What is experience?

Consciousness doesn’t exist inside the brain. The brain exists inside consciousness.

That is not a spiritual claim. It is a philosophical position with centuries of rigorous thinking behind it and it has direct implications for anyone who designs, builds or delivers experiences for a living. To truly call ourselves experience professionals, we must strive to understand what experience actually is.

The mind-body problem, one of the oldest questions in philosophy, examines the relationship between thought and consciousness in the human mind and body. It asks how immaterial thoughts and feelings can interact with the material world, or whether they are ultimately physical phenomena at all. Descartes framed it as a duality: mind and matter as separate substances. Centuries later, we are no closer to a definitive answer.

In the philosophy of mind, qualia are defined as instances of subjective experience tied to specific sensations. The warmth of the sun on a cold day. The physical comfort you feel when sunlight hits your skin. That sensation is not the sunlight itself: it is your experience of it. The two are not the same thing and the gap between them is where the deepest questions about consciousness live.

The Redness of Red

Consider how you interpret sound. Hearing your favourite song is a fundamentally different experience from hearing an alarm, even though both are vibrations in the air reaching the same auditory system. While the physical stimulus is comparable, the subjective experience is not.

It can become significantly more complex. Imagine staring at a red apple. What is the redness of that red? The physical reality is photons bouncing off a surface at a particular wavelength. But the quale, the individual unit of subjective experience, is something else entirely: it is the specific, internal sensation of seeing that colour in your mind. Now add the feel of the apple in your hand. The smell. The taste. The colour that seemed so defining a moment ago becomes almost secondary as the experience deepens.

In 1974, philosopher Thomas Nagel asked a question that has shaped consciousness studies ever since: what is it like to be a bat? His argument was not about bats specifically, it was about the limits of objective description. A bat perceives the world through echolocation. We can study the neuroscience of echolocation in extraordinary detail, map every neural pathway, measure every signal. But we will never know what it feels like to experience the world that way. The subjective experience is inaccessible from the outside.

David Chalmers formalised this in 1995 as “the hard problem of consciousness”: why are physical processes in the brain accompanied by subjective experience at all? We can explain how the brain processes light, sound and touch. We can map which neurons fire when you see red. What we cannot explain is why that firing produces the experience of redness rather than nothing at all. The easy problems of consciousness (how we process stimuli, integrate information, focus attention) are engineering questions. The hard problem is something else entirely.

Why This Matters for What We Build

If you design experiences professionally, you are designing for qualia, whether you use that word or not.

Every decision about a space, a brand, a programme or a journey is an attempt to shape someone’s subjective experience. The lighting in a venue does not just illuminate a room, it creates a feeling. The music at a reception does not just fill silence, it sets a psychological tone. The way a delegate is greeted at registration does not just process their arrival: it establishes their emotional relationship with everything that follows.

The gap between the physical event (photons, sound waves, spatial dimensions) and the experienced event (warmth, energy, connection, belonging) is the gap that Chalmers identified. It is the space in which experience design actually operates. We cannot control qualia. We can only create the conditions that make certain experiences more likely.

This is why two events with identical programmes, identical venues and identical production budgets can produce completely different experiences. The physical inputs are the same. The subjective outputs are not. The difference is in the conditions: the choices about atmosphere, pacing, human interaction and narrative that shape how the event feels rather than how it looks.

The Question Underneath

We measure attendance. We measure NPS scores. We measure deal flow, media reach, delegate satisfaction. All of these are proxies. They measure what happened around the experience. They do not measure the experience itself, because the experience itself is subjective, internal and ultimately private.

That does not make measurement pointless: it makes it humble. And it should make every experience designer pause, occasionally, to consider the depth of what they are actually trying to do: create the conditions for another human being to feel something specific.

Consciousness is not a feature of the brain. It’s the medium in which everything we call experience takes place. The better we understand that, the better we design for it.