## Metadata - Author: [[Adam Frank, Marcelo Gleiser, and Evan Thompson]] - Full Title: The Blind Spot - Category: #books ## Highlights - Hot and cold are concrete; temperature is abstract. Better yet, hot and cold are relatively more concrete, and temperature is relatively more abstract, because to single out hot and cold from among the myriad deliverances of sensation and perception is already to abstract from the flux of events. That’s why we say colloquially that the more you focus on being hot, the hotter you will feel. The beauty and power of science are that it enables us to intensify, prolong, and refine the abstraction already begun by sense perception, using the tools of logic, mathematics, and controlled experimentation in the scientific workshop. ([Location 725](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0C76Z6SNM&location=725)) - Descartes created a formalism for representing the space through which motion occurs. In his schema, space was separated into three orthogonal directions, which could be thought of as breadth, width, and height. Each direction was represented as a line—an axis—delineated with coordinate markings: x for breadth, y for width, and z for height. Thus, every point in space could be labeled with a triplet of numbers (x,y,z) that gave the point’s coordinates. It was a potent abstraction. Using this address system for space, Descartes provided the means for representing geometric constructions (lines, curves, surfaces, solids) in terms of functions of the coordinates: f(x,y,z). All future progress in classical mechanics would rest on this abstract method for representing space and the changes occurring within it. By so closely linking the experienced space of everyday life with the abstracted space of this address system, Descartes’ method established a foundational image for the reification of mathematics. Here was a mathematical formalism that lifted the rooms and roads, boxes and balls of daily life into a higher, perfect realization in pure abstraction. But it was also abstraction with tangible power, enabling workshop constructions (a theory of force and motion) to be put to work in the world outside the workshop in the form of powerful new technologies (such as more accurate canons). ([Location 1009](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0C76Z6SNM&location=1009)) - It is noteworthy that the military’s initial funding of climate-related science in the 1950s and 1960s gave the nascent field the jump-start it required to begin building a global view of global climate dynamics. Camp Century, a nuclear-powered military base established high on the Greenland ice sheet, was one potent example of these projects. It was there that the first deep ice core drilling operations began. By recovering ancient water from almost a mile below the ice sheet’s surface, the planet’s climate history over the last twelve thousand years was recovered. Recorded in those ice cores was a detailed view of the end of the last ice age and the surprisingly rapid climate change that accompanied it. The emerging recognition that Earth’s global climate conditions could change dramatically on timescales of centuries or even decades would come to haunt the emerging field. ([Location 4766](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0C76Z6SNM&location=4766)) - Science strives to be a self-correcting narrative built from a communal, open-ended, inquiry-focused dialogue with experience. It cannot be bound by the philosophical preferences of its practitioners. As the scientific workshop provides new tools for enlarging experience, science responds by opening up new pathways for its own narratives. Thus, the map is not only extended but also redrawn with new keys and symbols to represent newfound aspects of nature. ([Location 4995](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0C76Z6SNM&location=4995)) - Complex systems can be described as coevolving multilayer networks. Unpacking this description will show how the perspectives embodied in complex systems theory differ from those of classical physics (from which the Blind Spot metaphysics was born). ([Location 5009](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0C76Z6SNM&location=5009)) - Nature allows for, indeed generates, the emergence of novelty, as the coevolution of systems and environments continually opens new futures in the adjacent possible. Whitehead had already discerned this conception when he wrote, “Nature is never complete. It is always passing beyond itself. This is the creative advance of nature.” ([Location 5035](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0C76Z6SNM&location=5035)) - Before digital computers, the mathematics that could be brought to bear on system models was composed, for the most part, of linear differential equations. Linear systems are ones in which there is a direct proportion between changes in the inputs and changes in the output. Most of the systems that science studies, however, are nonlinear. Indeed, mathematical physicist Stanislaw Ulam is said to have remarked, “Using a term like nonlinear science is like referring to the bulk of zoology as the study of non-elephant animals.” ([Location 5067](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0C76Z6SNM&location=5067))