Authors
A physicist, an astronomer, and a philosopher argue that science has a blind spot: the whole enterprise is rooted in human experience, yet centuries of accumulating knowledge have entrenched and obscured that fact. Treating the mathematical models of the world as the world itself, the authors contend, leaves science unable to account for the very thing that makes it possible — the conscious observer doing the measuring.
The book traces this blind spot across cosmology, quantum physics, biology, and the study of mind, where treating lived experience as an afterthought has produced persistent confusions: the nature of time, the origin of life, the hard problem of consciousness. Rather than abandoning objectivity, Frank, Gleiser, and Thompson call for a science that includes human experience as an inescapable part of the search for truth.
For readers thinking about artificial intelligence, the argument cuts to a live question: whether a system that manipulates representations of the world can be said to understand it, or whether understanding is bound to the experience the blind spot leaves out.
