Conscious Experience

Today while reading my course reader I can across three intuitions of experience. The first intuition is that experience is rich and real. The second one is that every distinction drawn in experience will be reflected in a distinctive pattern of neural activity. The third and final intuition is that experience is an evolved capacity which governs our behavior.  In “The nature of consciousness” it says that each intuition works well by itself but that when you put them together you may come across some problems. These intuitions may work well separate because they have their own duty and they know what they are looking for but when you put them together you mix all of the sense which you get a different reaction.

 I think consciousness works like that too. Everyone sees things differently depending on what they experience in their life. People may go through the same thing, the same way but they may get a different outcome.

For example in the first season of “The Secret Life of An American Teenager,” Amy, the main character, had sex for the first time with an experience guy that she barely met. The consequence of their actions was that she got pregnant. But on the other hand Adrian has had sex many of times and she has not gotten pregnant or gotten an STD’s. So why it is that one got pregnant and the other didn’t? Who knows. Those two girls had the same experience and yet they had different outcomes. For that reason they see their experience different from each other. Amy sees sex as the down fall of her life because through that action she had to give up some dreams of her and sees that being irresponsible may cost you your teenage years as you know it. On the other hand Adrian sees sex as a way to have fun with guy and that in a relationship its okay to have sex if you are careful. These two girls see sex completely different from each other that is because they are not the same person and because they had different outcome to their experience with having sex. One had a good one that didn’t affect her life and the other one had a bad one that changes her life completely.  

Everyone has different ideas on what is right or wrong. Most criminals believe that when they commit a crime they are doing nothing wrong but in reality they are doing a wrongful act. Just like the death penalty, people believe that the death penalty is not wrong. They say that someone who kills deserves to die, basically an eye for an eye. But what makes it moral to kill someone that kills another human being? I believe it is an ongoing cycle because what makes you better than the other person who killed. You are doing the same thing as the criminal.

I guess every experience you have is the way you see thing because the family of the victim may want the criminal to die just like their loved one did. But a person who was not hit emotional with the tragedy may say why kill the person? Just make them pay.

Ones experience can change our perception of something whether it is good or bad but what we came it is what matter the most.