The Blind Spot

Karntakuringu Jukurrpa

Long before the advent of alphabets and literacy, human wisdom was stored and passed along as stories told from one person, one generation, to the next. Our modern, Western prejudice has long been that these stories, or "yarns," as author Tyson Yunkaporta calls them, may be entertaining or enlightening, but that they that are unreliable when it comes to passing along so-called "facts," especially of the scientific variety. 

I mean, after all, the great breakthrough that we call the "scientific process," the tradition of Aristotle, Galileo, Newton, and Einstein, strives to assume a position of objectivity, of pure logic. It is a tradition of observation, replicable experiments, and learned debate. Indeed, one of the primary missions of science is to separate mythology from "fact."

In his book Sand Talk, Yunkaporta tells us about the oral tradition of his Apalech clan (from what is today the far north of Queensland, Australia) that stretches back at least 7000 years, long before Western people began writing things down:

"We yarn about the sentience of stones and the Ancient Greek mistake of identifying “dead matter” as opposed to living matter, limited for centuries to come the potential of Western thought when attempting to define things like consciousness and self-organizing systems such as galaxies. Western thinkers viewed space as lifeless and empty between stars; our own stories represented those dark areas as living country, based on observed effects of attraction for those places on celestial bodies. Theories of dead matter and empty space meant that Western science came late to discoveries of what they now call “dark matter,” finding that those areas of “dead and empty” space actually contain most of the matter in the universe."

Indigenous peoples from around the globe tell ancient stories like this. The Ojibwe and other midwestern tribes tell stories that go back to the end of the last Ice Age, 10,000-12,000 years and perhaps beyond, yarns from "time immemorial".

Western science is only now beginning to catch up with much of this indigenous knowledge.

Yunkaporta writes, "In contemporary science and research, investigators have to make claims of objectivity, an impossible and god-like (greater-than) position that floats in empty space and observes the field while not being part of it. It is an illusion of omniscience that has hit some barriers in quantum physics. No matter how hard you may try to separate yourself from reality, there are always observer effects as the reality shifts in relation to your viewpoint."

Today, many of us hold science up as the gold standard of factual knowledge. And not without some validity. The scientific method has lead directly to the technological advantages that made both actual and cultural colonialism possible. Even us non-scientists seek to erase doubts about what we are going to say by starting off "Science tells us . . ." We shake our heads over those who take medical advice from anyone other than "trained" professionals. We teach oral traditions as literature or religion rather than an alternative perspective on truth.

Most scientists are humble enough to not pretend to know the "truth." They see their role as pursuing truth with the understanding that whatever we think we know today will be, at best, a stepping stone to a greater truth, if not an outright mistake. But there's little question that Western culture as a whole has embraced its science as a kind of supreme system for knowing things.

In their new book The Blind Spot, a scientist (Adam Frank) and a pair of philosophers (Marcelo Gleiser and Evan Thompson) explore what they call "the blind spot" of modern science in light of the story science has told over the past two centuries or so. This blind spot is made up of four main aspects of the progress of science (and most specifically physics) from the Ancient Greeks to the present day.

The first aspect of this is what mathematician and philosopher Alfred North Whitehead called "the bifurcation of nature." This refers to the assumption that we can separate human experience from nature. For instance, science tells us that atoms and light waves are "real," whereas experiences like color or hot and cold are merely psychological, manufactured by our minds, and thus not a part of so-called "objective reality." An example that comes to mind is that my doctor tells me that the placebo effect is "just in your mind" even if my lived experience is that the sugar pill, because it cured my ill, is real medicine. As Yunkaporta points out, the world since Einstein has shown us the process of bifurcation leaves us with an explanation of the world world, the quantum world, that makes no sense to those of us who live our day-to-day lives as an inseparable part of nature.

The second aspect of this blind spot is what the authors call reductionism (or the term I prefer, smallism). This refers to the process of attempting to understand larger systems by breaking them down into smaller and smaller parts. The idea is that the smaller the part, the better it represents reality, while our experience of larger systems -- like the human body or the planet Earth -- are just fabrications of our minds. But smallism has taken us to a place in which larger systems simply shouldn't exist as they do . . . Yet they do. There is something about these larger systems that we are missing as we squint into increasingly powerful microscopes.

The third aspect of science's blind spot is what Yunkaporta describes as "impossible and god-like": objectivism. This is perhaps the most profound absurdity of science, the idea that we can somehow step outside of reality in order to take a God's-eye view of things. What the quantum world is teaching us is that there is no place and no time at which a human can stand that is not inside the reality in which we exist. We are always inside it. The metaphor (or perhaps not a metaphor) that comes to mind is that no matter how much we know about what our brains do, we have no idea how it creates consciousness. That's probably because it's impossible for consciousness to take an objective view of consciousness. It's like asking a flashlight in a dark room to find something that doesn't have light on it. Since every direction it turns has light on it, the only conclusion is that everything has light on it.

The final component of the blind spot is what the authors call the reification (I prefer thingification) of mathematics. This means that we mistake the increasing abstractions of math as the skeleton upon which reality hangs rather than a product of our idealized scientific workshops or laboratories. Math can only explain things for which the scientist is seeking explanation, but to do so requires "controlling" for the rest of reality. To paraphrase Fran Lebowitz, let me assure you, in the real world there is no such thing as math. As an abstraction, math is one of the major tools for bifurcating us from our lived experiences.

Indigenous stories tell us of people without this blind spot, who accepted that they, and everything, is part of an un-bifurcatable system of reality in which there is no difference between living and non-living, in which everything is inseparably connected, in which our lived experience of doing, thinking, and being, of color and hot and cold, are as real and essential to understanding reality as atoms and light waves. This is the world of young children who have not yet fallen victim to the blind spot.

In their book The World of the Newborn, Daphne and Charles Maurer write about newborns:

"His world smells to him much as our world smells to us, but he does not perceive odors (as we do) . . . His world is a melee of pungent aromas -- and pungent sounds, and bitter-smelling sounds, and sweet-smelling sights, and sour-smelling pressures against the skin. If we could visit the newborn's world, we would think ourselves inside a hallucinogenic perfumery."

Western science tells that sweet-smelling sights are not objective aspects of reality. Tens of thousands of years of human experience, and every young child, begs to differ.

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