*Adam Frank, Marcelo Gleiser, Evan Thompson* # Progressive Summary Aspects of science's blind spots: - reification of mathematical concepts - surreptitious substitution - fallacy of misplaced concreteness - amnesia of experience # Definitions # Chapter Notes ## An Introduction to the Blind Spot A new worldview arose in the 17th century which became dominant by the 19th century. According to this worldview, "nature is nothing but shifting spatiotemporal arrangements of fundamental physical entities." There is no room for subjective experience. However, we can only know things from inside our experience. This results in a meaning crisis. > In short, although we have created the most powerful and successful form of objective knowledge of all time, we lack a comparable understanding of ourselves as knowers. We have the best maps we’ve ever made, but we’ve forgotten to take account of the map makers. Unless we change how we navigate, we’re bound to head deeper into peril and confusion. There are 3 main responses to the meaning crisis: - scientific triumphalism - doubling down on science as the single source of truth - science denialism and post-modernism - outright rejection of science - new age movement - uses fringe science or pseudoscience to justify wishful thinking > 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 blind spot lies at the heart of our visual field and makes seeing possible. In the visual blind spot sits the optic nerve; in the scientific blind spot sits direct experience—that by which anything appears, shows up, or becomes available to us. It is a precondition of observation, investigation, exploration, measurement, and justification. Things appear and become available thanks to our bodies and their feeling and perceiving capacities. Direct experience is bodily experience. > Direct experience precedes 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. > Philosophers have offered various conceptions of direct experience. William James, the father of American psychology and one of the most influential American philosophers of the nineteenth century, emphasized “pure experience,” which he described as “the original flux of life before reflexion has categorized it.” A little earlier, Bergson wrote about the experience of “duration,” the immediate conscious intuition of passage or flow. The twentieth-century Japanese philosopher Kitarō Nishida drew from Bergson and James but revised their ideas in light of Buddhist philosophy and his experience of Zen meditation practice. Nishida described pure experience as direct experience unmediated by the division between subject and object. Other philosophers have used words like intuition, feeling, and the phenomenal field to get at this kind of immediate experience or mode of presence. > Direct experience isn’t simple and instantaneous; it’s complex and has durational rhythms. Crucially, it’s prior to explicit knowledge. Knowing presupposes experiencing, and you can’t derive experience just from episodes of knowing. *Your being is always more than what you know*. > Our central concern will always be the dependence of science on experience, a dependence that is far richer and more complex than the obvious dependence of science on *observers and experiments*. An example of this is the phenomenon of temperature. > The starting point for creating thermometry (the measurement of temperature) was the bodily sensations of hot and cold. Scientists had to assume that our bodily experience is valid and could be communicated to others; otherwise they would have had no basis for building scientific knowledge. They noticed that sensations of hot and cold correlate with changes in the volume of fluids (liquids expand with heat), and they used sealed glass tubes filled partway with liquids as measuring devices for ordering experiences (“phenomena”) as hotter versus colder. These tools enabled them to determine that certain phenomena, like the boiling point of water, were constant enough that they could be used as fixed points for building thermometers with numerical scales. > But once they had invented thermometers, and therefore the concept of temperature, scientists discovered that the boiling and freezing points of water weren’t as precisely fixed in the natural world as they initially thought. High on a mountain, for example, water boils at a lower temperature than at sea level. This discovery meant that scientists had to intervene and control the context of their measurements as much as possible by manufacturing true fixed points in highly artificial and controlled settings. This effort required building special places for sequestering the phenomena they were investigating. The aspiring practitioners of thermometry had to build what philosopher of science Robert Crease calls “the workshop,” the communal scientific infrastructure required for creating new precise experiences along with the tools for manipulating, investigating, and communicating them. > Once scientists had created the workshop, they used its tools to redefine phenomena in ways increasingly removed from direct experience. The invention of thermometry happened in the absence of any established theory of temperature. But once the ability to measure temperature had been developed, nineteenth-century scientists took the next step and began formulating the abstract theory known as classical thermodynamics. Then, as if pulling themselves up by their own bootstraps, they used thermodynamics to define temperature even more abstractly. Now, temperature could be defined without referring to the properties of any particular substance. Thermodynamics even allowed for a definition of something physically impossible—absolute zero, the ideal limit of temperature at which a thermodynamic system has no energy. Later in the nineteenth century, when physicists devised statistical mechanics, another step in abstraction was taken as thermodynamic temperature was defined in microphysical terms as the average motion of molecules or atoms. > The Blind Spot arrives when we think that thermodynamic temperature is more fundamental than the bodily experience of hot and cold. This happens when we get so caught up in the ascending spiral of abstraction and idealization that we lose sight of the concrete, bodily experiences that anchor the abstractions and remain necessary for them to be meaningful. The advance and success of science convinced us to downplay experience and give pride of place to mathematical physics. > Concrete experience always overflows abstract and idealized scientific representations of phenomena. There is always more to experience than scientific descriptions can corral. Even the “objective observers” privileged by the scientific worldview over real human beings are themselves abstractions. [Chang 2004 - Inventing temperature: measurement and scientific progress](zotero://select/items/1_6C2WZ3GS) [Crease 2019 - The Workshop and the World: What Ten Thinkers Can Teach Us about Science and Authority](zotero://select/items/1_DKB7ZELW) ## 1 - The Surreptitious Substitution Edmund Husserl's final book is called *The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology*. > Husserl believed that “Western,” particularly European, civilization had lost its way. He traced the deep roots of the “crisis of European humanity” to a failure of reason and a fundamental misunderstanding of the meaning of modern science. The confusion was centuries in the making. Science itself, the actual practice of scientists, was not in crisis. On the contrary, science was tremendously successful. Instead, the crisis arose from the meaning that had become attached to science. A particular worldview had been grafted onto science, the worldview we are calling the Blind Spot. The dominant philosophical conception of science led to elevating mathematical abstractions as what is truly real and to devaluing the world of immediate experience, which Husserl called the “life-world.” He called the elevation of mathematical constructs like that of temperature to the status of fundamental reality "the surreptitious substitution." > Although the Blind Spot arises from and expresses a particular philosophical viewpoint, it isn’t a theory. Instead, it’s a broad perspective that encompasses many different problematic theories and ideas. These include opposed positions on various scientific and philosophical issues, so the ideas and theories it embraces don’t always have to be consistent with each other. Main tenets: - The bifurcation of nature. *Colour is an illusion, not part of the real world.* Nature is divided into what exists externally and objectively, and what is mere subjective experience. - Reductionism. *Elementary particles are the fundamental building blocks of matter and everything in the universe reduces to them.* - Smallism (ontology)- Small things and their properties are more fundamental than the large things they constitute. People are more fundamental than the social groups they compose, cells are more fundamental than the people they compose, molecules are more fundamental than the cells they compose, atoms are more fundamental than the molecules they compose, and, finally, elementary particles are more fundamental than anything else. - Microreduction (epistemology) - Preferred method of explaining a system is breaking it up into its elements and explaining the properties of the whole in terms of the properties of the parts - Objectivism. *Science strives to attain a God's-eye view of reality as a whole.* - Physicalism. *Everything that exists is physical.* Materialism was the older term for this. But physicists recognise fields and forces, which are physical, but not material. - Reification of mathematical entities. *Mathematics is the language of nature.* - Experience is epiphenomenal. *Consciousness is the brain's user illusion.* This list isn’t meant to be exhaustive or definitive. These ideas are neither individually necessary nor jointly sufficient for the Blind Spot. ## 9 - Earth ### Blind spot in economics Starting in the 18th-century, numbers and quantity started entering into political discussions. This matched the rise of industrialisation. Neoclassical economics is the economic equivalent of the Standard Model in physics. The inability of neoclassical economics to recognise the biosphere's existence is its most significant blind spot. Environmental economics and ecological economics are attempts to rectify this. William Nordhaus, who was given the Nobel prize in economics in 2018, applied neoclassical economics to the climate. He concluded that 3.5° warming was optimal for the economy based on his models. ### Complex systems are coevolving multilayer networks To unpack this, we need to look at the following aspects individually. #### Coevolution Physics and chemistry studies systems by establishing boundary conditions. In physics, "complexity" is handled by statistical mechanics, which only studies systems with ergodicity. This means that all possible states of a closed system are explored and assigned a probabilistic value. But in biology, systems are evolutionary, which means that their trajectories are path-dependent. Stuart Kauffman uses the term "adjacent possible" to describe this. The states that are possible are dependent on the past history of the system. Whitehead captured this with the statement: “Nature is never complete. It is always passing beyond itself. This is the creative advance of nature.” ### Networks # Quotes # References