I think this is pure brilliance. Our worlds and our understanding of our world (notice the duality of the beginning of this sentence!) starts and ends in our mind, this is where we draw consciousness. As this is already known, the experience of consciousness is entirely subjective. We understand that our consciousness perception, though relatively stable is not static but this relates in every way to our understanding of what is true and tangible in life.
Inception was a great movie but what about a another realm of smoking mirrors?
In other words, we cannot ignore the reality of first-person experience but must observe all the rules of scientific rigor. Buddhism has a long history of investigation into the nature of the mind and its various aspects.
Harvard psychologist Stephen Kosslyn explains that is it critical to recognize the natural boundaries of introspection. No matter how highly trained a person may be in the profession of neuroscience we have not evidence that his or her introspection can reveal the intricacies of the neural networks and the biochemical composition of the human brain, of the physical correlates of specific mental activities – tasks that can be most accurately performed by empirical observation through application of powerful instruments. During the meditative contemplation practiced in Buddhism and during introspection we recognize two quite different things.
“The key issue here is to bracket out the metaphysical questions about mind and matter, and to explore together how to understand scientifically the various modalities of the mind.”
In the movie Inception; when Cobbs reached for his totem (the top) he always waited to see that his totem stopped spinning. The end of the movie showed him walking away from his totem to see his kids. He did not wait to see if he was in a dream or not. Maybe it never really mattered, maybe there is more truth in the outcome of the spinning of his totem. Perhaps there is reason in both subjective philosophy and objective science....