What Counts as Seeing

Science is not a neutral force. A scientist’s conclusions are profoundly effect-influenced by the methods that she used, which are influenced by the questions that she thought to ask, which are influenced by her own beliefs and values, which are influenced by her senses, by her culture, by her background.

So much of the way knowledge is produced within an academy is very exclusive and inaccessible to so many people with not just different senses, but just to different walks of life. And that’s across every field. It’s such a loss, I think, about our understanding of the natural world.

One of my favorite reviews for I Contain Multitudes was a one-star review on Amazon, someone saying that this is a book about feelings, which makes it not a science book. There are no figures and tables or charts and numbers, and it’s not serious enough. That science should be opaque and serious. I think it should be exactly the opposite.

There’s always going to be this chasm where it can only be leapt over through imagination rather than through empiricism. Empiricism can guide our imagination, but we still have to make that final leap on our own. To really get at this, you need to fuse the sciences and the arts. You need to think more broadly than just the products of research pap... See more

Comparing and contrasting that tendency to make generalizations can very easily devalue the experiences of humans who sense the world in very different ways.

When we don’t have the words or when our words are overly broad, we run into misconceptions.

On the one hand, language is a wonderful tool. It allows us to describe these other worlds in metaphors that help us think and imagine them. But there are many places where our language leaves us in the lurch. Like with vision, we don’t have a word for detecting light but not having a conscious experience of it.

I think a lot about the limitations of language and how we interpret the language we use every day to talk about the senses.

I think that tension between just perceiving something, just detecting a stimulus, and then using it in the sort of rich way where we have a mental representation of what’s detected, is actually a very profound tension that exists across a lot of the senses. Does a mosquito landing on my skin have a mental perception of taste in the way that I have... See more