The Great Blind Spot of Science and the Art of Asking the Complex Question the Only Answer to Which Is Life

A century ago, the philosopher Simone Weil admonished against this fragmentation of the problem of reality into parochial questions addressed by disjointed scientific disciplines — “villages” of thought, she called them — each too blinded by its own axioms to make headway on illuminating the whole. “The villagers seldom leave the village,” she wrot... See more

At the heart of the book is the rigorous, passionate insistence that we need a softer and more elastic explanatory membrane between the three hard problems of reality: the hard problem of consciousness (rooted in the mystery of qualia, that inarticulable essence of what it feels like to be oneself, the felt interiority of being alive in a particula... See more