We can share [reality] with each other because of our shared evolution and culture, but we cannot really know what it is like not to be us, so we cannot be sure that a truly alien species, even one on our own planet, shares our way of seeing the universe.

I always find it interesting when someone denounces the human race as the inadequate beings we really are. But maybe that’s because my imperfections are so obvious. Near my thirtieth year, I had what I tell myself was, for lack of better words, a mental breakdown. That moment in my life was the culmination of a few things, like death and a burgeoning awareness, but, in retrospect, it was a more meaningful time than I then understood. I mean, how could I have known how much the future would for me change from that point. I believed my life was set in an inescapable pathway and, although I couldn’t know its details, I thought I could generalize its end with reasonable accuracy. Oh how naive I was.

It’s been so long now that I don’t remember everything about that time, but several major things occurred at the same time: I closed on the purchase of my house three days after I had been laid off from my first professional job. It was probably no coincidence that dying had become an acute awareness. I remember I was totally fixated on it, and absorbed with despair about the things I’ll miss when I’m gone. Death was suddenly becoming real, but today it seems like I was just being selfish back then.

My despair makes sense now. I had connected more of my beliefs and my identity to our conclusions than I should have. In those days I gave humans way too much credit, I didn’t realize the framework holding up what we call science is only our creation, simply amounting to a bunch of assumptions about the common things we see. And it hadn’t even occurred to me that since we use words and they are incapable of conveying 100% of our thought, so we can’t even adequately communicate.

I didn’t consider then that science is one of those tricky things we take for granted as real and fact, when it is probably better to acknowledge its inherent limitations. Sure, there is evidence that the earth will one day die in a radioactive bath when our sun finally goes out, and eventually the universe itself might blow up and do… what? I don’t know. Doesn’t matter. The point is that the evidence for these theories is not real until it happens, and it doesn’t exist even then because we will be gone.

Today I’m more comfortable with a different approach: what we call truth is a fabrication — it will never be “right” because we are imperfect. To me it seems like the very existence of consciousness makes science wrong because the thing we call science exists within our reality which is only a context of our consciousness; and if we are imperfect, so is everything we observe — everything, that is, except our own thoughts.