The Blind Spot: A Dialogue with Evan Thompson

The Theōros Project hosted philosopher Evan Thompson at CIIS for a dialogue with me about his new book (with Adam Frank and Marcelo Gleiser) The Blind Spot: Why Science Cannot Ignore Human Experience (2024).

We covered a lot of territory:

* early 20th century philosophical warnings about an impending crisis in scientific culture from Husserl and Whitehead

* the construction of temperature out of our felt sense of warmth

* the radically different treatments of color by Newton and Goethe

* the nature of time as highlighted in the Einstein-Bergson debate

* the nature of life as autopoiesis and what makes its emergence rather surprising from the perspective of the blind spot metaphysics informing much of physics and chemistry

* the hype surrounding artificial intelligence and machine learning technologies (which Evan and I argue are not intelligent and will not at least with anything like their current architecture realize consciousness)

* the way the horizonal structure of consciousness makes it entirely unlike any other natural phenomenon; it provides the condition for the possibility of scientific knowledge as such, and so cannot be explained in objectivist scientific terms.

I’ve written about and discussed the book several times earlier this year:

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