My point of view as a physicist is rather untypical among my colleagues. Many physicists still prefer a reductionist account of “what exists,” assuming that only the so-called “physical world” is real and that all our experiences—feelings, thoughts, abstractions—are ultimately reducible to metaphysically assumed elementary substrates (“fields and particles”) and nothing more.

Yet I suspect that some corners of physics—particularly those beginning to grapple with phenomenology and the role of the observer—are slowly expanding this stance. These developments suggest that we may be inching toward a broader definition of what “observation” means.

In my view, the word scientist should refer to anyone who makes honest, careful, complete, and undistorted observations of all kinds that present themselves to phenomenal experience. Observation includes not only seeing a comet through a telescope, but also noticing how a change of variables simplifies an equation, or recognizing a common structural feature among a set of abstract objects. Pure mathematics, on this account, is simply the discipline that restricts itself to observing abstract mental objects rather than laboratory phenomena. Mathematicians are scientists of a different domain—one composed of logical and symbolic forms that they observe through introspective experience.

Indeed, my understanding of observation is even broader. I consider the observation of feelings, moods, and internal sensations to be genuine observations as well. These, too, present themselves to experience and can be represented, analyzed, transformed, and communicated. Artists therefore also count as scientists in this wider sense. Their domain of observation is the realm of feeling, lived experience, and subjective texture. They observe internal emotional states, memories, and longing, and they represent these observations through narrative, imagery, sound, or other form. These artistic constructions are analogous to the models and theorems of mathematicians and scientists: they are structured representations that help us understand, share, appreciate, and navigate reality.

But this also demands an expanded view of what reality is. Reality, on this account, is the aspect of phenomenal experience that is shared and relatable by all observers. Tables and planets are real because we can all observe them together. But so are things like pain, love, and fear—we all can observe them even when we do not observe them simultaneously. What is real is what is publicly recognizable within experience, whether its domain is external, emotional, or abstract.

Thus, artists, mathematicians, and scientists are united by a common method. All are honest observers of different domains of experience. All construct representations—whether equations, theories, or artworks—based on what they observe. And all contribute to the shared human project of understanding, expressing, and making sense of the world.

In this broader and more inclusive framework, observation is empirical engagement with the entire contents of experience, not only with what traditional physics would call the “physically real.” Perhaps this is what those ancient painters in the Lascaux cave were grappling with: they painted things that existed outside their cave—danger, food, animals—but also things that existed inside, in the terrain of dreams and imagination. Even then, long before “science” or “art” were formalized, humans were already engaged in the same fundamental act: observing experience in all its forms, and representing it and sharing it so others could understand and navigate reality.