Experience refers to a universally conscious event, more specifically to perception, or to the instant knowledge and familiarity that this conscious process produces. Understood as a conscious event in a broad sense, experience relates to the subject in which various items are presented. In this interpretation, viewing a yellow bird on a branch presents the subject with the objects "bird" and "branches", the bond between them and the properties of "yellow".

Some items that are not real can also be included, which occur when experiencing hallucinations or dreams. When understood in a more limited interpretation, only sensory understanding is thought of as experience.

In this interpretation, experience is generally identified with assumption and contrasted with other types of conscious events, such as thinking or imagining. In a slightly different interpretation, experience refers not to the conscious events themselves but to the instant knowledge and familiarity they produce.

In this interpretation, it means that direct presumptive contact with the outside world is a source of knowledge. So an experienced climber is someone who really does a lot of climbing, not someone who just reads a lot of novels about hiking. This relates both to his umpteen past acquaintances and the skills learned through them.

Much of the scientific debate about the nature of experience focuses on experience as a conscious event, either in a broad or more limited sense. One of the most important topics in this field is the question of whether all experience is intentional, that is, it is directed to an object distinct from itself.

Another debate focuses on the question of whether non-conceptual experiences exist and, if so, what position they can play in correcting beliefs. Some theorists claim that experience is transparent, meaning that what kind of experience it is depends only on the content presented in this experience. Other theorists refute this claim by suggesting that what matters is not only what is presented but also how it is presented.

Various types of experiences are discussed in the academic literature

Perceptual experience, for example, represents the external world through stimuli that are recorded and transmitted by the senses. The experience of episodic memory, on the other hand, relates to reliving past events that are felt first.

In imaginative experience, objects are presented without the aim of showing how things really are. Thinking experiences link mental representations and data processing, wherein ideas or propositions are entertained, judged or linked. Pleasure refers to an experience that feels exciting. It is closely related to emotional experience, which has evaluative, physiological and behavioral bonus components. The moods of the heart are similar to emotions, with one major comparison being that they do not have a specific object found in emotions.

Conscious volition relates the experience of wanting something. They play a central role in the agency experience, where desires are created, actions are planned, and decisions are made and realized. Unusual experiences refer to very rare experiences that are significantly different from experiences in a normal state of care, such as religious experiences, out-of-body experiences, or near-death experiences.

Experience is discussed in various disciplines. Phenomenology is the science of the structure and content of experience. It uses a different method, such as an epoch or an eidetic alteration. Sensory experience is of great interest to epistemology. The traditional meaningful dialogue in this area concerns whether all knowledge is based on sensory experience, as empiricists claim, or not, as rationalists claim.

This is closely related to the position of experience in science, where experience is said to act as a neutral mediator between competing theories. In metaphysics, experience is involved in the mind-body problem as well as the hard problem of understanding, both of which seek to illuminate the bond between module and experience. In psychology, some theorists comment that all concepts are learned from experience while others comment that some concepts are innate.