5. Matter and mind, the objective outer world and the subjective inner world are taken to be two entirely different realms, different in kind, and utterly disconnected.

[…] The assumption that the structure of the outer world is separate from our own self combined with the assumption that we can only reach truth by distinguishing objective (agreed-upon) outer reality from individual (and not agreed-upon) inner reality, is the very foundation of modern science. It is the idea that observations and experiments must be made independent of the observer.

The first 20th-century cracks in the iceberg of this assumption arrived within physics itself. They came with Bohr’s and Heisenberg’s demonstrations that completely observer-free observations cannot exist at the level of photons and electrons […]. But today, seventy years after Heisenberg, mind and self still do not have a status in the world-picture that is comparable to the status of the underlying entities of 20th-century physics. Even among the scientists who accept the existence of cognitive structures, it is still generally accepted that a cognitive structure is an artifact of product of some particular neurological activity. Even among those who agree that many cognitive structures are similar from one person to another, there are few who believe that the inner experience of self has any fundamental connection to the outer structures we observe in physics.

The mental conditions imposed on us by assumption #5 make it hard to be at peace with oneself. Within such a dualistic world-picture the self cannot itself be successfully included into the larger view of the universe […]. Yet self is what we experience of ourselves. How, then, could the universe seem conformable to us?