We need a new science for and in the Anthropocene – that is the whole premise of this podcast. But what if we’re trying to build that new science on broken and/or inadequate foundations? What if the whole massive global enterprise of ‘science and technology’ as it is today is marked by a fatal blind spot, which is not only hobbling the productivity of scientific advancement, but even distorting science such that it is currently a massive part of the problem – i.e. of our contemporary meta-crisis – to which it claims to be contributing solutions? This is the rousing claim of a major new book by leading scientists and philosophers of science, Adam Frank, Marcelo Gleiser and Evan Thompson: ‘The Blind Spot: Why Science Cannot Ignore Human Experience’ (MIT Press, 2024). But what is this crucial ‘blind spot’? Exactly how does it hold back and twist the scientific enterprise? And what can we do about it?

Join us, in discussion with the decorated physicist and astronomer Marcelo Gleiser, Appleton Professor of Natural Philosophy at Dartmouth College, to explore these key questions.  We unpack the key ways in which we are all harmed by the dominant self-conception of science today as not only self-justifying and in no need of philosophical underpinning, but also a way of knowing that is justifiably focused exclusively on the objective gaze, with no role or place for the first-person experience of consciousness and aliveness. Discussing current challenges and roadblocks in the sciences of cognition/AI and consciousness, we unpack some daunting philosophical jargon that is nonetheless crucial for understanding the existential crisis of our contemporary scientific civilisation, e.g. Whitehead’s ‘bifurcation of nature’, Husserl’s ‘surreptitious substitution’, the crucial error of the ‘amnesia of experience’, and the ‘strange loop’ of consciousness.

In short, Gleiser and his co-authors present us with some bracing and much-needed clarity, posing a challenge to everyone involved in science today: we are at a civilisational cross-roads with existential stakes where either we continue business as usual with the Blind Spot, or we choose to confront it and open up to the ‘strange loop’. Join us to work out what all of this means and what you can yourself can do to tackle the Blind Spot.