Frank/Gleiser/Thompson’s “The Blind Spot”

Astrophysicist Adam Frank, theoretical physicist Marcello Gleiser, and philosopher Evan Thompson elevate and promote “the primacy of consciousness” in that “There is no way to step outside consciousness and measure it against something else. Everything we investigate, including consciousness and its relation to the brain, resides within the horizon of consciousness.”

Lest they be misunderstood, the authors reject any inference that “the universe, nature, or reality is essentially consciousness or is somehow made out of consciousness,” because “this does not logically follow.” Such “a speculative leap,” they say, goes beyond what we can know or establish on the basis of “consciousness as experienced from within and as an irreducible precondition of scientific knowledge.” Furthermore, “this speculative leap runs afoul” of what they call “the primacy of embodiment,” which “is as equally undeniable as the primacy of consciousness” (Frank et al., 2024, pp. 186, 188).

The Strange Loop and the Blind Spot

What now confronts us, Frank/Gleiser/Thompson say, is “a strange loop,” where “horizontal consciousness subsumes the world, including our body experienced from within, while embodiment subsumes consciousness, including awareness in its immediate intimacy.” The authors stress that “the primacy of consciousness and the primacy of embodiment enfold each other.”

They call for unveiling and examining this strange loop, which normally disappears from view and is forgotten in what they call The Blind Spot. They describe the Blind Spot as “humanity's lived experience as an inescapable part of our search for objective truth” (Frank et al., 2024, p. 189), and they seek “to reclaim the central place of human experience in the scientific enterprise by invoking the image of a ‘Blind Spot’” (Gómez-Marín, 2024).

In other words, they reject the way of thinking that “we can comprehend consciousness within the framework of reductionism, physicalism, and objectivism or, failing that, by postulating a dualism of physical nature versus irreducible consciousness that we could somehow grasp outside the strange loop.” This is why they label the hard problem of consciousness an “artifact of the Blind Spot.” It is “built into blind-spot metaphysics, and not solvable in its terms” because “it fails to recognize the ineliminable primacy of consciousness in knowledge” (Frank et al., 2024, p. 192).

Beyond the Blind Spot

Frank/Gleiser/Thompson see “only a few options for trying to deal with consciousness within the confines of the blind-spot worldview,” and that “ultimately, they're all unsatisfactory, because they never come to grips with the need to recognize the primacy of consciousness and the strange loop in which we find ourselves.”

They argue that the three major options—neural correlates of consciousness; metaphysical bifurcation of physical reality and irreducible mental properties (whether naturalistic dualism, substance dualism, or panpsychism); and illusionism—are all “within the ambit of the Blind Spot” (Frank et al., 2024, p. 196).

What Frank/Gleiser/Thompson offer is “a radically different approach beyond the Blind Spot.” They reference papers by astrophysicist Piet Hut and cognitive psychologist Roger Shepard (Hut & Shepard, 1996), and neuroscientist Francisco Varela (1996), making the case for “a major overhaul of the science of consciousness based on recognizing the primacy of experience.”

hey note that “we inescapably use consciousness to study consciousness,” such that “unless we recover from the amnesia of experience and restore the primacy of experience in our conception of science, we'll never be able to put the science of consciousness on a proper footing.” A science of consciousness can work, all say, only if “experience really matters” (Frank et al., 2024, p. 218).

The key, according to the authors, is “recognizing [both] the primacy of consciousness and the primacy of embodiment,” which, they claim “changes how we think about the problem of consciousness.”

The problem for neuroscience “can no longer be stated as how the brain generates consciousness.” Rather, “the problem is how the brain as a perceptual object within consciousness relates to the brain as part of the embodied conditions for consciousness, including the perceptual experience of the brain as a scientific object. The problem is to relate the primacy of consciousness to the primacy of embodiment without privileging one over the other or collapsing one onto the other. The situation is inherently reflexive and self-referential: instead of simply regarding experience as something that arises from the brain, we also have to regard the brain as something that arises within experience. We are in the strange loop” (Frank et al., 2024, pp. 219–220).

Neurophenomenology as a Path Forward

Frank/Gleiser/Thompson support Varela's neuroscience research program, “neurophenomenology,” based on “braiding together first-person accounts of consciousness with third-person accounts of the brain within the I-and-you experiential realm.”

They advocate that phenomenology and neuroscience “become equal partners in an investigation that proceeds by creating new experiences in a new kind of scientific workshop, the neurophenomenological laboratory. First-person experiential methods for refining attention and awareness (such as meditation), together with second-person qualitative methods for interviewing individuals about the fine texture of their experience, are used to produce new experiences, which serve as touchstones for advancing phenomenology. This new phenomenology guides investigations of the brain, while investigations of the brain are used to motivate and refine phenomenology in a mutually illuminating loop” (Frank et al., 2024, pp. 219–220).

The authors call neurophenomenology “probably the strongest effort so far to envision a neuroscience of consciousness beyond the Blind Spot” (Frank et al., 2024, p. 221). Consciousness, particularly human consciousness, is “an expression of nature and is a source of nature's self-understanding.”