MORE DETAILS
The Retinal Blind Spot in the Scientific Vision of Our Origins
Alan Wallace
Dr. Alan Wallace, who presented this lecture at the University of California, Santa Barbara, discusses the retinal blind spot in the scientific vision of our origins: consciousness. From the time of Copernicus, Western science has looked outward in its pursuit of knowledge of the natural world, which inevitably leads to the conclusion that the universe consists essentially of physical phenomena and their properties. As a result of this ideal of objective knowledge of objective reality—together with a taboo against subjective knowledge of subjective realities—an empirical science of the mind was not begun until some three hundred years after the Scientific Revolution. By then, the physical sciences had advanced so far that some prominent scientists thought their knowledge of the universe was already complete in all its essentials. For a hundred years after the inception of modern psychology in the late nineteenth century, consciousness itself continued to be largely ignored by the cognitive sciences. Thus, in its vision of cosmogony and the evolution of life, science has blinded itself to the role of consciousness in the natural world. Rather than knowledge of origins, nature, and potentials of consciousness, science presents us with a mass of assumptions often presented in the guise of established facts. As the eminent historian Daniel Boorstein comments: the major impediment to discovery is not ignorance, but the illusions of knowledge.Program recording date & length: 1998 • 1 Hour 29 Minutes
