Editing Experience (section)

=== As conscious event ===
Experience is often understood as a conscious event in the widest sense. This includes various types of experiences, such as perception, bodily awareness, memory, imagination, emotion, desire, action and thought.<ref name="Smith"/> It usually refers to the experience a particular individual has, but it can also take the meaning of the experience had by a group of individuals, for example, of a nation, of a social class or during a particular historical epoch.<ref name="Sandkühler"/> [[Phenomenology (philosophy)|Phenomenology]] is the discipline that studies the subjective structures of experience, i.e. what it is like from the first-person perspective to experience different conscious events.<ref name="Smith"/>

When someone has an experience, they are presented with various items. These items may belong to diverse [[Ontology|ontological]] categories corresponding e.g. to objects, properties, relations or events.<ref name="Gupta2012"/><ref name="Sandkühler"/> Seeing a yellow bird on a branch, for example, presents the subject with the objects "bird" and "branch", the relation between them and the property "yellow". These items can include both familiar and unfamiliar items, which means that  it is possible to experience something without fully understanding it.<ref name="Gupta2012"/> When understood in its widest sense, the items present in experience can include unreal items. This is the case, for example, when experiencing illusions, hallucinations or dreams. In this sense, one can have the experience of a yellow bird on a branch even though there is no yellow bird on the branch.<ref name="Gupta2012"/> Experiences may include only real items, only unreal items, or a mix between the two. Phenomenologists have made various suggestions about what the basic features of experience are. The suggested features include spatial-temporal awareness, the difference in attention between foreground and background, the subject's awareness of itself, the sense of agency and purpose, bodily awareness and awareness of other people.<ref name="Smith"/>

When understood in a more restricted sense, only sensory consciousness counts as experience.<ref name="Honderich"/> In this sense, it is possible to experience something without understanding what it is. This would be the case, for example, if someone experienced a robbery without being aware of what exactly was happening. In this case, the sensations caused by the robbery constitute the experience of the robbery.<ref name="Honderich"/> This characterization excludes more abstract types of consciousness from experience. In this sense, it is sometimes held that experience and thought are two separate aspects of mental life.<ref name="Gupta2012"/> A similar distinction is sometimes drawn between experience and theory.<ref name="Sandkühler">{{cite book |last1=Sandkühler |first1=Hans Jörg |title=Enzyklopädie Philosophie |date=2010 |publisher=Meiner |url=https://meiner.de/enzyklopadie-philosophie-14071.html |chapter=Erfahrung}}</ref> But these views are not generally accepted. Critics often point out that experience involves various cognitive components that cannot be reduced to sensory consciousness.<ref>{{cite journal |last1=Strawson |first1=Galen |title=Cognitive Phenomenology: Real Life |journal=Cognitive Phenomenology |date=2011 |pages=285–325 |url=https://philpapers.org/rec/STRCPR |publisher=Oxford University Press|doi=10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199579938.003.0013 |isbn=978-0-19-957993-8 |url-access=subscription }}</ref><ref name="Smith"/> Another approach is to distinguish between internal and external experience. So while sensory perception belongs to external experience, there may also be other types of experience, like remembering or imagining, which belong to internal experience.<ref name="Sandkühler"/>