Hey, this is Leo for actualized.org, and today I wanted to talk about phenomenology and the importance of first-person experience in personal development and in your own growth and to maximize your own growth

the importance of observing yourself from the inside and really paying a lot of

heed to the experiences that you have going on inside your head day to day.

So what I think about is so interesting about phenomenology and phenomenology is a branch of philosophy that deals with first person experiences.

So phenomenology is all about describing and studying first-person experiences from the first person.

So this contrasts to most of the ways that science or psychology or even philosophy approaches

certain problems that deal with the mind is that usually what happens is that we look

at them and we observe them from the outside

in and then we try to make connections.

So a psychologist might take a subject and run a bunch of experiments on them and then from that make deductions about what that person is thinking.

Well phenomenology kind of turns that whole process inside out.

So instead of observing subjects or running

experiments on them or cutting someone's brain open and studying it from

that from that

perspective. What phenomenology does is it studies it from inside. So what you're doing is you're actually

going inside your own head and experiencing and then trying to study and

actually figure out consistent properties within your own experiences

within your own thoughts and then draw certain conclusions out of it.

So there's a whole history of it. There's a rich history of about 150 years of

phenomenological work and that ties in with philosophy of mind. So what's interesting

there and I think this is so fascinating is the idea that first person experiences

are actually, a lot of times they're thought of as subjective and kind of flaky and not very important.

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