  I propose that quality of life can be compared despite the difference in
values across cultures when it is experienced at the sensory and perceptual
level. I argue that an approach to assessing quality of life which focuses on
an individual's ability to organize his or her context by perceiving positive
constellations of factors in the environment and his or her ability to achieve
valuable acts and realize valuable states of being is more meaningful than the
approaches of metrics which focus directly, and often solely, on the means of
living and the means of freedom. Because the felt experience of quality of life
is derived from a constellation of factors which make up the indivisible
structure of a milieu, the experience of quality of life cannot be regarded as
a subjective experience. Through the example of how different frequencies, and
mixtures of frequencies, of light are perceived as colour by the eye, I
demonstrate that the human cognitive apparatus, because of its relation to the
object that is measured, apprehends different scales of quantity as degrees of
quality. I show that lived experience is the result of a selective
relationality with one's environment and that the experience of quality has
something to do with the perception of entities in their interrelated and
networked nature as wholes.
