August 23, 2025

In this way, over time, scientists began to imagine a perspective-less perspective, a supposed God’s-eye view of the universe — free of any human bias. The philosopher Thomas Nagel calls this the “view from nowhere.” And this philosophical position eventually became synonymous with mainstream science itself.

The development of the thermometer, and from it the science of thermodynamics, offers a notable example of our scientific culture’s blind spot. In it, we can see how those unchanging elements of experience are extracted and then, in time, misconstrued as a false perspective-less perspective.

The embodied feeling of being hot or cold is a basic example of direct experience. But developing a measurable scale of this experience for future scientific inquiry took centuries of work. Much of this story played out in what we now call laboratories, where those elements of experience could be isolated and probed. First, hot and cold needed to become correlated with something like the level of alcohol or mercury in a graduated tube. This was the invention of thermometry. Once a way to measure degrees was established, those degrees could then be used to investigate other focal points of experience, like the boiling point of water. A mathematically formulated theory of thermodynamics was then slowly developed, describing the relationship between temperature and heat flow. Later, higher levels of abstraction came as the random motions of unseen atoms — studied via the new field of statistical mechanics — were recognized as the true nature of heat. In this way, more phenomena studied in labs became describable in ever more precise terms. Along with those new, precise descriptions came new, powerful capacities to control the world via technologies like heat engines or refrigeration.

As this upward spiral of abstraction was traversed, something, however, was lost. In what Husserl called the “surreptitious substitution,” abstractions like thermometric degrees were treated as more real than the experience they imparted. Eventually, the first-person, embodied experience of being hot or feeling cold was pushed aside as a phantom epiphenomenon, while abstracted quantities like temperature, enthalpy, Gibbs potentials and phase space became more fundamental and more real. This amnesia of experience is science’s blind spot.

I think, whether you believe in divine creation or solely in physics (though the two are really not incompatible), there can be no dispute about how fortuitous it is that we are here today as free, conscious entities, able to think and experience and love. Whether it is because some loving, omnipotent, unoriginated Being consciously decided to make the particular farting, mewling, grasping masterpiece that is you, or because a set of cosmic coincidences aligned so perfectly and yet so improbably that Simon Boas resulted, being alive at all is something we don’t appreciate nearly enough.

There can be no dispute about how fortuitous it is that we are here today as free, conscious entities, able to think and experience and love.

I’ve always approached this issue much more from the empirical, scientific side, and yet the conclusion is the same. Any physicist can explain the origins of the universe from a description of big bangs and space­time and matter, but will also attest to two things: that none of this would have existed but for some pretty spectacular ‘Goldilocks’ coincidences (not too hot and not too cold); and that there are myriad things which not only can’t be explained now, but which may never be.

The universe is fine-­tuned for us to exist.