Review of “The Blind Spot: Why Science Cannot Ignore Human Experience”

Review of The Blind Spot: Why Science Cannot Ignore Human Experience (MIT Press, 2024) by Adam Frank, Marcelo Gleiser, and Evan Thompson

By Matthew David Segall

In The Blind Spot, Frank, Gleiser, and Thompson offer an urgent philosophical intervention into humanity’s all but doomed technoscientific civilizational project. The authors argue cogently that our contemporary scientific culture has steered us off course due to its lack of appreciation for the ultimately irreducible, immeasurable, and incalculable realities of such fundaments as time, life, and consciousness. The hero of their story is “embodied experience,” something as ephemeral as it is primordial. They analogize it to the blind spot at the heart of our visual field caused by the passage of the optic nerve through the retina. Without this invisible absence there could be no visible presence. Far from being just another natural phenomenon that science might explain in objectivist terms, the authors argue that the horizon of conscious experience (which they believe is exhibited by at least all living organisms to some degree) constitutes science’s very condition of possibility. 

For several hundred years, modern scientific materialism ignored the experiential presuppositions of its own research activities, pretending it could achieve an outside, disembodied, “God’s eye view” of the universe. But the supposedly objective material stuff populating the universe of physics turns out to be the ideal construct resulting from an “ascending spiral of abstraction” that carefully filters out the messiness of real-world conditions. The natural world encountered in embodied experience in all its sensual overflow and emotional ambiguity becomes sequestered into artificial laboratory conditions designed in accordance with formalized mathematical ratios (xii-xiii). Such conditions may allow for greater precision in measurement and prediction, but this instrumental success comes at the cost of losing touch with the living relational context of the actual world-process. Further, it risks making science blind to the consequences of its own extractive techno-capitalist way of interacting with nature.

In their treatment of what Alfred North Whitehead diagnosed as “the bifurcation of nature,” the authors dwell on the qualities of warmth and color as examples of natural phenomena that scientific materialism has wrongly attempted to reduce to nothing but the quantifiable motion of material particles or fields. In Whitehead’s terms, modern science irrationally sought to sever nature into two separate systems, “the nature apprehended in awareness and the nature which is the cause of awareness” (The Concept of Nature [Cambridge University Press, 1920], p. 30-31). The supposed cause (the particles or fields) is never directly experienced but constitutes a conjectured hypothesis to be refined by evermore ingenious experimental set-ups in isolated laboratory conditions. The feeling of afternoon sunlight on our skin or the sight of the hues of dusk are thus deemed to be subjective dreams, hallucination in the head. As Whitehead summarizes the situation in a later book, Science and the Modern World (Cambridge University Press, 1925):

Thus the bodies are perceived as with qualities which in reality do not belong to them, qualities which in fact are purely the offspring of the mind. Thus nature gets credit which should in truth be reserved for ourselves: the rose for its scent: the nightingale for his song: and the sun for his radiance. The poets are entirely mistaken. They should address their lyrics to themselves, and should turn them into odes of self-congratulation on the excellency of the human mind. Nature is a dull affair, soundless, scentless, colorless; merely the hurrying of material, endlessly, meaninglessly (p. 54).

Following Whitehead, Henri Bergson, as well as the phenomenologists Edmund Husserl and Maurice Merleau-Ponty, the authors seek to restore human experience to its proper place at the very heart of the scientific enterprise. They make a compelling case that surreptitiously substituting favored abstract models for concrete reality leads not only to theoretical conundrums (e.g., the “quantum measurement problem,” or the “hard problem of consciousness”), but has deleterious social and ecological effects, as well.

Students of German idealism and Naturphilosophie will recall that Goethe made nearly identical criticisms of Newtonian science in his Zur Farbenlehre (1810; published in English as Theory of Colors in 1840). As Rudolf Steiner says of the Goethean method,

Human knowledge is not a process taking place outside of the things, not a process springing from mere subjective arbitrariness, but rather: what arises there in our spirit as a law of nature, what expresses itself within our soul, is the heartbeat of the universe itself (GA 1; Goethean Science [Mercury Press, 1988], p. 204).

Converging with The Blind Spot authors’ criticisms of representationalist theories of cognition (p. 163ff), Steiner’s development of the Goethean method provides an alternative to the idea that knowledge is about building internal copies of external stimuli. Instead, human knowing is an intensification of what streams in from the perceptual world, a distillation of the essence of what is sensed, and a bringing to birth of what remains pregnant in the world of the physical senses. The truth won through such a participatory method of knowing is not “the coinciding of a mental picture with its object, but rather the expression of a relationship between two perceived facts” (Goethean Science, p. 101). Living concepts are not internal representations of sensory percepts (whether as logical or numerical models), but the means by which the metamorphic relations connecting percepts become transparent to our conscious thinking. For more on the resonances between Goethe’s scientific method and Whitehead’s cosmological scheme, see my 2022 article “Steps to a Science of Organism.”

The authors affirm Whitehead’s redefinition of natural science as the study of the systematic relations linking together everything we are aware of in perception, which includes both qualitative warmth and color as well as the measurable quantities to which abstract hypothetical entities are supposed to be tethered. The point is not to swear off abstraction, since after all even our various sense organs tune into specific channels abstracted from the totality of the world-process. Abstraction is part of nature and is essential to both common sense experience as well as the scientific endeavor. The point is to avoid mistaking abstract models of what is supposedly beyond experience for the concrete reality that we in fact experience. This commitment to overcoming the blind spot further converges with the Goethean method, as from a participatory and phenomenological perspective, every scientific hypothesis must presuppose that its content is perceivable, if not by present experience than at least by some future experience. Thus “only hypotheses that can cease to be hypotheses have any justification” (Goethean Science, p. 135). The aim is not to replace experience with a model but to enrich experience itself. Steiner adds that 

Science never has to bring something in addition to the phenomenal world, but rather only has to disclose the hidden interrelationships of this world (Goethean Science, p. 196).

After introducing the historical sources of the blind spot in the development of modern mechanistic physics, the authors explore its lingering effects on contemporary cosmology. The nature of time takes center stage, as it powerfully illustrates the limitations of scientific measurement and calculation. Bergson’s criticisms of Einstein’s reduction of duration or living time to measurable clock-time is highlighted as a crucial rift in the scientific worldview. I discussed the Bergson-Einstein debate, along with Whitehead’s attempted mediation, in this “drunk history” session:

Our actual experience of time includes both memory and anticipation: that is, real time is not a series of simple instantaneous presents that might be marked on a number line but a complex and irreversible flow of creatively differentiating moments. It follows that a scientist’s ability to measure time using a clock presupposes her experience of duration, which itself remains immeasurable. We can coordinate our social activities using clocks, but this does not mean the physical models based on what clocks can measure are more real than our experience of living time. Steiner adds that “it is only to a completely mistaken understanding of the concept of time that the concept of matter owes its existence” (Goethean Science, p. 193). Unlike what Newtonian physicists had assumed, time is not a mere empty container in which changes in the rearrangement of abiding material entities occurs. The flow of time is rather an expression of the self-organizing mutual dependence of perceptual facts upon one another, which proper scientific cognition can study systematically. Living nature—that is, nature as a nexus of embodied experiences—is an ongoing process of transformation and metamorphosis with nothing substantial underlying it that abides all changes. “Matter is nowhere to be found within the world of experience,” according to Steiner. “Whoever wants to think matter must think it up and add it to experience” (Goethean Science, p. 234). The authors of The Blind Spot do not go quite this far, but they argue that the surprising findings of quantum physics ought to remind physicists of the central importance of experience even in the most precise technologically mediated experiments probing the microscopic world. The subject plays an inseparable part even in objective physics.

Despite the cogency of their criticisms of the experiential blind spot in scientific materialism, there are some shortcomings in the book. It is odd that, despite drawing so fruitfully on Whitehead’s early philosophy of science in The Concept of Nature (1920), his later cosmological scheme laid out in Process and Reality (1929) is entirely ignored. The authors admit that they have not tried to “formulate a comprehensive scientific or philosophical perspective to replace” the blind spot (p. 252). But readers familiar with Whitehead’s synoptic “Philosophy of Organism”—formulated specifically to integrate the findings of the new physics and biology with the presuppositions of human experience—may find the absence of any mention of his philosophical and methodological alternative to blind spot metaphysics rather conspicuous. Even a critical comment about why they believe his “organic realism” was off target would have been edifying. This becomes especially relevant given their rejection of “current versions of panpsychism [that] take for granted the blind spot conception of science” (p. 210). Surely Whitehead cannot be accused of blindly injecting experience back into nature as an “extra ingredient” when his process-relational ontology so thoroughly re-imagines the nature of what used to be called “matter” (not to mention “mind”) in terms of the concrescence of various grades of actual occasions. For a deeper look at Whitehead’s alternative to the substance-property form of panpsychism currently in vogue among some analytic philosophers, see my 2021 article: “The Varieties of Physicalist Ontology: A Study in Whitehead’s Process-Relational Alternative.” 

Less surprising is the lack of any mention of Rudolf Steiner’s Goethean approach to integrating natural and spiritual science. The Blind Spot may have deepened its own stated aims by entering into dialogue with, for example, Steiner’s lecture cycle Interdisciplinary Astronomy (GA 323). The authors unwittingly reveal that the residue of model-centrism remains alive and well even in their own thinking when they contrast Aristotle’s geocentric universe with the supposed truth, that Earth “really” goes around the Sun (p. 30). To deny the heliocentric model of the solar system may at first seem like anti-scientific heresy, but it is well-known by astronomers that the Sun, like the Earth, is moving. Thus, the true relative motions of the Sun, Earth, and other planets is far more complex than the simple model most of us have in mind of a static Sun-centered system. Further, the incommensurability of the ratios of the periods of planetary orbits leads Steiner to argue that if the orbital periods of the planets were commensurable (i.e., had a simple integer ratio), cumulative disturbances would eventually cause the planetary system to come to a standstill, to die. The incommensurability, which results in orbital periods with irrational numbers (infinitely non-repeating decimals), is essential for the ongoing life and stability of the planetary system. It prevents the planets from falling into a predictable and ultimately destructive pattern. In other words, what the authors of The Blind Spot argue about living organization and conscious experience in the biological world—that they are noncomputable—turns out to be true of nature at the astronomical scale, as well. 

The authors conclude their book by calling for a reintegration of the human being back into the cosmological picture that scientific materialism had sought to remove us from. If there is no outside view from nowhere, then science must be reformulated in participatory terms: “we must inscribe ourselves back into the scientific narrative as its creators. Science rests on how we experience the world” (p. 251). As powerful new technologies emerge and threaten to irrevocably transform the human life-world, it is imperative that we remember our status as microcosmoi. The human is not an accidental epiphenomenon emergent from meaningless matter, but an exemplification of the spirit latent in its cosmic origins.