Dialogue with Evan Thompson about “The Blind Spot”

The Theōros Project hosted philosopher Evan Thompson at CIIS for a dialogue with me about his new book (with Adam Frank and Marcelo Gleiser) The Blind Spot: Why Science Cannot Ignore Human Experience (2024). 

We covered a lot of territory:

• early 20th century philosophical warnings about an impending crisis in scientific culture from Husserl and Whitehead
• the construction of temperature out of our felt sense of warmth
• the radically different treatments of color by Newton and Goethe
• the nature of time as highlighted in the Einstein-Bergson debate
• the nature of life as autopoiesis and what makes its emergence rather surprising from the perspective of the blind spot metaphysics informing much of physics and chemistry
• the hype surrounding artificial intelligence and machine learning technologies (which Evan and I argue are not intelligent and will not at least with anything like their current architecture realize consciousness)
• the way the horizonal structure of consciousness makes it entirely unlike any other natural phenomenon; it provides the condition for the possibility of scientific knowledge as such, and so cannot be explained in objectivist scientific terms.