Experience is really all we have

What makes human consciousness so transformational?

I’ve just returned from one of those thrilling vacations that transplants you to another part of the world and asks you to look at it, drink it in, absorb it in ways you simply don’t do at home. After one of these, it’s impossible to return unchanged. Though our habits may return to normal, a little window of the mind has been cleared off, polished, so that it now lets in a little streaming light of novel experience.

I’ve written about the psychological value of travel before, but only from the lens of the travel itself. Not the more fundamental experiential level — or that first-person moment-to-moment happening that makes up every waking (and even some of the not-waking) minutes of our lives.

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Are you seeing what I’m seeing?

Experience is what the entire human project ultimately comes down to, and it exists on one of the largest spectrums we could ever imagine. The word’s sheer ubiquity and self-encompassing nature leaves it practically meaningless. Experience is the cornerstone of our humanity, the medium through which our humanity is realized.

And for most of us, the quality of that experience is one of the dearest things to us. If I told you the plot of a movie you really wanted to see, you would have, in a sense, an experience. You would experience the physical moment of my rendition; you would likely have an imaginative experience where your mind’s eye constructs the storyline as I tell it. You would have, more or less, the same plotline knowledge as someone who sat through the entire movie. But you would be missing the one-of-a-kind, ineffable, transformative experience of anticipation, emotional upheaval, suspense, and the satisfaction or dissatisfaction that only comes from riding the ride for yourself.

This is why spoilers are so crushing. They rob us of the joy of pure, unadulterated experience. Without intimate, up-close, real-life experience for ourselves, we’re diminished, unable to access the very thing that makes us human. Someone who only ever experienced movies via detailed “spoilers” would seem closer to a robot than a person. Their encyclopedic knowledge would be valuable, but they would miss any sense of first-person experience.

This is important because it’s not just our own experience that matters to us — we rely on our primal understanding that everyone else shares that same experiential capacity. This is something we develop early in life, steadily, until we’re suddenly and effortlessly able to identify everyone around us as independent, experiencing agents.

Known as “theory of mind,” this critical cognitive capacity provides the foundation for a wide range of emotions and other higher-order capacities, like embarrassment, pride, and relationship-building. We have evolved to care very much about others’ inner lives, their mental experiences, what they think of us and the world. We pick up on subtle expressions, body language, coded words. These all depend on my tacit acceptance that you are a fellow experiencer, not merely an element of the background or an obstacle in my own way.

What’s particularly frightening to us, then, is the potential for a creature to exist without our common, seemingly inalienable sense of experience. Isn’t that what terrifies us about the looming, half-baked figure of artificial intelligence? Science fiction threatens us with tales of conscious robots rising to power through their sheer will to dominate, but the alternative is even more chilling: a system that has no sense of itself or the world and yet manages to masquerade as one of us. A world in which conscious humanity can no longer be assumed.

Many of us have no problem with AI in and of itself. We’re perfectly happy to let it sort our millions of medical records, for example, because humans don’t really enjoy or value sorting millions of medical records. But we’re a bit warier of self-driving cars and sex robots¹ because these are such quintessentially human behaviors. Why? Because they involve interpersonal experience, the acknowledgement that the other participant is an experiencer, just like you. The negotiation of traffic or intimacy is a subtle business, seemingly dependent on a shared evolutionary history and the accompanying, precious sense that we can be understood. The abrupt intrusion of AI into this realm of deeply human activity feels not just like a threat to our daily life, but, more fundamentally, to our sense of shared, intelligible coexistence.

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Why must the lights always be on?

This exploration of the artificial, however, brings us back to the organic. If we can conceive of a being that exhibits our behavior without a trace of true first-person experience — one of the infamous philosophical zombies — then why on earth do we have access to a conscious experience at all? Why aren’t we all stumbling around without a twinge of thought or feeling?

There are many quasi-spiritual responses to this, of course. And just as many evolutionary ones. It’s called the hard problem of consciousness — coined to describe that nagging problem of why we experience at all. Unlike the comparatively “easy” problems of consciousness that ask how this whole operation works, the hard problem demands an answer to why the lights are on in the first place.

And while that question is part of an enormous enterprise of scientific and philosophical inquiry, the rest of us go on living, enjoying on the whole our small, vivid, experiential-based lives, deriving great joy from sharing that experience with others, trusting that their experience mirrors, in some fundamental way, our own.

Psychologist Paul Bloom writes at length about the unique and universal pleasure we get from this kind of shared experience:

My suggestion is that the pleasures of showing and sharing are, in large part, the pleasures of being known, of being understood, and of not being alone.

There is something very human in this suggestion. Even in an era of dramatic technology ramp-up, we can see that everything falls back to the inherent interconnective and relational nature of the world. An isolated creature is a vulnerable creature — whether human or machine. And, in turn, it seems much of our uniquely human consciousness orients us toward each other, toward a sense of mutual understanding or at least a shared perceptual platform from which we could, with the right intentions, try to understand each other and progress toward something larger than our individual selves.

I occasionally work with university students, and just the other day, I watched two groups of my students turn into cooperative engines when each asked to solve a jigsaw puzzle — each person’s natural inclination to play to their strength, an intuitive, shared system of communication, a previously unparalleled degree of industriousness and purpose.

Humans, like computing machines, require networks to function at their best. And perhaps we’re just the lucky ones to get to be awake for the whole thing.

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Turning up the volume of experience

I’ve recently seen talk of generational differences related to our thirst for experience. Despite widespread laments that younger generations are anxiety-riddled hermits content to stay at home wrapped in blankets — or, more broadly, that people have pulled back from the world post-pandemic — we’re going out in larger droves than nearly ever before. Concerts, vacations, restaurants, sports. The floodgates of (relatively) low-cost leisurely travel are open, and people are thrilled to take part.

We get a great deal of joy from experience — authentic, real experience. Not spoilers or someone else’s photos, but the real thing and all its corresponding transformational power. Because that’s really the meat of experience. The moment is fleeting, often over before it’s even properly absorbed. Once it passes, the mind is already onto the next experience, as the one before crystallizes in real time². So, to derive real value from an experience, we must be transformed by it. While all experience shapes us in some way, it’s those rare, most coveted experiences that linger in our minds and undeniably alter us.

Robin Williams’ character in the film Good Will Hunting makes the point so eloquently in this famous scene when he carefully distinguishes knowledge from the intangible reality of experience. The experience of standing under the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel, of fighting in war, of being in love. This reminds me of the famous thought experiment³ of a woman who knew everything about the color red, down to the exact light wave pattern and the specific cones at work in the eye to perceive it, but who had never, herself, seen the color red. Knowledge and experience are not one and the same. There is something much too transformational about the first-person, real-life experience.

It’s this same undying desire for firsthand, authentic experience that shines through in Robert Nozick’s classic thought experiment of the experience machine. Asked to choose between a life plugged into a machine that could neurologically simulate every pleasant experience or to simply experience real life, nearly everyone would choose real life. Our true, unobstructed consciousness, though frustratingly oppressive at times, is us. To do away with it in favor of an artificial, simulated mindscape is to reduce ourselves to machines, to pull the plug on what makes us human, alive. Experience, in all its rich unpredictability, is existence.

For this reason, many are frustrated by the modern habit of going through a novel experience with eyes glued to a phone camera, tapping away to capture every last moment of a special or exotic moment. It’s a waste, a distraction, an addiction, a corruption of an otherwise pristine, aware moment.

And yet, we take millions upon millions of photos of the Eiffel Tower. Every tourist to Paris has one, a personal and pocketed rendition of something priceless that quietly reassures us and everyone else that we were there, that we experienced it. Perhaps our obsession with photography and documentation and social media is just a trivial, capitalistic preoccupation with appearances and personal branding. But I think it speaks to a much more primordial longing within us: the simple desire to stop, momentarily, the ongoing flow of experience, to bottle it up in all its fleetingness, call it ours, hold it close, and then show it off as a testament to our existence⁴. A soothing act of resistance against the beautiful onslaught of experience that is human life.

There’s great joy and consolation in the knowledge that no matter how fleeting, this happened and we were part of it, if only for a little while.

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As always, thank you for reading. If this article sparked something in you, I’d love for you to tap the heart at its top or bottom.

1. An excellent article by Gunnar, by the way.

2. Memory is, in reality, far from crystallized.

3. Interestingly, this thought experiment is often used to refute the view that mental experience is, like everything else, a physical process. I find the experiment immensely interesting but don’t agree with this conclusion.

4. That said, it’s likely best not to give in to this existential anxiety at every turn.