a deep ontological question. We can get a glimpse of it through introspection, and understanding the will, or what is describing as "blind striving". But Janus' account is a little off the mark, because this "will" can never be truly blind because it would then just be a cause of action which would be completely random, and unintelligible in an absolute sense. What we do find (or I find) through introspection is that the inclinations of the will are not totally accessible to the conscious mind. This is what gives the will the appearance of being "blind", and these origins of activity as being somewhat unintelligible. We are driven by many features from the subconscious (or unconscious) level of our physical living bodies, and the conscious mind does not have access to that source of activity.

Likewise, when we look externally with our senses we observe the activity of things, and our sensations do not have access to the true cause of these activities. This leaves the cause, or origin of activity as completely out of reach of empirical science. The application of numbers leaves us baffled because we allow "infinite" to be incorporated into the axioms and this implies no end (or beginning), leaving the origins as necessarily unintelligible.

So, we have two approaches toward the origin (cause) of activity, inward and outward, and neither one provides us with what we need to be able to understand it. Furthermore, the approach provided by looking inward, toward the will, becomes completely incompatible with the approach of empirical sciences which is looking outward with the senses, as we delve deeper and deeper. What this suggests to me is that we do not have an adequate understanding of the relationship between space and time.

Conventional representations of space do not provide the means for distinguishing the outward direction from the inward direction. We make a three dimensional object, like a sphere, and we model motion in space, relative to that proposed object, as the same, whether the motion is inside or outside this object. If the object is imaginary, fictional, just a plotting of points, like a reference frame, there is nothing real to substantiate a difference between inside and outside of the object. But when we take a real object, with molecular structure, there is a real, substantial difference between inside and outside due to the existence of mass, and the known forces which are associated with it. However, we (physicists), with our advanced principles, still represent forces in the Newtonian way of two massive objects having an effect on each other from the outside inward, a "collision". So for example, physicists cannot model the interaction of two objects as there being an intrinsic source of activity within each object, and these two internally sourced activities interacting, with each other, because they do not have an adequate spatial-temporal representation to allow for internally sourced activities. Activity coming from inside appears counterintuitive to the materialist perspective because it does not conform to a three dimensional model of space, so it must come from "nowhere", or just spontaneously (magically) appear at a random point in space.

That’s the whole point - you can't get outside the appearance to see it as it 'truly is'. — Wayfarer

And yet you quote Pinter making a claim about the mind-independent world

The mind-independent world is not naturally divided into individual parts — Pinter, Charles. Mind and the Cosmic Order (p92)

My view is that it really exists, but that the very notion of existence always implies an observer for whom it exists, — Wayfarer

The very notion of anything at all implies something having a notion. But existence is not the notion of existence. As you say, the object really exists.

Distance between Moon and Earth is in our heads...? :chin: — jorndoe

If you know the distance between here and earth, it's in your head. I don't, so it's not in my head. Of course distance is something in human heads, it's a value, something measured. There is no value without the measurement. — Metaphysician Undercover

Hm? :brow: Well, if you ask how far away the Moon is, someone might variously say "No clue", "Between 200,000 and 300,000 miles", "The average distance between Earth's and the Moon's centers of gravity is about 360,000 km, increasing about 4 cm a year, and Earth's rotation slowing down accordingly", (translated) Hipparchus said about 400,000 km, ... Maybe no one will respond, doesn't really matter much. It's beliefs + justifications. None of which has any particular bearing on the Moon being distanced, and that getting there is no walk in the park. Whatever distance is discovered, not invented, and not existentially dependent on whatever human discoverers' heads. :shrug:

It does look like he is trying to have his cake and eat it, but maybe that's how it appears when someone builds a comprehensive account. It's human cognition that puts time and space into it. Natural selection is a process we have interpreted, based on our cognitive apparatus, and our understanding of consciousness, which we have interpreted as physicalism. I understand Kastrup sees evolution as an account of consciousness evolving and changing (our conceptual frame) over aeons. — Tom Storm

Do you have a link for that?

”I think Kant's claim that we don't know what things are in themselves stands”

I disagree: I think schopenhauer finished Kant’s project by correcting this error of Kant’s. — Bob Ross

No, he didn’t correct the error; there wasn’t one to correct. It is impossible to know what things are in themselves, iff the human cognitive system is representational, which they both accepted as the case, and that necessarily. All S did was take that which is impossible to not know….the will….and call it the thing-in-itself, a philosophical blunder for which there is no legitimate excuse.

Let’s do some science. For any transformation of energy there is loss. It follows that for whatever mode of energy incorporated in the mode of reception by the sensory organs, that transforms into another form of energy in the peripheral nervous system, there is a loss in the original form. Therefore, whatever information is represented in the secondary form cannot be identical to whatever information was contained in the original. If that information in the secondary energy represents that which ends as knowledge, and that secondary information is not identical to the original information due to energy loss, it is impossible such knowledge can be of the original energy source.

So it seems metaphysics already proposed in its domain what physics subsequently obtained in its own.
————

if Kant were correct in saying that we never come to understand the noumena—but we can. — Bob Ross

Context aside, insofar as there is no pertinent connection, it remains Kant could not have said noumena could not be understood, after having himself conceived a version of them. In Kant, understanding is the origin of conceptions, noumena are conceptions, or rather, noumena is a conception of a general class of conceptions, therefore noumena in general must be understandable, for otherwise the conception itself would be impossible. He made the apodeitic systemically conditioned argument that noumena could never be represented in the intuitive faculty of human cognitive system, therefore no noumenal objects could be an experience for us. Which is not entitlement to say there are no noumenal objects, but only that those systems predicated on a intuitive/discursive systemic methodology are not equipped to know what one would entail.
————-

”There isn’t a proof, per se, only an internal affirmative logical consistency”.

I just mean what is the case for it? What do you mean by it being an internal affirmative logical consistency? — Bob Ross

Be it granted it is impossible to know what an object is, if for it there is only a single intuition or a single conception. Many things are round, but to cognize any one thing, it must be more than just round. For however many representations there are by which an object becomes an experience, all those representations must be united into a single cognition. The categories are those primitive conceptions, not by which they are but by which representations of objects can be united such that a cognition is possible. This and this and this make up the cognition of that, but there still must be that which facilitates that this and this and this can be connected without conflicting with each other.

The categories can be thought of as regulatory principles, in that the cognition of objects depends on a logical system adhering to something that both makes the cognition possible and at the same time, alleviates contradictions in them. For instance, it is not enough to know it is possible to experience that which exists, but something must make it apodeitically certain it is impossible to experience that which does not exist, even if non-existence itself holds no contradiction insofar as it is merely a complementary conception.

The real attraction justifying the categories, is the human ability to construct its own real existences from abstract conceptions, re: numbers, letters, and so on, which would be utterly impossible if, like Hume, the denial of pure a priori conceptions, as logically invalid or altogether rationally impossible, were the case. It is tacitly inconceivable how we could invent mathematical objects if we didn’t already have the pure a priori conception of quantity contained in our understanding. There would be no moral philosophy predicated exclusively on abstract conceptions, justified post hoc by empirical behaviors.

Anyway….basic rendition of the what they are, but not so much the how they work, which would take a hellava lot more than a couple paragraphs and more than a couple presuppositions.

Fast times at Ridgemont High, or, you gotta be a complete stoner to comprehend this stuff??? Not to be taken as a confession, I swear.

As you say, the object really exists. — Fooloso4

No object without subject. That’s my final offer. :wink:

Pinter goes on to make the case that without subjects, there are no facts. Facts are not self-existent, they are dependent on being singled out from the background. Besides, the word ‘exist’ means to ‘be apart’, to be this as distinct from that. My view is that any meaningful notion of ‘what exists’ always implicitly includes the subject, but as the subject is not apparent in objective analysis, then it is overlooked. That is something that is brought out by phenomenology. I think it has something to do with Heidegger’s ‘forgetfulness of being’, but as I’m not a Heidegger scholar, I won’t labour that point. (It’s also the point of the Aeon essay The Blind Spot of Science.)

Behind all this, there's the deep and difficult subject of the distinction between the objective and the transcendent, but I don't have the scholarly chops to expound on that, either. So I'll bow out for now.

Do you have a link for that? — RogueAI

I spent a lot of time on his blog a while ago trying to nail down the story he is presenting to us.

I'm not sure I have the precise reference, but this is a start -

https://www.bernardokastrup.com/2012/07/meaningful-evolution.html

No object without subject. — Wayfarer

And each subject 'appears to itself' a secondary quality presupposing that it is fundamentally also an object.

It is a foundational unprovable assumption/premiss, resting its laurels on terminological consistency(coherence) and/or 'logical' possibility alone(scarequotes intentional).

Indeed, there are all sorts of things that could be said to follow from it, if accompanied by some other premisses, but - by my lights anyway - 'logical' possibility alone does not warrant belief, and untenability is completely unacceptable.
— creativesoul

OK, I don't see it that way: I think that the attributes of things that can be revealed in perception could not be exhaustive of what they are unless some form of idealism were true, and idealism seems very implausible to me. So, it's as I said a logical or conceptual distinction between things as they are perceived and things as they are in themselves, but I don't see the idea that things have their own existence independently of perception as being a mere logical possibility. — Janus

Nor do I. My mistake for not being clear enough. What I meant was that Noumena is a conception that rests upon logical possibility alone and is untenable for the reasons previously given.

Some things are not existentially dependent upon us. Some things are. Some things are existentially dependent on us for their emergence, but their persistence is not.

When we ask, "What is it like to watch a sunset?", what exactly are we asking for?

:brow:

Does that question even have an answer? It seems clear to me that it does not! Watching a sunset is not like anything. To quite the contrary, each viewing is different. One could watch the sun set as many times as one likes, and each time it will be different. Likewise, each day, each moment, of one's so called 'subjective experience' is different from all the other days and moments as well.

Hence, it is the question itself that is problematic in that it is not a well formulated question to begin with. There is no sensible meaningful answer to it.

Does that question even have an answer? It seems clear to me that it does not! Watching a sunset is not like anything. To quite the contrary, each viewing is different. One could watch the sun set as many times as one likes, and each time it will be different. — creativesoul

But each time it will involve (at the very least) watching and a sun. I agree that each experience is somewhat different, but so is each time we take a piss or eat a curry. But in each instance, there are elements that clearly distinguish taking a piss from eating a curry (unless there is beer involved). What is it like? This is a question that elicits a rich source of experiential data from people, the answers are meaningful, but the question probably doesn't elicit specific, verifiable data.