The call for revolution

As a long-time advocate of a science-based worldview – worldview naturalism – I was intrigued to read this on the first page of The Blind Spot: Why Science Cannot Ignore Human Experience:

We believe we need nothing less than a new kind of scientific worldview. (vi)

What new worldview is in order, and why? In this book, science grounds the naturalist conclusion about reality: there’s no empirical basis for positing a supernatural realm separate from the natural world that science shows to exist. But a particular view of science has, the authors argue, increasingly marginalized what they call “direct human experience,” that is, consciousness:

...that by which anything appears, shows up, or becomes available to us. Things appear and become available to us 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 Maurice Merleau-Ponty, but as we will see, firsthand bodily experience lies hidden in the Blind Spot. (xi)

This blindness to the centrality of our conscious experience – what’s called phenomenal consciousness in the philosophical trade – is, they say, at the root of what they call “the crisis of meaning in our scientific worldview”:

According to that worldview, nature is nothing but shifting spatiotemporal arrangements of fundamental physical entities. In this perspective, the mind is either a derivative physical assemblage or something radically different from nature altogether. Most important, science gives us a literally true account of objective physical reality or at least of the totality of observable physical facts. This worldview of nature, mind, and science eventually came to underpin our political systems, our economic structures, and our social organization. But it is precisely that philosophical perspective, including its presence within scientific theories themselves, that is now in crisis, as evidenced by its inability to account for the mind, meaning, and consciousness that are the very source of science itself.  (vii-viii)

So it isn’t science’s fault per se, but a hubristic, reductionist, and mechanistic philosophical view of science that the authors claim needs correcting – a metaphysical mistake of many parts. And it needs correcting because it’s the root cause of a host of planetary and existential evils, including the climate crisis. By splitting the knower from the known, abandoning direct experience, and privileging unmediated objectivity, this view

…menaces our project of civilization altogether. Our present-day technologies, which drive us ever closer to existential threats, concretize this split by treating everything – including paradoxically, awareness and knowing themselves – as an objectifiable informational quantity or resource. 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 treating nature as just a resource for our use, is the most pronounced and catastrophic manifestation of our crisis. (ix)

The Blind Spot is thus an urgent call to philosophical action: we must revise our current scientific worldview or face dire consequences. After describing the history of its development, the authors present a detailed, carefully argued case against what they see as it faults: that it’s overweening in its explanatory ambitions (“triumphalist”), too reductionistic, too wedded to mind-independent realism, and too quick to claim perspective-free objectivity. These charges are made in separate chapters on time, matter, cosmology, life, cognition, consciousness, and, finally, planet Earth and its troubles. Each chapter critiques different aspects of the Blind Spot (capitalized throughout) in the context of its subject matter, one of which – the nature of time and duration - I’ll discuss below to illustrate their main complaints against the dominant scientific worldview.  Whether or not one agrees with their general thesis (I do not), these are informative, well-referenced, and philosophically astute. The reader comes away with a useful overview of the scientific state of play in each domain, perhaps the one exception being the discussion of artificial intelligence, which has leapt ahead since the book’s publication. Overall, I recommend The Blind Spot to anyone interested in the philosophy and history of science, the philosophy of mind, and the influence of the scientific worldview on the wider culture.

Science vs. common sense: conflicting or complementary?

In several instances the authors mount telling challenges to what they see as overly mechanistic and reductionistic understandings of human behavior and cognition, championing what’s now called a “4E” view of intelligence and agency: that these capacities are embodied, embedded, enactive, and extended, not just confined to the brain-in-the-skull. We shouldn’t think of ourselves as mere molecular machines – the strong reductionist view – but as autonomous agents who actively construct our worlds just as much as we are shaped by our biological and cultural determinants (143). They question the computational model of the mind – brain-based algorithms operating over internal representations – as insufficient to ground “genuinely cognitive systems” like us (174) which flexibly respond to real-world contingencies using our “culturally configured and socially situated bodies” (177). Although their charges of rampant reductionism seem overstated – many scientists and philosophers accept that it's not just the micro-level that has causal powers – it’s good to have the non-reductionist, anti-mechanist view of ourselves so forcefully articulated.

That said, it isn’t clear that our scientific worldview must bow to “direct experience” as a corrective to what the authors claim is an untenable quest for objectivity. What is clear is that the practice of science can’t literally leave behind human experience, since the world appears to each of us individually in terms of consciousness. Our personal grasp of reality, primarily dedicated to ensuring our continued survival, is mediated by what the brain and body cook up in response to perceptual input as we behave in the world: a continuous stream of experience – phenomenal consciousness – that we now know is a rather limited, creaturely perspective. But it serves well enough, otherwise we wouldn’t be here to tell the tale of its limitations. It is only through this personal experiential lens that the broader view of science manifests itself to us, individually and collectively. If this much is uncontroversial, what then is the complaint against our current scientific worldview?

It’s that science, in its theories, is deemed capable of transcending our necessarily perspectival grasp of the world, delivering to us (or us to) a “view from nowhere” that leaves behind and in many cases contradicts what our senses commonsensically tell us. Such contradictions, the authors say, must always be resolved in favor of our human perspective for the simple reason that the ambitions of trans-human objectivity are unfulfillable. They want to return “experience to its proper centrality in science” (108) to counter what they describe as four major misconceptions: that science can replace “concrete and tangible phenomena with abstract and idealized mathematical constructs (the surreptitious substitution);” that by claiming such constructs are concrete reality it commits the “fallacy of misplaced concreteness;” that it holds abstractions are independent of human consciousness, when in fact they contain “distilled residues of experience;” and that, ultimately, science can leave consciousness – its “source and touchstone” – behind, what they call the “amnesia of experience” (195).

Time and the manifest image

All these play a role in their analysis of the conflict between the commonsense understanding of time and its scientific counterpart as derived from the physics of special relativity. A widely (but not universally) accepted implication of special relativity, that of Minkowski spacetime, describes reality as a four-dimensional block universe  – three spatial dimensions, one time dimension – in which time doesn’t flow. Instead, all events equally exist along the time dimension (but not at the same time!) just as a 3-dimensional object equally exists in all three dimensions. Considered from a “God’s eye” perspective that we take up in our imaginations, the universe is a static block of events. But of course, we experience time as passing, with the present moment becoming a past moment, and the future becoming the present. It is the latter, human take on time that the authors say must hold (letters in superscript indicate points I’ll discuss below):

The block universe theory epitomizes the Blind Spot. How is it possible to formulate coherently a conception of the contemporaneous reality^A of all events in the block universe without adopting an impossible God’s-eye perspective^B external to the universe and the passage of nature? Besides being objectivist, the block universe theory bifurcates nature into objectively real space-time and illusory psychological time^C, surreptitiously substitutes space for time (spatialized time for duration), and treats an abstract mathematical representation as if it were concrete being^D (the fallacy of misplaced concreteness). The theory robs nature of passage and time of duration. It reifies space-time by turning the process of becoming into a thing.^E (122-3)

Duration, passage, flow of time: these are essential to how we experience the world. Science would be impossible without them. Any science that tries to attribute the flow of time to a subjective illusion induces an amnesia of experience and cuts away the ground on which it stands.^F To imagine that we can abstract away from the flow of time to attain an objective view of reality is to replace the passage of nature with a lifeless symbol.^G There is a crucial difference between how we can be misled by sensorial experience – which Einstein’s theories attempt to correct by focusing on observational invariants – and discarding experience altogether as being irrelevant to our description of reality.^H (124)

Here we see most of the complaints the authors have against objectivity and their corresponding insistence that the reality of human experience must take precedence over scientific pretensions to transcend it. But I'll argue that these worries are unfounded and overlook a basic scientific goal, which is, as far as possible, to step outside our specifically human perspective on the world in order to gain a more objective view of it. We can’t step outside conscious experience in modeling reality, but we can do our best to remove specifically human biases that might color that model. The way we generally do that in science is to develop mathematical abstractions, derived from observations and codified in theories, that we have good reason to believe any sufficiently advanced non-human cognitive system would understand.

The authors claim that such abstractions still contain, or are constituted by, ineliminable residues of human experience, so in doing science we’ve not accessed anything truly objective. But it isn’t obvious that mathematical constructs as we humans have developed them can’t float free of our brand of consciousness, and even if this were the case, the ideal of trans-human objectivity would remain. Keeping in mind that even our most abstract models might still reflect a specifically human perspective is a step toward greater objectivity: it draws attention to the possible parochialism of that perspective and finding ways to overcome it.[1]  

But let’s parse the above passage a little further:

A. First, a correction. The block universe seen from a God’s eye perspective doesn’t make all events contemporaneous (occurring at the same time) but puts them in temporal order – past, present, and future – from a point of view within the block. There’s just no single, shared “now” that we (or God) can assign to them. The block universe – the collection of all events – exists outside of time, with the time dimension incorporated within it. So it doesn’t present a picture “in which time is an illusion” (121).

B. The fact that we can’t literally take a God’s-eye point of view doesn’t invalidate the intuition that the universe exists independently of any particular perspective that might arise within it. Nor should it bar us from doing our best, in our imaginations and theories, to picture it from no particular, especially human, vantage point. Special relativity was a triumph of empirically-based conceptual innovation that showed our perception of events to be perspectival (from our reference frame) but in a way that can be transcended by calculating space-time intervals that are the same for all observers – what they call at the end of the above quote “observational invariants.”

C. The block universe conception doesn’t “bifurcate nature” into something real (spacetime) and something illusory (our experience of temporal duration) since our experiences are real and clearly within the universe, however it gets conceived by science.[2] Our experience that time flows – part of what Wilfred Sellars dubbed the manifest image – may not line up with the scientific image of time presented by special relativity, but it isn’t as if science declares the experience itself to be an illusion. Nor do we have to choose between these images; we probably can’t since the non-conceptual feeling or perception of the flow of time, which serves us reasonably well, is not about to be displaced by a rather high-level conceptual scheme such as special relativity. Nor can special relativity be displaced by common sense about time, only by further scientific investigation.

D. The block universe idea is indeed an abstraction, as are all concepts, hypotheses, and theories, but these are not generally claimed as literally being the mind-independent physical world they model. The current scientific worldview, as far as I’m aware, does not as rule mistake abstract theory for the explanatory target (the thing in itself), nor does it aim to substitute the former for the latter.[3] It’s worth pointing out here that both science and our culturally modulated conscious experience are world models, the former couched in abstract terms derived from collective observation (see note 1), the latter in terms of the sensations and perceptions of concrete experience as well as everyday concepts and propositions, most of them not involving much math. The twist is that conscious experience (discussed in Part 2) can’t be put aside, as we might put aside math in favor of non-quantified takes on reality, so in that sense it’s prior to science. But recognizing its status as a model, not the world directly and unmediatedly presented in a way that competes with science, is an important step in getting a more objective grasp of the world.

E. “Becoming” is perfectly real on the block universe view since the series of events on a timeline incorporate change relative to what happened before and after just as much as on the presentist view where the future doesn’t yet exist. The worry about reification turning an “active process” into a “thing” suggests the contrast between living and dead, that science in its austere physicalism somehow disenchants the world by killing off change and novelty (see Part 2 on the fear of scientism). But describing the world in terms of an abstract model is not in contradiction with seeing (correctly) the world as active, alive (in the case of biological organisms), and wondrous.[4]

F. Recognizing that the manifest and scientific images might diverge when it comes to modeling time and duration (see C above) doesn’t make science a threat to the reality of our experience as our window on the world. Such divergence is simply to be expected as empirical observations and theories, always apprehended and understood from within our conscious standpoints, reveal aspects of reality that only appear using such cognitive tools. Conscious experience for us humans will always remain the basic context of cognition, so science can’t “cut away” consciousness; but common sense is rightly tutored by science and should welcome such instruction.

G. Here again the authors characterize the quest for objectivity as somehow deadening (see E above), as if the abstract and quantified scientific understanding of time (a “lifeless symbol”) threatens the experiential reality of duration we all know so well. But such displacement is not a possibility precisely because, as the authors themselves recognize, we can’t escape our embodied consciousness and its psychological deliverances. We can of course raise the question of how well our psychology tracks reality as described from a standpoint that does its best to minimize our innate perceptual and cognitive biases. But that investigation is enlightening, not deadening.  

H. It’s not clear why the authors suppose science, or any philosophical view of science, aims to supplant experience altogether as irrelevant to our description of reality. It’s an unavoidable commonplace that scientific observations are filtered through our sensory-perceptual channels even when using the most advanced imaging and detection technologies. And of course conscious cogitation plays an essential role in the development of scientific theories, along with the spontaneous insights and hunches that arise unbidden into consciousness. So this worry seems a bit of a strawman.

Summary of Part 1

The bottom line, as I see it, is that our scientific worldview and its ambition of trans-human objectivity is not in need of correction by the common sense of direct experience, nor does common sense need to yield to science as we go about our business, unless such business depends on resolving a conflict between the two when it comes to matters of fact, as was the case when the heliocentric model of the solar system replaced commonsense geocentrism. The manifest and scientific images can for the most part happily co-exist even as science reaches conclusions quite at odds with intuition, so the current scientific worldview isn’t a threat to what the authors call “the primacy of experience” and the practical efficacy of our conscious world models. Likewise, consciousness isn’t in a position to challenge the scientific description of reality: the experience of duration can’t invalidate special relativity and Minkowski spacetime. However, to the extent portrayals of science or scientific practice are actually guilty of marginalizing human experience and its take on the world, the authors’ complaints should be heeded.

Having sketched some rejoinders to what I see as misconceptions about the scientific quest for objectivity and its relation to human experience, in Part 2 I’ll take up the authors’ discussion of consciousness as a possible target of scientific explanation. Does the nature of "direct experience" outstrip the project of gaining a naturalistic, objective understanding of the world? And is our current scientific worldview, by supposedly denying the centrality of consciousness, responsible for our "treating nature as just a resource for our use" and the resultant climate crisis? 

- Tom Clark, October 2024