Experience reduces world complexity by shifting its own intentional boundaries

Evidence

The limits of the human capacity for experience are set and characterized by their intentional structure. Every intention captures something meant – and thereby presupposes the world. The boundaries of what is meant at any given time can, and indeed must, be continually surpassed. It is impossible to halt experience, to stick to one and the same subject area all the time. This self-mobilizing of experience is crucial for achieving this, in order that the complexity of the world can be confronted and reduced to meaningful directives for conduct. But experience can transcend its boundaries only at any given time in so far as it shifts them, and accepts other boundaries. In this movement of experience factual identities are constituted, which lead from one experience to another, which hold out the prospect of future experience and preserve the past. The world is therefore constituted as the universal horizon of experience, which must be presupposed in every movement and can never be broken through. — Niklas Luhmann, Trust and Power, 131

Categorization

• DEFINE: Defines the intentional structure of experience as the mechanism by which world complexity is reduced — groundwork for how trust further reduces complexity.