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| Source: SR Film Photography |
"We can recognize the typical pattern of left hemisphere thinking. It has certain qualities. It's simplistic, fragmented, linear, two-dimensional, decontextualized, abstract, disembodied, inanimate... it's all these things, and it thinks it knows everything. It loves certainty and is intolerant of ambiguity or the need to suspend judgment. The left hemisphere is less reliable. It sees less, understands less, and is prone to delusion. It gets to the point where we're just a bunch of automatons without free will, and it's all predetermined anyway, so whatever ends up happening in our lives is already more or less a foregone conclusion. There's a certain element of fatalism to it.
"I took part in a film called "Tawai: A Voice from the Forest" made by Bruce Parry about hunter-gatherer people. He spent a lot of time with them and their image of the world is one which is entirely coherent. They would be astonished at the idea that somehow it was all pointless purposes and meanness. Now you may say "Well, they're just simple people", but I think you ought to be very careful before you say that, because they seem to have contact with an intuition, an awareness of things that civilization has kind of damped down in us. We don't understand who we are, we don't understand what this world is, but when you look at those people they do understand who they are what they're doing there and the sacredness of the world around them and the need for their relationship with it.
"If you wanted to destroy the happiness of a people what would you do? Alienate them from nature, alienate them from the idea that there's any kind of spiritual or divine or sacred realm, and divide them one from another and destroy their traditions and history. In the 1970s Helena Norberg-Hodge went to a community in Ladakh where they largely lived in a way that was uninterrupted for hundreds of years, thousands of years, and she saw all the beautiful buildings and places. She was shown where people lived, and what they did, and she said "Now I want to see where the poor people live". And they said "But there are no poor people. This is how we all live." And she went back some 20 years later, after advertising, television, and toxic Western culture had been imported to Ladakh, with all its generation of unhappiness, disquiet, sense of falling behind, need to compete, greed, and found rates of self-harm which were formerly unknown. And the people said "We're just so poor". But these people had a true wealth which they had lost. They had become truly poor." [In a Richard Knights interview he added:] "One of the things that worries me is Stephen Pinker's view that "So many people have been brought out of poverty." That somehow everything's got a lot better. Now what they are actually counting is people who used to have no income at all because they lived in an indigenous culture. We've taken them ruthlessly out of that culture. We have bombarded them with Western advertising. We have told them there is somewhere they can go where they can have unimaginable whatever, and they end up in slums around big cities. They have a wage, so now they've gone from having nothing to having a lot by comparison. But actually they've lost everything." [See Harold Napoleon's first hand account in Yuuyaraq: The Way of the Human Being, and this discussion.]
"In Max Scheler's pyramid of values, as you are taken up each level towards the peak, the right hemisphere is able to see each, but the left hemisphere has been engaged in a kind of feat of 'explaining away' whereby all the higher values are explained in terms of lower ones, which boil down to utility. So the utility of a belief in the holy is that there can be a hierarchy of priests who control things. It also usefully causes a degree of social cohesion and makes people fear the afterlife. As for goodness, beauty, and truth? These are again just ways of disciplining the unruly people, and courage and magnanimity and so on are things for poor fools who prepare to sacrifice their own happiness but can't see that they'd be better to be Machiavellian and just please themselves... In The Master and his Emissary I talk about the origins of money in the ancient world, when it started to become a means of exchange. That was already an abstraction which then took on the qualities of the thing that it represented, as though the representation were the reality that it represented. And I think that is now part of the world picture. Many people I know professionally have made a lot of money, but have not made themselves happy." [And from the Richard Knights interview:] "We're going into an age of new puritanism. The Puritans were extremely authoritarian people, ruthless. They set up a kind of moral righteousness which was based on certain commandments, and if you didn't follow those then you were outcast. We're going there right now."
"Imagination is the fourth mode to understanding. People superficially relate to it as an escape from reality, rather than something that can bring you closer towards reality. But it's not fantasy. Fantasy is whatever it is that you use to escape from reality, based on bits of experience gathered from other places. Wordsworth and Coleridge wrote about this. That was a couple hundred years ago, but they still remain for me the most important writers on imagination in the English language, and they're very consonant with the writings of philosophers such as Hegel and Schelling, where the concept is that there is a stark difference between fantasy and imagination. Imagination is seeing into the depths of something that you think you know, but seeing it for the first time. You're finally making contact with it, not just with an image of it. Whereas fantasy is the substitution of something for whatever is in front of you. So these work in exactly opposite directions. Somewhere I quote from a biographical or literary passage in which Coleridge distinguishes the two with eight or ten pairs of epithets that contrast. These map onto the two hemispheres.
"It is a myth of our age that there's a conflict between science and reason, on the one hand, and intuition and imagination on the other. There isn't. Imagination is a form of understanding. It is how the world comes into being for us and feeds back into other forms of understanding. As a scientist you have to have imagination to come up with a creative hypothesis, to think about something that you haven't considered. As a reasonable person, and to use reason effectively, you have to have imagination to consider how a certain person that you're interacting with would react in that situation, and so on and so forth. These modes are constantly interacting, and to apply any of them well they need to be supported by the others. Using our imagination to get back to the core of what things are and who we are is not a matter of fantasy, it's a matter of reality. These are sort of threads that every ancient wisdom tradition has pulled on."
Jordan Peterson: “Fundamentally we're looking at something that's much more profound, and it is something that I think is represented in Christianity. For example, as the Luciferian presumptions of the untrammeled intellect. And it is associated with this idea of left hemisphere domination, it's hyper-systematization at the cost of the whole.”Iain McGilchrist: “Yes, I think that's right. And one thing that struck me very much in the last few years is that the myth of the “Master and His Emissary”, which was also the title of my first book, is something that actually crops up all around the world. There is a wise ruler, and there is an intemperate hot-headed general or underling who is put out by the feeling that there is this more powerful being, and actually he wants to usurp that being. This precise myth of there being two beings, one of them that is willing to take under its aegis the other, and to allow it to work well, and the other being who doesn't want that. Like Satan in Milton's Paradise Lost, it has the very expression of resentment, envy, and the desire to destroy if it cannot own something. And this seems to be the really important element in the picture that we're looking at.”
Jordan Peterson subsequently returned to McGilchrist's ideas during an interview with Karl Friston. This shed new light on their context and development, and how they might integrate into Friston's conceptions of the predictive processing framework, specifically Active Inference. The potentially significant consilience between the two wasn't adequately explored. Friston frequently makes use of the notion of (functional) complementarity, and both Friston and McGilchrist employ forms of dual aspect monism (aka non-dual dualism) in their explanatory frameworks (perhaps multi-aspect monism). For McGilchrist, the notion of "complementary opposites" looms especially large. Of course with Friston, this brings to mind the complementarity of agent/environment (often invoked using the dance/dialogue metaphor). But within the agent itself, the possibility that dual/complementary strategies for deploying attention are cost optimal is exactly the sort of evidence that could provide additional support for McGilchrist's hemisphere hypothesis (see also opponent processors, adversarial networks, and the explore/exploit dilemma below). Marco Lin suggested that this would follow from the "No Free Lunch Theorem" because, after all, we are optimizing for the convergence, synchronization, or coupling between a generative process (environment) and a generative model of that process (agent) leading to mutual adaptation, phenotypic space, and an attracting (synchronization) manifold. See also Gregory Bateson's "double description," illustrated with the notion of stereoscopic vision, and Alex Gomez-Marin's article "Making life & mind as clear as possible, but not clearer" for another view. Much more can been said about their respective views concerning autism and schizophrenia as well:
Jordan Peterson: "Is there any reason to make the assumption that the left hemisphere specializes in some sense for precision or for instantiating certainty at the lower levels of the hierarchy, whereas the right hemisphere is involved in play at the higher levels? Is there anything to those concepts that you know of?"
Karl Friston: "It's a very interesting question. Speaking as an imaging neuroscientist about functionality, if we go back to what we were talking about before (the cybernetic view, the "good regulator" theorem, and the notion that we entail "good models" of our lived or sensed world) then having two hemispheres tells me immediately that there is some lateral symmetry in my lived world in the sense I have two arms and two legs. As a newborn, basically ninety-nine percent of your world is just your body, so having two hemispheres tells you something quite fundamental about the universe into which you (as a brain at least) are introduced. Just to generalize, what that means is if you gave me the brain of a Martian I should be able to tell you a lot about its lived world, its embodiment, its body, and the kind of world that it lives in just by looking at the structure and the anatomy of the brain. So I think that's an important aspect to the lateralization issue."
"A more scholarly but more specific answer to your question is that there is certainly in neuropsychology an asymmetry in the way we deploy attention. So if you now read the deployment of certain neuromodulators (such as serotonin, acetylcholine, or adrenaline) as instantiating endogenous attention, then its deficits will correspond to certain kinds of neglect, a pathological inability to attend to (i.e. you're always going to ignore or just not be aware of something). There's really interesting work in terms of hemineglect systems and bilateral asymmetries between the right and the left parietal cortex in these syndromes."
"I don't know very much beyond that other than to be able to say that, for reasons that must have a principal explanation in terms of the higher order causal structure of the worlds in which we operate, there certainly is some asymmetry in the way that we attend to things, or there's some benefit in terms of having that factorization that allows certain things to be attended to, that sets the sensitivity (or the flexibility or inflexibility) of a hierarchy construction. It must be the case that there are certain domains and certain attributes that do show this lateralization. Just to point out, the lateralization issue was quite hot in the days of Jeffrey Alan Gray at the Maudsley Hospital as a possible correlative to things like schizophrenia."
Peterson: "Elkhonon Goldberg, who was a student of Alexander Luria, also suggested that the right hemisphere was specialized for processing in the domain of novelty and the left hemisphere was specialized for processing in the domain of relative certainty. So it might be something like the more novel a thing is, the more likely the right is to attend to it. That sort of maps on to Iain McGilchrist's conceptualization of hemispheric specialization with regards to both predation and predator detection. The right hemisphere seems to be specialized for contextual evaluation and the spotting of predators and the left for focused attention in the service of predation. So a bird, for example, will attend preferentially with the prey detection system while eating, but the right hemisphere and the other eye are scanning the environment for context-dependent signs of predation on the bird."
Friston: "I didn't know that, that's very interesting. I was just thinking that the obvious example of lateralization is language. So if you look at language as "predation for information", as the way of asking questions, that is the tool that we use to predate for information. So that makes entire sense. I didn't know that about the comparative ethology and anatomy of predators."
Peterson: "McGilchrist's new work details that out at some length, the relationship between attentional breadth and focus and hemispheric specialization. It maps very nicely onto the concepts that we've been discussing today."
As a synthesizer of diverse lines of research, McGilchrist is offering an alternative Gestalt (or world-picture) that is based on an understanding of the import of the structure of our brains. But this falls short of a ‘theory of everything’ (TOE) for the reason that brain structure begs the question: Why are brains structured in the way that we find them? To answer that we would likely need to invoke more fundamental principles. And those principles would, relatively speaking, be more suitable for any TOE worthy of the name. (In his latest book McGilchrist explores that question to some extent.) Thomas Kuhn, in The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, talked about how paradigms provide stability. But these are impacted by anomalies that conflict with the paradigm. And when those anomalies get convincing and perhaps overwhelming enough, the paradigm has to shift. Max Planck said that science advances one funeral at a time because people are very resistant to that shifting. In a way, McGilchrist is challenging us to re-examine our beliefs: Could the prevailing paradigm held concerning brain structure be too simple or incomplete?
Friston's 'theoretical primacy' and McGilchrist's 'psychiatric primacy' can be thought of as two sides of the same coin. A coin we’ve just begun to explore. One might also say these are either bottom-up or top-down views on the same subject. If it follows from the theoretical formalism that complementary strategies for deploying attention are cost optimal (and here McGilchrist would be in agreement) then what are the implications for culture, society, and the phenomenal and intersubjective? That’s the sort of question that McGilchrist, as psychiatrist and philosopher, is eager to try to tease apart. So just how far does Friston’s side of the coin go in supporting McGilchrist’s explorations there? Peterson’s interview suggests that it may be farther than I would’ve guessed. From another angle, where might Friston suggest implications that McGilchrist hadn’t considered? And more speculatively, if Friston were to write about the sort of grand cultural themes that occupy large sections of McGilchrist’s magnum opus, would the results be similar? Regardless, reading either thinker through the lens of the other would be a very interesting exercise; the intellectual common ground is extensive. McGilchrist is trying to add to our 'cultural heuristic toolkit' and shape a new, or perhaps more accurately, facilitate the return to an older folk psychology around an understanding of complementarities. (Marco Lin provides other contemporary examples, like adversarial networks and the explore/exploit dilemma that navigate the tradeoff between new possibilities and old certainties.) But given that the implications of the hemisphere hypothesis follow from a rather straightforward appreciation of relational dynamics, complementarity, etc., why bother to highlight the apparently arbitrary significance of brain lateralization at all? Isn’t it just an accident of evolution that led to the instantiation of these principles in those particular anatomical structures? There’s no good a priori reason why attentional capacities should lateralize to the left or right. They could have just as easily found some other configuration. So why all the fuss? I think the reason is that McGilchrist seeks to justify his conclusions using an embodied and thoroughly contextualized perspective, and so he is compelled to highlight the direct observations, just as they are. He’s careful to let observation inform theory instead of vice versa. Indeed, it may be that it is exactly our inability to deduce these (clinical) observations from first principles that makes their consistency (both intra- and interspecific) even more profound and convincing. In the aggregate it’s exceptionally compelling evidence.
Matt Segall recently facilitated an interview followed by a Q&A session. In his accompanying article he wrote: "Modern Westerners are doing grave damage to the world—to ecosystems, to culture, and to ourselves—as a result of a lop-sided way of seeing. McGilchrist has laid out a comprehensive and, in my opinion, thoroughly convincing case that this imbalance can be fruitfully interpreted as the result of a “left hemisphere insurrection”. ...Readers familiar with Owen Barfield and Rudolf Steiner, or other thinkers of the evolution of consciousness (e.g., Jean Gebser, Sri Aurobindo, William Irwin Thompson, Ken Wilber, …) will find what McGilchrist has to say about the growing dominance of the left hemisphere nicely complements their accounts of the rise of the modern materialistic mode of thought out of the more participatory modes which preceded it. ...while the right hemisphere is clearly the protagonist of McGilchrist’s story, the solution is not to excise the crucial function of the left. When properly kept in check and attentive to context the left hemisphere offers much that enhances our unique human capacities." Selected portion of the interview follows:
Matt Segall [addressing McGilchrist]: "In the documentary, The Divided Brain, which was made following your first book, there's a segment on education and a discussion about the way our modern educational approach is to rush children into the cultivation of the left hemisphere. Basically childhood, up until the time that schooling begins, is more of a right hemisphere type of world - there's a lot of imitation going on and emotional connection to things, stories, and whatnot. The rush to cultivate the left hemisphere through schooling seems to produce a type of human being that is atrophied in a way, or that it results in a hyper-developed left and a underdeveloped right." [...]
Richard Tarnas [also addressing McGilchrist]: "You're bringing forth into the world a kind of Gestalt shift. It's a new way [or a return to an older way] of framing our approach to things. We [at the Philosophy, Cosmology, and Consciousness program at California Institute of Integral Studies] are very focused on original ideas capable of transforming world views and making a difference. But the big challenge is how do we translate new ideas, visions, moral orders, paradigms, new Gestalt shifts, such as what you're bringing forth, into practices that are enacted in our society, our civilization. I know you care for the state of the world, it's obviously in a fraught, even catastrophic state. So how are you making the bridge? Do you have ideas about how to bring your particular conception into practical, transformational efficacy in the world?"
Iain McGilchrist: "I hope it's true the idea that I might be trying to affect, or succeeding in affecting, something of a paradigm shift. There are two things we can do: questioning and pushing back against practices that seem to lead into capture by the left hemisphere, and rethinking what we're trying to do when we're educating somebody. We're not trying to stuff information in. I think we're poisoning or corrupting and de-skilling the minds of children by turning them into something more robotic, and actually the way people talk nowadays and go about in the world seems to be more zombie-like often, I mean literally, and so I want to see people recapture something of the life of the imagination."
Iain McGilchrist [from an interview with Phil Stieg]: "Push back everywhere you see that machines are taking over from human beings. Push back when you hear a bureaucracy that’s full of codes and procedures, taking over from skill and judgment of professionals. Hit back if you’re a teacher, if you’re a doctor, you have skills. Learn to practice them. You make relationships with students or with patients. These are the important things about your work, not something that can be administrated. Push back about education. Let us broaden the scope of education. Bring back in things like philosophy, history, the understanding of other people’s cultures, and our own history of culture, not in some punitive way where we score it as not measuring up to our mark, but actually trying to understand it. And let’s also bring back into our lives the love of things that are not utilitarian. It’s no good thinking of things like music and going to an art gallery or something as some way to make you a better stockbroker or something like that. That’s to mistake the nature of it. It’s not to achieve another end. It’s not utilitarian. The left hemisphere only understands utility. Instead, the thing has enormous beauty and value in itself. So does great art. So does the great beauty of nature, and so does the beauty of spiritual rights, rituals and places."
Iain McGilchrist [from an interview with Satish Kumar]: "We belong in nature. Nature is not the environment. The ‘environment’ suggests something around us, not us. But we are nature. We come out of nature. We go back to nature. Nature is where we belong, where we have our home, and it's that that we are destroying. ...What to do about it? Well I think, in brief, it's up to each of us to push back against devitalization, dehumanization, de-animation, bureaucratization, proceduralization, and the culture of such processes that overlays the whole of our current lives."
Iain McGilchrist [in conversation with Philip Pullman]: "As a psychiatrist, I’m a great believer that the first thing in getting anyone to change is making them aware of what's going wrong at the moment, what they're doing wrong, otherwise they don't know what to do."
Iain McGilchrist [in conversation with Mark Vernon]: "I think this may sound negative, but 'resistance', and 'the negative', and 'the contrary', and 'the opposite' are often very important ways to go when we're trying to achieve a goal. What I would say has been important for me is mainly the things I don't do. I don't have a television. I hardly ever listen to the radio now. I don't do social media at all. I live somewhere where it's very silent. You cannot hear the road, perhaps once a week you might hear an aeroplane. What you hear in this silence is everything is happening, everything around you is alive: the trees, the hills, the cliffs, the waterfalls, the sea... And so, when I come to think about it, it's really more about what I don't do. I create open spaces. Life comes to us if we create the space for it. If we keep trying to make it happen we force our conceptions on it. In psychotherapy one of the things people are told is "Stop doing the things that you know you're doing that aren't working. Try something completely different and opposite to that."
During the Q&A portion of a recent lecture hosted by The Beshara Trust, the topic of how to translate new paradigms into practices was revisited again:
Edward Gay: "If we live in a left hemisphere world, how do we bring the right hemisphere more into play?"
McGilchrist: "There are a number of ways of answering this question. One is at that sort of level of "What do I personally do to introduce it more into my life?" There's a great deal to be said for allowing the world to presence to us, rather than a re-presentation of the world. But I would say that what we need is not just to do one or two things in isolation, but to reconceive who we are as human beings. This is the reason I wrote this very long book. It's an attempt, starting from the neurological basis and going through philosophy and physics, to see a coherent vision of who we are and what we're doing in the world.
Unless we grasp that, we'll be doing the 'right things' but for the wrong reasons. While that's perhaps better than doing nothing at all, if our motive for saving the rainforests is simply that they're very useful for preserving a climate in which we can live, then we might as well forget trying to save them. Because unless we see that they're intrinsically valuable, not just of utility, but are in themselves the most beautiful expressions of vitality, complexity, and richness - the soul of the world - then we're on the wrong track. So I think it's very important that we we take on board the message I'm trying to get across.
As a psychiatrist, I know that you can tell people what they need to do, but it never works because they need to see it for themselves. So you need to guide them to a place where they see that they need to do it. If you just tell them they need to do it, they won't get it. But it's not entirely hopeless; if only about three percent of a population really understands an important new idea, then it can become a force in that culture. So I'm just looking for three percent of the population to try and understand my philosophy, and I hope that will be in itself a move towards a better future."
Richard Gault: "It's said that we live by the ideas of dead philosophers. But you're a very much alive philosopher. Do we have time for the ideas to filter out?"
McGilchrist: "I think we do. I sense an enormous hunger for a better way of looking at the world amongst young people, and people of my generation too. What pleases me most is that my audiences, when I talk in public, are a whole range of ages from teenagers through to people of my age. So I think there is that need, that desire for something different."
McGilchrist's remarks on the importance of the humanities in education are supported by Kopytin and Gare: "While the practical outcome of the natural sciences is technology through which nature is transformed, and the practical outcome of the human sciences is the transformation of society through politics, the practical outcome of the humanities is the transformation of culture. The crucial distinction between the humanities and the sciences is that in the humanities the subject and the object of study coincide; in the humanities, humans are studied by humans and for humans. Therefore, to study the human being also means to create humanness itself; every act of the description of the human is, by the same token, an event of one’s self construction. In a wholly practical sense, the humanities create the human, as human beings are transformed by the study of literature, art, languages, history and philosophy: the humanities humanize." Iain McGilchrist’s keynote speech at the AI World Summit, 12 October 2022 in Amsterdam (condensed and paraphrased):
"In my recent book, The Matter with Things, I do my best to address why we're getting things so badly wrong. I'm not just here referring to our heinous crimes, such as poisoning the Earth's oceans, destroying its forests, persecuting its indigenous peoples, fighting wars, melting the ice caps, and bringing to extinction rare and beautiful species of living things. These are visible, but less visible perhaps is that we're making ourselves wretched. It seems that, for us, to be of ‘two minds’, to appear inconsistent, is a greater sin than to be consistently wrong. No room for ‘yes, but’, for nuance, for seeing the hidden opposite that is always there in whatever is being peddled to us.
Every angel has his devil. In many ways, AI could be seen as replicating the functions of the left hemisphere at frightening speed across the entire globe. Since the evolutionary reason for developing left hemisphere functions was solely to enhance power, this could indeed be seen as the ultimate logical aim of the left hemisphere. It has, after all, no sense of the ‘bigger picture’, of other values, or of the way in which context, and even sheer scale and extent, changes everything. What looks good in one context may be far from good in another, or when extended too far.
But every devil has his angel, and full credit to AI where it has potential to be an enormous help to us. Above all I believe this is in finding ways to help reverse the damage done by the tide of destruction that industrialization itself has brought about. And it can help treat diseases and perhaps find less destructive ways, such as nuclear fusion, to generate power. (As an aside though, maybe our dependency on power is part of the problem and we should be aiming to use far less power in the future.)
The problem with every step that increases the reach of human power is it will sooner or later be used for evil ends, and once a pernicious regime reaches a certain level it can effectively destroy any attempt to resist it, bringing the prospect of a totalitarianism which can have no end. AI is there to make things happen, to give us control, but this is good only if we make progress in wisdom as fast as we make progress in technical know-how. Otherwise it's like putting machine guns in the hands of toddlers. I’m not talking here about an apocalyptic future. I’m talking about apocalypse now. We’re already calmly and quietly surrendering our liberty, our privacy, our dignity, our time, our values, and our talents to the machine. Machines will serve us well if they truly relieve us from drudgery, but we must leave human affairs to humans. If not, we sign our own death warrant.
Can AI further the workings of the right hemisphere? Not directly, but it can by choosing its projects very carefully and positively turning away from those that will harm. Your choices are moral acts! You can't shrug it off. To succeed at AI, whose entire purpose is to give us control, you must paradoxically let go of control, at least to a large extent. What makes life worth living is what can only be described as a resonance, an encounter with other living beings, with the natural world, and with the greatest products of the human soul, some would say with the cosmos at large. It’s only in encountering the uncontrollable that we really experience the world and come fully alive. The resonance of a real relationship with a truly sentient other is not possible where there is no freedom, no spontaneity, no life."
Iain McGilchrist addressed some of the most widely misunderstood ideas about asymmetry and symmetry. Drawing on, as he put it, "this wretched book that I published last November called The Matter with Things", he explains how asymmetry is the greater of the two:
Language fails us all the way through life, except for the immediate business of manipulating a situation. It's part of the role of the left hemisphere, which is just simply manipulation not comprehension. Poetry is the way in which language can subvert language. It disconcerts the reader in certain ways, makes connections the reader is not used to in order to liberate hidden levels of meaning in words. But when those words are stuck together in the way that, for example, a user manual for some technological device sticks them together, there is no hidden anything. In the business of living, as we use language, it develops layers of meaning, and those can only be accessed through things like poetry, myth, metaphor, humor (which is particularly important), and narrative. All of these are much better understood by the right brain. The left brain doesn't understand metaphor, jokes, narratives, or myths. It thinks they're all lies, but the right hemisphere sees that these are incredibly important.
The way in which we now only valorize learning information, acquiring information in a way which will get you a reasonably well paying job in some technical sector... that is not an education. And when you stop educating your people you start to destroy your civilization. I believe we're taking a sledgehammer to our civilization right now. It's under attack from all kinds of sources. To see what's happening you have to be able to step to one side of it and have a standpoint from which to see it. That standpoint used to be given by the complexities of a tradition in which certain things were handed down, certain stories, myths, rituals (some of them religious, some of them not), poetry, music, drama... These things are hugely important for offering the richness of perspectives on life. That's where intellectual life actually starts.
Children up to the age of about 11 or 12 will often write rather wonderful poetry, but once they get into their teens the poetry tends to deteriorate because, in a way, it becomes more self-conscious and they think "I'm writing poetry now". One way of looking at it is that children are pragmatists, so they're encountering reality in a very empirical way and responding to it without too much overthinking. Gradually the more theoretically minded part of the brain, which is the left hemisphere, starts to dominate and restrict one's spontaneous, open receptivity to the nature of reality, which the right hemisphere is good at, by interfering with its own theoretical mapping or diagramming of the world. (One of my sound bites is that the relationship between the right hemisphere and the left hemisphere is like that between the world and a map of the world. One is enormously rich and complex, and the other is extremely simplified, but its value lies precisely in it's being simplified.) In the teens this theoretical mind takes over. And of course suddenly everything seems terribly simple: "Why can't one's parents see that actually it's just like this?" So they often go off into very extreme political positions that are based entirely on theory, and it's only after they've had a decade or two of experience in the world that they realize actually it's far more complicated, it doesn't fit into these neat categories. Then they start to recover the proper balance of pragmatism with a theoretical underpinning, but for quite a long period the theory dominates.
It's often said that we prefer, or animals generally prefer, symmetrical faces. But what they actually prefer is nearly symmetrical faces. Too great an emphasis on symmetry denatures whatever it is. And in fact human faces are never symmetrical. When they're represented as symmetrical they look to us threatening and uncanny. Most of the natural sequences in mathematics are also not in favor of closing down to a simple symmetry. The golden section has a kind of internal symmetry and asymmetry that makes it work, as does the Fibonacci series which lies behind it. Nests of alternating symmetries and asymmetries, at a philosophical level, are imaged in the biology of life. The right hemisphere alone understands that opposites may cohere, whereas for the left hemisphere it just doesn't compute. It exclaims, as it were, "That's the point! They don't cohere."
In an aesthetic of asymmetry there is also a place, from time to time, for symmetry. But in an aesthetic of symmetry, there is no place at any time for asymmetry. Asymmetry is greater than symmetry because it can include it, and imperfection is greater than perfection because it can include it. Let me take the example of Japanese art, which I think is one of the most staggering creations of the human mind. This wonderfully beautiful art is almost always in some important way asymmetrical, and the asymmetry brings breathtaking life to it. Precision is incredibly important in certain contexts; the problem here is our love of a dead perfection.
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| Source: Mehmet Geren |
Iain McGilchrist: "What we value, at any one time, in any one place, may vary. So people's values, in that sense, can be said to be somewhat societally determined, however this is grossly overestimated. People from quite different cultures usually see the same things as beautiful or ugly, and make the same judgments about pieces of music and so forth. Generally speaking they have similar ideas about goodness. They may vary on certain ways in which it might be lawful to kill somebody or not, but generally speaking, most people don't think that murder and rape are a good idea and so on."
Jonathan Rowson: "The question about the politics of Iain's work comes up in different forms. One way I think is helpful to think about it is that it's not so much political as metapolitical. It's about looking inside "what politics is" and recasting "what politics should be about". Clearly there's a relationship between the left hemisphere and power, for example, and clearly there's a sort of vision of the world presented by the right hemisphere. When you look through those lenses the whole idea of the political spectrum should dissolve. A new set of priorities should come into being. If the cosmos is as Iain describes it, "politics as we know it" changes fundamentally. So it's not as though the thesis says "therefore vote this way or that way", or prioritizes economic growth or something else, it's more that it recasts the very idea of "what political practice should look like" because it reprioritizes the sacred, education, imagination, and so forth. And through that a different kind of politics should arise."
In a recent conversation with Jim Rutt, John Vervaeke said: "You can make a good case for left and right hemispheres. The left is for well defined, the right is for ill-defined and they’re doing opponent processing. The point I want to make is you’ve got this complex dynamic of opponent processing systems that are pushing and pulling on each other." And he later elaborated: "There's an important strategy called opponent processing. You have two networks, and they are opposed to each other yet they are causally interpenetrating, interrelated. They are constantly pulling and pushing on each other. We don't do most of our problem solving as individuals, but as collectives. Democracy is a form of collective intelligence or distributed cognition. It is the style of governance that gives us opponent processing (and reciprocal accountability with it). You and I may have opposite biases, but we cooperate in the shared understanding that the best way I can correct myself is by looking through your eyes, and the best way you can correct yourself is by looking through my eyes. We don't come to a final agreement. Democracy is constantly evolving and self-correcting. Today we have abandoned opponent processing for adversarial processing, in which one side has determined that its bias should be absolutely triumphant and destroy the other side. I talk about an “ecology of practices” because there is no “panacea practice”. Every practice has strengths, but it also has complementary weaknesses. (There's actually a formal proof for that called the “no free lunch theorem”.) You need to engage the cerebellar cortex loop, you need to get into hemispheric opponent processing. Every practice should be paired with its opponent process so that you optimize self-correction. Then you can link these pairings into a larger ecology of practices. We should be offering the world opponent processing situated within a hermeneutics of beauty, building friendship and fellowship, rather than adversarial processing situated in a hermeneutics of suspicion that only increases tribalism." This echoes something Yuval Noah Harari recently said: "Democracy is an ongoing conversation. It must start long before the elections and it must continue after the election. And what conversation is all about is really the ability to listen to other people, also to look inside you and correct your mistakes. As in the body of a human being, so also in a political body in a country. Democracy needs a lot of self-correcting mechanisms, the ability to admit mistakes and correct them."
The intelligence of a collective is a reflection of its constituents and their level of trust in one another and social institutions. A democracy cannot respond to ecological disruption and global risks if it doesn't trust fact-finding institutions. It can't respond if its constituents don't understand ecological relationships. Instead it would struggle and inevitably fall short. Indeed, that's what we see today. Hence an educated electorate, institutional integrity, and processes of accountability are all essential self-correcting mechanisms. Erode the foundations of democratic societies and opponent processing is compromised. Collective intelligence declines. Vervaeke comes from the perspective of cognitive psychology, where knowledge and power asymmetries could be characterized as a disequilibrium between opponent processes. That disequilibrium prevents reciprocal accountability, and the ability to admit mistakes and correct them. Since, in the context of democratic politics, those processes lie at the core of opponent processing, their erosion leads to something more like adversarial processing, the various ways in which power concentrates into the hands of a dictator or oligarch. So we need an educated electorate, one capable of understanding the broad picture, but also one which values democratic decision making since no single individual, no matter how knowledgeable, is immune from making mistakes. Vervaeke has had conversations with McGilchrist, and so here he appears to be discussing this with reference to the first section of Iain McGilchrist’s book “The Matter with Things” under the heading "Some preliminaries: How we got here" where opponent processing is briefly discussed:
“To make sense of hemisphere differences, we need to go back long before the advent of the human brain, to the development of the very first nervous system of which we have knowledge. What emerges is something like a dance. (Musician Ren Gill noted "It is this eternal dance that separates human beings from angels, demons, and gods.") And, like many a good dance, it involves couples, their paths sometimes crossing, coming together and moving apart again, in a pattern that, viewed as a whole, makes perfect sense. The proper working of the body depends on ‘opponent processors’, systems that complement and counterbalance one another by their essentially opposing actions. In the brain there are three main such pairs of opponent processors, ranged along each of the three spatial axes. There is the top-to-bottom axis: that is to say, the relationship between the cortex – the outermost layer, literally the ‘shell’, of the brain – and the regions which lie below it. (This is called the ‘dorsal-ventral’ axis, but the name is not important here.) There is the front-to-back axis, the relationship between the frontal cortex and the posterior cortex of each hemisphere. (This is called the ‘rostral-caudal’ axis, but again the name is not important.) Finally, there is the lateral axis, that of the two hemispheres. Each one of them involves a relationship of balance, that includes both mutual potentiation and mutual inhibition."
In “The Master and his Emissary” McGilchrist added: “But the ‘left–right’ dichotomy is different in kind from the ‘up-down’ and ‘front-back’ dichotomies in several important respects. The cortex and subcortical regions are functionally distinct and incomparable, and run in series rather than in parallel. The cortex arises out of and exists to modulate the ‘input’ from the more ancient regions that lie below: the relationship between the frontal and posterior regions of the cerebral cortex has a similar structure, in that the frontal lobes developed from, and exist to modulate the action of, the posterior cortex. By contrast, the hemispheres are evolutionary twins: they display a remarkable degree of apparent overlap or redundancy of function, and run in parallel rather than in series. Each on its own can sustain something remarkably like a normal human mind, which certainly cannot be said of any of the other paired entities on its own. The hemispheres are capable singly of underwriting nothing less than a version of reality, and displaying the rivalry that in this book forms my focus of attention.” [Note: Not only is this rivalry the intuitively apprehended subject of many myths and legends, but it could also have improved Pixar's film "Inside Out" if, instead of emotional concepts, the main characters had been the brain hemispheres.]
On the topic of neuroanatomy, the authors of "Convergent minds: the evolution of cognitive complexity in nature" write: "Is the evolution of
mind a historical accident, or do we have reason to think that mind and
its associated cognitive competencies are a robustly replicable feature
of the evolutionary process? The prevailing theory is that cognitive
evolution is an adaptive response to environmental complexity. So under
what conditions and constraints does complex cognition tend to evolve
and what is it used for? What do patterns of convergence in the
history of life on Earth tell us about the nature of mind, its evolution
and its place in the universe?" A convergence hypothesis for the
evolution of cognitive features has apparent validity. Every animal, in
order to survive, has to solve a conundrum: how to eat without being
eaten (how to 'get' without being 'got'). This may be among the most
basic constraints for the evolution of mind, with others arising under
increasing environmental complexity. The question then is less whether
convergence occurs, so much as the extent to which we should expect to
see it, and what, as the authors pointedly ask, this can tell us about the nature of mind itself.
The
study of "convergent cognitive evolution", recently brought up by Joshua Plotnik, has many implications for
how we understand living, conscious systems. On the one hand, we know
that cognitive mechanisms arise from neuroanatomical structures, such as
asymmetrical cerebral hemispheres. But lateral neural asymmetry emerged
very early in evolutionary history (approx. 700 million years ago) - all
extant lineages exhibiting complex cognitive properties share a common
ancestor that displayed it. Which may mean that only comparative
astrobiology (in some distant future) would be able to confirm whether neural asymmetry would evolve independently. But, having once
evolved, the subsequent enlargement of these structures in diverse
lineages displays some interesting properties (such as, potentially, enhanced
opponent processing), and detailed comparisons of these could support the convergence hypothesis. The
authors also write: "A direct prediction of this model is that complex
cognitive capacities will begin to degrade under relaxed selection in
less informationally demanding environments, and that these, too,
deserve our theoretical and empirical attention." It is interesting to
note that, although generally imagined to occur on timescales of
hundreds of thousands of years, processes of degradation may also have
relevance to cultural evolution, which can occur within a single generation.
From a conversation with Michael Levin in which McGilchrist suggests what (if any) unique contributions he provides. (It should be mentioned that although he describes a sort of 'decision framework' here, the Heraclitean harmony of these asymmetric perspectives is equally important):
Michael Levin: "What do we take away from all this, on a personal level? What do you think are the life lessons here? What does this mean for us in terms of being 'beings'?"
Iain McGilchrist: "I’ll just say something about the philosophical importance. Up till now we've only been able to say, when it comes to arguing a matter in philosophy, "Well this school thought this. This school thought that. Take your pick!" And so philosophy has gone on in this way. But what I think I've been able to offer is that we can see the imprint of a left hemispheric, limited way of thinking, on how we would take the world. And we can see the hallmark, if you like, of viewing the world as the right hemisphere would see it. What I've undertaken to show is that the left hemisphere is more prone to delusion, more mistaken, and less reliable than the right hemisphere. Now if that is the case, then when we take a well known paradox, we can see that one way of looking at it is the way that the left hemisphere would, and the other way of looking at it is the way the right hemisphere would. So for example, according to the left hemisphere, Achilles cannot overtake the tortoise. It’s just impossible. But everybody knows that Achilles can easily overtake the tortoise in two or three strides. So what I think I can show is that the reason we get caught up in it is because we've espoused the left hemisphere's way of looking at it. When we look at it from the right hemisphere’s way of looking at it there isn't a problem anymore. Now if that is the case, and if I'm right, then I have actually added, in a modest way, something to the history of philosophy, which is that we can now make more weighted decisions about which path is likely to prove in the long run more veridical, more helpful." [Which echoes an earlier lecture: "If we can see the signature of the left hemisphere and the signature of the right hemisphere in any particular position on a particular topic it helps us because we can no longer just go “Oh well, there are these two and they're in conflict”, shrug the shoulders and go off and have supper. No, we can go further now. We can say “One of these is likely to be a better guide than the other”. Not invariably, but it is in all probable terms going to be a much profounder guide to an understanding of the world than a vision of it (which we can recognize from its signature) that has all the qualities that come from the left hemisphere."]
Michael Levin: "People really are looking for meaning in their life. With a couple of collaborators we're actually looking at trying to tackle the loss of meaning. It's fine to destroy some of those things, but then we need to build it back up in a better grounded and more meaningful way."
Iain McGilchrist: "I couldn't agree with you more. And from my point of view it is not part of the left hemisphere’s evolution that it should be looking for meaning. It’s looking for stuff, for things, and that's why I say "the matter with things". Whereas the right hemisphere is actually interested in purpose, in meaning, and what all this is about. What we now believe is that we invent meaning. But I say no, we either do or do not discover meaning. Meaning is part of the process of living."
The Nocturnists Conversations podcast:
Iain McGilchrist: "Looking at Western history since the time of the ancient Greeks, three times we have grown up a flourishing civilization. But these only lasted for a few hundred years, because when you have an empire, your prime value becomes control: being able to keep that empire under control, to exert power over it, and to use the resources that are made available by it. And that is massively served by the left hemisphere. The left hemisphere can get on with grabbing stuff, and manipulating stuff, and making up procedures, rules, and algorithms. It thinks in a very "either/or" way. “Make up your mind. Is it this or is it that?"
"Whereas the right hemisphere is perceiving that things are much more complicated than that. If you try to express the right hemisphere's point of view, you have a very difficult task. It's much truer than the left hemisphere's point of view, but the difficulty is that it's much more subtle. Many nuances have to be conveyed, which is very difficult, particularly in the era of the soundbite. There's usually something to be said on both sides of the argument, which the right hemisphere is much better able to see. A lot of what it has to say could seem contradictory. You need to hold two points of view. Each of them has something to be said for it, but they aren't strictly speaking to be fused into one. That is a more difficult task to do. So I think that what happens in these larger societies, as empires grow and flourish, is that this kind of rationalizing public discourse takes over. And therefore the messages that the right hemisphere would have given are fainter. And in our modern society, the very ways in which they would have come to us in the past have been neutralized or minimized or almost dismissed."
A related point, which recalls the 'primitivist critique' of Richard Heinberg, and Graeber and Wengrow's thesis in The Dawn of Everything, was made during the August 2022 Q&A with McGilchrist:
Audience member: "What were the major factors that have caused a shift towards left hemisphere 'separatist' modes of consciousness, from the more participatory mode of consciousness that prevailed for much of human history?"
Iain McGilchrist: "I think that the original cause of that shift, in terms of social history, must have something to do with the move away from the mind of hunter-gatherers and nomads on the one hand, and people who had settled in a certain place, who owned land, who cultivated land, who needed a hierarchy of laborers, overseers, priests, legal people, and so on. And so I think that's when the left hemisphere mode comes into its own. ...It's interesting, isn't it, that as you go, as they say 'further up the evolutionary tree,' the left and right hemispheres become more distinct and more able to operate separately. This hard and fast separation has just got stronger within human history, and I think it’s reinforced by agricultural civilization."
All historical parallels have limitations. Each situation is unique in many ways, and no less our own today. So it’s worth asking: Can examining our past help us to avoid similar outcomes in the present? Only if we understand the lessons history can teach us. And the lesson McGilchrist is highlighting here is that the overreaching of an empire, and the decline and collapse of a civilization, appears to coincide with the increasing prevalence of left hemisphere forms of thought and attention. This doesn’t mean that restoring equilibrium between the right and left will prevent collapse. There are many other factors in play. However it might improve the quality of our interactions, and thereby measures of health and resiliency that can help to mitigate against the possibility of collapse. It’s important to note that in this portion of the conversation, McGilchrist is referring specifically to the recorded history of the Western world. Elsewhere he’s discussed non-Western cultures (a majority of which have not faced the same problems or patterns). There is an increasingly vocal ‘anti-civilization’ perspective being expressed today, and it’s not without its reasons. In a recent podcast, McGilchrist said “I think that civilization, as we now understand it, may not have long. I think there will be a great crash and that something better and wiser may emerge. I think that there will be losses of life. I'm sure people will survive and may live in small groups and rediscover things that we've forgotten, skills and understandings, a kind of wisdom that we have discarded. But I'm not making any hard and fast predictions; I don't think that we can predict things. I'm just saying this looks like a possibility worth considering, that it may go that rather unfortunate way.” Avoiding a crash and the preventable loss of life by pursuing a gradual revolution is still a possibility too. Peter Corning's book The Fair Society discusses a biosocial contract along with other important ideas such as ‘essential services’ and ‘basic needs’, surplus and reciprocity. Ideas that may help reconstitute society around an ethic of social and ecological responsibility. For a tense few months at the start of the Covid pandemic a few of these were actually part of the national dialogue. But that discussion did not last long. As for the role of technology, it can certainly help to bring us there. But to a significant extent this depends upon how it interacts with negative and positive feedback loops. As we know from climate science, in the absence of sufficiently mitigating negative feedback loops, too strong of a positive feedback dynamic can quickly destabilize a situation. From a conversation with Rich Archer:
Iain McGilchrist: "There comes a point when you have to say “We have to find a better paradigm.” That is the point at which I find myself. Three times I can see the same pattern. In the Greek case, things were at their best in the sixth century BC. And then over time, the balance between the two hemispheres went further and further towards the left. And then you get the same thing in Rome. Things were very good, then as you go on for the next 300 years through the Empire they get more and more left hemisphere. And I think we can see the same thing in our own time since the Enlightenment. Things are sort of tailing off. In every case, this has to do with a number of things. One is usually an empire that tries to administer too much, take on and influence too many things, and therefore it overreaches itself. And the only way it can do this is by a sort of very ‘bureaucratic’ take: everything is rolled out the same, everything is procedural, everything is categorical, all the fineness, the individuality, the responsiveness goes and everything becomes very cut and dry. And I think we are very strongly heading in that direction.
"There are a number of massive problems that are so obvious I hardly need to name them. One is the way in which we're killing the living planet. Another is the way in which we're driving to extinction peoples who have a non-Western way of living their lives. And in our own civilization, I think I can see things breaking down now, drifting towards the dogmatic and categorical. When the Roman civilization collapsed in 410 AD, or whenever you like to place it, it took 1000 years for civilization in Europe to really re-emerge as a kind of vibrant force. I'm not saying that the Dark Ages, as we used to call them, were entirely barbaric. But effectively, civilization is not something you can take for granted. To be hacking away at its main institutions in the way we are is reckless. It is like pulling down statues. It is like, you know, Islamic fundamentalists taking a pneumatic drill to an Assyrian winged bull, and that's what we're doing.
"In this period of the early Greek civilization around the sixth century BC, in and around the year dot in Rome, and in the beginning of the Renaissance, there was a wonderful marriage of everything, for example the beginnings of science - actually investigating what is really happening in the world in an empirical way, rather than taking it out of a book or out of a story. There's also the beginnings of drama or poetry, of music, of doing astronomy, of a civil society developing a government that is democratic, or at least more democratic than it had been. You get this wonderful efflorescence of everything coming from a working together of the technical mind along with the imagination. And you see the same thing in Rome; you see literature, the beginnings of Roman law, which ensured a sort of stable society, a deep morality, an appreciation of nature, all these things happening together. During the Renaissance you get figures like Erasmus and More, people with a sense of humor, of proportion, of the balance of the individual with the state, of not being dogmatic but encouraging learning and spirituality. It all happens in like a hundred years. And then gradually, it gets fossilized into a mechanistic worldview, a terribly bureaucratic, abstracted, militaristic, hierarchical way of thinking, in which nothing has a place unless, as it were, it can be proven in a lab. Last time it took 1000 years to come around [between the fall of Rome and the Renaissance]. We haven't got 1000 years this time.
"Education is not about putting things in, it's about drawing something out. And actually, what you're trying to do is make the stuff that children have in them flourish. And that means clearing things away. I often think being a teacher is like being a good gardener. You know, a gardener cannot make a plant, and he can't make the plant grow. But the gardener can get out of the way all the stuff that would choke that plant and make the conditions good for that plant to flourish. So in a way, you're mediating the flourishing of another individual. And that's what a good teacher is doing. So one of the things that ought to happen is deregulation, but not total deregulation because that's the other extreme that you get from the left hemisphere: “Oh, so you don't want any rules at all? And nobody is accountable for it?” No, that's not what I'm saying. What I'm saying is, there is a degree of necessary monitoring, and there's a degree of accountability, but there must be freedom too. Otherwise you kill the human spirit. So that's one thing. Another is what the curriculum would contain. And we've become obsessed in a very left hemisphere way with grabbing and getting. As you know that's what the left hemisphere is for. And so its main thing is that we should be teaching techniques to make people fit into a large machine that will make money. Now that is not an education! That is simply not an education. Education is not teaching a rote skill or teaching information that gets to be regurgitated.
"It's teaching a child to think, to use their imagination, to listen to their intuitions, to argue all the time against what seems to be the fashionable story. And to think we might be different. That's what's not happening. Children are being brainwashed now, in the current education system. And in this country, you know, during this last month or so, the government said, “Oh, children no longer need to be bothered with learning poetry or studying poetry.” That's a very, very weird thing to be saying in the middle of a humanitarian crisis. There's nothing that's kind of a ‘soft option’ about the humanities. Learning and understanding history is about putting yourself in another person’s position and understanding what they understood then, broadening your mind. It’s not narrowing down what they did to whether they ‘tick your boxes’ as good people. Learning philosophy is not a soft option, it's the most difficult thing you can do. And studying literature is not a soft option. It is if you just have to learn the six things you need to know about Jane Austen (which seems to be what it's all about now). But if you really are going to understand literature, it means putting yourself into the mindset of another person and experiencing the world through their eyes. And that is liberating and beautiful, and intellectually challenging. And it also arms you for life. You know, if we bring people out of school, and they haven't got the faculties to concentrate, to pay slow, deep attention, to enter into other people's imaginative worlds, to question their own dogmatisms all the time, even though they think they're perfectly correct. If we're not doing that, we're letting civilization go."
Where do values and ideas of beauty and goodness come from? How do we get from functional utility to value? This has been described as the 'is-ought problem' in philosophy. Are values, as Sam Harris has suggested, explainable in terms of utility? In this conversation facilitated by Michael Levin, Iain McGilchrist and Richard Watson talk about this in the context of evolution, understood as a process of optimization (for synchronization, for example). Unfortunately, their conversation ended before reaching a clear conclusion, but they are suggesting that we should encourage a broader, possibly multi-dimensional view on evolution. And indeed the extended evolutionary synthesis has already begun that work. Like any other attempt at a 'theory of everything', aspirations for completeness may always remain just that, an aspiration. At any rate, they are in agreement that a single dimensional view that gets stuck in popular conceptions of utility maximization is an inadequate 'map' for the 'terrain' we find ourselves within.
Some things are easier explained by moving from the complex to the simple than the reverse. This is usually explained using the example of emergent properties (Levin alludes to these as "a storehouse of 'free lunches' that you get from the physics or whatever"). Water and table salt are common examples of emergent properties. Emergence is a type of synergy, and synergy can be used to explain the existence of cooperation in nature. It is not difficult to imagine that values are qualities that emerge from a more basic utilitarian calculus, in the same way that the properties of water emerge from hydrogen and oxygen when combined in the proper arrangement. If this is so, then these emergent ethical and aesthetic qualities would deserve the same recognition given to other emergent qualities. A simple utilitarianism would likely be blind to these. There are other reasons to suspect utilitarianism is, at best, incomplete. If this is so, then using an incomplete understanding of ethics as a justification for policies that affect nearly all domains of life could produce catastrophic results, as McGilchrist and Watson suggest. (We don’t need to look far to find examples.):
Richard Watson: "I’ve been thinking about the societal impact of the idea of evolution by natural selection and survival of the fittest. The left hemisphere’s value system is a very simplistic "Everything is competition and finding 'the best'. Everything is about optimizing. It’s all very simple: just maximize it. There's nothing else to think about here." But have we really thought about what we are trying to maximize? "That doesn't matter, we're maximizing it!" That attitude in the world creates discompassion, and an attitude of exploitation towards one another. That's the root of all our problems. But if instead there's a more nuanced view of the world, where understanding of what's important, and why it's important, is much more fluid and dynamic, integrated and connected to adaptive experience and a wealth of values which are multi-dimensional and not single dimensional, then that's a different way of thinking, as you say in the difference between the hemispheres. It's also a different way of behaving in the world."
Iain McGilchrist: "A lot of people think first you get your model, and then the values are painted on at the end. But no, what values you have begin to affect the process from the very start because it affects what you're attending to and why. If your value is only ‘grabbing and getting’ then you pay this very disembodied, narrowly focused attention to details that are isolated and taken out of context, and all the implicit meaning is lost, then you really have a different world. You are now creating a different world, one that has consequences for everyone else, but also for your belief about what kind of a world you live in. We don't examine this. Science in particular hardly examines what their values are. I'm not talking about political values, or saying they should have a mission statement. I'm talking about what actually matters. When you more or less dismiss beauty and goodness out of hand, because they're really only there to help you ‘grab and get’, that's an inversion of values. It produces a dysfunctional society, projects that are misconceived, and a way of attending and being in the world that changes who we are, what we experience, and what the world is like. It's chaos. Values are not a fringe thing; they’re at the core."
Richard Watson: “Well the scientific ideal is objectivity, which is another way of saying “There are no values here. I'm just objectively saying: this is bigger than that”. ...You've already chosen what you’re attending to…”
Iain McGilchrist: “…And how you will attend to it, so that you will only see certain things. Put very simply, when science takes all the values out, and will not speak of any kind of directional, teleological principles, it then solemnly looks at what it has found and says “There are no values, and there's no purpose, so it's all meaningless”. ...What would happen if we accepted that it's not entirely absurd that these things could exist and actually make a huge difference to how we see biology, life, society, where a human being is, and how we relate to the cosmos?"
Richard Watson: “The notion that the scientific way of looking at the world is entirely objective, and prides itself on being so, doesn’t acknowledge that you had to pick a particular question. You can measure and objectively say whether one thing is bigger than another, but you can't say whether it's better than another, and so it gets bottomed out in really crude utilitarian ways. So that's really interesting, to draw that together with your understanding of that disparity between the hemispheres and new ways of thinking about evolutionary processes. If you think of evolutionary processes as purely maximizing survival and reproduction, then it ends up not explaining anything about the complex beauty that we actually wanted to explain about organisms.”
The idea that science “takes values out”, or dismisses their relevance, deserves its own entire discussion. There are at least two equally valid positions to be made there. It is true that normative claims are generally not made, aside from some generally agreed ethics standards for conducting research, which are viewed as somewhat arbitrary (the sort of values “painted on at the end”). But there’s also a lot of psychological and sociological research that examines the role of various values in society and ‘social determinants of health’. This sort of research, which the members in this conversation are aware of and indeed depend upon to do their own work, definitely does rely on recognizing values as meaningful. Since evolution and economics was the topic here, I can’t help but wonder what David Sloan Wilson, the main proponent of multilevel selection theory, would say regarding possible intersections in his research with McGilchrist. Economics tends to take that purely utilitarian view to measure the ‘cost of life’, the marginal cost of death prevention under varying circumstances. And we see, with the ‘social cost of carbon’, an attempt to put a dollar value on ecological health. As a field, economics struggles (and arguably fails) in its utilitarian calculus. Is that for a lack of data and brute force methods, or is it more fundamentally a reflection of the inadequacy of a single dimensional (or single level) utilitarianism? The goal of being able to compare every possible choice using a highly reductive approach and a single unit of measure is understandable, but we may also be ignoring too much of the terrain in that pursuit. McGilchrist has said “The assumption is that the failing is in humanity if we don’t fit the model, not that there is a failing in the model if it doesn’t fit humanity.” That’s very apropos in this context.
The ability to reduce everything to a single metric can be both a blessing (a powerful tool) and a curse (what isn’t quantified is assumed to be irrelevant). In light of both these virtues and limitations, such reductive methods should be used, but only so long as we remember that they are an imperfect tool and a very low resolution map. As Abraham Maslow wrote in 1966, "If the only tool you have is a hammer, it is tempting to treat everything as if it were a nail." Market fundamentalism really loves the hammer, but forgets that not everything is a nail. But I think Watson may be mistaken to suggest that only a subjective approach is comfortable making ethical value claims. Religious fundamentalism, which makes many normative claims, is no stranger to the desire for objective certainty (aka, God's eye view). So it would seem that many religious individuals may not feel so estranged by a profession that likewise appeals to the desire for objectivity. But would they if it collapsed all their values to a simple utilitarianism? Would it lead to cognitive dissonance? Perhaps for some. Or they see their work as necessarily narrow, and that such constraints are required for its performance. Many people in contemporary society hold secular values with equal conviction, and they also often view their occupations with similar detachment. These and other ideas led David Graeber to publish his 2018 book Bullshit Jobs; it’s not just the religious who feel alienated. But if science ever did speak with greater confidence about a richer world of values, while many secular and religious people might welcome this change, it would also be very challenging to others. And contemporary social institutions could find themselves in the difficult position of being criticized for moral failings from a corner of academia that they are not accustomed to receiving it from.
Scientific research has not generated outcomes that are aligned with the actual values held by the scientists doing it. I think Watson and McGilchrist would say this is a reflection of at least two things. First of all, science is blind to values. To the extent any values are recognized at all, it is just a “crude utilitarianism”. But it’s not immediately obvious why this should be a problem. Even Peter Kalmus wrote that it was a revelation to him that "facts alone were not persuading world leaders to take action.” What took so long? For years, people have believed that facts, and simple utilitarian self interest, should be sufficient to persuade the necessary action (that's the logic behind Pigouvian taxes). Indeed, we know that quantitative analysis can motivate people in some contexts. But the narrow focus that it succeeds to stimulate has severe limitations. It is often blind to broader contextual factors and generally insufficient to motivate the sort of system change that climate scientists are seeking. To the extent that utilitarianism is a purely quantitative approach to ethical issues (and that is how it is often conceived), it is qualitatively blind, nihilistic, and devoid of any values other than power. And secondly, this same ethos has also infected the majority of social institutions in contemporary Western culture, which are primarily interested in how scientific research can aid in consolidating and projecting power. The challenge of reconnecting contemporary science and culture to a broader multi-level understanding of value, purpose, and meaning is no small task!
Individual scientists, typically when speaking outside their professional roles, have very often referred to the importance of values. Aldo Leopold articulated a land ethic, for example. And more recently in 2013, Gus Speth voiced his frustration: “I used to think that top environmental problems were biodiversity loss, ecosystem collapse and climate change. I thought that thirty years of good science could address these problems. I was wrong. The top environmental problems are selfishness, greed and apathy, and to deal with these we need a cultural and spiritual transformation. And we scientists don’t know how to do that.” This statement was widely circulated, garnering both praise and criticism. McGilchrist again, “The LH is interested in how much, how many, quantity, more than it is in differentiating the qualities of individual cases. The left hemisphere has a need to immobilize, split up, and instrumentalize the world. Whereas the RH is the one that really appreciates qualitative differences." And from his earlier conversation, "From my point of view it is not part of the left hemisphere’s evolution that it should be looking for meaning. It’s looking for stuff, for things, whereas the right hemisphere is actually interested in purpose, in meaning, and what all this is about." So should we expect science to be anything other than utilitarian? Perhaps not. Science is not the only (nor perhaps even the ‘optimal’) path to truth. It may be necessary, but not sufficient. We must reintegrate the process of science with the other “paths to truth” (reason, intuition, imagination). Our maps are useful, but always incomplete. Nonetheless, attempts to improve them are important. And so I view work on the Extended Evolutionary Synthesis, and work within biosemiotics and process philosophy, and that of interdisciplinary syntheses conducted by figures like David Sloan Wilson (on multilevel selection theory) and Iain McGilchrist to be very welcome developments. Both because they recognize the failings of current maps and models, and because they properly contextualize these efforts as processes that are themselves evolving. (In that context, Erica Thompson's approach to "plausible models" is important as well.) These should enable all of us, both scientists and lay people, to better reintegrate qualitative values into education, research, public policy, and maybe even economics, with much greater conviction. Hopefully that can translate to renewed motivation for addressing multi-scalar problems at both the local and global levels. Opportunities exist everywhere. As Malcolm Guite put it, "We're at a kind of crisis moment in terms of worldview, where there's a possibility for really big creative breakthroughs and for somebody, whether scientists or others, to start reimagining, in the deepest senses, a picture of the world which is more holistic."
McGilchrist views science as one of four paths to truth. Is that number firm? Might there be five or six? Conversely, might there just be one or two? I suppose four seemed an obvious number (science, reason, intuition, imagination) but I don’t know that even these are neatly divisible. If evolution is a braided stream, dividing and recombining along its length, then perhaps so are the paths to truth. For this reason, although it seems like science may not be the path to an understanding of telos or values, I can’t completely exclude that it won’t play some role here. Evolution has a long history of being used to justify ethically questionable policies. Usually these are based more on a misunderstanding of evolution than anything else. Social Darwinism and certain eugenics policies, and aspects of evolutionary psychology and Wilson’s sociobiology are a few examples. But Watson and McGilchrist didn’t even have to touch on any of those to recognize the root problem infecting the understanding of “the idea of evolution by natural selection and survival of the fittest” in contemporary society today: our LH view of evolution can only see the influence of power (though sexual selection, for example, may prize other values). It is true that we repudiate the historical distortions of evolutionary theory, but have we ever adequately addressed the valorization of power and control above all else? It may quite easily burst into flame again. What to do? I think the ability to maintain an awareness of two very different Gestalten within each of us is a crucial first step toward mitigating that danger. During "Conversation between Richard Watson, Iain McGilchrist, and Michael Levin #2" the topic moved to where we draw the boundaries for life, how a keen sensitivity to embodiment, to the substrate upon which we depend, is in some sense essential for caring and meaning-making, and the goal-oriented nature of life:
Michael Levin: “What I don't like about a sharp distinction between living things and machines is that we now know that we can make all the transition forms at every level: molecular, cellular, tissue, organ, swarm… you've got all these levels. At every single level we can introduce any percentage, from zero to fairly high numbers, of something that you would call a ‘machine’, something that was designed by humans. We're going to be seeing cyborgs. We’re going to be seeing all this stuff, so I think we get into a really difficult place if we try to draw these hard boundaries.”
Iain McGilchrist: “I want to make clear that I don't think there is a hard and fast difference between the living and the non-living, and in fact Robert Rosen said as much. He said that animacy is the norm and inanimacy is an asymptotic, never achieved state in which animacy is reduced to a minimum. The whole cosmos is animated, and I hold this to be the case.”
Richard Watson: “In computer science we have this notion of an algorithm being ‘substrate independent’, that you can implement the same algorithm in multiple different substrates and it just doesn't matter because the details of the substrate that you implement it on just don't matter to the essentially symbolic and discrete computation that you're doing at the higher level. By divorcing it of all of the concrete details you get the generalization, but you lose that connection to the concrete instances in a way that the symbols that you're manipulating don't have any meaning. If you treat them abstractly, they can be pulled out of the context in which they had some meaning. So that notion of the substrate independence of algorithms suggests that you could replace part of an organism with a machine, or part of a machine with an organism, and it wouldn't really matter. When we implement an algorithm on a machine in a conventional sense we are doing so in a way which is as divorced as possible from the physical implementation of it. So it doesn't matter what numbers I put into my sorting algorithm, it never makes my logic gates overheat. The physics of what I implemented it on just doesn't matter. Whatever computation I do, it just doesn't interact with the physical implementation.
But in organisms, it's not just that it does interact with the physical implementation, but that they are organisms because it interacts with the implementation. You can get an organism to behave like an 'on and off’ gate if you put it in the right circumstances. But when you make it do it over and over again it says “Fuck this!” and it crawls out of the dish and does something else. The interaction with the substrate of which it is made matters. The thing that makes it organic is that when you stress one level of function, the implementational level of function below it begins to show through. Whereas when you do that with a mechanical device, and you push it beyond its limits, it doesn't show you the in-between states. You need the in-between states otherwise it can't really be adaptive, it can't really learn. You just say “Uh, I broke it” because it doesn't degrade gracefully. You went straight from this really high level symbolic stuff to the physics it was made out of multiple levels below.”
Michael Levin: “One reason why people aren't into teleology is because what they observe most of the time is the default behavior, and they think it's a purely feed forward, emergent system. They say “Oh, complexity and emergence, we know local rules can give rise to complexity,” and that's true if all you do is observe the standard default behavior. But once you start putting barriers in its way, and you start stressing it in various ways, then you get pulled out of this false sense of inevitability and you see that it actually has some degree of intelligence, which is the ability to reach the same goal by different means. You start to see the incredible Ingenuity that these things can muster in different problem spaces.”
Does evolution optimize for value? For responsiveness? And does responsiveness imply a paradox: the deployment of polarized modes of attention pulled down from some Platonic 'mind space'? Does the existential struggle, in some sense, itself imply the values of relationship, resonance, and responsiveness, as well as lateralized cognitive features for the parts/whole dynamic? In Iain McGilchrist, Richard Watson, and Mike Levin #3 they got more specific about the continuity of life and mind or consciousness, touching on 'property dualism', emergence, and implications for some version of panpsychism (addressed by Levin earlier as well). In a separate conversation Levin was asked by Kensy Cooperrider "What is the minimal form of cognition?" He responded, "Elementary particles, because quantum indeterminacy means that you are not entirely bound by current, local conditions, and least action principles tell you that even particles of light have the ability to pursue goals.":
Levin: “My claim is that the process of evolution is not guaranteed to optimize for most, if not all, of the things that we value. Therefore the condition in which we find ourselves, meaning the various limitations of our bodies, minds, all these different features, I think are fundamentally up for improvement. So as one changes the various aspects of the biology and physiology, and integrates designed devices, we will change. So what is a human? What is it that we should not change? What's essential? And if there is a direction to evolution, is it ‘aligned’ with the things that we would like it to be aligned with?”
McGilchrist: “What life seems to do is enormously increase responsiveness, and that responsiveness is to value. A single cell can value some things, and we can value more. So something is happening in evolution. I think that there's something that's driving this, and I think it is responsiveness. Response has in it this idea of ‘responsibility’, a sort of moral engagement with the world.”
Levin: “I do think that the things that we're interested in, including consciousness and mind, pre-date life. I think it is an ontological primitive, and I think what life is very good at is scaling up. I've tried to formalize this notion of a ‘cognitive light cone’, which literally is the spatiotemporal boundary of the biggest thing you can care about, the biggest goal that you as a cognitive system are capable of pursuing, from little tiny local goals of bacteria, to humans, and potentially to planetary and wider scale goals. In our lab we have ‘hybrots’ (biorobots), in which some neurons drive a little robot. They really do care about what happens, but their body is now different. There are parts of them that you would call living, and there are components that have mechanical properties that aren't actually alive, but you would call the whole thing alive. I think these crisp categories used to be quite useful when the technology wasn't there to blur them, but now we're starting to see that the possibilities are such that I'm not sure these very binary categories can be maintained. In the space of possible beings we're going to be able to explore all kinds of hybrids, cyborgs, and every possible combination that has a novel body and mind. So I'm very interested in the ethics aspect of how you relate to them.”
Watson: “The thing that is a bit different about current AIs is that they are not causally connected across scales all the way down like we are. I think that makes them a bit more dangerous than other kinds of machines and other kinds of diverse intelligences because we're likely to think that it's like us because it looks like us on the surface, basically.”
McGilchrist: “We often misconceive the nature of the danger. They are dangerous simply because people will mistake themselves for these machines, and the machines for themselves because their whole way of thinking about who we are and so on has become so narrow. Even the phrase “goal directed” is only a part of what we do, it's what the left hemisphere, which is designed to have a goal and go straight for it and get it, does. But I'd like to put it another way, that there are things to which we are ‘attracted’ it's not so much that we're sort of pushed towards a goal, and we know the steps and we take them, but we're drawn towards realizing some potential that we may not be able to specify exactly, but we know there's something there. With an organism you need to understand the whole before you can understand the parts, and you need to understand the parts before you can understand the whole. I know that's a paradox, but I believe that when you get close to the truth in these areas the paradox is what you find.”
Levin: “I like what you guys said about having a shared causal structure. I think what needs to be shared in common is that basic existential struggle, that autopoiesis where you constructed yourself from your bootstraps at the beginning from scratch, from parts, and you didn't know ahead of time as you are coming into this world what you were or what your parts are what the boundary between you and the world is, what your effectors are. All of that had to be self-constructed. You are in danger of disappearing pretty much at any moment. These are the sorts of things, this existential struggle, which machines and robots and such don't have. They're told from day one “Here, this is your body. Here's the border between you and the outside world. This is what you're going to do. You get all the energy you want.” All of these things are completely different from us. So that's where I would pin it. It's about knowing that we are both facing the same kind of fundamental existential problem in the world of figuring out who and what we are, and where we begin and where we end, and from that I think we can build rich, fruitful, ethical relationships with things that have that origin story even if they are nothing like us.”
Watson: “I’m gonna if I may take issue with you about the struggle for existence. I think that's really interesting. It doesn't doesn't have to be made from the same stuff, it doesn't have to have been from the same evolutionary lineage, it doesn't have to have been part of the same tree of life as me, but I don't want to view my existence as a struggle. That's part of the mythology created around the separateness of me and everything else. Life is really a resonance between me and everything else, not a separateness, not of me trying to persist whilst everything else that's not me doesn't matter to me. That takes all of the meaning from the relationship between me and the other. I'm more likely to have a genuine relationship with something, in a way that matters to me and is meaningful to me, if it has the same ‘harmonic depth’ that I do, that there's multiple levels of causal structure inside it in the same way that I do. But how am I going to know if it's not in the same ‘key’ as me? You can ‘build a song’ with lots of harmonic depth to it. Now it meets another song. Do they have any relationship to one another? They could be discordant with each other at every level of that hierarchy in a way that they just don't ‘dance’ together at all, with no harmonic resonance at any causal scale. Or when one song meets another they could be built from a similar harmonic scale.”
Levin: “I’m not claiming that life is supposed to be a struggle, but has shared concerns. Even if we are in harmony I still think that there are these fundamental big questions as far as what we are, and what we ought to be doing. I don't see any way of getting rid of those fundamental questions.”
McGilchrist: “I like the emphasis on a relationship in what you had to say Richard, because I believe that relationships are absolutely fundamental and therefore it's not about a thing that is atomistically angsting about its survival, but it's constituted by a web of interconnections and is part of that. I'm not going to deny that life is very often a struggle, it surely is, but there's also a lot left out of the picture if we focus only on that. If you go back to your paramecium, you can take it apart and replace some of the parts, but you haven't really created anything. All you've done is reverse an act of destruction. The thing itself is not created by humans or by anything like that. We may say “Look, we made a paramecium” but what we're really doing is piggybacking on something that nature has given us that we don't fully understand. We’re just reversing something. It's not that different from doing a heart transplant. A person needs a heart. There is a heart. Put the heart in. But of course what's really exciting and interesting about heart transplants, and it's not an urban myth, is how after a heart transplant the recipient takes on something of the person whose heart they've received. (I know one senior surgeon at a center for transplants who gave up doing his work because he was so spooked by what he was doing to people.) So even when we think we're doing a kind of ‘parts’ job we don't really know what kind of a ‘whole’ is coming with it. We're fixated on the idea that everything can be broken down into parts and then reconstituted. But I think the relationship between parts and wholes is greatly misunderstood.”
Levin: “That I think is absolutely critical. I've been giving a couple talks about this and writing some about this too, this idea that we automatically know what we have when we understand the parts. It’s just completely wrong, but very pervasive. I agree with you about taking apart the paramecium and all that. Let's go even further down. There's this emerging field of ‘active matter’ which I think is extremely interesting. A lot of people think that this sort of undermines the kind of humanist, organicist things that we've been saying here and I think it's just the opposite. All of this work on these amazing, unpredictable, emergent properties of very simple systems are actually highlighting exactly what we started out with, which is this claim that deep cognition is in some way a feature of the universe, and that in many ways we're all basically just ‘pulling these out’ when we create these machines, these physical bodies. We're basically just ‘pulling out’ some interesting things from some ‘Platonic space of minds’ out there. [See N. Katherine Hayles on the 'cognisphere'.] There is truly minimal matter. We’re talking about two or three chemicals at most. I mean that's it. So this is not like taking apart some complex paramecium because we don't really know how it works. This is literally like, you see all the ingredients, there's just three of them and what you're starting to see is unexpected problem-solving behavior. Now I'm not claiming that this has all the richness of the human experience. Of course not. But I think that the thing that you've got with a paramecium can already be sort of begun, and I really think it's a continuum. You've already got it there, and you didn't put it there. I agree with you on this. There are parts that you did which is to put together the physical system, and there are aspects of the whole that you did not put in. You didn't create, you didn't predict, you didn't know it was going to be there. None of those are on you. What you created was a ‘physical manifestation’ that seems to somehow ‘pull down’ some of these dynamics that we have a very poor understanding of.”
McGilchrist: “I too believe that all of that is a seamless continuum. I don't make a hard and fast difference between animacy and inanimacy. I think that they are extensions, and this is why consciousness doesn't need to begin with life. It’s there anyway. So is some sort of ‘urging toward’ something complex and beautiful. Why does the cosmos produce such amazing variety? This is the unpacking of the potential that's within that whole. So I would expect to see just what you're describing from these three chemicals.”
Levin: “You know, I asked the scientist who makes these things “How long did you have to search to find these three?” They run mazes and they do all kinds of stuff. I said “How long did you have to search to find the right three chemicals?” He replied “These were the first three things on my shelf that I tried.” That makes me wonder what else is out there. If these were the first he tried, my God, what else is out there? The space of possible implementations is not sparse. I think it's incredibly dense with these things.”
McGilchrist: “Yeah. Possibly limitless.”
During a conversation on the Fri Tankes Podcast:
Christer Sturmark: “Correct me if I'm wrong, but you're not a panpsychist because they would say that consciousness is an element of matter. But you say the opposite, that matter is an element of consciousness.”
Iain McGilchrist: “I don't think it matters too much, unless you're a dogmatist when it comes to that point. They only say that because they're used to feeling confident that they know what matter is. But actually if you talk to physicists they say that it's rather embarrassing supposing that by reducing consciousness to matter we can understand it better, because quite frankly as physicists we haven’t the slightest clue what matter is. So I don't think it matters which way around you look at it. What matters more is whether you think there is some kind of huge divorce between them.”
Christer Sturmark: “I really must ask you what you think about the latest developments in artificial intelligence. Are you worried about whether machines can develop consciousness?
Iain McGilchrist: “I don't hold that it’s impossible at all, and in some ways I think it's the least important of many worries. But what I do worry about is the debasing of truth, the capacity for lies to be propagated, and for people to place far too much trust in AI. In the old days we had a phrase “the camera never lies”, now the camera lies all the time. There’s a line in the Analects of Confucius that says for a people to survive they need food, guns, and trust. If they have to give up one, give up the guns, if they have to give up another, give up the food, but never give up the trust. Without trust they can't survive. That's where we're at now.”
In Guite's conversation with Iain McGilchrist they discussed Coleridge, who said “Truth is the divine ventriloquist, it doesn't matter which of us dummies it speaks through”. They went on:
Iain McGilchrist: “Coleridge stated that one can distinguish without dividing. Unfortunately nowadays we assume that because I've made a distinction that I mean a division, but I don’t. One can distinguish the north and south poles of a magnet, but they both require one another and there isn’t a hard and fast place where one becomes the other.”
Malcolm Guite: “Coleridge attempted to develop what he called “polar logic”, which I think he took from some earlier thinkers, that there is a field as it were, a semantic field of meaning that operates between the poles, and which is what “organizes the magnetic filings” as it were.”
Iain McGilchrist: “He says that the faculty of reason allows us to distinguish without dividing, but then the next stage is to recompose a whole, to allow things to go back into their union. I believe that this is the way the hemispheres relate, that the right hemisphere has, if you like, a “first grasp of the whole”, the left hemisphere then analyzes, breaks up, categorizes, spots a theoretical structure, etc. And that is all fine, as long as it's then taken back up again into a whole in which that sharpness is no longer the only truth. So it's resolved into something greater. But unfortunately in much of our thinking these days we stop at the fragmentation, at the analytic stage, and say “Well, there we have it”. But no, you're only in the intermediate stage. Now you need to take that information that you found by this left hemisphere process back into making a new Gestalt, a new whole vision.”
Each hemisphere has a separate Gestalt, and a Gestalt shift occurs each time we move from one to the other and back again. In Gestalt psychology, it is said that our figure–ground organization is what allows us to identify the foreground from the background. What is foregrounded within one Gestalt may be backgrounded in another, and vice versa (Deacon also uses this concept to explain "absential qualities"). This helps me to understand the concept of the limit case. McGilchrist defines the limit case thus: "what is essential to the phenomenon has in this case reached its minimum, without being actually extinguished". The examples that he provides typically reverse the order that is generally accepted within contemporary Western culture, captivated as it is by the left hemisphere (LH). So it is this flipped, RH view that I think can be very helpful for understanding the positions McGilchrist takes on many of the issues he addresses in TMWT.
When I encounter a position of his that is difficult to understand, it has been helpful for me to go back and see if I am foregrounding what is really essential to the phenomenon or not. The LH Gestalt tends to foreground the limit case and exclude that which is essential to phenomena. Take for example the mind/matter problem. The LH foregrounds inanimacy, and it appears that from that viewpoint, a reductive explanation of consciousness, which posits its emergence from matter, is in fact the best solution. However McGilchrist notes "there is no feature of matter as conventionally conceived that explains how it could possibly on its own give rise to consciousness". In contrast, the RH does not foreground the limit case, but neither does it provide a simple mirrored reversal of the same process used by the LH and reduce matter to “mind stuff”. In a classic asymmetric maneuver, McGilchrist suggests the RH somehow integrates both possibilities. According to that synthesis of the RH and LH perspectives, matter and consciousness are two different states of the same "thing" (the Tao?). Metaphors used to describe this have included water, which can be both solid and liquid. Another is the dipolar magnet, whose lines of force can be revealed using magnetic iron shavings. It has two poles, yet a single magnetic field that frustrates our attempts to identify where one pole becomes the other. Hence, McGilchrist has described as a sort of panpsychist view consistent with the dual-aspect monism that he espouses. (He said “I’m not a straightforward Idealist. I'm not entirely at one with Bernardo Kastrup or Donald Hoffman. If I'm a follower of any philosophy for the last hundred years, it's probably of A.N. Whitehead.”) We might be able to apply the same process to our understanding of ethics, where utilitarianism is the limit case of a much richer theory of values. Here's another possible example of a Gestalt shift, from a recent interview in which he said:
Iain McGilchrist: "The question is always "What is it that consciousness does for us? What is the purpose of consciousness for us?" There's an argument that since we can do so much unconsciously we don't really need consciousness. But I put the question the other way around, because if I'm right that consciousness is an ontological primitive, then we are to the purposes of consciousness rather than consciousness being to our purposes."
Max Scheler and his pyramid of values comes up frequently in TMWT, so it's good to be familiar with why McGilchrist references him so often. In a nutshell, Scheler supports the essential distinction that runs throughout both TMAHE and TMWT. His work supports the other ideas we are introduced to (the limit case, the Gestalt shift, and the hemispheric asymmetry). Whereas the limit case helps us identify what is essential to a phenomenon, and understanding the hemisphere differences allows us to more clearly see the more veridical of two choices, Scheler's pyramid places the utilitarian values at the bottom, with beauty and spiritual values at the top. In other words, in large part it recapitulates the LH/RH split as McGilchrist describes it. But if embodiment captures both spirit and body, then wouldn't utilitarian values, and hedonic values, be spiritual values as well? After all, isn't beauty, in fact, pleasurable? What should we make of Scheler's pyramid now? In the final analysis, Scheler's pyramid is of course imperfect, and both right and wrong in different senses. Yet another example of a coincidentia oppositorum that can only be resolved in the light of whichever context it is invoked. I imagine Scheler would appreciate that his description has limitations as well. Providing him the benefit of the doubt, I don't think he imagines that his pyramid is in any sense "real", but rather for illustrative purposes only, as it were. Those who are captivated by the LH will tend to pursue the values of power and control, and think more often in terms of utility and pleasure, while subordinating the values of beauty, goodness, and spirit. Whereas those with a more balanced view will tend to elevate beauty above utility. And the pyramid may also fail in one other important respect: Hemispheric asymmetry as described by McGilchrist means that, whereas the LH does not appreciate the RH Gestalt, the RH does in fact understand that the LH (and its value preferences) play an essential role. In other words, the Emissary can only see Scheler's pyramid of values in reverse. But the Master can see it in both directions. In an online lecture on the topic of values, McGilchrist said (paraphrasing):
"Are values just paint or wallpaper on the walls of our cell, which we put there in order to brighten our prospects in this hermetically sealed box in which we lead our lives? Are they merely just a matter of opinion, about what works well for us? There is no assumption of value, purpose, or meaning made in the life sciences. And that is a perfectly valid assumption to make. However it won't be surprising if we then find nothing after carrying out our investigations on that basis, and on those terms. Science may tell us what their brain correlates are, and it can attempt to account for them in terms of something else. It can say, for example, that beauty is a tool for mate selection (an "honest signal"), or it can say that goodness enables priests to have power over the people, or something of that kind. But it cannot say if beauty, complexity, and responsiveness are drives in the universe. A.N. Whitehead, the philosopher and mathematician, in contrast did say "The teleology of the universe is directed towards the production of beauty". And John Dewey remarked "The deepest problem of modern life is that we have failed to integrate our beliefs about the world with our beliefs about value and purpose."
Thomas Nagel wrote that values are not just an accidental side effect of life. Rather, he saw things the other way around, that there is life because it is a necessary condition of value. Life enhances both the degree and the speed of responsiveness to and within the world, and these are preconditions for the capacity to recognize and respond to value. Life enables the very process of continually discovering and furthering the unfolding of beauty, truth, and goodness. Values evoke a response in us and call us to some end. Values are what give meaning to life. Max Scheler and Derek Parfit also suggested that values are an intrinsic aspect of reality that are not derivable from anything else. They cohere and sustain a web of interconnectedness. Rather than things within consciousness, they are evocations that we fulfill by responding to them. We are attracted to what is true, beautiful, and morally good at a deeper level than mere cognition. Values are a primary aspect of our experience. By analogy with our ability to perceive color, Scheler introduced the word "Wertnehmung", which means something like "value-ception" - the ability to perceive value. He proposed a sort of pyramid of values. While in the right hemisphere these serve one another in the order that he described, in the left hemisphere they go in the reverse."
The recent video "Understanding The Matter with Things: Chapter 26 - Value" took a deeper dive into the subject, and tied together several points made earlier concerning ontological primitives and the question of beauty, which if not merely an 'honest signal' in the sense employed by evolutionary biologists like Amotz Zahavi, then perhaps something far more numinous, in the sense with which A.N. Whitehead associates it with the teleology of the cosmos. Here McGilchrist, by all accounts, appears to link it to the indescribable Tao itself.
At this point in the video series, having already described the earlier portions of his book regarding two different 'ways of attending' to the world that are embodied in the hemispheres of the brain, he's moved on to the latter half of the book, which is about trying to unpack what the larger implications of this might be. Of course this gets difficult, since a lot of it is speculation and conjecture. When it comes to beauty, there's a lot of contextual, historical, highly contingent factors that can lead any two people to disagree over whether anything in particular is beautiful or not. So it's subjective. But at the same time, in the larger aggregate, patterns do emerge. The perception of beauty isn't entirely random and arbitrary. The same situation applies in regard to concepts of virtue and ethics in general. When we ask "What is utility, duty, or value?" at first we might get definitions that appear robust, but when these are interrogated further they can also devolve into personal preference. Martha Nussbaum made an interesting observation ("Virtue Ethics: A Misleading Category?"). She said that virtue ethics is actually subsumed in utilitarianism and deontology. In other words, all ethical theories presuppose virtue at some level. From this perspective, utilitarianism and deontology are merely efforts to impose a quantitative calculus, or overlying decision framework, on pre-existing virtues. What McGilchrist is pointing out here is that these efforts, while useful in many contexts when we want to prescribe policy or evaluate the possible consequences of an action, are ultimately an imperfect guide for understanding ethical foundations and certainly can't be taken to extremes. Ethical abuses are most often carried out and excused by cultural institutions (religious or otherwise) that have done precisely that, and imposed some decision framework (for example a holy book) or quantitative calculus (for example longtermism) to excuse their actions. Why do they lead to abuses? It's not the supposition of virtue or value that is a problem, it's the willful ignorance of history and context and relationships - all those factors that necessarily must inform ethical conduct - that lead to poor ethical decisions. To the extent that we hold firm to any particular framework or calculus we tend to ignore all the rest, even the very world before our eyes. Hence cults and fundamentalist movements that require complete adherence to authority and the rejection of the evidence of experience often perpetrate the very worst offenses.
Iain McGilchrist: “There's something unsatisfactory about multiplying too many ontological primitives. I take values to be ontological primitives like consciousness, but perhaps they are better described as aspects of consciousness. So the way that I see it is that a process like consciousness has different ways of 'being'. (By analogy, for any one verb there can be many adverbs, but those ‘adverbs’ are referring to ‘ways’ that only consciousness can bring about.) So I would say that truth, and beauty, and goodness are ‘aspects’ of the flow of consciousness, emanating from that flow of consciousness, owing their existence to that flow of consciousness, but with that flow of consciousness and having no 'prior' out of which they come other than consciousness itself. Thinking of them as ‘adverbial’ might help.” [McGilchrist has also said that life enables the discovery and unfolding of values, which ‘evoke a response’, ‘call us to some end’, and ‘give meaning to life’. To bring this all together, value is an aspect of consciousness which, with matter, are both aspects of something still more general, just as we might say that solid and liquid are 'aspects' of water. McGilchrist has espoused a sort of dual or multi-aspect monism.]
“Goethe said that "unless we are able to love something we cannot value it correctly or properly". This may be behind austere Oriental beliefs that compassion and humility, which enable us to enter into a loving relationship with things, enable us to see them truly, and that by not having this compassionate relationship we miss the truth of what we are seeing. So I don't think it's just an idea of Goethe's. Pascal made the same point, that we need to learn to love something before we can fully understand it. (Fortunately, we don't have to understand something in order to fully love it.) But is this necessarily the case? I would say that the business of "Which comes first?" is a typical irritable excitement of the left hemisphere. I think that what happens is that our relationships are a matter of reciprocation, of cyclical or spiral-like, helical development, in which one thing gives rise to the other, which gives rise to the one, and so forth. It's not "first you must do this then you can move on to that". It's a reciprocal relationship.
“Traditionally there have been two main ways of thinking about morality. One is utilitarianism, in which you work out the calculus of how much good flows to how many people. In other words, the judgment is based entirely on an outcome. Another is based entirely on an intention, but by rules, and this is called deontology. It comes from a Greek word meaning duty, so it's a matter of doing your duty. What happens when two duties conflict? What happens if your duty to save people conflicts with your duty not to kill somebody? How do you resolve that problem? There is a third school of ethics which I think is preferable to either of the others called virtue ethics. It gives you no hard and fast rules or a calculation, the two things a left hemisphere would like. It's something that takes into account the whole context of 'this person, this situation, and you' (who are making the call). It is a more sophisticated, subtle, and complex way of arriving at a conclusion.
“Darwin was constantly seeing the beauty of life, and he repeatedly came back to the problem that it can't exist to further mate selection. That's the answer to a different question, which is "Given the existence of beauty, how can we use it? Well, we can use it to help select mates." But how do we have the sense of beauty in the first place? He puzzled over what makes certain sounds, colors, shapes, and smells attractive to creatures in their own right. And he professes that we cannot know. This is an interesting insight, and it helps to pan out from this idea of mate selection to the much broader issue of the things that we find beautiful. We find a sunset beautiful. We find the sound of a minor third beautiful. We find the Euler equation beautiful. We find a chess move beautiful. We find a mountaintop covered in snow beautiful. We find a Zen garden beautiful. What is this? Can it just be to do with reproductive advantages? And beauty is not just a culturally determined thing. Western people have long appreciated the beauty of Eastern paintings, artifacts, and so on. And Eastern people appreciate very clearly the beauty of Western paintings, drama, and so on. They didn't find Shakespeare or Tintoretto alien to them any more than we find the beauty of their ceramics or poetry alien to us.”
But what might make ethical theories vulnerable to special pleading, to claiming exceptions without justifying them? Here are several. One is the problem of 'precision' or 'resolution'. At one end, as when a system is highly granular, and therefore able to distinguish between superficially similar situations, moral ambiguity is rarely encountered. In other words, a precise enough process should always provide a clear answer. It's the lower resolution versions of any ethical system that are more vulnerable to special pleading on that account, because you'll more often encounter situations that are harder to differentiate in terms of value. How do we 'calibrate' the quantity of good that might be derived from any particular action, given chaotic systems, with emergent properties, at many scales of interaction? Utilitarianism presupposes that this qualitative stuff has largely been sorted out already, allowing us to get on with things. Just "shut up and calculate" (to quote Feynman). And that's the appeal of it of course. One could conceivably argue that a similarly precise, fine grained deontology could also avoid ambiguity and special pleading. But because the qualitative nature of value still lies at the foundation of ethics in either case, special pleading may still result from either system due to questions of precision, calibration, incomplete or new information, and imperfect actors. Unrelated to special pleading, but perhaps increasingly important today, is that a highly developed and granular utilitarianism can actually increase the risk of deception by bad actors who are able to hack into the calculus itself, often in ways that may not be easily detected. For if all we have to do is "shut up and calculate", then we can be very fast and efficient. However if the formulae are manipulated in some inconspicuous way, we could accumulate significant harm before the deception is found. To conclude, the prescriptive deontological approach can be appropriate in some cases, and outcome-based utilitarian approaches are useful as well. Both of these depend on some mutual understanding of value and how that relates to our experiential world. McGilchrist is advocating an appropriate perspective on the limitations of all of these. Where deontology can be abused, utilitarianism can be manipulated, and virtue ethics, while perhaps more fundamental, by that same token presents its own difficulties concerning practical application, chiefly because it repudiates any ostensible structure or quantification. But these difficulties may be a relatively small matter compared to the problems we face today. If we address the ethics of consumer culture, which gets into ideas about the unjust transfer of responsibility as well (responsibilization). For example the transfer of responsibility from oil companies to individual consumers. The simple view is that there's no supply without demand, but look closer and things are less straightforward. So system interactions and scale of analysis can lead to ethically counterintuitive conclusions. One could forgo buying a car and have a smaller carbon footprint, or one could buy a car that is used in the performance of work that leads to holding larger polluters accountable. In other words, the shortest path (on the large scale) isn't always a straight line (at the small scale). It's hard to make an equivalent argument for the relative utility of one cup of coffee and ten vaccines, assuming they cost the same amount, but you get the idea that generalizing from that situation to every other situation may be illogical. Goods and services that seem purely hedonistic or psychological may have consequences we don't understand. And because we don't understand them, any justification may look like special pleading to the utilitarian like Peter Singer. From the 2019 documentary "The Divided Brain":
Jonathan Rowson: “There's a certain disconnection from the natural world gradually happening. We’re living in cities much more. We are distracted much more. We have more claims on our attention. The problem is when a completely urban life shuts you off from the ecological resources that sustain the life you have. They're all hidden from us. I mean, our electricity, our gas, our water, our food sources… we don't know where they're coming from. So there's a kind of delusion, really, at the heart of modern urban life. The sort of implicit understanding that we're a part of nature is no longer a default position. People, worldly, accept that climate change is a global phenomenon. That humans are causing it. That it's very serious. That we can and should do something quickly. And that if we don't there will be very serious effects. But, we live as if that knowledge was not there. You’ve got to look at it from the perspective of science, from the perspective of technology, from law, from culture, from democracy, from behavior, from money, and so on. To do that requires a form of perception and understanding that isn't going to come from the left hemisphere that wants to ‘slice and dice’ and execute quickly.”
Iain McGilchrist: “Economists have been amongst the most frequent of my correspondents, saying “You describe precisely the world in which I operate.”
Peter Rajsingh: “The tendency to get fixed with models, almost to fetishize them, has led us astray in many ways historically. Versions of instrumental rationality and reductive reasoning have taken finance through boom and bust cycles. People have failed to see what's plainly obvious in front of their noses, that we're in potential economic bubbles and so forth.”
Li-Jun Ji: “People think differently depending on their cultural background. Compared to North Americans, East Asians are more sensitive to the context. They attend more to the context. In traditional Chinese and Japanese paintings you do see less focus on the individual person. You barely see the face. Instead you see the overall scene. You see mountains, trees, and flowers. The person is actually minimized.” [Similarly, Barbara Ehrenreich wondered about “the stick figures found in caves such as Lascaux and Chauvet” that appear alongside “perfectly naturalistic animals”. Could it be that these Paleolithic people, like modern East Asians, were also more sensitive to context? “In the Paleolithic world, humans were not at the centre of the stage.”]
Iain McGilchrist: “We do need a paradigm shift, because it's not about little things here and there. It's about the whole way we conceive what a human being is, what the world is, and what our relationship with it is. Love is a pure attention to the existence of the other. Really, what we're on this planet to do is to give attention to that other. It can be other people, but it can also be what, until very recently, was the other that we were all surrounded by all the time, which was the natural world, which is our home, which is just a completely amazing, beautiful, staggeringly expressive gift.”
Is there a relationship between value and existential risk? A week ago Zak Stein and Iain McGilchrist got together to explore questions of value. Stein is a founding member of the Consilience Project, where he's worked on articles including "It’s a MAD Information War" and "Technology is Not Values Neutral: Ending the Reign of Nihilistic Design". His work reveals both numerous areas of overlap with McGilchrist's thought and fruitful extensions of it into new areas. Here are a few edited selections from their talk:
Zak Stein: "When I encountered your work it was like an experience of reading someone who was saying something that I almost completely agreed with. There was just this complete absorption of the book (and the prior work). What was interesting to me was that in my own experience (in the branches of psychology and philosophy that I explored) 'value' was a given. The skepticism and cynicism about value that I encountered in post-modernism and even some forms of modernism I didn't understand. So when I got to the places in your work where it was clear that there were hemispheric dominance patterns that were expressing themselves across these different philosophical positions, and even in the personalities of the people who are holding them, the light went on! Thank you. You're placing value as equally primordial with time, space, matter, motion, and consciousness. When you think about "What is reality?" Time, space, matter, motion... sure, everyone kind of buys that. Consciousness? You can get people to do that. But placing value as equally primordial to those elements of cosmos? Most humans (in most cultures, philosophies, worldviews, and religions) saw value as constitutive of universe. It's only recently in modernity that the default position has been a value cynicism or value skepticism. So returning value to its position is one of the most important philosophical moves that can be made in our culture today. The idea that the universe matters and has a purpose, and that the universe responds to value and is intrinsically valuable puts the press on the hardcore reductionist view, it puts them into a corner."
Iain McGilchrist: "I argue that the purpose of life, the reason the cosmos brings into being something quite so counter-intuitive as life with all its problems, is that it has the ability to respond to these primordial values. These values are fulfilled in being responded to in themselves, not for any further purpose beyond that."
Stein: "Whitehead spoke of the 'appetition of the cosmos', that the cosmos had an appetite, that it wanted something, that it moved towards something. Life emerged to respond to value, which pre-existed it. That the evolutionary process responds to value makes it teleological. It also means that there's a dimension in biological evolution that is responding to the same field of real value that we are responding to. That's a position that humans have believed before. Think of natural law theory. Think of religious systems where the ordering of the cosmos you participate in was a microcosm of the continuity of value across life, human and divine. So the power of the left hemisphere to reify a worldview that is so much a minority position, respective to most of human thought, is interesting. One way to think about human development is just then maturation, this 'deepening appreciation' of the field of value. It's not making up more things to care about, it's getting deeper in touch with reality. Today, a lot of what occurs is just the absence of support for that skill, and things that counteract it, which is to say 'anti-value'. Consider 'preference falsification', which is the root of advertising. And advertising suffuses our environment. So there's an intentional thing in our culture to actually disrupt the ability to truly perceive value. That's something that we need to think about. How do we protect ourselves from being confused? How do we appreciate? The ability to hold attention for a long period of time is necessary for certain levels of appreciation of value and beauty."
McGilchrist: "Which is another reason why attention is a moral act. I believe that Goethe is right when he says that everything properly considered and appreciated by us calls out in us the faculty with which we can appreciate it."
Stein: "One implication is that if we really downgrade value-ception, let's say that value collapses at the center of culture, which you could say is occurring, that we've kind of 'burnt off the fumes' of pre-modernity and we're running out of a center of value and even the ability to perceive value, that's very dangerous. If part of what evolution has been is adapting us to perceive and relate to value, then if we cut off that ability, then we become evolutionarily non-adaptive, which means we go extinct. So I'm looking at the relationship between value and existential risk, and civilizational qualities. The patterns you're pointing to are actually deep generator functions of existential risk leading us to a point in civilization that is treacherous. So there's an urgency, an educational urgency, to figure out how to rebalance the hemispheres. That's why I'm focusing on value-ception. If we've been brought to a place where our civilization is about to self-destruct, then how do we learn to perceive what's actually valuable again? Because we're clearly very confused about value. One of the central risks that people don't see, in terms of catastrophic risk, is the collapse of culture, truth, and value. What occurs there is basically a schizophrenic break at the level of culture, where the entire culture gets out of touch with the ability to perceive value. A great example of something that could perpetrate that break is artificial intelligence. The core of AI is the alignment problem, which is a values alignment problem. I'm wondering if one of the things that will reawaken the perception of value is actually the occurrence of catastrophe and tragedy."
McGilchrist: "It's a philosophical question that I don't think science can shed a great deal of light on. It may become more vivid to us when the over sophisticated, over technical, over scientistic way of conceiving ourselves has been 'blown away' by a collapse, some kind of cataclysm that will lead to suffering. You hinted at the idea that suffering might actually enable us to see certain things that otherwise we wouldn't, in a paradoxical way. I profoundly believe in the coincidence of opposites, that sometimes the way in which things get better is actually by getting worse, that in doing that our vision will become clearer, our responses will become more natural, and we will see that that which matters to us, and will enable us to survive, is to be able to trust people and to achieve something which really exemplifies 'goodness, truth, and beauty'. Perhaps the only way in which one can resurrect a good sense of values is by looking at societies that have been stable for a long time. Societies that have produced harmonious relations between things, beautiful and generous relations that work together. We either participate in the evolution of value or fail to do so, and the tragedy is that at the moment we're failing to do so.
Stein: "The return to value at the core of culture is inevitable if culture is to survive. A symptom of the state of our civilization is the degree to which we are removing value from the center of culture, and what's interesting is that the native disposition of the human is to respond to value. So we haven't been completely dehumanized yet. And there's evidence to show that, for example during natural disasters, people spontaneously do heroic things, they spontaneously collaborate. The number of people who go completely sociopathic is actually much smaller than you'd think. Our spontaneous action under complete 'adrenal overload' is basically to respond to immediate value and 'save that baby' and 'get this person water' and just do what needs to be done. It's the fallback position of the human nervous system; it's evolved to respond to basic value."
Stein wrote "it is essential that we adopt an approach to design that accounts for how tech affects the way people think and behave. This is axiological design." Here, ethics are primary and engineering is secondary. This is precisely the inverse of nihilistic design, which is the dominant approach today. There are already fields of inquiry dedicated to design ethics, choice architecture, and persuasive tech. So these are not new ideas. But Stein is extending some of these a bit further. The humble farm plow and the smartphone are a few examples he gives of how design both embodies and influences values. In another famous example (not given by Stein), the legendary New York urban planner Robert Moses restricted the public — that is the poor, lower class public — from new city parks and beaches by a clever and subtle technological discrimination. According to his biographer, Moses lowered the clearance on the 200 overpasses he built on the Long Island Parkway so that public buses (the untidy poor) were unable to use this highway to get to Jones beach, but (middle class) cars could. If intentional bias can be inserted so effortlessly, couldn’t inadvertent bias emerge just as easily? Douglas Rushkoff gave a different example: "People like to think of technologies and media as neutral and that only their use or content determines their impact. Guns don't kill people, after all, people kill people. But guns are much more biased toward killing people than, say, pillows... If the concept that technologies have biases were to become common knowledge, we would put ourselves in a position to implement them consciously and purposefully. If we don't bring this concept into general awareness, our technologies and their effects will continue to threaten and confound us." Rushkoff is at the same point as Stein, they both recognize something significant here. I hope they next integrate the hemisphere hypothesis, and it's full implications, into the development of axiological design. In his conversation with McGilchrist, Stein referenced Whitehead's idea of "the intensification of polarities and dynamics of values all co-evolving in tension". Today it's more common to hear the word "tension" used to describe anxiety, conflict, and war. But we also know that it is the tension on the strings of a harp that allows it to sing.
Stein reminds me of John Ehrenfeld. Like Stein, John was able to unite McGilchrist with his work. In his earlier book that addressed industrial ecology (Sustainability by Design, 2008) John described the importance of closing material loops and creating industrial symbioses that are analogues to natural symbioses. Symbiosis opposes cooperation (both/and) to the dominant notion of competition (either/or). And the concept of an ecosystem opposes holism (continuity) to the reductionist, mechanistic sense (fragmentation) of the current paradigm. The parallels with the hemisphere hypothesis are clear. John's most recent book, The Right Way to Flourish (2019) identifies flourishing as an objective or ultimate good, a right-brain phenomenon that is "a powerful driver for social change". Value evokes a response. With reference to McGilchrist's discussion of values, perhaps flourishing may be thought of as a condition of being in alignment with value, that is, if it is not a value in and of itself. Under the paradigm of nihilistic design, technology can all too easily enter into a reinforcing feedback loop with the LH and its quest for control and manipulation. That has implications for our attention, and what we see (or what we fail to see). Our attempt to rebalance the hemispheres will likely involve a reappraisal of the role of design in our life, seeing that technology isn't neutral or entirely positive. This means questioning the Tenets of Winner's "Technological Orthodoxy" (see Stein's article). What we see instead of this is that design both embodies and leverages a sort of tension that is capable of shifting our attention (attention and tension are related words; attention is from ad "to, toward" + tendere "stretch"). If we as individuals recognize the very real relationships between design, attention, and value, perhaps we can be in a better position to wake up as a society. In a "Understanding The Matter with Things Dialogues: Ch 27 - Purpose, life, nature of the cosmos" McGilchrist said:
"It's not the distinction between "Is there God or there isn't?", but whether there is a free, reciprocal, cooperative coming together of opposites to achieve something more complex, and more beautiful, but that is fundamentally undetermined. It's between that position, and the one where there is just blind machinery which is pushing forwards. It knows not where, we know not where, and we are the playthings of that machinery. Now these are very, very different pictures of the cosmos. And they have not only consequences for fulfillment as human beings, but they have moral consequences. We know that people who have a deterministic view tend to make less moral decisions. They also tend to be more despairing, to have less creative initiative, because after all if everything's determined why really would you bother? Why not just sit back, watch a movie, eat a burger, drink a six pack, and hope you'll die quite soon. I'm of course parodying, but there is extremely good research that shows that people who are deterministic are less happy, less productive, and make less moral decisions. So it does matter how you think. Again, "as we think we live".
Bonnitta Roy and Iain McGilchrist were recently in a conversation titled "Are we unmaking the world":
Roy: For me, a lot of what you're talking about I see every day. I’ve seen the erosion of the adult mind through the 15 years that I've been teaching. The nature of the question of whether reality is 'real' is extraordinary now. The emphasis is always on the idea that the world is a simulation that we share. My question for you is "Why are we so feverishly trying to convince ourselves that we live in a simulation? Where is that pain coming from, that we don't want to live in the natural world?"
McGilchrist: There's many things to say about that. The natural world imposes limits on us. I think another reason why we're addicted to this idea of a representation is because the left hemisphere is a representation of the world, while the right hemisphere is a 'presencing' of the world; it allows the world to presence to us. That is a vibrant two-way experience. But once it is taken up by the left hemisphere it is dislocated, dismembered, analyzed, categorized, and turned into something abstract - a map of the world - and you cannot live in a map. You have 'unmade the world' once you do that. The left hemisphere can only trust the things that it itself has made. Heidegger actually said that, he was of course not talking about hemispheres at all, but he did say that modern man needs to be able to tell himself that he is the giver to himself of everything that he has. That is part of this problem that we have. That we must be all-powerful, and we must be the one that can do anything. There is a kind of paradox. At the same time that we believe ourselves to be capable of doing almost anything we want, we believe ourselves to be basically pointless and worthless. So happiness and belonging have plummeted while at the same time our hubris has gone through the roof. Adopting a certain degree of modesty and a sense of proper limits would actually help us to regain a sense of respect for what we are and what we can do. If we understood the world in all its awe-inspiring complexity, then a lot of things would happen differently because so much of what's wrong is due to simple hubris.
Roy: Deep down inside we know that we haven't made the Earth, the trees, or ourselves. Everything that we actually are has been given to us freely by nature. Now when I say that people will say "Oh that's very spiritual". But I respond "No, it's just a strong naturalism, that's just actually the case, it's rather mundane". It's all given to us. I went to a conference the other day, and this young man was presenting an argument that the world is intelligible and that communication between people is possible. But to do that he took this long detour through theoretical cognitive science and opponent processing and the free energy principle. And I thought, something very odd is happening here. If people had to understand all that in order to understand that the world is intelligible, and that communication is possible, then most people would be lost. And I told my dog "You have absolutely no chance at all for being in the world". This is an example of something that looked like a well delivered presentation, but it really conveyed to me a sense of collective madness.
McGilchrist: What you're describing is this unnecessarily complex way of approaching the world, and there's a lot of this in science, in which what is extraordinarily obvious is demonstrated at great cost and length. We've lost contact with the live, intuitive, reverberative business of experiencing the world in which it approaches us, becomes available to us, and we to it. At the same time, there are things that are completely obvious that are wholly denied. We've been encouraged to attack and reject our intuitions. We've become paralyzed by a kind of 'Gorgon stare' of the intellect on everything we're doing. The beauty of life is that things work well only when they're not like that. Imagine how bad the performance of a piece of music would be if the pianist was consciously thinking all the time about what he was doing with his fingers. Imagine how diminished an act of sexual love would be if it was entirely contrived according to a plan, an algorithm, or a worked out schema. It's this way of thinking that is absolutely crazy and a huge affliction and makes life impossibly difficult for us. We've moved from a world of intrinsic, spontaneous, and intuitive action to a world where somebody is unable to stand unless they've got scaffolding all around them. And of course such a person is a feeble version of a healthy living individual. The trouble is the way we think. We think we can reduce the world to parts, but all we find after we've done this is a lot of material elements that have been broken out of a whole. And the whole cannot conceivably be reconstructed from these inanimate bits. What I mean by "the unmaking of the world" is all that structure, all those relationships that enable things or people, and the feelings that they have, the experiences they have that interrelate with one another, are being shorn away. Our world view is becoming simpler and simpler, not because it's approaching truth but because it's moving away from truth. It's running away to a blatant falsehood which it feels it can't escape because of a certain way of thinking, which is that "the only thing that matters is that we should be able to be in control and amass material goods". Those are the values of the left hemisphere. All the other important values are better served by the right.
From a conversation between Iain McGilchrist and Phoebe Tickell titled "Imagination: A Way to Remake the World":
McGilchrist: “Blake said “To the eyes of the man of imagination, nature is imagination itself.” I used that at the beginning of the chapter “Intuition, Imagination and the Unveiling of the World”. Just before it I quoted Richard Feynman who said “The imagination of nature is far, far greater than the imagination of man.” Blake is making the more profound point, that the subject-object divide is actually transcended. That if you really look into nature, you are already in nature. And this is what imagination is about, it's about healing the divide. There is something desperately profound in this idea that in the realm of imagination we are actually contacting not a representation, which is what the left hemisphere offers us, not a drawing, a picture, a graph, or a theory, but the actual experience of what it is, in which we finally see it. Imagination is not something that has to be “drummed up”. It's something that is there all the time. It comes into being for us when it is allowed to do so.”
Tickell: "One of the most valuable things that we do is to give ourselves unplanned time. That's what it takes. How can we expect to exercise the imagination when there's no space or time, and we're completely flooded by the need to deliver, to produce, to perform? These are the worst conditions for imagination."
McGilchrist: “And those are all expressions of the left hemispheric mentality that we must have something we can measure, that there must always be a utility, there must be a product otherwise this has been completely wasted, even if the time that you spent was profoundly useful but didn't actually turn up anything measurable at the time. So it's all this administrative, managerial thinking that in my view is mushrooming in the world. I think this is partly to do with machines that have no imagination, understanding of context, individuality, embodiment, or anything but following simple left hemisphere rules. Worse than talking to an administrator is having to deal with ‘the machine’. And now most of the time when you want to do anything you have to interface with the machine. That is the death of imagination. I'm sure you know Paul Kingsnorth uses the term “the machine”. The machine is an expression of this left hemisphere mentality, but the left hemisphere mentality is behind many other things.”
Tickell: “You mentioned machines don't have imagination, and I'm sure that's on everybody's mind right now as there's a lot of talk about how chatGPT seems to have imagination and seems to be creative. Do you want to say anything about that?
McGilchrist: “I do, yes, because I can't intellectually, completely rule out that at some point, some creation of ours might achieve a kind of consciousness. I just can't rule that out. Partly because I don't think there is a hard and fast difference between the living and the non-living. [This was a theme during his recent conversation with Michael Levin and Richard Watson.]
I very much admire Dougald Hine’s latest book. He visited on the day that it came out, a week or two ago. I don't have much time these days for reading, but I started reading it and I thought it was brilliant. What he's saying is there is a whole way of thinking that underlies ‘this, that, and the other problem’, the whole package, and it's no good just addressing these at the surface level. That would be like putting a bandage on a cancer. You've covered it, but it's going to keep growing. The destruction of the planet, catastrophic climate change, the growing disparity between the rich and the poor. We think “We’ve got a problem here. What do we do? There's all these different problems. What's the solution?” The answer is that they're not ‘problems’. According to Dougald Hine they are ‘predicaments’ that we have brought about by a certain way of thinking which leads inexorably to each of these, and to a desacralized sense of the world in which we live. The reason we're so despairing about what's coming is that we think too narrowly about ourselves. The left hemisphere is very useful, but it doesn't know its own limitations, and that is the problem we now find ourselves in. The only way out of this is to embrace above all a degree of humility about what it is that we as humans can do. Similarly, criticism can only work if it works against itself, if it is aware of its own limitations and can incorporate them.” [This emphasis on a “way of thinking” is consistent with Donella Meadow’s paper on leverage points.]
Tickell: “A really important part of my work is the connection to what matters, the ‘moral imagination’. Religion can be wonderful, but it can also be very harmful when you're looking to a kind of ‘top-down morality’. The way I see it is that, rather than following moral laws and rules that can be massively manipulated, what we need instead is to build a kind of muscle of moral imagination and metaphor, and the ability to really connect with what matters and is beautiful, good, and true, and not wait to be told to follow rules, or to try and work out what the right law, rule, or principle is, but to get this kind of ‘coming alive’ through the right hemispheric, intuitive, imaginative capacities. We need to develop that compass of what is right and wrong, and what we are not going to let happen.”
Incidentally, Hine has a lot to say about George Monbiot. And in a recent opinion piece Monbiot wrote: “The only politics that matter now are those that might arrest our rush towards the brink.” How familiar these words sound to those who read and listen to McGilchrist! As he wrote "If I am right, that the story of the Western world is one of increasing left-hemisphere domination, we would not expect insight to be the keynote. Instead we would expect a sort of insouciant optimism, the sleepwalker whistling a happy tune as he ambles towards the abyss". The brink, the abyss, are of course very common metaphors, so perhaps one shouldn’t be too surprised to encounter them so often.
It’s a pertinent subject. Monbiot is addressing the ongoing effects of environmental disruption and increasing rates of species extinction. He writes: "France now has a Ministry for Ecological Transition. By the end of next year, the nation’s 25,000 most senior civil servants will have been trained in the principles behind this" as part of becoming an "ecological civilisation". Reading those words will elicit a variety of reactions. Is this merely astroturfing, greenwashing that likely won’t do anything to address the deeper systemic problems lying at the root of our polycrisis?
Of course these measures are not nearly enough. But then, neither are they nothing at all. Ultimately, what may be needed is a way to not only address the symptoms, but the disease as well, or as Hine puts it, the problems and the predicament - the way of thinking that gave rise to the environmental problems we are now beset with. But whereas a “Ministry for Ecological Transition” (which sounds a lot like Kim Stanley Robinson’s The Ministry for the Future) might be capable of addressing problems, can any ministry truly address our predicament? After all, it is of the same nature as the predicament of regulatory capture, of “who watches the watchers?”, of “who rules in a democracy?” It’s the predicament of finding a solution to “solutionism”. (Bayo Akomolafe frequently identifies “solutionism” as a problem in contemporary culture and politics as well.) For these, Einstein purportedly said "We can't solve problems by using the same kind of thinking we used when we created them”. And per McGilchrist’s thesis, problems concerning regulation, control, and governance aren’t solved by more of the same, but through reference to wisdom, what Daniel Schmachtenberger has called “the capacity to recognize the limits of our models, our methodologies, and the logic process operating on those, which requires being able to attune to reality itself.” It’s the reason why democratic institutions rely on dialogue among the demos. It is a process of attunement, and the quality and integrity of that conversation determines that of the nation. No ministry alone is sufficient.
I do wonder at the possibilities though. A ministry occupies the role of an emissary, that “intelligence function” that must always be in service to a master “wisdom function”. It generates what Erica Thompson called “plausible models” which are then submitted to our “shrewd assessment of which we ought to prefer”. It’s the McGilchrist Manoeuvre, iterated over and over again, opposing each new model against every other model, and opposing all models against the actual terrain of reality itself. We don’t need a solution, a model, or a ministry so much as a synergistic relationship and the ability to attune to reality. The Ministry for Ecological Transition will certainly address several problems, but will it be able to address our predicament? Only if it can create the conditions for something which no ministry alone can achieve: presencing to the very world we are neglecting, and trying to heal.
In a conversation with David Bentley Hart (proponent of apokatastasis, a RH perspective to be sure), McGilchrist isn't asking a rhetorical question that presupposes a Postmodern viewpoint. Rather, he is making the point that not only is there is a long history of simply assuming native peoples are wrong due to cultural prejudice, but also that we have significant attentional blindness and hubris. There are many instances in which the knowledge of native peoples has been discounted only to be later confirmed.
David Bentley Hart: “In reading your most recent book, it was clear that one of the dimensions of humility we have to learn in the modern West is that we have a lot to learn from other cultures, that there are many things that the narrowing of our focus has closed us off from.”
McGilchrist: “And when people who belong to certain cultures, such as the Aboriginal people of Australia, say they can see or hear things that we can’t, who are we to say that they can’t? We need to learn quite quickly from cultures that know things that are different from us, before we have turned them into carbon copies of ourselves.”
David Bentley Hart: “If we start with the notion of a dead Universe, such that death is the prior reality and life is the exception, then curiously enough we find that's where we're heading, in terms of the way we treat life. So there's this sort of moral challenge in the book.”
McGilchrist: “Yes, I completely agree. …There are a couple of things that people want from my story. They want me to be able to say that one hemisphere is good and the other one's bad. But no, the left hemisphere is enormously important and serviceable, as long as it remains guided by the overall view of the right hemisphere. The other thing is people want me to say that if there are two things they must be equal, but I find that they're not, and this is in keeping with the rest of the world, in which I find that no two things are ever equal.”
A conversation with Philip Goyal explored the relationship between the hemispheres. Goyal was an excellent foil for McGilchrist, occupying the role of an educated skeptic in regard to the asymmetric implications of the hemisphere hypothesis. As some have suggested, we could think of each hemisphere as operating at separate ‘levels of analysis’. It may be that the left hemisphere is necessarily constrained to lower levels of analysis and a preference for simplified, quantitative thinking (as opposed to complex, qualitative thinking) in order to effectively fulfill its role of enabling an organism to engage in manipulation. And accordingly, with the greater context that comes at a higher level, one can indeed resolve many lower level paradoxes. We can also see that there are significant consequences attendant to a failure to think at a sufficiently high level. Consider cancer; it’s not just a convenient analogy. As Daniel Schmachtenberger recently put it:
"A cancer cell will optimize itself - both how much it consumes and its reproduction cycles - at the expense of everything around it. And in doing so it’s on a self-terminating curve, because it ends up killing the host and then killing itself. Cancer cells do not want to align their consumption with the pattern of the whole, and so they actually do better in the short term. There's a maximum number of cancer cells… right before the body dies and they're all dead. If something is inextricably interconnected with the rest of reality, like the heart and the liver or the various cells, but forgets that or doesn't understand that and optimizes itself at the expense of the other things, it can be on what looks like a short-term winning path. But it self-terminates. It’s an evolutionary cul-de-sac. And I would argue that the collective action failures of humanity as a whole are pursuing an evolutionary cul-de-sac."
Cancer ends in a fight for survival between a body that still functions as an integrated whole and the rogue tumor cells that no longer respond to negative feedbacks and are now only acting at a lower level of integration (or no integration at all). But when they are functioning in a healthy manner, cells must still be able to consume sources of energy and reproduce. So it isn’t the processes themselves that are problematic. Rather it is the failure of the cells to integrate with the larger system and respond to balancing feedbacks that would normally regulate those processes. The analogy to a “left hemisphere insurrection” is much the same. In his conversation with McGilchrist, Goyal is eager to advocate for the healthy functioning of the left hemisphere, which is indeed very necessary. But he doesn’t seem to recognize the danger that excessive fragmentation and loss of social integrity poses to the body politic. And not just to human health and well being, but also to the planet itself. It is an existential risk no less real than the threat that cancer poses to the continued survival of an individual organism.
Goyal understood McGilchrist in a very logical, though perhaps disembodied sort of way. One doesn’t get the impression that he understood the full implications of the hemisphere hypothesis for the world we live in. Schmachtenberger, on the other hand, with his analogy to cancer, really does seem to understand the existential implications. But Goyal did make an interesting point regarding the need to disregard some contextual considerations in order to allow other contextual features, that we were previously unaware of, to come into focus. For example, a microscope ignores the vast majority of the world, but in doing so it can reveal cellular structures that we had no idea were present. This gets to a critical aspect of what Jonathan Rowson called "The McGilchrist Manoeuvre". As he described it:
"The McGilchrist manoeuvre refers to a pattern of disclosure and a morphology of analysis in Iain McGilchrist’s scholarship. In its most fundamental manifestation, it refers to the hemispheric hypothesis developed in The Master and his Emissary (2011) expressed as the ‘right, left, right’ functioning of our brains as we move (sequentially but imperceptibly) from the presencing of a particular lived context (right hemisphere) to the re-presentation of that context into elements for analysis (left hemisphere) and then back into a perception of context that is changed by the hemispheric interaction (the right hemisphere’s initial perception of context is enriched and enhanced by the left hemisphere’s analysis and includes but transcends it)."
So there’s a kind of ratcheting effect going on here. Ultimately, the hemispheres have a ‘productive opposition’. The tension between them sustains a harmonious partnership. And indeed, they are partners that depend upon each other. Thus, there is a role for disregarding context, but it comes with some very important caveats. And it’s not clear Goyal adequately appreciates those. You can’t get to "the deep structure of reality" if you disregard the context, but you might not get to it if you don’t (strategically, at certain times and places) either. In the end, according to Rowson, you need to do both!
Iain McGilchrist: "We can never fully know or specify anything. But that doesn't mean that we can't know more and more about it, or can't say truthful or non-truthful things about it. This way of thinking is typical of the right hemisphere of the brain. The left hemisphere is working in the opposite direction, but it needs that contrary motion, it needs that opposition. Nothing comes into being without resistance. One needs these two forces, although one is greater than the other. I would hold, you might not, that one is actually truer in some sense to the big picture, while the other gives us usable and important information at a more local level. I'm not saying that there's no value to this knowledge, it has a technical kind of use, but it's a mistake if we found our philosophy on it. William James said that half the trouble that scientists and philosophers have with paradoxes is because they don't understand that context is all important. They decontextualize and then they find they've got a problem. There are movements both ways, where we see the inadequacy of one way of looking and embrace the other more, but sometimes this can turn from a case of 'negative feedback' into one of 'positive feedback' in which things simply accelerate towards catastrophe. And I have the feeling that is what we're in."
Philip Goyal: "I suppose the challenge from a scientific or physicist perspective, as I see it, is that on the other hand so much has come from this act of decontextualizing. It's been so profoundly inspirational. I mean the idea of atomism in the time of the Greeks was pure metaphysical fancy, but today it's virtually regarded as proven fact. And we have the Germ Theory of disease, and we have Dalton's theory of chemistry, and modern chemistry. All of that development, which happened over roughly a 300 year period, has been profoundly inspired by this. So on the one hand, from a scientific perspective, we've gained so much by saying "Let's not worry too much about context right now. Let's just see how far this will take us." This drive for precision has been extraordinarily important as well because it's led to quantification of all sorts of qualitative experiences, like temperature, color, and things of that nature. So I think the dilemma for the minds that have seen the power of this decontextualized way of thinking is how to keep that spirit alive and take it forward in the face of the demand to take into account context, to take into account the right hemisphere's sense of wholeness.
For the right hemisphere, context is trivially obvious. But there is a sense of loss aversion from the left hemisphere's point of view. It feels like "well, I'm going to have to give up my way of thinking". It's not clear how you might do science or fundamental physics if you take context into account. That's why I feel that we're at a stage where human thought needs to evolve to the point where it can see how to take forward the scientific endeavor, particularly exploration of the physical world at this extraordinary level of precision, and still incorporate more of the insights of reality that come from the right hemisphere. For example, Niels Bohr's concepts of complementarity. He thought that was incredibly important for epistemology, for humanity. He tried to apply it all over the place. It would really give hope if we could see how to do this."
McGilchrist: "I understand what you're saying, and I would embrace almost all of it. It's a useful way to think. For example if I want to build a garage I find a piece of flat ground. I don't need to take into account the fact that the Earth is actually curved. But if I extrapolate from my garage and everything I see around me that the Earth is flat, then I would be deeply deluded about the Earth. But it would be quite useful to forget it for the purposes of everyday business. So it's not that it isn't useful sometimes to sort of forget parts of the context, but when you forget them they don't become untrue. When you pan out from the 'little view' you find the 'bigger view'. Every little view only makes sense in terms of a broader view. You can make it make sense on its own terms, but we're keen on knowing what reality is."
Jonathan Rowson: "I can feel from the conversation that, while you agree on almost everything, there is some underlying difference. Iain tries to show that the right hemisphere is closer to the truth than the left. That even though they're both of value, there is an asymmetry: one is somewhat more trustworthy than the other in a general sense, not always, but in the general sense. This is a quite fundamental claim, because that's what leads him to argue that where you have paradoxes, such as the ones relating to time and motion and so on, we should instinctively defer to the right hemisphere's perspective as being somehow the more fundamental reading of reality. Philip, if I'm not mistaken I sense you're not entirely persuaded that one is necessarily more reliable or trustworthy. Am I right in suspecting that?"
Goyal: "There is a part of me that is very uncomfortable with according priority to one perspective. I've cultivated both of them, and can switch between these two different perspectives. I feel that it's probably, for me anyway, more helpful to say that we have two extraordinarily different ways of perceiving reality, and our job as human beings is to find a way of honoring both of those perspectives, and shaping language so it is faithful to both of them. From a scientific perspective, in which domains can we safely apply one perspective? When, where, and how does the other perspective need to be brought in? So I suppose, from my point of view, and in terms of my developmental trajectory, I don't normally think of one of these perspectives as being fundamentally superior or closer to reality. On the other hand, I'm torn because I agree with so much that Iain's said. I'd agree that if push comes to shove, the right hemisphere's view must take priority. If there's ever a need for adjudication, it's the right hemisphere that seems to be on the money, so to speak, that it's view seems to be very important.
But when I look at the development of scientific thought, especially theoretical physics, I can see time and again the power of the left hemispheric view of reality and the willingness to sort of push that forward. And I think that particular development, the emergence of modern science, was very much in reaction to and against the insistence of a much more nuanced view of reality. In other words, sometimes it seems to me that the right hemisphere's insistence on nuance and context can, as it were, paralyze the left hemisphere's exploration of reality. And I do worry about that. So I think that sometimes the right hemisphere needs to say "Look, I don't agree with what you're doing, I don't agree with the decontextualization, but just go and see what happens if you do". And then there needs to be the contrary movement, where once the left hemisphere has gone off and done its thing the right hemisphere has to have the authority to reflect on that properly. And as long as this process, this back and forth process is respected, then all is well. But if one of these gets out of balance, then I think we're in trouble as a culture. Sorokin has this idea of 'ideational' versus 'sensate' cultures, representing the two extremes, with the 'idealistic' culture as the harmonious synthesis of these two perspectives."
McGilchrist: "The right hemisphere sees that what the left hemisphere thinks of as fixed, certain, and familiar is not necessarily fully known, not ever going to be completely certain, and not fixed. Neither is it isolated. The left hemisphere isolates things, but in reality we know that nothing is isolated. The left hemisphere's world is not just something that I don't happen to think is right, but no normal person is going to say is a truthful image of the world. When people have lesions in one or the other hemisphere it is very clear that they are deluded much less often after damage to the left, but very often after having damage to the right hemisphere. Now one may say "Well, who decides what's a delusion?" Yes, ultimately one can never be certain, but in general terms you can clearly see that the left hemisphere gets deluded unless the right hemisphere helps recontextualize and sophisticate the whole thing. We need both of these hemispheres, but one of them is very much closer to, and a better guide to, the truth."
Rowson: "So it's not that one hemisphere is somehow 'true' and the other is 'not true', because there's a sense in which the left hemisphere has its own 'truth'. What you're saying is that the ‘fuller truth’, the more liable truth, lies in the right?"
McGilchrist: "I'm not saying "it's all this" or "it's all that". It is both, but they're asymmetric. And the great beauty of the asymmetric relationship between the hemispheres is that the right hemisphere can take both perspectives. We live in an age in which it is almost impossible for anybody any longer to think that if there are two things one of them may be more important than the other. We live in an age in which symmetry and equality is the truth. And it isn’t."
Goyal: "This is obviously a very fundamental point. I think that there's a conversation between two different modes of perceiving reality. A part of me is not comfortable with saying that the left hemisphere's view is merely useful, that it's somehow not true. For a physicist it's very hard to swallow that. The great emphasis in pursuing physics, and why physicists are drawn to it, is because they felt they were really getting to the deep structure of reality. I think that the achievements of physics go well beyond simple utility for humanity's benefit. We’re talking about having a set of equations that describe the electrons and atoms and molecules at a ridiculous level, that allow us to send spaceships that can end up in Pluto. We can plot trajectories. We can do all of this. Are we going to put all those achievements on the side of ‘utility’ and deny them ‘truth’? I have a very hard time with that as a physicist. And I think that a lot of physicists are drawn to physics because they really do think they're getting at some real truth. Even if it’s only a limited truth, they're getting at something very deep.
I'm also a meditator so I experience reality all the time in a completely different way. But I also experience it as a physicist. So I have to manage this on a day-by-day basis myself. I tend not to regard one as necessarily superior. But having said that, there are these critical 'moments of adjudication' where you have to make a decision. And so at a critical moment it does seem to me without fail that the right hemisphere's view seems to be leading me in a better direction. So in that sense the right hemisphere has priority. But I also think that autonomy has been incredibly important in the history of the development of science, and it was very important for science and culture to allow the left hemisphere to run and discover its own truth, and then somehow adjudicate between these truths. So I would suggest a picture like that.”
McGilchrist: “I want to agree. I’ve spent my life saying there's nothing in itself wrong with the left hemisphere. We need it. But I don't make claims for its ultimate truth. I think within a certain context, in which many things are excluded, it may be true for those purposes. For example, if I completely decontextualize the garage I'm building, and cut out the world, the measurements and everything I do to build the garage are entirely true to reality, but it’s not the whole reality, and therefore not really true. That's the point I'm making, and that's why I do sort of accept the idea of a certain degree of truth. It has a kind of beauty, a kind of fascination for the mind, and it may reveal some aspects of reality, in fact it probably does. The trouble is just that we've started to think that this way of thinking will lead us to reality. We've had this unfolding over the last 400 years. So I would just sound a note of skepticism and caution. Of course it's lovely being in the world we’re in now, but we're probably going to end the world because of this kind of thinking.”
Rowson: “Philip, you said something fascinating, which was that there are ‘moments of adjudication’ where you feel the right hemisphere is leading you somewhere more true. I just want you to describe phenomenologically what that's like, as somebody who knows meditation, as someone who knows physics, what does it feel like for your mind to be saying one way is somewhat more trustworthy than the other? As far as possible, talk us through that experience."
Goyal: “Well these ‘moments of adjudication’ have for me happened at certain critical moments in life and really changed my life course. In 1998 when I was working in neuroscience for a period of time, I went into that direction because I really wanted to somehow bring together my physics perspective and understand the nature of mind. I thought what better thing to do than learn about neuroscience. But quite quickly I felt that I'm missing the essential point, that I'm never going to understand the nature of mind through this mechanistic reduction to neural networks and such. I can study the neurochemistry and so on, but in the end I'm just looking at it through a mechanistic lens. You have to understand at that point I hadn't developed my thinking, so I didn't really know what the alternative was, but there was just this powerful sense that this was not the way. And so I looked more broadly at the literature and was very fortunate to encounter Robert Rosen. That was revelatory for me. That's when I realized that maybe there is a way of satisfying the left hemisphere, with its insistence on mathematical precision and potentially testable scientific consequences whilst at the same time honoring the sense that there's much more to the mind and living than simply neural networks, or cells interacting with each other.”
McGilchrist: "The physicist Lee Smolin said 'One way to unify things that appear different is to show that the apparent difference is due to the difference in the perspective of the observers. A distinction that was previously considered absolute becomes relative.' And I would like to say the difference between the hemispheres is relative. 'This kind of unification is rare and represents the highest form of scientific creativity. When it's achieved it radically alters our view of the world.'"
A few days ago Nate Hagens interviewed Daniel Schmachtenberger, and they had a wide ranging and very interesting conversation on a number of topics. He titled the podcast "Artificial Intelligence and The Superorganism", however what I found most interesting was the way Schmachtenberger made an explicit analogy between McGilchrist’s Master and Emissary, characterizing them as Wisdom and Intelligence, respectively, at the conclusion. It was as if the entire preceding several hours was an extended argument in support of McGilchrist's hemisphere hypothesis. (Apparently, McGilchrist is to be a future guest with Hagens.) As usual, a lengthy paraphrase:
"What is distinct to human intelligence? Why did that create a superorganism and cause a metacrisis? How does AI relate to that? And what would it take, other than intelligence, to ensure that intelligence is in service to what it needs to be in service to? I’m not saying that humans are the only intelligent thing in nature. Obviously not. Nobody reasonably would say that, but there is something about human intelligence that is distinct from that of other animals. We don't just have the ability to work within a range of behavioral capacities that are built into our physiology. Animals can't become radically more than those capacities through their own choice and understanding. Their physiological capacities may increase through genetic selection, but that is relatively slow and not under their direct control. And the mutations that make the cheetah a little faster happen as the rest of the environment is going through similar mutations. The cheetah's getting a little faster, but so are the gazelles. There's co-selective pressure; tiny changes happening across the whole system that co-upregulate each other. So the entire homeodynamic system is able to maintain its metastability and continue to increase in complexity over time. But that metastability is the result of that type of corporeal evolution.
Humans' adaptive capacity is mostly extra-corporeal or extra-somatic, meaning outside of just our body. We can use a lot of calories outside of our body, which started with fire. Fire was the beginning of us being able to warm ourselves. It made new environments possible and new foods edible that weren't edible before. Our ability to get more calories from the environment, gather more stuff, kill more things, innovate tools, and coordinate with each other created ever greater surpluses. We take our corporeal capacities and extend them extra-corporeally, in the way that a fist can get extended through a hammer, or a grip can get extended through pliers, or an eye can get extended through a microscope or telescope, or our metabolism can get extended through an internal combustion engine. At the heart of how we figured out how to do all that was intelligence, a kind of recursive intelligence in service of our goals.
But I would argue that humanity is currently in the process of pursuing an evolutionary cul-de-sac. The things that may have appeared to be moving us forward are actually self terminating. At the heart of that is perceiving reality in a fragmented way, and optimizing for narrow goals by modifying a fixed number of parameters, only a subset of the metrics that matter. Human intelligence, and all forms of intelligence, have something to do with modeling. To inform our next choice, we take in information from the environment and try to forecast what happens if we do something. Which choice is more likely to achieve some future goal? Which leads to us wanting to optimize those models and those metrics. Some models win in the short term, but in the longer term only move us towards self extinction. So now we can start to define the distinction between intelligence and wisdom. Wisdom is related to wholes and wholeness. Intelligence is related to how to achieve a goal.
The risk singularity we are headed towards is one in which the underlying drivers overdetermine failure, meaning that even if we could prevent the AI apocalypse, that doesn't prevent the synthetic biology one, or the planetary boundary one, or the gazillions of other ones. If we could stop planetary boundaries regarding fishing, that doesn't affect what we're doing to soil, or nitrogen runoff, or PFAS pollution, or whatever. The underlying thing is creating so many different sources that can lead to catastrophic risk. If you don't deal with the underlying thing, and you just deal with some of the risks, you only buy a tiny bit of time.
Human intelligence unbound by wisdom and in the pursuit of narrow goals, it is fair to say, is the underlying generative dynamic of the growth imperative of the superorganism and this metacrisis. The growth in consumption, waste, technology, and the promotion of the same, are all epiphenomena, a second order effect of that. It has created all the technologies: the industrial tech, the agricultural tech, the digital tech, the nuclear weapons, the energy harvesting… all of it. That intelligence has created all those things. What everyone is pursuing is not the growth of the whole system. They're just individually pursuing their own narrow goals. The pursuit of AGI to maximize recursive intelligence is partly the result of this competitive race, and partly the result of a set of biases. Those who are more focused on the opportunity than the risk end up being the ones who rush ahead. People who don't think AGI will kill everything try to build AGI because they think it will solve everything. It's a combination of 'naive progress optimism', all of the various sources of motivated reasoning, the legal obligation for profit maximization, the inherent externalization of liability and centralization of profit, and the avoidance of regulation because nations want economic growth to grow their militaries and strengthen geopolitical alliances. There are layers and layers of multipolar traps driving the optimization of near-term narrow interests.
Given that it can optimize so powerfully, what is the right thing to guide this intelligence? It's the thing that can identify the difference between the set of metrics you've identified as important and reality itself, the limits of your own models. That is not intelligence. That is wisdom. It’s the difference between what the optimization function on the set of all the weighted metrics says you should do, and what you should actually do. It requires being able to attune to more than just the known metrics, and more than just the optimization and logic process on those. Laozi started the Tao Te Ching with “the Tao that is speakable in words or understandable conceptually is not the eternal Tao”. He was saying keep your sensing of base reality open and not mediated by the model you have of reality, otherwise your sensing will be limited to your previous understanding, and your previous understanding is always smaller than the totality of what is. I would even argue that “thou shall have no false idols”, could itself be understood as a false idol.
Wisdom will always be bound to restraint. If we do not get wisdom to stop the maximization race, then these will be the last chapters of humanity. So how do we do that? Is it possible for humans, individually or in groups at different scales, to develop wisdom, i.e. a relationship to base reality rather than the symbols and models that mediate it? A relationship to the wider whole, both temporally and spatially? Is there anything about human nature that makes that impossible? No. Is it possible for eight billion humans, in our current environment, to continue without that wisdom? No. It will self terminate. We need civilizational and technological systems that have restraint, and that don't optimize narrow interests, or drive arms races and externalities. We need the intelligence in the system to be bound and directed by wisdom.
We are not the web of life. We are merely a strand, and whatever we do to the web, we do to ourselves. David Bohm said the underlying cause of the problem is a consciousness that perceives parts rather than wholes or the nature of wholeness. And because it perceives parts, it can make a model that separates it all, then up-regulate this, harm something else, and not even realize it’s harming something else because that's not in the model. And so I can benefit myself at the expense of somebody else. I can benefit my in-group at the expense of an out-group. I can benefit my species at the expense of nature. I can benefit the present at the expense of the future. I can benefit these metrics at the expense of other metrics we don't know about. All of our problems come from that. But if we were perceiving the field of wholeness itself, then our perception of and identification with wholeness would guide our manipulation of parts, i.e. technology. That's what wisdom binding intelligence would mean.
Iain McGilchrist, in The Master and His Emissary, advanced what David Bohm was saying in an incredibly beautiful way. Basically he said that to not hit evolutionary cul-de-sacs, there's a capacity in humans that needs to be the ‘master’ and another capacity that needs to be the ‘emissary’, meaning ‘in service of’, and also ‘bound by’. Or in other words, there is a capacity that needs to be the ‘principal’ and another that needs to be the ‘agent’. In legal terms this is a ‘principal-agent dynamic’. The thing that needs to be the master is that which perceives, not mediated by word symbols and language models, but perceives in an unmediated way the field of inseparable wholeness. And the emissary is the thing that perceives each thing in light of its relevance to goals and figures out how to up-regulate some parts relative to others, i.e. what we think of as intelligence, relevance realization, salience realization, and information compression.
When I was talking with McGilchrist I said “Basically you're saying that the emissary developed all these powerful capabilities. And so in some places the emissary said, ‘Fuck the master thing. I want to be the master.’ It had the tools to do so, and started to win on a runaway dynamic, and that’s the cause of the metacrisis?” He replied, "Exactly." So if you look at the global metacrisis as the result of the emissary intelligence function unbound by the master wisdom function, then AI is taking that part of us already not bound by wisdom, and putting it on a recursive exponential curve. It is a hypertrophication of the intelligence that is already driving the superorganism. So what is it that could bind the power of AI adequately? It has to be that which human intelligence is already bound by and in service to: wisdom. Which means a restructuring of our institutions, our political economies, and our civilizational structures, such that the goals that arise from wisdom are what the goal achievement is oriented towards. That is the next phase of human history, if there is to be a next phase of human history.
If we understand this, but become lotus eaters and simply drop out, we won't affect the trajectory we're on. Neither will we affect it if we work for change, but only through narrow goals. We need to both really try to make progress in the direction of and in the service of the whole, and also, to avoid the danger of hubris, have the humility to know we’ll never do it properly. Only that will improve our chances of intervening on our current trajectory."
Schmachtenberger remarked that we are “in the process of pursuing an evolutionary cul-de-sac” where the “underlying drivers overdetermine failure”. McGilchrist also recently said, while talking with Philip Goyal, that “we're probably going to end the world because of this [left hemisphere] kind of thinking”. If they are right, and Schmachtenberger certainly provided many reasons to think so, then we are facing a very grim situation. In the face of this, one might respond in the spirit of Albert Camus, who wrote “The struggle itself toward the heights is enough to fill a man's heart. One must imagine Sisyphus happy.” Or perhaps with Thomas Babington Macaulay’s lines from Lays of Ancient Rome: "Then out spake brave Horatius, The Captain of the Gate: “To every man upon this earth Death cometh soon or late. And how can man die better Than facing fearful odds, For the ashes of his fathers, And the temples of his gods?"
Should we have hope or pessimism concerning the future? One of the 20 headline differences between the hemispheres that McGilchrist gives in TMWT is “The LH is unreasonably optimistic, and it lacks insight into its limitations. The RH is more realistic, but tends towards the pessimistic.” Another characteristic of the LH, described in TMAHE, is “a veering between two apparently opposite positions which are in reality aspects of the same position: omnipotence and impotence”. In his paradoxical ‘both/and and either/or’ way, McGilchrist calls himself a ‘hopeful pessimist’. Is this the appropriate disposition to adopt? Is there any sense in which we might avoid the shoals of either extreme and embrace a more nuanced position somewhere between them?
The LH, or our “emissary intelligence function” as Schmachtenberger called it, will “take in information from the environment and try to forecast what happens”. But the RH, or our “master wisdom function”, is inherently skeptical of any predictions thus generated, because they are the product of a limited and ultimately hubristic model. The RH presences to reality, which is neither fully determined nor ever fully captured within the confines of our models. With this insight into its limitations, the RH is neither certain, nor self-assured, nor excessively optimistic, but neither is it excessively pessimistic. It is skeptical of its own skepticism, because there too it sees limits. McGilchrist wrote:
"Prediction is another matter, and very difficult – especially about the future, as Niels Bohr is said to have said. We all make projections: it’s a necessary part of life. But it’s wise not to do it any more than you have to, and to admit your uncertainty. Whitehead was a bit fiercer: The world’s experience of professed seers has on the whole been very unfortunate. In the main, they are a shady lot with a bad reputation … On the whole, the odds are so heavily against any particular prophet that, apart from some method of testing, perhaps it is safer to stone them, in some merciful way."
Yes, but… in one sense this is true, but perhaps not in another sense... Processes of attention change our perception and action. Our answers to questions about life and death, being and non-being, and endings and beginnings, on an individual or collective scale, depend on how we attend to reality. If we conceive of ourselves, via the LH, as somehow fragmented and static entities, then perhaps we are continually ending. But we also know via the RH that everything is a process of change, so if we conceive of ourselves as a continuous and dynamic process that extends forward in time, teleologically drawn toward and responsive to value, then we will have a different answer. The RH alone has insight into this paradox, that in some sense both of these responses may be right, however one is ‘more veridical’ than the other.
Being who we are, as Whitehead’s “partners in creation”, and assuming some tacit agreement with “McGilchrist’s wager”, we have an active interest in this process. I think Schmachtenberger, over the course of the three hours he spoke, tried to provide only the beginning of the amount of nuance that would be required to adequately respond to such a question. He focused principally on the parts/whole distinction and the asymmetry between these, such that the whole contains the parts, but the parts do not contain the whole. Anyone who is receptive to this criticism of reductive thinking might find it to be an entry point into McGilchrist’s other work on the imagination, values, the sacred, and so on, as an exploration of these other subjects necessarily rests on the foundation of a holistic view of reality. Hagens later spoke with McGilchrist:
Hagens: "What do you care most about in the world?"
McGilchrist: "It's a very dicult thing to say, because I just care about the world really. But I care about it under the aspect of love. I care about real love continuing and prospering and spreading. I can't say it better than that. That's ultimately what life's about. You can do anything. You can be anything. But if you don't experience love, and you don't do, in your own way, what seems to you to be the loving thing, then I'm not sure what point life has."
Hagens: "If you could wave a magic wand, what is one thing that you would do to improve human and planetary futures?
McGilchrist: "I think bringing back into our lives those things that I talked about, humility and awe, if people could experience those things on a daily basis. As William James said, ignorance is an ocean, what we know is just a drop. That's how we are. If we had that sense before the world, if we had the sense of awe and wonder in it, we would behave well to it and to one another in that aspect of love that I've described. That's all I can say."
"At school, I got to know Heraclitus. And then at about 20 I read Alan Watts's Tao: The Watercourse Way, and that reconnected me with the pre-Socratic philosophers like Heraclitus. It was another life-changing moment when I read that book. And since then Taoism has always been part of my thinking."
"We need the everyday stuff. We need the jobs, and we need to put in place particular measures, legal measures, maybe scientific plans to try and stop the poisoning of the oceans and all that. But that's not enough. That's only a part of the story. And perhaps in some ways it is less important than being able to see things in a different way... We live in a society that is becoming stupid because we are no longer trying to understand the people who came before us... if there is a humanity in the future, people will look back on this as the most absurd era."
"A slower culture would be a great thing. When we are hurtling towards the precipice, why would we try and speed it up by inventing ever more sophisticated technology that will push us faster and faster that way? Technology is just a way of giving people power. And power is neither good nor bad, it depends on who's wielding it and to what end. It needs wisdom. And at the moment what we're doing is we are creating very powerful mechanisms, and we're giving them to people who haven't any of the wisdom to use them properly. And so what we need is more wisdom, not more power. I'm afraid, by the way we're talking at the moment, it's all about increasing our power to do things. This has got us into the mess. And as Einstein famously said, we don't get out of the mess by the same means that got us into it."
Hagens: "Are you still writing?"
McGilchrist: "I might write a few short books... a short intellectual autobiography, ...a short book of things I'd like to say to my younger self or to people who are growing now, ...and a short book on the art created by psychotic subjects."
Jeremy Lent is an amazing communicator in more than one way. He appears to have been inspired by that conversation between Hagens and Schmachtenberger (at least in part, as he pulls in many other sources). He wrote: “Similarly, in psychology, dual systems theory posits two forms of human cognition—intuitive and analytical… which correspond to the animate and conceptual split within both intelligence and consciousness. […] The dominant view of humanity as defined solely by conceptual intelligence has contributed greatly to the dualistic worldview underlying many of the great predicaments facing society today… Once, however, we recognize that humans possess both conceptual and animate intelligence, this can transform our sense of identity as a human being. As an accelerant of the misalignment already present in our global system, might the onset of advanced AI… jolt us as a planetary community to reorient toward the wisdom available in traditional cultures and existing within our own animate intelligence? If there is real hope for a positive future, it will emerge from our understanding that as humans, we are both conceptual and animate beings…”
First off, there's plenty of room for disagreement in an article of this length and scope, and I have my issues as well. But in general Lent makes a number of important points. And his framing of the "animate and conceptual split" is interesting because it not only refers to dual systems, but also to animacy in particular. If these two features of his article weren't enough to bring McGilchrist to mind, there's also that reference to Schmachtenberger's conversation with Hagens, which rested predominantly on the hemisphere hypothesis. The eighth comment to Lent's article points out these similarities as well, which Lent is undeniably aware of. So when can we get a conversation between the two? They have been mutually aware of each other's material since at least 2010, when Lent wrote a review of TMAHE. McGilchrist responded to that review. One of the key ideas made in TMAHE is the union of division with union. However, at least as of 2010, it did not appear that Lent fully appreciated that this paradoxical relationship was the key to the synergy of dual systems. Does he now? Here he is in 2010, with McGilchrist's response below the selected portion of his review:
Jeremy Lent: “I believe that as long as we maintain a dichotomy of values between right and left orientations, we might be continuing to move in the wrong direction. If our global culture is to move towards what I call a “democracy of consciousness,” I think we may have to turn our attention to approaches that harmonize the different aspects of our consciousness rather than exacerbate the conflict. In this view, it’s not about right hemisphere versus left hemisphere – it’s about integration rather than conflict between the hemispheres. It’s not about conceptual consciousness versus animate consciousness – it’s about harmonizing our conceptual and our animate experience of ourselves into one whole. McGilchrist might respond to this view by pointing to the fact that the right-hemisphere is characterized by its integrative function, and that this is why he’s arguing for a greater role in right-hemisphere thinking. Well, that may be true in itself, but I’m proposing a different level of harmonization, one that integrates analytical thought with holistic thought.”
Iain McGilchrist: “I agree with much of what you say, as you might expect. But I’d have to say that your conclusion, contrasting my implied opposition of the hemispheres to your sense of the need for synthesis, is mistaken. I continually recur to the theme, in both Parts One and Two of the book, that we need both, and that they need to be integrated: synthesis. The black and white, either/or mode is the mode of the left hemisphere on its own. I cite Hegel and others on the need for the union of division with union, the integration of differentiation with integration; and in Part Two it is clear that my take on the Ancient World and the Renaissance is that the two worked in balance in each of those ages. My whole thesis, encapsulated in the metaphor of the title, is that both need to work together. Both are valuable. It’s just that in our age, the left has got above itself, and blotted out the whole picture: it is the left hemisphere viewpoint that only one matters. The right hemisphere knows better than that.”
As for the statement "McGilchrist wants to declare that “ultimately” there are only fields in motion; and that “ultimately” we need to achieve a union... This is, ironically, a worryingly LH-style." We see that Read is attempting to hold McGilchrist to his word, as a fellow thinker who values the via negativa method, humility, metaphor, and so on. He's asking McGilchrist, "If you truly value these things, then why are you positively affirming anything at all?" (Later Read writes "I agree with McGilchrist that... the RH typically has a truer or deeper way of seeing, ultimately, than the LH.") I think McGilchrist is affirming this because that's what the clinical studies upon which he is drawing show. And it also draws out the tension and contrast between the hemispheres. The RH-style is, problematically for some, a multi-faceted presencing to reality. And although it shrinks from making ontological commitments, it nonetheless sees that there is "something there", which means that it doesn't merely "move away from.. ideological assumptions (rather than toward The Truth)". No, in fact it is drawn toward something. Read writes: "Some of the early chapters explicitly give readers the option of skipping their content (which in those cases is largely semi-specialist material on neurology) in favour of very short summaries; I’d strongly advise non-neurologists to take his advice."
I wouldn't; it's really essential. But we have to remember that Read is a philosopher, not a psychiatrist, as when he writes "We shouldn’t give away the concept of ‘things’ to the LH." Upon what basis? And so, like Robert Ellis, he appears very much at home with the sort of clean and disembodied arguments and conclusions that philosophers tend to work with that leave no room for ambiguity. Here it's as if Read has discovered that McGilchrist is apparently a little untidy in his thinking, and so he takes him to task for this (as one does). But if we are really going to be faithful to reality, which is itself under no compulsion to conform to our philosophical preferences, then I think we will have to abandon some of the assumptions we tend to have for how it "should" work.
But were I to try to reassure Read, who with good reason suggests we "ought to be quasi-permanently nervous of any seeming ultimate ontological commitments", I might say that when we view these sort of statements within the context of the book itself, and within the context of opponent process theory, they become paradoxically self-refuting. It's the only way to interpret them, "ultimately". So I like this footnote where he adds: "McGilchrist talks repeatedly about language’s ’inadequacy’, but he runs the risk thereby of falling into the standard problem faced by those who so talk: he uses language to make the point. And in fact: he uses it very well. It no longer seems inadequate... The very point he wants to make, paradoxically, recuperates language remarkably fully. Thus the claim of language’s ‘inadequacy’ appears to be self-refuting, in the hands of as consummate a writer as McGilchrist."
Now, if McGilchrist were ever to disavow the role of paradox and self-refutation, then we'd truly need to abandon the hemisphere hypothesis as completely unsalvageable! As Read writes: "we only can appreciate Heraclitus’s brilliance on the taken-for-granted basis of the ordinary. Only against the Moorean or late-Wittgensteinian ground of the ordinary, only with that ground remaining intact, can the figure that Heraclitus sketches for us even be seen." Indeed. Near the end Read finally concludes that we need to see the book on its own terms:
Had he led the review with those simple lines, he could've saved himself a lot of spilled ink. Read is reviewing TMWT within his capacity of a certain type of philosopher (who is not a process philosopher, whatever else might be said of him). Other philosophers, such as Arran Gare (who is a process philosopher) might've reviewed it in a rather different way. But to do it justice I think we'd need a philosopher-psychiatrist to review the book, and there seem to be precious few of these around.
Addendum One:
Gould’s figure-ground shift (a reflection on value and evolution)
In his paper “The Spandrels of San Marco and the Panglossian Paradigm: A Critique of the Adaptationist Programme” I would suggest that Stephen Gould provides a challenge, not only to how we view evolution, but also how we think about important features of our experiential world such as consciousness and value. In The Matter with Things, Gould was cited favorably by McGilchrist for his book "The Mismeasure of Man" and his concept of “non-overlapping magisteria”, but his notion of evolutionary “spandrels” was not discussed. However, in McGilchrist’s earlier book, The Master and His Emissary, Gould’s spandrels paper did come up, in connection with language and music:
“Music has been seen as a pointless ‘exaptation’ of language: that is to say, an adaptation of a skill, originally developed for its competitive advantage in one area, to a quite different purpose. Thus typing could be seen as an exaptation of the digital skill developed for making tools: it was not the pressure to out-publish one's colleagues that caused the skill to develop in the first place, any more than we have legs in order to give employment to tailors. Music has to be, on such an account, an irrelevant spin-off from something with more of a competitive cutting edge – namely, language… Nonetheless the evidence does not stack up in favour of music being an exaptation of language – rather the reverse. If language evolved later, it looks like it evolved from music. So the evolutionary problem remains… Music is likely to be the ancestor of language and it arose largely in the right hemisphere, where one would expect a means of communication with others, promoting social cohesion, to arise.”
This passage makes claims about which of two things are “essential” to a phenomenon, and whether one of them can be reduced to, or explained in terms of, the other. As usual, McGilchrist tends to side with the unorthodox view (at least within contemporary Western culture) that what we see as an exaptation is actually the essential process itself.
Taking a step back, it has been said that Gould’s paper fundamentally changed the discourse of evolutionary biology. For very similar reasons, McGilchrist could do the same for our understanding of culture. What I find most interesting is that although the spandrels paper is clearly arguing against the simple “Panglossian paradigm” of adaptationism (selectionism), there are several ways in which this has been understood:
“Sandra Mitchell argues that the paper's arguments regarding adaptationism can be interpreted in three different ways: that adaptationist hypotheses need to be rigorously tested before they are accepted, that pluralistic explanations of biological phenomena should be widely accepted alongside adaptationist ones, or that non-adaptationist explanations are objectively preferable to adaptationist ones.”
We could assume, with the evo-devo biologist PZ Myers, that religion is an unintended byproduct, or side effect, of something else that either is or was at one time adaptive. From that perspective, religion itself has no adaptive value at all. And so asking what purpose it might serve is a meaningless question; it fulfills no adaptive purpose. On the other hand, one might say that of course religion has no adaptive value, because it’s value isn’t in reference to the adaptationist paradigm at all, but lies somewhere outside of that. This second possibility, of course, isn’t recognized as legitimate by PZ Myers and those with a similar perspective. However Gould not only criticizes the internal logic of the adaptationist paradigm (this is the reason for which Myers cites it in support of his position) but he also encourages us to look outside of it, by referring to the work of other researchers who have done just that.
McGilchrist has said “There is no assumption of value, purpose, or meaning made in the life sciences. And that is a perfectly valid assumption to make. However it won't be surprising if we then find nothing after carrying out our investigations on that basis, and on those terms.” Today this is precisely the sense in which the spandrels paper is understood, as support for the assumption that purpose, value, and meaning are merely an evolutionary “spandrel” a “byproduct of the evolution of some other characteristic, rather than a direct product of adaptive selection”.
I’d suggest that maybe we should rather interpret Gould to mean that we are ignoring significant contextual features that would tell us why these spandrels exist in the first place, and that the contextual features cannot be dismissed as merely “incidental”. Are spandrels useless and unimportant, or are they indicative of some deeper fundamental structure (that religion or value are “pointing” to)? Are spandrels in fact where the really interesting stuff is going on, and precisely for that reason should not be dismissed out of hand? Gould describes “organisms as integrated wholes, fundamentally not decomposable into independent and separately optimized parts”.
Gould cites religion (and perhaps value in the broader sense) as an example of an exaptation or spandrel, and brings up Freud's suggestion that our large brains, which evolved for other reasons, led to consciousness. For Gould, this was not a pejorative statement at all, unless one thinks that anything that doesn't directly influence reproductive advantage is bad. It was merely a factual statement. If consciousness is a spandrel, then in some sense religion may be a “second order” spandrel having been built upon the first. In his later paper "The exaptive excellence of spandrels as a term and prototype", Gould would write:
"Promoters of the importance of spandrels, and of nonadaptation in general, are not trying to derail the effort to establish a true “evolutionary psychology” on genuine Darwinian principles (rather than the limited hyperadaptationist doctrine that currently uses this label), or even to overthrow the centrality of adaptation in evolutionary theory. We wish, rather, to enrich evolutionary theory by a proper appreciation of the interaction between structural channeling (including the nonadaptive origin of spandrels as a central theme) and functional adaptation (as conventionally analyzed in studies of natural selection) for generating the totality and historically contingent complexity of organic form and behavior."
If it's spandrels "all the way down", and why not, then where does this lead? Evolution isn’t free to do “anything at all”, because selective pressures operate on physical constraints. As Gould wrote, “change, when it occurs, may be mediated by natural selection, but it holds that constraints restrict possible paths and modes of change so strongly that the constraints themselves become much the most interesting aspect of evolution.” Let’s consider some of those constraints and inquire into the physics of life. This is a difficult question. But if we explain value in terms of selective pressure and interactions, we ignore that more importantly, value reflects those native physical constraints, and ultimately whatever we might discover concerning their deeper origins. Value then appears to resonate with far deeper sources than a comparatively superficial selectionist account of evolution would surmise. And it is this understanding of value that we are after. In his paper, Gould quotes Rupert Riedl, an Austrian zoologist:
“The living world happens to be crowded by universal patterns of organization which, most obviously, find no direct explanation through environmental conditions or adaptive radiation, but exist primarily through universal requirements which can only be expected under the systems conditions of complex organization itself... This is not self-evident, for the whole of the huge and profound thought collected in the field of morphology, from Goethe to Remane, has virtually been cut off from modern biology.” There are distinct signs of a return to this line of investigation today, as in the work of those, like Michael Levin, who ground their research in a better understanding of the physics of biological processes. This brings to mind Seilacher’s "bautechnischer” or architectural constraints.
“In a fascinating example, Seilacher (1972) has shown that the divaricate form of architecture occurs again and again in all groups of mollusks, and in brachiopods as well. This basic form expresses itself in a wide variety of structures: raised ornamental lines (not growth lines because they do not conform to the mantle margin at any time), patterns of coloration, internal structures in the mineralization of calcite and incised grooves. He does not know what generates this pattern and feels that traditional and nearly exclusive focus on the adaptive value of each manifestation has diverted attention from questions of its genesis in growth and also prevented its recognition as a general phenomenon.”
Although he worked within a very different field, the design theorist Christopher Alexander wrote “A Pattern Language”, and his reasoning may have been similar (later work by Wendy Wood and Zak Stein has also been into holistic design considerations). It is common to assume that, because heritable characteristics must at a minimum permit survival, that they can be explained entirely with reference to their contribution to that process. But this is not a sound inference to make. Survival is a necessary condition for evolution to occur, but other selective processes may take place that may or may not be reducible to (or best explained by) survival advantage. However, because survival is relatively easy to quantify, to the LH it is the most obvious of these evolutionary processes, and therefore it has dominated popular interpretations of evolutionary theory.
According to this LH perspective, the answer to the question of why we find beautiful a very large set of things that do not directly relate to reproduction and survival (including a sunset, the sound of a minor third, the Euler equation, a chess move, a snow covered mountain top, and a Zen garden) is that in some way these are exaptations of other processes that are directly related to survival in obvious ways. For example one might say “I find this scenery beautiful because it shares features in common with a healthy mate” or “I find this performance beautiful because I value intelligence in my conspecifics”.
These are examples of the LH “explaining away” features of RH experience (value and consciousness) as merely evolutionary “byproducts”. By contrast, the RH recognizes these (as referring in some way to features of phenomenal experience not adequately represented by the adaptationist paradigm), in addition to the more easily quantifiable features that contribute to reproductive advantage. McGilchrist suggests the RH provides greater access to reality. So if we see the spandrel paper from the RH perspective, we can produce a figure-background Gestalt shift in our view of evolutionary theory. Should we reinterpret the “exaptation or spandrel” as the essential phenomenon, and the more utilitarian survival features as the “byproducts”? No, we should see “organisms as integrated wholes”.
Within popular articles the interpretation which seeks to dismiss value as an epiphenomenon is the most common, and fewer people look for pluralistic or non-adaptationist explanations, which I think McGilchrist would suggest we should indeed prefer as they would reflect the world of the RH far better. Today this is especially problematic in the context of discussing AI value alignment. In one article Joanna Bryson wrote “Our values are the way that we hold our societies together; they make no sense outside of the context of evolution.” As the preceding discussion should make apparent, this is a rhetorical sleight of hand. By evolution she is really referring to the “getting and grabbing” raison d'etre of the LH. Bryson has ignored the role of structural channeling, in light of which our apparently nonadaptive values likely do make sense outside the context of a (narrowly conceived) concept of evolution.
Is contemporary Western culture, captured by the LH, analogous to the “Panglossian paradigm” Gould described, in that it operates in many ways according to an inverted perspective? At one place he muses, “Why invert the whole system in such a curious fashion and view an entire culture as the epiphenomenon?” Exactly who is inverting what, and why? At issue is the question of whether values are arbitrary byproducts that could have just as easily been otherwise, whether they are entirely contingent upon the adaptationist paradigm, or whether they along with the adaptationist paradigm are subsumed by a deeper paradigm of fundamental physics and structure. If it is the latter, then the supposition they are in some sense entirely arbitrary is a modern conceit and our ambivalence to them, which we have internalized with "blind by design" philosophy in our material and institutional culture, may be our undoing.
References:
The Spandrels of San Marco and the Panglossian Paradigm: A Critique of the Adaptationist Programme (1979)
The exaptive excellence of spandrels as a term and prototype (1997)
Addendum Two:
To see the most comprehensive description of how LH cultural shifts occur (which have sometimes been referred to as LH 'capture' or 'insurrection'), we probably can’t do better than read the Preface to the “New Expanded paperback edition” of The Master and his Emissary. This is the 2019 edition. (McGilchrist referenced this in a recent conversation on the podcast Wild with Sarah Wilson.) So what does he say about them? He says (my emphasis):
“Nor do I suggest that the causes of such cultural shifts can be reduced to neuroscience. There are many causative factors in play when cultures change, including sociological, psychological, environmental, epigenetic, technological, economic and political factors, all of which are interconnected. In a causal nexus one can privilege one over the rest if one wishes to do so, and interpret the changes in one way or another. However, I am not attempting to answer the question of what causes changes: just of what patterns are discernible when such changes occur, and how those patterns relate to the possible takes on the world afforded to us by the brain’s bihemispheric structure. Doing so gives us insight into those situations – I believe we are in one now – where the balance is lost. It helps us see what it is we are missing. [...]
I am sometimes asked Why, if the left hemisphere ‘take’ on the world is less insightful, it has come to dominate the way we think? And if this has happened not just once, but three times, as I believe, in Western history, How do I account for that fact? These are good questions. I think there are, again, several reasons why this characteristic entrenchment occurs, and indeed is likely to occur whenever a civilisation passes its peak. All of them, to some degree, illustrate the self-reinforcing, recursive nature of the left hemisphere’s world, a world subject to positive feedback."
Immediately after this, seven reasons are enumerated over the course of eight paragraphs. If you haven't read this section of the preface to the 2019 edition, it may be essential if we are to understand our contemporary situation from the perspective of the hemisphere hypothesis. Here's a quick summary:
"The LH view is designed to aid you in grabbing stuff."
"The LH view offers simple answers."
"The LH's world view is easier to articulate."
"We have created a world around us which... reflects the LH's priorities and its vision."
"The hemispheres... have a different take on everything - including on their own relationship."
"A culture that exemplifies the qualities of the LH's world attracts to itself, in positions of influence and authority, those whose natural outlook is similar."
"Though the 'takes' of the two hemispheres are made to work together below the level of conscious awareness, they are not strictly compatible."
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