The sheer absence of reality cannot conceivably be experienced, he thinks, for if it were experienced an existing experiencer would be presupposed.
Observing facial expression, posture, and behavior provide some objective evidence and connections with neuroscience and behavioral science may provide more — without abandoning the epistemic primacy of the judgment of the experiencer at the time of experiencing on which Sidgwick insists.
In both species of delightful experience, the reader may notice, the experiencer is motionless, holding his breath as it were, and the things experienced are morally detached from him: there is nothing he can do, or ought to do, about the flow, the tumult.
The case-marking pattern is nominative-accusative, with experiencer subjects taking the dative inflection.
If there is the mere reflection of the self in the state of the buddhi, this can only account for the fact that the state of cognition seems to be a conscious state; it cannot account for the fact that the self considers itself to be the owner and experiencer of that state.
But now Sidney, a cancer experiencer himself, was reaching out to his old friend with words of tenderness and comfort and implicit forgiveness.
The objective biological facts about the brain and the subjective fact of being also an experiencer never fit the same reference frame.
And given that still-living persons can appear in NDEs, it becomes statistically probable that on occasion there will also be encounters with persons who have recently died but whose death was unknown to the experiencer.
This is how Vasubandhu resolves some of the standard challenges to the no-self view, such as the question of how experience can exist without an experiencer.
As for the moving now, it is noted that the contents of the now change over time, but it seems to the experiencer as if the now is a single thing persisting or enduring over time, and moving from event to event.
Start, then, with Butler's complaint that memory presupposes identity, that I can remember only my own experiences, so memory just reveals to me my identity relation to some past experiencer and cannot constitute that relation.
