Embodied agency and the blindspot of medical science

Abstract

Embodied agency and the blindspot of medical scienceModern science is driven by a "life-as-machine metaphysics", according to which the world is given and objectively there, to be quantified and divided up into more basic, material elements (Frank et al., 2024, p. 92).In this view, human lived experience plays no or next to no explanatory role (ibid., 7-8).This is the blindspot of modern science: it largely operates by ignoring consciousness.The ignorance is based on a fundamental confusion Husserl called the "surreptitious substitution" (8-9).Science replaces the world of experience with mathematical and physical models of the scientific workshop (10), demoting experience while elevating mathematical and physical models to objective reality.But while models and laws are part of a method, a method itself does not describe what is objectively given or true.For Husserl this thinking confuses the map with the territory.Far from describing objective facts, scientific insights result from a process of intellectual abstraction that can ultimately be traced back to an observer and to their lived experience of the world."The Blindspot" is thus a timely call for action to develop a new, alternative scientific worldview, in which science is guided by the metaphor of the living organism, not the machine, and where consciousness is not an epiphenomenon, but instead the very point of departure for all scientific inquiry.Human experience is not just another physical "object of knowledge" (ibid., 103), but the precondition for there to be any object of knowledge in the first place (ibid.116).Thus, to achieve a more complete and human understanding of reality and to resolve the core challenges of our time, science must exhibit sensitivity to observer dependence and put direct human experience back into its models and explanations.In other words, we must "inscribe ourselves back into the scientific narrative as its creators" (150).