# The Blind Spot  ## Metadata - Author: [[Adam Frank, Marcelo Gleiser, and Evan Thompson]] - Full Title: The Blind Spot - Category: #books ## Highlights - It’s precisely this split—the divorce between knower and known and the suppression of the knower in favor of the known—that constitutes our meaning crisis. ([Location 100](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0C76Z6SNM&location=100)) - These idealized objects and properties aren’t physically real. They don’t actually exist in space and time, and they don’t participate in causal interactions. So they do not and cannot constitute the real world of nature. They’re fictional entities that we use as tools. They’re conceptual instruments necessary for us to formulate exact mathematical statements that we can apply to the real world through a series of increasingly accurate approximations. ([Location 381](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0C76Z6SNM&location=381)) - To think this way is to confuse the map—an idealized and limited representation of the terrain—with the territory. As Husserl says, to think this way is to “take for true being what is actually a method.”3 This is the surreptitious substitution—the substitution of a tool to describe phenomena for nature itself, or confusing an instrument of prediction for how things are in themselves. It’s a kind of category mistake. ([Location 387](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0C76Z6SNM&location=387)) ## New highlights added April 10, 2024 at 9:57 AM - A modern example is twentieth-century physicist Arthur Eddington’s “two tables,” the ordinary table and the scientific table. The ordinary table has shape, color, and solidity, and it belongs to the commonplace world of perception. The scientific table is mostly empty space pervaded by fields of force. Modern physics assures us, according to Eddington, that the scientific table is the only one that is really there.24 Herein lies the problem characteristic of the Blind Spot: the demotion of concrete experience and the elevation of abstractions. ([Location 607](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0C76Z6SNM&location=607)) ## New highlights added April 11, 2024 at 8:46 AM - The explanatory purpose of philosophy is often misunderstood. Its business is to explain the emergence of the more abstract things from the more concrete things. It is a complete mistake to ask how [the] concrete particular fact can be built out of universals. The answer is, “In no way.” The true philosophic question is, How can concrete fact exhibit entities abstract from itself and yet participated in by its own nature? In other words, philosophy is explanatory of abstraction not of concreteness.6 ([Location 1796](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0C76Z6SNM&location=1796)) ## New highlights added April 14, 2024 at 11:16 AM - As we’ve seen throughout this book, blind-spot metaphysics arises when we mistake a method for the intrinsic structure of reality. We devise a powerful explanatory method that abstracts away from consciousness while forgetting that the method remains fundamentally dependent on consciousness. As our parable of temperature and discussion of time illustrate, we begin by replacing concrete and tangible phenomena with abstract and idealized mathematical constructs (the surreptitious substitution). Because these constructs are so useful, we forget they are abstractions and take them instead to be concrete reality (the fallacy of misplaced concreteness). As we ascend the spiral of abstractions, we come to regard what are really highly distilled residues of experience as if they were essentially nonexperiential entities that constitute the objective fabric of reality (the reification of structural invariants). Finally, conscious experience, the method’s source and touchstone, drops out of sight completely, hidden in the Blind Spot (the amnesia of experience). The result is a picture of reality drawn in physicalist, reductionist, and objectivist terms, from which consciousness has been excluded by construction. ([Location 4008](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0C76Z6SNM&location=4008)) ## New highlights added April 30, 2024 at 7:46 AM - The amnesia occurs when we forget that direct experience is the implicit departure point and constant requirement of this procedure of creating objective knowledge. ([Location 485](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0C76Z6SNM&location=485)) - They pointed out that we inescapably use consciousness to study consciousness. So unless we recover from the amnesia of experience and restore the primacy of experience in our conception of science, we’ll never be able to put the science of consciousness on a proper footing. ([Location 4512](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0C76Z6SNM&location=4512))