I don't think there is a linking point between "inside" and "outside", not an accepted one.  There are the various distances from the body that different cultures accept as "my space", the italian space is inches closer to the body than the english one.

PSC 41 Virtual lab, Personal space experiment , SP '01

Think about how you feel invading another person's space and having your own space invaded. The point where you have the feeling that someone is standing too close is your personal space boundary. Typically distances will be longer in front than at the sides and greater when the partner has eyes open rather than eyes closed. Previous research has shown that individuals from Latin cultures often have small interaction distances. They sit and stand closer, than do people from Anglo cultures. There are interesting effects when people are paired with others from different ethnic groups with different concepts of personal space.

In general people stand closer to those like them and further away from those who differ from them. Gender affects distance in complex ways. Other things being equal, female-female pairs tend to have smaller interaction distances than male-male pairs, and the distance between female-male pairs depends on the relationship between the pair. Tall height and bright clothing increase interaction distance whereas sunglasses (similar to the eyes closed condition) decrease distance. A status difference is also likely to increase interaction distance.

This has science, reasoning, flexible borders, and relates to perceptions and their ability to change over time.

When people talk about their experiences, which change over time, there is a distance within which things become uncomfortable.  I think maybe the "science" part of this debate comes across as too invasive.  It wants to challenge subjective experience but subjective experience is challenging subjective experience as soon as emotional modifiers are added ("loony", "ridiculous", "fantastic", etc.)...I mean, the argument seems to be about science but is in fact an argument based on invasion into personal (inner) space.  I mean something like the difference between, "You believe in UFOs?  You are deluded, my friend" and "Have you ever seen a UFO yourself?  You have?  Where was that?  What happened?" etc.

(Hmmmm....I mean that for human interactions "how you say it" is as important as what's being said--if the aim is to move perceptions--or learn more about other people's experiences...something like that.)

What Does Science Prove?  As I understand things (at present) science is about measuring.  To get an accurate mesaurement, you don't just do it the once, you do many measurements (many different measurements) to check that you have correct answers.  Also, as science progresses, the measuring tools become more accurate.  Things that could only be inferred two hundred years ago (atoms) can now be photographed.

Quantum mechanics fascinates both scientists and non-scientists because it is the point where the ongoing search for accuracy in measurement leads to non (common) sensical models to explain testable results.

Richard Feynman:

"Quantum Mechanics describes nature as absurd from the point of view of common sense.  And if fully agrees with experiment.  So I hope you can accept nature as She is--absurd."

I don't like his last sentence.  I think it is better to say that we cannot currently conjure up sensible models for what his happening--sensible to our understanding of spacetime...and here come the New Agers, saying that they don't have your understanding of spacetime...so the model (as they have understood it) makes sense to them...maybe...

The point being that the search for accurate measurement hits the "inner" wall, as Zeno's paradox hits the inner wall of infinite division...so what happens if you posit that there is something "in there" that is not just reactive but also active, as we are?

From The Elegant Universe:

"In fact, if you were to capture a single electron in a big, solid box and then slowly crush the sides to pinpoint its position with ever greater precision, you would find the electron getting more and more frantic.  Almost as if it were overcome with claustrophobia, the electron will go increasingly haywire--bouncing off the walls of the box with increasing frequency and unpredictable speed"

....to the point where it will even tunnel its way out--which should be impossible (and here "impossible" I think is used in the way that can be seen as dismissive--"That's just impossible!  So it can't happen!"), but experiments have been done and tunneling (that is the model) is what happens.

Or so I've read (or failed to understand from what I've read.)

These strange facts about nature (and I agree with DoDo's comment above, basically--that nature is stranger than strange) clearly tie nicely to people's various experiences of things happening that are "impossible"!  However, there is a lack of basic empirical data about these impossible events (e.g. ESP) [where I'll take "S" to mean our five senses], and what data there is points to no such impossible yet actually existent phenomena.

Key point: typically, people who are convinced of "unacceptable to science but nevertheless true" processes often don't know much about what science currently says regarding a particular topic.  This creates an imbalance--and I think the best scientific approach is to (kindly rather than angrily) point out where current scientific knowledge disagrees with their thoughts about what current scientific knowledge is...ach....so much time needed, and so much I think unnecessary sneering from "those who know"--referencing Miguel's comment about growing up, I am learning things now that are learnt by many twelve year olds and not known by many seventy year olds.  Learning happens when it happens--the learning moment is, and this is my belief, a moment for tenderness, compassion, clarity, and attention to the effects involved in the movement from "I didn't know that" to "now I know that."  I think that, ideally, it should be felt, internally, as a positive moment, but it probably won't be if everyone is also jeering.  The difference between (factually true statement) "your flies are undone"

1) "you idiot!  You can't even do up your trousers!" (and variations thereof)

and

2) "Psst, your flies are undone."

Where 2) will hopefully get the two responses

a) Person does up their flies (the aim) and
b) Person says "Thanks!"

For those who continually leave their flies undone, maybe other types of trousers are to be recommended, but without the sneering.

Not that anyone here ever sneers!

I just thought I should mention...er....cough cough!

The Soul.  I suppose the best I can come up with is that when it is brought home to an individual that "who  I am" does not correlate (and often deviates wildly) from "who my conscious mind thinks I am", that's the terrain.  Freud wrote about this, as did Jung.  I prefer Jung's approach and his theories--and I think over time Jung's have stood up better to rigorous analysis--but that's me.  Something like the collective unconscious, where Jung suggested that individual consciousness (I am not you) is looking at individual mountain peaks, while collective consicousness (we are one) looks at the way the peaks drop down to valleys and are in fact connected one to the other as the larger land mass.  Sven mentioned unconsciousness, Chris mentioned arationality, an evolutionary psychologist might have other terms...I think we can all agree that we live at the very bottom of earth's atmosphere and that outside it we die very quickly unless we encase ourselves in that atmosphere--in which case we don't leave our atmosphere, we take it with us.  Some people claim to have had profound experiences--and maybe they have.  Maybe some people have lots and some people have none.  There are suggestions that exercises such as meditation (which are designed to silence the chattering ego) permit an individual to become aware of the non-ego inner and outer worlds in a different way--and that this leads to more profound experiences.  I have also heard (from a friend) that meditation develops an area of the brain, the god spot at the top of the head, as does prayer and other forms of belief, so those who develop this part of the brain will have, presumably, more activity happening there, without that signifying anything more than that there is a part of the brain we can exercise....for those who aren't interested, I don't think judgements are necessary--unless there are claims that this development leads to "better" outcomes (or humans.)  I think numeracy and literacy can be seen in the same way: reading and writing can only be seen as "better" in the context of human possibilities.  I would reading and writing enlarge the range and are therefore useful.  I can't say they are better than other methods, and a finite life maybe doesn't allow an individual to practice every possible method for possibility expansion...

Data and its analysis:

Broad Street Pump Outbreak

When a wave of Asiatic cholera first hit England in late 1831, it was thought to be spread by "miasma in the atmosphere." By the time of the Soho outbreak 23 years later, medical knowledge about the disease had barely changed, though one man, Dr John Snow, a surgeon [actually an anesthesiologist] and pioneer of the science of epidemiology, had recently published a report speculating that it was spread by contaminated water -- an idea with which neither the authorities nor the rest of the medical profession had much truck. Whenever cholera broke out -- which it did four times between 1831 and 1854 -- nothing whatsoever was done to contain it, and it rampaged through the industrial cities, leaving tens of thousands dead in its wake.

[...]

Snow lived in Frith Street, so his local contacts made him ideally placed to monitor the epidemic which had broken out on his doorstep. His previous researches had convinced him that cholera, which, as he had noted, "always commences with disturbances of the functions of the alimentary canal," was spread by a poison passed from victim to victim through sewage-tainted water; and he had traced a recent outbreak in South London to contaminated water supplied by the Vauxhall Water Company -- a theory that the authorities and the water company itself were, not surprisingly, reluctant to believe. Now he saw his chance to prove his theories once and for all, by linking the Soho outbreak to a single source of polluted water.

From day one he patrolled the district, interviewing the families of the victims. His research led him to a pump on the corner of Broad Street and Cambridge Street, at the epicenter of the epidemic. "I found," he wrote afterwards, "that nearly all the deaths had taken place within a short distance of the pump." In fact, in houses much nearer another pump, there had only been 10 deaths -- and of those, five victims had always drunk the water from the Broad Street pump, and three were schoolchildren who had probably drunk from the pump on their way to school.

Dr Snow took a sample of water from the pump, and, on examining it under a microscope, found that it contained "white, flocculent particles." By 7 September, he was convinced that these were the source of infection, and he took his findings to the Board of Guardians of St James's Parish, in whose parish the pump fell.

Though they were reluctant to believe him, they agreed to remove the pump handle as an experiment. When they did so, the spread of cholera dramatically stopped. [actually the outbreak had already lessened for several days]

I think this is what Jake was referring to the other day when he talked of the dangers of believing that, say, mass praying can prevent a cholera outbreak.  However, this argument should only (I think) be aimed at those who are denying that water supplies should be kept uncontaminated.  In the same way, western medicine has much information about nervous systems, and it is worth arguing with a person who denies the results (e.g. about chemical and electrical interactions.)  However, that doesn't preclude that other models also tell us something--I'm thinking of acupuncture which was originally sneered at as it was a different system (model), but is now accepted and being studied.

So...I suspect that there is a fault line between inner and outer, how science is an investigation of this boundary, and that consciousness offers a moveable boundary (whether it be called higher/lower--such that knowing about chemical interactions at the molecular level is "higher" knowledge than just chucking things in a pot and hoping they work; and whether it be called inner/outer (e.g. the personal space example above.)

the angriness that I sense comes from people placing themselves (for their various historical reasons) variously at different points in various directional scales and assuming some form of essential bad faith on the part of the people who (for their various historical reasons) find themselves at other points.

The idea that there are directions and that they are relative is part of quantum mechanics, general relativity (as I understand them), and also one of the messages transmited by the Tao Te Ching.  Maybe we need directions to create any models; and we can't function without models--without a picture "in here" of the various realities "in here and out there".  The human condition is that these models lead to behaviour and there are no historically agreed lists of correct human behaviour because "correct" involves a model and a direction with "incorrect" at its other end.

My take:

The universe is strange as they come.  The more we learn about it the stranger and more marvelous it becomes.  That experiencing this strangeness is more profound than learning about someone else's experiences of this strangeness (going into space is more profound than watching a film about people going into space); and that human limitiations (e.g. time) mean that we are limited in how much profoundness we can experience directly...and maybe profound is the wrong word.  Numinous?  Exciting?  Awe inspiring?  Enjoyable?  That humans are happier when they participate...

And then, that we all have inner lives that are conflicted in some way.  This may not be true of all humans at all times, hence the belief that at least one human at at least one moment in time was not conflicted--that they were not alienated but fully integrated, and that this sense of integration is more pleasurable, more healthy for the individual than a sense of alienation; and so the inner and the outer...ach....as a friend said recently, "but how can sound waves generate emotions?"  I have the start for some answers, but I like the question, I like looking for various answers, and synthesis is my favourite part of the thesis-antithesis-synthesis process--I'd rather we could synthesise as much as possible as that way...I dunno....that way our possiblities open more widely...heh...

Protein synthesis: an epic on the cellular level

Don't fight forces, use them R. Buckminster Fuller.