The Architecture of Experience: Global State, Valence, and the Layered Structure of Experience

Contemporary discussions of experience are marked by persistent terminological overlap and conceptualdrift across terms such as consciousness, feeling, valence, awareness, cognition, emotion, qualia, and sentience. Different theoretical frameworks often target distinct aspects of viability-regulated control while using overlapping vocabulary, producing debates in which mechanisms, experiential properties, and descriptive labels are frequently conflated. This paper introduces the Architecture of Experience (AoE), a biology-anchored conceptual framework grounded in Consciousness Mechanics (CM) and the Consciousness Component Model (CCM). Rather than proposing a complete mechanistic implementation or phenomenological theory, the paper clarifies how commonly used experiential terms correspond to distinct roles within a viability-regulated control architecture. Within the AoE, Global State (GS) dynamics provide the basis of experience. Feeling corresponds to sensed perturbations of GS, valence to the direction of GS trajectory relative to viability boundaries, awareness to significance-based selection of signals for cognitive evaluation, cognition to model-based evaluation of aware signals, and emotion to weighted evaluation of valenced signals relative to goals, memory, and context. Sentience is treated as a regime marker describing systems in which valence is experienced as intrinsically positive or negative significance, while qualia denotes the experiential character accompanying the coordinated operation of the AoE mechanisms. By separating mechanism, associated experience, and milestone labels, the AoE stabilises the conceptual vocabulary surrounding experience, clarifies how existing frameworks address different architectural layers, and provides a conceptual foundation for future CCM formalisation and a companion treatment of the so-called hard problem of consciousness.