The Single Description of Physics Cannot Replace the Self-Observation Invited by the Buddha

Modern physics provides a precise, self-consistent descriptive system for explaining the workings of the "external world." However, in its pursuit of objectivity, this system has excluded the observer's own experience from its description. It has replaced the observer's direct experience of form, sensation, perception, mental formations, and consciousness with physical quantities such as mass, momentum, time, space, and energy, and then claimed to describe "the world itself." This paper points out that the single description of physics cannot replace the self-observation invited by the Buddha. Physics is locked onto a fixed observational interface — the electron interface — and uses this single window to explain everything, while the Buddha invites every observer to personally experience the impermanence, suffering, and non-self of form, sensation, perception, mental formations, and consciousness. The two paths are not opposed, but their functions are not interchangeable. Physics describes the external readings of "swimming"; the Buddha teaches "swimming" itself. Keywords: Physics, Buddha, self-observation, form, sensation, perception, mental formations, consciousness, single description, electron interface