Adam Frank: evaluation

Transcript context

…I think you give a bunch of examples of that. Looking at temperature as a number is a very objective, scientific way of looking at that. And then there’s the experience of the temperature. And how you build the parable of temperature that we call it. So what is the blind spot? We use the term it’s a constellation. It’s not just materialism. It’s a constellation of ideas that are all really sort of philosophical views. They’re not what science says, but because of the evolution of the history of science and culture got like pin the tail on the donkey, they were sort of pinned on and to tell us that this is what science says. So what is it? One is reductionism that you are nothing but your nerve cells, which are nothing but the chemistry, which is nothing but all the way down to quarks. That’s it. So that’s reductionism. The objective frame that science gives us this god’s eye view, this third-person view of the world to view the world from the outside. That’s what science bequeaths to us, that view. Physicalism, that everything in the world is basically made of stuff. There’s nothing else to talk about that, that’s all there is. And everything can be reduced to that. And then also the reification of mathematics, that mathematics is somehow more real than this. And there’s a bunch of other things. But all these together, what they all do is they end up pushing experience out and saying experience is an epiphenomena. Consciousness. I tend not to use the word consciousness. I think it leads us in the wrong direction. We should focus on experience because it is a verb kind of in a way. It is verb-like and by being blind to that, we end up with these paradoxes and problems that really not only block science, but also have been detrimental to society as a whole, especially where we’re at right now. So you actually say that, that from a perspective of detrimental society, that there’s a crisis of meaning, and then we respond to that in a way that’s counterproductive to these bigger questions, scientific questions. So the three ways responses you mentioned is scientific triumphalism, and then on the other side is rejecting science completely, both on the left and the right. I think the postmodernist on the left and the anti-establishment people on the right, and then just pseudoscience that kind of does this in-between thing. Can you just speak to those responses and to the crisis of meaning?…

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