‘The map is not the territory’
Science gives us amazing tools and models. But when we divorce scales of temperature from the human experience of hot and cold, when we think of measured ‘clock time’ as more real than ‘lived time’, when we substitute maths for living reality we enter the ‘Blind Spot’ of science.
We cannot be outside of our experience of being in the world. It is a distracting and damaging fantasy to think a God’s eye, absolute view is ever true.
It’s very hard to summarise and do justice to all the ideas in this book. The authors have enough gravitas to challenge interpretations of quantum physics, classic models of time and space and a bunch of my favourite consciousness models.
There is an immediacy to their arguments. They contend that not understanding the Blind Spot is a major contributor to treating the earth as a resource to be plundered and allows the excesses of capitalism.
The book fried my brain on time: Time involves the experience of ‘duration’. We cannot go backwards in time, even though the formulas of classic physics allow for this. The arguments they offer around appreciating the passage of nature as a lived bedrock experience were entrancing.
The sections on cognition and consciousness give sharp reviews, and critiques, of a whole range of models. Illusionism (I have always quite liked this, but will be more careful of using it in the future), integrated information theory, panpsychism, controlled hallucination, computational, and predictive processing (another one I like a lot) all come out lacking as models of consciousness.
As the authors frame it, the hard problem of consciousness is part of the Blind Spot. Their solution is difficult for me to articulate or frame in a simple quote. But they love a bit of Merleau-Ponty: ‘sensing always includes a reference to the body’. Enactive models, embodied cognition and developing skills of meta-awareness are practices that do not get lost in the Blind Spot.
‘Humanity’s lived experience’ is an ‘inescapable part’ of our search for truth.
Some quotes:
‘Awareness doesn’t show up apart from the objects of awareness, yet it is clearly distinguishable from them’.
‘Biologists, mathematicians, and philosophers’ can ‘work together to understand life as “based on physics but beyond physics”.’
‘The qualities we experience are constituted by relations – relations that come from having a body, being situated in an environment, and having a history.’
‘Experience is the horizon within which any object or collection of objects is specifiable’ I wish I understood this more. The notion of a horizon as a limit to consciousness, but also a necessary feature, is an important section. ‘Horizonal consciousness’ together with ‘strange loops’ and ‘duration’ I need to interact with more to make sense of.
Upcoming Trainings with Steve Haines:
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