In this post, I summarise the five distinguishing dimensions of more-than-human real experience along with their implications.
WHAT IS REAL EXPERIENCE?
Real experience is the more-than-human, beyond embodied (mind-with-body), qualitative, dynamic and interactional phenomena that constitutes the reality of our world. Seeing and knowing differences in real concrete experiences and their conditions of creation deepens our understanding of (and increases the potential to change) the forces, events, relations and recurrences of any context of actual lived experience, whether positive (health-wellbeing) or negative (such as disease, dis-ease, disability, discrimination, dislocation or disorder). Any research, policy, design or creative process is enriched when using a real experience context or contexts as its focal problem or frame of purpose. The five key distinguishing dimensions of real experience then are as follows.
1. THE WORLD IS MADE OF FLOWS OF MORE-THAN-HUMAN ENTITIES
Virtual interacting flows consisting of diverse more-than-human entities (matter, energy, objects, forms, percepts, affects), processes and tendencies exist in the world. Via the productive agencies of assemblages bearing certain conditions, relations, and forces of entities in events, the real experiences of living conscious beings (including humans) are actualised and become.
Implications: Real experience transcends individual human persons and bodies. It extends to the whole more-than-human intra/interacting virtual realm that already bears the conditions and content of the production and differentiation of actual experience.
2. REAL EXPERIENCE IS AN INTERACTIONAL CREATION
Real experience is not produced in the brain as mind or computer separate from our encounters in the world. Rather it is created, enriched, and diminished via our ongoing social, cultural, material, spatial, bodily and motor interactions and by our perception, cognition and memory of them. Real experience does not arise in bodies of isolated individual persons in fragmented material space.
Implications: We better know real experience by discerning the forces and relations of conditions and entities that form and differentiate the actual content, qualities and capacities of actual concrete experience.
3. REAL EXPERIENCE IS A DYNAMIC FLOW ITSELF
Real experience is always becoming or flowing. Time in experience is ceaselessly passing and also irreversible. The future is always on its way to the present and the present moment is always slipping into the past. In real experience then, nothing is stable or stays the same. Real experience is dynamic and never repeated.
Implications: When we freeze experiences to analyse and often quantify them, we lose sight of their essential dynamic properties. By revealing important and recurring movements in real experience and the forces driving them, we add an important dimension to our understanding and increase our capacities to arrest unwanted or accelerate desired experiences.
4. REAL EXPERIENCE IS FORMED OF SENSATIONS AND CAPACITIES (OR AFFECTS)
The content of real experience consists of affections (sensations or feelings), relations (to the entities of their origin-formation, and each other) and affective capacities (powers to affect and be affected). They all arise, form or sediment in human and other living conscious bodies via the above three dimensions. Memory comes to the present moment of sensations and capacities to serve action.
Implications: For any context of real experience, we can identify the predominant and enduring affects and capacities, forces and relations forming, differentiating and stabilising that context in flows of events of encounters and interactions. This opens up a realm of possibilities for what I call Real Experience Flow Creation - the design and enactment of flows that produce health-wellbeing impacts in real experience.
5. REAL EXPERIENCE IS A QUALITATIVE FUSION; IT IS NOT AN EMOTION WITH QUANTITY
Real experience is not an abstracted emotion or quantity of one similar sensation but an indivisible qualitative multiplicity of interpenetrating, overlapping, non-successive affections (sensations or feelings) and affective capacities. For any context or cut-out of real experience (such as a type of disease, dis-ease, or affective disorder), there are differences in kind (not degrees) of qualities of affections and capacities, and their speed or slowness of movement or transition.
Implications: The use of emotions and the quantification of sensation (e.g., a pain or depression score) to describe and distinguish experience produces only a superficial understanding of that experience. Such an analytical method neglects the above four dimensions and can even be counter-productive as it forces a false representation of actual experience back onto the experiencer.
See and know real experience using the Umio Flow Intuition® method
Using the Umio Flow Intuition® method in the Health Ecosystem Value Design framework, it is possible to gather much deeper insight into concrete actual lived experience together with knowledge of the conditions of their formation, change and persistence. In any program of work for a defined context, we reveal hidden insights and wider experienced differences beyond common socio-economic and other categories of identity and representation. By stating problems of real experience more truthfully (especially in their differences in kind, conditions, tendencies and movements), we reveal novel possibilities for realising greater health and wellbeing impacts for any enterprise purpose.