2024-03-26 07:08:47
Translated by: Lutfia Al-Dulaimi
This text is taken from the book:
The Blind Spot: Why Science Cannot Ignore Human Experience
The Blind Spot: Why Science Can’t Deny Human Experience
By its authors: Adam Frank, Marcelo Gleiser, Evan Thompson. The book is published by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, MIT, United States, and was published in March 2024.
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Our scientific worldview has become stuck in the middle of a seemingly intractable paradox; Which makes our current crisis a crisis of meaning in its fundamental essence. At first glance, science appears to trivialize human life and make it empty and meaningless. The grand narratives of cosmology and human evolution present us – we humans – as if we were just a small, chance event that occurred in a vast universe that does not care about us, little or much. But in a second vision, science continues to reveal to us in a recurring manner that our human condition cannot be escaped from or separated from when we diligently search for objective truth because we cannot stand far away and abandon our human being. Seeing objective truth is not absolute effectiveness, and cannot be separated from the context of human experience.
Cosmology tells us that we can know the universe, its origins, and how it develops only in the context of – and through – our internal position in it, and not through an absolute vision separate from it. We live inside an information bubble governed by causal laws subject to specific inevitabilities (what is meant is the distance that light has traveled since the Big Bang), and we cannot know what happened or what may happen outside that range. On another side of the picture, quantum physics believes that the nature of subatomic matter cannot be separated from the methods we use to research and explore it. In the science of life (biology), too, the origin and nature of life – and the origin and nature of consciousness as well – remain an enigmatic dilemma, despite all the amazing developments that have occurred in genetics, molecular evolution, and evolutionary biology. Ultimately, we cannot abandon our personal experience and being alive when we strive with all our available abilities to understand the phenomenon of life. Cognitive Neuroscience seems to be the best one to originate this vision among the sciences and put it in its appropriate place when it pointed out that we cannot accurately understand the phenomenon of consciousness without living it from within – and within the framework of – real human experience and not far from it.
Each of these scientific fields referred to above revolves in its own research orbit, and has its own problematic contradictions and approaches to dualities such as the inner versus the outer, and the observer versus the observed. These problematic dualities are, in an in-depth analysis, a reflection of the dilemma of how we can understand the issue of realizing the value of “subjectivity” in a universe in which it is assumed, in advance, that it can be fully described using objective scientific vocabulary without any reference to the human mind. The shocking contradiction in this matter is that science keeps telling us two interconnected things: that we are marginal beings in the cosmic perspective of things, and at the same time we hold a central importance in the reality about which we strive as much as we can to uncover the dense mystery. If we do not fully understand how this basic paradox arose and what it means, we will never be able to understand science as a human activity, and we will remain trapped in a limited view of nature that it (nature) is something that we must only achieve mastery over.
Each of the research fields referred to above (cosmology and the origin of the universe, quantum physics and the nature of matter, biology and the nature of life, cognitive neuroscience and the origin of consciousness) represents more than one scientific field in its own right. If we look at the matter collectively, these research fields represent the major scientific narratives of our contemporary culture about the origin and nature of the universe, life, and consciousness (the mind). These research fields are the basic infrastructure on which the current project seeking to achieve a global scientific civilization is based. These original fields of research are contemporary in relation to ancient myths (or, let’s say, a contemporary alternative to them), and we often see them in the form of narrative stories that serve as a guide for us to reshape our understanding of the world.
For all the reasons mentioned above, the contradictions faced by these research fields are greater than mere conceptual puzzles or ambiguous theories. In a careful analysis, it is a reference to the major incompatible perspectives between the Knower and the Known, between reason and nature, and between subjectivity and objectivity. The fragmentation between these dualities is a source of threat to undermine all our human efforts to advance our scientific civilization and our growing technical achievements. Our current technologies, which push us towards the brink of catastrophic existential threats, are an embodiment of this conceptual split, as we treat everything as a source of information that can be dealt with strictly objectively and is separated from the questioning and exploring self. This split between the research subject and the researched subject – combined with the increasing suppression of the self in exchange for the glorification of the researched subject, which is the material of knowledge – is precisely the origin of all the dilemma of meaning that we live and experience daily. The climate emergency, for example, is a dilemma that arises because we treat nature as a resource available only for our use and benefit, regardless of the catastrophic global consequences that such overuse may lead to.
“This disconnect between science and direct human experience (which is the essence of what the blind spot is) lies at the heart of many of the dilemmas and dead ends that science faces today when it deals with matter, time, life, and mind (consciousness).”
If we wanted to summarize the matter, we would say: Although our species has created the most powerful and successful forms of objective knowledge compared to all previous times, at the same time we lack that success and that power in understanding ourselves. We created the best global maps of the world; But we have forgotten to take into account the makers of these maps, and unless we change the way we navigate this life, we will find ourselves sinking deeper and deeper into unprecedented levels of crisis, confusion, and inability to do the right things.
We call every source that causes the accumulation and deepening of the crisis of meaning in our human life “The Blind Spot.” At the heart of science lies something we do not see that makes science possible, just as there is a blind spot at the heart of our visual field that makes vision possible. In the visual blind zone there is the optic nerve, and in the scientific blind zone is located our direct experience, from which and in the context of which everything appears to us and becomes within the range of our available sensory capabilities. This is the prerequisite for every scientific observation, exploration, inquiry, measurement or justification. Science is based on the principle that things fall within the ranges of our human sensory capabilities, and this requires us to give thanks to our bodies and their unique capabilities of feelings, sensations, insights, and capabilities for reasoning and rational accountability. A direct scientific experiment is ultimately a human physical experiment.
From right: Evan Thompson – Marcelo Glaeser – Adam Frank
“The human body is the vehicle of existence in the world,” says the French philosopher Maurice Merleau-Ponty. But direct human experience lies hidden in the blind area.
The tragedy that the blind spot imposes on us is the loss of what is essential and fundamental to human knowledge: our lived experience in all its vivid details. When we do not live this living experience, the universe and the world that seeks to know and explore become abstractions that lack life. Science as we know it, which has made – and will continue to make – major victories, is in fact devoid of human feeling, even if it emerges from the heart of our direct human experience in this world. This disconnect between science and direct human experience (which is the essence of what the blind spot is) is at the heart of many of the dilemmas and dead ends that science faces today when it deals with matter, time, life, and mind (consciousness).
Scientific knowledge is not a window that allows us to achieve an absolutely objective view of the world. It does not guarantee us access to an objective, timeless reality that transcends time and humans and can be fully known. This is God’s eye perspective, or “View from Nowhere,” according to the famous phrase attributed to the philosopher Thomas Nagel. Instead of this absolute vision, science is our human science, which cannot be reduced to a science separate from humans, and in the end it is an embodied expression of how we interact and deal with the world. But our human science is, at the same time, always a science connected to the world and inseparable from it, and it is an embodied expression of the way in which and through which the world interacts with us.
Science struggles fiercely to be a self-correcting narrative, and every successful scientific narrative must include the world and our human experience of it. The two develop together, and there is no possibility for either of them to develop alone, apart from the other.
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Adam Frank: Professor of Astrophysics at the University of Rochester, USA.
Marcelo Glaeser: Professor of Physics, Astronomy, and Natural Philosophy at Dartmouth College. He has five published books. He and Adam Frank co-created the 13.8 Blog on the Big Think website in an effort to promote the beauty of science (physics in particular).
Evan Thompson: Professor of Philosophy at the University of British Columbia.
The translated topic was published on the Big Think website on March 7, 2024 under the title:
The “blind spot” in science that’s fueling a crisis of meaning
https://bigthink.com/13-8/why-science-must-contend-with-human-experience/
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