The Blindspot of Science

My confidence that I have something new to say was slightly dented this morning when I came across this blog post on The New Mysterians. It's mainly about relationships between the ideas of Owen Flanagan and Ken Wilber. Flanagan coined the term "mysterians" for those philosophers (mainly) who are skeptical about a scientific explanation of consciousness. Wilber suggests that a full solution to the "hard problem" comes only with Enlightenment but I was interested to learn that Flanagan's a Buddhist too. (As well as Wilber? Don't know, but he's certainly a fellow-traveller at least.) And there're some good points made about intersubjectivity in the comments on The New Mysterians - Part Deux.

But that was just a short-lived dip. I'm sure that, by combining a Nagelian take on subjectivity and objectivity with a really good appreciation of the significance of intersubjectivity, I'll have something that people will find worth reading. The title of this post is the new working title of the book. Using "science" instead of "philosophers" or "philosophy" sharpens it up. In fact it's probably not the case that scientists are necessarily more hard-nosed than philosophers on this issue, but titles and blurbs have to deal with perceptions as much as reality. And, in fact, it's the strictly objective approach that fails to find consciousness, so this title is more accurate in that sense.