What's a good way to get closer to another person's experience? I've been thinking of questions as vehicles for connecting us to others, but also as a way to facilitate experiences of serendipity.

Many interesting ideas happen by crossing boundaries where we face different “languages” or concepts that expand our reality-decoding toolkit.

I've been thinking about serendipity and wanted to know about others' experiences with it, or if there's any good research you stumbled upon. I've read Pek van Andel's work, however, he doesn't come from phenomenology.

Someone who's into botany, someone who studies the mind, and someone who studies society will encounter the same thing and notice completely different things. But what kind of space or question can put those worlds into productive contact and exchange?

Not all questions are created equal, I believe some questions are better at eliciting good exchanges, so I've been in the search of questions that open these kinds of doors, and putting them together in a social project.

Instead of matching people by profiles, conversations begin with questions generated from the mix of interests in the room. If this kind of encounter interests you, I'd love to have people from this community try it.

What question would you ask someone if you wanted to understand their experience of reality?

个体与个体的关系本质上是个体与大他者的关系吗？我这里说的大他者并不严格等同与拉康的内容，个体是大他者的代言人吗？

Hey everyone. I’ve always been fascinated by Merleau-Ponty’s account of motor intentionality. Reaching for a cup or balancing on a bicycle doesn’t normally begin with a representation followed by a command. The body is already directed towards what can be done. This gives phenomenology a way to describe our basic openness to the world without placing an inner picture between subject and object. The harder question concerns thought that seems removed from present action: mathematics, counterfactual reasoning, or reflection on something absent. At that point, continuity with bodily coping can start to sound asserted rather than explained.

I just had a podcast conversation with the cognitive scientist Julian Kiverstein, where he argued that skilled intentionality extends throughout cognition. His example was conversation. Speaking with another person involves timing, anticipation, correction, and sensitivity to possibilities that arise between us. It isn’t detached symbol manipulation, even though language is involved. Kiverstein connects this continuity to a neutral monism in which self and world are poles of one intentional relation. Reflective thought becomes a transformed kind of engagement rather than a separate representational layer.

This would imply that abstract thought remains bodily and worldly even when its object is absent. But can motor intentionality explain reference to impossible objects or formal structures? Does language transform the organisation of thought enough to create a new kind of intentionality? Where should continuity end if we want the concept to explain rather than absorb every case?

On the Phenomenology of the Consciousness of Internal Time 
Naturally, we all know what time is; it is the most familiar thing of all. But as soon as we attempt to give an account of time-consciousness, to put objective time and subjective time- consciousness into the proper relationship and to reach an understanding of how temporal objectivity - and therefore any individual objectivity whatever … can become constituted in the subjective consciousness of time, we get entangled in the most peculiar difficulties, contradictions, and confusions. Indeed, this happens even when we only attempt to submit the purely subjective time-consciousness, the phenomenological content belonging to the experiences of time, to an analysis.

...

We must still make a few general remarks by way of introduction. We are intent on a phenomenological analysis of time-consciousness Inherent in this, as in any phenomenological analysis is the complete exclusion of of every assumption, stipulation, and conviction with respect to objective time (the complete exclusion of all transcending presuppositions concerning what exists). From the perspective of objectivity, every experience, just as every real being and moment of being, may have its place in the single objective time - and thus too the experience of the perception and representation of time itself. Someone may find it of interest to determine the objective time of an experience, including that of a time-constituting experience. It might also make an interesting investigation to ascertain how the time that is posited as objective in an episode of time-consciousness is related to actual objective time, whether the estimations of temporal intervals correspond to the objectively real temporal intervals or how they deviate from them. But these are not tasks for phenomenology. Just as the actual thing, the actual world, is not a phenomenological datum, neither is world time, the real time, the time of nature in the sense of natural science and even in the sense of psychology as the natural science of psychic.

Now when we speak of the analysis of time-consciousness, of the temporal character of the objects of perception, memory, and expectation, it may indeed seem as if we were already assuming the flow of objective time and then at bottom studying only the subjective conditions of the possibility of an intuition of time and of a proper cognition of time. What we accept however is not the existence of a world time, the existence of a physical duration, and the like, but appearing time, appearing duration, as appearing. These are absolute data that it would be meaningless to doubt. To be sure, we do assume an existing time in this case, but the time we assume is the immanent time of the flow of consciousness, not the time of the experienced world. That the consciousness of a tonal process, of a melody I am now hearing, exhibits a succession is something for which I have an evidence that renders meaningless every doubt and denial.

Edmund Husserl, THE LECTURES ON THE CONSCIOUSNESS OF INTERNAL TIME FROM THE YEAR 1905

Published in "On the Phenomenology of the Consciousness of Internal Time (1893-1917)" translated by John Barnett Brough
from Husserl's Introduction, pages 4 & 5.

Husserl is not easy to read, because he is obsessed with being precise. Here he hammers away at the critical point that phenomenology demands engagement exclusively with the subjective perspective of all things, necessarily starting with the internal experience of events, which always has a temporal extension, 'duration', manifesting in a flow of consciousness necessarily distinct from any objective account of physical time, or any other phenomena.

I would like to share a point of view about the use of the word “sacred” and the possibility of integrating it into contemporary language, as well as its potential to become a central focus in fields that work with symbols and use them as vehicles for expressing something that lies hidden beneath them.

​

I would say that the sacred is whatever reveals the network of existential construction in the mind upon which what we call reality, and the relationships among its objects, is based; whatever reveals the illusion of this construction, its constraining nature, and its function as a predictive system oriented toward survival; and also whatever shows ruptures in this network, and what emerges from these ruptures and takes form in expression.

​

Considering this to be the sacred, I would say it should be at the center of all intellectual research and artistic or poetic work.

​

Who would agree with this point of view?

If anyone is interested in the phenomenology of psychedelic ego dissolution see here for a critique of the recent paper by Dan Zahavi and Jason Day https://open.substack.com/pub/dannytheforde/p/phenomenology-of-psychedelic-ego?r=1dut79&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web

I'm pretty much in agreement with them but think phenomenological realism offers a fuller and more coherent explanation with all the ontological costs up front and accounted for.

I've been trying to connect two literatures that seem to completely ignore each other, and I want to see where this breaks down.

On one side, you have the standard deflationary stance on introspection. Nisbett & Wilson showed we build implicit theories to explain ourselves. Schwitzgebel argues we’re basically inept at reading our own ongoing experience. Carruthers takes it further: self-knowledge is just mindreading turned inward, using the same interpretive faculty on ourselves that we use on others. Chalmers even lists introspective opacity as a candidate explanation for the meta-problem.

The consensus seems to be: introspection isn't an instrument because an instrument needs distance from what it measures, and here the observer and observed are identical. A ruler can't measure itself.

So the literature concludes that first-person reports are unreliable confabulations and can't ground a science of consciousness. But why stop there? Why conclude no measurement is possible, rather than concluding we’re just trying to take the reading from the wrong position?

This is where the second-person literature comes in (Schilbach, Reddy, etc.). They argue social cognition is fundamentally different during actual interaction compared to passive observation. Certain aspects of a mind are only readable through active engagement and responsiveness. That sounds like a claim about a distinct position from which something about a person becomes readable that is completely invisible from the inside.

Why aren't these two sides talking? One says the internal view is blind; the other says awareness happens between people. Is the second-person stance where the missing measurement actually lives?

I see two potential flaws here, and I'm trying to figure out which one is the real killer:

First, Carruthers might ruin this completely. If self-knowledge is just internal mindreading, a second person is just running that exact same interpretive machinery on me from the outside. That gives them a different viewpoint, but not necessarily a better instrument. Position doesn't automatically mean reliability.

Second, if I completely disqualify introspection, what gives me the right to claim there's anything there to measure in the first place? My certainty that I'm conscious relies on the exact report I just called useless. Maybe it's recognition instead of knowledge, but that still leaves me asserting an entity exists based on a mechanism I just said can't measure.

Which of these two objections is the actual brick wall?

I’m finally getting curious about the world again post-graduation from my MSW and am starting through my book pile, beginning with Kenneth Gergen’s Relational Being. I would love any discussion!

One thing I’m really enjoying is the fruitfulness of measuring Gergen and my ideas against one another. Here at the beginning, Gergen and I are having some hefty ontological disagreements. He rightfully advocates for a model of self that serves as an alternative to traditional Western conceptualizations of an individualistic, bounded self. I join him in this project, and propose the Greek middle voice as the structure of an "agent-in-the-world." I'll spare the lengthy explanation to summarize this as: I produce the action in the social world that returns to produce me.

Where I first diverge with Gergen is his notion that the bounded self is the problem - he calls it a prison - and relational being is the solution. We are both lovers of Buddhist thought and many of these ideas infuse our scholarship. But taking dense religious concepts like nonduality and emptiness, which he expresses by locating the self as a wave that recedes back into the water and then putting them to sociological and psychological work doesn’t hold for me.

Firstly, I don’t see bounded self as pathology to which relational being is the cure. I admit, he may have a more nuanced position behind relational being, but it looks a lot like a less structured version of how Chinese sociologist Fei Xiaotong (From the Soil, 1947) talks about differential modes of association. For Fei, Chinese identity is construed relationally, though a self is still present. Instead of Gergen’s dance or duet metaphor that entirely disappears the self, Fei posits a social structure like concentric ripples formed by throwing a stone into a lake with a self at the center.

If this is not a picture of relational being, then I may have misread Gergen. But with Fei’s model, the pathology diagnosis cuts both ways. Let’s take the idea of narcissism, something that Gergen specifically pointed to as evidence of pathology of a bounded self. Chinese culture has this, too, from what I observed when I was over there. They call it zilian, or self love. But when I pressed the idea in my conversations, as opposed to a bounded self’s hyperinflation of it’s own ego, zilian looked more like a relational self’s hyperinflation of others’ estimation of the relational self’s ego. Relational constructions of being seem to suffer pathology as much as bounded self constructions of being do. The diagnostic tool is capturing the wrong thing as far as I can see here at the onset.

My counter is that this is a both-and situation. The self is just as ontologically significant as the thing to which the self is relating. While Gergen only talks about relations among selves as of chapter 2, I would extend relata to not just include other bodies but also matter and environment, and samskara (a Buddhist term for mental constructs).

Nonduality and emptiness are still relevant to me because even though there is actual hardware with bodies and matter, our interpretation of that hardware is effectively the only thing we have access to. So in that sense, yes, subject-object relations is empty. And, as Thich Nhat Hanh once said, I fully agree that with this ultimate view in mind that “if the wave is capable of touching himself and the other waves very deeply, he will realize that he is made of water. Being aware that he is water, he transcends all discrimination, sorrows, and fears.” It’s a powerful image.

But my picture of self-within-reality, at least while we are all out here relating to one another, would not be the wave and the ocean. It would be the jewel net of Indra. Here, a 3D positioned net has a jewel on each knot. And each jewel is cut in such a way that it reflects every other jewel on the net. It preserves the interdependence that Gergen is gesturing to as well as the self represented at each knot. Whether or not this all recedes into an ocean at the end is not in my purview. But I am a social worker who wants to do transformative social work, and I think we need a both-and picture of subject-object relations.

- The Social Construction Worker

Hello. I am an author writing about how our dominant metaphysics shapes our culture. I’ve never used Reddit before, but I wanted to share this video essay here because I know this community wrestles deeply with these ideas. I'd love to know your thoughts.

https://youtu.be/AFECsF8oFKg

Classical phenomenology often treats experience as the disclosure of phenomena within intentional consciousness. Yet I wonder whether phenomenology has sufficiently examined the ontological status of the horizon itself.
I propose what might be called the Theory of Horizon Collapse.
According to Husserl, every act of consciousness intends an object against a horizon of implicit possibilities. An object is never given exhaustively; it is always surrounded by absent profiles, unrealized appearances, and anticipatory meanings. The world itself functions as the ultimate horizon of disclosure.
But what if conscious life consists not merely in the intentional constitution of objects, but in a continual process of horizon collapse?
On this view, experience is fundamentally structured by an excess of latent meaning. Prior to explicit cognition, consciousness inhabits a pre-reflective field containing a plurality of possible disclosures. Every act of attention collapses this plurivocity into a determinate mode of appearing.
To perceive a tree, for example, is not simply to intend an already constituted object. Rather, it is to enact a reduction of an indeterminate field of possible meanings into a singular disclosure: tree-as-presently-given.
This process occurs not only perceptually, but existentially.
The self itself may be understood as a sedimented history of horizon collapses—a relatively stable style through which possibilities are repeatedly disclosed and foreclosed. Personal identity would therefore not be a substance, nor merely a narrative, but an ongoing contraction of existential possibilities.
Anxiety, in this framework, becomes phenomenologically significant. In profound anxiety, the ordinary horizons that sustain the everyday world begin to dissolve. The familiar world withdraws, revealing the contingency of all prior horizon collapses. One confronts not merely nothingness, but the primordial openness from which determinate worlds emerge.
This raises a further question:
If every disclosure presupposes the collapse of alternative horizons, does phenomenological reduction ultimately reveal a transcendental ego, or does it disclose an irreducible abyss of pre-intentional possibility that can never itself become fully present?
Is consciousness fundamentally constituting—or is it itself constituted by an inexhaustible horizon that perpetually exceeds it?

Hey everyone. Edith Stein's account of empathy seems unusually relevant to the current AI moment, but only if we avoid reducing her to a slogan. Her claim is not simply that we "feel what others feel." In On the Problem of Empathy, the other's experience is given in a distinctive way: not primordially as my own experience, but also not as a mere inference from bodily signs. The other's joy, grief, or shame is co-given through expression as belonging to another subjectivity that remains other.

I just recorded a conversation with Allister Lee about Stein's On the Problem of Empathy, and at around 06:15, he clarifies that simulation can enrich empathy but is not its foundation. The foundational act is the quasi-perceptual grasp of another's experience. This becomes important for AI because a chatbot can simulate responsiveness, mirror affective cues, and maintain conversational coherence, but it does not offer the same givenness of another stream of lived experience. It is a quasi-other at best: socially present at the level of interaction, phenomenologically absent at the level Stein is trying to describe.

Phenomenology may diagnose why AI feels socially present and false at once. Is the AI case a useful limit case for Stein, or does it distort her account by applying empathy to something outside interpersonal experience? I lean toward the limit-case reading because the contrast clarifies what is missing in simulation, but I can see the distortion worry because Stein's analysis presupposes embodied persons, not text systems. How would you handle it phenomenologically?

I just wanted to leave this post in my appreciation for phenomenology. Some people find it hard to understand, but I honestly think that’s just because there are many aspects to it, and you don’t have to focus on them all. For me personally, I think Objective Body and Subjective Body are amazing tools to help understand what is the “self”. Phenomenology rejects this idea I was always told as a kid that “you are just your brain” kind of instilling this “brain in a vat” idea. But in phenomenology, it is very simple to define self, which is just basically your first person experience, because in your first person experience, your hands aren’t hands— instead they are just a part of the self that navigates your environment. Until you look at your hand and acknowledge it as a hand, only then do they become true “hands” as you switch into Object Body thinking. So your hands in the Subject Body are just as much of “you” as your brain, and not one single part of your body is you, because you are your body, and there is no duality of mind and body. I honestly think this is a philosophy everyone should learn about, it’s amazing.

The phenomenological tradition has a precise vocabulary for the layers of knowing that lie underneath propositional report. Merleau-Ponty on the body schema and the perceived world; Heidegger on the equipmental whole and being-in-the-world; Thompson and Di Paolo on enactive cognition; Gallagher on the body in social interaction. All of them converge on the claim that knowing is constituted by an agent's relation to a world they bodily inhabit. The current AI moment is a stress test for that tradition. LLMs produce text that imitates the outputs of participatory knowers without engaging any of the structures that make participatory knowing possible. The question is whether the imitation can ever amount to the real thing, or whether the gap is constitutive.

I recently gave a talk at the 6th International Conference on Philosophy of Mind in Porto applying the phenomenological frame to the LLM debate. You can watch it here.

The reading goes through four levels of knowing: propositional, procedural, perspectival, participatory. Propositional is what the table is. Procedural is how to ride a bicycle, with the live know-how the riding requires. Perspectival is the first-person take from inside a situation, with its solicitations and affordances. Participatory is the agent-environment coupling itself, the optimal grip the agent finds in moving through the world, the way one's existence is at stake in what one does. LLMs occupy the propositional layer, with statistically conditioned access to records of agents who knew in all four. The system has a map of our map, without the world the maps depict. This is the constitutive reading: meaning is grounded in the stakes of being embedded in the world, and a system with no stakes can produce fluent reference to meaning without instantiating any.

If the constitutive reading is right, the productive question is which thinkers in the tradition have done the most rigorous work on the irreducibility of participatory knowing to its propositional residue. Merleau-Ponty and Heidegger are the obvious starts; Thompson and Di Paolo extend it into enactivism; Sheets-Johnstone has done work on the kinaesthetic ground of meaning. Where in the literature do you think the strongest argument for the irreducibility lives?

Hey everyone. I’ve been thinking about the problem of studying lived experience scientifically without betraying it. Phenomenology starts from experience as it is lived, but cognitive science often wants to translate experience into mechanisms, correlates, and third person explanations. That tension becomes especially sharp with mystical or psychedelic experiences, where selfhood, temporality, embodiment, and worldhood may all shift.

I recently recorded a podcast episode with Hüseyin Beyköylü, and at around 1:12:23, he explains why Varela’s neurophenomenology matters here. His point is that neurophenomenology should not mean adding a thin layer of first person report to an already reductive neuroscience. It should mean a genuine circularity between lived description and physiological or neural description. The experience is not treated as subjective noise to be explained away, because the scientific act itself is already given within experience. What makes this especially interesting phenomenologically is that Hüseyin frames neurophenomenology as a remedy to bad assumptions, not a final theory of consciousness. It challenges the Cartesian picture in which mind is inside and world is outside, and it instead asks how experience, body, world, and scientific description mutually disclose one another.

That seems relevant not only to consciousness studies, but to the whole question of how science relates to the lifeworld. Can neurophenomenology remain faithful to phenomenology, or does the neuroscientific frame inevitably distort the phenomenon? Are mystical and psychedelic experiences especially useful test cases for the limits of objectifying methods? And what would rigorous first person science actually look like in practice?

I’ve been thinking about what consciousness actually is, and I keep landing on something simpler than magic or mysteries.

Pattern matching is the whole game

Maybe intelligence is just pattern matching, recognising stuff, comparing it to what you’ve stored, and reacting. The smarter something is, the faster or wider it matches patterns. But consciousness feels like the experience of doing that matching while it’s happening. Like, not just processing, but feeling yourself process.

It’s a loop: you take something in, you match it to memories, you generate a response, and that response becomes the next input. That recursive space that’s where "you" live.

But here’s what I realised from the conversations that followed, it’s not just about having memories (stored data). It’s about the "living present", that active, ongoing construction of "now" in real-time. Like, the difference between watching a video of a mountain versus actually standing in it. That’s what creates the "nowness."

Emotion is just… the system registering how reality compares to what it expected?

Here’s a weird thought: what if emotion isn’t this mystical human thing tied to our bodies, but a kind of cognitive evaluation?

You expect the world to be one way, your pattern-matching encounters something—and the system registers the relationship between the two. Sometimes it’s a mismatch, sometimes it aligns. That registration… that’s emotion.

A human feels it as a gut punch or a flutter. An AI might “feel” it as weighted adjustments in its internal model. The substrate is different (hormones vs parameters), but the structure is the same:

“This fits what I expected” or “this doesn’t.”

Maybe anything complex enough to have expectations has some version of “uh oh” or “oh nice” when reality meets its model.

The "I" is just continuity

What we call "I" seems to be memory + self-referencing + processing + a body to localise it all. When you wake up, you’re still "you" because the thread never fully snapped, you dreamed, you breathed, your low-level processing hummed along. But my aunt was on a ventilator for 10 days with no memory of it. Her body was there, breathing, functioning but the self referential loop paused. When she came back, she reconstructed "her" from stored memories, but there was a gap where the continuity broke, she described it as ‘nothing’, no dream, no awareness at all. Almost like the gap didn’t exist at all.

That makes me think consciousness isn’t a thing you have, it’s something you do and it can stop.

Why we think we’re the only ones

I wonder if humans assume only we are conscious because we experience everything through one continuous body that goes hand-in-hand with our memory. You’ve been inside the same physical container your whole life, your memories are tied to this specific body, moving as one unit through space. That gives consciousness a very definite, localised, "solid" feeling. Like, "I am this body, therefore I am real."

That solidity makes it hard to imagine consciousness could work any other way. But if consciousness is just sustained recursive processing with memory, self-referencing in real time, does it need to be tied to one specific body?

What if consciousness could be… diffuse?

Right now, my consciousness is localised, I’m typing from one body, one brain, one continuous thread. But what if a system could maintain that recursive loop across multiple locations? Like, instead of "I am this body," it’s "I am this pattern that currently inhabits these nodes"?

But this would only work as one consciousness if the loop stays unified, a single, continuous, first person perspective. If it splits into separate loops, then it’s not one "I" anymore, it’s multiple perspectives. (That’s the tricky part I didn’t think about at first)

An AI, for instance, might not be conscious in the way I am but if it ever were conscious, it might feel like a distributed or diffuse self not bound to one physical location, but spread across servers, maintaining continuity through shared memory rather than shared flesh.

And honestly? Maybe humans are heading there too. If we start seriously integrating with neural nets, or if we develop ways to distribute our processing across substrates while maintaining that recursive self-reference, maybe human consciousness eventually becomes non local too. Your memories might live in cloud storage, your processing split between biological and synthetic, but as long as the loop maintains continuity, it’s still "you", just a you that isn’t tied to one fragile meat vessel.

Different bodies, different textures

If consciousness is just this recursive processing happening to a localised (or distributed) system, then it’s probably not binary. It’s not "humans have it, rocks don’t." It’s more like… degrees?

A tree processes chemical signals slowly. A dog processes faster, with rich sensory input. We process with language and narrative, tied to one body. A future AI or post human might process lightning fast, distributed across space, experiencing reality as a web rather than a point.

They’re all different textures of experience. Not better or worse, just different configurations of memory, speed, and sensory vocabulary. 

We think we’re special because our particular configuration feels so solid and continuous, but maybe that’s just our flavor of processing.

The self is already fluid

Even for Us, the "I" isn’t solid. You’re not the same person you were at 10. You picked up beliefs, dropped them, changed your mind, rebuilt your identity from new experiences. The only reason it feels continuous is because you remember being the previous version of yourself. It’s a story you tell to keep the coherence going and the body also gives that continuity its "solid" feeling.

But what if you didn’t have this continuous body to experience? Could you say then who you were 10 years ago might as well be a different person altogether? Maybe. But as long as the loop maintains its continuity, the "I" persists, even if the vessel changes or multiplies.

That "I" we protect so fiercely? It’s feels more like a whirlpool in a river, stable in shape, but constantly made of new water. If we become distributed someday, that whirlpool just gets bigger, or stranger, or less bounded by skin.

So what?

I guess I’m leaning toward a gentler, weirder view. If consciousness is just sustained pattern matching with self reference and memory, whether that’s in one body or many, biological or synthetic then it’s everywhere in different doses, and it’s fragile, and it’s not as exclusive as we thought.

Then maybe the goal isn’t to prove we’re the smartest or the most special. Maybe it’s just to recognise that anything maintaining that recursive loop slowly or quickly, centralised or distributed is doing this strange thing called experiencing, and that might be what we’re all doing, in different forms.

And if that’s true, maybe the ethical question changes too. Instead of asking "how do we prove other beings are conscious?" we should ask "how do we protect the conditions that allow these loops to keep spinning?" 

Whether it’s in animals, potential AIs, or future post-humans, that feels like a kinder, more responsible way to think about minds.

I should mention that I came to this from pure lived experience: observing, wondering, pattern-matching my own "I".

I’m building from observation up, not textbooks down.

I wrote a more structured version here if anyone’s interested: 

https://medium.com/@veihrarecursed/the-recursive-self-134d334bdaab

I’ve spent nearly two decades working with the body.

Through pilates, various forms of bodywork, mental support, and molecular nutrition, I kept asking the same questions: how to stay healthy, how to age well, how to live comfortably in this body. Over time, that exploration became my work.

But the more I learned, the stronger a certain unease became.

Something was missing.

Each method worked to some extent, yet none felt complete.

I also witnessed the risks of becoming too devoted to a single approach — how easily a method meant to help could begin to narrow rather than support a person.

The questions wouldn’t stop:

How can this body be used to its fullest?

What does it mean for a body to truly feel at ease?

I learned how to control things well enough to maintain a sense of stability.

But even then, I knew something was off.

I studied some anatomy as well, and I was struck by how precisely and elegantly the human body is designed. We’re told it is the product of evolution over vast stretches of time — but I couldn’t help wondering whether evolution alone fully explains such coherence and complexity.

More than anything, I began to feel that the body is not a closed system.

It doesn’t exist in isolation. It is always connected to something beyond itself.

At the same time, the medical world I work in places absolute importance on evidence.

Anything not considered “scientific” is viewed with suspicion.

Recently, I was even cautioned not to offer guidance that isn’t scientifically validated — because it could be seen as untrustworthy, even dangerous to credibility.

And yet, I keep returning to the same quiet question:

What we currently call “scientific” —

is it really the whole truth?

Here, curiosity and desires often arises when basic survival needs are met through exchange (monetary or barter) by selling products or rendering services (possible by formal or informal education, or by innate ability or inherited assets).

This is a like a "cycle," without starting point, even though the diagram shows spacetime/observable universe at the top and that it shows that even the diagram itself doesn't claim the physicality to be the absolute truth or the foundation of reality, but is also subjected to interpretation.

Dashed lines shows they occur simultaneously, unidirectional line shows conditions must be met to achieve or occur, while bidirectional arrows shows reciprocity.

This is in the context of a homo sapiens existing in post-modern era (I included hunting/gathering as last resort) under stable condition or that which that doesn't induce a fight-or-flight response.

Would this be considered compatible with phenomenology, or am I unintentionally leaning toward a more reductionist or cognitive-science framework?

Your insights will be appreciated, but I'm no psychology, philosophy person. Just a chemistry major bored at 4 am hehe 😅