Rating: ⭐️⭐️
Review
The book starts with an important claim, but it quickly falls in a repetitive and boring spiral, so I simply skimmed the last chapter, out of boredom and nausea. Let’s start with a fact:if a book repeats phrases like “the reification of mathematical structures”, or “the epistemic scoping of ontology”, it is not focused on a wide audience, so this is hard to read and I’m not sure I get all the messages anyways.
The good part includes a critique to the standard way of science, compartmentalized, where the mathematical models are considered more real than reality, where reductionism is king. This is true for a lot of fields, including physics and economics. The authors define “The Blind Spot” as this division between human experience and physical reality, this reductionism, etc.
Where the authors fail miserably is trying to convince that (1) The Blind Spot has been historically such a big problem and (2) what is the solution today. For the first part, the book repeats that the scientific efforts of the last 4 centuries has been spectacular… if that is the case, then why is the Blind Spot a problem? For a scientist in the XIX century working on electricity, this Blind Spot is non-existent and/or not important at all. If the results of my experiments are well aligned with mathematical abstractions that described them, why shouldn’t I believe that these mathematical abstractions aren’t the fundamental reality?. I think the Blind Spot does make sense with the advent of Relativity, Quantum Mechanics and other disciplines that appeared later, but I don’t think it has been such as big deal before.
The second part (and the most infuriating for me), is that after a very, very long discussion on a broad number of topics, from cosmology, to biology to cognitive science and phenomenology, there is actually very little value on how to move away from the Blind Spot: Like an art critic, the authors provide very limited advice besides “we must find another way”, or “we must include the human experience”. True, at the end there are mentions to Network Science, Complexity, and System Theory, but those theories (and other ideas, like Extended Phenotype, Metabolic Networks, Control Theory, Ecological Economics) have existed for at least half a century, so there is nothing really new proposed on this book that solves this issue.
There is a lot of philosophy discussed in this book, but very little science about that philosophy (that is, lots of claims, with little evidence to support such claims), and the broad scope and obscurity of the language (when a philosopher uses a common word but in a completely different sense, that is a red flag of BS in my opinion), made the experience of reading the book starting in a good foot but at the end it was lame and boring.
Yes, we need to find more holistic ways of understanding Nature, yes, climate change is one of those big holistic problems, but we don’t need 300+ pages of philosophical discussions to understand that.
Finally, when scientists try to talk criticize such a broad diverse set of fields, I can’t but remember a classic SMBC comic:
Quotes
Location 77
Our scientific worldview has gotten stuck in an impossible contradiction, making our present crisis fundamentally a crisis of meaning. On the one hand, science appears to make human life seem ultimately insignificant. The grand narratives of cosmology and evolution present us as a tiny contingent accident in a vast indifferent universe. On the other hand, science repeatedly shows us that our human situation is inescapable when we search for objective truth because we cannot step outside our human form and attain a God’s-eye view of reality.
Location 89
The striking paradox is that science tells us both that we’re peripheral in the cosmic scheme of things and that we’re central to the reality we uncover.
Location 100
It’s precisely this split—the divorce between knower and known and the suppression of the knower in favor of the known—that constitutes our meaning crisis. The climate emergency, which arises from our treating nature as just a resource for our use, is the most pronounced and catastrophic manifestation of our crisis.
Location 109
Triumphalism’s conception of science remains narrow and outmoded. It leans heavily on problematic versions of reductionism—the idea that complex phenomena can always be exhaustively explained in terms of simpler phenomena—and crude forms of realism—the idea that science provides a literally true account of how reality is in itself apart from our cognitive interactions with it. Its view of objectivity rests on an often unacknowledged metaphysics of a perfectly knowable, definite reality existing “out there,” independent of our minds and actions.
Location 147
Today we view temperature as an objective property of the world, but we’ve forgotten how the concept of temperature as a physical quantity—the degree or intensity of heat present in an object—derives from the direct experience of the world through our bodies. We have lost sight of the lived experience that underpins the scientific concept and think that the concept refers to something more fundamental than our bodily sensations. This way of thinking is an instance of the Blind Spot.
Location 172
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.
Location 175
From the perspective of that scientific worldview, the abstract, mathematically expressed concepts of space, time, and motion in physics are truly fundamental, whereas our concrete bodily experiences are derivative, and indeed are often relegated to the status of an illusion, a phantom of the computations happening in our brains.
Location 192
Scientific knowledge isn’t a window onto a disembodied, God’s-eye perspective. It doesn’t grant us access to a perfectly knowable, timeless objective reality, a “view from nowhere,” in philosopher Thomas Nagel’s well-known phrase.5 Instead, all science is always our science, profoundly and irreducibly human, an expression of how we experience and interact with the world. But our science is also always the world’s science, an expression of how the world interacts with us. Science strives to be a self-correcting narrative.
Location 225
Nishida, in his later writings, used the term action-intuition to emphasize that direct experience is not passive and disembodied; to be aware is already to act with our bodies.
Location 238
Our quarrel is with a particular, misguided conception of science, one that has come to be built into our present scientific worldview but isn’t an essential part of science. This misguided conception, which we delineate in chapter 1, is essentially a philosophy of science based on certain metaphysical assumptions about nature and human knowledge. We argue that science doesn’t require this philosophy, and that given its failures, we should jettison it and move on.
Location 371
Thus, according to this way of thinking, temperature or the average kinetic energy of atoms or molecules is what’s objectively real, but the feelings of hot and cold are mere subjective appearances.
Location 380
We can see from these examples that the laws of mathematical physics refer to idealized objects and their properties—free-falling bodies, frictionless planes, hypothetical ideal gases, perfectly elastic collisions, and so on. These idealized objects and properties aren’t physically real. They don’t actually exist in space and time, and they don’t participate in causal interactions. So they do not and cannot constitute the real world of nature. They’re fictional entities that we use as tools. They’re conceptual instruments necessary for us to formulate exact mathematical statements that we can apply to the real world through a series of increasingly accurate approximations. This is how we gain predictive knowledge of things and control over them.
Location 385
Mathematical idealization and approximation constitute a method for knowing how things will behave under various conditions. But the method doesn’t tell us what things are and why they behave as they do. Hence, to think that the idealized laws of mathematical physics describe the inherent being of nature is fundamentally mistaken. To think this way is to confuse the map—an idealized and limited representation of the terrain—with the territory.
Location 405
Galileo’s model of a frictionless plane, the Bohr model of the atom with a dense nucleus surrounded by electrons in quantized orbits, evolutionary-biological models of totally isolated populations—these are idealized representations that exist in the minds of scientists. They are not concrete realities in nature. We should not surreptitiously substitute abstract mental representations for concrete reality, the map for the territory.
Location 433
We’re referring not to the oppressive gender imagery—it’s unlikely Husserl would have been sensitive to this—but instead to the tendency to view nature outside the workshop entirely in terms of concepts and procedures applied to nature inside the workshop. Inside the workshop we sequester phenomena, protect them from outside influences, subject them to our specialized devices, and thereby manufacture new phenomena. The rest of the life-world, on which the workshop depends for its purpose and meaning, resides outside the workshop.
Location 470
The combination of fundamentalism and objectivism about scientific models exemplifies the Blind Spot. It occludes our direct experience of the world outside the scientific workshop. It advertises itself as “what science says,” when it’s really a philosophical mind-set, not anything established by actual scientific practice. It’s based on generalizing from a small number of cases where we do have successful predictive models to a vastly larger number of cases where we do not, and arguably cannot, have this kind of knowledge, because the world outside the workshop is too entangled and complex.
Location 480
Bitbol points out that we produce objective knowledge in two main steps. First, we progressively set aside anything in our experience on which we cannot find absolute agreement, such as how things feel or look, or our individual preferences, tastes, and values. In other words, we progressively abstract away from concrete experience. Second, we retain a “structural residue” of experience that we can make into an object of consensus, especially when we refine it in the workshop. Structural residues include classification schemes (taxonomies), models, general propositions, and logical systems. The most abstract kinds of structural residues are mathematical, such as magnitudes. The amnesia occurs when we forget that direct experience is the implicit departure point and constant requirement of this procedure of creating objective knowledge.
Location 504
Abstract scientific concepts (thermodynamic temperature, information, computation) spring from concrete experience and therefore cannot explain or ground experience. The abstract can never explain or ground the concrete as a matter of general principle. Rather, the reverse always is and must be the case. Part of the crisis of our scientific culture is that we have allowed ourselves to forget this fundamental truth.
Location 654
In other words, once the mind is pushed outside nature, which inexorably happens with the bifurcation of nature, any physical-to-mental transaction cannot count as an interaction within nature. Natural science, however, is premised on not referring to anything outside nature in its explanations. Hence, appealing to the mind, even just as the supposed end point of a causal chain, is unacceptable.
Location 676
In other words, although scientists are establishing ever more precise correlations between neuronal activities and reports of conscious perception in their experimental participants, these successes presuppose the consciousness of the scientists themselves as a precondition of the whole scientific enterprise. Thinking that the same methods we use to study correlations between brain activities and reports of conscious experience can be turned back onto consciousness as a precondition of the presence of anything, particularly to science, is like thinking you can pull a rabbit out of an empty magician’s hat.
Location 1,062
Although later ages would drive God out of this description of space, the Newtonian God’s absolute perspective, its “view from nowhere” or rather “view from everywhere,” its “absolute conception of the world,” would become lodged as an unquestioned assumption in the minds of physicists.31 It would form the ideal of a perfectly objective vantage point for viewing the world as-it-is in-itself, a vantage point only science can provide. It would become part of the Blind Spot.
Location 1,281
On the contrary, as Whitehead also thought, nature as passage, as sheer becoming, is given in duration, and duration is the wellspring for constructing time systems using clocks.3 Thinking that clock time is physically real, but duration exists only in the mind, is an example of the bifurcation of nature, of dividing nature into external physical reality versus internal subjective appearance.
Location 1,310
The key thing to notice is that to measure time, we must use time, but in constructing a time standard—clock time—we spatialize time. What Bergson wants us to see is that this procedure will not work for duration. If duration is to be measurable by a clock, the clock itself must have duration. It must be an enduring temporal entity. It must exemplify the property it is supposed to measure.
Location 1,360
Clocks don’t reveal the true nature of time; they are tools invented to abstract certain aspects of the experiential flow of time and to measure them in a systematic way.
Location 1,387
But you cannot be a mapmaker if you cannot see what you are mapping. The mapmaker should not forget what cannot be included in the map—the experience of walking the terrain, the biting chill of the mountaintop, the dappled light through the trees of the forest. Which details are important for which purpose? The map will get its users lost if the mapmaker does not understand its purpose.
Location 1,556
This assumption is a fantasy: nothing that humans can know can be known to infinite precision. In every practical application, numbers denoting physical quantities are always truncated to a certain number of decimal places. It follows that given the irreducible centrality of experience in the scientific narrative of the world, epistemology frames ontology: what we can know of the world determines what we can say about its physical nature. This is what is lost in the Blind Spot of classical physics.
Location 1,691
It’s here that the critical issue emerges. Due to the finiteness of the phase space cells, some information about the collision is always lost. It becomes impossible to reconstruct the correlations in all detail. In other words, every phase space description entails memory loss. Coarse-graining of phase space guarantees that the system exhibits what is called molecular chaos, which means that initial and final states remain uncorrelated. Only in this way can closed thermodynamic systems satisfy Boltzmann’s H-theorem and thus distinguish between past and future.
Location 1,698
Time’s arrow emerges as the number of objects grows, collisions increase in complexity, cells in phase space coarsen, and entropy increases. Time’s direction would now appear as a consequence of our blurry perception of reality, a point also made by Carlo Rovelli.
Location 1,702
If our physical theories, models, and interactions with nature are, and must always be, coarse-grained and time’s arrow emerges from coarse graining, then time’s direction now reappears in physics as a consequence of the essential dependence of physics on our durational perception and narrative of reality. We are back to the impossibility of pulling apart physical time and lived time. We are back to human time.
Location 1,705
The problem of time’s arrow, viewed from a microphysical perspective, reveals that the perfectly omniscient “Gods-eye view” of classical physics was never more than a useful abstraction. It was a map that could not, even in principle, recover the terrain of lived experience.
Location 1,710
Nature knows nothing of phase spaces or coarse graining. It knows nothing of our idealized abstractions. Yet time has been advancing since the Big Bang. How come?
Location 1,770
The success of classical physics led to the belief that those basal structures and their relations, now represented by atoms, fields, and their mathematical laws, had been fully enumerated and articulated. All the rest, including experience, could be recovered through the proper procedure of reducing the world’s apparent complexity to those basal forms. Physics gave us the ultimate ontology of nature.
Location 2,169
In the Copenhagen interpretation, the state function Ψ does not allow for a picture of what is occurring on nanoscales: the state function does not represent a thing or an entity. Instead, it is symbolic of our understanding of the context-dependent experimental arrangement, being by nature epistemic. It is an expression of our knowledge of the quantum system, gathered through the experiments we perform. Note that such knowledge is objective, in the sense that two experimentalists can perform the same experiments and compare their results. If the experiments yield the same answers, then those answers constitute objective knowledge.
Location 2,246
For example, the price the many-worlds interpretation pays for making the state function a real thing in the real world is an unaccountable proliferation of worlds with innumerable copies of every one of us. The price QBism pays for unraveling the weirdness of superpositions and measurement is an acknowledgment that agents must be central to any description of physics. In both cases, and for very different reasons, the Blind Spot’s vision of classical physics with just one perfectly knowable universe must be abandoned in favor of a new set of assumptions about the nature of the world and our relationship to it.
Location 2,656
Coarse graining thus plays a dual role in our understanding of physical reality. There is a blurriness that is intrinsic to the very fabric of the world, a fundamental feature of physical reality at the quantum level; and there is a blurriness that stems from how we interact with the physical world, through the limitations of our measurements and data gathering and storing. If we accept the relation between the arrow of time and loss of information, this means that entropy in closed systems grows and time has a unique direction from past to future.
Location 2,853
String theory is the apex of the Blind Spot in modern physics, an illustration of the confusion between mathematical abstraction and nature that Whitehead admonished against.
Location 2,875
We can either accept that they are fabulations or, alternatively, accept that certain questions transgress the bounds of science. Who decreed that science must be able to answer all questions about reality? If what we can say of the world depends on our experience of the world, to describe what lies beyond any possibility of experiential confirmation belongs to the realm of gods, not people.
Location 2,912
This strange loop—that it takes life to recognize life—is what the Blind Spot hides when it comes to biology. Just as the science of thermodynamics presupposes our bodily experience of heat, so the science of biology presupposes our experience of life.
Location 3,117
Organizational closure, understood as closure of constraints, “achieves a form of ‘self-determination,’ in the precise sense that the conditions of existence of the constraints subject to closure … are determined within the organization itself.”29 Thus, closure of constraints entails autonomy (self-determination).
Location 3,151
Looked at from a purely physicochemical perspective, the sucrose gradient is just a variable concentration of disaccharides (two-part molecules). It has no inherent meaning, significance, or value. Its being food is not intrinsic to its physicochemical structure. Nor is its being food just a matter of its being able to bond to other molecules in the cell membrane. Rather, sucrose means food only given the bacterium as an autonomous agent that must maintain its viability. Meaning resides not at the molecular level but at the level of autonomous agency, which is to say at the level of the organism as a whole. Sucrose means food because it contributes to the bacterium’s ongoing self-determination (organizational closure). Sucrose has significance and value as food in the microbial world that emerges with bacteria and other microbes.
Location 3,332
“In short, life is based on physics but beyond physics. There can be no ‘final theory’ for the evolution of a universe having at least one evolving biosphere.”
Location 3,506
The inability to see that behind and within AlphaGo lie millennia of human experience playing Go, combined with decades of accumulated human knowledge about how to design game-playing programs, constitutes a striking case of the amnesia of experience at the heart of the Blind Spot.
Location 3,510
AlphaGo excels at detecting patterns that we know are Go board positions, but it does not know that its data structures represent Go positions and moves. AlphaGo does not know that it is evaluating Go moves; indeed, it does not know that it is playing Go at all.
Location 3,848
At the same time, horizonal consciousness is nothing in itself or all by itself, because it’s nothing other than the disclosure or manifestation of the world.
Location 3,851
Consciousness is the recipient of the manifestation of presence, including all the ways that absences, such as what’s over the horizon, are intimated within presence.
Location 3,859
Consciousness is not just another object of knowledge, but also, and more fundamental, that by which any object is knowable. For this reason, consciousness is irreducible to any object or domain of objects: any explanation of consciousness in terms of a specific object, such as the brain, or even a totality of objects, already presupposes consciousness as that by which objects are individuated and intelligible.
Location 3,925
Merleau-Ponty is not denying that there is a perfectly legitimate sense in which we can say that the world existed before human consciousness. Indeed, he refers to the “valid signification” of this statement. He is making a point at a different level, the level of meaning. The meanings of terms in scientific statements, including mathematical equations, depend on the life-world, as our parable of temperature and our discussion of the dependence of clock time on lived time illustrate.
Location 4,176
The predictive processing theory distorts perceptual experience. We don’t perceive predictions and error signals, even if our brain makes use of them. We perceive the world. How is the brain’s guessing, and updating its guesses, equivalent to the concrete sense of shared presence we experience in perception?
Location 4,210
This is like saying that a bird is its wings and that flying takes place inside them.65 A bird needs wings to fly, but flight isn’t inside the wings. Flying is a relation between the whole animal and its environment. We need brains to perceive, but perceiving isn’t inside our brains. Perceiving is a relation between ourselves and the world.
Location 4,217
But we’re not inside our heads.67 We’re not reducible to our brains. The brain is an organ of perception, not the perceiver. The perceiver is the whole person or animal, geared into its world.