“still we can come to a kind of experience which is not defiled, right? Then in the seeing there is only the seeing, in the hearing only the hearing etc. There are no likes or dislikes or even a subject/object split..”
When we see an object, whether we generate likes/dislikes depends on the object AND our gati.
One may not generate any like/dislike if the object is of no interest. We see so many things in a given day, but like or dislike only a fraction of them.
However, if we do experience like or a dislike, that happens very fast. It happens with mano sankhara, due to our gati automatically; see, my response to “Difference between Tanha and Upadana“.