Discussing "The Blind Spot" with Gregg Henriques

Gregg and I review Frank, Gleiser, and Thompson's important new book

Here is a rough transcript of some of my comments to Gregg:

I think this book speaks to both of us for obvious reasons. The work you've been engaged in with your UTOK system to bring together the humanities and the natural sciences in a more comprehensive, systematic perspective, and any of the dialogues you've been hosting on your channel with John and others are right in the thick of the questions that Adam Frank, Marcelo Gleiser, and Evan Thompson are exploring in this book. Likewise, for me, I think it's been years, maybe even a decade, since Evan mentioned to me that he was digging into Whitehead's work and was planning to write something about him. I don't know if when I first heard from him that he was digging into Whitehead he had already conceived of this particular book. From what I understand, there was a conference a few several years ago where Evan met his co-authors, who are both physicists, and they hatched this idea. It gave Evan a chance to share some of what he was extracting from Whitehead's work, but it's predominantly drawing on Whitehead's early philosophy of science. Somewhat early—he was already in his 60s. Whitehead had his first 25 years at Cambridge doing math, working with Russell on the Principia Mathematica. Then the second scientific revolution gets underway with relativity theory and quantum theory coming onto the scene, which draws Whitehead into the philosophy of science. He writes three books from 1919 to 1922: Principles of Natural Knowledge, The Concept of Nature, and The Principle of Relativity. It's The Concept of Nature, in particular, that Thompson's drawing on in The Blind Spot. But for the most part, the book is a transcendental, phenomenological critique of scientific reductionism and materialism, attempting to put human experience back at the center of everything—not in an anthropocentric way, but walking this line they call the "strange loop," where the human being and human experience are both at the center of everything science knows, and the universe that science knows makes it seem as though the human being is not actually the center. They don't fully resolve that tension, but they mark it in a way that I think provides helpful goalposts.

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I can’t stop thinking and writing about this book. I was asked to write a review of it by a French magazine called Aether News that's more of a spiritual magazine but wanting to be in dialogue with the sciences. They thought this book would be of interest to their audience, and they only wanted like a thousand words or something. I had more to say about it, so thankfully I have my own blog. It is primarily a critical work, applying these related ideas they draw both from Husserl's sense of "surreptitious substitution" and Whitehead's sense of the "bifurcation of nature," which leads to what he calls the "fallacy of misplaced concreteness." Galileo and Locke had a similar split between primary and secondary characteristics. What ends up happening, as the authors articulate it, is that modern science starts to build elaborate mathematical models of the physical world. Along the way, those models have certain touchpoints in the empirical world, in human experience. As the techniques and instrumentation used to provide those empirical touchpoints became more complex, it became more about artificial laboratory conditions, further removed from everyday human experience of sight, sound, and touch—these sense organs that put us in contact with the concrete reality of nature. At this point, when we say "nature" in the modern world, we're immediately imagining the physical models that scientists have developed. Surreptitious substitution happens when the very compelling physical models come to be thought of as primary, and we get into a situation where the universe is imagined to really be the quantum wave-function or the space-time manifold. We then try to get human consciousness out of that, forgetting that human consciousness was always there from the beginning. It's the precondition for us to even do any of that abstraction or laboratory work. The authors want to rewind the clock and understand what happened in the modern scientific period where we got so entranced by the knowledge we were able to produce that we forgot where it came from and committed Whitehead's fallacy of misplaced concreteness. I think that critique is so important, so we can understand in a more adequate way what science is, how it works, and how it's possible, while honoring and respecting the knowledge it can produce, without getting ourselves in such a tangle that we end up with something like the hard problem of consciousness. We end up with these dead ends, trying to squeeze our own concrete existence as conscious agents out of a model that can't in principle provide that. The model presupposes our conscious agency. It's such an important critique that they manage to get across in a really clear way.

In my review, I express personal disappointment that they didn't go further into a speculative cosmological mode to say, "Okay, this doesn't work, so what might be a bigger picture that we can replace the scientific materialist view with that would be more coherent and give more of a place to human experience without inflating us too much?" But that's my wheelhouse and not what they were trying to do in this book, so it's not a criticism of their book. They have a phenomenological orientation, primarily bracketing the question of ontology, and they're just saying, "Let's attend to human experience and not rush into the speculative mode until we've really grounded ourselves in our own embodiment." All of that is well taken, but I think there's this other project that both of us are interested in, which is, "What is the alternative cosmology? What's the alternative overall picture to replace the one that they have so thoroughly demolished in this text?"

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In some sense, we're trying to understand how human knowing is not outside of the things it's studying. It's part and parcel of the natural processes that science has been engaged in studying. But as you're saying, because of this blind spot or this God's eye view, the epistemology of science has not been too self-reflective about its own epistemological preconditions. It's been busy building self-correcting models of the natural world. That process of model-making has gone so far that now the human being is increasingly being encroached upon by the modeling apparatus. That's where we're hitting these dead ends. As Whitehead would say in The Concept of Nature, when we're studying the natural world, Whitehead would say we're studying what we are aware of in perception. This is his attempt to refound modern science on a more coherent basis. Instead of separating primary and secondary characteristics, instead of saying all the measurable stuff we can quantify is really out there in nature and everything else is a subjective dream, Whitehead says, "No, everything we perceive is in nature—the red hue of the sunset as much as the electromagnetic waves that physicists might want to study." The key here is un-bifurcating our picture of nature so that primary and secondary characteristics are maybe helpful heuristics in some cases, but we do not want to ontologize that. What we're doing is studying the systematic relationships among various perceptions. What is a scientific theory or hypothesis in that context? It's a stand-in where we're hypothetically imagining that there's something beyond what we can currently perceive that might be causing what we perceive. The shift here is instead of being satisfied with a hypothesis of some underlying substrate or process or activity that would be unperceivable in principle, we want science to try to imagine hypotheses that could in principle become perceivable. Whatever that underlying process is, and that doesn't mean with our eyes or our ears but maybe with instrumentation. You can see how in physics and often in cognitive science as well, there are a lot of models that can be operationalized and instrumentalized and make predictions that sometimes line up and sometimes not so much. But the mechanisms being hypothesized are also being hypostatized, meaning they're being treated as something independent not only of what we can perceive now but something that is in principle unperceivable. In physics, this would be something like string theory, which can't even be tested, but the math works. You can have a model in cognitive neuroscience like the free energy principle—very compelling model that seems to apply not only to brains but to any individuated system. But is that model how the brain is actually doing what it's doing? I don't think that's been shown. It seems like the free energy principle in cognitive neuroscience or something like string theory in physics is the kind of hypothesis that's postulating something that is unperceivable in principle. This more Whiteheadian approach to science, and the way these authors seem to be suggesting we move forward, is to think of a hypothesis as a scaffolding that we would eventually want to tear down. We're not going to be satisfied with positing a hidden mechanism that would always be a conjecture beyond our capacity to ever perceive or even measure with an instrument empirically. We hypothesize and build models in science, but we're always trying to move from the model to something perceivable. This is very much in line with what I describe in my article as the Goethean method of science, where the phenomena themselves, the facts themselves rightly ordered, become the theory, rather than the theory being of something beyond the phenomena, behind the phenomena.

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I'm quite interested in how human beings have evolved to become proposition-wielding beings who care about truth and falsehood and who have this whole semantic network of propositions that, when we're our best rational selves, we're trying to make more consistent and coherent. In some sense, Whitehead's whole metaphysics is an attempt to... I mean, he has his categorial scheme, and he wants it to be internally consistent and coherent. But crucially, he also wants it to be applicable and adequate to our experience. So he has his rational criteria, which is the consistency and coherence, and the empirical criteria, which are, "Does this apply to what I feel, what I taste, what I see, what I hear? Is it applicable across all the domains of my experience?" Not just in science, but do these metaphysical categories also help me make sense of my aesthetic experience, art, literature, religious and spiritual experience, relationships—everything, the full swath of human experience? Being able to be clear about what happens when we become proposition-wielding creatures, the danger there is that we do get lost in the models. We're trying to recover this embodied phenomenology, which they refer to as our “direct experience.”

You were talking about science on the empirical level switching from the first to the third person. I also appreciated the way they dwell on the second person dimension. They quote Merleau-Ponty at one point, saying that the bodily subject is a project of the world, a way the world locally self-organizes and self-individuates to constitute a living being. I think that's very resonant with what Whitehead says in Process and Reality, where he's talking about Kant and describes how Kant's transcendental idealism is saying that the objective world is a construct that appears to the subject. Kant's question is, "What is the nature of subjectivity such that an objective world that science can study in terms of physical laws and everything, and such that our math applies to it, how is that possible?" But it's a construct, it's an appearance for Kant. Science is about the phenomenal world, it doesn't tell us what reality is in itself, it's what our human perspective allows us to say about nature. Whitehead is saying, rather than a merely apparent objective world being constructed by a transcendental subject, Whitehead reverses that and says the subject emerges from the world as a “superject.” So Whitehead has this sense that the physical pole is inheriting the past, the mental pole is anticipating the future. Every event in nature is doing that at some level of intensity. As the evolutionary process ramps up, Whitehead would say evolution presupposes this function of the actual occasion, which is to inherit the past, inject a little bit of novelty, and give that to the future to be inherited by the next round, by the next occasion of experience. You're both getting a distillation of the basic structure of experience, a generalization of that to all events in nature, and a generalization of evolutionary theory as well. In Darwin, the basic components you need are inheritance, variation, and reproduction. The process of concrescence of an actual occasion has the physical pole inheriting the past, the mental pole as the variation, and it's a cyclical process being reproduced over and over. You get the complexification, the arc of complexification, as a result of this kind of process-relational ontology. That's the basic idea. The key is shifting from the view dominant in physics and still present in Einstein, where we think of mind as just this floating God's eye view observer. That's not going to work. We need to bring the observer back into nature and think of nature as a network of events. Think of space and time as adjuncts of and abstractions from concrete relational events. In other words, various geometries of space and time are our way of abstractly coordinating among events. Einstein's halfway there; space-time is not a container that we're inside of, it's the relational field. That's Whitehead in a nutshell.

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A basic way to think about this is that the substance form of panpsychism is saying everything, say a particle, has consciousness as one of its properties, specifically its intrinsic property. Panexperientialism, on this process ontological view, wouldn't say an actual occasion “has” experience; it is experience. There's no underlying substrate that has experience as a property; it is a drop of experience. Whitehead has to really pull on our grammar and twist it. He has his own theory of propositions, but he's worried about the way that logic since Aristotle has been locked into this subject-predicate structure, which leads right into a substance-property ontology. He says we've been hoodwinked by our own language into perceiving the world in an overly abstract way. The subject-predicate grammar works great when what you're dealing with are gray stones. You have the stone, and then it's got this inhering quality of grayness. Great, got it. But most of the world isn't like that. With quantum and relativity theory, the relational dimension of reality becomes front and center, whether it's between observer and observed or any of the properties. Properties are relational. The color red is not out there in the world, but nor is it in the brain. It's the relationship. That relational way of thinking and the processual way of thinking is a difficult paradigm shift for natural science because the shift from point-instants to events, for example, means you have to let go of this Cartesian obsession with certainty and absolute precision. It turns out that vagueness is an ontological category, is part of reality. That's a fact of nature. Our theory should reflect that clearly. Practically speaking, science has always known this, that measurement is—you’re never going to know exactly what the initial conditions are. You just can't do all the measurements, and even if you could, you’d be interfering with what you want to measure, changing what it was before you decided to measure it. But that's not just in practice; that's actually in principle. Quantum physics bears that out. We've gotten as precise as we can get, and there's still some fuzziness. That's part of science letting go of the need for the precision of the abstract models we can come up with and the exactitude we can get when we're talking about math. That's never going to map perfectly onto nature because experience is vague. One moment bleeds into the next. We can get fairly precise enough to build all these wonderful machines and technologies, but we have to let go of that Cartesian dream, or nightmare maybe, that we could really nail it down.

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Another way of talking about the structure of experience is the physical pole that's inheriting the past, it’s receiving objective data, you would say. Experience begins with objectivity, actually. The already perished occasions of the past grow into this new moment of experience, and then there's what he calls the subjective form where there's an interpretation of the past, and the mental pole begins to ingress novel possibilities about how to interpret it. But then, once the satisfaction is achieved, that moment of experience completes itself, it perishes and becomes a superject, which from the perspective of the next occasion is objective data to be brought into the next round of concrescence. Whitehead is putting the subject back into nature as part of this process of experiencing, which is the inversion of Kant's picture. So, I'm left wondering if what The Blind Spot authors have done is just a sort of Kantian holding pattern, as it were, to defend against reductive materialism. But we've been kind of dropped off at this more or less transcendental idealistic perspective, and the reconstructive project becomes, “Okay, how do we make this more realistic? How do we understand what science wants to call nature as not just an appearance to our mind, even if it's an embodied mind?”

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Another thing I can throw into the mix here is Whitehead's technical use of the term “society,” which would be—it's a nexus or a group of actual occasions that come together to form a historical route sharing a common characteristic. Most of the enduring bodies in our world, our own bodies, plants, animals, tables, chairs—these are societies of actual occasions that share a definite characteristic that's being repeated through the whole lineage. The form of the chair is a function of the actual occasions that compose it reiterating or repeating the same form, and it's wood, right? Wood lasts as long as it lasts until it rots, and no form can be repeated indefinitely perfectly because of the way it's relating to its environment. Whitehead is able to say that our bodies are a society of cells, and that's just an analogy anyone could make, but our bodies, in other words, are socially constructed, but not by human culture, by the community of cells. An atom is the social construction of protons, electrons, and neutrons. He's explicitly choosing a category that we usually apply at the human domain—usually we say humans have societies, and nature is not social. Whitehead is saying we can generalize this category too. Society goes all the way down, and what human societies are doing is a more sophisticated version of what's going on at every scale in nature as actual occasions come into these resonant relationships with each other.

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Is Whitehead really a panpsychist? Well, he’s not a materialist, he’s not a dualist, and I don't think he's an idealist. He's very explicitly—I mean, he's in deep dialogue with German idealism and British idealism, but he's very clear that he's looking for an organic realism here. I have other friends and interlocutors who don't want me to refer to Whitehead as a panpsychist, my friend Tim Jackson, for example, but I still think Whitehead is a process-relational species of panpsychist. How we categorize these things, I'm not overly attached to it. I think there are basically four positions: physicalism, idealism, panpsychism, and dualism. There are plenty of nuances, of course. You could have a materialist monism or an idealist monism; you could have an idealist pluralism or a materialist pluralism. There are different ways of slicing it up, which is very interesting. But I don't want to—this is just a simple schematic way of thinking about the options. I’m not attached to calling Whitehead a panpsychist.

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Evan Thompson did have a chance to chime in and respond to my review. Folks can see we've had a little bit of a back and forth there. One of the issues we ended up talking about in terms of the relationship between model and experience—what kind of got the whole scientific revolution kicked off was this Copernican revolution where the old Ptolemaic geocentric model was replaced by the heliocentric model. In their book, they pass over, they tell this history, and without much nuance, they just say, basically, now we know what is “really” true, which is that the sun is at the center and the earth goes around the sun. On the one hand, I think it's clear that in terms of more context and a better approximation, the Copernican heliocentric model is better than the Ptolemaic. But on the other hand, Copernicus's model was actually way less accurate than Ptolemy's model in terms of making predictions about when the eclipse is going to happen or where the planets are going to be. It wasn't until Kepler added the ellipses and Newton improved the math that it actually became as predictive as Ptolemy's model. In terms of telling us where the planets are going to be in the sky, either model works. If you want to land a rover on Mars, you better stick with the heliocentric Newtonian model because otherwise, you're never going to find Mars with Ptolemy's model. But it seems to me that if we want to avoid the blind spot and if we want to not be hoodwinked by our models, we can't say that it is really the case that the heliocentric model is true in an unambiguous sense because the sun's moving, everything's moving around everything else. So, in order to say the heliocentric model is really the case, we're still imagining ourselves out there floating in space with some disembodied God's-eye view looking down. We would have to be in the same inertial reference frame as the sun to see the sun as if it were still and the other planets moving around it. There's a lot of qualifications required to say that this heliocentric view is the correct view. It's correct from a certain perspective. The Ptolemaic view is correct from another perspective. What's the true perspective? I think that's a very difficult question to answer. In order to avoid the blind spot, I would have liked the authors to be a little more cautious about this typical story of scientific triumphalism where it's like, “now we know...” We've improved the approximation, but what is the true movement of the Earth and the sun relative to each other? It's very complicated to try to picture that.

I think it puts a fine point on the critique of the blind spot and what it opens up for us if we can hold more lightly this view of the history of science as a triumphal march toward the true view as if we've somehow arrived. I don't mean to downplay the extent to which science advances, but if you look at paradigm shifts and how things get totally reconfigured, there's a gestalt shift in what we even thought we were perceiving. It's not just new ideas applying to the perceptual field; the perceptual field shifts. We could have a future physics that could be as dramatically transformative as the Copernican model was in replacing the Ptolemaic model. We should be cautious about thinking we now know what's really the case. We're still talking about a model either way.

I think it's going to be weirder than people think when we come out the other side of this because bringing subject and object back together again and putting consciousness back in nature changes what we have imagined consciousness to be, but it also changes what we have imagined nature to be. It's an exciting time.