Third person theories are really different from first person experiences

We have two ways of understanding our reality: our first-person experiences, and our third-person theories. First-person experiences are how we see, hear, and otherwise experience the world. It’s how things seem to us. Third-person theories are how we scientifically make sense of the patterns of observation we discover in our experiments.

Often, the story our first-person experiences tell us is wildly different from, and even contradictory to, what our third-person theories have to say. The case of heat is a familiar example. When you feel, say, the warmth of a mug filled with hot coffee, you feel this distinctive sense of hotness. But according to third-person physics, there is no hotness per se. Instead, there’s just motion, faster or slower, which for some unknown reason we experience as hotness. Other physical theories, like the existence of tiny microbes all over us and inside us, contradict personal experience as well.

First-person experiences also contradict third-person theories in social science. Our first-person experience of emotions tells us that emotions are sudden, uncontrolled, animalistic bursts of impulse. But the third-person theory of constructed emotions says that emotions are the result of a complex, anticipatory control process. Similarly, our first-person experience of motor behavior is that it “just happens” as an act of will, but third-person theories of motor behavior say that motor behavior is assembled out of a complex internal process as the parts of your body seek goal states.

The massive divergence between what our first-person experiences seem to tell us and what our third-person theories say is really happening confronts us with a choice: do we rely on our first-person experiences or our third-person theories? In daily life, the answer has to be our first-person experiences. But in science, our third-person theories are very powerful, and our first-person experiences are often very limited in their utility. In fact, relying on first-persone experiences can be counterproductive because those experiences can be so different from our theories. In such cases, it is almost always better to either make an effort to reinterpret first-person experiences in terms of third-person theories, such as reintrepreting a sense of hotness as being a way of detecting relative motion in a certain context, or else it is prefereable to neglect first-person experiences altogether so as to prevent conflict with third-person theories.