Does pain represent anything, or is it just raw feeling?
Philosophers traditionally held that every experience points at something beyond itself. Pain is the awkward test case. Critics say it is pure sensation with nothing represented; defenders reply that pain signals bodily damage. Mystics add another challenge: moments of pure consciousness, supposedly aware of nothing at all.
In its widest sense, experience covers any conscious event: perceiving, remembering, imagining, feeling, wanting, acting and thinking. Seeing a yellow bird on a branch presents two objects, a relation between them and a colour. Hallucinations and dreams can present things that are not real. On a narrower reading only sensory consciousness counts, so someone caught up in a robbery can experience it without grasping what is going on. A third meaning is practical familiarity, the know-how built from repeated past encounters.
The varieties differ in interesting ways. Episodic memory relives something that happened before, while imagination presents objects without claiming they are real. Emotions carry evaluative, physical and behavioural components, and moods resemble them but lack a specific object. Conscious desire feeds the experience of agency, where plans form and decisions get carried out. Rare non-ordinary states include religious, out-of-body and near-death experiences.
The view that all experience is directed at objects is called intentionalism, and it is widely accepted that every experience has phenomenal character, something it is like to undergo it. Theorists also argue over transparency. One camp says how an experience feels depends only on what it presents; the other says the manner of presentation matters too. Another dispute asks whether some experiences are non-conceptual and whether such states could justify beliefs.
Several disciplines claim the topic. Phenomenology studies the structure of experience from the first-person point of view, using techniques such as epoché and eidetic variation. Epistemology asks whether all knowledge rests on the senses, the old quarrel between empiricists and rationalists, and science treats observation as a neutral referee between theories. Metaphysics meets experience when it tries to explain how matter and felt experience relate, while psychologists debate whether any concepts are innate. The word itself shares a Latin root with experimentation.
Source: Experience
