“Certain experiences are not admittable to description or testimony” – to paraphrase the philosopher L.A. Paul. How would you describe the color red to someone who has never seen it? This seemingly simple question shows us the limitation of human communication. Certain experiences – called qualia – resist complete description through language alone. Yet this is what the current e-commerce ecosystem tries to do via reviews, social proofs, before and afters etc. We make significant purchase decisions based on others’ testimony about experiences we cannot truly access until we have them ourselves.
So what are we actually buying? We are buying affiliation and status – the physical product is a token of a certain aspirational state. We buy a new mattress to obtain more comfortable sleep, buy expensive wine for the delicious taste, and for the membership of the tribe of people that value sleep or the exclusive few who really understand to appreciate a complex bouquet. In a sense the current ecosystem fills the void of the subjective experience ahead by selling us on:
- The exclusivity of who else has had this experience
- The signal that consuming certain products sends to others
- The narrative about ourselves that ownership creates
- The community we join through shared consumption
An objective experience
is boring. Imagine that your mattress sales pitch was reduced to granular quantifiable metrics like pressure points, material science descriptions of the fabric, heat dissipation — these are not quantities we can associate with experience, it lives in another mental universe. Also explanations such as: “this mattress provides firm support for side sleepers weighing less than 85kg” doesn’t really work. When talking about the subjective we are sort of forced to remain in a subjective language and descriptive setting. Reducing experiences to numbers and quantifiable units feels cold and un-relatable.
Qualia by proxy
We do however all have past experiences from which we can create relational descriptions. Instead of describing a new experience in isolation, we can connect it to something familiar: Think of it like Thai cuisine, but with more emphasis on meat and less sweetness. This method works by leveraging our existing experiential framework to build bridges to new experiences rather than teleporting us to an entirely new perceptual island.
The power of relational descriptions lies in their ability to triangulate experiences. When a wine connoisseur describes a Cabernet as having “notes of blackcurrant with hints of cedar and a velvety mouthfeel,” they’re not attempting to transmit the exact taste but rather positioning it within a constellation of reference points that help us anticipate where this new experience might land in our own sensory landscape.
This approach acknowledges that while direct transmission of qualia is impossible, we can construct frameworks of comparison that narrow the experiential gap. Consider how we describe music to friends: “If you like the rhythmic complexity of band A but want something with warmer vocals, you might enjoy band B.” Such descriptions don’t capture the full experience but provide sufficient contextual anchors for meaningful navigation.
This is where Large Language Models becomes interesting. They have been trained on vast amounts of human testimony about experiences, and boiled it down to an embedding space in which we can do numerical operations. In this case our numerical operations is an attempt to capture your personal experiential space – creating a map where your past reactions to products become coordinates for navigating toward future satisfactions.
Imagine a personal AI shopper that:
- Maps Your Experiential Space: Through conversations about your past experiences with products, cuisines, or sensations, the AI develops a map of your personal “qualia space.”
- Offers Calibrated Predictions: When you consider a new product, the AI can leverage its understanding of how experiences typically relate to predict where this novel experience might fall relative to your known reference points.
- Learns From Feedback: After you’ve had the actual experience, your feedback helps refine the accuracy of these predictions, improving the model’s understanding of your unique perceptual framework.
- Creates a Personal Qualia Dictionary: Over time, this creates a personalized framework for communicating about subjective experiences that’s calibrated specifically to your sensory history and preferences.
Such a system would be able to articulate why and how a new experience might relate to known ones. It would be able to make predictions for entirely new experiences based on descriptive properties of said experience, drawing from descriptors across both sensory, emotional and functional dimensions. It would enable you to develop a refined vocabulary for discussing subjective experiences by offering particular words and phrase to choose from. Increased dialogue with such a system would increasingly refine its ability to “get it right” and offer up recommendations such as: based on your description of enjoying X for reasons A and B, you might find Y offers a similar experience but with more intensity in dimension C.
The future of e-commerce
The future of e-commerce is not about pushing products via another more powerful recommendation engine powered by AI. It is about figuring out how to build experiential translators that speak the language of your personal sensory history. It is not about telling you what others liked; it is about telling you about how you might interact with something new.
This shift represents a fundamental reorientation of consumer culture. Commerce has thrived on the gap between promise and fulfilment – that space where anticipation lives. But what if technology could narrow this gap, not by making products better, but by making our understanding of our own preferences more precise?
Maybe we can go from status and affiliation to actual enjoyment of our purchases – where we are not experiencing fatigue of options and choices, but have a solid map for navigating to enjoyable experiences and meaningful purchases. As we develop a more articulate relationship with our own experiences, as how we feel, taste and sense expands, our awareness of subtle differences sharpen. We may transform from passive consumers driven by status anxiety into conscious connoisseurs of our own unique experiential landscapes – making choices that genuinely resonate with our individual sensibilities rather than simply echoing the preferences of others.