The Architecture of Experience (AoE) is the primary experience branch within Consciousness Mechanics (CM). It explains how experienced events are processed, integrated, and expressed within an organism, from local state change through to feeling, valence, awareness, cognition, and emotion.
Within this framework, experience is defined as an event that results in an impression on the organism, where an impression is a control-relevant state change that contributes to a response.
Not every event becomes an experience, and not every experience becomes felt, attended, or cognitively evaluated. AoE explains how local impressions contribute to wider organism-level state change, and how significant perturbations in global state can give rise to feeling, valence, awareness, cognition, and emotion.
AoE begins from a simple clarification: experience is not raw sensing. An organism may be exposed to an event, and a sensory surface may register it, without that event becoming an experience in the mechanistic sense used here.
This distinction is important because AoE is concerned with how experiences are processed, not with treating every environmental occurrence as already equivalent to feeling, awareness, or cognition. An event may leave only a minimal local impression, or it may propagate much further through the architecture.
This visual summarises the current public interpretation of AoE, showing how a sensed event is registered, how local evaluation produces an impression (ΔSᵢ), and how the aggregation of local state changes contributes to global state perturbation (ΔGS).
In this framework, experience begins locally, when an event results in an impression on the organism. AoE does not treat experience as identical to feeling, awareness, or cognition. Instead, it shows how local state change can contribute to wider organism-level state change.
The diagram should therefore be read as a processing map of experienced events. Feeling marks the sensed perturbation of global state, with further experiential organisation, including valence, awareness, cognition, and emotion, depending on how that perturbation is subsequently evaluated.
The following concepts make up the AoE branch. Each marks a distinct part of the experiential structure described by AoE and will serve as an entry point for more focused pages as the branch expands.
Experience, AoE, and the CCM capability layers (CLn) describe different parts of the same architecture and should not be collapsed into one another.
Put simply: experience answers whether an event leaves an impression, AoE explains how that experience is handled, and CCM describes the structural capacity available for that handling.