Essay

The Galilean Abstraction: How Science Removed Experience from Nature

Modern science is one of the greatest achievements in human history. It has given us planetary motion, electricity, medicine, radio waves, evolutionary biology, neuroscience, quantum mechanics, space travel, and the ability to peer billions of years into the past. It has transformed our understanding of the universe and our place within it. It would be absurd to deny its power.

And yet, something strange happened at the birth of modern science. In order to describe nature mathematically, science made a fateful abstraction. It separated the measurable from the lived, the quantitative from the qualitative, the world as described by physics from the world as experienced by conscious beings.

This abstraction was extraordinarily fruitful. But it also created a problem that has never fully gone away.

It helped give us physics.

It also helped create the modern problem of consciousness.

Galileo’s move

Galileo Galilei is rightly remembered as one of the founders of modern science. He helped show that nature could be described mathematically. The book of nature, he famously suggested, is written in the language of mathematics. Shapes, sizes, motions, positions, quantities, and relations could be measured, modelled, and expressed in equations.

This was revolutionary. The world was no longer approached primarily through inherited authority, scholastic categories, or common-sense appearances. It could be measured. It could be mathematized. It could be predicted.

But Galileo’s move involved a crucial distinction. Some properties of things seemed suitable for mathematical science: size, shape, number, position, motion. These were treated as belonging to the objective world. Other properties — colours, sounds, tastes, smells, heat as felt, pain as lived — seemed less suitable for mathematical description. These were relocated to the experiencing subject.

In other words, redness was no longer taken to be simply out there in the object in the same way as shape or motion. The tomato, on this view, has a certain surface structure, reflectance profile, and physical relation to light. But the redness as experienced belongs to the perceiver. Sound is not simply in the bell; it is produced in experience when vibrations affect an organism. Heat as measurable molecular motion belongs to physical description; warmth as felt belongs to lived experience.

This was not foolish. It was methodologically brilliant. By focusing on what could be measured and formalised, science gained extraordinary clarity and power. But the cost was that experience itself was no longer part of nature as described by physics. Experience was placed on the other side of the divide.

Nature became mathematical.

Experience became subjective.

And ever since, we have been trying to work out how subjective experience fits back into the natural world from which it was methodologically excluded.

The birth of the explanatory gap

This matters because consciousness is not just one more phenomenon among others. Consciousness is the field in which phenomena appear at all. Pain, colour, sound, memory, thought, emotion, bodily feeling, and perception are not abstract entities. They are lived. They are present. There is something it is like to undergo them.

Modern physical science is extremely good at describing structure, relation, quantity, mechanism, and function. It can describe wavelengths, neural firings, retinal processing, cortical activity, information flow, and behavioural response. But a familiar question remains: why should any of this be accompanied by experience? Why should neural activity feel like anything from the inside? Why is there something it is like to see red, hear music, feel grief, taste coffee, or watch the evening light move across a room?

This is often called the hard problem of consciousness, or the explanatory gap. The problem is not simply that we do not yet know enough neuroscience. The problem is that the kind of description physical science gives us seems to leave out the very thing we are trying to explain: lived appearing.

If one begins with a description of the world in terms of particles, fields, causal relations, mathematical structures, and functional organisations, it is not obvious how experience re-enters the picture. One can add more detail. One can describe more neural mechanisms. One can map the visual system, the thalamus, the cortex, attention, prediction, and memory. All of this is essential. But still the question presses: why should these processes be accompanied by subjective experience at all?

The Galilean abstraction helps explain why this problem is so persistent. If experience was bracketed out at the beginning in order to construct mathematical physics, then perhaps it is no surprise that experience is difficult to recover from within that physical picture later.

The difficulty may not be an accidental gap in current science. It may be a consequence of the original abstraction.

The lifeworld forgotten

The philosopher Edmund Husserl saw this with remarkable clarity. In his late work, The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology, Husserl argued that modern science had forgotten its origin in what he called the lifeworld.

The lifeworld is not a theory. It is the world as lived before theory: the world of perception, embodiment, action, meaning, practice, memory, others, and everyday involvement. It is the world in which we wake, walk, speak, measure, doubt, calculate, love, suffer, and wonder. It is the world in which science itself takes place.

Science idealises this world. It abstracts from it. It constructs mathematical models of nature. Again, this is not a mistake. The mistake occurs when we forget that these mathematical models are abstractions from the lived world and begin to treat them as more real than the lived world from which they arose.

A map is useful because it leaves things out. It does not show every stone, smell, sound, puddle, memory, fear, or expectation associated with a place. Its usefulness depends on abstraction. But it would be strange to conclude that only the map is real and the lived landscape is secondary or unreal.

Something similar may have happened with scientific objectivity. The mathematical description became so powerful that it began to seem like the true world, while lived experience became puzzling, secondary, internal, or merely subjective.

But science itself is something that appears within experience. Equations are read. Instruments are observed. Data are interpreted. Theories are understood. Measurements are made by embodied beings in a world already disclosed to them. The lifeworld is not an optional extra. It is the condition within which science becomes possible.

Philip Goff and Galileo’s error

The contemporary philosopher Philip Goff has recently revived this line of thought in relation to consciousness. In Galileo’s Error, Goff argues that the problem of consciousness arises because Galileo and the architects of modern science excluded qualitative experience from the domain of physical science. Physics, on this view, describes matter in terms of mathematical structure and behaviour, but does not tell us what matter is in itself, nor does it account for the intrinsic qualitative character of consciousness.

Goff uses this diagnosis to defend forms of panpsychism or Russellian monism: views according to which consciousness, or consciousness-involving properties, may be fundamental features of reality rather than late products of wholly non-conscious matter.

One does not need to accept all of Goff’s conclusions to see the force of the diagnosis. If physical science was built by setting aside qualities, then the hard problem may be less surprising than it first appears. We are trying to recover consciousness from a framework whose founding gesture was to exclude qualitative consciousness from the objective picture.

That does not make physics false. It means physics may be incomplete as a total metaphysics.

Lawful abstraction

This point is easily misunderstood. To say that science abstracts from lived experience is not to attack science. Abstraction is the source of science’s power.

A physics textbook does not describe the smell of the laboratory, the anxiety of the student, the beauty of the diagram, or the feeling of understanding an equation. It does not need to. It abstracts from those features in order to capture relations that can be measured, shared, and formalised.

Likewise, a mathematical model of colour vision may describe wavelengths, cone responses, opponent processes, cortical activity, and perceptual discrimination. Such a model may be scientifically excellent. But the redness of red as lived — the qualitative presence of colour in experience — is not obviously contained in the equations themselves.

The abstraction is lawful. It preserves something real. It captures structure, relation, invariance, and prediction. The problem arises only if we mistake the abstraction for the whole of reality.

A shadow can preserve the outline of an object while omitting its colour. A map can preserve spatial relations while omitting the sound of the place. A graph can represent a motion while omitting the felt drama of seeing something move. These are not errors. They are successful abstractions. But they cannot, by themselves, recover everything they have left out.

The danger is not abstraction.

The danger is forgetting that abstraction has occurred.

Consciousness and the inverse problem

There is an analogy here with perception itself. Perception is often described as an inverse problem. The sensory input reaching the eyes or ears does not uniquely specify the world that caused it. The same retinal image could, in principle, be produced by different objects, distances, lighting conditions, or arrangements. The brain must infer the most coherent cause of the sensory input.

This is why perception is not simply passive recording. It is constructive, interpretive, and shaped by context, attention, expectation, and prior knowledge. We do not merely receive the world. We perceive a coherent world by resolving ambiguity.

Something similar may be true at a deeper philosophical level. Physical science gives us a projected description of nature: structure, quantity, relation, dynamics. But if that projection has omitted lived qualitative appearing, then we cannot simply invert the projection and expect experience to fall out. The inverse is underdetermined. The projected description does not uniquely recover the full lived reality from which abstraction began.

This is one of the ideas I explore in my own theoretical work on Awareness-First Theory. The suggestion is not that physics is wrong, or that neuroscience is irrelevant, or that experience floats free from nature. The suggestion is that physical description may be a lawful but non-exhaustive projection from a richer field of appearing. It preserves what can be measured and formalised, but it may not preserve everything that is present in lived experience.

If that is right, the explanatory gap is not merely a missing mechanism. It is a projection problem. We are asking a projected description to recover what the projection itself was constituted by omitting.

Why this matters for cognitive science

This may sound very abstract, but it matters for the science of perception and consciousness. In psychology and neuroscience, we study how the brain constructs perceptual experience. We investigate attention, expectation, awareness, memory, prediction, and the conditions under which people consciously perceive or fail to perceive the world around them.

This work already shows that experience is not a simple copy of external reality. People can fail to see large visible objects when attention is elsewhere. They can miss dramatic changes in a scene. Expectations can shape what is perceived. Context can alter the interpretation of ambiguous input. The same sensory signal can give rise to different perceptual experiences depending on the wider organisation in which it is embedded.

Such findings do not show that the world is unreal. They show that experienced reality is actively structured. The world we live in is not merely registered by the brain; it is disclosed through embodied, attentive, predictive, and interpretive processes.

The Galilean abstraction is therefore not just a historical curiosity. It continues to shape how we think about perception. If we assume that the real world is simply the world described by physics, then conscious experience becomes a puzzling inner add-on. But if we begin from appearing itself — from the fact that any world, object, body, measurement, or equation must be disclosed in experience — then the problem looks different.

Experience is no longer something to be squeezed into a world first defined without it.

Experience is the starting point from which any world is known at all.

Returning experience to nature

The challenge now is not to abandon science, but to deepen our understanding of what science is and what it leaves out. We need physics, neuroscience, psychology, mathematics, and computational modelling. But we also need to remember that all of these arise within the field of lived appearing.

Nature, as described by science, is one achievement of abstraction.

Nature, as lived, is richer.

The task is not to choose between them. The task is to understand their relation.

Galileo’s abstraction gave us modern science. It allowed nature to be measured, predicted, and mathematically described. But it also helped remove experience from the official image of nature. The result is the modern puzzle of consciousness: how can lived experience arise in a world whose basic description was constructed by leaving lived experience out?

Perhaps the way forward is not to force experience back into a purely physical picture, nor to reject that picture, but to see physical science as a lawful abstraction from a more fundamental field of appearing. On this view, experience is not an embarrassment to nature. It is not a ghostly extra. It is not a decorative surface laid over a mindless mechanism.

It is the condition under which nature is disclosed at all.

Science did not discover a world without experience.

Science abstracted from experience in order to describe the world mathematically.

Now the task is to bring experience back into nature without losing the extraordinary power of science.

Part of Constructing Experience: short essays on perception, consciousness, and reality.