Experiential science

Experiential science examines the conditions of human experience. As an interdisciplinary subject, it uses knowledge from various disciplines such as cognitive science , neurobiology , neurophysiology and psychology and combines these into a comprehensive, integrative and systemic working model. The basic concept of experiential science was first published in book form by the Austrian biologist and philosopher Gerhard Frank in 2011 and has since been further developed in several publications.

Basics

The starting point of experiential science is the knowledge that every form of experience is caused and integrated by interacting cells. Cells temporarily combine to form groups of interaction, thereby creating a cross-cell, collective behavior in which the individual experience is manifested.

Two forms of cellular coordination can be distinguished in these interactions: humoral and neural coordination. In humoral coordination, cells exchange molecules via body fluids that modulate the molecular state of the recipient cell. In neuronal coordination, nerve cells function as connecting links.

In both humoral and neural coordination, interaction patterns arise in the overall association of all cells. The reason for this is, on the one hand, the molecular specificity of humoral coordination: Certain cells can only take up certain molecules due to their surface properties. On the other hand, the basic mechanism of the neurons is responsible for this: They are capable of rapid electrical state changes, so-called action potentials , which are directed across the cell body. Nerve cells usually have many branches with which they come into physical contact with other nerve cells as well as body cells. In this way, they form a complex network through which the electrical state changes propagate from cell to cell. Here, too, a molecular specificity comes into play: Some interactions favor, others make the formation of action potentials more difficult in the subsequent cell. Since nerve cells are in diverse contact with one another, negative and positive effects overlap. If the positive effects outweigh the total, an action potential is triggered in the subsequent cell above a certain threshold value. This creates patterns of interacting cells that fire with each other.

There are also interfaces between the humoral and neural levels, for which nerve cells are responsible and which also have a secretory effect. Fundamental interactions between humoral and neural coordinations are therefore to be assumed, which shape the experience accordingly.

The concept of domains of experience

Experiential science distinguishes five autonomous process elements that work together in experience and are referred to as domains: emotional experience, sensorimotor experience, communicative experience, imaginative experience, rational experience. The individual domains are clearly distinguishable in the individual experience of healthy people. From an experiential point of view, this is interpreted as an indication that the domains are separated from each other by their own laws.

Since the domains refer to each other, the experience can be understood as a self-organizing, autopoietic phenomenon.

A fundamental distinction between the domains is given by the two coordination mechanisms on which human experience is based. The emotional experience is identified with the (neuro) humoral coordination mechanism. All other domains that are characterized by rapid changes are based on neuronal coordination.

In terms of experiential science, the content of experiences is created through coordination patterns, with a specific coordination pattern behind each experience pattern. The scent of the rose is represented by a different coordination pattern than the scent of the lilac.

Emotional experience

The human experience is influenced by moods. Moods are omnipresent and shape the experience. Distinct moods such as curiosity, fear, anger, joy and sadness each have their own selective effects on the experience. There are emotional, affect-logical vectors that pave the way for experience by directing the experiencer's attention to appropriate coordination and coordination patterns in the area of the other domains.

Moods also have an important function in human learning . They mark what they have learned and subsequently ensure that people enjoy doing something or not. Every learning is accompanied by feelings that attach themselves to the neural coordination that occurs in the process. If positive emotions attach themselves to the new coordination, they ensure their repetition. In the case of negative emotions, the marked coordinations are avoided. This is how preferences arise in human experience.

The emotional experience can thus be used as a gateway to the other domains of experience, which is an important aid in practical experience work.

Sensorimotor experience

Perception is the form of interaction that creates physical contact with the environment. Two functional areas always come together in the coordinative process: sensory and motor cells. The nerve network connects both to form changing sensorimotor patterns. Recurring sensorimotor patterns provide the physical constants of experience.

The experiential concept of sensorimotor functions thus ascribes a dual nature to every physical experience: every experience is characterized by both a sensory and a motor element that are related to one another: no touching without muscle pressure, no seeing without motor coordination of the head, no hearing without fine motor control of the eardrum.

Social experience

In communicative experience, people interact by alternately coordinating their coordination. This creates a separate area for mutual interaction: human language . It manifests itself in the form of specific neural coordination patterns , which in turn are related to coordination patterns in other domains, and this relationship is learned during language acquisition .

Imaginative experience

From an experiential point of view, imaginative experience is a derivative of sensorimotor experience. The stream of images in the head comes primarily from physical experience. In the absence of suitable environmental sections, the learned coordination appears as independent neuronal fragments without sensory and motor components.

Rational experience

The rational experience is scientifically a derivative of the communicative experience. Similar to the case of imaginative experience, the communicative coordination develops a life of its own independent of social interactions: conceptual thinking.

Forms of experience

Repetition experience

Repetitive occurrence of coordinations causes their storage. The molecular mechanism of learning takes care of that . Coordinating coordinations are linked and form the fields of action that organize human life - nutrition, personal hygiene, professional activity, etc. The everyday life of many people largely consists of repetitive actions, whereby the experience draws on the fundus of learned coordination: brushing teeth, showering , Getting dressed, preparing breakfast, having breakfast, lace up shoes, putting on your coat, opening the door, climbing stairs, etc.

Learning experience

Experience in the course of which new elements (coordination patterns) emerge within an existing context of action. E.g. the knowledge of a new formula within the framework of the existing chemical understanding (rational experience). But also a new figure in the context of previously learned tango steps (sensorimotor experience)

The starting point for learning experiences is always an existing coordination pattern that is differentiated. Among other things, it can split up and combine with other coordination patterns or parts thereof.

The experiential analysis conceives each learning experience as an event consisting of two steps: differentiation and contextualization, that is, integration into an experience context, which becomes more complex as a result. For example, a new formula that expands the previous chemical understanding or a new dance step that enriches the previous dance skills.

Transformation experience

Experience in the course of which the context, i.e. the connection between individual coordination patterns, changes. A well-known example from the cultural development of humans: the transition from the geocentric to the heliocentric worldview . The same physical constants in sensorimotor experience (stars) are linked and interpreted differently from rational experience. If the geocentric worldview lets the planets orbit the earth, in the heliocentric worldview they circle the sun - a difference that made history.

Transformation experiences lead to fundamental changes in the context of the experience. Since habits of thinking, feeling and acting are complexly networked, transformation experiences usually have far-reaching effects on human behavior and well-being. In the context of scientific rationality, one speaks in this context of a paradigm shift .

Theoretical and practical consequences

Theoretical consequences

Experience science pursues a process-oriented approach within the framework of systems theory. This also sheds a corresponding light on general questions and phenomena that are associated with experience. This includes the spirit , the soul , but also the consciousness .

In the light of experiential science, mind and soul can be understood as emergent phenomena that occur when individual domains of experience are connected. The mind as a disembodied phenomenon manifests itself accordingly in the interacting processes of imaginative and rational experience. To a certain extent, it is identical to this duality of thinking and imagining and the knowledge associated with it. Similarly, the soul as an emergent process can be identified with the triad of emotional, imaginative and rational experience.

An experiential science principle consists in the analysis of the underlying generative processes that generate experience: All human experience follows from coordination between cells and must therefore be able to be derived from them. For consciousness as a present phenomenon, an explanatory approach emerges that identifies it with a specific modus operandi within the multi-part process system. Specifically, the feedback interaction between coordinations of at least two experience domains is proposed as a generative mechanism; for example the reciprocal interplay between sensory-motoric and rational experience, which is the rule in everyday life. Due to the combinatorial possibilities within the experience, this approach suggests several forms of consciousness; an assumption that is hypothetically confirmed in the work of the neurobiologists Gerald Edelman and Giulio Tononi .

The experiential model also casts significant light on the concept of reality. How do people know whether an event is real - the crunch of gravel underfoot when walking - or not - the crunch of gravel in the movie that reveals the perpetrator? Here experiential science provides a surprisingly simple answer: If a sensory event follows from a previous motor action, the experience is real. If it happens independently of this, if the sensor and motor functions are not causally linked, it is virtual. Reality is, as it were, a judgment that the sensorimotor domain makes automatically.

Happiness research can also expect new impulses from the experiential science approach. The flow concept comes from the Croatian psychologist Mihály Csíkszentmihályi , which describes happiness as a state of experience in which the person feels in harmony with the world. Since the world manifests itself in terms of experience science in the coordinations that generate human experience, this means being in harmony with an event that takes place between the domains. The domains are in harmony with each other when a person feels happiness: feeling (emotional experience) with thinking (rational experience) and both with perception (sensorimotor experience) and so on. The experiential science model thus opens a way to a systematic handling of the experience of happiness.

Last but not least, the knowledge-theoretical implications that result from the experiential model should be mentioned. The distinction between implicit and explicit knowledge , which goes back to the philosopher Michael Polanyi , is taken up here as a representative. The experiential science includes a concept that assigns each domain its own area of knowledge. From an experiential point of view, there are several forms of knowledge, each with its own area of application, but which are related to one another: emotional knowledge, sensorimotor knowledge, communicative knowledge, imaginative knowledge, rational knowledge. The first four forms of knowledge can now be assigned to implicit knowledge and the rational to explicit knowledge.

Practical consequences

Renowned economists such as the two American scientists Joseph Pine and James Gilmore speak of the experience economy as the new economic era that is emerging worldwide. This new era receives its systematic scientific basis with experiential science. Both the world of leisure and the world of work will change fundamentally in the course of this new era. In the leisure world, these developments are already underway. Just think of the increasing importance of events with an event character. With the help of experiential science, events and leisure facilities can be specifically optimized.

Experiential science will have a decisive influence on the world of work in the future. A fundamental quality principle is still not used: that the experience value of the work significantly determines its result and thus the work performance. That, in other words, applied experiential science can provide an effective lever for improving the quality of work.

Perhaps the most important significance of experiential science lies in its possible contribution to the energy transition . In its light, the energy transition presents itself as a collective transformational experience, in the course of which human behavior changes fundamentally, i.e. in all domains. With its systematic approach, experiential science now enables a consistent, verifiable and predictable approach both in the area of planning and the implementation of necessary publicity measures in the context of the transition to a sustainable society.

Individual evidence

↑ Luc Ciompi: The emotional foundations of thinking. Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1997.
↑ ^a ^b Erlebniswissenschaft - Frank Erlebniswelt - Erlebniswissenschaft in Vienna ( Memento of the original from 23 July 2015 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link has been inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. , Definition of terms from experiential science @1@ 2
↑ Gerald Edelman, Giulio Tononi: A Universe of Consciousness. How Matter Becomes Imagination. New York: Basi Books, 2000.
↑ Mihály Csíkszentmihályi: Flow. The secret of happiness. Stuttgart: Velcro-Cotta. 2001.
^ Joseph Pine, James Gilmore: The Experience Economy. Work is Theater & Every Business a Stage. Boston, Massachusetts: Harvard Business School Press, 1999.
^ Gerhard Frank: Becoming sustainable: Human determinants of change. STOTEN: Science of the Total Environment. 481 (2014) 674-680.

[1] Luc Ciompi: The emotional foundations of thinking. Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1997.

[Erlebniswissenschaft-2] Erlebniswissenschaft - Frank Erlebniswelt - Erlebniswissenschaft in Vienna ( Memento of the original from 23 July 2015 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link has been inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. , Definition of terms from experiential science @1@ 2

[3] Gerald Edelman, Giulio Tononi: A Universe of Consciousness. How Matter Becomes Imagination. New York: Basi Books, 2000.

[4] Mihály Csíkszentmihályi: Flow. The secret of happiness. Stuttgart: Velcro-Cotta. 2001.

[5] Joseph Pine, James Gilmore: The Experience Economy. Work is Theater & Every Business a Stage. Boston, Massachusetts: Harvard Business School Press, 1999.

[6] Gerhard Frank: Becoming sustainable: Human determinants of change. STOTEN: Science of the Total Environment. 481 (2014) 674-680.