The Power Of First Person Experience

Rating: 9/10 (19 December 2019)

Most people would deny that science tells us to ignore our perceptions, and yet that's precisely what science does. Science is almost predicated upon the rejection of first-person phenomena. For example, if you tell a scientist that you had a mystical experience, what's he going to do? He's going to dismiss that, and say, "They're just feelings. You're just hallucinating". Science rejects the subjective, which is the only thing that exists, and the only thing science could be predicated upon. But because science is in denial about it, it has to repress that, projected outwards. Science demonizes religious groups, non-rationalists, hippies, mystics, and philosophy because that's inherent to the enterprise of modern science. To be a modern scientist, you have to ignore perceptions to be a great scientist. You have to be completely absorbed and lost within concepts within your imagination to create scientific theories. The scientific methods are imagination concepts, they're not perceptions. You don't perceive gravity, you invent gravity with your mind as a concept, and then you formalize it using equations. Then you have to convince yourself that all of those equations and maps that you made are real. That they are out there in the world, that you didn't actually create them, that they're more real than your first-person experience of life. What you imagine in all your concepts and theories is objective, and what you actually feel and experience is all the flaky stuff. This is all the subjective stuff. 'Contact' explores the unknown and how science is only coming from a finite perspective, and will never fully understand reality. Moreover, it allows us to respect religion, and science and how both are searching for the same thing.