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In The Blind Spot, astrophysicist Adam Frank, theoretical physicist Marcelo Gleiser, and philosopher Evan Thompson call for a revolutionary scientific worldview, where science includes-rather than ignores or tries not to see- humanity's lived experience as an inescapable part of our search for objective truth. They urge practitioners to reframe how science works for the sake of our future in the face of the planetary climate crisis and increasing science denialism.When we try to understand reality only through external physical things imagined from this outside position, we lose sight of the necessity of experience. This is the Blind Spot, which the authors show lies behind our scientific conundrums about time and the origin of the universe, quantum physics, life, AI and the mind, consciousness, and Earth as a planetary system. The authors propose an alternative vision: scientific knowledge is a self-correcting narrative made from the world and our experience of it evolving together.The Blind Spot goes where no science book goes, urging us to create a new scientific culture that views ourselves both as an expression of nature and as a source of nature's self-understanding, so that humanity can flourish in the new millennium. Read more
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Top Amazon Reviews
Format: Hardcover
This is an outstanding exposition, tracing the development of “the Blind Spot” in science, from the Enlightenment to today. The essence of the Blind Spot and its complex history is that science and technology have led advanced technological civilization (to include component industrial, economic, and political systems) away from direct experiential interaction with our planet; its physical systems and natural processes. This disconnect is the result of abstract substitutions for real experience, used in the workshops of science and biology, that have objectified the earth and reinforced the capitalist view that it is primarily a physical resource for extraction and production. One tragic result of this abstract objectification is that it has led to the desecration of our planet. This has been done via the compound abstractions of, what I will call “cognitive prostheses” (my term, not theirs), e.g., the tools of logic, mathematics, controlled experiments in the scientific workshop, etc. In the Introduction, they write, “The failure to see direct experience as the irreducible wellspring of knowledge is precisely the Blind Spot” (xiv). Of course, like most tools, abstraction, per se, and prostheses, are not, in themselves, the problem; the issue is how they are used to lead further and further away from real experience, into a scientific intellectual world of questionable abstractions. They write that “. . . blind spot metaphysics arises when we mistake a method for the intrinsic structure of reality” (195). As counterpoint to this disconnect and a way back to direct experience in science, the authors draw on the works of phenomenologists Edmund Husserl and Maurice Merleau-Ponty, natural sciences philosophers Alfred North Whitehead and Henri Bergson, and studies in cognition and consciousness, to reemphasize the fundamental importance of inescapable subjective human experience and associated cognitive processes of reality construction; this, as a way back from the compound abstractions of the scientific workshop to a more direct and conscious engagement with geophysical and biocentric processes. From the front book flap: “To finally ‘see’ the Blind Spot is to awaken from a delusion of absolute knowledge and to see how reality and experience intertwine.” To avert the dangers of reductionism, the importance of “complex systems science” is discussed toward the book’s conclusion. (I will add “dynamic” to that rubric.) Dynamic complex systems thinking is one way to avert the isolation of various branches of academic and scientific research. They write that the science of complex systems is a blend of physics, biology, and the social sciences (245). Perhaps the works of early 20th century anthropologists Alfred Radcliffe-Brown and Bronislaw Malinowski, known for their work as structural-functionalists, could be dusted off for potential insights into socio-cultural systems analysis. This review is, necessarily, a gross simplification of the book and its complex, fascinating thesis. The book, itself, comprises an historical and comprehensive theoretical overview, well worth the investment of time to study and understand. For a complementary perspective which dovetails nicely, I recommend reading it before or after Marcelo Gleiser’s recent tome, The Dawn of a Mindful Universe, which is an outstanding plea for a reconnect of humanity to the natural world writ large. Another Amazon reviewer docked The Blind Spot by one star because no solution to the identified problems and issues was given. This strikes me as unreasonable. Would it be reasonable to fault field researchers who, at last, discovered some pathogen that was causing mysterious illnesses and death, for presenting their findings to the global scientific community for evaluation and study, but without offering a cure at the same time? Of course not. In fact, in the Afterword, on page 252, the authors write, “Although we’ve pointed to many scientific ideas that go beyond the Blind Spot, we have not tried to formulate a comprehensive scientific or philosophical perspective to replace it. This choice is deliberate. Science is a collective project. It is the entangled dance of collaborative theory building and experimentation that ultimately moves science forward . . . Our hope is that by bringing the Blind Spot into our collective vision, we will be better able to find new paths beyond it.” The book is certain to be controversial in those circles therein challenged, but I can easily see it destined for landmark status, becoming a classic in the field with future updated editions, in the way that Thomas Kuhn’s, Structure of Scientific Revolutions, and Augustine Brannigan’s, Social Basis of Scientific Discoveries, are. In my opinion, it should become a foundation text in the curricula of undergraduate and graduate programs across disciplines: the sciences, biology, social sciences, and, perhaps, even particular arts programs, inasmuch as it shines a light on the potential problems associated with the disconnect between hyper-abstraction and direct experience. Arts programs, you say?! Indeed. All human activity (especially in ivory tower institutions) is vulnerable to the sorts of compound abstractions that lead away from direct experience. This might be even more of a problem issue in the arts (visual, literary, theater, music, etc.) depending, of course, on one’s perspective on the aesthetic value of degrees of abstraction there (think, the avant-garde). In addition to the disclosure that my own background includes anthropology and the arts, here is a short selection of interesting associated thoughts from the iconic American poet Wallace Stevens (Library of America, Stevens: Collected Poetry and Prose), that I jotted down in my copy of, The Blind Spot, that correlate to the book’s thesis: • Man fabricates by abstraction. (883) • Definitions are relative. The notion of absolutes is relative. (901) • Metaphor creates a new reality from which the original appears to be unreal. (908) Finally, I would like to commend the authors and their editors for compiling an exemplary comprehensive, detailed index, and thorough footnotes that serve as excellent bibliographic resource.
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Reviewed in the United States on November 4, 2024 by Steve Johnson
Format: Hardcover
“The Blind Spot: Why Science Cannot Ignore Human Experience,” by astrophysicist Adam Frank and theoretical physicist Marcelo Gleiser, along with cognitive science philosopher Evan Thompson, is an academic exploration of complex subjects written for an educated non-scientist audience. After Gleiser’s intriguing discussion with Robert Kuhn on Closer to Truth, I anticipated an exploration of my favorite topics at the intersection of science, especially physics, and philosophy. I was not disappointed. The central thesis of the book posits that science has reached an impasse when delving into subjects situated at the fringes of our understanding. This stagnation is primarily attributed to science's failure to acknowledge the significance of subjective human experiences within the explanatory framework embraced by practicing scientists. The authors label this oversight as a metaphysical issue. Covering a wide array of scientific and philosophical topics, the book's discussions are profound and relevant to its core arguments. As an avid reader of popular science literature, I found the depth of their discussion on physics to be just right—a skillful balance between oversimplification and excessive complexity. The depth and relevance of the information presented make the book a worthwhile investment. Written in an engaging and accessible style, it attempts to address the “crisis of meaning” in the naturalist worldview. It covers major questions in the philosophy of science, classical and quantum physics, cosmology, consciousness, and Earth science, all while advocating for the restructuring of science's metaphysical deficiencies. They effectively contest our intuitive notions regarding objectivity and reality, as well as its implications for the philosophical underpinnings of science. Despite its strengths, my primary critique pertains to the authors' own metaphysical stance. While acknowledging the need for a radical reevaluation of science, the authors admit that mental states and subjective experiences elude full comprehension through purely physical processes, hinting at a property dualist viewpoint, which posits that mental and physical properties are distinct yet arise from a single substance, in contrast to substance dualism that holds the mind and body as two separate substances. However, they refrain from examining the implications of substance dualism, as advocated by Descartes, leaving a gap in their argument. Perhaps substance dualism was deemed uncomfortably close to spiritual or theological domains, rendering it an unacceptable subject of inquiry. From my perspective, the authors' fundamental philosophical commitments to naturalism constrained their ability to explore the full range of potential solutions. It would have been beneficial if they had clarified the rationale behind imposing such limitations on their explanatory framework. Furthermore, the book leans heavily towards critiquing the current state of science's metaphysics, while lacking a proactive contribution towards resolving the identified issues. While the arguments are compelling and well-developed, the absence of constructive suggestions is notable. The authors themselves acknowledge this shortfall in the afterword. Despite these critiques, I thoroughly recommend "The Blind Spot" and rate it 4 out of 5 stars for its captivating, informative, and meticulously researched content. They creatively strive to align science with a more optimal and credible worldview; however, the authors' philosophical commitments limit the scope of their inquiry.
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Reviewed in the United States on March 19, 2024 by R.L. Smith
Format: Audiobook
The generally accepted views of the Enlightenment included one major misstep—the one addressed in this book. Without understanding that, science—as powerful and predictive as it is— has to deal with a worldview that fails to truly conform with reality. You don’t have to get too far in the book before you will see what I’m talking about.
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Reviewed in the United States on August 18, 2024 by Art
Format: Hardcover
A new and outstanding review of Reality from philosophical and physical approaches, in a simple and clear way. Very good around the cloak work. Every body interested can read it through.
Reviewed in the United States on June 8, 2024 by Filippo
Format: Paperback
Excellent service, high quality book! Thank You!
Reviewed in the United States on June 7, 2025 by Rob Gushurst
Format: Paperback
The God’s Eye View from Nowhere: A Review of Frank, Gleiser, & Thompson’s "The Blind Spot: Why Science Cannot Ignore Human Experience" (2024) Science is sick and barely knows it. Perhaps it sounds pretentious to claim as much but, from the perspective of the authors, scientists the world over pursue their work oblivious to, or only slightly aware of, this fever and how it continually shapes the work they do and the views they propound, not to mention how it has helped bring us to the current planetary crisis. This illness is the “Blind Spot,” a purposeful dismissal of conscious awareness deeply embedded not only in science but in the heart of western culture, in our very own ideas about the world. Following up on Thomas Nagel’s 1989 The View from Nowhere, Frank, Gleiser, and Thompson’s book presents a thoroughgoing diagnosis of the problem as it appears across the spectrum of the sciences. Blind to what? Scientific thinking pervasively disregards human experience: it trivializes, explains away, or is oblivious to the critical role of first-person experience in doing science. And what exactly is “experience”? It’s nothing less than the utter obviousness of our conscious awareness, our faculties of sensation, perception, and observation, our interiority, our undeniable subjectivity, what is necessarily involved in seeing, thinking, doing, or saying anything. Science ignores the reality of first-person subjectivity. A central argument underlying the book is: how can anything – knowledge, meaning, truths or facts – be established, claimed, or understood without conscious subjects, without someone experiencing and claiming something? Thankfully, many have begun taking human experience seriously and seeing it as a fundamental prerequisite for all knowing and thinking. But the vast majority of science research, education, media, and publishing ignores our interiority, treating it as a transparent given. This fundamental oversight not only undercuts the legitimacy of the work being done, but also it also plays a critical role in creating the conditions that have given birth to our planetary climate crisis - conditions that could lead to our own demise. This trivializing of experience, the authors write, is so pervasive it’s like the air: “invisible but all around us. We’re given simple versions of it in high school science classes, and we find it as an unspoken background in science documentaries. If you pursue a career in science, it often lies like an invisible map marking your journey through introductory classes in physics, chemistry, and biology. … it’s so pervasive that it doesn’t seem like philosophy at all. Rather people think it’s just ‘what science says.’” (ch1/p4). The obviousness of our conscious awareness plus the pervasiveness of its devaluing combine to obscure the seriousness of its omission in the scientific community. In fact, the omission is so ubiquitous that convincing others it exists is a challenge. Even my faculty study group colleagues (in math, engineering, astronomy) with whom I read this book had a hard time accepting the overall argument. They didn’t much care that they themselves were purveyors of the Blind Spot. Although they found it interesting, they didn’t particularly see why it’s important or why it’s a problem. And why is it a problem? After identifying the main characteristics and causes of the Blind Spot (chapters 1-2), then going through the many ways the Blind Spot appears in the physical, biological, psycho-social, and cognitive sciences (chapters 3-8), in the last chapter 9, the authors return to look at problems our Blind Spot-addled civilization has, in concert with global capitalism, helped create a suite of crises that are leading us to eco- and social system destabilization and collapse: climate change, global pandemics, and runaway technology. Now called the Anthropocene, the geologic era of humanity and the sixth great extinction, this is “a massive manifestation of the Blind Spot. It’s the result of one particular and very recent version of the human civilizational project: the originally modern European, and now transnational, scientific project of objectifying the world through scientific materialism” (9/226). As 20th century science and technology evolved from an enabling to a regulating enterprise, its authority became distrusted and challenged. For all its astonishing success, contemporary science has not only become perceived as arrogant and inhuman but has also suffered postmodern challenges to its credibility and authority, challenges which have devolved into post-truth science denial, the masquerading of pseudo-sciences, and rampant conspiracy mongering. As a pervasive characteristic of the scientific enterprise, the Blind Spot was instrumental in birthing these problems. Being led to the brink of collapse in the past few decades has spawned the rise of new scientific perspectives that promise move us beyond Blind Spot metaphysics. In the final chapter and Afterword, Frank, Gleiser, and Thompson discuss the emergence of a group of new approaches and conceptual tools that evolved out of postwar systems theory called Earth Systems Science (9/233-239) which sees the Earth as a coupled set of systems constituting the atmosphere, hydrosphere, cryosphere, lithosphere, and biosphere – interlocking systems forming an integrated whole. They explain: "The constellation of new scientific disciplines that form the foundation for the current understanding of Earth and the biosphere are significant in relation to the Blind Spot. Network theory, cybernetics, dynamical systems theory, chaos theory; taken separately, each of these fields challenges different aspects of the Blind Spot’s metaphysical assumptions about life, the world, and experience. Taken together in what is called complex systems theory, they represent the emergence of a new way of seeing how science functions, what it describes, and, most importantly, how it relates to human experience" (9/226). Some of these new disciplines explicitly incorporate human experience. Now three to four decades old, a promising area of research in this regard is embodied mind cognitive science, discussed numerous times in the book as enactive cognitive science. “For enactive cognitive science, the living body is the critical node of cognition, and the body’s key attribute is being self-individuating. The living body, through the mutual enabling of its parts, makes itself distinct from its environment into a world of relevance. Cognition is sensemaking, to use an enactive slogan” (7/179). But, the authors warn, even cognitive science stands at a crossroads that could follow a path that reinforces the Blind Spot, i.e. neural computationalism, or a path that can help us move beyond it, i.e. embodied mind approaches. Although the authors do a bang-up job diagnosing Blind Spot thinking and how it’s woven into all sectors of science and culture, they offer little in the way of a solution or prescription to its undoing other than presenting new approaches in science. They’re clear that at the core of the Blind Spot is a set of metaphysical commitments (list below) that are in the process of being challenged by these new approaches but, even though they present a number of best practices for overcoming Blind Spot beliefs, they stop short of describing what alternative metaphysical commitments might look like. In the Afterword the book they write: “Although we’ve pointed to many scientific ideas that go beyond the Blind Spot, we have not tried to formulate a comprehensive scientific or philosophical perspective to replace it” (9/252). Nevertheless, these new sciences have already shown us what some of these new philosophical perspectives look like. They have done this by granting ontological validity to what could be called postmodern commitments wherein equal reality status is given to relationality and contextuality, situatedness and embodiment, organization and complexity, and wholeness and emergence. Together these form a thoroughgoing this-world approach where mind and consciousness are the natural interiors of complex self-organizing systems, aka organisms. On this view dynamical organization and relations have equal reality status to physical objects – greater exterior complexity and greater interior sentience and mental capacity go hand in hand. Here, consciousness, the mind, and experience are no more than the interior aspects of the evolutionary coupling of organisms and their environments – brain-in-body-in-environment. We can see, for example, the 4E approach in cognitive science (embedded, embodied, extended, enactive) presents a major challenge to Blind Spot computational-representational views of the mind as being a “brainbound” neural computer. 4E cognitive science also directly incorporates experience through research that tracks both 1st and 3rd-person phenomena, bringing phenomenology into a biological context (neuro-phenomenology). But, as significant as they are, even these new postmodern commitments don’t go far enough. In the final analysis, neither inside nor outside, neither whole nor part, subject nor object, nature nor mind, one nor many, can be primary, meaning, can independently exist. The whole notion of primary ontology, an assumption lurking within all Blind Spot metaphysics, is itself bankrupt. What is most sorely needed to overcome Blind Spot metaphysics is a nondual or complementarity metaphysics, a paradoxical both/and-neither/nor perspective where all conceptual pairs are understood as necessarily mutually generative and referencing. Chinese and Indian philosophy both figured this out long ago, the inherent nondual, paradoxical nature of the human mind. Apart from a few rebel thinkers, the West, however, seems eternally mired in dualistic thinking. How can there be singular without plural? What front exists without a back? How can outside have any meaning by itself? What could presence possibly mean without absence? Author Evan Thompson is one among many who have been actively participating in cross-cultural philosophical dialogues with Buddhists and other philosophers of nonduality to bring these perspectives into embodied mind research and complexity science. Formulating a comprehensive philosophy of science with nonduality at its core would sound the final death knell of Blind Spot metaphysics. One last example: The standard Blind Spot argument for the primacy of objective reality is evolution – particles, elements, basic molecules, and galaxies, stars, planets had to exist prior to the emergence of life which requires many billions of years of biochemical evolution to produce higher forms of complexity and living sentient awareness. True enough. But the question “at what point does interiority emerge?” is a misguided question because it assumes Blind Spot objectivism, i.e. that interiority is dependent on exteriority, that objectivity precedes and gives rise to subjectivity. Only a nondual metaphysics in which the complementarity of concepts is primary can objective-only Blind Spot fundamentalism be avoided. On this view, interiority “goes all the way down” to the most basic, earliest levels of objective material organization such that galaxies, stars, planets, atoms, molecules themselves have proto-interiority – not sentience, not consciousness, not mind, but interiority that has the potential to develop as it organizes into more complex forms which give rise to sentience. Reactivity, the attraction-repulsion of basic elements, could be understood as a form of proto-sentience. A notable example of a nondual metaphysics in the context of systems theory has been developed by Ken Wilber in his quadrant model of reality and theory of holons as presented in his Integral Theory (see "Sex, Ecology, Spirituality"). Although the quadrant model is outstanding work to which I am very much indebted, I disagree with other aspects of his work. Nonetheless, a nondual complementarity stance sees the interdependence of complementary pairs and gives them equal reality value. With such a stance, for exteriors to exist without interiors is absurd. To finish is chapter one’s list of primary assumptions of Blind Spot thinking followed by a booklist of the new sciences challenging these assumptions. SIX ASSUMPTIONS OF BLIND SPOT METAPHYSICS: pervasive, overlapping-interlocking belief structures that together make it impossible to take interior subjectivity seriously: 1-The bifurcation of nature: Otherwise known as the mind/nature-appearance/reality split, this is our belief in the division between the reality of the external world -vs its subjective appearances. Examples: 1) Color is an illusion, not part of the real world; 2) Your thoughts and feelings are simply neural computations. 2-Reductionism: The belief that what’s most real and most fundamental, are the smallest entities – cells more fundamental than organisms, molecules more fundamental than cells, then on down to simpler molecules, to atoms, and finally to elementary particles. “Reductionism is summed up in the quip: ‘Biologists defer to chemists, who defer to physicists, who defer to mathematicians, who defer to God” (1/6). 3-Objectivism: This is science’s attempt to establish a transcendent “God’s eye” view wherein only objects are real. Such a “view from nowhere” gives ontological primacy to 3rd-person objects. This arguably self-refuting view is mind/subject-independent, meaning that, for science, what is real is outside and apart from any human perspective. One may wonder, how can “entities” with “properties” “exist” without some mind or experience being involved? Are scientists experienceless zombies doing research? 4-Physicalism: Closely related to objectivism is physicalism, also known as materialism. This is the notion that physical facts alone exhaust reality. Physicalism is not a scientific theory but a metaphysical thesis, a philosophical interpretation of physics and science in general (1/7). 5-Reification of mathematical entities: Reify means to make real or concrete and is the view that mathematical entities are real, exist “out there” independently of us, and are what the universe is truly is: laws, equations, constants, models. Here mathematical constructs are more real than your subjective thoughts and feelings. 6-Experience is epiphenomenal: This is the view that mental events are caused by physical events in the brain but have no effects upon any physical events; “Consciousness is the brain’s user illusion.” BEYOND THE BLIND SPOT BOOK RECOMMENDATIONS Embodied Mind and 4E Cognitive Science: 1. Mind in Life, Evan Thompson 2. Philosophy in the Flesh, George Lakoff 3. The New Science of the Mind, Mark Rowlands 4. Radical Embodied Cognitive Science, Anthony Chemero Consciousness Studies and 1st-Person Approaches: 5. The View from Within, ed. Francisco Varela and Jonathan Shear 6. Understanding Consciousness, Max Velmans 7. Introduction to Phenomenology, Robert Sokolowski Beware of Blind Spot views of mind in cognitive science which show up in the form of representationalism, neuronal computationalism, brainbound-internalist models, and the various futile attempts to make consciousness into a 3rd-person objective thing – quantum gaps, information fields – attempting to overcome “the hard problem” of consciousness, a problem which is a classic symptom of Blind Spot metaphysics. Complexity, Systems, and Chaos Theories 8. The Web of Life, Fritjof Capra 9. Complexity: A Guided Tour, Melanie Mitchell 10. Simply Complexity, Neil Johnson 11. Principles of Systems Science, Mobus and Kalton (UW Tacoma!) Systems and complexity theory are the antidotes to Blind Spot reductionism and the primacy of the small. They give primacy instead to relationality, context, and wholeness. Non-Equilibrium Energy Flow Systems 12. Into the Cool, Schneider-Sagan 13. Evolution as Entropy, Daniel Brooks, E.O. Wiley 14. Order Out of Chaos, Prigogine-Stengers 15. Sync, S. Strogatz Beware here of fundamentalist physics views propounding reductionist reversible-symmetrical time, claiming that the thermodynamic arrow of time is an illusion that organisms have created (e.g., see my review of Carlo Rovelli’s "The Order of Time"). Origin of Life Research 16. The Vital Question, Nick Lane 17. The Origin and Nature of Life on Earth, Smith-Morowitz 18. What is Life? Margulis-Sagan Beware here of the tyranny of molecular biology and the “replicationist” view of life. The above books instead view energy flow and metabolism as prior to and necessary for replication. FINAL THOUGHTS: "The Blind Spot" is a worthwhile read – a masterful diagnosis of this deeply ingrained “illness” in our scientific and cultural worldview. But it is not a breezy read in that it demands familiarity with a broad range of issues across science and philosophy from physics and cosmology to biology to consciousness studies. Here three scientists – Frank, an astrophysicist, Gleiser, a theoretical physicist, and Thompson, a philosopher/cognitive scientist, each who cares about science but sees its deleterious effects on itself and society – put forth a timely argument for a new scientific understanding of ourselves in our world. "The Blind Spot" is an outstanding presentation of a critical short-sightedness we each carry, one that will have to be healed in the face of the inevitable ecological and climate chaos bearing down upon us. But make no mistake, God’s Eye/Blind Spot metaphysics is fighting to maintain its hegemony against the challenge of the emerging research approaches and disciplines that are forming around postmodern contextuality and situatedness, systems complexity and wholeness, thermodynamics and asymmetrical time, emergence and embodiment, and eventually nondual complementarity metaphysics.
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Reviewed in the United States on July 15, 2025 by Snow Brain
Format: Kindle
If there were ever a book written for me, I thought this would be the one. I grew up with an exceedingly scientific and mathematical worldview, only to change direction into artistic pursuits which opened up a whole new world of focusing on experience, which opened my eyes to just how much the scientific approach has gotten wrong. Much like the authors, I’m 100% pro-science, but had very much come to the conclusion that it has gigantic “blind spots” in its practice. Which leads to things like doctors focusing solely on measurable cures and entirely ignoring holistic wellness, or nations to focus on industrial output and GDP rather than well-being and environmental sustainability, and so forth. The first two chapters of the book are superb. The first one lays out precisely how there’s more to life than numbers and scientific measurement, and the fatal mistakes we make when we think that current science explains more than it actually does. And the second chapter provides a welcome (albeit short) history of how the modern scientific attitude arose. After these, I couldn’t *wait* for a detailed analysis of how this affects the world today in its science, economics, and culture. I was expecting case studies of how “blind spot” scientific thinking has led to blinkered science that misses the forest for the trees — like thinking it was ever a good idea to put lead in gasoline, or a million other scientific mistakes you might easily think of that seemed like good ideas at the time. And then I was hoping big ideas around how scientists might ignore these blind spots in the future, whether via reformed academic guidelines, or new governmental regulatory philosophies, or the start of a new set of scientific ethics. Unfortunately, absolutely none of that came to pass. The rest of the book that follows is a complete hodgepodge of big-picture subjects — the remaining titles are literally titled “Time”, “Matter”, “Cosmology”, “Life”, “Cognition”, “Consciousness”, and “Earth”. And I honestly don’t know who the intended reader is for these chapters. On the one hand, they’re such wide-ranging overviews and the authors keep repeating the capitalized term “Blind Spot” so often (you almost expect a “(TM)" after it each time), that it feels almost more like a New Age or self-help book where the author wants to apply their Grand Idea to absolutely Everything! But on the other hand, they delve *so deep* into scientific and philosophical details, that if you aren’t already extremely familiar with each subject, it’s going to seem like gobbledegook for you. There’s an entire lengthy section on quantum mechanics that, if you haven’t already read full books on QM from the past couple of decades, I can’t imagine anyone not being just completely lost. But also, none of these chapters really have much to do with the “blind spot” at all. As hard as the authors try to claim that the “blind spot” is somehow related to a bunch of ongoing controversies in each field, I find myself entirely unconvinced. Each of these fields *do* have major controversies, but the described controversies seem to belong entirely *within* each field, and not have anything to do with the “blind spot” issue described by the first two chapters of the book at all. It isn’t until the final chapter “Earth” that we finally move to anything that might have practical application, because after all, global warming is a perfect example of where scientific thinking is leading to harm. The authors, finally, correctly diagnose: “...we suggest that these tightly woven threads of the Blind Spot in the political economies of industrial society are an important cause of our society’s inability to comprehend the rise of the Anthropocene, its existential threats, and its profound inequities across the Global North and South, as well as between settlers and indigenous peoples.” Amazing! I can’t wait to find out what they *finally* have to say. Finally, the good stuff! But tragically, it is immediately followed by: “We acknowledge that this proposed codependency of science and the value system behind industrialization would require an entirely separate work to elaborate using the scholarly tools of history, economics, and political science. We offer here just a few points to motivate our claims.” Ugh. They basically point to the book that needs to be written — the “entirely separate work” that uses “history, economics, and political science”. The book that the first two chapters had led me to believe *this* book would be. And then... they admit that they haven’t written it. And their “few points” don’t amount to much. It’s followed by a section on complex systems science, which was once an area that seemed highly promising but these days has just been (usefully and correctly) subsumed into normal science. It’s not an answer to the “blind spot”. Finally, to make this book even stranger, there isn’t even a concluding chapter that tries to tie it all together — just a trivial Afterword. After attempting to survey everything from “Time” and “Cosmology” to “Consciousness” and “Earth”. Their final conclusion is merely: “What, however, does leaving the Blind Spot behind look like? Although we’ve pointed to many scientific ideas that go beyond the Blind Spot, we have not tried to formulate a comprehensive scientific or philosophical perspective to replace it.” I mean, I wasn’t expecting anything “comprehensive”, but I was definitely looking for *something*. Some suggestions. *Anything.* But nope. They’re just here to raise awareness, not provide any actual insight or anything new. So ultimately this book is a disappointment. The first two chapters are fantastic in describing one of the central problems of scientific culture in the 20th and 21st centuries (although nothing particularly new if you’re already familiar with phenomenology). But then the rest of the book is just a hodgepodge of concepts that don’t really have anything to do with the “blind spot” and which you’d be *far* better off reading dedicated books on. I think that, fundamentally, the problem is that the authors are two physicists and a philosopher, as opposed to say, a science historian, a sociologist, and a philosopher. Because the solutions needed to the problems the book describes do not lie in discussing quantum mechanics or the hard problem of consciousness — two subjects the book spends an extraordinary length of time on. They lie in the actual practice of science — the cultural values, the social expectations, and the economic incentives involved in the actual work of scientists and engineers and technocrats today. So in the end, it’s deeply ironic that a book titled “The Blind Spot” turns out to focus mostly on completely irrelevant content, and have a massive blind spot itself around how science needs to change to avoid the kinds of outcomes the authors are correctly concerned about.
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Reviewed in the United States on April 13, 2024 by Michael
Format: Paperback
Difficult to understand .
Reviewed in the United States on May 17, 2025 by Mariana