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A review essay on a book by Martin Jay, Songs of Experience: Modern American and European Variations on a Universal Theme (U California Press, 2005).

As we live our lives, we repeatedly make decisions that shape our future circumstances and affect the sort of person we will be. When choosing whether to start a family, or deciding on a career, we often think we can assess the options by imagining what different experiences would be like for us. L. A. Paul argues that, for choices involving dramatically new experiences, we are confronted by the brute fact that we can know very little about our subjective futures. This has serious implications for our decisions. If we make life choices in the way we naturally and intuitively want to--by considering what we care about, and what our future selves will be like if we choose to have the experience--we only learn what we really need to know after we have already committed ourselves. If we try to escape the dilemma by avoiding an experience, we have still made a choice. Choosing rationally, then, may require us to regard big life decisions as choices to make discoveries, small and large, about the intrinsic nature of experience, and to recognize that part of the value of living authentically is to experience one's life and preferences in whatever way they may evolve in the wake of the choices one makes.Using classic philosophical examples about the nature of consciousness, and drawing on recent work in normative decision theory, cognitive science, epistemology, and the philosophy of mind, Paul develops a rigorous account of transformative experience that sheds light on how we should understand real-world experience and our capacity to rationally map our subjective futures

This book offers an account of perceptual experience—its intrinsic nature, its engagement with the world, its relations to mental states of other kinds, and its role in epistemic norms. One of the book's main claims is that perceptual experience constitutively involves representations of worldly items. A second claim is that the relevant form of representation can be explained in broadly biological terms. After defending these foundational doctrines, the book proceeds to give an account of perceptual appearances and how they are related to the objective world. Appearances turn out to be relational, viewpoint dependent properties of external objects. There is also a complementary account of how the objects that possess these properties are represented. Another major concern is the phenomenological dimension of perception. The book maintains that perceptual phenomenology can be explained reductively in terms of the representational contents of experiences, and it uses this doctrine to undercut the traditional arguments for dualism. This treatment of perceptual phenomenology is then expanded to encompass cognitive phenomenology, the phenomenology of moods and emotions, and the phenomenology of pain. The next topic is the various forms of consciousness that perceptual experience can possess. A principal aim is to show that phenomenology is metaphysically independent of these forms of consciousness, and another is to de-mystify the form known as phenomenal consciousness. The book concludes by discussing the relations of various kinds that perceptual experiences bear to higher level cognitive states, including relations of format, content, and justification or support.

The experience economy is a fourth economic field, different from commodities, goods and services. Experiences are an economic value that is added to a product or identical with a product. When you buy an experience, you pay to spend time enjoying a series of memorable events that a company stages to engage a customer in a personal way.Fueled by an expanding global and digital economy, the experience dimension has moved into a predominant place since the 1990s. In developed countries, people have become richer and more individualized, and with all their basic material needs being met they focus increasingly on personal development and self-realization. Demand is increasing for experience-based products such as tourism and sports, as well as film, music and other contents of media and interactive technologies. Furthermore, the demand for experience values has extended to include any product or dimension of modern societies, such as the design of houses, furniture, clothes, cars, computers, etc.This is not a completely new story - commercial entertainment and design have, after all, been around for a century or so, and the universal values of love, sex, belief, family and the meaning of life have always been vital to human beings. What is new is the fact that capitalism is invading more and more fields of experiences connected with emotions and the extension of life. In all developed countries, and increasingly on a global scale, a series of expanding industries has emerged to supply the market with experience-oriented goods.In this book, the business development of markets and industries is examined: from tourism, to media and entertainment, from design to sex, and the leading companies and trends in all the industries involved are also given consideration