Many of us like to think that science can give us a complete, objective description of cosmic history, distinct from us and our perception of it. But this image of science is deeply flawed. In our urge for knowledge and control, we’ve created a vision of science as a series of discoveries about how reality is in itself, a God’s-eye view of nature. Such an approach not only distorts the truth, but creates a false sense of distance between ourselves and the world. That divide arises from what we call the Blind Spot, which science itself cannot see. In the Blind Spot sits experience: the sheer presence and immediacy of lived perception*.* (View Highlight)
We never encounter physical reality outside of our observations of it. Elementary particles, time, genes and the brain are manifest to us only through our measurements, models and manipulations. Their presence is always based on scientific investigations, which occur only in the field of our experience (View Highlight)
Nuestra experiencia consciente es, en última instancia, la fuente de todo nuestro conocimiento.
Experience is just as fundamental to scientific knowledge as the physical reality it reveals. (View Highlight)
To put it bluntly, the claim that there’s nothing but physical reality is either false or empty. If ‘physical reality’ means reality as physics describes it, then the assertion that only physical phenomena exist is false. Why? Because physical science – including biology and computational neuroscience – doesn’t include an account of consciousness. This is not to say that consciousness is something unnatural or supernatural. The point is that physical science doesn’t include an account of experience; but we know that experience exists, so the claim that the only things that exist are what physical science tells us is false. (View Highlight)
crítica fisicalismo experiencia
We’re not alone in our opinions. Our account of the Blind Spot is based on the work of two major philosophers and mathematicians, Edmund Husserl and Alfred North Whitehead. Husserl, the German thinker who founded the philosophical movement of phenomenology, argued that lived experience is the source of science. It’s absurd, in principle, to think that science can step outside it. The ‘life-world’ of human experience is the ‘grounding soil’ of science, and the existential and spiritual crisis of modern scientific culture – what we are calling the Blind Spot – comes from forgetting its primacy. Whitehead, who taught at Harvard University from the 1920s, argued that science relies on a faith in the order of nature that can’t be justified by logic. That faith rests directly on our immediate experience. Whitehead’s so-called process philosophy is based on a rejection of the ‘bifurcation of nature’, which divides immediate experience into the dichotomies of mind versus body, and perception versus reality. Instead, he argued that what we call ‘reality’ is made up of evolving processes that are equally physical and experiential (View Highlight)
The mystery of consciousness includes more than just qualia. There’s also the question of subjectivity. Experiences have a subjective character; they occur in the first person. Why should a given sort of physical system have the feeling of being a subject? Science has no answer to this question. (View Highlight)
conciencia misterio subjetividad
To bring the point home, consider that in certain intense states of absorption – during meditation, dance or highly skilled performances – the subject-object structure can drop away, and we are left with a sense of sheer felt presence. How is such phenomenal presence possible in a physical world? Science is silent on this question. And yet, without such phenomenal presence, science is impossible, for presence is a precondition for any observation or measurement to be possible. (View Highlight)
The contention that science reveals a perfectly objective ‘reality’ is more theological than scientific (View Highlight)