FPSI The First-Person Science Institute
The First-Person Science Institute begins with the person who has the experience. Being awake and paying attention. Pain, and its relief. The self dissolving in meditation or under a psychedelic. What people report from the edge of death, or from outside their own bodies. Sleep and anesthesia, where there may be nothing it is like at all. And the return of awareness afterward, when the person can say what happened. Each of these is a fact that belongs first to the one who lives it. Measurements of body and behavior matter; they do not, by themselves, capture it.
The Institute studies conscious and nonconscious life as one field, because the border between them is part of the evidence. It keeps a public Atlas of the field's theories, practices, and instruments, rated on evidence and without a side. It plans studies that set first-person reports beside third-person measures. And it trains people to make those reports specific enough to compare, so that what it is like can count as data.
The Institute is a registered 501(c)(3) nonprofit. It carries no advertising and does not sell attention. Support comes from membership, gatherings, the School, and gifts.
explore@fpsinstitute.org · firstpersonscienceinstitute.org