"If one has any kind of direct experience,"

No one has any sort of "direct experience"... ever. Everything "you" perceive is filtered through the "you" of immediately before and creates a new "you". You are indeed the sum of your preconditioning and your interpretation of external events via that preconditioning.

Y(z) = AX(z)+ BY(z-1)
where z represents a unit time... usually not a constant sampling rate in wet systems. A and B are probably less than 1.

That's the simplest form... you'll recognise that as a filter perhaps?