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“I know it when I see it.”
This famous line comes from U.S. Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart in 1964, when he was asked to define hard-core pornography. He couldn’t define it formally, but trusted that it was intuitively recognizable.
There are many things in life like this: the feelings we recognize instantly and viscerally, yet struggle to define or quantify.
- The joy and lifting of our spirit when our favorite song comes on.
- The anxiety of watching the final seconds of a close college basketball game—we are so elated, we cannot help high-fiving a stranger next to us when our team wins.
- The kindness and warmth of a person.
- Knowing instantly as you enter the room that your spouse is mad at you.
We know these states when we experience them. Measuring them is another matter.
Recently, I conducted a research study testing hula—a traditional Hawaiian cultural dance—for individuals with Parkinson’s disease. At first, participants were understandably skeptical. But they quickly fell in love with the class: moving to music, learning from a charismatic instructor, and sharing the experience together.
After 12 weeks, something remarkable happened. They were transformed. They became close friends, supported one another, and universally said the class had changed their lives.
As scientists, we tried to capture this transformation using the best tools available to us. We administered validated questionnaires: quality-of-life scales, wellness scales, and self-efficacy measures. These instruments are designed to translate subjective experience into data that can be analyzed, compared, and shared.
And yet, these tools are still self-reported, subjective questionnaires—useful, but far from sufficient. They do not fully capture the depth of connection, meaning, and transformation, the sparkle in their eyes.
This limitation points to a deeper problem. When we attempt to measure subjective experiences, we face an inherent challenge: we do not yet fully understand the inner workings of the brain and consciousness, so we are using a tool we don’t fully comprehend that likely carries built-in biases. That doesn’t invalidate the effort—but it does demand humility.
Ontologically Subjective but Epistemologically Objective
I recently encountered an idea from philosopher John Searle. This is what he wrote:
“Consciousness is ontologically subjective, epistemologically objective”
OK, I had to read that sentence several times to decode it, so allow me to unpack it.
Ontology refers to nature or mode of existence—how something exists.
Something is ontologically objective if it exists independently of any observer’s mind: a table, a mountain, a rock.
Something is ontologically subjective if it exists only as it is experienced by a conscious subject: pain, fear, joy.
You can almost remove the word ontological and arrive at our everyday use of objective versus subjective.
Now let’s introduce the second term: epistemology, which refers to how we evaluate, define, and know something is true.
Something is epistemologically objective if it can be evaluated independently of personal feelings or preferences. For example: “Water boils at 100°C at sea level.” This can be tested and verified.
Something is epistemologically subjective if it depends on personal experience or preference, and there is no universal truth. For example: “Chocolate ice cream tastes better than vanilla.” In everyday terms, this is the difference between fact and opinion.
Searle argued that consciousness is ontologically subjective, meaning it can only be experienced from the first-person perspective. Consciousness–encompassing awe, pain, fear, joy–has no independent physical existence outside of first-person experience. So far, this idea seems straightforward enough.
Searle’s key insight was that ontologically subjective things can still be epistemologically objective: they can be studied and evaluated, with the eventual goal of uncovering their structure and truth.
Having said that, honestly, where do we start? How can we define, study, and seek truth for what is ontologically subjective? Can we start by trying to measure it?
Water, Temperature, and “Feels Like”
This made me think about something as basic as water. Long before we knew that water is H₂O, our ancestors knew water intimately: the coolness on the skin, the wet misery of a storm, the relief of the first sip when thirsty, the sensation as it moves down the throat.
Only later did we develop epistemically objective descriptions—its molecular structure, volume, purity, and temperature. But even now, water does not reduce entirely into an equation. We still need words, metaphors, and lived experience to describe it.
Or consider temperature. Temperature is epistemologically objective—we can measure it precisely. Yet anyone who checks a weather app or watches the evening news knows that this number is rarely presented alone. Alongside the “actual” temperature, we are also given the “feels like” temperature.
That second number acknowledges that lived experience often differs from objective measurement. Wind, humidity, sunlight, and shade all shape how temperature feels. Even internal states—fatigue, hunger, emotion—play a role. Both numbers are real, and together they offer a more complete understanding of what we will actually experience.
Why Measurement Still Matters
So why do we try to measure these things at all?
Not because subjective, lived experience is secondary. In fact, subjective experience is how we live our lives. Joy, fear, connection, meaning, and suffering are not side effects of existence—they are existence.
But experience lived only privately cannot easily be shared, compared, or built upon. Measurement is our attempt to make the invisible visible—to translate individual experience into a shared language. It allows us to extrapolate beyond a single story, to identify patterns, and to ask whether what helped one person might help many.
In this way, measurement is not a rejection of our unique inner life, but a bridge from isolated experience to communal knowledge, allowing human understanding to progress.
The goal is not to reduce joy, fear, or connection to numbers alone. Just as water is more than H₂O and temperature is more than a single reading, lived experience cannot be fully captured by metrics. But without some shared way of measuring, we remain siloed in individual experience.
Measurement, at its best, is an act of connection. We need to keep looking for better ways to measure the unmeasurable and define the undefinable—to start chipping away and eventually uncover a little truth about the “ontologically subjective.”
