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The Blind Spot - Adam Frank, Marcelo Gleiser and Evan Thompson ****

This is a curate's egg - sections are gripping, others rather dull. Overall the writing could be better... but the central message is fascinating and the book gets four stars despite everything because of this.

That central message is that, as the subtitle says, science can't ignore human experience. This is not a cry for 'my truth'. The concept comes from scientists and philosophers of science. Instead it refers to the way that it is very easy to make a handful of mistakes about what we are doing with science, as a result of which most people (including many scientists) totally misunderstand the process and the implications.

At the heart of this is confusing mathematical models with reality. It's all too easy when a mathematical model matches observation well to think of that model and its related concepts as factual. What the authors describe as 'the blind spot' is a combination of a number of such errors. These include what the authors call 'the bifurcation of nature' - splitting between what is based on theory and considered objective and what we actually experience which is seen as second class and subjective. An example they give is the idea espoused by many scientists that colour (as opposed to wavelength of light) is an illusion.

Perhaps the most familiar of the errors is reductionism - considering that if we can break a system down to its most basic elements we can fully understand it from the behaviour of those elements. This entirely misses emergence, complex systems and chaos, not to mention practically any social science. Then there is physicalism (what used to be called materialism, but, as is pointed out the concept of fields in physics, for example, is not material), the reification of mathematical entities and the notion that experience is epiphenomenal. Those last two are where we consider the properties of the universe that can be subjected to mathematics as the only real ones, and where we consider conscious experience to be an unreal construct of computation in the brain and hence worthless scientifically.

This kind of problem in science is related to that uncovered by Sabine Hossenfelder in the (much better written) Lost in Math, but that book is purely about the way that modern physics often builds whole theoretical structures on mathematical models without any great connection to observation and experiment, where more emphasis is given to the 'beauty' of the maths than its relation to reality. And there's also a touch of Kant's concept of the 'Ding an sich' - the unknowable reality of the universe where we can only discover the phenomena it produces. But what's new here is that the blind spot extends to vast swathes of science, where we put far too much emphasis on idealised models that bear only a passing resemblance to reality and take far too little notice of what we actually experience and observe.

To dig a little into my complaint about the writing, by far the best bits were those dealing with time, matter, the cosmos and AI, while the sections on life, Earth science and climate change were particuarly weak. Consciousness was also covered - the content was interesting, but that section was somewhat laboured. I also think the structure of the book could have been better. In essence, it introduces the blind spot and its characteristics (which are all labelled with incomprehensible terminology once we get past the approachable 'blind spot'), then has sections on each of the topics. The trouble with this was that it was quite difficult to keep in mind what something like 'reification of mathematical entities' meant as we went from discipline to discipline. It might have been better to structure the book by the elements of the blind spot and bring in different disciplines to illustrate them instead. There was also rather too much unnecessary history of science, some of which was on slightly dodgy ground, for instance appearing to equate phlogiston (effectively un-oxygen) with caloric (an imagined fluid corresponding to heat).

As mentioned at the beginning, despite some issues, the concept is genuinely important. The authors are not advocating for some fluffy person-centred pseudoscience, but rather for more realism in science that takes in what is happening, rather than just simplified mathematical models and that recognises that experience is an important part of how we should look scientifically at the world.

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Review by Brian Clegg - See all Brian's online articles or subscribe to a weekly email free here
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