How can there be experience?
Everything on this website begins with a simple observation: there is experience. Not as an abstract concept or a philosophical assumption, but as something immediate. Colour, sound, thought, memory, expectation, fear, love, certainty, confusion, a body, a world, other people, time, and space all appear before any explanation is offered. Whatever else may or may not exist, experience is already here.
Most of the time this seems so self-evident that it hardly attracts attention. We ask what we experience, whether our experience is accurate, what it means, or how it should be interpreted, but we rarely pause before the fact of experience itself. Wide Open Windows begins there, with the question that usually remains hidden beneath all the others: how can there be experience at all?
How can there be no experience?
Yet there is another question that is at least as puzzling. If experience can be present, how can it also be absent? General anaesthesia, dreamless sleep, coma, and perhaps death all seem to confront us with the possibility that there can be no experience whatsoever: no world, no body, no passage of time, and not even an awareness of absence.
When experience returns after dreamless sleep or anaesthesia, the world simply appears again. Time has passed according to clocks, bodies, and other people, but there was no experienced interval through which that time seemed to pass. There was no waiting and no darkness, because even darkness would already have been something experienced. The absence of experience cannot itself appear within experience; it can only be inferred afterwards, from the discontinuity between one experienced moment and another.
This makes the apparent disappearance of experience difficult to think about. How can a world vanish without appearing to vanish? How can experience begin again without having witnessed its own absence? And what, if anything, does it mean to say that there was nothing in between?
Experience before consciousness
The word consciousness carries many different meanings. It may refer to wakefulness, awareness, subjectivity, an inner substance, or even a universal principle. Each use introduces assumptions that may already determine the direction of the inquiry. For that reason, this project begins with experience rather than with a theory of consciousness.
To say that there is experience does not yet explain what experience is, who or what has it, or what produces it. It only acknowledges that something appears. Lived experience is therefore not presented here as a doctrine about consciousness, but as the field within which every body, object, memory, idea, theory, and world can become present.
The lived world
Experience does not ordinarily arrive as a collection of disconnected colours, sounds, and sensations. It appears already organised as a world. There are rooms, roads, dogs, neighbours, countries, books, institutions, scientific theories, religious beliefs, personal histories, and imagined futures. They belong together within a more or less coherent whole that usually feels stable, familiar, and simply real.
This coherence is easily overlooked because we live within it. We do not normally experience a series of fragments that must first be assembled; we find ourselves already situated in a meaningful environment in which things have names, functions, histories, and relations. A chair is there to sit on, a door leads somewhere, a face belongs to someone, and a memory seems to refer to a past that really happened.
The question is therefore not only how experience is possible, but also how experience comes to take the form of a world. How do distinctions, meanings, expectations, habits, memories, and social practices come together in such a way that reality appears coherent and inhabitable?
The Dioramic Approach
The Dioramic Approach investigates how worlds become organised within lived experience. Rather than beginning with the question of whether a world is objectively true or false, it asks how that world becomes structured, convincing, and real for those who inhabit it.
A world can be approached as a configuration: a dynamic organisation of perceptions, concepts, distinctions, memories, habits, bodily capacities, technologies, relationships, and inherited forms of interpretation. None of these elements stands entirely alone. Together they shape what can appear, what can matter, what can be questioned, and what remains almost invisible because it is taken for granted.
This does not mean that every world is arbitrary or that all interpretations are equally adequate. It means that reality as lived is never encountered without structure. The Dioramic Approach tries to make that structure visible without claiming to occupy a position outside every possible world.
An open investigation
Wide Open Windows does not present a finished doctrine. It is an ongoing investigation in which descriptions, concepts, memories, images, scientific ideas, philosophical traditions, and ordinary experiences are placed beside one another and allowed to interact.
Some pages remain close to particular moments of experience. Others examine language, perception, identity, dreams, anaesthesia, nonduality, science, or death. The connections between them do not form a single linear argument, but a rhizome through which recurring questions can be approached from different directions.
The aim is not to replace one worldview with another supposedly final worldview. It is to remain close to the strangeness of experience itself: that there can be experience, that experience can apparently disappear, and that whenever it is present it already unfolds as a world.
Three questions
The investigation repeatedly returns to three basic questions:
- How can there be experience?
- How can there be no experience?
- How do worlds emerge within experience?
These questions are not offered as puzzles that will eventually be closed by a final answer. They function more as openings: ways of interrupting what seems obvious and of looking again at the fact that anything appears at all.
Leave a reflection
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