Is experience something in the world, the world understood as the totality of truth, of 'all that is the case'? This is the same as asking whether every event of the experience belonging to any being is an objective fact, or perhaps, asking whether qualia, whatever they be, are objective facts, reducible not necessarily to material process as to some kind of definable third-person event, or whether the 'I feel' is a special case of the 'there is'. The arguments about the existence of qualia seem to come down to something like this; the opponents of them will only be satisfied when you can put forward the equations that determine qualia as a part of objective reality. It is a strange quest because it would seem that if it were to succeed then the ethical significance of qualia, the irreducibility of suffering, say, which is the latent metaphysics even in utilitarianism, would be undermined, in other words the whole reason why you wanted qualia in the first place, the Cartesian protest. To know how something works means to be able to modify it as it were from backstage, without having to go through the motive structures of its appearance, as for example in genetic manipulation of organisms side-stepping evolution, or CGI substitutions for live action in films. If you could make someone's experience whatever you wanted it to be while doing something entirely different to their physical embodiment, then surely you would be beyond morality. That such a notion is deeply repugnant ought to suggest that experience can never be a thing, and that our best hope is that qualia can never be proven to exist. That's going too far, however. Everything about any individual quale does exist except for its experiencer. Redness could be located in the brain but not that it is experienced, and that it is experienced is not experienced and has no associated quality. The 'I' in consciousness is only the placeholder for this gap. Experience may prove not to be what it appears, not because it is actually some objective process, but because the meaning of the absence of the subject can change - there is no necessity tying it to the way it is in human experience, only history whose nature is ever-changing relative stability.