The (In)validity of Experience

Perception versus interpretation

Experience today is either everything or nothing. It's either worthless "anecdotal" evidence incapable of supporting knowledge or it's the primary basis of Truth. The trajectories of two parallel historical processes point in opposite directions. One one hand, the death of expertise and the proliferation of disinformation and fake news online has renewed the dependence on gut instincts. On the other, the technological refinement of scientific methods and exponential increases in computing power cast experience as irrelevant (at best). The resulting contradictions complicate our conversations about experience.

Predictably, our sense of the general validity of experience at any given moment is frequently self-serving. If your experience supports a conclusion I find disagreeable, experience is cheap and inconsequential. But if you question my testimony, experience configures the Nature of Reality. In a telling development, new defensive phrases have emerged which frame the questioning of experience as a moral infraction. The questioned will accuse the questioner of either erasing or invalidating her experience. "You don't get to define my life!" Usually, it's easy to understand both the frustration of the questioned and the motivation of the questioner in such cases. The terms of these exchanges, however, are peculiar to me. What exactly are we invalidating when we reject personal/lived experience?

In a very practical sense, I grapple with this question every day. By default, I am deeply suspicious of the stories I weave from my perceptions. I attribute this skepticism predominately to two events in my adolescence. When I was in high school, I developed an eating disorder. The accompanying body dysmorphia was so strong that I quickly learned to instinctively distrust my reflection. Despite appearances, it was not logically possible to be too fat one day and too skinny the next. For me, overcoming body dysmorphia involved (and involves) disconnecting seeing and believing; it entails resisting the urge to accept my immediate understanding of my sensory experience looking in the mirror.

The second event cut even deeper, wedging a barrier between feeling and believing. Growing up in the Southern Baptist religious tradition, I frequently heard people describe their experience feeling the presence of, or even hearing the voice of, God. This frustrated me to no end. What does God's presence feel like? I wished I could inhabit the psyches of the God feelers to find out. One day, also in high school, I was suddenly overcome with an inexplicable sense of calm while praying earnestly in the shower. Perhaps this was The God Feeling? I considered this for a time, but eventually decided I did not believe in God (as colloquially defined). My newfound agnosticism did not necessitate an invalidation of that shower experience, just the re-interpretation of it. I definitely felt something. The sensations I considered naming "God" were valid, I didn't fabricate them. I just had to categorize them differently. Feelings exist independently of the names we ascribe them.

If experience really is everything (or close to it), then the process of determining what we experience when experiencing shapes our perspective of the world. The language of "erasure" or "invalidation" glosses over the distinction between experience as sensory perception and experience as interpreted perception. Understood reality lies in the distance between these two senses of lived experience. The invalidation of interpreted perception does not necessarily entail the invalidation of the sensory perceptions being interpreted, just the re-understanding of them.