I finished reading The Blind Spot: Why Science Cannot Ignore Human Experience, by Adam Frank, Marcelo Gleiser and Evan Thompson. It is an ambitious book that I think succeeds in its aims. I recommend it highly and hope it is widely read. The authors argue that the great achievements of science have been unfortunately accompanied by a pervasive and problematic worldview. The problem begins with the widespread tendency to take our successful scientific models and theories as a guide to what is real, rather than as highly abstract and idealized tools for representing natural phenomena. These tools lead to successful predictions and fruitful explanations, but their (mostly mathematical) content, outside the context of specific applications, is far removed from the concrete world of our experience. As someone trained in the philosophy of science, I appreciated the authors invoking the work of thinkers like Nancy Cartwright and Ian Hacking in pursuing this part of their discussion.
This tendency to reify the content of theories gives rise to a broad metaphysical notion about “what the world is really like:” one that ends up downgrading first-person experience to a dangling epiphenomenon or perhaps just an illusion—it falls into the “blind spot”. This worldview, supposedly based on an “objective” scientific account of the world, is typically physicalist/materialist, reductionist, and deterministic. Forgetting the basis of science in human experience, it offers a picture of a reality drained of intrinsic quality or meaning. The authors’ goal is to encourage development of an improved worldview that reintegrates experience and value with the findings of science.
The authors helpfully sketch the history of “blind spot” thinking (the great success of classical physics is central to the story). They also trace a number of historical and contemporary critiques that are similar to their own. This includes the “surreptitious substitution” of theories for reality described by Husserl, Whitehead’s diagnosis of the “fallacy of misplaced concreteness”, Bergson’s admonitions against spatializing time, and various other warnings against “mistaking the map for the territory” (this complaint may seem like a cliché, but new examples are forthcoming all the time).
This sort of mistaken metaphysical derivation has deleterious consequences for our society and the planet, but it also causes puzzles within science itself, revealed in conceptual difficulties found in cosmology, quantum mechanics, biology and (most directly and obviously) in the study of cognition and consciousness. In physics, for example, if you drop out the fact that theories are based on the experiences of observers in laboratories and then reify the mathematics you get absurdities like the many-worlds interpretation of QM, and the notion that relativity theory implies a static “four-dimensional block” universe. In cognitive science, you have the widespread spectacle of scientists and philosophers taking the usefulness of computational models for some mental functions as implying that the mind is essentially a computer. The study of consciousness itself (long a scientific backwater) has been unsurprisingly made difficult by the assumption that all scientific truths must be objective, “third-person” facts.
The authors cover a lot of ground, with chapters discussing the presence and consequence of blind spot thinking across different fields – they finish up with a helpful and extremely topical chapter on planetary science. My favorite chapter may be the one on biology, which highlights recent strides to recover the crucial concept of organismal agency from reductionist thinking. Given the wide range of topics, I have a few quibbles with some of the details of the authors’ arguments and conclusions, but I can save these for another time. This is a excellent book.