hey, peeps.

for many years i have held to a personal doctrine i have called The Primacy of Experience. this doctrine states that for sentience, the quality of experience is of foremost importance everywhere, and that for sentience the primary ground for testing reality is always experience itself. this doctrine does not mean, however, that sensation is all that there is that is meaningful, nor all that matters importantly, nor that sensation is all that there is. it does not mean that there is no substratum upon which sensation is that is not sensation per se, for instance. and this doctrine does not mean to oversimplify life either into a meaningless mass of sensation, either, for, again, this doctrine admits to the possibility of very much more than mere sensation existing importantly. the logical processes of mind, for instance, don't seem to be directly sensorial even though they can be sensed in many cases. this doctrine does say though that for sentience, if it doesn't somehow affect one sensorially in some way, even by what may at least *seem* to be a rather circuitous path, then it is for all intents and purposes a meaningless thing to one, no more than background noise if that. the proof is in the pudding, as they say, and the "acid pudding" as my grandmother used to call it, to our amusement, really is our own direct experience and experiences and the built up experiential base we have built up over lifetimes, i am convinced.

l8r...