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The Blind Spot: Why Science Cannot Ignore Human Experience
A compelling argument for including the human perspective within science, and for how human experience makes science possible.
It’s tempting to think that science gives us a God’s-eye view of reality. But we neglect the place of human experience at our peril. In The Blind Spot, astrophysicist Adam Frank, theoretical physicist Marcelo Gleiser, and philosopher Evan Thompson call for a revolutionary scientific worldview, where science includes—rather than ignores or tries not to see—humanity’s lived experience as an inescapable part of our search for objective truth. The authors present science not as discovering an absolute reality but rather as a highly refined, constantly evolving form of human experience. They urge practitioners to reframe how science works for the sake of our future in the face of the planetary climate crisis and increasing science denialism.
Since the dawn of the Enlightenment, humanity has looked to science to tell us who we are, where we come from, and where we’re going, but we’ve gotten stuck thinking we can know the universe from outside our position in it. When we try to understand reality only through external physical things imagined from this outside position, we lose sight of the necessity of experience. This is the Blind Spot, which the authors show lies behind our scientific conundrums about time and the origin of the universe, quantum physics, life, AI and the mind, consciousness, and Earth as a planetary system. The authors propose an alternative scientific knowledge is a self-correcting narrative made from the world and our experience of it evolving together. To finally “see” the Blind Spot is to awaken from a delusion of absolute knowledge and to see how reality and experience intertwine.
The Blind Spot goes where no science book goes, urging us to create a new scientific culture that views ourselves both as an expression of nature and as a source of nature’s self-understanding, so that humanity can flourish in the new millennium.
It’s tempting to think that science gives us a God’s-eye view of reality. But we neglect the place of human experience at our peril. In The Blind Spot, astrophysicist Adam Frank, theoretical physicist Marcelo Gleiser, and philosopher Evan Thompson call for a revolutionary scientific worldview, where science includes—rather than ignores or tries not to see—humanity’s lived experience as an inescapable part of our search for objective truth. The authors present science not as discovering an absolute reality but rather as a highly refined, constantly evolving form of human experience. They urge practitioners to reframe how science works for the sake of our future in the face of the planetary climate crisis and increasing science denialism.
Since the dawn of the Enlightenment, humanity has looked to science to tell us who we are, where we come from, and where we’re going, but we’ve gotten stuck thinking we can know the universe from outside our position in it. When we try to understand reality only through external physical things imagined from this outside position, we lose sight of the necessity of experience. This is the Blind Spot, which the authors show lies behind our scientific conundrums about time and the origin of the universe, quantum physics, life, AI and the mind, consciousness, and Earth as a planetary system. The authors propose an alternative scientific knowledge is a self-correcting narrative made from the world and our experience of it evolving together. To finally “see” the Blind Spot is to awaken from a delusion of absolute knowledge and to see how reality and experience intertwine.
The Blind Spot goes where no science book goes, urging us to create a new scientific culture that views ourselves both as an expression of nature and as a source of nature’s self-understanding, so that humanity can flourish in the new millennium.
328 pages, Paperback
Published April 1, 2025
131 people are currently reading
3009 people want to read
About the author
Adam Frank
24 books175 followersAdam Frank is a professor of astrophysics at the University of Rochester. He is a co-founder of NPR’s 13.7: Cosmos and Culture blog and an on-air commentator for All Things Considered. He also served as the science consultant for Marvel Studio’s Dr. Strange. He lives in Rochester, New York.
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 37 reviews
March 17, 2024
We're at a pivotal place in explanations. The web shows us narratives are largely illusions, AI demonstrates that words are far too arbitrary to confer meaning in any definitive way. As we unmask our communication and sharing as being equally if not dominated by status signaling, academic philosophers attempt to double down on ancient strategies of language in order to keep the house of human society together. Unfortunately, this book's approach entirely misses the evidentiary blind spot. The problem isn't how we approach science, it's how we approach explanations. You can't maintain coherent shared explanations as long as folk science and folk psychology remain dominant.
April 18, 2025
This book had a theme that is important for the book I want to write so I was very curious to see where they took it. Unfortunately, I ended up being a bit disappointed. This book included way too much, this is why this can’t be the case and very little of this is what is the case. It will be importantly to keep this in mind as I am writing. Make sure you present clear solutions in addition to problems. Also some of the physics parts in the middle were incredibly dense and I had trouble focusing.
May 27, 2024
This is a very important work in progress: bringing forth to light the Blind Spot (which eats the Hard Problem for breakfast), elucidates the Strange Loop by way of Headless Pointing, and which brings in supporting arguments from Maurice Merleau-Ponty. What more could a reader want from a collaboration between a cosmologist, a physicist and a philosopher?
In their own words:
‘We call the source of the meaning crisis the Blind Spot. At the heart of science lies something we do not see that makes science possible, just as the blindspot lies at the heart of our visual field and makes seeing possible. In the visual blindspot sits the optic nerve; in the scientific blindspot sits direct experience—that by which anything appears, shows up, or becomes available to us. It is a pre-condition of observation, investigation, explanation, measurement, and justification. Things appear and become available thanks to our bodies and their feeling and perceiving capacities. Direct experience is bodily experience. “The body is the vehicle of being in the world,“ says French philosopher Maurice Merleau-Ponty, but as we will see, firsthand bodily experience lies hidden in the Blind Spot.’ p.xi
‘The failure to see direct experience as the irreducible wellspring of knowledge is precisely the Blind Spot. The tragedy the Blind Spot forces upon us is the loss of what’s essential to human knowledge—our lived experience. The universe and the scientist who seeks to know it become lifeless abstractions. Triumphalist science is actually humanless, even if it springs from our human experience of the world. As we will see, this disconnection between science and experience, the essence of the Blind Spot, lies at the heart of the many challenges and dead ends science currently faces in thinking about matter, time, life, and the mind.’ p.xiv
‘Uncovering the Blind Spot can help to repair this rift and the larger split between science and lived experience. But beyond uncovering the Blind Spot, we also need to plumb the deaths of the experience it hides. Drawing from some of the philosophers just mentioned, we will argue that direct experience lies at the heart of the Blind Spot. Direct experience proceeds the separation of knower and known, observer and observed. At its core is sheer awareness, the feeling of being. It’s with us when we wake up every morning and go to sleep each night. It’s easy to overlook because it’s so close and familiar. We habitually attend to things instead of noticing awareness itself. We thereby miss a crucial precondition of knowing, for without awareness, nothing can show up and become an object of knowledge.’ p.xv
‘… a set of key elements of Blind Spot metaphysics. … they lead to the occlusion of experience through the following interlocking mistakes:
1. Surreptitious substitution. This is the replacement of concrete, tangible, and observable being with abstract and idealised mathematical constructs. …
2. The fallacy of misplaced concreteness. This is the error of mistaking the abstract for the concrete. It underlies the surreptitious substitution.
3. Reification of structural invariants. Science produces structural invariance through abstraction from experience in the scientific workshop. They include classification schemes, models, general propositions, logical systems, and mathematical laws and models. …
4. The amnesia of experience. This happens when we become so caught up in surreptitious substitution, the fallacy of misplaced concreteness, and the reification of structural invariants that experience finally drops out of sight completely. It now resides in the Blind Spot we have created through misunderstanding the scientific method.’ p.24-5
‘A Strange Loop: We are now confronted with a strange loop. Horizontal consciousness subsumes the world, including our body experienced from within, while embodiment subsumes consciousness, including awareness in its immediate intimacy. The primacy of consciousness and the primacy of embodiment enfold each other. We need to examine this strange loop, which disappears from view in the Blind Spot.
In fact, we’ve already encountered this strange loop in our discussion of time and cosmology and our discussion of life: Our experience of time depends on the flow of cosmic time that we measure through experience of time, and only life can know life. Like the ouroboros, the serpent swallowing its own tail, we are in the universe and the universe is in us. This is the strange loop.’ p.189
‘Merleau-Ponty put his finger on the strange loop when he writes in Phenomenology of Perception: “The world is inseparable from the subject, but from a subject who is nothing but a project to the world; and the subject is inseparable from the world, but from a world that itself projects.” This statement is meant to clear path between two extremes. One is the idea that there is a world only for or in consciousness (idealism). The other is the idea that the world exists ready-made and comes pre-sorted into kinds or categories apart from experience (realism). Instead of these two extremes, Merleau-Ponty proposes that each one of the two terms, the conscious subject and the world, makes the other one what it is, and thus they inseparably form a larger whole. In philosophical terms, their relationship is dialectical.
The world Merleau-Ponty is talking about is the life-world, the world we’re able to perceive, investigate, and act in. The subject projects the world because it brings forth the world as a space of meaning and relevance. But the subject can project the world only because the subject inheres in a body already oriented to and engaged with a world that supasses it. The bodily subject is not just in the world but also of the world. The bodily subject is a project of the world, a way the world locally self organises and self individuates to constitute a living being.” p.190
‘We have argued that we must inscribe ourselves back into the scientific narrative as it’s creators. Science rests on how we experience the world. There is no way to take ourselves out of the story and tell it from a God’s-eye perspective. Forgetting this fact means of succumbing to the Blind Spot, and that means losing our way in both science and all the critical ways that science shapes society.’ p.251
‘The first step along the path beyond the Blind Spot is a historical and a philosophical awareness of how present theory building in science carries the weight of its past perspectives. … We have spent most of this book trying to carry the first part of the project outlined above—excavating and laying out history and submerged philosophy to understand how Blind Spot metaphysics came to permeate so much of the background in which modern scientific practice is conducted. We have done so in the hope that this will open gateways for the second part of the best practices process—exploring alternatives. Thus, along the way, we have examined various ideas and trends in modern science that seem to represent possible gateway is into post Blind Spot perspectives: network theory, complex systems theory, QBism, relational quantum mechanics, biological autonomy, embodied cognition, enaction, and neurophenomenology.’ p.252-3
‘Recall that we have explicated four pathologies associated with the Blind Spot: (1) surreptitious substitution, (2) the fallacy of misplayed concreteness, (3) verification of structural invariants, and (4) the amnesia of experience. … To put it in a nutshell, look for alternatives that can recognise and embrace the strange loops of experience in science rather than favouring approaches that ignore or try to obviate them.’ p.253
Headless pointing: see Chapter 8 ‘Consciousness’ p.181-186. This experiment from Douglas Harding’s work is one way to directly experience the Blind Self from one’s own first-hand perspective.
Brilliant.
In their own words:
‘We call the source of the meaning crisis the Blind Spot. At the heart of science lies something we do not see that makes science possible, just as the blindspot lies at the heart of our visual field and makes seeing possible. In the visual blindspot sits the optic nerve; in the scientific blindspot sits direct experience—that by which anything appears, shows up, or becomes available to us. It is a pre-condition of observation, investigation, explanation, measurement, and justification. Things appear and become available thanks to our bodies and their feeling and perceiving capacities. Direct experience is bodily experience. “The body is the vehicle of being in the world,“ says French philosopher Maurice Merleau-Ponty, but as we will see, firsthand bodily experience lies hidden in the Blind Spot.’ p.xi
‘The failure to see direct experience as the irreducible wellspring of knowledge is precisely the Blind Spot. The tragedy the Blind Spot forces upon us is the loss of what’s essential to human knowledge—our lived experience. The universe and the scientist who seeks to know it become lifeless abstractions. Triumphalist science is actually humanless, even if it springs from our human experience of the world. As we will see, this disconnection between science and experience, the essence of the Blind Spot, lies at the heart of the many challenges and dead ends science currently faces in thinking about matter, time, life, and the mind.’ p.xiv
‘Uncovering the Blind Spot can help to repair this rift and the larger split between science and lived experience. But beyond uncovering the Blind Spot, we also need to plumb the deaths of the experience it hides. Drawing from some of the philosophers just mentioned, we will argue that direct experience lies at the heart of the Blind Spot. Direct experience proceeds the separation of knower and known, observer and observed. At its core is sheer awareness, the feeling of being. It’s with us when we wake up every morning and go to sleep each night. It’s easy to overlook because it’s so close and familiar. We habitually attend to things instead of noticing awareness itself. We thereby miss a crucial precondition of knowing, for without awareness, nothing can show up and become an object of knowledge.’ p.xv
‘… a set of key elements of Blind Spot metaphysics. … they lead to the occlusion of experience through the following interlocking mistakes:
1. Surreptitious substitution. This is the replacement of concrete, tangible, and observable being with abstract and idealised mathematical constructs. …
2. The fallacy of misplaced concreteness. This is the error of mistaking the abstract for the concrete. It underlies the surreptitious substitution.
3. Reification of structural invariants. Science produces structural invariance through abstraction from experience in the scientific workshop. They include classification schemes, models, general propositions, logical systems, and mathematical laws and models. …
4. The amnesia of experience. This happens when we become so caught up in surreptitious substitution, the fallacy of misplaced concreteness, and the reification of structural invariants that experience finally drops out of sight completely. It now resides in the Blind Spot we have created through misunderstanding the scientific method.’ p.24-5
‘A Strange Loop: We are now confronted with a strange loop. Horizontal consciousness subsumes the world, including our body experienced from within, while embodiment subsumes consciousness, including awareness in its immediate intimacy. The primacy of consciousness and the primacy of embodiment enfold each other. We need to examine this strange loop, which disappears from view in the Blind Spot.
In fact, we’ve already encountered this strange loop in our discussion of time and cosmology and our discussion of life: Our experience of time depends on the flow of cosmic time that we measure through experience of time, and only life can know life. Like the ouroboros, the serpent swallowing its own tail, we are in the universe and the universe is in us. This is the strange loop.’ p.189
‘Merleau-Ponty put his finger on the strange loop when he writes in Phenomenology of Perception: “The world is inseparable from the subject, but from a subject who is nothing but a project to the world; and the subject is inseparable from the world, but from a world that itself projects.” This statement is meant to clear path between two extremes. One is the idea that there is a world only for or in consciousness (idealism). The other is the idea that the world exists ready-made and comes pre-sorted into kinds or categories apart from experience (realism). Instead of these two extremes, Merleau-Ponty proposes that each one of the two terms, the conscious subject and the world, makes the other one what it is, and thus they inseparably form a larger whole. In philosophical terms, their relationship is dialectical.
The world Merleau-Ponty is talking about is the life-world, the world we’re able to perceive, investigate, and act in. The subject projects the world because it brings forth the world as a space of meaning and relevance. But the subject can project the world only because the subject inheres in a body already oriented to and engaged with a world that supasses it. The bodily subject is not just in the world but also of the world. The bodily subject is a project of the world, a way the world locally self organises and self individuates to constitute a living being.” p.190
‘We have argued that we must inscribe ourselves back into the scientific narrative as it’s creators. Science rests on how we experience the world. There is no way to take ourselves out of the story and tell it from a God’s-eye perspective. Forgetting this fact means of succumbing to the Blind Spot, and that means losing our way in both science and all the critical ways that science shapes society.’ p.251
‘The first step along the path beyond the Blind Spot is a historical and a philosophical awareness of how present theory building in science carries the weight of its past perspectives. … We have spent most of this book trying to carry the first part of the project outlined above—excavating and laying out history and submerged philosophy to understand how Blind Spot metaphysics came to permeate so much of the background in which modern scientific practice is conducted. We have done so in the hope that this will open gateways for the second part of the best practices process—exploring alternatives. Thus, along the way, we have examined various ideas and trends in modern science that seem to represent possible gateway is into post Blind Spot perspectives: network theory, complex systems theory, QBism, relational quantum mechanics, biological autonomy, embodied cognition, enaction, and neurophenomenology.’ p.252-3
‘Recall that we have explicated four pathologies associated with the Blind Spot: (1) surreptitious substitution, (2) the fallacy of misplayed concreteness, (3) verification of structural invariants, and (4) the amnesia of experience. … To put it in a nutshell, look for alternatives that can recognise and embrace the strange loops of experience in science rather than favouring approaches that ignore or try to obviate them.’ p.253
Headless pointing: see Chapter 8 ‘Consciousness’ p.181-186. This experiment from Douglas Harding’s work is one way to directly experience the Blind Self from one’s own first-hand perspective.
Brilliant.
May 27, 2025
Great exposition of the smuggling of the first person into the third in particular realms of science. Could have done with a more radical exploration of the proceeding ontology - but I don’t think that was what the authors wanted to do. I think it is a much needed text in the philosophy of science and could really do with being widely read.
December 13, 2024
This is such an important book. I feel like in every (relevant) scientific study there should be a moment in which the scientists ask themselves whether their study is committing any of the four pathologies associated with the Blind Spot.
Already while I was reading this I was seeing numerous examples of the Blind Spot in everyday life.
I only wish there was a more "layperson's" version of this book. The "matter" (physics) chapter for me was the toughest (went completely over my head, in fact.. I've never been great at physics). People without a strong grounding in science may struggle with this, which is a shame, as I really do wish everyone could become aware of the concept of the Blind Spot and how much it permeates everyday life.
Even with the above criticisms, I highly recommend this to anyone with the stomach for it (and don't worry if, like me, you don't understand physics, or maybe one of the other disciplines discussed - there is plenty in there worth reading that is more accessible).
I might even go through the discipline-based chapters below to encourage people scared by the tough chapters:
* Time (physics) - loved this chapter, new area for me
* Matter (quantum physics) - tough hang for me
* Cosmology (astrophysics, specifically cosmic time) - I found this rewarding and quite digestible
* Life (biology) - my favourite!
* Cognition - very interesting to me
* Consciousness - this was a little difficult, but it covered stuff I was already familiar with as I've followed Evan Thompson for a while - so might be harder for others. I enjoyed the Physicalism vs Panpsychism section the most.
* Earth - enjoyed very much but I intend to explore the topics/references in this more.
Already while I was reading this I was seeing numerous examples of the Blind Spot in everyday life.
I only wish there was a more "layperson's" version of this book. The "matter" (physics) chapter for me was the toughest (went completely over my head, in fact.. I've never been great at physics). People without a strong grounding in science may struggle with this, which is a shame, as I really do wish everyone could become aware of the concept of the Blind Spot and how much it permeates everyday life.
Even with the above criticisms, I highly recommend this to anyone with the stomach for it (and don't worry if, like me, you don't understand physics, or maybe one of the other disciplines discussed - there is plenty in there worth reading that is more accessible).
I might even go through the discipline-based chapters below to encourage people scared by the tough chapters:
* Time (physics) - loved this chapter, new area for me
* Matter (quantum physics) - tough hang for me
* Cosmology (astrophysics, specifically cosmic time) - I found this rewarding and quite digestible
* Life (biology) - my favourite!
* Cognition - very interesting to me
* Consciousness - this was a little difficult, but it covered stuff I was already familiar with as I've followed Evan Thompson for a while - so might be harder for others. I enjoyed the Physicalism vs Panpsychism section the most.
* Earth - enjoyed very much but I intend to explore the topics/references in this more.
March 31, 2025
This book was a journey. It all started in the first few days of january 2025, where I attended a gathering organised by some friends about this book. At that time, I had only read the introduction, which had already struck me. The gathering consisted of a few days of discussing the content and presenting parts of it, and it had ignited my curiosity for the philosophical side of Science - a side I had not been in touch with before. How crazy is that? During my entire scientific education, I had not encountered any philosophical aspect. My whole perspective on science has shifted to a much broader view, thanks to the Blind Spot. Although the writing is terribly wordy and each sentence feels slightly too long, it is not often a book leaves me so confused yet inspired. Is complex systems science the way? Lots of food for thought. My only criticism is repetition, and extremely dry phrasing. This is a MUST-read if you're in science, or if you're simply very curious ;)
August 24, 2024
Mixed feelings about this book. The idea of making sure human experience and the human viewpoint are kept primary within science is interesting and seems valuable. But I had a difficult time understanding parts of the book, in some places because it was just too technical for me, but in other spots it just seemed a little inconsistent or incoherent. I wonder if having three authors was part of the problem? I thought the last chapter in particular was all over the place. But again, I really did like the overall concept.
July 26, 2024
Precise, clear, convincing. A careful, expansive argument against the bifurcation of nature, but more gripping than you'd ever expect from philosophy of science. The pages require careful attention, but the arc of The Blind Spot left me giddy.
May 22, 2024
Was interested by the title and the subject matter when I saw it at my library.
Was also apprehensive seeing one of the co-authors. The dust jacket reminded me of what I already had read years ago: Marcelo Gleiser won the 2019 Templeton Prize.
Decided to take it home. First, I researched all three authors. And, if not directly and avowedly so, first and foremost, re this book, all three buy the idea of Gould’s NOMA, or non-overlapping magisteria. I do not. Neither do many other scientists who do NOT practice scientism (which is real, but I knew that long before this book) and who are NOT Gnu Atheists.
On Frank, the NOMA seems very true, but, per more critical reviews of other books of his, this is based on a narrow definition of religion. With Gleiser, when a previous book of his is titled “The Dawn of the Mindful Universe,” enough said. Thompson’s “Why I am not a Buddhist” actually looks decent as far as it goes, but he needs to push harder on the reality of both ancient Buddhism and modern New Agey distillates of it being, yes, religions. Shut up, Bob Wright and fanbois.
OK, so decks cleared.
The key is in the first chapter, where the trio lay six principles that cause “The Blind Spot.”
And, even before I got through, a trio of words came to mind. They are: Stereotyping, handwaving and whataboutism.
Before we dive in on each of the six, two other things:
Titling the first section, after a rhetorical question, as “A Guide to the Perplexed” kind of lets the cat out of the bag for those who know the reference. I assume it’s primarily to E.F. Schumacher’s book. (It has “A” and Maimonides has “The”) with its references to things like “smallism.” When he talks about things like the “evolutionist doctrine” (sic) he sounds exactly like our authors. Although the trio don’t mention things like the “great chain of being,” ideas behind it are behind them, too. Above all is the idea that Homo sapiens needs to be “recentered” in the universe.
The idea that someone like Steven Weinberg might be right, and that we’d be better served philosophically dealing with that reality never crosses their lips or fingers.
If that isn’t enough, before we get to the principles, the authorial trio show themselves to have a big old boner for Husserl. He’s discussed, I think, more than all other 20th-century philosophers combined. In other weirdness there, Chalmers gets more mention than Dennett and the alleged “hard problem of consciousness” gets more discussion than any idea of Dennett. So does Galen Strawson’s version of panpsychism. (Citing Whitehead early on might be a clue as to the trio’s angle.)
Why Husserl? Although the word “bracketing” is not used, “epoché” in his sense is used quite liberally. And, in a much more smooth sense than that of the old joke, “and then, god,” the pause of the epoché, or the “step outside” of bracketing, leave that entirely open.
Now, the six items and my thoughts on: Sterotyping, handwaving and whataboutism.
1. Bifurcation of nature. “Color is only an illusion” stereotypes serious modern philosophy of mind discussion about whether qualia exist, and for that matter, the foundation of traditional empiricism (wrong as it may be for various reasons).
2. Reductionism. Not all reductionism is bad, only greedy reductionism, per greedy reductionist Dan Dennett.
3. Objectivism (not the Ayn Rand version). Like reductionism, there are greedy and non-greedy versions of this.
4. Physicalism: See the trio lapping up on the “hard problem of consciousness” above. Note that elsewhere in the book, they’re careful to avoid the claim that, on issues of mind, they’re not epiphenomenalists. What then, are you? Some “tertium quid,” per John Randolph?
5. Reification of mathematical entities. Mathematical Platonism, as the idea is more commonly known, may well be wrong. But, just the fact that it is wrong, if it is, doesn’t push humans back to a pre-Copernican center of the universe. This may not be exactly what they mean by reification of mathematical entities, but I think they’re wrong otherwise.
6. Experience is epiphenomenal. (Here, not using it in the mental dualist version of epiphenomenal, to which I referred above.) Again, total ignorance, or willful kicking, or a bit of both, just as in item 1, of serious modern discussion on philosophy of mind. Thompson is himself a professor of philosophy; his signing off on points 1 and 6 right here guarantees the book is no more than 2 star.
At that point, it’s checking the index time and grokking. While climate change is mentioned on 10 pages, it really doesn’t get that much discussion. The word “ecology’ is not in the index. Nor is Schumacher! (There is no bibliography, as a side note.)
They do talk about the Gaia hypothesis, and both James Lovelock and Lynn Marguils. She? A 9/11 truther (and false flagger). An AIDS denialist, at least on HIV causing it, and that’s of relevance given the authors’ use of COVID to bash that “good old time fundamentalist science.” And, a rejector of the neo-Darwinian synthesis. Symbiosis comes off as something she was looking for precisely because she saw it as a rejection of the neo-Darwinian synthesis, and then moved on from it when it was incorporated.
While I’m here? Their info about greenhouse gas science’s start is incorrect. An American woman scientist first postulated the idea 50 years before Arrhenius.
Barry Commoner is referenced briefly. Murray Bookchin not at all. No Wendell Berry, etc etc.
Had the book actually had a chapter on modern ecology, with some in-depth discussion on “recentering humans” and how this would actually avert a sixth mass extinction and a climate crisis (the real problem is overly-human centered neoliberal capitalism), I would forgive its philosophical tendentiousness enough for two stars. If it did a lot more than that, I’d give it three.
As is, this is not a whole lot more than a stylized, intellectually-veneered version of holding one’s breath, Templeton style, especially with the presumption in the subtitle that science is ignoring human experience. It isn't, and neither are philosophers. And, at an average rating at the time of my post of 4.10 stars, it’s overrated anyway. But, it's not worth reading through for a crushing review like I gave Sapolsky.
Was also apprehensive seeing one of the co-authors. The dust jacket reminded me of what I already had read years ago: Marcelo Gleiser won the 2019 Templeton Prize.
Decided to take it home. First, I researched all three authors. And, if not directly and avowedly so, first and foremost, re this book, all three buy the idea of Gould’s NOMA, or non-overlapping magisteria. I do not. Neither do many other scientists who do NOT practice scientism (which is real, but I knew that long before this book) and who are NOT Gnu Atheists.
On Frank, the NOMA seems very true, but, per more critical reviews of other books of his, this is based on a narrow definition of religion. With Gleiser, when a previous book of his is titled “The Dawn of the Mindful Universe,” enough said. Thompson’s “Why I am not a Buddhist” actually looks decent as far as it goes, but he needs to push harder on the reality of both ancient Buddhism and modern New Agey distillates of it being, yes, religions. Shut up, Bob Wright and fanbois.
OK, so decks cleared.
The key is in the first chapter, where the trio lay six principles that cause “The Blind Spot.”
And, even before I got through, a trio of words came to mind. They are: Stereotyping, handwaving and whataboutism.
Before we dive in on each of the six, two other things:
Titling the first section, after a rhetorical question, as “A Guide to the Perplexed” kind of lets the cat out of the bag for those who know the reference. I assume it’s primarily to E.F. Schumacher’s book. (It has “A” and Maimonides has “The”) with its references to things like “smallism.” When he talks about things like the “evolutionist doctrine” (sic) he sounds exactly like our authors. Although the trio don’t mention things like the “great chain of being,” ideas behind it are behind them, too. Above all is the idea that Homo sapiens needs to be “recentered” in the universe.
The idea that someone like Steven Weinberg might be right, and that we’d be better served philosophically dealing with that reality never crosses their lips or fingers.
If that isn’t enough, before we get to the principles, the authorial trio show themselves to have a big old boner for Husserl. He’s discussed, I think, more than all other 20th-century philosophers combined. In other weirdness there, Chalmers gets more mention than Dennett and the alleged “hard problem of consciousness” gets more discussion than any idea of Dennett. So does Galen Strawson’s version of panpsychism. (Citing Whitehead early on might be a clue as to the trio’s angle.)
Why Husserl? Although the word “bracketing” is not used, “epoché” in his sense is used quite liberally. And, in a much more smooth sense than that of the old joke, “and then, god,” the pause of the epoché, or the “step outside” of bracketing, leave that entirely open.
Now, the six items and my thoughts on: Sterotyping, handwaving and whataboutism.
1. Bifurcation of nature. “Color is only an illusion” stereotypes serious modern philosophy of mind discussion about whether qualia exist, and for that matter, the foundation of traditional empiricism (wrong as it may be for various reasons).
2. Reductionism. Not all reductionism is bad, only greedy reductionism, per greedy reductionist Dan Dennett.
3. Objectivism (not the Ayn Rand version). Like reductionism, there are greedy and non-greedy versions of this.
4. Physicalism: See the trio lapping up on the “hard problem of consciousness” above. Note that elsewhere in the book, they’re careful to avoid the claim that, on issues of mind, they’re not epiphenomenalists. What then, are you? Some “tertium quid,” per John Randolph?
5. Reification of mathematical entities. Mathematical Platonism, as the idea is more commonly known, may well be wrong. But, just the fact that it is wrong, if it is, doesn’t push humans back to a pre-Copernican center of the universe. This may not be exactly what they mean by reification of mathematical entities, but I think they’re wrong otherwise.
6. Experience is epiphenomenal. (Here, not using it in the mental dualist version of epiphenomenal, to which I referred above.) Again, total ignorance, or willful kicking, or a bit of both, just as in item 1, of serious modern discussion on philosophy of mind. Thompson is himself a professor of philosophy; his signing off on points 1 and 6 right here guarantees the book is no more than 2 star.
At that point, it’s checking the index time and grokking. While climate change is mentioned on 10 pages, it really doesn’t get that much discussion. The word “ecology’ is not in the index. Nor is Schumacher! (There is no bibliography, as a side note.)
They do talk about the Gaia hypothesis, and both James Lovelock and Lynn Marguils. She? A 9/11 truther (and false flagger). An AIDS denialist, at least on HIV causing it, and that’s of relevance given the authors’ use of COVID to bash that “good old time fundamentalist science.” And, a rejector of the neo-Darwinian synthesis. Symbiosis comes off as something she was looking for precisely because she saw it as a rejection of the neo-Darwinian synthesis, and then moved on from it when it was incorporated.
While I’m here? Their info about greenhouse gas science’s start is incorrect. An American woman scientist first postulated the idea 50 years before Arrhenius.
Barry Commoner is referenced briefly. Murray Bookchin not at all. No Wendell Berry, etc etc.
Had the book actually had a chapter on modern ecology, with some in-depth discussion on “recentering humans” and how this would actually avert a sixth mass extinction and a climate crisis (the real problem is overly-human centered neoliberal capitalism), I would forgive its philosophical tendentiousness enough for two stars. If it did a lot more than that, I’d give it three.
As is, this is not a whole lot more than a stylized, intellectually-veneered version of holding one’s breath, Templeton style, especially with the presumption in the subtitle that science is ignoring human experience. It isn't, and neither are philosophers. And, at an average rating at the time of my post of 4.10 stars, it’s overrated anyway. But, it's not worth reading through for a crushing review like I gave Sapolsky.
April 15, 2024
With the availability of 24/7 news, information, and distraction, it is becoming apparent that many of us have lost a simple but very fundamental way of being in the world—to be present without encountering barrages of thoughts, plans, and ideas. And because of that loss, many of us often feel incomplete, alienated, forever restless, and, increasingly, angry. The authors of this hugely important book (which is based on a 2019 essay by the same authors published on Aeon, available online as a teaser to the book) do not go into this or into psychology for that matter (for good reason), but their careful work suggests that our cultural ignorance or even rejection of first-person, embodied experience likely plays a major part in this malaise.
The authors recount how the 17th-century division of the world of experience into mind (qualitative states of being) and matter (quantifiable things and entities seemingly existing "out there") by major scientific thinkers such as Galileo, Descartes, and Bacon gradually led to the overvaluing of theoretical abstraction and thinking as a means to access truth and meaning. Over time, the schism between mind and matter became enshrined in Western culture. It became what the authors dub the Blind Spot—the eventual occultation of direct experience by intellectual conceptualization and rationalization. It also led to a misappropriation and reduction of science to a mere tool to try to manipulate and exploit (and, ultimately, rule) what is now recognized as the biosphere, an intricately complex system that is inextricably linked to our existence.
The split of the world into qualitative experience and quantitative measurement was obviously very valuable but it also led to what Alfred North Whitehead (who features prominently in this book) called the "bifurcation of nature" (as the authors explain in the book, direct experience of hot and cold or of felt time is replaced by more and more sophisticated ways to measure abstract entities called temperature and clock time that are taken to be really existing from the their “own side,” rather than conceptual constructs) and the "fallacy of misplaced concreteness," in which mathematical models are mistaken (and substituted) for concrete experience—erroneously taking the map for the territory (or the menu for the meal, as Alan Watts and others have wryly observed).
Because science has been so powerful for developing conceptual ideas about the world and for providing explanatory mechanisms for what is observed, it's caused a collective amnesia of what had led to its development in the first place—science was (and still is) motivated by first-person experiences, be they driven by curiosity of "how the world works" or the goal to control and redesign nature. Among other things, it led to the fateful mind-matter division, resulting in deep metaphysical confusions (such as the hard problem of consciousness—an artifact of the artificial mind-matter division, as the authors show) that now haunt much of modern discourse. And it led to what the authors call “scientific triumphalism”—the assertion that everything can be explained with and through the scientific method of inquiry.
The authors aren’t anti-science—quite the contrary, as three individuals who actively work in the sciences—two physicists and one cognitive scientist/philosopher—they express a deep concern that the current dominance of a worldview that depicts science as the be-all and end-all not only damages the very fabric of our world (by promoting a blind faith in science and technology, increasingly divorced from fundamental human needs and understanding) but also does severe harm to the project of science itself (by gradually undermining its credibility and standing with a public that sees it as more and more detached from the concerns of most people and delivering fewer and fewer tangible benefits or even posing harm to societal stability worldwide).
The authors lay out several ideas for addressing the lopsidedness of how science is practiced, articulated, and applied today. They propose to include a wider and more comprehensive focus offered by disciplines like systems research, neurophenomenology, and the history of science and philosophy. One might argue that the goals of these fields won’t fit well into research structures that are largely geared to reinforcing the Blind Spot (such as too-big-to-fail universities and grant agencies) by emphasizing that science must “deliver values” and provide “services,” business speak for monetary profits, the narrowest of goals if there ever was one. But residues of truly critical thinking, deep inquiry, and curiosity—and the recognition that statements like “that’s what the science says” won’t cut it to effectively engage wide swaths of the public to act on climate change, rapidly diminishing cultural and biodiversity, and the threat of further global pandemics—should still exist in these institutions, and perhaps these benevolent forces can effect the necessary changes needed to move on from Blind Spot thinking.
Because the book is written by scientists for scientists and for those interested in science (and its close cousin, philosophy), the authors occasionally go into some technical details, including some light math and descriptions of major current models of quantum mechanics/physics. But these are merely used as illustrative examples, without bogging readers down in unnecessary minutiae. Moreover, these brief excursions bring home the point that this work does not stray into esoteric speculation about quantum physics or the cosmos—the theories in this book are very nuts and bolts and extremely well presented. One very ingenious move the authors make (at the start of an illuminating chapter on consciousness) is that they ask the reader to do a simple exercise to get (re-)acquainted with what forms the basis of sensory experience that brings the entire world into being—immediate, pure awareness.
I very highly recommend this book to all who have a deep concern about the scientific enterprise and the future of this living organism we call Earth.
The authors recount how the 17th-century division of the world of experience into mind (qualitative states of being) and matter (quantifiable things and entities seemingly existing "out there") by major scientific thinkers such as Galileo, Descartes, and Bacon gradually led to the overvaluing of theoretical abstraction and thinking as a means to access truth and meaning. Over time, the schism between mind and matter became enshrined in Western culture. It became what the authors dub the Blind Spot—the eventual occultation of direct experience by intellectual conceptualization and rationalization. It also led to a misappropriation and reduction of science to a mere tool to try to manipulate and exploit (and, ultimately, rule) what is now recognized as the biosphere, an intricately complex system that is inextricably linked to our existence.
The split of the world into qualitative experience and quantitative measurement was obviously very valuable but it also led to what Alfred North Whitehead (who features prominently in this book) called the "bifurcation of nature" (as the authors explain in the book, direct experience of hot and cold or of felt time is replaced by more and more sophisticated ways to measure abstract entities called temperature and clock time that are taken to be really existing from the their “own side,” rather than conceptual constructs) and the "fallacy of misplaced concreteness," in which mathematical models are mistaken (and substituted) for concrete experience—erroneously taking the map for the territory (or the menu for the meal, as Alan Watts and others have wryly observed).
Because science has been so powerful for developing conceptual ideas about the world and for providing explanatory mechanisms for what is observed, it's caused a collective amnesia of what had led to its development in the first place—science was (and still is) motivated by first-person experiences, be they driven by curiosity of "how the world works" or the goal to control and redesign nature. Among other things, it led to the fateful mind-matter division, resulting in deep metaphysical confusions (such as the hard problem of consciousness—an artifact of the artificial mind-matter division, as the authors show) that now haunt much of modern discourse. And it led to what the authors call “scientific triumphalism”—the assertion that everything can be explained with and through the scientific method of inquiry.
The authors aren’t anti-science—quite the contrary, as three individuals who actively work in the sciences—two physicists and one cognitive scientist/philosopher—they express a deep concern that the current dominance of a worldview that depicts science as the be-all and end-all not only damages the very fabric of our world (by promoting a blind faith in science and technology, increasingly divorced from fundamental human needs and understanding) but also does severe harm to the project of science itself (by gradually undermining its credibility and standing with a public that sees it as more and more detached from the concerns of most people and delivering fewer and fewer tangible benefits or even posing harm to societal stability worldwide).
The authors lay out several ideas for addressing the lopsidedness of how science is practiced, articulated, and applied today. They propose to include a wider and more comprehensive focus offered by disciplines like systems research, neurophenomenology, and the history of science and philosophy. One might argue that the goals of these fields won’t fit well into research structures that are largely geared to reinforcing the Blind Spot (such as too-big-to-fail universities and grant agencies) by emphasizing that science must “deliver values” and provide “services,” business speak for monetary profits, the narrowest of goals if there ever was one. But residues of truly critical thinking, deep inquiry, and curiosity—and the recognition that statements like “that’s what the science says” won’t cut it to effectively engage wide swaths of the public to act on climate change, rapidly diminishing cultural and biodiversity, and the threat of further global pandemics—should still exist in these institutions, and perhaps these benevolent forces can effect the necessary changes needed to move on from Blind Spot thinking.
Because the book is written by scientists for scientists and for those interested in science (and its close cousin, philosophy), the authors occasionally go into some technical details, including some light math and descriptions of major current models of quantum mechanics/physics. But these are merely used as illustrative examples, without bogging readers down in unnecessary minutiae. Moreover, these brief excursions bring home the point that this work does not stray into esoteric speculation about quantum physics or the cosmos—the theories in this book are very nuts and bolts and extremely well presented. One very ingenious move the authors make (at the start of an illuminating chapter on consciousness) is that they ask the reader to do a simple exercise to get (re-)acquainted with what forms the basis of sensory experience that brings the entire world into being—immediate, pure awareness.
I very highly recommend this book to all who have a deep concern about the scientific enterprise and the future of this living organism we call Earth.
May 26, 2024
Very important book for me... There is a whole broken civilization we've built for ourselves around a mistaken understanding of life, with the broken economy, broken technology, broken art and broken built environment that run on this one principle: human experience, care for the human side is besides the point... It could all be better written and better stated but the author's message is indeed urgent
We need liberation from the mental detritus of this failing modernity, this book is one step forward
If humanity fails this beautiful world fails as well
We need liberation from the mental detritus of this failing modernity, this book is one step forward
If humanity fails this beautiful world fails as well
June 3, 2025
The main idea makes sense, particularly in the context of physics. The other chapters are not particularly convincing. Maybe the problem was listening to this in audiobook format - think I might have missed important details.
November 13, 2025
The God’s Eye View from Nowhere: A Review of Frank, Gleiser, & Thompson’s The Blind Spot (2024)
Science is sick and barely knows it. Perhaps it sounds pretentious to claim as much but, from the perspective of the authors, scientists the world over pursue their work oblivious to, or only slightly aware of, this fever and how it continually shapes the work they do and the views they propound, not to mention how it has helped bring us to the current planetary crisis. This illness is the “Blind Spot,” a purposeful dismissal that is deeply embedded not only in science but in the heart of western culture, in our own ideas about the world. Following up on Nagel’s 1989 The View from Nowhere, Frank, Gleiser, and Thompson’s book presents a thoroughgoing diagnosis of the problem as it appears across the spectrum of the sciences.
Blind to what? Scientific thinking pervasively disregards human experience: it trivializes, explains away, or is oblivious to the critical role of first-person experience in theory and research. And what exactly is “experience”? It’s nothing less than the utter obviousness of our conscious awareness, our faculties of sensation, perception, and observation, our interiority, our undeniable subjectivity, what is necessarily involved in seeing, thinking, doing, or saying anything. Science ignores the reality of first-person subjectivity. A central argument underlying the book is: how can anything – knowledge, meaning, truths or facts – be established, claimed, or understood without conscious subjects, without someone experiencing something? Thankfully, many have begun taking human experience seriously and seeing it as a fundamental prerequisite for all knowing and thinking. But the vast majority of science research, education, media, and publishing ignores our interiority, treating it as a transparent given. This fundamental oversight not only undercuts the legitimacy of the work being done, but also it also plays a critical role in creating the conditions that have given birth to our planetary climate crisis - conditions that could lead to our own demise.
This trivializing of experience, the authors write, is so pervasive it’s like the air: “invisible but all around us. We’re given simple versions of it in high school science classes, and we find it as an unspoken background in science documentaries. If you pursue a career in science, it often lies like an invisible map marking your journey through introductory classes in physics, chemistry, and biology. … it’s so pervasive that it doesn’t seem like philosophy at all. Rather people think it’s just ‘what science says.’” (ch1/p4). The obviousness of our conscious awareness plus the pervasiveness of its devaluing combine to obscure the seriousness of its omission in the scientific community. In fact, the omission is so ubiquitous that convincing others it exists is a challenge. Even my faculty study group colleagues (in math, engineering, astronomy) with whom I read this book had a hard time accepting the overall argument. They didn’t much care that they were purveyors of the Blind Spot. Although they found it interesting, they didn’t particularly see why it’s important or why it’s a problem.
And why is it a problem? After identifying the main characteristics and causes of the Blind Spot (chapters 1-2), then going through the many ways the Blind Spot appears in the physical, biological, psycho-social, and cognitive sciences (chapters 3-8), in the last chapter 9, the authors return to look at problems our Blind Spot-addled civilization has, in concert with global capitalism, helped create a set of crises that are leading us to eco- and social system destabilization and collapse: climate change, global pandemics, and runaway technology. What is now called the Anthropocene, the geologic era of humanity and the sixth great extinction, is “a massive manifestation of the Blind Spot. It’s the result of one particular and very recent version of the human civilizational project: the originally modern European, and now transnational, scientific project of objectifying the world through scientific materialism” (9/226). As 20th century science and technology evolved from an enabling to a regulating enterprise, its authority became distrusted and challenged. For all its astonishing success, contemporary science has not only become perceived as arrogant and inhuman but has also suffered postmodern challenges to its authority and credibility, challenges which have devolved into post-truth science denial, the masquerading of pseudo-sciences, and rampant conspiracy mongering. As a pervasive characteristic of the scientific enterprise, the Blind Spot was instrumental in birthing these problems.
Being led to the brink of collapse has in the past few decades spawned the rise of new scientific perspectives that promise to move us beyond Blind Spot metaphysics. In the final chapter and Afterword, the authors discuss the emergence of a suite of new approaches and conceptual tools that evolved out of postwar systems theory called Earth Systems Science (9/233-239) which sees the Earth as a coupled set of systems constituting the atmosphere, hydrosphere, cryosphere, lithosphere, and biosphere – interlocking systems forming an integrated whole. They explain,
Although the authors do a bang-up job diagnosing Blind Spot thinking and how it’s woven into all sectors of science and culture, they offer little in the way of a solution or prescription to its undoing other than presenting new approaches in science. They’re clear that at the core of the Blind Spot is a set of metaphysical commitments (list below) that are in the process of being challenged by these new approaches but, even though they present a number of best practices for overcoming Blind Spot beliefs, they stop short of describing what alternative metaphysical commitments might look like. In the Afterword they write: “Although we’ve pointed to many scientific ideas that go beyond the Blind Spot, we have not tried to formulate a comprehensive scientific or philosophical perspective to replace it” (9/252).
Nevertheless, these new sciences have already shown us what some of these new philosophical perspectives look like. They have done this by granting ontological validity to what could be called postmodern commitments wherein equal reality status is given to wholeness, relationality, organization, situatedness, embodiment, contextuality, complexity, and emergence. Together these form a thoroughgoing this-world approach where mind and consciousness are the natural interiors of complex self-organized systems, aka organisms. On this view organization and relations have equal reality status as physical objects – greater exterior complexity and greater interior sentience and mental capacity go hand in hand. Here, consciousness, the mind, and experience are no more than the interior aspects of the evolutionary coupling of organisms and their environments – brain-in-body-in-environment. We can see, for example, the 4E approach in cognitive science (embedded, embodied, extended, enactive) presents a major challenge to Blind Spot computational-representational views of the mind as being a “brainbound” neural computer. 4E cognitive science also directly incorporates experience through research that tracks both 1st and 3rd-person phenomena, bringing phenomenology into a biological context (neuro-phenomenology). But, as significant as they are, these new postmodern commitments don’t go far enough.
In the final analysis, neither inside nor outside, neither whole nor part, subject nor object, nature nor mind, one nor many can be primary. The whole notion of primary ontology, an assumption lurking within all Blind Spot thinking, is itself bankrupt. Thus, what is most sorely needed to overcome Blind Spot metaphysics is a nondual or complementarity metaphysics, a paradoxical both/and-neither/nor perspective where all conceptual pairs are understood as necessarily mutually generative and referencing. Chinese and Indian philosophy both figured this out long ago, the inherent nondual, paradoxical nature of the human mind. Apart from a few rebel thinkers, the West, however, seems eternally mired in dualistic thinking. How can there be singular without plural? What front exists without a back? How can outside have any meaning by itself? What could presence possibly mean without absence? Or same without different? Author Evan Thompson is one among many who have been actively participating in cross-cultural philosophical dialogues with Buddhists and other philosophers of nonduality to bring these perspectives into embodied mind research and complexity science. Formulating a comprehensive philosophy of science with nonduality at its core would sound the final death knell to Blind Spot metaphysics.
One last example: The standard Blind Spot argument for the primacy of objective physical reality is evolution – particles and the elements, basic molecules, and galaxies, stars, planets had to exist prior to the emergence of life which requires many billions of years of biochemical evolution to produce higher forms of sentient awareness. True enough. But the question “at what point does interiority emerge” is a misguided question because it assumes Blind Spot objectivism, i.e. that interiority is dependent on exteriority, that objectivity precedes and gives rise to subjectivity. Only a nondual metaphysics in which complementarity is primary can objective-only Blind Spot fundamentalism be avoided. On this view, interiority “goes all the way down” to the most basic, earliest levels of objective material organization such that galaxies, stars, planets, atoms, molecules themselves have proto-interiority – not sentience, not consciousness, not mind, but interiority that has the potential to develop as it organizes into more complex forms which give rise to sentience. Reactivity of basic elements and molecules could be understood as a form of proto-sentience.
To finish is chapter one’s list of primary assumptions of Blind Spot thinking followed by recommended books on the new sciences challenging these assumptions.
Six Assumptions of Blind Spot Metaphysics: pervasive, overlapping-interlocking belief structures that together make it impossible to take interior subjectivity seriously:
1-The bifurcation of nature: Otherwise known as the mind/nature-appearance/reality split, this is our belief in the division between the reality of the external world -vs its subjective appearances. Examples: 1) Color is an illusion, not part of the real world; 2) Your thoughts and feelings are simply neuronal computations.
2-Reductionism: The belief that what’s most real and most fundamental, are the smallest entities – cells more fundamental than organisms, molecules more fundamental than cells, then on down to simpler molecules, to atoms, and finally to elementary particles. “Reductionism is summed up in the quip: ‘Biologists defer to chemists, who defer to physicists, who defer to mathematicians, who defer to God” (1/6).
3-Objectivism This is science’s attempt to establish a transcendent “God’s eye” view wherein only objects are real. Such a “view from nowhere” gives ontological primacy to 3rd-person objects. This arguably self-refuting view is mind/subject-independent, meaning that, for science, what is real is outside and apart from any human perspective. One may wonder, how can “entities” with “properties” “exist” without some mind or experience being involved? Are scientists experienceless zombies doing research?
4-Physicalism: Closely related to objectivism is physicalism, also known as materialism. This is the notion that physical facts alone exhaust reality. Physicalism is not a scientific theory but a metaphysical thesis, a philosophical interpretation of physics and science in general (1/7).
5-Reification of mathematical entities: Reify means to make real or concrete and is the view that mathematical entities are real, exist “out there” independently of us, and are what the universe is truly is: laws, equations, constants, models. Here mathematical constructs are more real than your subjective thoughts and feelings.
6-Experience is epiphenomenal: This is the view that mental events are caused by physical events in the brain but have no effects upon any physical events; “Consciousness is the brain’s user illusion.”
BEYOND THE BLIND SPOT Book Recommendations
Embodied Mind and 4E Cognitive Science
1. Mind in Life
2. Radical Embodied Cognitive Science
3. The Oxford Handbook of 4E Cognition
Consciousness Studies and 1st-Person Approaches
4. The View from Within
5. Understanding Consciousness
Beware of Blind Spot views of mind in cognitive science which show up in the form of representationalism, neuronal computationalism, brainbound-internalist models, and the various futile attempts to make consciousness into a 3rd-person objective thing – quantum gaps, information fields – attempting to overcome “the hard problem” of consciousness, a problem which is a classic symptom of Blind Spot metaphysics.
Complexity, Systems, and Chaos theories
6. Complexity: A Guided Tour
7. Simply Complexity
Systems and complexity theory are the antidotes to Blind Spot reductionism and the primacy of the small. They give primacy instead to relationality, context, and wholeness.
Non-Equilibrium Energy Flow Systems
8. Into the Cool
9. Order Out of Chaos
10. Sync
Beware here of physics views propounding reductionist reversible-symmetrical time, claiming that the thermodynamic arrow of time is an illusion that organisms have created (e.g., see my review of Rovelli’s The Order of Time).
Origin of Life Research
11. The Vital Question
12. The Origin and Nature of Life on Earth
Beware here of the tyranny of molecular biology and the “replicationist” view of life. The above books instead view energy flow and metabolism as prior to and necessary for replication.
Final Thoughts: The Blind Spot is a worthwhile read, a masterful diagnosis of this deeply ingrained “illness” in our scientific and cultural worldview. But it is not a breezy read in that it demands familiarity with a broad range of issues across science and philosophy from physics and cosmology to biology to consciousness studies. Here three scientists – Frank, an astrophysicist, Gleiser, a theoretical physicist, and Thompson, a philosopher/cognitive scientist, each who cares about science but sees its deleterious effects on itself and society – put forth a timely argument for a new scientific understanding of ourselves in our world.
The Blind Spot is an outstanding presentation of a critical short-sightedness we each carry, one that will have to be healed in the face of the inevitable ecological and climate chaos bearing down upon us. But make no mistake, God’s Eye/Blind Spot metaphysics is fighting to maintain its hegemony against the challenge of the emerging research approaches and disciplines that are forming around postmodern contextuality and situatedness, systems complexity and wholeness, thermodynamics and asymmetrical time, emergence and embodiment, and eventually nondual-complementarity metaphysics.
Science is sick and barely knows it. Perhaps it sounds pretentious to claim as much but, from the perspective of the authors, scientists the world over pursue their work oblivious to, or only slightly aware of, this fever and how it continually shapes the work they do and the views they propound, not to mention how it has helped bring us to the current planetary crisis. This illness is the “Blind Spot,” a purposeful dismissal that is deeply embedded not only in science but in the heart of western culture, in our own ideas about the world. Following up on Nagel’s 1989 The View from Nowhere, Frank, Gleiser, and Thompson’s book presents a thoroughgoing diagnosis of the problem as it appears across the spectrum of the sciences.
Blind to what? Scientific thinking pervasively disregards human experience: it trivializes, explains away, or is oblivious to the critical role of first-person experience in theory and research. And what exactly is “experience”? It’s nothing less than the utter obviousness of our conscious awareness, our faculties of sensation, perception, and observation, our interiority, our undeniable subjectivity, what is necessarily involved in seeing, thinking, doing, or saying anything. Science ignores the reality of first-person subjectivity. A central argument underlying the book is: how can anything – knowledge, meaning, truths or facts – be established, claimed, or understood without conscious subjects, without someone experiencing something? Thankfully, many have begun taking human experience seriously and seeing it as a fundamental prerequisite for all knowing and thinking. But the vast majority of science research, education, media, and publishing ignores our interiority, treating it as a transparent given. This fundamental oversight not only undercuts the legitimacy of the work being done, but also it also plays a critical role in creating the conditions that have given birth to our planetary climate crisis - conditions that could lead to our own demise.
This trivializing of experience, the authors write, is so pervasive it’s like the air: “invisible but all around us. We’re given simple versions of it in high school science classes, and we find it as an unspoken background in science documentaries. If you pursue a career in science, it often lies like an invisible map marking your journey through introductory classes in physics, chemistry, and biology. … it’s so pervasive that it doesn’t seem like philosophy at all. Rather people think it’s just ‘what science says.’” (ch1/p4). The obviousness of our conscious awareness plus the pervasiveness of its devaluing combine to obscure the seriousness of its omission in the scientific community. In fact, the omission is so ubiquitous that convincing others it exists is a challenge. Even my faculty study group colleagues (in math, engineering, astronomy) with whom I read this book had a hard time accepting the overall argument. They didn’t much care that they were purveyors of the Blind Spot. Although they found it interesting, they didn’t particularly see why it’s important or why it’s a problem.
And why is it a problem? After identifying the main characteristics and causes of the Blind Spot (chapters 1-2), then going through the many ways the Blind Spot appears in the physical, biological, psycho-social, and cognitive sciences (chapters 3-8), in the last chapter 9, the authors return to look at problems our Blind Spot-addled civilization has, in concert with global capitalism, helped create a set of crises that are leading us to eco- and social system destabilization and collapse: climate change, global pandemics, and runaway technology. What is now called the Anthropocene, the geologic era of humanity and the sixth great extinction, is “a massive manifestation of the Blind Spot. It’s the result of one particular and very recent version of the human civilizational project: the originally modern European, and now transnational, scientific project of objectifying the world through scientific materialism” (9/226). As 20th century science and technology evolved from an enabling to a regulating enterprise, its authority became distrusted and challenged. For all its astonishing success, contemporary science has not only become perceived as arrogant and inhuman but has also suffered postmodern challenges to its authority and credibility, challenges which have devolved into post-truth science denial, the masquerading of pseudo-sciences, and rampant conspiracy mongering. As a pervasive characteristic of the scientific enterprise, the Blind Spot was instrumental in birthing these problems.
Being led to the brink of collapse has in the past few decades spawned the rise of new scientific perspectives that promise to move us beyond Blind Spot metaphysics. In the final chapter and Afterword, the authors discuss the emergence of a suite of new approaches and conceptual tools that evolved out of postwar systems theory called Earth Systems Science (9/233-239) which sees the Earth as a coupled set of systems constituting the atmosphere, hydrosphere, cryosphere, lithosphere, and biosphere – interlocking systems forming an integrated whole. They explain,
The constellation of new scientific disciplines that form the foundation for the current understanding of Earth and the biosphere are significant in relation to the Blind Spot. Network theory, cybernetics, dynamical systems theory, chaos theory; taken separately, each of these fields challenges different aspects of the Blind Spot’s metaphysical assumptions about life, the world, and experience. Taken together in what is called complex systems theory, they represent the emergence of a new way of seeing how science functions, what it describes, and, most importantly, how it relates to human experience (9/226).Some of these new disciplines explicitly incorporate human experience. Now three to four decades old, a promising area of research in this regard is embodied mind cognitive science, discussed numerous times in the book as enactive cognitive science. “For enactive cognitive science, the living body is the critical node of cognition, and the body’s key attribute is being self-individuating. The living body, through the mutual enabling of its parts, makes itself distinct from its environment into a world of relevance. Cognition is sensemaking, to use an enactive slogan” (7/179). But, the authors warn, even cognitive science stands at a crossroads that could follow a path that reinforces the Blind Spot, e.g. neuronal computationalism, or a path that can help us move beyond it, e.g. embodied mind approaches.
Although the authors do a bang-up job diagnosing Blind Spot thinking and how it’s woven into all sectors of science and culture, they offer little in the way of a solution or prescription to its undoing other than presenting new approaches in science. They’re clear that at the core of the Blind Spot is a set of metaphysical commitments (list below) that are in the process of being challenged by these new approaches but, even though they present a number of best practices for overcoming Blind Spot beliefs, they stop short of describing what alternative metaphysical commitments might look like. In the Afterword they write: “Although we’ve pointed to many scientific ideas that go beyond the Blind Spot, we have not tried to formulate a comprehensive scientific or philosophical perspective to replace it” (9/252).
Nevertheless, these new sciences have already shown us what some of these new philosophical perspectives look like. They have done this by granting ontological validity to what could be called postmodern commitments wherein equal reality status is given to wholeness, relationality, organization, situatedness, embodiment, contextuality, complexity, and emergence. Together these form a thoroughgoing this-world approach where mind and consciousness are the natural interiors of complex self-organized systems, aka organisms. On this view organization and relations have equal reality status as physical objects – greater exterior complexity and greater interior sentience and mental capacity go hand in hand. Here, consciousness, the mind, and experience are no more than the interior aspects of the evolutionary coupling of organisms and their environments – brain-in-body-in-environment. We can see, for example, the 4E approach in cognitive science (embedded, embodied, extended, enactive) presents a major challenge to Blind Spot computational-representational views of the mind as being a “brainbound” neural computer. 4E cognitive science also directly incorporates experience through research that tracks both 1st and 3rd-person phenomena, bringing phenomenology into a biological context (neuro-phenomenology). But, as significant as they are, these new postmodern commitments don’t go far enough.
In the final analysis, neither inside nor outside, neither whole nor part, subject nor object, nature nor mind, one nor many can be primary. The whole notion of primary ontology, an assumption lurking within all Blind Spot thinking, is itself bankrupt. Thus, what is most sorely needed to overcome Blind Spot metaphysics is a nondual or complementarity metaphysics, a paradoxical both/and-neither/nor perspective where all conceptual pairs are understood as necessarily mutually generative and referencing. Chinese and Indian philosophy both figured this out long ago, the inherent nondual, paradoxical nature of the human mind. Apart from a few rebel thinkers, the West, however, seems eternally mired in dualistic thinking. How can there be singular without plural? What front exists without a back? How can outside have any meaning by itself? What could presence possibly mean without absence? Or same without different? Author Evan Thompson is one among many who have been actively participating in cross-cultural philosophical dialogues with Buddhists and other philosophers of nonduality to bring these perspectives into embodied mind research and complexity science. Formulating a comprehensive philosophy of science with nonduality at its core would sound the final death knell to Blind Spot metaphysics.
One last example: The standard Blind Spot argument for the primacy of objective physical reality is evolution – particles and the elements, basic molecules, and galaxies, stars, planets had to exist prior to the emergence of life which requires many billions of years of biochemical evolution to produce higher forms of sentient awareness. True enough. But the question “at what point does interiority emerge” is a misguided question because it assumes Blind Spot objectivism, i.e. that interiority is dependent on exteriority, that objectivity precedes and gives rise to subjectivity. Only a nondual metaphysics in which complementarity is primary can objective-only Blind Spot fundamentalism be avoided. On this view, interiority “goes all the way down” to the most basic, earliest levels of objective material organization such that galaxies, stars, planets, atoms, molecules themselves have proto-interiority – not sentience, not consciousness, not mind, but interiority that has the potential to develop as it organizes into more complex forms which give rise to sentience. Reactivity of basic elements and molecules could be understood as a form of proto-sentience.
To finish is chapter one’s list of primary assumptions of Blind Spot thinking followed by recommended books on the new sciences challenging these assumptions.
Six Assumptions of Blind Spot Metaphysics: pervasive, overlapping-interlocking belief structures that together make it impossible to take interior subjectivity seriously:
1-The bifurcation of nature: Otherwise known as the mind/nature-appearance/reality split, this is our belief in the division between the reality of the external world -vs its subjective appearances. Examples: 1) Color is an illusion, not part of the real world; 2) Your thoughts and feelings are simply neuronal computations.
2-Reductionism: The belief that what’s most real and most fundamental, are the smallest entities – cells more fundamental than organisms, molecules more fundamental than cells, then on down to simpler molecules, to atoms, and finally to elementary particles. “Reductionism is summed up in the quip: ‘Biologists defer to chemists, who defer to physicists, who defer to mathematicians, who defer to God” (1/6).
3-Objectivism This is science’s attempt to establish a transcendent “God’s eye” view wherein only objects are real. Such a “view from nowhere” gives ontological primacy to 3rd-person objects. This arguably self-refuting view is mind/subject-independent, meaning that, for science, what is real is outside and apart from any human perspective. One may wonder, how can “entities” with “properties” “exist” without some mind or experience being involved? Are scientists experienceless zombies doing research?
4-Physicalism: Closely related to objectivism is physicalism, also known as materialism. This is the notion that physical facts alone exhaust reality. Physicalism is not a scientific theory but a metaphysical thesis, a philosophical interpretation of physics and science in general (1/7).
5-Reification of mathematical entities: Reify means to make real or concrete and is the view that mathematical entities are real, exist “out there” independently of us, and are what the universe is truly is: laws, equations, constants, models. Here mathematical constructs are more real than your subjective thoughts and feelings.
6-Experience is epiphenomenal: This is the view that mental events are caused by physical events in the brain but have no effects upon any physical events; “Consciousness is the brain’s user illusion.”
BEYOND THE BLIND SPOT Book Recommendations
Embodied Mind and 4E Cognitive Science
1. Mind in Life
2. Radical Embodied Cognitive Science
3. The Oxford Handbook of 4E Cognition
Consciousness Studies and 1st-Person Approaches
4. The View from Within
5. Understanding Consciousness
Beware of Blind Spot views of mind in cognitive science which show up in the form of representationalism, neuronal computationalism, brainbound-internalist models, and the various futile attempts to make consciousness into a 3rd-person objective thing – quantum gaps, information fields – attempting to overcome “the hard problem” of consciousness, a problem which is a classic symptom of Blind Spot metaphysics.
Complexity, Systems, and Chaos theories
6. Complexity: A Guided Tour
7. Simply Complexity
Systems and complexity theory are the antidotes to Blind Spot reductionism and the primacy of the small. They give primacy instead to relationality, context, and wholeness.
Non-Equilibrium Energy Flow Systems
8. Into the Cool
9. Order Out of Chaos
10. Sync
Beware here of physics views propounding reductionist reversible-symmetrical time, claiming that the thermodynamic arrow of time is an illusion that organisms have created (e.g., see my review of Rovelli’s The Order of Time).
Origin of Life Research
11. The Vital Question
12. The Origin and Nature of Life on Earth
Beware here of the tyranny of molecular biology and the “replicationist” view of life. The above books instead view energy flow and metabolism as prior to and necessary for replication.
Final Thoughts: The Blind Spot is a worthwhile read, a masterful diagnosis of this deeply ingrained “illness” in our scientific and cultural worldview. But it is not a breezy read in that it demands familiarity with a broad range of issues across science and philosophy from physics and cosmology to biology to consciousness studies. Here three scientists – Frank, an astrophysicist, Gleiser, a theoretical physicist, and Thompson, a philosopher/cognitive scientist, each who cares about science but sees its deleterious effects on itself and society – put forth a timely argument for a new scientific understanding of ourselves in our world.
The Blind Spot is an outstanding presentation of a critical short-sightedness we each carry, one that will have to be healed in the face of the inevitable ecological and climate chaos bearing down upon us. But make no mistake, God’s Eye/Blind Spot metaphysics is fighting to maintain its hegemony against the challenge of the emerging research approaches and disciplines that are forming around postmodern contextuality and situatedness, systems complexity and wholeness, thermodynamics and asymmetrical time, emergence and embodiment, and eventually nondual-complementarity metaphysics.
March 6, 2024
This is a curate's egg - sections are gripping, others rather dull. Overall the writing could be better... but the central message is fascinating and the book gets four stars despite everything because of this.
That central message is that, as the subtitle says, science can't ignore human experience. This is not a cry for 'my truth'. The concept comes from scientists and philosophers of science. Instead it refers to the way that it is very easy to make a handful of mistakes about what we are doing with science, as a result of which most people (including many scientists) totally misunderstand the process and the implications.
At the heart of this is confusing mathematical models with reality. It's all too easy when a mathematical model matches observation well to think of that model and its related concepts as factual. What the authors describe as 'the blind spot' is a combination of a number of such errors. These include what the authors call 'the bifurcation of nature' - splitting between what is based on theory and considered objective and what we actually experience which is seen as second class and subjective. An example they give is the idea espoused by many scientists that colour (as opposed to wavelength of light) is an illusion.
Perhaps the most familiar of the errors is reductionism - considering that if we can break a system down to its most basic elements we can fully understand it from the behaviour of those elements. This entirely misses emergence, complex systems and chaos, not to mention practically any social science. Then there is physicalism (what used to be called materialism, but, as is pointed out the concept of fields in physics, for example, is not material), the reification of mathematical entities and the notion that experience is epiphenomenal. Those last two are where we consider the properties of the universe that can be subjected to mathematics as the only real ones, and where we consider conscious experience to be an unreal construct of computation in the brain and hence worthless scientifically.
This kind of problem in science is related to that uncovered by Sabine Hossenfelder in the (much better written) Lost in Math, but that book is purely about the way that modern physics often builds whole theoretical structures on mathematical models without any great connection to observation and experiment, where more emphasis is given to the 'beauty' of the maths than its relation to reality. And there's also a touch of Kant's concept of the 'Ding an sich' - the unknowable reality of the universe where we can only discover the phenomena it produces. But what's new here is that the blind spot extends to vast swathes of science, where we put far too much emphasis on idealised models that bear only a passing resemblance to reality and take far too little notice of what we actually experience and observe.
To dig a little into my complaint about the writing, by far the best bits were those dealing with time, matter, the cosmos and AI, while the sections on life, Earth science and climate change were particuarly weak. Consciousness was also covered - the content was interesting, but that section was somewhat laboured. I also think the structure of the book could have been better. In essence, it introduces the blind spot and its characteristics (which are all labelled with incomprehensible terminology once we get past the approachable 'blind spot'), then has sections on each of the topics. The trouble with this was that it was quite difficult to keep in mind what something like 'reification of mathematical entities' meant as we went from discipline to discipline. It might have been better to structure the book by the elements of the blind spot and bring in different disciplines to illustrate them instead. There was also rather too much unnecessary history of science, some of which was on slightly dodgy ground, for instance appearing to equate phlogiston (effectively un-oxygen) with caloric (an imagined fluid corresponding to heat).
As mentioned at the beginning, despite some issues, the concept is genuinely important. The authors are not advocating for some fluffy person-centred pseudoscience, but rather for more realism in science that takes in what is happening, rather than just simplified mathematical models and that recognises that experience is an important part of how we should look scientifically at the world.
That central message is that, as the subtitle says, science can't ignore human experience. This is not a cry for 'my truth'. The concept comes from scientists and philosophers of science. Instead it refers to the way that it is very easy to make a handful of mistakes about what we are doing with science, as a result of which most people (including many scientists) totally misunderstand the process and the implications.
At the heart of this is confusing mathematical models with reality. It's all too easy when a mathematical model matches observation well to think of that model and its related concepts as factual. What the authors describe as 'the blind spot' is a combination of a number of such errors. These include what the authors call 'the bifurcation of nature' - splitting between what is based on theory and considered objective and what we actually experience which is seen as second class and subjective. An example they give is the idea espoused by many scientists that colour (as opposed to wavelength of light) is an illusion.
Perhaps the most familiar of the errors is reductionism - considering that if we can break a system down to its most basic elements we can fully understand it from the behaviour of those elements. This entirely misses emergence, complex systems and chaos, not to mention practically any social science. Then there is physicalism (what used to be called materialism, but, as is pointed out the concept of fields in physics, for example, is not material), the reification of mathematical entities and the notion that experience is epiphenomenal. Those last two are where we consider the properties of the universe that can be subjected to mathematics as the only real ones, and where we consider conscious experience to be an unreal construct of computation in the brain and hence worthless scientifically.
This kind of problem in science is related to that uncovered by Sabine Hossenfelder in the (much better written) Lost in Math, but that book is purely about the way that modern physics often builds whole theoretical structures on mathematical models without any great connection to observation and experiment, where more emphasis is given to the 'beauty' of the maths than its relation to reality. And there's also a touch of Kant's concept of the 'Ding an sich' - the unknowable reality of the universe where we can only discover the phenomena it produces. But what's new here is that the blind spot extends to vast swathes of science, where we put far too much emphasis on idealised models that bear only a passing resemblance to reality and take far too little notice of what we actually experience and observe.
To dig a little into my complaint about the writing, by far the best bits were those dealing with time, matter, the cosmos and AI, while the sections on life, Earth science and climate change were particuarly weak. Consciousness was also covered - the content was interesting, but that section was somewhat laboured. I also think the structure of the book could have been better. In essence, it introduces the blind spot and its characteristics (which are all labelled with incomprehensible terminology once we get past the approachable 'blind spot'), then has sections on each of the topics. The trouble with this was that it was quite difficult to keep in mind what something like 'reification of mathematical entities' meant as we went from discipline to discipline. It might have been better to structure the book by the elements of the blind spot and bring in different disciplines to illustrate them instead. There was also rather too much unnecessary history of science, some of which was on slightly dodgy ground, for instance appearing to equate phlogiston (effectively un-oxygen) with caloric (an imagined fluid corresponding to heat).
As mentioned at the beginning, despite some issues, the concept is genuinely important. The authors are not advocating for some fluffy person-centred pseudoscience, but rather for more realism in science that takes in what is happening, rather than just simplified mathematical models and that recognises that experience is an important part of how we should look scientifically at the world.
June 9, 2025
The general premise of the book is worth the read, as it raises well constructed challenges to the foundations of modern scientism. However, it gets bogged down in the academic weeds and caught up in the authors' own scientific and philosophical blind spots, leaving the most thought provoking points short of their logical conclusions. This book could have been more interesting and groundbreaking had the authors only summarized the technical takedowns of individual theories and devoted more attention to bringing their argument full circle by exploring the limits (or loopiness?) of all human knowledge.
The opening chapters lay out an argument that human perspective is at the core of scientific observation but consensus thinking and theorizing tends to overlook humanity's central role. The authors point out how math and science are a theoretical construct developed by humans to observe, describe, and communicate about the physical world. Math and scientific theory are reflections of our experience of the world/universe rather than inherent properties of the world/universe revealed to us. Although the latter perspective is false, it has gained widespread acceptance as modern technology and culture have been built using these incredibly effective descriptive tools (math and science), hence "The Blind Spot". The authors' argument includes well-articulated criteria for identifying how the mathematical language and tools of subjective scientific description are mistaken for objective fact.
The authors then proceed to apply these analytical criteria for in-depth evaluations of the various schools of academic thought underlying the (man-made) scientific disciplines of physics, chemistry, and biology, as well as leading theories of consciousness. Although the fault lines and flaws exposed along the way are legitimate, the repeated exercise is tedious and superfluous. The middle chapters are filled with an exhausting intellectual word-salad attempting to summarize and deconstruct the whole of modern scientific thought through point-counter-point arguments. To a reader outside of academia, the need to identify each theory in each discipline and then pass it through the gauntlet of the authors' premise and criteria seems more like an extension of university faculty room bickering than a revolution in the philosophy of science.
And so, a revolution it is not. The closing chapter touches on the practical implications "the blind spot" has had on culture, economics, and climate change, but only scratches these surfaces. The authors appear to be content pointing fingers and casting stones, albeit in well-mannered end-noted academic terms. Absent are any suggestions of how to move on from "the blind spot" perspective in the philosophies of hard science, or any of the named soft sciences. Perhaps this is because the authors themselves have failed to see and explore the deeper existential implications of their initial premise.
The "blind spot" is not just a wayward turn taken by modern science, it is a symptom of the fundamental limits of human knowledge in general. Early on, and then throughout the book, the authors assert the primacy of "concrete" human experience as the foundation of science that needs to be recognized and built upon. They fail to support or interrogate the "concreteness" assertion. If they had, it would be apparent that human experience is anything but concrete. Experience is fleeting and subjective. It is both unique and ubiquitous. It transcends description by verbal and mathematical language. It is intrinsically tied to consciousness. The authors recognize and explore the inscrutable strange-loop aspects of consciousness in a devoted chapter that outlines the fundamental limitations of conscious experience. They conclude that conscious experience cannot objectively know itself. However, they fail address the Mobius-like loop this creates for their argument that human experience is something concrete that scientific knowledge can based on. It is not.
The opening chapters lay out an argument that human perspective is at the core of scientific observation but consensus thinking and theorizing tends to overlook humanity's central role. The authors point out how math and science are a theoretical construct developed by humans to observe, describe, and communicate about the physical world. Math and scientific theory are reflections of our experience of the world/universe rather than inherent properties of the world/universe revealed to us. Although the latter perspective is false, it has gained widespread acceptance as modern technology and culture have been built using these incredibly effective descriptive tools (math and science), hence "The Blind Spot". The authors' argument includes well-articulated criteria for identifying how the mathematical language and tools of subjective scientific description are mistaken for objective fact.
The authors then proceed to apply these analytical criteria for in-depth evaluations of the various schools of academic thought underlying the (man-made) scientific disciplines of physics, chemistry, and biology, as well as leading theories of consciousness. Although the fault lines and flaws exposed along the way are legitimate, the repeated exercise is tedious and superfluous. The middle chapters are filled with an exhausting intellectual word-salad attempting to summarize and deconstruct the whole of modern scientific thought through point-counter-point arguments. To a reader outside of academia, the need to identify each theory in each discipline and then pass it through the gauntlet of the authors' premise and criteria seems more like an extension of university faculty room bickering than a revolution in the philosophy of science.
And so, a revolution it is not. The closing chapter touches on the practical implications "the blind spot" has had on culture, economics, and climate change, but only scratches these surfaces. The authors appear to be content pointing fingers and casting stones, albeit in well-mannered end-noted academic terms. Absent are any suggestions of how to move on from "the blind spot" perspective in the philosophies of hard science, or any of the named soft sciences. Perhaps this is because the authors themselves have failed to see and explore the deeper existential implications of their initial premise.
The "blind spot" is not just a wayward turn taken by modern science, it is a symptom of the fundamental limits of human knowledge in general. Early on, and then throughout the book, the authors assert the primacy of "concrete" human experience as the foundation of science that needs to be recognized and built upon. They fail to support or interrogate the "concreteness" assertion. If they had, it would be apparent that human experience is anything but concrete. Experience is fleeting and subjective. It is both unique and ubiquitous. It transcends description by verbal and mathematical language. It is intrinsically tied to consciousness. The authors recognize and explore the inscrutable strange-loop aspects of consciousness in a devoted chapter that outlines the fundamental limitations of conscious experience. They conclude that conscious experience cannot objectively know itself. However, they fail address the Mobius-like loop this creates for their argument that human experience is something concrete that scientific knowledge can based on. It is not.
May 14, 2024
This 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.
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.
March 20, 2024
“The Blind Spot: Why Science Cannot Ignore Human Experience,” by astrophysicist Adam Frank and theoretical physicist Marcelo Gleiser, along with cognitive science philosopher Evan Thompson, is an academic exploration of complex subjects written for an educated non-scientist audience. After Gleiser’s intriguing discussion with Robert Kuhn on Closer to Truth, I anticipated an exploration of my favorite topics at the intersection of science, especially physics, and philosophy. I was not disappointed.
The central thesis of the book posits that science has reached an impasse when delving into subjects situated at the fringes of our understanding. This stagnation is primarily attributed to science's failure to acknowledge the significance of subjective human experiences within the explanatory framework embraced by practicing scientists. The authors label this oversight as a metaphysical issue.
Covering a wide array of scientific and philosophical topics, the book's discussions are profound and relevant to its core arguments. As an avid reader of popular science literature, I found the depth of their discussion on physics to be just right—a skillful balance between oversimplification and excessive complexity. The depth and relevance of the information presented make the book a worthwhile investment.
Written in an engaging and accessible style, it attempts to address the “crisis of meaning” in the naturalist worldview. It covers major questions in the philosophy of science, classical and quantum physics, cosmology, consciousness, and Earth science, all while advocating for the restructuring of science's metaphysical deficiencies. They effectively contest our intuitive notions regarding objectivity and reality, as well as its implications for the philosophical underpinnings of science.
Despite its strengths, my primary critique pertains to the authors' own metaphysical stance. While acknowledging the need for a radical reevaluation of science, the authors admit that mental states and subjective experiences elude full comprehension through purely physical processes, hinting at a property dualist viewpoint, which posits that mental and physical properties are distinct yet arise from a single substance, in contrast to substance dualism that holds the mind and body as two separate substances. However, they refrain from examining the implications of substance dualism, as advocated by Descartes, leaving a gap in their argument. Perhaps substance dualism was deemed uncomfortably close to spiritual or theological domains, rendering it an unacceptable subject of inquiry. From my perspective, the authors' fundamental philosophical commitments to naturalism constrained their ability to explore the full range of potential solutions. It would have been beneficial if they had clarified the rationale behind imposing such limitations on their explanatory framework.
Furthermore, the book leans heavily towards critiquing the current state of science's metaphysics, while lacking a proactive contribution towards resolving the identified issues. While the arguments are compelling and well-developed, the absence of constructive suggestions is notable. The authors themselves acknowledge this shortfall in the afterword.
Despite these critiques, I thoroughly recommend "The Blind Spot" and rate it 4 out of 5 stars for its captivating, informative, and meticulously researched content. They creatively strive to align science with a more optimal and credible worldview; however, the authors' philosophical commitments limit the scope of their inquiry.
The central thesis of the book posits that science has reached an impasse when delving into subjects situated at the fringes of our understanding. This stagnation is primarily attributed to science's failure to acknowledge the significance of subjective human experiences within the explanatory framework embraced by practicing scientists. The authors label this oversight as a metaphysical issue.
Covering a wide array of scientific and philosophical topics, the book's discussions are profound and relevant to its core arguments. As an avid reader of popular science literature, I found the depth of their discussion on physics to be just right—a skillful balance between oversimplification and excessive complexity. The depth and relevance of the information presented make the book a worthwhile investment.
Written in an engaging and accessible style, it attempts to address the “crisis of meaning” in the naturalist worldview. It covers major questions in the philosophy of science, classical and quantum physics, cosmology, consciousness, and Earth science, all while advocating for the restructuring of science's metaphysical deficiencies. They effectively contest our intuitive notions regarding objectivity and reality, as well as its implications for the philosophical underpinnings of science.
Despite its strengths, my primary critique pertains to the authors' own metaphysical stance. While acknowledging the need for a radical reevaluation of science, the authors admit that mental states and subjective experiences elude full comprehension through purely physical processes, hinting at a property dualist viewpoint, which posits that mental and physical properties are distinct yet arise from a single substance, in contrast to substance dualism that holds the mind and body as two separate substances. However, they refrain from examining the implications of substance dualism, as advocated by Descartes, leaving a gap in their argument. Perhaps substance dualism was deemed uncomfortably close to spiritual or theological domains, rendering it an unacceptable subject of inquiry. From my perspective, the authors' fundamental philosophical commitments to naturalism constrained their ability to explore the full range of potential solutions. It would have been beneficial if they had clarified the rationale behind imposing such limitations on their explanatory framework.
Furthermore, the book leans heavily towards critiquing the current state of science's metaphysics, while lacking a proactive contribution towards resolving the identified issues. While the arguments are compelling and well-developed, the absence of constructive suggestions is notable. The authors themselves acknowledge this shortfall in the afterword.
Despite these critiques, I thoroughly recommend "The Blind Spot" and rate it 4 out of 5 stars for its captivating, informative, and meticulously researched content. They creatively strive to align science with a more optimal and credible worldview; however, the authors' philosophical commitments limit the scope of their inquiry.
February 7, 2025
This book contains a whole lot of interesting information about the current state of physics.
However, for me, the book’s thesis never quite came into focus. It seemed to be based on the fact that physics, in describing the world, has gone far beyond what we humans can observe and experience with our sensory organs. The authors are concerned that this is removing science and the world from our immediate ken, causing a blind spot: science is outside human experience, divorcing the average human from science, and science from the problems of the world. One example given is that the average human regards matter as something with weight, shape, color, perhaps odor, while physicists see matter as a collection of tiny subatomic particles and electro-magnetic fields, which elude human perception.
The societal gap between science and the humanities has been a well-known situation for more than half a century. Yet on the other hand, we have known far longer, at least since Plato, that human perceptions are not direct observations but filtered through sense organs, nerve channels, and a lot of brain editing. So it makes sense that scientists, who are trying to discover the more factual nature of the world and universe, will come up with answers that do not fit exactly, or even closely, with our experiential perceptions. In other words, I’m not so sure this is a “blind spot” rather than a fact of life that science needs to work around. Let’s not forget that vaccines were developed before we could see bacteria and viruses.
The authors make a very good point about some scientists extrapolating mathematical results from collider experiments and assuming these same results would apply to significantly larger-scale phenomena such as black holes, which we have never gotten anywhere close to, and the big bang, which happened around 14 billion years ago, if in fact that is what happened. I agree that we must live in the world we experience through our perceptions. But that is not our only reality. Science offers us an often strange yet useful and possibly more genuine world to contemplate.
The authors also do a good job of talking about AI and stressing the point that true intelligence and wisdom are not a matter of just having huge amounts of organized information but of having experience in dealing with situations in one’s environment.
The organization and writing could be better. There’s a lot of scientific and philosophical jargon, some of it undefined and/or, it seemed to me, gratuitous. There are frequent references to previous or later chapters, which interrupt the flow of information and understanding. These all may make the book seem seriously scientific, but for a general-public release, communicating well to nonprofessional readers is probably more important. This also brings to mind the famous Einstein quote, “If you can't explain it simply, you don't understand it well enough.”
The authors are onto something here, but I don’t quite get it, and I’m not sure they’ve gotten a firm grip on it either.
However, for me, the book’s thesis never quite came into focus. It seemed to be based on the fact that physics, in describing the world, has gone far beyond what we humans can observe and experience with our sensory organs. The authors are concerned that this is removing science and the world from our immediate ken, causing a blind spot: science is outside human experience, divorcing the average human from science, and science from the problems of the world. One example given is that the average human regards matter as something with weight, shape, color, perhaps odor, while physicists see matter as a collection of tiny subatomic particles and electro-magnetic fields, which elude human perception.
The societal gap between science and the humanities has been a well-known situation for more than half a century. Yet on the other hand, we have known far longer, at least since Plato, that human perceptions are not direct observations but filtered through sense organs, nerve channels, and a lot of brain editing. So it makes sense that scientists, who are trying to discover the more factual nature of the world and universe, will come up with answers that do not fit exactly, or even closely, with our experiential perceptions. In other words, I’m not so sure this is a “blind spot” rather than a fact of life that science needs to work around. Let’s not forget that vaccines were developed before we could see bacteria and viruses.
The authors make a very good point about some scientists extrapolating mathematical results from collider experiments and assuming these same results would apply to significantly larger-scale phenomena such as black holes, which we have never gotten anywhere close to, and the big bang, which happened around 14 billion years ago, if in fact that is what happened. I agree that we must live in the world we experience through our perceptions. But that is not our only reality. Science offers us an often strange yet useful and possibly more genuine world to contemplate.
The authors also do a good job of talking about AI and stressing the point that true intelligence and wisdom are not a matter of just having huge amounts of organized information but of having experience in dealing with situations in one’s environment.
The organization and writing could be better. There’s a lot of scientific and philosophical jargon, some of it undefined and/or, it seemed to me, gratuitous. There are frequent references to previous or later chapters, which interrupt the flow of information and understanding. These all may make the book seem seriously scientific, but for a general-public release, communicating well to nonprofessional readers is probably more important. This also brings to mind the famous Einstein quote, “If you can't explain it simply, you don't understand it well enough.”
The authors are onto something here, but I don’t quite get it, and I’m not sure they’ve gotten a firm grip on it either.
May 25, 2024
This book is an excellent collaboration which developed from conversations that the three authors, each with particular expertise in separate subjects, had over their recognition of the extreme existential danger humanity has brought about for the future of civilization. They determined that the history of scientific inquiry has generated a number of misconceptions which have become embedded in the practice of science, and in this way created a lethal "blind spot"to understanding the real impacts of our so called 'progress' as a species. Specifically, they point to the impending catastrophe of climate change and the likely collapse of the biological systems that support our survival.
The writing is uniformly engaging and coherent, making for a consistent voice across all the chapters, despite the input from three very differently qualified authors. They speak as one, and the news is not good. But at the same time their effort has made, for the first time, a daring analysis of
this time in our history when a complete reordering of our purpose and direction must be implemented. Needless to say, this dramatic of a change will be challenged and resisted on every point. Given the speed of events unfolding now, this book will most likely be simply ignored, completing the end of the human story.
Bleak as this may be, it must be seen as the threshold of something possibly greater. That such self realization could emerge at so fundamental a level, brought forward by our inability to penetrate basic questions with the tools we have so far created, may signify a true step forward in our evolution.
May 25, 2025
While I agree with the central premise of The Blind Spot—that phenomenology should be integrated into science—the authors did not need 250 pages to make this point. The book would have been stronger if it had laid out a range of arguments for and against this thesis, especially since it offers no fundamentally new ideas.
Much of the length is due to the authors’ tendency to overexplain concepts that could be conveyed in less than half the space. The examples chosen are often weak. For instance, their attempt to define life by comparing it to fire is poorly reasoned. They argue that bacteria are living because they possess agency: they respond to a gradient of sucrose, which "means" food to them. This agency and autonomy are attributed to a basic algorithm—random movement until food is detected, after which the gradient is followed.
But by the same logic, fire too could be said to have agency and autonomy. It spreads randomly until it encounters fuel, then follows the "gradient" of combustible material. While fire lacks a membrane and instead expands its volume, its behavior is functionally similar. Yet the authors dismiss this comparison without addressing its implications.
Finally, the authors criticize science for confusing the map with the territory. One consequence of this confusion, they argue, is the climate crisis. Ironically, climate science often falls into the very traps identified in the book: it is heavily model-based, and those models are both complex and insufficiently sophisticated to produce accurate predictions. This critique is epistemological and applies regardless of your opinions on the matter of the climate crisis.
Much of the length is due to the authors’ tendency to overexplain concepts that could be conveyed in less than half the space. The examples chosen are often weak. For instance, their attempt to define life by comparing it to fire is poorly reasoned. They argue that bacteria are living because they possess agency: they respond to a gradient of sucrose, which "means" food to them. This agency and autonomy are attributed to a basic algorithm—random movement until food is detected, after which the gradient is followed.
But by the same logic, fire too could be said to have agency and autonomy. It spreads randomly until it encounters fuel, then follows the "gradient" of combustible material. While fire lacks a membrane and instead expands its volume, its behavior is functionally similar. Yet the authors dismiss this comparison without addressing its implications.
Finally, the authors criticize science for confusing the map with the territory. One consequence of this confusion, they argue, is the climate crisis. Ironically, climate science often falls into the very traps identified in the book: it is heavily model-based, and those models are both complex and insufficiently sophisticated to produce accurate predictions. This critique is epistemological and applies regardless of your opinions on the matter of the climate crisis.
November 2, 2024
I'd happily recommend this book to anyone. That said, if you (1) are concerned about the future of human civilization, (2) know what "the hard problem of consciousness" is, and (3) have been irritated by people treating useful theoretical models as "ultimate reality", this book is definitely for you.
Note on language/style
This is a book-length philosophical polemic. It does not aim to entertain the reader or engage them in a popular-science kind of way. It does, however, lay out its arguments in relatively plain language (at least as plain as the subject matter allows) and provides explicit definitions/explanations of the more technical concepts.
Personal highlights
The chapter on how "the blind spot" manifests itself in consciousness research is outstanding.
Also, I was very happy to see Volodymyr/Vladimir Vernadsky recognized for what he was: a true scientific trailblazer who anticipated the Gaia hypothesis as well as the Anthropocene paradigm by several decades.
Note on language/style
This is a book-length philosophical polemic. It does not aim to entertain the reader or engage them in a popular-science kind of way. It does, however, lay out its arguments in relatively plain language (at least as plain as the subject matter allows) and provides explicit definitions/explanations of the more technical concepts.
Personal highlights
The chapter on how "the blind spot" manifests itself in consciousness research is outstanding.
Also, I was very happy to see Volodymyr/Vladimir Vernadsky recognized for what he was: a true scientific trailblazer who anticipated the Gaia hypothesis as well as the Anthropocene paradigm by several decades.
August 20, 2024
C.P. Snow, in 1959, offered us a lecture titled "The Two Cultures". It is short enough, trenchant enough, and good enough to be satisfying.
"The Blind Spot", is a dazzling display of erudition across centuries and disciplines. But I kept thinking about Snow and having a feeling I was in a review course for The Great Books. Mortimer Adler wrote "How to Read a Book" and either pontificated himself or quoted someone (Ezra Pound?), saying one should put as much effort into reading a book as the author did in writing it. Certainly, I have not done that with this tome, as the three writers have done a yeoman's job. I simply can't say I was wise to read it.
"The Blind Spot", is a dazzling display of erudition across centuries and disciplines. But I kept thinking about Snow and having a feeling I was in a review course for The Great Books. Mortimer Adler wrote "How to Read a Book" and either pontificated himself or quoted someone (Ezra Pound?), saying one should put as much effort into reading a book as the author did in writing it. Certainly, I have not done that with this tome, as the three writers have done a yeoman's job. I simply can't say I was wise to read it.
October 7, 2025
The premise of the book is extremely relevant and very well argued. I’ve read works by each of the three authors individually, but this joint effort struggles somewhat with consistency and writing style. The first part—on Time, Quantum Physics, and Cosmology—is by far the strongest and most engaging. Several of the later chapters felt rather dull and unoriginal, particularly Chapter 9. I realize this might sound more like a three-star review, but the central idea is powerful enough to make up for its shortcomings.
November 29, 2025
I didn't finish the book, made it 3/5 of the way. I simply could not understand the author's point. They seem to be saying that physics only provide models of the world and not real descriptions of how the world actually is. But that is a lot of pages to say that in and they never quite come out and say that so explicitly. I think I must be missing the point.
November 13, 2024
The thesis of this book is very interesting and well argued for (using different branches of science). I am not giving it 5 stars because it was quite difficult to read (some pictures would have been great).
Want to read
February 21, 2025I added this book to my shelves because its claim is intriguing even though it may not be true. I always admired those who question the orthodox views and methods of any intellectual subject. The authors of this book seem to be one of them.
April 29, 2024
RK AUDIBLE
September 26, 2024
While the thesis of the book is relevant and has been well developed, I found the writing style too dry for a public interest book.
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