Blind Spot (2024)

January 21, 2025

book

Blind Spot (2024) includes an incredibly lucid chapter on consciousness. We summarize part of it here.

Primacy of Consciousness #

Our awareness and everything we experience appear within consciousness. It includes all our thoughts, feelings, perceptions, and the way we experience the world around us. One aspect of consciousness is what philosophers call the primacy of consciousness. This means that consciousness comes first in how we understand and experience reality. We can’t measure our consciousness or compare it to anything. Everything we investigate, including our brains, happens within our awareness.

Think of consciousness like the horizon. The horizon is always there no matter how far you walk toward it. Similarly, everything we experience is present in consciousness. We can’t get outside of consciousness to look at it from an external viewpoint. Even when scientists study the brain and consciousness, they have to use their own consciousness to do that research.

The primacy of consciousness has three key aspects:

Existential primacy: Consciousness isn’t something we have, like a feeling or thought. It’s something we live.
Cognitive primacy: All our knowledge, including scientific knowledge, starts from and depends on conscious experience.
Transcendental primacy: Consciousness isn’t just an object we can study. It’s necessary to know or understand anything at all.

Primacy of Embodiment #

Just as we can’t step outside of consciousness, we also can’t step outside of our bodies. This is the primacy of embodiment. Our bodies are essential to how we experience and understand the world. Even our most basic awareness depends on having a living, physical body that interacts with its environment.

Think about your consciousness right now. Every thought, even abstract ones, depends on concepts you learned through your body and social interactions. Our life has external causes. It comes from our parents and our connections with others. The primacy of embodiment reminds us that we’re not minds floating in space. We are living beings. Our consciousness grows through our interactions with the world and others.

Anything we try to say about consciousness being independent from the body is self-contradictory. We can only think or talk about such ideas using concepts and language. These we learned through our bodies and social interactions. Our consciousness and our embodiment are inseparably linked. Each one depends on the other. This relationship between consciousness and embodiment creates what philosophers call a strange loop. Our conscious experience includes our body, but our body is also what makes consciousness possible. Neither one comes first. They rely on one another.

Strange Loop #

Our conscious experience includes everything we experience. This includes our body and the entire physical universe. But at the same time, our physical body and brain are what make consciousness possible. It’s like two mirrors facing each other–each one contains the reflection of the other in an endless loop.

Think about it this way: When you look at the stars, those stars exist in your conscious experience. You can only have that experience because of your body. It has eyes and a brain that developed over billions of years in this universe that contains those same stars. The universe is in our consciousness, but our consciousness exists within the universe.

This strange loop appears in other ways too. Consider time: We experience time flowing in our consciousness, and we use this experience to measure cosmic time. But cosmic time is what makes it possible for us to have consciousness and experience time in the first place. Similarly, we can only study life because we’re alive, and we can only understand consciousness because we’re conscious.

Scientists and philosophers often try to ignore or avoid this strange loop. They attempt to study consciousness as if they could somehow step outside it and look at it purely objectively. But this is impossible–we can’t escape the loop. Understanding this strange loop is crucial for studying consciousness.

Hard Problem of Consciousness #

The hard problem of consciousness asks how our brains create conscious experiences. Scientists and philosophers have struggled with this question for centuries. But the problem is ill-posed. It results from a mistaken way of thinking called the Blind Spot. The Blind Spot occurs when we forget that all scientific knowledge starts with and depends on conscious experience. When we study anything, including the brain, we’re using our consciousness to do it. But modern science often tries to explain everything in physical terms. It leaves out consciousness. This creates an artificial split between the physical world and our conscious experience of it.

This split creates problems when we try to explain consciousness. Scientists first remove consciousness from their picture of reality. They treat everything as purely physical. Then, they try to explain how consciousness emerges from physical processes. It’s like we remove something from a recipe and then feel confused about why we can’t taste it in the final dish! This approach makes four key mistakes:

It replaces actual experiences with abstract mathematical concepts.
It forgets that these are abstractions and treats them as concrete reality.
It turns these ideas into objective facts. They are said to exist independently of experience.
It completely forgets about the role of conscious experience.

When we recognize these mistakes, we can see that the hard problem of consciousness isn’t really a scientific problem to be solved. Instead, it’s an artifact. We created the problem by trying to explain consciousness while ignoring its role in all our explanations. The answer isn’t to keep trying to solve the hard problem. We need to find new ways of doing science. It should acknowledge both consciousness and physical reality, without reducing one to the other.

Neurophenomenology #

In 1996, Francisco Varela proposed a new way to study consciousness. It acknowledged that we can’t avoid using it to study itself. He called this approach neurophenomenology. The approach has two main steps. First, we need to “turn the hard problem upside down.” Instead of asking how the brain creates consciousness, we should ask how we understand physical objects through conscious experience. Second, we need to “turn the problem sideways.” Consciousness isn’t just personal. Our interactions with others shape it. For example, our ability to reflect on our own experiences comes from learning to see ourselves from others’ perspectives.

Neurophenomenology combines first-person accounts with third-person brain studies. It treats both approaches with equal importance. Studies often recruit people trained in meditation and similar techniques for observing their own minds. These subjects hope to accurately report their moment-to-moment experiences. Scientists can then connect these reports to patterns in brain and body activity. This approach creates mutual constraints. The study of experience guides brain research. In turn, brain research improves our understanding of experience. For example, detailed reports of someone’s experience might help scientists find overlooked patterns in brain activity. Discovering these patterns might help us understand the experience better.

Neurophenomenology is a growing research field. It is a promising way to study consciousness without falling into the Blind Spot. Instead of ignoring consciousness, it grapples with it.

Frank, A., Gleiser, M., & Thompson, E. (2024). The Blind Spot: Why science cannot ignore human experience. MIT Press.