subjective experience
How things feel
Subjective experience is what it feels like from the inside to be a conscious being—the private, first-person quality of sensations, emotions, and thoughts.
Philosophers call this qualia: the redness of red, the pain of a headache, the taste of coffee.
Subjective experience is inherently personal and cannot be fully communicated or verified by others: No brain scan can capture my subjective experience of grief.
The term appears frequently in discussions of consciousness, artificial intelligence, and the mind-body problem.
- qualiaSubjective character of experiences
- emotionComplex psychological state
- introspectionObserving one's own mind
- self-awarenessInsight into one's psyche
- moodPrevailing emotional condition
consciousness · stream of consciousness · embodiment · phenomenal · empathy · ineffable · personal truth · nostalgia · interiority · anxiety · sentience · first-person · first-person perspective · joy · proprioception · sadness · intuition · identity
- mindmind, thought, cognition, consciousness, thinking
- perceptionsee, vision, seeing, senses, observing
- consciousnessconsciousness, self-awareness, awareness, wakefulness, alertness
- existentialismexistence, authenticity, existential angst, existential crisis, angst
- modernist literatureJoyce, Woolf, James Joyce, Kafka, Hemingway
- interpretivismhermeneutics, meaning-making, thick description, phenomenology, ethnography
subjective experiencethird-person perspective
Vantage point outside the subject
empirical data · public knowledge · scientific observation · objective reality · common knowledge
subjective experiencequantitative data
Numerically expressed information
empirical evidence · statistical analysis · raw numbers · statistics · metric
subjective experienceexternal world
Reality beyond one's consciousness
matter · objective reality · physical reality · physical world · physical properties