concepts and representations come from? Without assigning religious experi-
ence a special ontological status (that is, labeling it“sui generis”), I will address
these issues while drawing on the philosophy of mind and cognitive neuro-
science research.
7.1 SUBJECTIVE RELIGIOUS EXPERIENCEThe concept ofsubjective experienceseems so intuitive that biblical scholars
and scholars of religion seldom bother to address it. However, why and how
we have“experience”has been subject to intense debates for some three
decades in the modern philosophy of mind. Imagine that you look at a bright
turquoise color patch in a paint store and then look at a dull brown color patch
(Tye, 2008). In each case, there is somethingit is like for you to undergo that
experience, and this something will be different in each case. What is different
in each case is thephenomenal characterof the experience. The phenomenal
character of experience has different qualities in each case (which you can
identify by reflecting on your experience), and the qualities that together make
up the phenomenal character of experience are calledqualia. Thus qualia
include the ways things look, sound, and smell, the way it feels to have a pain,
and more generally,“what it is like to have experiential mental states”(Block,
2004). In other words,“[w]hat it is like to be in pain is distinct from what it is
like to see red, but for both states, there is something it is like to be in them”
(Sytsma & Machery, 2010, p. 301)—which is why these mental states involve
subjective experience.
There is disagreement about the kinds of mental states that possess qualia
(and thus involve subjective experience), but a usual list (Tye, 2008) includes
(a) perceptual experiences (such as seeing green or handling a piece of fur),
(b) bodily sensations (such as feeling pain), (c) felt reactions or emotions (such
as feeling love or jealousy), and (d) felt moods (such as feeling calm or miser-
able). Interestingly, folk-intuitions about subjective experience are different
from the philosophical notion (Sytsma & Machery, 2010) and focus on the
hedonic value (desirable or undesirable nature) of some mental state as a
criterion. In other words, the folk-intuition of subjective experience is that
it is associated withvalence. On this account, we can speak of subjective
experience when we like or dislike some mental state, such as smelling a banana
or feeling anger.
The discussion of subjective experience is often embedded in the discussion
of consciousness, which is not the subject of this chapter. Let us note that
David Chalmers (2007) identified“easy”and“hard”problems of conscious-
ness. The easy problems include such issues as the so-called binding problem
(Revonsuo & Newman, 1999): How do we know what pieces of information
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