I explore the possiblity that having a sensory experience consists in having cognitive access to the fact that one is engaging in an exploratory skill in which one has implicit mastery of the way body motions change incoming stimulation.

When enhanced with the concepts of ´bodiliness' and ´grabbiness' this skill-based approach provides an explanation of aspects of sensory experience which have up until now remained mysterious, namely the ´presence' of feels, the fact that they have a quality rather than no quality, and the fact that the qualities are different within and between sensory modalities.

In other words, the theory explains why having a pain feels like something rather than nothing, and how and why it feels different from the sensation of red or the sound of a bell.

A mathematical application of the approach shows how color qualities like grey, red, green, blue are intrinsic properties of an observer's interaction with his environment, and not phenomenal categories arbitrarily linked to neural excitation.

Some avenues of empirical investigation suggested by the approach are: change blindness, sensory substitution, and eye-movement dependent color contingencies.