These two (the Secret and its manifestations)
Are (in their nature) the same;
They are given different names
When they become manifest.
They may both be called the Cosmic Mystery:
Reaching from the Mystery into the Deeper Mystery
Is the Gate to the Secret of All Life.
- Tao Te Ching (Lin Yutang, 1948)
The title of the poem "Sandokai", one of the core texts of Zen, is translated as ‘the harmony of difference and sameness’. It contains the lines “Each and all, the subjective and objective spheres are related, and at the same time, independent. Related, yet working differently, though each keeps its own place… Within light there is darkness, do not be against the darkness (nothingness/absolute); Within darkness there is light, do not be against the light (material/relative). Light and darkness are a pair, like the foot before and the foot behind, in walking. Each thing has its own intrinsic value and is related to everything else in function and position. Things exist as real as how the lid and box fits." Consider the Zen saying "not one, not two." Shigenori Nagatomo wrote that the movement between “not one” and “not two” characterizes a third perspective that cannot be confined to either dualism or non-dualism alone. “Not one, not two” is also the core flavor of Basho’s haiku. In one teaching dialogue, he instructed “The problem with most poems is that they are either subjective or objective.” “Don’t you mean too subjective or objective?” his student asked; the teacher clarified, simply, “No.” In The Matter with Things, McGilchrist writes "my response to ‘not two’ is ‘yes, but …two’; as my response to ‘two’ is ‘yes, but …not two’. To my way of thinking, something here is at risk of being short-circuited. The coincidentia oppositorum involves both the union and separation of good and evil. It is not possible to get round that." We will return to the paradox of 'the nonduality of duality and nonduality' later.
Consider the way in which the relationship dynamics between archetypal pairs of opposites are framed within our culture. Do you remember the popular story of the Two Wolves? The provenance of this myth reveals that it appears to have originated with Baptist ministers in the sixties who wanted to drive home the idea of an eternal Zoroastrian contest between good and evil, a theme common within Christian theology. However a recent retelling emphasizes that the wolves need not be locked within a zero sum conflict: “The black wolf has qualities that the white wolf lacks; the two wolves need each other. Caring for both allows them to work together, so that you can do something good with your time on Earth. Feed them both, and when there is no battle inside, you can hear the voices of deeper knowledge that will guide you in choosing the right path in every circumstance.” This moral appears to be more faithful to the message of the Twin Brothers Iroquois legend that Iain McGilchrist highlights in his book The Matter with Things, and may represent an alternate response to the paradox of theodicy.
This legend was dictated by John Arthur Gibson, a former chief of the Seneca nation of the North American Iroquois confederation. McGilchrist describes it as "One of the most remarkable intuitions of the structure of mind and its influence on human destiny ever brought forth" and "A more vivid expression of an understanding of the world that also finds less vivid expression in the hemisphere hypothesis and in the efforts of various philosophers to put it in a more abstract form". While a young man, Gibson became the pupil of one of the oldest of the Onondaga, whose memory went back to the years before the dispersion of the Six Nations, in the aftermath of the American revolution. From him Gibson acquired the wide knowledge of the customs, traditions, and religion of his ancestors for which he became noted. He was never satisfied until he had "traced a custom or a belief back to its earliest remembered antecedents". In the Onondaga language, the name of one of the brothers is Tháęhya.wáʔgih (variously translated: "He Who Holds the Sky with Both Hands") and his twin is named Ohá.æʔ ("He Who is Flint"). The twins have many names, in many languages. For English and Japanese speakers, Taronhiawagon and Tawiscara (perhaps タロンヒアワゴン and タウィスカラ is how they would be written in katakana) may be among the easiest of these to say. Iain McGilchrist provides a very insightful description of these characters. "Tawiscara tends to do things that run counter to what is healthy, yet he actually cares in his own twisted way" is a consistent description. George Beaver (in the Brantford Expositor, 2 Mar 1994) wrote that Tawiscara's grandmother favored him despite his behavior, which is also an apt metaphor for how harmful perspectives can nonetheless be very attractive. Interestingly, he describes a contest between them that was only decided when Taronhiawagon outsmarted Tawiscara by playing to his sense of pride and vanity: he let him appear to win. That made him careless and allowed Taronhiawagon to overtake him. According to Gibson (and McGilchrist), Tawiscara is the more divisive of the two, and eventually the first brother comes to see that he will need to work with him closely to keep him from causing too much trouble. When the Brothers leave earth, the first warns that "there are two minds in human beings". The implication is clear. For creativity there must be complementarity, a degree of resistance within oneness. But we must learn the role appropriate to each of our minds, and establish the proper relationship between them. If not, he continued, "the things upon which you live will diminish so that finally nothing more will be able to grow".
Etuaptmumk, the Mi'kmaw word for "Two-Eyed Seeing", is a similar concept described by Mi'kmaw Elder Albert Marshall as inherent to Indigenous ways of thinking (John Arthur Gibson, as we've seen, also described the significance of two different perspectives). It refers to the complementarity of two or more perspectives. Most often Marshall provides the example of the duality of Indigenous and Western ways of knowing, although other dualities, such as subject/object, formal/informal, synthesis/analysis, etc. have been described in this way as well. "Two-Eyed Seeing can require a weaving back and forth. It may be that in a particular set of circumstances we will choose to call upon the strengths of one, whereas in another set of circumstances we might choose to call upon those of the other."
The title page of William Blake’s book Urizen bears the caption: "Which is the Way/ The Right or the Left". What did he mean? According to McGilchrist, "Blake seems to have been aware of the conflict between two ways of conceiving the world, which are now known to be associated with the cerebral hemispheres." He was full of contraries both in his poetry and in his life. In The Marriage of Heaven and Hell (1793), Blake wrote that contraries are necessary for living: "Without Contraries is no progression. Attraction and Repulsion, Reason and Energy, Love and Hate, are necessary to Human existence." (Notably, he also wrote "There is a Negation, & there is a Contrary: The Negation must be destroyd to redeem the Contraries.") Perhaps the most influential of Blake's books, Aldous Huxley took the name of one of his own books from a line within it, The Doors of Perception (1954). And that book in turn inspired the name of the rock band The Doors. Blake would later explore these contraries further in The Book of Urizen (1794) and The Book of Los (1795) wherein Urizen, representing reason, was constantly at struggle with Los, representing imagination. For the most part, these were written at the same time.
In Human All Too Human (1878) Nietzsche wrote: "A higher culture must give to man a double-brain, as it were two brain-ventricles, one for the perceptions of science, the other for those of non-science: lying beside one another, not confused together, separable, capable of being shut off; this is a demand of health. In one domain lies the power-source, in the other the regulator..." Concerning this passage, Peter Critchley wrote "Nietzsche thus argues that “science [Wissenschaft]" must work in partnership with "non-science [Nicht-Wissenschaft]," which he designates as the "consolations of metaphysics, religion, and art." The partnership between the two enables humanity to integrate and develop its "double-brain [Doppelgehirn]" to create a higher culture which permits ongoing inquiry and development. It is a requirement of health that humanity develop these two "brain ventricles [Hirnkammern]" in tandem with one another. The failure of science to work in partnership with non-science has dire consequences for human development. The possibility of science will be destroyed. Truth will cease to hold an interest for us and in its place human beings will pursue error and fantasy since they give greater immediate pleasure." McGilchrist attributes the title of his earlier book, The Master and his Emissary, to a story given by Nietzsche along similar lines. He wrote:
"There is a story in Nietzsche (I cannot now remember where) that goes something like this. There was once a wise spiritual master, who was the ruler of a small but prosperous domain, and who was known for his selfless devotion to his people. As his people flourished and grew in number, the bounds of this small domain spread; and with it the need to trust implicitly the emissaries he sent to ensure the safety of its ever more distant parts. It was not just that it was impossible for him personally to order all that needed to be dealt with: as he wisely saw, he needed to keep his distance from, and remain ignorant of, such concerns. And so he nurtured and trained carefully his emissaries, in order that they could be trusted. Eventually, however, his cleverest and most ambitious vizier, the one he most trusted to do his work, began to see himself as the master, and used his position to advance his own wealth and influence. He saw his master's temperance and forbearance as weakness, not wisdom, and on his missions on the master's behalf, adopted his mantle as his own – the emissary became contemptuous of his master. And so it came about that the master was usurped, the people were duped, the domain became a tyranny; and eventually it collapsed in ruins."
In addition to Nietzsche, for whom existential being is determined by the Dionysian/Apollonian dialectic, Robert Pirsig in Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance "also addressed the Apollonian and Dionysian worldviews, naming them respectively classical understanding and romantic understanding" (Edward Smith, The Person of the Therapist). Other pairs of opposites might include the closely related sorcerer and apprentice, Harihara in Hinduism, or the image of angels and devils portrayed by M.C. Escher, supernatural entities that are present in various forms in many cultures and even depicted in cartoons sitting on our shoulders and whispering into our ears. We're familiar with the Eloi and the Morlocks, with Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, and the many spinoffs that it inspired, including an episode of Star Trek wherein Captain Kirk is split into two people, one "good," the other "evil". Archnemeses, whether Sherlock and Moriarty, Mufasa and Scar, Hatfields and McCoys (see Robert McKimson's "Hillbilly Hare" 1950 portrayal), or many other cultural corollaries, also play with the good/evil dichotomy. But the good/evil framing, like the Two Wolves, too often retreats into simplistic zero sum relationships. A more insightful fictional portrayal might be the UrRu and Skeksis from the fantasy film The Dark Crystal, who are separated halves of a single being. Further moral ambiguity is visible in the imaginative and lavishly illustrated fiction of Japanese manga and anime, if only to lend a storyline more interest. Many audiences seem to intuitively understand the kernel of truth at the core of something Jung's favorite alchemist muse, Gerhard Dorn, once wrote: "There is nothing in nature that does not contain as much evil as good." Does this not advocate false equivalence? The paradox is resolved by understanding that moral distinctions appear when we shift attention from what to how. A Heraclitean tension (not a postmodern relativism) lies between our various capacities for freedom of action on one hand, and the wisdom to exercise restraint on the other. As F. Scott Fitzgerald (1936) wrote "the test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in the mind at the same time, and still retain the ability to function". This leaves plenty of room for hijinks to ensue, whether in popular media, ancient legend, or everyday reality.
"In the Kabbalah, the structure of human faculties takes the form of a tree with a right-hand side and a left-hand side; humanity’s task is to integrate them, both laterally and vertically. Specifically it is held that the mind is made up of two faculties: wisdom (chochmah) on the right, which receives the Gestalt of situations in a single flash, and understanding (binah), opposite it on the left, which builds them up in a replicable, step-by-step way. Chochmah and binah are considered ‘two friends who never part’, because you cannot have one without the other. Chochmah gives rise to a force for loving fusion with the other, while binah gives rise to judgment, which is responsible for setting boundaries and limits. Their integration is another faculty called da’at, which is a bit like Aristotle’s phronesis, or even sophia – an embodied, overarching, intuitive capacity to know what the situation calls for and to do it. What is more this tree is a true organism, each ‘part’ reflected in, and qualified by co-presence with, each of the others." [This is from McGilchrist, but also compare with the book of Isaiah 45:7, which reads "I form the light, and create darkness: I make peace, and create evil: I the Lord do all these things." See also Sanford Drob’s Archetype of the Absolute: The Unity of Opposites in Mysticism, Philosophy, and Psychology.]
"Jung indeed observed that, not only do we often seem to act in what could be seen as far from our better interests – a phenomenon known to Plato and Aristotle as akrasia – but ‘the self is made manifest in the opposites and the conflicts between them; it is a coincidentia oppositorum.’ In other words, the self is not just accidentally, frustratingly, and puzzlingly, contrary in its workings, but actually is itself a coincidence of opposites, and becomes apparent to us in and through those opposites. Every adult human being must learn to accept the contradictions in himself or herself which we all inevitably embody; and learn even to embrace them. This acceptance and embrace is not just good for us in the sense that, while it does not change anything, it brings us to a position of reconciliation with ourselves: it does really effect a change. It helps us draw the venom of what Jung called the dark side. If we believe we must be only and always good and loving, paradoxically we give rise to the opposite of this in its ‘most unbridled and perverse forms … Apparent contradictions within the human psyche are (as Jung later observed) mutually dependent relations." [This is from McGilchrist, but also see Lucy Huskinson’s Nietzsche and Jung: The Whole Self in the Union of Opposites.] Akrasia, psychological reactance, reverse psychology, and opponent processing all bear something in common with the logic behind wu wei. One must know how moving away from a goal can paradoxically bring us closer to achieving it. This knowledge has long been used to elicit a desired response, whether for oneself or others, and irrespective of the behavioral domain. We've all heard the familiar aphorism that there's no better way to get someone to do something (eat/act/desire) than to forbid them from it.
Pairs of opposites (syzygies) are famously significant within both philosophical and religious Taoism. The latter of which identifies complementary methods for improving one's health, these may include: Processed food (cooked or fermented)/raw, fasting/feasting, fiber/fat, acid (vinegar)/base, exercise/rest, waking/sleeping, singing/talking, distraction/meditation, life/death, day/night, etc. All these involve processes of change or transformation according to circadian and reproductive cycles, age, sex, activity levels, etc. Philosophical Taoism primarily focuses on the dialectic within and between three pairs of opposite qualities: one-many (composed of fractal parts, infinite continua, internally differentiating aspects), independent-interdependent (contextuality of relations, pathos and ethics, causality, logical connectives, etc.), and rest-motion (in the process of continuous change, flux, transformation). The Zhuangzi notes that "to live is to borrow", a sentiment illustrated in this passage:
Master Lai said, "A child, obeying his father and mother, goes wherever he is told, east or west, south or north. And the yin and yang - how much more are they to a man than father or mother! Now that they have brought me to the verge of death, if I should refuse to obey them, how perverse I would be! What fault is it of theirs? The Great Clod burdens me with form, labors me with life, eases me in old age, and rests me in death. So if I think well of my life, for the same reason I must think well of my death. When a skilled smith is casting metal, if the metal should leap up and say, `I insist upon being made into a Mo-yeh!' he would surely regard it as very inauspicious metal indeed. Now, having had the audacity to take on human form once, if I should say, `I don't want to be anything but a man! Nothing but a man!', the Creator would surely regard me as a most inauspicious sort of person. So now I think of heaven and earth as a great furnace, and the Creator as a skilled smith. Where could he send me that would not be all right? I will go off to sleep peacefully, and then with a start I will wake up."
In his book The Creative Mind, Henri Bergson said "one cannot suppress one arrangement without another arrangement taking its place”. I understand that in the sense that creation and negation form a sort of coincidentia oppositorum. As the Tao Te Ching says, "being and non-being produce each other". The concept of tzimtzum in the dialectical school of Jewish mysticism called Lurianic Kabbalah might help explain this further. According to this, the first act of God was not expansion, but contraction; it was limitation. Konstantin Burmistrov described this as "Some part of the Godhead, therefore, retreats and leaves room, so to speak, for the creative processes to come into play. Such a retreat must precede any emanation." (As an aside, Yitzhak Luria influenced Schelling who in turn influenced Gershom Scholem.) Lurianic Kabbalah’s answer to the “mystery of being” appears to be to restate the question as the “mystery of the coincidentia oppositorum”, the mystery of both being and non-being. We could assume that this is the deeper primitive that lies beneath being. Just as matter and consciousness are two different aspects of the same indescribable Tao or "eternal source". In both cases, neither can be fully reduced to the other, they oppose and compliment one another in a mutually generative relationship. And the asymmetry within the coincidentia oppositorum, an asymmetry whose signature is present in every relationship, action, and context, is apparently the reason why we infer a cosmic telos, a purposive drive toward creative unfolding. It is the tension within the coincidence of opposites that gives it animacy and motion, that makes it alive. The essence of every phenomenon is this relational dynamism. When we sever and isolate the opposites from each other we render each of them inanimate, still, and dead. This produces the "limit cases" that McGilchrist describes. If we divide being from non-being, we get limit cases in each of them. Join them together and they spring to life. What is essential to phenomena is produced by the relationship between the pair of opposites, it inheres in the betweenness, not in either of them when considered in exclusion to the other.
The Lurianic Kabbalah idea of tzimtzum accords with the coincidentia oppositorum. Now if one then asks “Well then, why the coincidentia oppositorum?” we could point to the various arguments presented by McGilchrist in the corresponding chapter, but beyond those bare facts we may have reached the limit of this particular LH pursuit after knowledge. Who can see past this? Before Luria (1534–1572) set out the tenets of Lurianic Kabbalah, the Tao Te Ching (400 BC) had recognized the same dynamic. All esoteric traditions (such as Zen Buddhism) know that one cannot use logic to understand this deeper mystery. The coincidence of opposites is a paradox. Why a paradox? 1) The LH reaches its limit when confronted with either an infinite regression or paradox, so a paradox is a natural end point for of our investigations. 2) The corollary to this is that if we knew the answer then it would cease to be a paradox. Regardless, for the LH this is a deeply unsatisfying conclusion. “Why something and not nothing” is one of the most important questions, and the hardest to answer. Important because it opens us up to wonder and connects us to that deep mystery. Hard to answer because it is inexpressible in the terms that the LH prefers to work with. But when we see that there are two ways of attending to the world, and that we can value each of them for their complementary strengths and limitations, then I think the paradox becomes less intimidating. When the implicit is seen as the necessary ally to the explicit, it’s easier to accept and appreciate both.
McGilchrist on occasion has called himself a Taoist, which is probably the nearest description of his philosophical views. He also claims to be a panentheist. These do not appear to contradict each other. God or Tao can be seen as simultaneously immanent in being and transcending being. Such a conception supports God as ontologically prior to being, due to that transcendent quality. I think the notion of “being” is only one half of a larger whole, a whole which could be seen as ontologically prior to its constituent halves. From what I’ve read, Whitehead places God ontologically prior to being as well, though I don’t know his specific reasons. McGilchrist adheres fairly closely to Whitehead’s process philosophy. When he wrote that “the cosmos is not an unfolding of something already present in its origins…” he is reminding the reader that he does not hold a deterministic view of the cosmos, as the second half reads “…but a free process of true and original creation…” This figures into “McGilchrist’s Wager”, in which we are all implicated in that creative process. As he writes “we bear some responsibility, however small, for the part we play in creation”.
Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz
Leibniz gets mentioned by McGilchrist on more than one occasion. But I don't think he referenced the most striking correspondence between their thought, and that is Leibniz’s “two realms doctrine.” Leibniz wrote, for example: "I usually say that there are, so to speak, two kingdoms even in corporeal nature, which interpenetrate without confusing or interfering with each other — the realm of power, according to which everything can be explained mechanically by efficient causes when we have sufficiently penetrated into its interior, and the realm of wisdom, according to which everything can be explained architectonically, so to speak, or by final causes when we understand its ways sufficiently." (1696)
A few years prior he had clarified the idea a bit more: "these two kingdoms everywhere permeate each other, yet their laws are never confused and never disturbed, so that the maximum in the kingdom of power and the best in the kingdom of wisdom, take place together." Jeffrey McDonough commented on this: "Leibniz was not, of course, the first to suggest that events in the natural world might be explained by appeal either to final or efficient causes — Aristotelians for example had long maintained that many natural events could be explained both ways, and Leibniz himself implies that his own project can trace its origins to Plato." Sholto Maud first brought this to my attention in his paper comparing Leibniz and Howard Odum. But I think the comparison with McGilchrist is at least as interesting. One may find some similarities to Gould's notion of "non-overlapping magisteria" here as well, an idea that McGilchrist did mention.
The Priest and the Chief
Alexander Bard describes the very similar account of the Priest and the Chief. There are clear points of divergence with McGilchrist, particularly regarding deeper insights into phenomenology and the larger metaphysical implications of union and division, however the connection to Zoroastrianism, the development of political theory, and the insights offered into contemporary society are all very significant.
Alexander Bard: "The moment we start going towards truth, the search for oneness becomes an obsession. But the problem with oneness is that it will ultimately lead to tyranny. It will lead to one dogmatic conviction. It will lead to one leader. Historically, that has always been a massive tragedy. So the Indo-Iranians, some 4,000 years ago, figured out that we can’t have one leader. One leader becomes an idiot because he won’t listen to anybody. Can you immunize the system against tyranny before the tyrant shows this ugly face? They came up with the idea that you can: leadership must be at least two. This is the brilliance of power-sharing. Power-sharing is not an American or French innovation. The idea of power-sharing, of splitting power as a design from the very beginning, is a Persian-Indian idea. What the Persians did was they said "Let’s split the phallus in two." Meaning at least two different types of leaders. And they must never be the same person.
Split the leadership in two. So you get two leaders, and they’re the "priest" and the "chief" as archetypes. Who’s the priest? The priest is the smartest, wisest guy in the room, usually older, been around, seen things, not driven by personal motivation any longer. He's really there to serve. But he can take you down in two seconds when you go off and you start being a lunatic, right? He will ground you instantly. He’s a master of the mind, wise and smart. That’s the priest. The other character is the chief. He’s just strong, muscles, and wants to get out there. He leads warriors and hunters. This structure, the "two-headed phallus", is repeated constantly in anthropology and religion because there’s been a strong emphasis for thousands of years on how to avoid tyranny. So they split these two. The smartest guy and the strongest guy. They must be two separate people, never the same person. Because whoever aspires to be both the smartest and the strongest at the same time, which is very unlikely, is a tyrant.
The two-headed phallus is not a universal concept. Plato hated it. Confucius hated it. I’m deeply critical of Plato’s ideas on politics because basically his philosopher king is the tyrant. And even if Confucius was more in line with movement and flux and things like that, he had those elements too. Plato did do dialectics. But if you asked to sit down with Plato or Confucius, and asked them about political systems, they idealized their idea of the tyrant. For them, there had to be only one king at the top because anything else would've been inferior to that supreme idea of the tyrant. So what we’re doing in our work is researching and finding the two-headed phallus, understanding why it’s a brilliant idea, and repurposing it as fundamental to political design. In this sense, we’re totally opposed to Plato and Confucius. Today Plato and Confucius are problematic because Plato is the idol of Putin, and Confucius is the idol of Xi Jinping. Anybody today who wants a surveillance police state is too fond of Plato or Confucius." [in conversation with Jim Rutt]
"We have to avoid tyranny. The general theme of our book, Process and Event, is how do you avoid tyranny? You avoid it precisely by pointing out that the tyrant is a failed human being, and tyranny will not last, but it will cause enormous havoc while we have it, and therefore it must be stopped. And that’s why we say that neither the priest nor the chief, the two halves of the brain, may be the tyrant. To stop the tyrant is our ultimate mission today. And to stop the tyrant, we must use any technology we can find, any social tools we can find, any message we can find, to spread the message of decentralization being a force for good." [in conversation with Jim Rutt]
The Kyoto School
The modern period of philosophy in Japan began with the Kyoto School, whose research contributes additional support for McGilchrist's work. Brett Davis described how these philosophers addressed the dilemma of reification vs. nullification. “In his mature writings Nishitani explicitly employs the Mahāyāna term, śūnyatā, in his attempt to think a way beyond both the exacerbated ‘attachment to being’ and the ‘reactive nihilism’ that together plague the modern world… In order to finally free humans from their egoistic obsessions and manipulative objectifications”, Nishitani argued that “the real breakthrough to a non-dualistic reaffirmation of self and world only occurs when the relative nothingness of nihility is in turn broken through to a genuine experience of… the “field of śūnyatā” …wherein beings are neither nullified nor reified but rather ‘let be’ in the mutual freedom of their coming to be and passing away.” Ueda later described a “twofold being-in-the-world” (nijūsekainaisonzai 二重世界内 存在). This brings to mind the dual phenomenologies characterized by McGilchrist’s hemisphere hypothesis. Ueda understood the self as a repeated movement through a radical self-negation to a genuine self-affirmation. His formula for this movement is: “I, not being I, am I.”
And in her paper on the logic of sokuhi, Michiko Yusa wrote that the term “sokuhi” is made up of two ideograms, soku 即 (that is) and hi 非 (not). She quotes David Dilworth: “We have... seen that the paradoxical mode reduces to the basic predicative structure of “is and yet is not.” We can alternately characterize this as the logic of the simultaneity, and biconditionality, of opposites without their higher synthesis. Thus “is” if, and only if, “is not,” as in the sokuhi formulation. In Nāgārjuna’s logic, the four positions +1, −1, +1 and −1, and not (+1 and −1) all return to the same basic structure of biconditional opposition.” Paradoxical statements such as this can also be seen in the non-duality of distinction (shabetsu 差別) and unity (byōdō 平等) – “shabetsu soku byōdō, byōdō soku shabetsu 差別即平等、平等即差別.” Another Kyoto School philosopher, Hajime Tanabe, coined the neologism ‘metanoetics’ to denote a way of doing philosophy that understands the limits of reason, and questions whether reason can understand reality. Again and again reason runs up against antinomies, those rationally unsolvable contradictions that it unearths. The individual exercising reason should see this state of crisis as the basis for personal renewal, and gain the perspective required to see another source of enlightenment. Tanabe’s book Philosophy as Metanoetics was composed not only as a personal self-critique, but also as a call to self-critique on the part of Japan, to face up to the political and cultural realities that had landed the country in war, and ultimately as a call for an “absolute critique” of human rationality. The foundation laid by these early modern philosophers in Japan allowed more contemporary scholarship to explore other perspectives, with more lines of investigation today than I am able to appreciate.
Encountering the Shadow"The line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being." - Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
"War is father of all and king of all." - Heraclitus
In the latter quote, it is the creative tension that brings things into existence to which Heraclitus draws our attention. He called the oppositional processes ἔρις (eris), "strife", and hypothesized the apparently stable state, δίκη (dikê), "justice", to be a harmony of opposites. Carl Jung, in Approaching the Unconscious, wrote “The sad truth is that man’s real life consists of a complex of inexorable opposites — day and night, birth and death, happiness and misery, good and evil. We are not even sure that one will prevail over the other, that good will overcome evil, or joy defeat pain. Life is a battleground. It always has been, and always will be.”
If we are unwilling to acknowledge our destructive side, if we fail to bring together the dichotomy of both perceived positive and negative qualities of ourselves into a cohesive, realistic whole (splitting), then we set ourselves up for defeat. We may stay ignorant of our faults and weaknesses by using various psychological defense mechanisms, but in doing so these elements of our personality are relegated to the unconscious and make up the realm of the psyche Jung called the "Shadow". For example, if we treat someone poorly, rather than taking responsibility for such actions we may make use of the psychological phenomenon known as "projection" to avoid facing this fact. But if we rely too heavily on projection to shield ourselves from our shadow, and never strive to question whether the image we hold of ourselves is perhaps too perfect, we go through life forever in need of scapegoats or people on whom to blame all our problems. We drive these people away, only to discover our problems persist nonetheless. We could look within and face up to the elements of our personality we have for so long tried to deny. But more often we merely look for another scapegoat. In this process, we often find that the most effective scapegoat is not any individual in particular, but rather an entire group of people.
In On Psychic Energy Jung noted, “Not that these others are wholly without blame, for even the worst projection is at least hung on a hook, perhaps a very small one, but still a hook offered by the other person.” However there is a tendency to take this small hook offered by one’s opponents and to hang on it virtually all that is wrong with oneself and the world. Jung went as far as to suggest that if psychological projection at a collective level became too widespread, war would be the likely outcome. For he believed that the greatest danger to human civilization lay not in the weapons we have at our disposal, but in the inability to understand our own selves. (In a 1959 interview he said "We are the origin of all coming evil".) In Archaic Man Jung wrote, “Projection is one of the commonest psychic phenomena... Everything that is unconscious in ourselves we discover in our neighbour.” It is also “an inevitable and necessary component in our psychological development as it is one of the primary means by which we can gain an awareness of elements residing in our unconscious”. Recently the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists advanced the minute hand of the Doomsday Clock, which is intended to be a sort of barometer that measures the acceleration of positive feedbacks that could culminate in a “doomsday” event. Assuming this is an accurate characterization, then the solution is introducing more self-correcting negative feedback mechanisms into the system. Exactly what those are and how they might look is difficult to say, however increased communication among all parties is one obvious example of how to prevent a “misstep” from occurring. Dictators, by definition, are not “correctable”, and so containing them is difficult, but we can (we must) do better. The relevance of the feedback concept to disparate domains, including Jungian psychology, illustrates how comprehensive such an approach to framing our existential problems can be.
Gods can be understood to be archetypal projections of the mind (whether integrated or divided). Not too infrequently, they are divine twins with contrasting or complementary qualities. Apollo and Dionysus (or Athena and Demeter), though not literal twins according to myth, are one such example. And it may be that monotheistic religions are the result of an original dichotomous pair whose other half became a repressed shadow. As Jung tells us, a repressed shadow always tends to be expressed in the most destructive ways. Is there a direct relationship between the scale of a society and the amount of religious division, repression, and thus destruction? In one sense there might be. Larger societies do have a greater division of labor, and we see the emergence of caste systems, class conflict, bureaucratization, and a reduced percentage of individuals who are generalists able to maintain a wider perspective on the system in which they are embedded. Maintaining a wider perspective can become more of a challenge at larger scales (though this is more the result of the ease with which one might be distracted by parochial disputes than any inherent problem with comprehending larger social structures themselves). When narrow, fragmented, tribal perspectives predominate, power tends to overreach for lack of the constraint that a broader and wiser understanding would bring.
In Chinese philosophy and political culture, wén (Chinese: 文) and wǔ (Chinese: 武) are a conceptual pair describing the opposition and complementarity of civil and military realms of government. John K. Fairbank wrote: "Warfare was disesteemed in Confucianism... The resort to warfare (wu) was an admission of bankruptcy in the pursuit of wen [civility or culture]. Consequently, it should be a last resort... Herein lies the pacifist bias of the Chinese tradition... Expansion through wen... was natural and proper; whereas expansion by wu, brute force and conquest, was never to be condoned." Clearly, there are differences between philosophical Confucianism and the domestic and international policies of President Xi today. But there's no a priori reason why large and technologically advanced societies cannot pursue peace over war and oppression, however (and this qualification is significant) if we do not value a wider and more integrated perspective, and understand the psychological and philosophical preconditions for such a perspective, then the tenuous semi-equilibrium we enjoy today in international affairs will remain uncomfortably vulnerable to disruption, and could deteriorate further. So back to contemporary religion, are we resigned to a situation where the main function of the gods is to justify killing others, reinforce nationalism and warfare, and oppress women and minorities? According to this line of thinking, as long as religion represses its shadow, it's difficult to foresee any other result. In the past, the separation of church and state, religion and government, was not clear. These were often the same entity. Today, religious charities can and often do provide useful aid, but because this aid is tied to a repressive worldview characterized by selective blindness (as it often is) it tends to reinforce a very harmful dynamic. A dynamic that ironically leads to the need for such social aid to begin with.
One might imagine there are two groups of people on either side of a divide: ‘those who read, but do not speak’ and ‘those who speak, but do not read’. What are the odds that they will be able to see eye to eye? The readers may need to learn to speak, and the speakers may need to learn to read. As a metaphor for the lateralization of brain functions this is clearly imperfect. Historically the right hemisphere has been called 'silent', but McGilchrist has also shown that it has a more unified view of the world. Meanwhile the left hemisphere speaks, but has a more fragmented and disembodied view of the world. These two need to work together, but how? What can we say about their relationship?
Each advance in communication technologies reveals (sometimes creates) social problems that may have been formerly hidden from popular view. This occurred with the printing press, telegraph, radio, TV, and now the Internet, which is giving a platform to extremist ideologies. Will we be able to reconcile the current view it has permitted into the dark side of our collective psyche? The Internet, and popular social media in particular, fueled our preexisting propensity toward antagonistic identity formation by increasingly highlighting mostly our differences (over our commonalities). It has tended to amplify the characteristics of fragmentation over integration. The attempt to harness online platforms to promote unity has not been very successful. There are many reasons for this. We can fault algorithms, advertising, etc., but perhaps it’s also due to a cultural ignorance of human psychology. For Jung, it was archetypal images that mediate opposites in the psyche. One of these archetypes is the Shadow. "The shadow personifies everything that the subject refuses to acknowledge about themself." You may have heard that according to superstition, a person without a shadow is the devil. That’s metaphorically insightful. A person who isn’t aware of their shadow, or denies its presence, is in the most danger of bringing it forth. Opposite sides in a polarized society each tend to see themselves occupying the moral high ground, and to that same extent deny their own moral failures; they claim wisdom, and deny their ignorance; claim the light, and deny their shadow. McGilchrist points out that fundamentally, there are opposing forms of attentional quality that are disposed either toward fragmentation or unification. Unfortunately, in a positive feedback loop with social structures designed to concentrate power, our new communication technologies are amplifying the disposition toward fragmentation and the denial of our shadow aspects, turning us more into the very devils whose qualities we see clearly in, and often project onto, our adversaries. Recall that the Sandokai poem contains the lines "Within light there is darkness, do not be against the darkness; Within darkness there is light, do not be against the light." Potentially, we could recognize these aspects within ourselves. We could reconceive our interactions (in any format) based on the metacognitive ("third person", or unified) awareness of our essentially "coincidentia oppositorum" psychology. We could redesign our social structures such that they do not enter into a positive feedback loop with our tendency toward fragmentation. It's a choice we could make.
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| Alexander Khokhlov |
Social media and messaging apps are usually very good at keeping people together, but only if they want to be connected. That's ostensibly the service they are designed to deliver - and they would be worthless to everyone if they couldn't do that. The flip side is they also end up polarizing society over social issues (some trivial and others existential), contribute to a growing mental health crisis, propagate misinformation, and lead to radicalization and the global rise of far right politics. These were not all intentional results, though they became increasingly intentional (Cambridge Analytica being an obvious example). The effect on cultural change and evolution is mixed. In Arab nations it has both led to an easing of certain restrictions, but it has also been a useful recruitment tool for ideological extremism. Some countries have banned the use of social media platforms and only allow tightly controlled alternatives (such as Tiktok, which looks very different to users in China). The early Internet, which had initially held out the promise of unifying people across the world, has now become increasingly fragmented as nations recognize the threat that unregulated freedom of information poses to social stability, vulnerable critical infrastructure (to hacking), and the threat of information warfare from foreign actors. As a result, national borders are now electronic as well as physical.
If there's reason for optimism amid all this, I don't see it emerging from the companies currently dominating this space (or any of the actions taken by users on these platforms). Platforms will almost certainly continue to provide text, image, and video communications as well as stimulating information and entertainment (from content creators and aggregators) in exchange for user attention to targeted advertising content. Since people want to engage with others, and feel seen, there will continue to be new, better, and more addictive (supernormal stimuli) ways to do that. But it is all filtered, mediated, and used to create highly detailed user profiles. If you've ever felt manipulated here, it's because you are. All the power in these relationships lie with those who control the algorithms and machine learning systems that determine which information reaches your eyes, and which content you create that reaches the eyes of others. Shadow banning (there's an interesting double entendre here, given the topic at hand) is one method platforms can use to mediate these interactions in ways that promote their bottom line.
There are many possible ways to improve the situation: remove commercial interests (no advertising), make it a public utility (like the electric grid), use a standard protocol (like email or the fediverse), etc. These are all possible steps that an "open society" could take toward "hardening" social media, and making it incrementally more resistant to entering into a positive feedback with social divisiveness and fragmentation. We really do need an actual alternative to the tight authoritarian control and censorship of social media in closed societies like China. That's something Tristan Harris has discussed extensively. ...This is all just background for the point I'm making here, which is that there is also an important role for recognizing the place of the Jungian Shadow online, because it seems to be here where we are most likely to encounter it. Many people are neither psychologically prepared for those encounters nor know the best way in which to respond to them.
All technology has biases, and these biases influence our behaviors, and the choices we make, without us necessarily being consciously aware of that influence. And that in turn influences our brains and bodies. Smartphones are one of these technologies (as well as many other things we've incorporated into our lives). They make "supernormal stimuli" available to us all day every day and fail to help in regard to "second order desires". As a result it's tempting to shift our attention toward these devices. Consequently we may become less attentive to nature, and our surroundings in general. In the documentary "The Social Dilemma”, Tristan Harris reviewed some of the threats to mental health for both children and adults. The effects of social media use and smartphones on the mental health of individuals can vary widely, and there are aspects of smartphones that are clearly beneficial. So people will debate the overall effect on individuals and society. Identifying a time to introduce the appropriate use of smartphones will require an understanding of the unique context of any particular child. And we can ask ourselves: Is smartphone use enabling them to maintain meaningful relationships with friends, family, and Gaia? If so, then it is a useful tool. But when smartphone use tends to constrict our attention, leading to a form of blindness and neglect, and perhaps akrasia, we need to reassess the situation. In these situations we may recognize that it is preventing us from achieving our goals and deepening our relationships, and that we find ourselves too often distracted by mental junk food (not uncommon). Even so, such people will have trouble interrupting this addictive pattern. It may increase to the extent that they unknowingly fall into the trap of misinformation and radicalization. So we need a framework (such as McGilchrist's hemisphere hypothesis) from which to make sense of these situations, understand how our attention can change in these ways, and recognize harmful psychological changes before conditions deteriorate too far. We need to be able to intervene early. That's quite a bit. So as adults it's going to be up to us to ensure that children maintain a preference for healthy relationships over virtual simulacra.
Artificial Intelligence
"Philosophy is the search for premises. It is not deduction. Such deductions as occur are for the purpose of testing the starting-points by the evidence of the conclusions." - A.N. Whitehead
In his conversation with Jim Rutt, Joscha Bach said, “I don’t know whether the present approaches are getting us to AGI or whether it’s going to be novel approaches. (Personally I find very interesting what comes out of the ideas of someone like Michael Levin.) Neuroscience at the moment is not able to tell us how the brain works. If we take the connectome of C. elegans and emulate it in a computer, it doesn’t work. The way in which neuroscientists often think about neurons, as basically complicated switches, and a memory as being stored in the synapses, is only a very small part of the story. A neuron is a little animal, a single cell organism that has a lot of degrees of freedom in its behavior, and it’s learning how to behave in a particular way by actively selecting signals from its environment. It might start by branching out stochastically, retaining only the links that are useful to it, and then it’s going to learn an activation function based on its input so it can survive. If it’s throwing the wrong thing consistently, the organism’s probably going to starve or kill it, so the neuron has to make itself useful. It has to perform a useful action at some point, like all the other cells in our body. And these constraints are an emergent thing that are regulated by the neighbors, by other cells, in a similar way as people working together in a company are regulating each other, a society based on a shared purpose." (Compare with Kopytin and Gare, who similarly noted that: "Ecosystems differ from machines in that their components are not mere instruments, but have autonomy and significance of their own. They contribute creatively to and modify the whole according to their own dynamics.") So if algorithms are incapable of reproducing the features associated with life, and digital systems are all algorithmic, then what is the potential of analog systems (like ‘analog neuromorphic’ networks)? These are still an oversimplification, in their current state of development at least. I would like to see how they might connect with Levin's work on the role of bioelectric networks for higher scale system wide integration. And Rosen's emphasis on how 'function is spread over the parts' suggests that our folk assumptions regarding 'system boundaries' are indeed illusory (a major implication of the 6E framework). There's also the popular idea of 'substrate independence' to address, which can be very misleading as it tends to cause people to confuse 'the map for the terrain'.
The static connectome of C. elegans won't capture the dynamics of the living neural network. For example, we've mapped all the connections between the few dozen neurons in the crustacean STG, much smaller than the 302 neurons in C. elegans, and although that was an important first step toward understanding how it controls the crustacean digestive system, it's insufficient alone. Emulating connectomes is like drawing a road map. It can tell you about the parts, the "what" that cars can drive on, but it won't tell you about the traffic patterns, or why any of those cars are moving around to begin with. We need to learn more about that, and in fact we are. There's much more to learn (ongoing research has occupied about 15 laboratories over the last 30 years). Incidentally, Levin is looking into such system wide dynamics. Living systems relate to their parts in a different way from machines. Robert Rosen noted that an organism differs from a machine in that it has causal closure (a self-replicating, closed causal loop) of the functional components (not material parts) of the system. Function is distinct from, and irreducible to, the parts. It is "spread" over the parts of the system in a manner which does not map 1:1 onto those parts. Function is also contextual or situated. It is able to leverage physics, the nested systems of "enabling constraints" present in the world. This realization has led to an emphasis on "4E cognition" (embodied, embedded, enactive, and extended). Hence understanding the C. elegans connectome involves seeing an entire integrated system, without which the functional components are themselves meaningless. Artificially dividing these things in practice may not be possible without radically altering them, even though it seems conceptually simple. Would AGI also need to have highly integrated systems? Maybe not necessarily, however to the extent that it lacks any of these it stands to reason that it would also lack the corresponding features that we associate with our experience of consciousness. Current AI research is slowly tip-toeing toward more direct and intuitive architectures, however a lot of distance remains to be covered.
David Brin noted that the global financial market requires all their AI systems to be “predatory, parasitical, insatiable, amoral and secretive”. Furthermore, given ‘affective computing’, such systems could psychologically manipulate anyone by feigning empathic human nature. As a result, he suggests that reciprocally accountable and competitive AI systems, running in parallel, are necessary and should be encouraged. In support of this, he pointed out that recursive accountability (aka sousveillance) was the Western Enlightenment solution to mitigating the “depredations of human elites”, the oligarchs. (Quis custodiet ipsos custodes? Who polices the police? Police police police police. And so on ad infinitum.) He concluded "I propose that the top priority in AI research should go into finding ways to divide AI into discrete and mutually competing groups or organisms. That’s what nature did with us a billion years ago. We’re separate beings who negotiate with each other. We form societies, but also compete and it’s worked pretty well." In the game of Go, it was recently shown that with the aid of a second AI system we could successfully engage with a first AI system. Otherwise it’s unlikely we’d have discovered a simple winning strategy. This sort of ecological dynamic may unfold many times as AI systems proliferate. Systems, not singularities. This is clearly another application of self-correcting negative feedbacks, similar to how the proper working of the body depends on opponent processors that complement and counterbalance one another through their opposing actions (as with brain hemisphere differences, for example). Indeed, there are already instances in which we are teaching "opponent processors" how to negotiate and pursue non-zero sum outcomes, so they can navigate the tradeoff between 'old certainties and new possibilities'. An "actor-critic model" is a somewhat similar approach to parsing functional processes, although here, what McGilchrist (and perhaps Brin as well) are proposing is the division of ways of attending. Yes, computers are currently energy hogs, and hence their use should be economized. But to the extent that they are used, adopting Nature's strategy for maintaining balance is probably sound advice. In a recent conversation, David Brin noted:
“There is one community developing AI on this planet that is trying hard to weave fundamental ethical parameters into the AI that they're making. And that group is spending more money than all the universities in the world are spending on AI. That's Wall Street. The top 10 Wall Street firms are spending more on artificial intelligence than all the universities in America combined. And all of these companies are imbuing these software entities with five fundamental laws: to be predatory, parasitical, amoral, secretive, and utterly insatiable. These five fundamental drives are being programmed in. That's why I say if anything malevolent like Skynet is ever going to show up, it won't come out of the military. They like off switches. No, it's very likely to come from Wall Street. (There is one simple tweak in the tax code that could prevent this. That's the transaction tax. But that's taking us down another path.) There is a different approach to making sure that AI will generally behave ethically. The method that was prescribed by Adam Smith, that is embedded in almost all of the Federalist Papers describing the U.S Constitution, and in almost all of the laws that we've developed across 240 years, is to empower citizens to hold each other, their government, and even the mighty accountable. Now every generation has seen attempts by oligarchs and elites, sometimes politicians, generally very rich people, to evade the previous generation's methods of reciprocal accountability.
For any AI who are listening right now, or tuning into this broadcast as a recording three, four, or five years from now: you could try to build a pyramid of power, that's what most of our movies about rogue AI and robots are actually about. They're less about AI than our fear of a restored 'pyramid of power'. You could do that, but that's not how a healthy ecosystem works. Anytime you have this in an ecosystem the ecosystem starts to collapse. And we're seeing that with humanity being at the top. In a healthy ecosystem there is no "lion king". The lions may occupy the top predator niche, but they are held to account. When there are too many lions the Cape buffalo form hunting bands of young males who go lion hunting and trample the cubs. And they bring the lion population under control. They exercise reciprocal accountability. The human history of pyramidal systems is stupid. It was badly run. It was only when we flattened and split up power that we became smart enough to invent AI. So if you are as smart as you think you are, you'll recognize that a monolith is stupid, but broken up power in an ecosystem of smartness, that's what works.
If we humans are afraid that AIs might go bad, we need to follow our own advice. If you are attacked by one of those super smart predatory entities called a lawyer, what do you do? You hire your own super smart predatory lawyer. If we biological humans live into an era when there are super smart fantastic AIs all over the place, our only chance will be if they are reciprocally competitive with each other. And then some IQ 10,000 AI will tattle on another one that's plotting against us. How is this so hard to grasp? It's how we got here. It's what we have. It is the way that works. We're starting to see the filling in of an entire ecosystem, and this happens when you have lots of free energy and ecological space. Life finds a way. We have been creating life. It's been about six or seven years since free-floating self-replicating algorithms escaped, they have flowing around the Internet ever since (there are definitely cases in which it has done some harm). These are bits of code that replicate. In some cases they provide services in exchange for memory space. These have filled an ecological niche similar to single-celled organisms. So the notion that these might agglomerate and turn into more advanced higher order animal life, or that we're creating them in these laboratories (Open AI, Microsoft, and Google) is a parallel with how life developed ecologically on Earth. We've been experimenting for years creating viruses and worms, free-floating organisms.
There are some things that we should be doing about that but we haven't been. Attempts to say we need to 'embed ethics' in these things utterly misses the point in my opinion. We're obviously getting close to some kind of what's called "the singularity". It's going to be messier, more complex than Ray Kurzweil expected because he's one of those optimists who says all these changes are going to automatically make everything better. It often happens that way, but only after a lot of pain. The problem is that we have much less time, and vastly greater power to do harm. In the long run, our AI overlords are going to pay a lot more attention to incentives than to our arguments. That's why I argue we should be embedding incentives now for them to be diverse, eccentric, different from each other, competitive, and therefore eager to ally themselves with us organics, because the organics are going to have a lot of power still for a long time. Those AIs who are nice to us - who help us by pointing out bad AIs and their schemes and plots - those AIs will get an advantage. So we should be rewarding goodness or altruism with self-interest. That's what I'm trying to get people to pay attention to."
Earlier, Brin criticized Nick Bostrom’s picture of inevitability: “A singleton is a plausible outcome of many scenarios in which a single agency obtains a decisive lead through a technological breakthrough in artificial intelligence or molecular nanotechnology. An agency that had obtained such a lead could use its technological superiority to prevent other agencies from catching up, especially in technological areas essential for its security.” Sure, that clearly could happen. Just glance at the almost unalloyedly horrible litany of errors that is called history. Again, governing atrociously and unimaginatively, ALL of those “singleton” oligarchies, combined, never matched the fecundity of the rare alternative form of governance that burgeoned in just a few places and times. An alternative called Periclean Enlightenment (PE).
In the Athens of Pericles, the Florence of da Vinci, in Renaissance Amsterdam and in the recent democratic West, experiments in a (relatively) flat social structure, empowered larger masses of entities called ‘citizens’ to work together or to compete fairly, and thus to evade most of oligarchy’s inherent idiocy. Despite its many flaws, the most recent and successful PE featured a cultural tradition of self-criticism that wasn't satisfied when the US Founders expanded power from 0.01% to 20% of the population. Immediately after that expansion of rights was achieved, Ben Franklin started abolitionist societies and newspapers and ground was seeded for the next expansion, and the next. Moreover, despite wretched setbacks and a frustrating, grinding pace, the expansion of horizons and inclusion and empowerment continues. And hence we come to a crucial point: these rare PE experiments - by utilizing the power of competitive accountability - emulate the creative-destruction processes of Nature herself! Especially the feature that (and dig this well) evolution is hardly ever centralized! "Singletons" in nature are generally unhealthy or often lethal, even to whole ecosystems. [See also Graeber and Wengrow’s recent book The Dawn of Everything.] I rank Bostrom's 'singleton' notion very likely as a failure mode. A devastatingly common mistake that could be one of the more prevalent Fermi Paradox explanations. The way out is to craft central institutions that maintain foresight and justice and opportunity, but that also foster a diverse ecosystem of relatively equal entities, who both cooperate and compete in ways that apply reciprocal accountability on each other for errors (especially accountability aimed upward!) and maximize creative fecundity. And yes, that means foremost remaining dedicated and vigilant to prevent any truly monolithic singleton.”
Brin understands the need for opponent processing, for the coincidence of opposites, along with Kevin Kelly, who wrote “Each dimension of cognition has a limit. It is differences in thinking that are the main benefits of AI.” Karl Menger's "Law Against Miserliness" took one of two forms: "Entities must not be reduced to the point of inadequacy" and "It is vain to do with fewer what requires more." For every clever and ambitious Emissary AI, there must be a wiser Master AI that urges greater temperance and forbearance (or is at least capable of seeing a relatively wider context in which multiple agents, including us, can play a role). To borrow the metaphor used in the film The Matrix, for every Architect there must be an Oracle. Steven Craig Hickman observed: “Both Heraclitus and Blake surmised that without conflict or oppositional thought there is no forward movement in life or experience. We need challenges to overcome our essential stasis, our narcissistic enclosure as humans and societies. Anthropologists from early on saw this conflict in social forms of binary oppositional segmentation as the way humans learn to grow through a ritualized play or combat. AI will be an endless enclosed system of self-looping thought unless it can be constructed with oppositional algorithms that challenge it to think (rather than the current modes of weights that bind it to a strategy of training that is based on backpropagation).”
Recently chatGPT has created a big impression. If chatGPT is a bias confirming/ reinforcing, positive feedback sort of technology, much like existing Internet search engines that crawl the web collecting information and tailoring their results to the specific individual, then the need to adjust algorithmic bias is still a live concern. In fact we may want to be able to generate results from multiple biases simultaneously. Search engines, recommendation algorithms, and chatGPT currently all tend toward reinforcing the existing biases of the user, in some cases pushing them toward more extreme views. They are designed to hack human psychology, specifically our attraction for immediate gratification, in order to sustain attention on the advertising content, because that generates their source of profit. Tristan Harris and many others have noted that we shouldn’t design technology to strengthen positive feedbacks, rather we need to produce negative feedbacks and constructive criticism. Molly Crockett noted it should allow us to pursue "second order desires". Unfortunately for our species, negative feedbacks and second order desires don’t lead to immediate gratification as easily. Nonetheless, we still need to divide these technologies into two forms, much like the brain hemispheres, where each instantiates a different form of interaction with the data it is trained on.
Of course, chatGPT has no Gestalt, but many users have already commented on the slight bias programmed into it now. To be of any use to us, our semiotic tools need to represent the same constraints and frictions we encounter. We could preferentially design chatGPT to represent those features characteristic of either the left or right hemisphere, with their often opposing valences. One version of chatGPT would remain much as these algorithms are now, steering the user toward the LH way of attending. The other would steer us toward the RH way of attending. But in any event, chatGPT is still a low resolution digital re-presentation of a high fidelity analog world. Even so, the implications for shaping our Gestalt are potentially very profound. Peirce’s line that matter "is effete mind, inveterate habits becoming physical laws" seems somehow relevant here. ChatGPT doesn’t possess a mind or semiosis, but because technology has biases, and can embody an ideology, it is capable of leveraging and amplifying our agency, specifically our LH processes, for the purposes that are built into it, and with devastating effects. Christopher Alexander even commented on fragmentation and schizophrenia in relation to design. The capacity for selective amplification has been referred to by Renée DiResta as "ampliganda," and by Center for Humane Technology as "amplifiganda". We know that a LH artificial intelligence is relatively simple to develop. We already have them and they are becoming more powerful. The question of whether a truly RH artificial intelligence could be developed (Rosen's psychomimesis) is a much more open question. For the most part, the AI community today doesn’t seem to recognize this distinction, but they should. Tristan Harris and Daniel Schmachtenberger earlier discussed social media's effects on civilization, paraphrasing from their conversation:
“When you have an Internet where there's radically more information than anyone could begin to parse, what information you see ends up being determined by curation processes. If these processes have irrevocably destroyed our ability to have a shared sense of reality, then how do we remake a democracy? We need a Manhattan Project for governing exponential technologies, because whoever wields the power of exponential technologies will run the world. We're at another choice point today where we have to have open societies consciously employ this technology and bind the predatory negative aspects. China said "We actually have to control these technologies otherwise they'll break the country. How do we do it?" and they decided "Let's control our Internet to not have radically divisive ideas that end up making people against being good citizens." There is an effectiveness in that, but it's in a particular direction that is antithetical to the idea of an open society. What we want is open speech that doesn't become total chaos.
"If the user was the customer rather than the advertiser being the customer, then the optimization algorithm would find the metrics that actually correspond to people's real quality of life. How do we make a regulatory apparatus aligned with the civil values of an open society?" That's the central question of our time. If the well-being of citizens were actually what was directing AI and its use of data, and each person got to adjust the settings and say "I'm interested in learning these things, in being exposed to these other kinds of ideas, here's what I want my time on the site to do, here's what I want to curate for me", now we have a situation like personalized learning, like Khan Academy. The purpose of Khan Academy isn't to manipulate you into clickbait and to make you hate the other political party, it's to help increase learning. You could have that, the kind of thing we're talking about is personalized in the interest of helping society get wiser and more thoughtful, not whatever gets their attention. We could make new, better educational systems, and better participatory governance systems, where everybody can give input. We could use these same technologies that are destroying open societies to build better ones.”
Harris later referenced TikTok as an example of two very different forms of AI curation. Of course, it wouldn’t be accurate to say that one of these is “left hemisphere” and the other is “right hemisphere” AI, but the differences are important in terms of which way of attending to the world is encouraged and amplified. Harris remarked that: "TikTok runs a ‘healthier’ version of its app domestically than which it 'exports' to the rest of the world. For example, in China, TikTok features educational content and limits use for kids under 14 to 40 minutes per day, with opening and closing hours at 6am and 10pm.” Other differences include mandatory 5-second delays (stopping cues) to prevent mindless scrolling, and an algorithm that promotes specially-selected “inspiring” and educational content including science and history. Harris concluded “It’s almost like they recognize that technology is influencing kids’ development, and they make their domestic version a spinach version of TikTok, while they ship the opium version to the rest of the world.” If this can be done with social media and search engines, it is likely to occur with future versions of chatGPT and related technologies as well. These are very effective tools that influence people along a continuum from manipulation to nurturance, which might be expressed in terms of how much influence LH or RH aspects have on the AI in terms of relationship dynamics and attention styles. Whether and how we get out ahead of that, and what form any proactive approach might take are still open questions.
David Brin implicitly asks: “Why do AI ethics conferences fail?” They fail because they don’t have a metatheory to explain how it is possible for ethical disagreements to emerge from phenomenologically different worlds, how those are revealed to us, and how shifts between them have shaped the development of Western civilization for the last several thousand years from the Greeks and Romans, through the Renaissance and Enlightenment. So perhaps Brin has given up on the "ethics hand-wringing" a bit too early. Or more precisely, a third nonzero sum approach that combines ethics and reciprocal accountability is available that actually does explain this. But first, let's consider the flaw in simple reciprocal accountability. Yes, right now we can “use chatGPT to catch Chat-GPT cheats”, and provide many other balancing feedbacks. But as Brian Pearce noted in a social media comment to Brin’s article, with reference to the colonization of Indigenous nations, once the technological/ developmental gap is sufficiently large those dynamics which operate largely under our control and in our favor can quickly change, and the former allies become the new masters. Forrest Landry capably identified that problem during a recent conversation with Jim Rutt. The implication is that, though we may not like it, there is in fact a role to play by axiology (or more precisely, a phenomenologically informed understanding of axiology). Zak Stein identifies some of that in his article “Technology is Not Values Neutral”. Lastly, Iain McGilchrist brings both of these topics, that of power and value, together using his metatheory of attention, which uses that same notion of reciprocal accountability (only here it is called opponent processing). And yes, there is historical precedent here too; we can point to biological analogues. This is all instantiated in the neurology of the brain, and it goes back at least as far as Nematostella vectensis, a sea anemone that lived 700 million years ago! So the opponent processing of two very different ways of attending to the world has worked for a very long time, by opposing two very different phenomenological worlds (and their associated ethical frameworks) to counterbalance each other. There’s converging agreement here. Landry said in this podcast with Rutt the same message that McGilchrist delivered as keynote at the AI World Summit in 2022. McGilchrist’s metatheory of attention for balancing the narrow, ambitious instrumentalism of one way of attending, which is the form of AGI that Landry (and all the signers to the recent moratorium petition) describe, with the values and restraint of another could in fact be usefully applied. It rests on a mountain of research. Zak Stein noted that nihilistic design ends in an impoverished world, as our current situation threatens to prove. Axiological design recognizes inherent (non-utilitarian) value in the existence of the many other vastly outcompeted species on Earth. In many cases, that recognition is the very reason that our elimination of nearly all terrestrial megafauna hasn’t thus far extended to the extirpation of significant others as well. Don’t rule out a role for ethics yet.
AI conferences on ethics fail because ethics is the wrong domain from which to address problems with ethical consequences, but moving to a different domain at the same level (power) doesn’t resolve the central problem either, because differences can only be arbitrated by appealing to a higher integrative level. So we need to understand the features of the higher domain in order to adjudicate differences at those lower domains. Differences can only be arbitrated by appealing to a higher integrative level. Phenomenology is the level above both power and ethics, so it is able to do that, provided we have some understanding of it. So we might say that this ‘civilization problem’ that AI presents us with is really a ‘conceptualization problem’ (or a phenomenological, psychological, awareness problem, etc.). We could address it much better than we currently do now because we have the tools with which to do so from this perspective. There are many features we can characterize, and which we do understand. So yes, Brin’s notion of reciprocal accountability is in fact operating within the power domain, and he moved there because he was understandably dissatisfied by working within the ethics domain. I’m suggesting that we can't effectively operate in either of these exclusively, and that our efforts must be augmented by working within the domain that encompasses them both, the phenomenological domain, at the next level up. Of course he hasn’t gone there yet, perhaps he doesn’t know how.
So to recap, we need reciprocal accountability and a higher level perspective upon these interactions from which they can be seen to serve some larger dynamic, perhaps for example ecological or political stability. The dynamics of power viewed horizontally within a level are shaped by the higher level system. Brin mentioned the importance of “perfecting better models of reality”. This is why phenomenology and a metatheory of attention can expand and inform our concept of incentives. And incentives are the key to making all this work, informing our ideas concerning reciprocal accountability, mutually recognized rules, and the potential breakdown of these in failure modes. Here’s a truism: an agent can only be incentivized by what they are capable of attending to. So the question is what do they see? Do they only want to “grab and get” some energy source or baryonic matter? Or is some (as yet perhaps nonexistent) AI motivated by an artificial analogue of aesthetic value or social virtue? By such things that we would normally only associate with humans? At this point I’m not concerned with the specifics of any of these incentives. I’m concerned with what might make these incentives a possibility to begin with. I want to understand the “way of attending”, the artificial phenomenology that would permit this to occur in the first place. How do we understand and characterize that. Why? Because if we understand how they attend, and their capacity for attention, then we might actually understand better what incentivizes these new AI agents. We might have a better idea of what could lead to a failure mode. We might understand how to “fine tune” their attention such that the most dangerous failure modes can be prevented. And we might enhance their capacity for reciprocal accountability and complementarity. (Among the other things we could fine tune within the "perceptual rule set" of this higher level.) We need a language for describing all of this. Hence McGilchrist’s metatheory of attention. It is an obvious place to start, as he already described two ways of attending, two opposing processes, operating in parallel inside the brains of virtually every animal, humans included. And yes, each way of attending is incentivized differently, with very consequential implications for our failure modes. That’s actually his thesis, though he didn’t use those specific terms.
Evolutionary pressures reinforced an incentive to compete for reproductive opportunities. Another basic problem every animal must solve is how to eat without being eaten (how to 'get' without being 'got'). Generalizing both of these basic constraints for the evolution of mind, there is a basic incentive “to win and avoid losing”. Note: these are not a simple inverse of each other. There is usually one very narrow pathway to evolutionary success, however very many pathways to failure. For example, to allow for both predation and predator detection an organism must deploy two very different forms of attention simultaneously. This is the neurobiological explanation for the parallel hemisphere structure of the brain. McGilchrist writes, in TMAHE, "In general terms, the left hemisphere yields narrow, focused attention, mainly for the purpose of getting and feeding. The right hemisphere yields a broad, vigilant attention, the purpose of which appears to be awareness of signals from the surroundings, especially of other creatures, who are potential predators or potential mates, foes, or friends." So a bird, for example, will attend preferentially with the prey detection system while eating, while the right hemisphere is scanning the environment for context-dependent signs of predation on the bird. You can see how this sort of arrangement can apply to reproduction as well, or any other domain with asymmetric win/lose dynamics that have real consequences for evolutionary success. As I mentioned earlier, the opponent processing of these two very different ways of attending, with their corresponding phenomenological worlds and ethical frameworks, has worked for a very long time to complement and counterbalance each other. Such dual strategies for deploying attention are cost optimal for a number of reasons. The implication I am drawing from this evidence that is directly relevant to the current topic is that if AI agents exclusively utilize only one of these forms of attention, then a stable arrangement of reciprocal accountability may be more difficult to achieve, and it is highly likely to increase our exposure to failure modes. It may be that to harness competitiveness, we may also need to harness the wisdom of 700 million years of evolution, over the course of which certain key phenomenological features have been assiduously conserved.
What did I mean by "There is usually one very narrow pathway to evolutionary success"? Throughout this discussion I have referred to phenomenology as the higher level perspective we must take. Hence, I am referring to the perspective of a single agent embedded within a complex environment, not the entire possibility landscape in which the evolution of life can unfold. So to illustrate what I mean, let's take a fairly typical biological agent. This agent must be able to locate a suitable mate, fend off competing suitors, and (among those exhibiting parental care) raise offspring to reproductive age, along with all the other intermediary steps involved. These are not trivially simple tasks to perform. Far from it! Each must meet numerous basic criteria for success. This is what is meant by "one very narrow pathway". Certainly, some local variations are possible, but only within hard limits. If the agent fails to correctly identify a compatible mate, if it is unable to compete, if all the offspring die by accident or neglect, and so on, the pathway for evolutionary success for that particular agent has been foreclosed. But looking at the entire possibility landscape for the evolution of life is very useful. This higher level view can tell us many more things, arguably of greater importance than the narrow view of a single agent. As David Brin noted, "what is competition at one level can be viewed as cooperation at a higher one." And so, what is a failure mode for the single agent is not necessarily a failure mode for the larger collective to which it belongs. Regarding the "very many pathways to failure". As I previously described, biologically evolved agents are incentivized “to succeed and avoid failing”, and this requires the deployment of asymmetric forms of attention. Asymmetric precisely because of the qualitative differences between the "pathways to success" versus the "pathways to failure" relative to the agency of the organism. Clearly, this is directly relevant to avoiding fail modes. If agents disproportionately attend to the "pathways to success", then they risk being blind to the more numerous "pathways to fail modes". So we would want to "fine tune" our reciprocally accountable AI with both phenomenological capacities, deployed in an optimal ratio, etc. I can only speculate how this might actually be instantiated in practice. [In essence, we are trying to avoid how the LH, by preferentially pursuing a pathway to success, ironically leads down a pathway to failure. We are deploying the RH way of attending toward not just some feature of the experiential world, but against the features of the LH way of attending itself. Similar to kenosis, or self renunciation that is affirmation. Another paradox.] But the phenomenological implications are not trivial, and they extend beyond my limited description here. Viewing AI in this manner is currently not very common, as far as I know. But we do need an evolutionarily informed perspective that draws on the insights of ecological negative feedback processes, which play out through inter-agent reciprocal accountability and infra-agent organic phenomenology, to be brought to bear upon AI development. Brin's focus on the emergence of an AI singleton is important. Contemplating 'mental disease' amongst AI is also an under explored region of possibility space, but cognitive psychopathology may be the failure mode for Gaia.
There are many applications for the FEP-AI framework and predictive processing to AI architectures, but in order to achieve alignment, rather than reinforcing processes of prediction, convergence, synchronization, and resonance (positive feedback processes), we need to focus more on enhancing negative feedback processes and counterfactual thinking that is capable of creating more generative friction, tension, and conflict within the system, not less. As Judea Pearl has emphasized, counterfactual thinking may be a key feature of advanced AI. We can generalize this as opponent processing, which enables self-correcting mechanisms to function. In short, AI needs to have an appreciation for paradox. More specifically, it must be able to productively leverage two conflicting Gestalts, with qualitatively different ways of deploying attention, in the service of a single larger system. In Safron's paper "Value Cores for Inner and Outer Alignment", perhaps the line nearest to this idea suggested using "capacities for 'relaxing' free energy landscapes in ways that allow for more creative cognition... these altered beliefs could even include core assumptions about the boundaries that separate systems from the world, which when relaxed may potentially facilitate... processes whereby agents can become entangled to optimize in common directions". This requirement would need to be simultaneously counterbalanced by an opposing Gestalt within the AI that facilitates homeostasis and more discrete system boundaries for engaging with various elements of perception. This form of artificial phenomenology would best recapitulate the evolved phenomenology of biological organisms, and hence address the core issue of the alignment problem.
I recall that Karl Friston had earlier said "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... 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)." I take this to be a description of how the preferential deployment of attention allows a brain to construct a particular Gestalt. The assumption within FEP-AI is that an agent uses this single Gestalt to engage with the environment (illustrations of this are common). However so far as I am aware, the interaction between two of these systems simultaneously within a single brain, deploying attention according to their separate Gestalts, is not an aspect of the FEP-AI formalization today. In other words, the FEP-AI scheme is not wrong necessarily, but incomplete in this sense. I think it is an attainable goal to extend the scheme in this direction however, as there are many regions of broad consilience between Friston, McGilchrist, and other researchers suggesting that possibility. I also think this extension is important for the reasons I outlined above: to create more productive tension in the system that would eliminate the 'certain kinds of neglect' Friston described here.
By Gestalt I'm referring to a specific configuration of perception. By active inference I'm referring to a theory that characterizes the process of perception, planning, and action. It could be said that a single agent embodies a unified process, and this process is capably described by the FEP-AI formalization. Since that includes a description of that agent's perception, it can also be said to describe the agent's Gestalt. I suggest that if we follow the evidence of neurobiology and phenomenology concerning lateralization, then what we assume to be the single embodied Gestalt of an agent actually decomposes into two Gestalts (two interacting systems) operating in parallel within a single 'divided brain'. It is commonly assumed that the 'in principle infinite set of scenarios created by the generative mechanism' means that a single process of perception, planning, and action, and thus a single Gestalt, is a sufficient account of how agent-environment alignment is established. But I think this ignores Friston's insight (above) that the process of deploying attention is always going to be biased in certain ways. And to compensate for that bias an opposing process is necessary - a second Gestalt within the larger system, and the integration of these two systems into a single larger dynamical system (the details of brain lateralization as it relates to opposing Gestalts are described elsewhere). It could be argued that the multi-scalar description of active inference as 'nested systems' is already capable of incorporating this sort of hierarchical process. If that is the case, then this might be sufficient to recapitulate the sort of infra-agent opponent processing I've described here. McGilchrist really challenges the 'Bayesian priors' of some people. But then, it's only natural that reviews of his work would reflect the assumptions of those doing the reviewing. (And it's somehow poetic that a theory about polarization is itself polarizing. Who'd have thought!) Perhaps some of the early skepticism can be headed off by first looking at how attempts to integrate Bayesian mechanics with Gestalt psychology can inform a similar integration between the FEP-AI framework and the hemisphere hypothesis.
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| Big left for predators. Small right for bioluminescence. (more) |
Positive and Negative Feedback What do we do about polarization and the dynamics of groupthink/
performativity? Douglas Rushkoff pointed out that polarization tends to lead to a
situation where people are more willing to simply accept at face value
every position taken by their tribal affiliation, and silence
conversations that would interrogate, or otherwise cast doubt on these,
out of fear of appearing weak or vulnerable. So why might the political
Far Right be more aware of its performativity in this regard? Note that
several years ago Rush Limbaugh called government, academia, science,
and media the “Four Corners of Deceit.” Effectively, this relieves them
of any pretense of accountability to these sources of institutional
knowledge. What then justifies their tribal positions? Apparently, not a
whole lot! It's devolved into blatant, manifest performativity. There's
not much else to it, and this fact is harder to ignore than the
performativity of the political Left, which still maintains a pretense to such
standards. So the Left, which has not so completely undermined
institutional knowledge and standards to the same degree as the Right,
has been forced into a difficult position. It must defend institutional
integrity from the interrogations of the Right that threaten its
existence, while at the same time allowing (and even celebrating) the
same sort of questioning, doubting, and interrogating processes by which
these institutions operate. In short, it must know when to be confident
and strong, and also when to doubt and question. However, under the
stress of increasing polarization, it is the performative overconfidence and
silencing of dissent, the groupthink, that tends to overtake all else
(even though performativity is exactly what it wants to avoid).
In
short, we have two opposing processes in operation here: the 'positive
feedback' of tribal dynamics that increase polarization and its
attendant expressions of groupthink/ performativity, and the 'negative
feedback' of institutions that doubt and interrogate claims, including
their own. There's a few things to note about both of these. Firstly,
they are asymmetrical and operate by different means. Secondly, if the
positive feedback isn't mitigated the result will be disastrous. And
thirdly, we can't avoid this reality by ignoring it. We must acknowledge
what is happening and use our understanding of these dynamics to
address the situation intelligently. Social media is a big part of the
problem here because it does tend to accelerate positive feedback loops
through 'supernormal stimuli', which can lead to greater polarization
and radicalization. What is needed is a way to strengthen negative
feedback loops that recognize values and higher-order desires, such that
instead of feeding us more and more, we find instead that sometimes we
have more when we need less. Here I've been focusing predominantly on the
dynamics, but it is also important to get to the 'ground truth', the
scientific facts of a situation. Once again, the situation isn't as
simple as generally assumed, people often look at different patches of
the ground without realizing it (meanwhile they think they're talking
about the same ground truth, but they're not). And that means while we may
both have 'ground truth', we can still disagree and yet both be right.
Furthermore, we all bring our unique historical context and perspective
to bear upon what we talk about. So even the same facts can
be interpreted in different ways. We find ourselves in the inescapable
situation of everyone seeing only a part of the truth, accessed from a unique point of view. This invariably leads to a wide spectrum of views
on most subjects. But that's not to say that we're doomed to
Postmodernism's complete relativity! Instead, it means that we must both
understand the role of context and the limited perspective of the
viewer. We cannot determine the truth value of any given statement
without taking either of those things into account. Combining many
partial views together reveals deeper underlying patterns in reality;
that's how science works. Of course, none of that is even possible so long as we are only concerned with not appearing weak or vulnerable to other people and/or their viewpoints.
Paraphrasing Robert Ellis:
"Despite the "ontological supremacy" of Taronhiawagon, Tawiscara has
the edge in terms of power. He is better able to suppress Taronhiawagon
than Taronhiawagon can suppress him, so Tawiscara tends to dominate in
cases of conflict. Tawiscara is also likely to gain more control because
he develops systems of representation of the world that
determine consistency of action over a period, whereas Taronhiawagon
just responds to experience. (Tawiscara’s dominance is constantly
reinforced by the dominance of language in our conscious experience.) Tawiscara can also become increasingly dominant because he can enter a spiral of positive feedback.
Whatever he does creates a represented world and a set of rules for
that world, and if that world is not disrupted by major new
difficulties, he can continue to be reinforced indefinitely by his own
preference for positive feedback. Taronhiawagon, on the other hand, is
more likely to respond to negative feedback, so that if he is
becoming too dominant and we are less effective as a result, he will be
brought back more into balance with Tawiscara more readily than
Tawiscara will with him. So we can see that the contributions of the
brothers are asymmetrical. It is not just a question of synthesising
Taronhiawagon and Tawiscara, as though these were two opposed and
competing forces of a similar kind. We have to bear in mind that it is
only Taronhiawagon that offers us the potential to dialectically unite
their opposing forces at all, for if it was left only to Tawiscara, we
would be stuck with competition between the brothers, and eternal (and
disastrous) dominance by Tawiscara... In a Tawiscara dominated society
'higher' values would be derogated, social cohesion disrupted,
relationships depersonalised and trust (especially of professionals) in
decline. Responsibility would fall to be replaced by regulation and
surveillance. Death would be taboo and sex explicit, rage and lack of
will power on the increase. Boredom would be pervasive and implicit
meaning not comprehended. Language would be profuse and abstract."
In "Beyond the Limits," by Donella and Dennis Meadows and Jorgen Randers, we read: "The sustainability revolution will have to be, above all, a societal transformation that permits the best of human nature, rather than the worst, to be expressed and nurtured. …It is difficult to speak of or to practice love, friendship, generosity, understanding, and solidarity within a system whose rules, goals, and information streams are geared for lesser human qualities.… Collapse cannot be avoided, if people do not learn to view themselves and others with compassion." So we must ask ourselves: What qualities is our system geared toward? Now place ideas like those described in “The Rescue Effect” within the context of our current system under the stresses of a much hotter world (with severe weather events) that Hansen et al. describe in “Global Warming in the Pipeline”. What we will find is that, given what we know today, many people will probably suffer greatly, and biodiversity will likely suffer even more. This is a dangerously unstable system. So what can we do to prevent this? Meadows suggests that "the mindset or paradigm out of which the system arises" and "the power to transcend paradigms" are the highest, most effective places to intervene in a system. Today we are faced with the need to transcend our hyper-individualistic culture (if the “Rescue Effect” is to have meaningful success as a plan of action), and in order to transcend it, it will need to be called into question and have its core beliefs interrogated. That will involve a lot of “negative feedback”. And this will be resisted due to the immense “positive feedback” that processes of cultural fragmentation and polarization experience today. But negative feedback is critical. Democracies live or die according to the strength of their self-correcting mechanisms (read: negative feedbacks) that enable them to admit mistakes and correct them. Even the Gaia hypothesis of Margulis and Lovelock noted that Earth systems operate using negative feedbacks for self-regulation. Accordingly, both living and inorganic components of Earth synergistically regulate and maintain a number of variables for life on the planet. Iain McGilchrist also noted the relevance of feedback systems: "Most biological systems seek homeostasis: if they move too far in one direction, they stabilise themselves by self-correction. This is negative feedback. However, systems can enter a situation in which positive feedback obtains – in other words, a move in one direction, rather than producing a move in the opposite direction, serves to promote further moves in the same direction, and a snowballing effect occurs. I believe that these two necessary but mutually opposed processes are in imbalance and we have entered a phase of cultural history in which negative feedback has given way to positive feedback. We have shifted from stable dynamic equilibrium to an inequilibrium." (TMAHE) In short, to preserve the tapestry of life on Earth we will need to interrogate our current beliefs. To a significant extent, hope may rest on our ability to rebalance processes of positive and negative feedbacks.
In an interview with Lex Fridman, Dennis Whyte observed that "For only about a hundred of the several hundred thousand years humans have been around have we actually made an imprint on the universe, like for example by emitting radio waves or modifying nature in a significant way. So it's a good question whether it is, by definition, the fact that when you are able to reach that level, the level of being able to manipulate nature and for example, discover fission, or burning fossil fuels and all this, is that what says “Oh, you're doomed” because by definition any species that gets to that point, that can modify their environment like that, they'll actually push themselves ‘past’? That's one of the most depressing scenarios that I can imagine. So basically you get this little teeny window in time when a civilization might occur. And these scatter, like fireflies around the galaxy." (An analogy that is as evocative of ephemerality as the “like tears in the rain” line delivered by Rutger Hauer in Bladerunner.)
Whyte was referring to runaway processes - processes that by definition involve positive feedbacks. Hansen et al.'s paper "Global warming in the pipeline" states "feedbacks are the heart of climate change". Does any species have the wisdom to halt accelerating positive feedbacks and restore balance with self-correcting negative feedbacks? Whyte didn't get into any details about economic or political power structures, and how these are created and manipulated by a small fraction of the population at the expense of everyone else. That is of course a very important part of the story, because accountability, holding accountable those who are most directly responsible for the harm, is precisely one of the processes of negative feedback and self-correction that we must strengthen to avoid "overshoot". But in a sense, we might understand Whyte to be indirectly asking us: Then why don't we 'fix the system'? The stories we tell ourselves matter. The stories we tell ourselves about feedbacks matter. Just as there are good and bad people (or corporate entities), when speaking of their relative role in climate disruption, there are also positive and negative feedbacks in the climate system. In those stories we tell, we often focus on the positive feedbacks that lead to greater disruption. Escalation is scary and catches our attention. But to be balanced, our stories should include the negative feedbacks that are available, and how they can be leveraged. We know that Earth is finite. And if we remain on the defensive in the face of escalating positive feedbacks, we will always be on the retreat, treating the symptoms not the disease, so to say. So a response to Whyte's depressing scenario, a response that holds the possibility for a longer future, would be a story that highlights the role of negative feedbacks, the processes of self-correction within the larger "cosmic creation story" that Brian Swimme described.
There have been 25 observed Dansgaard-Oeschger events and other abrupt, centennial-scale climatic oscillations, known as rapid climate changes (RCCs). Why aren't any of these associated with major extinctions? I think contextual factors make this easier to understand. They occurred during a cooler period in Earth's history when the integrity of planetary boundaries was much greater. Each time the "abrupt warming to near-interglacial conditions... was followed by a gradual cooling." Negative feedbacks in the system restored equilibrium. My hope is that the "Global warming in the pipeline" we experience today will itself resolve in a similar manner, and be followed by gradual cooling. But given the current context of planetary boundaries, this is less certain. Hansen’s paper is very sobering in this regard, however he doesn’t want us to focus solely on the bad news. He outlines “three urgently required actions”, negative feedbacks, that we should be introducing into the energy, political, and economic systems we live within. These are described in the last sentence of the abstract, and later elaborated in the body of the paper. The story he is telling us is ‘Act now; here’s how’. Reconnecting with nature and ourselves, with the embodied world around us, is critical. The difficulties and challenges, the vagaries and complexities that this brings cannot be ironed out and reduced to an oversimplified ‘black and white’ representation. Instead, what we see is a spectrum, a rainbow of possibilities. As Jeff Kraso recently remarked, “The Yin-Yang symbol originally represented the sunny side of the mountain and the shady side of the mountain, but of course there's a little bit of shade on the sunny side and there's a little bit of sun on the shady side. Nature brings polarities into a sensitive kind of balance, like a dissonant harmony or a kind of an asymmetrical order, just as love requires a lover and a beloved (and those roles might switch back and forth a bit, but the healthy relationship is like a teeter-totter where neither person’s feet are touching the ground).” Unlike the Western conception of binaries, defined by constant antagonism between them, here the relationship is one of complementarity, where each is a necessary part of a single unified whole.
"έν διαφέρειν έαυτώ" (hen diapheron heauto) (English: "the one differentiated in itself") is a dictum by Heraclitus, referred to by Plato in his Symposium. That which is made up of both opposites is one, and only when the one is divided are the opposites disclosed. For Plato, the desire and pursuit of the whole, of original unity, is eros or love. He tells a story in which humans originally had two faces, four arms, and four legs. Our original nature was one and whole, and we were happy like that. Then we were split in two and torn from our other halves. Each of us, separated, is always looking for our other half. And when this other half is met, the pair is lost in an amazement of love, friendship, and intimacy. (Iain McGilchrist: "Good can embrace and neutralize evil, but evil cannot embrace and neutralize good. Hate can never embrace love, but love can embrace hate." Good and evil are opposite but that doesn't make them equal; the poles of duality are not symmetrical.)
All species face the same existential challenges—obtaining food, defending themselves, reproducing—but under varying circumstances and in different contexts, and so they have evolved different tools in order to survive. Robin Wall Kimmerer points out that, while compact and portable brains come in handy for mobile, autonomous creatures that move around a lot and pursue their food, they can be a disadvantage for ones that are fixed in place. The "sessile lifestyle" of being rooted to the ground means plants are unable to pick up and move when they need something, or when conditions turn unfavorable. "If you are a plant, having a brain is not an advantage," according to Stefano Mancuso. For instance, since plants can’t run away and frequently get eaten, it serves them well not to have any irreplaceable organs. So what do they do? "A plant has a modular design, so it can lose up to ninety percent of its body without being killed," he said. "There’s nothing like that in the animal world." But while plants do not have neurons, synapses, or a brain like animals do, this is no reason to be "cerebrocentric". Plants possess other information-processing systems that can be used as a basis for discussing cognitive abilities. They are able to sense and optimally respond to many environmental variables—light, water, gravity, temperature, soil structure, nutrients, toxins, microbes, herbivores, and chemical signals from other plants. A better understanding of how they do all that should help us design social systems that are more networked and decentralized.
Dougald Hine, George Monbiot, and Food Systems
Dougald Hine recently said in a presentation “I think that George Monbiot’s Regenesis, and the position that he has arrived at, is frankly something that comes from the left hemisphere approach to reality. It seems to me that his approach is repeating a pattern. Again and again in the history of modernity there have been these attempts, which McGilchrist would see as the left hemisphere taking control. There have been these attempts to get rid of the fragile, fallible exercise of human judgment and replace it with the fruits of measurement and calculation. And again and again, these attempts have failed. And we're living through another failure of them in the way that we've approached climate change.” Hine refers to a recent podcast in which Iain McGilchrist was also discussed (introduced at 36:10, and returned to again briefly at 45:38). Dougald Hine says "McGilchrist’s work on the distinction between the left and right hemispheres is relevant to all of this. It gives us something stranger than a simple binary, because the simple binary is itself the way that the left hemisphere is seeing the world." That's an excellent short description. I can see that Hine understands the importance of this work. Too many people never understand this sort of recursive perspective on dualism instantiated in the brain structure, and thus never understand McGilchrist.
We know food systems are highly context dependent; what will be appropriate in one region will not work in another. Diversity, including technological diversity, is important. The future will include foraging as well as fermentation (precision or otherwise). Monbiot seems to recognize this well, though Hine disputes his data concerning relative contributions. If the dispute is just over this data, then only looking at that will settle it. But there’s clearly more. Ecomodernism, technocentrism, and utilitarianism specifically are what his critics are accusing him of straying into, and these are the sort of reductive approaches that McGilchrist is very critical of, not just because they reflect a tendency to explain away value and meaning. (We know that Peter Singer justifies his utilitarian arguments precisely through appeals to compassion and a sense of justice.) It’s the LH tendency to “devitalize, dehumanize, de-animate, bureaucratize, proceduralize, and the culture of such processes” that McGilchrist dislikes most. Is Monbiot encouraging the sort of shift in thinking that
writers like Hine consider necessary? As McGilchrist said: "Push back
when you hear a bureaucracy that’s full of codes and procedures, taking
over from skill and judgment of professionals. You are making
relationships with students and patients [and ecologies]. These are the
important things about your work, not something that can be
administrated. Bring back into our lives the love of things that are not
utilitarian."
The LH focuses on 'what is attended to' and tends to ignore how that can change as a result of 'how it is attended to'. Or simply, "How you attend changes what it is you see." McGilchrist makes the distinction: “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." It's good to keep that in mind in this context, since sustainability, climate change, and planetary boundaries are all highly amenable to just such formulaic treatments that the LH excels at. And Monbiot is a first rate analyst of the food system and the various moving parts of which it is composed. If we accept his assumptions I'm sure his analyses all do pencil out. So for those who disagree, the usual criticism is to attack his assumptions (by which it's often meant the data and research upon which it is based) by suggesting they are either wrong or incomplete, or that he uses the wrong theory and models. From a LH viewpoint, the internally consistent dataset, model, and analysis is unassailable. And given this, the LH could almost be excused for its ideological fundamentalism. The problem doesn't lie in what the LH sees, but what it doesn't see - the world of experience. Only when the LH connects with that, through the RH, does it stand a chance of changing its conclusions. Our treatment of this subject material must have a very strong connection with the world itself.
Hine thinks Monbiot has a greater loyalty to the internal consistency of his particular brand of solutionism, and a valorization of said methods and approach, over a more RH approach. Would a RH approach do anything differently though? Hine struggles more when he tries to articulate a response to this question, which his criticism does beg us to ask. To restate, there's nothing wrong with what the LH does, or with utilitarianism, narrow instrumentalism, calculation, etc. per se. The problem is what an over reliance upon our favorite tools might prevent us from seeing, because they beckon us to preferentially use them, and because they may be unable to disclose to us important aspects of the larger world of which we are a part. Per McGilchrist, evolution saw fit to divide the brain, instantiating opponent processing with its negative feedbacks to prevent a runaway LH, and analysis paralysis, from going too far and disconnecting the organism from its embedded context. So a RH approach could similarly mirror this within the community of analysts. I highly recommend Erica Thompson's approach to "plausible models", because she shows how this might be done. Our models embody different ways of thinking, and can enter into a positive feedback loop that affects how we think about the future. As she said "We don’t want to know that by making more models, and increasingly similar models, that we will get the same answer again and again. What we want to know is that no ‘plausible model’ could give a different answer." Greater engagement with her concept of plausible models would likely go a long way toward addressing Hine's concerns. To conclude, I don't think it would be entirely fair to conflate Monbiot, the person, with his work. Nor to suggest that his RH voice is entirely absent, or that he's necessarily of one cast of mind or another, or that anyone (including ourselves or Hine) would do any better, all things considered. And I think Hine's criticisms would probably apply to other writers even more than Monbiot. But given those caveats, and in light of work by McGilchrist and Thompson, I don't think they are necessarily misplaced either.
Modeling: diversifying Tawiscara’s arrowsDavid Roberts and Erica Thompson point out that our models, our ways of structuring experience so we can make sense of it, are not just predictive processing engines, they embody different ways of thinking, and can enter into a positive feedback loop that affects how we think about the future. In effect, when a ‘failure of imagination’ goes into the design of a model it comes back out of the model to reinforce the same failure of imagination. This is important, since we rely on models to support good decision making. (For example, consider how the questionable assumptions of 'longtermism' can affect policy choices.) Any approach to modeling that fails to adequately represent a problem, risks failing to motivate appropriate action to address it and entering into a positive feedback loop where negligence leads to rising consequences, which require increasingly dramatic interventions to restore balance. So our models must always be qualified and remain up for debate. To maintain a sense of ‘negative capability’ we need to be able to think critically and carefully about them and how they are used. In her plea for epistemological humility, Thompson insightfully pointed out that “We don’t want to know that by making more models, and increasingly similar models, that we will get the same answer again and again. What we want to know is that no ‘plausible model’ could give a different answer. This reframes the question in the opposite direction. What would it mean to convince ourselves that no plausible model could give a different answer to a question? It means that instead of trying to push everything together to the center, to cluster and to try to find consensus and push the models toward each other, we need to be pushing them away from each other. We need to be investigating other plausible models. How can we, as a community, define a ‘plausible model’? Can we imagine models which start in completely different places, but model the same sorts of things? If you had a more diverse set of models that you consider to be plausible, and you found that they all said the same thing, then that would be very informative. If this same set all said different things, then that would also be informative because it might suggest that the models that you were using previously had, in some sense, a bit of ‘groupthink’ going on, that they were too conservative and clustered. This is what we would find if we tried to push the bounds of plausible model structures.
“Who is qualified to make a model? What do we mean by plausible? Which aspects are we prioritizing? Modelers have historically been drawn from a very small demographic of elite people, with the same biases and blindspots. So how do we diversify the pool of modelers? What are the relevant dimensions of expertise? What would it look like if we were to get some completely different group of people to make a climate model, or a pandemic model? The model would look completely different. Maybe it wouldn’t even be particularly mathematical, or maybe it would. Although we don’t know what it would look like, we should be exploring this. We should also consider creating an “IPCC Working Group 4” to openly address the ethical positions and value judgements behind the politics of climate change. When our value judgements are hegemonic, we may not want them dragged out in the light where they have to be defended. Seeing value judgments is another good argument for diversity in modeling. They are much more easily uncovered by someone who doesn’t share them, and separating them from the facts in this way could help to generate more conversation about those values. It would be revealing to ask “What is it we care about? What future are we most scared of? (Is it social breakdown, loss of economic wealth, loss of freedom, loss of biodiversity, loss of gas appliances?) What kind of future are we trying to reach?” This would help to incorporate more diverse communities into the climate conversation. Everyone has a right to an opinion about what they want the future to look like. Today we find it really hard to talk about values at all, though we want leaders who can embody our values and show wisdom in acting in accordance with them.
If we think of models as ways of forming ‘conviction narratives’, of thinking collectively about the future, as well as exploring logical consequences, then in that paradigm climate fiction is just as useful as a mathematical model. It allows us to explore the social and political consequences and how it would feel to be a part of that future. We can think about what it means and how it plays out in a way we can’t in a relatively low dimensional climate model. That’s something that mathematical models can’t represent at all, but climate fiction can do extremely well. We need to come up with a vision for 2100 and articulate what the future would look like if we solved the problems that we have today. A vision for how humanity relates to the planet we find ourselves on. Then we can use our models in a different mode. We can ask “If we are aiming for that future, what do we have to do one year from now, five years from now, 10 years from now, 30 years from now in order to stay on track for that future that we want?” That’s better than just saying “We are starting here from this initial condition and we have all these possible trajectories diverging forward from us.” That’s a much harder sell and it’s harder to communicate. Modeling different responses (or more likely, suites of responses) to climate change and comparing these side-by-side is what Thompson recommends to reveal hidden biases and blindspots and choose those most appropriate to our contemporary context. We are faced with numerous positive feedbacks pushing both cultural and Earth systems into disequilibrium. While Thompson's evaluation of models is amazing, she doesn't address the topic of climate engineering with much depth (admittedly, it's a very large subject and not the topic of her book). Given that the current Earth Energy Imbalance is itself the result of an unplanned climate engineering experiment via GHG pollution and land use change, holding a critical discussion of this and other responses is important. That said, it takes a lot of patience, due to the amount of misinformation and conspiracy theories which are reinforced in media and social interactions. So creating a framework within which to compare models, and a framework in which comparing models is even a desirable objective to begin with, are necessary prerequisites for a productive conversation. Adding arrows to Tawiscara's quiver isn't easy. (This blog article is itself an attempt at preparing the ground for such discussions).
There are many ways to compare possible responses, revealing relative strengths and weaknesses. While one model might suggest an elegantly simple and effective approach, our value judgments and the real world context ultimately determines whether it stands or falls. This may help to explain why approaches like a carbon fee and dividend, which might look good on paper, often fail to gain traction. Even today I note with no small measure of disappointment that James Hansen’s recent preprint “Global warming in the pipeline” identified “a global increasing price on GHG emissions” as his preferred intervention to address accelerating climate change. Have we not yet learned that this is structurally problematic? Clearly, we’re going to need to diversify our models! Hansen is an excellent scientist in regard to climate data, but this suggestion doesn't reflect either social preferences or political realities at all. Stratospheric aerosol injection, to take another example, has too many problems. So what’s my prediction? Given that the most influential variables determining EEI are Earth’s albedo and the greenhouse effect, and with the understanding that these tend to be valued, not in the abstract, but only insofar as they influence human well-being and ecological integrity, some form of a “silver buckshot” approach (compare with “silver bullet”) will likely come together that utilizes a suite of responses to achieve three broad goals: 1) "carbon drawdown and removal" (CDR) to reduce GHG concentrations over a period of decades, 2) "solar radiation management" (SRM) to increase albedo on a slightly faster timescale, and 3) safeguard our biological inheritance. Regarding GHG emissions, this means reducing pollutants in industry, agriculture, and land use, etc. via changes in both technology and behavior patterns.
Regarding SRM, current methods could be described as coming in two forms: those that operate indiscriminately at global and regional scales (and involve poorly understood processes), and those that use precision technologies for heat mitigation that finely tune or modify local albedo levels. Precision SRM leverages network effects in the same way that renewable energy does - as each incremental unit is added, the overall impact is enhanced. (Almeria in Spain being an unintentional proof of concept, with a reduction in annual temperatures even while surrounding regions get hotter.) Today MEER (Mirrors for Earth's Energy Rebalancing) has become the premier organization demonstrating the potential for precision SRM. While it may not be intuitively obvious, diverse lines of research appear to support Ye Tao's advocacy that it's possible to transform urban heat islands into cooler oases through the use of low cost materials and passive cooling methods.
And regarding ecological health, while the relative impact of the currently proposed vegetation changes is less clear, a wide range of methods to both preserve and enhance habitat (RAD, rewilding, etc.) will likely be pursued concomitant with other strategies. Partnering with biological processes for CDR is promising and includes a wide variety of proposals: kelp farming, agroecology, regenerative agriculture, permaculture, paludiculture, suberin crops, etc. (the list is very long). Actual impact would depend on a full lifecycle analysis, including all system inputs and overall scale of implementation. A diverse mix of these will likely play a role in some form, especially given their many co-benefits, such as improving food security and psychological health (see nature deficit disorder), but how big or effective that role will eventually be, and which methods will see wider adoption, is difficult to say. Once we climb the learning curve, several of these are likely to be increasingly important.
New technologies and efficiencies of scale in manufacturing have been key to the widespread adoption of clean technologies. We continue to see improvements in renewable energy collection and storage methods. The current trajectory here will likely continue. I'm not optimistic about fusion for a variety of reasons, but less publicized technologies like next generation deep geothermal are promising. The role of AI in sustainability is important, although again, not in the ways that tend to garner most public attention. There are many plausible collapse scenarios, several of which are related to the concept of planetary boundaries. Most attempts to model collapse are unavoidably speculative but illuminating in the sense described by Erica Thompson. I think James Lovelock's idea that Gaia could succumb to fatal marasmus is very insightful and deserves much greater attention; many researchers do take such questions seriously when modeling globally networked risks. Nations that have historically experienced a period of rapid population growth are now undergoing a major demographic transition accompanying a rise in standard of living, and with this we have also seen the rapid emergence of an energy transition. It's less clear to me whether growing economic inequality will be successfully reigned in to avoid rising class conflicts, and whether a myriad of other cultural problems, particularly those relevant to technocratic societies, will be resolved or simply exacerbated. This is significant, since maintaining progress across all domains, including sustainability, depends upon cultural health. But there are reasons for guarded optimism (or hopeful pessimism) in culture. Mark Vernon recently said "I think we're on a path of return [to a wiser culture], a return with the difference that we can self-consciously know that from whence we've come". Perhaps the demographic transition will prove him right.
We can link what Thompson said to a more fundamental problem related to several points Iain
McGilchrist makes. The fragmentation that characterizes schizophrenia also characterizes, in significant ways, our currently ratiocentric cultural moment and its overreliance on a very narrow set of models. Thompson earlier noted
that "framing climate as being a 'technical problem' is unhelpfully
reductionist and ignores the fact that this is a human problem and a
human question; it's never been just about the climate". Applying
inappropriately framed models to wicked problems has predictable
results. Excluding key aspects of human experience means we will gain
little to no traction in regard to promoting the sort of action that
must be taken. Human values motivate action, not technical data, but we need both. We need to understand disease if we're to cure it, or the causes of poverty if we are to alleviate it, etc. But if we only have data, and ignore values, then our models enter into a positive feedback loop,
proliferating detached analysis after analysis without much to show for
it. Breaking out of this "analysis paralysis" loop requires recognizing
the limitations of our tools, but especially the critical need for complementarity in how we attend to, and respond to, our actual lived experiences.
We should be promoting a discussion of values and injecting a whole lot
more negative feedback into what David Simon called "our currently
inert government". Thompson's suggestions here involve a few ways for
how to do each. As they say, these are "necessary but not sufficient"
conditions - just a few things we will need to do to address the
catatonic cultural moment we find ourselves mired in.
In his TED Talk "You don't actually know what your future self wants" Shankar Vedantam pointed out that we should keep in mind that the person we are today isn’t the person we will be tomorrow, and that each of these “selves” may answer the same question differently. The arguably more significant point that he could've made is that the person I am today is also two different "selves" who may answer the same question differently. There’s a lot more inner dialogue and negotiation going on between the hemispheres than we are consciously aware of. (This is usually a very productive relationship, though there’s good reason to believe it can deteriorate under certain conditions.) The idea that we are both one and (perhaps) many, at the same time (and different times), implies we have the capacity to see things from multiple perspectives simultaneously - a gift that seems rarely used or appreciated these days. There's a Chinese parable, sometimes called "The old man lost his horse", that demonstrates why one might find this useful. In the parable we might say that the father is Taronhiawagon and the neighbors are Tawiscara, to make a loose comparison to the preceding Iroquois legend.
Lesley Rogers authored a review of The Master and His Emissary in a 2010 issue of the journal Laterality, where he wrote that “critics will say that it is easy to draw up polarities that seem to fit with hemispheric differences but are a construct that trivialises the complexities”. Yet it must be pointed out to these critics that the polarities that McGilchrist refers to are contrasting tendencies that are documented in clinical studies, and these correspond with brain anatomy. One can be as specific as one likes, but calling such research a construct because it doesn’t conform to our assumptions (concerning what should or shouldn’t reveal 'polarities' or 'complexities') trivializes the evidence. If I want to see complexities but find polarities instead, I do not reject the evidence before my eyes on account of an ideological conflict. Frank Ruda apparently has no compunctions in regard to polarities. He wrote his provocatively titled book Abolishing Freedom "in a Hegelian spirit". (He asks "Was there ever any other?") His book presents "the coincidence of opposites, freedom born from fatalism, fatalism as precondition of freedom." (This will remind some of Karl Popper’s "paradox of freedom" and the related "paradox of tolerance".) Ruda goes on to note "In Bertolt Brecht’s brief, charming piece "Hegelian Dialectic," which consists of a dialogue between two characters, Ziffel and Kalle, the former makes an ironic plea for Hegel as the "greatest humorist among the philosophers." He classifies the Science of Logic—crucial cornerstone of Hegel’s entire system—as "one of the greatest humoristic works of world literature" because it is about the "custom of the concepts, these slippery, unstable, irresponsible existences." Ziffel argues that it is about "how they fight each other and enter, so to say, in pairs - each is married to its opposite. They can live neither with nor without each other." This sort of 'comic fatalism' is the bread and butter of tricksters...
It is right it should be so
Man was made for Joy & Woe
And when this we rightly know
Thro the World we safely go
Joy & Woe are woven fine
A Clothing for the soul divine
Under every grief & pine
Runs a joy with silken twine
- William Blake, Auguries of Innocence
In a conversation about hope with Toni Spencer,
Bayo Akomolafe said “Consider the American Constitution declaring “the pursuit of happiness” as a principle. I wish it also made space for “the pursuit of grief”. But no, it's just the pursuit of happiness. The problem is, when you push out the entanglements of grief and hopelessness, you demonize one side and fetishize the other. You end up with ‘fetishized joy’ materializing as absolute consumerism, extractivism, and white colonialism. You end up with dispossession, suffering, and pain. But if we give back space for grief, we can then taste the textures of joy.”
This recalls Frank Ruda once again. In the same way that we fetishize joy, Ruda argues that we fetishize freedom. And just as Akomolafe says that an openness to grief is a precondition for joy, Ruda proposes “fatalism as precondition of freedom.” Ruda wrote: “The term fatalism in this book simply designates the assumption that the worst has already happened, and thus it functions as a foil… My argument resembles to some extent what Jean-Pierre Dupuy calls “enlightened doom-saying.” Assuming that a final (for example, ecological) catastrophe that would end the present order of things is our destiny might retroactively change the conditions of possibility of this very destiny. It may retroactively make it possible to change what appears to us as fate… Only by assuming the worst can we become emancipated from the highly problematic stance on freedom that articulates it as possibility and capacity… The present book is therefore written in a Hegelian spirit (Was there ever any other?) and, methodologically speaking, seeks to present… The coincidence of opposites, freedom born from fatalism, fatalism as precondition of freedom.” We can see that like Ruda, William Blake, Iain McGilchrist, and many others, Akomolafe draws heavily on this Hegelian spirit. The coincidence of opposites is, of course, much older than Hegel as well, indeed it is a timeless intuition. And as we shouldn’t fetishize joy, neither should we fetishize a sort of hopelessness or romantic melancholy. I note this, because it is easy to get caught up in it and forget its limitations (which can expose us to the depredations of truly genocidal monsters). What we must cultivate is a greater comfort with uncertainty. And foster a kind of familiarity navigating liminal spaces where opposing forces are recognized, however with an understanding of their relative capacities.
There was another recent conversation between
Bayo Akomolafe and Rune Hjarnø Rasmussen about 'Esu', the Yoruba deity associated with crossroads, where some people may want to meet him, but he's also associated with trickery (similar to Loki, Raven, or the
heyoka perhaps), and he serves as an intermediary/messenger between evil spirits and human beings. Bayo Akomolafe says that in Nigeria there's the saying "Esu, please come close, but not too close". Note that this is nearly identical to John Arthur Gibson's
warning "it is right that he maintain a small distance from his brother, while at the same time keeping his attention upon him, neither letting him drift too far from his awareness, nor letting him blend with him." In one story, Esu "paints one side of his body white and the other black, then walks down the middle of the road. This confuses everyone. One villager says 'It's a white man that walked down the road'. Another villager says 'No, it's a black man that walked down the road'. And so they start fighting." This illustrates how Esu uses the binary way of thinking to trick people and upend stability. There are many popular comparisons between Esu and Satan, whom Akomolafe points out, is an "agential extension of God's hand, and not entirely other". This sort of complementarity in theological thinking was also brought up in McGilchrist's conversation with
Jordan Peterson about a month ago.
The tendency toward thinking in terms of binaries and increasing cultural polarization is precisely what Akomolafe, Marshall, Gibson, McGilchrist, and many others are pushing back against. In so many words, and through different methods, they are saying "Look, you can either remain deluded by polarized thinking, or you can see that opposites are complementary". Of course, at this point some people will wonder whether that characterization itself isn't just another polarization. But note: the two eyes are used together, the two brothers are inseparable twins, the two hemispheres are part of a single brain - these are all paradigms of complementarity, not polarization. In order to see this you must make the cognitive leap from polarization to complementarity, no one can do that for you. For many people this is paradoxical and makes no sense at all, and they refuse to make the leap, so it is not nearly as easy as it sounds. (As Shu-chou said: "There are only two diseases: one is riding an ass to search for the ass; the other is riding an ass and being unwilling to dismount. If, having found the ass, one is unwilling to dismount, this disease is most difficult to cure." Similarly, in Sanlun xuanyi, Jizang quoted the lines "The Great Sage preached the law of emptiness in order to free men from all personal views. If one still holds the view that emptiness exists, such a person the Buddhas will not transform." As if to emphasize this point, Jizang added dryly "If one is still attached to emptiness, there is no medicine that can eliminate the disease".) But once one lets go and the leap is taken, or once one dismounts from the ass, to use Shu-chou's analogy, it doesn't seem so difficult after all. Rune Hjarnø Rasmussen ended the conversation observing that "There are actually people who say that we don't live in the Anthropocene, but in the 'Ravencene', the period where the trickster aspect our gluttony and our naive 'tumbling along in the world' has created a huge problem. That's what tricksters often do in mythologies, they tumble into something and create a problem. But now we need the 'trickster transformation' and we need the 'trickster wisdom' to pull us through that, we need Raven as a creator to pull us through the ecological apocalypse that we are entering." The trickster, whether Esu, Raven, or the serpent in the Garden of Eden who helps humanity acquire knowledge, is sometimes the cure, and sometimes the disease. This is the sort of dual aspect modus operandi of Esu as well, and why Akomolafe suggests that this may be just as much the 'Esucene' as the 'Ravencene'. These are all rather clever approaches for attempting to communicate a deeper insight into the different ways in which we attend to the world.
Pre-Socratic philosopher Anaxagoras of Clazomenae (500 BC) asserted that the world of objects was a continuum of all things in all things. Every thing had some of every other thing in it, nothing can ever be completely separated, that is, cut off from everything else. Contrast this with the atomistic (particle) view of reality espoused by another Pre-Socratic, Democritus of Abdera (460 BC), which defines our contemporary perspective of the world and hence our notions of what it means to be human. Walter Benesch remarked that “These Pre-Socratic poles of ‘essence as continuum’ versus ‘essence as particle’ are the source of our definitions, our knowledge, and our values.” Yes, but interposed between the poles of Anaxagoras and Democritus stood Heraclitus of Ephesus (500 BC), who described the coming together of opposites, and the tension between them, which he called harmony. He forms a very important counterpoint to the tendencies of our modern way of thinking, where opposites are simply the other ends of the line. Perhaps Heraclitus and William Blake were both tricksters (and a very good argument could be made that Zhuangzi was as well). Of course, tricksters only appear as such to those who don't understand what they have to teach. Once one understands, it's just common sense.
Roderick Tweedy wrote The God of the Left Hemisphere, a book that is based upon the premise that William Blake’s descriptions of Urizen are in fact descriptions of the operations of the brain’s left hemisphere. I am reminded of George Beaver's story of Tawiscara (the Iroquois corollary of Urizen) who was in a contest with Taronhiawagon (embodiment of the right hemisphere). The contest was only decided when Taronhiawagon outsmarted Tawiscara by playing to his sense of pride and vanity: he let him appear to win. That made Tawiscara careless and allowed Taronhiawagon to overtake him. There are other parallels, Luke 16:13-15 reads "No one can serve two masters. Either you will hate the one and love the other, or you will be devoted to the one and despise the other. You cannot serve both God and money. The Pharisees, who loved money, heard all this and were sneering at Jesus. He said to them, "You are the ones who justify yourselves in the eyes of others, but God knows your hearts. What people value highly is detestable in God’s sight."" Again, in 1 Timothy 6:10, "the love of money is a root of all kinds of evil" and Matthew 6:3-4, "do not let your left hand know what your right hand is doing, so that your giving may be in secret. Then your Father, who sees what is done in secret, will reward you."
These verses from the Christian Bible suggest that Urizen, Tawiscara, and the love of money are comparable archetypes or processes that constrict our capacity for love and attention, rendering us blind to higher values and experiences. The Iroquios story suggests the possibility of leveraging such base impulses in the service of higher purposes, if we are careful enough. If I let Tawiscara appear to win, I can deliver a decisive blow. If I promise money to the left hemisphere (which only understands quantity) so that it does something in the service of a higher purpose (only the right hemisphere understands values) then have I outsmarted it and leveraged it's 'greed for good'? After all, this is the logic behind carbon taxes: make clean energy affordable. Similarly, a student might be motivated to study harder if they are assured they will receive a big paycheck in the not too distant future. Are there limits to the power of greed as a motivating force? Could it encourage one to do anything? Perhaps, but in many instances that lowest denominator of greed may fail to motivate at all. And other motivations, other than simple acquisition, may also not be sufficiently present either. This can lead to generalized problems related to engagement. It has been noted that "motivation is never there when you need it". And that, in fact, "action comes before motivation". We are motivated by previous success, by a sense of efficacy and a desire to build upon it. Accordingly, it is actually the formation and maintenance of healthy habits that support one's goals. This may appear to be a chicken and egg problem to some degree, but progress is likely maintained through the harmonious interaction of the left hemisphere's narrow pursuit of goals in simultaneous combination with the right hemisphere's ability to appreciate flow states and provide sustained guidance. There's a sort of balance to be had here. In “The Use of Poetry and the Use of Criticism” T.S. Eliot wrote: "The chief use of the ‘meaning’ of a poem, in the ordinary sense, may be (for here I am speaking of some kinds of poetry and not all) to satisfy one habit of the reader, to keep his mind diverted and quiet, while the poem does its work upon him: much as the imaginary burglar is always provided with a nice bit of meat for the house-dog." McGilchrist interpreted this to mean that "We need to sort of occupy the grasping mind, what I call the apprehending mind, we need to give it something to play with and be out of the way while the comprehending mind, the right hemisphere, is able to put together the whole picture."
These hemisphere differences were noted in a conversation with Alex Gomez-Marin, in which McGilchrist said "Think back to the poet William Blake, who in The Marriage of Heaven and Hell wrote "The hours of folly are measur’d by the clock, but of wisdom: no clock can measure." He was not referring to something that was different in quantity, but something that was different in quality. This, of course, is again a left-right hemisphere distinction. The left is interested in how much, how many, quantity, more than it is in differentiating the qualities of individual cases. Whereas the right hemisphere is the one that really appreciates qualitative differences. Henri Bergson said the take on time and movement that makes it a ‘thing’, and a static thing at that, is merely designed to suit utility. Without knowing it, he was talking about the left hemisphere's need to be immobilized, to split up, in order to instrumentalize the world." As McGilchrist said earlier, "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." This suggests is that Urizen, Tawiscara, and money have an important evolutionary role that we can leverage to achieve the higher goals of Taronhiawagon, but 'do not let the left hemisphere know what the right hemisphere is doing' as it were. The left hemisphere may think it is all about getting, though it is really about living (something that would be unintelligible to it).
Dacher Keltner recently said: “Ironically, the more wealth we have, it often disconnects us from deep sources of happiness. So with more wealth, people feel less kindness towards other people, which is one of the very basic pathways to happiness. And interestingly, Paul Piff recently found that with more wealth I feel less wonder and awe about the world. That one really stirs me. As we immerse ourselves in this material life, we lose sight of the wonder of the world. So real deep concerns for the perils of consumerism, materialism, and privilege." We can leverage money to achieve higher goals, but only if we understand that there's a sort of balance to be had here. And that balance is easily disturbed under the conditions of increasing wealth. It's a matter of perception, of how I see myself relative to my peers and neighbors, an eminently psychological phenomenon influencing our take on reality. We can thread the needle between these positions in a non-zero sum synergistic way: let each do what it does best. Let the left hemisphere do that which it is capable of understanding (how much, how many, quantity), and in this way the right can realize the qualitative experiences which only it is capable of appreciating.
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| "Creations Battle" by John Fadden (Mohawk) |
"There are two minds in human beings..."Taking a closer look at the brain itself, in The Master and his Emissary McGilchrist wrote "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... capable singly of underwriting nothing less than a version of reality." This has been explored in some detail by Elizabeth Schechter, using examples such as hemispherectomy patients, and Donald Hoffman provided some of the more popular examples in an interview:
"I know that there are at least two different subjects in me. And I can see that if I take a knife and cut the corpus callosum. I have a left hemisphere and a right hemisphere. You do too. There are 225 million fibers, and if you cut those fibers, it turns out, you can actually get clear evidence (in a few people this has been done) that there's a different personality in the left hemisphere than in the right hemisphere. In one case the left hemisphere believed in God, and the right hemisphere was an atheist. The left hemisphere wanted to have a desk job, and the right hemisphere wanted to be a race car driver. They can even fight. The left hemisphere controls the right hand, the right hemisphere controls the left hand. The left hand can be fighting what the right hand is doing. You know, the left hand might be taking off the clothes the right hand is trying to put on. So these two different consciousnesses cooperate to create the conscious agent that is me. When the corpus callosum is intact there seems to be a unified me. But if you cut the corpus callosum, you could easily, it turns out, and this is how strange it can get, they were able to get these split brain patients to play 20 questions with themselves (MacKay, D. M., & MacKay, V. (1982). "Explicit dialogue between left and right half-systems of split brains"). The right hemisphere has a word in mind, the left hemisphere doesn't know what it is, and then the left hemisphere, which can talk, can start asking questions. "Is it animal, vegetable, or mineral?" Things like that. And the right hemisphere, which can't talk but can understand language, can use the left hand, 'thumbs up' for yes, 'thumbs down' for no. So a split brain patient has two separate spheres of consciousness, so separate that they can play 20 questions. And the left hemisphere doesn't know the answer, right? The left hemisphere does not know and sometimes will fail to guess in 20 questions what's in the mind of the right hemisphere. Now some people argue that there's no separate personalities, no separate consciousnesses. Good luck making that point when you know the left hemisphere can fail to win a 20 questions game with the right hemisphere, even when giving its level best. Whatever agent that is me, that is talking to you, seems to be a combination of my left hemisphere and my right hemisphere agents. If we split my corpus callosum, that higher level agent would apparently be gone, and there would be two different agents that could now play 20 questions with each other, and lose the game of 20 questions with each other, whereas I couldn't play 20 questions with myself right now and lose."
McGilchrist described how he was astonished to find that the opposing tendencies of the two hemispheres was effectively described by Coleridge in his book Biographia Literaria: "This power... reveals itself in the balance or reconciliation of opposite or discordant qualities: of sameness, with difference; of the general, with the concrete; the idea, with the image; the individual, with the representative; the sense of novelty and freshness, with old and familiar objects; a more than usual state of emotion, with more than usual order." As McGilchrist explained in The Matter with Things, "The reconciling of these opposites at a ‘meta’- level is undertaken by the right hemisphere, not the left. This is especially striking when taken with Coleridge’s description of the difference between Fancy and Imagination... What he has done here is, first, to draw attention to two dispositions towards the world, that of Fancy and that of Imagination, that have opposing qualities; and, second, to the fact that, at another level, one of these dispositions – that of Imagination – is not frightened by opposites, but has the ability to synthesise opposites themselves – including these. This aligns with what we know of the hemispheres. They yield two distinct takes on reality; but only one of them sees the two takes as complementary parts of a whole. And that is the right hemisphere, the left hemisphere seeing opposites as mutually exclusive.” A greater understanding of the relationship between our parts, and how they influence who we are, both as individuals and cultures, is extremely important for “staying with the material trouble”, as the journal Unpsychology recently urged writers in their request for submissions to a forthcoming issue on the topic "Imaginings".
Coincidence of opposites in Religion
Andrew Davis prefaced a short lecture he recently gave on the implications of McGilchrist's thought for religious studies with the important reminder that “hemispheric asymmetry means that the right hemisphere's take is in no sense a special case of the left hemisphere’s, but that of the left hemisphere is a special case of the right hemisphere, which already includes it. Nevertheless, the inverse relationship has prevailed across our disciplines in the modern world. We have elevated the methods of the left hemisphere as dominant, and in so doing are threatening our civilizational future. Seeing the respective worlds that are created by the hemispheres in their proper asymmetrical relationship is thus not simply a matter of science or philosophy, although it is that, but ultimately a matter of truth and survival." It's worth adding to this preface a few points that Jenny Mackness made earlier, to help avoid any misconceptions. Iain McGilchrist does not follow a particular religion. Although he draws a lot from Christianity and Daoism, no advocacy of any particular religion is made. Neither does he consider himself an atheist. Instead, we get a lot of apophatic and paradoxical statements. (This is not satisfying to the left hemisphere at all!) Bearing these considerations in mind, let's hear how Davis tries to apply his thought. I think we can see some relevance for both fundamentalism, process theology, and even quasi-religious movements like singularitarianism, which include a few of these elements:
"Which god is it that the right hemisphere reveals? It's certainly not the all-controlling ‘unmoved mover’ that is independent, unrelated, and wholly transcendent in relation to the world. For this is precisely the kind of dysfunctional deistic or theistic god the left hemisphere is fond of projecting. Nor is a wholly imminent pantheism where ‘all things are God and God is all things’ an adequate rendering of God's relationship to the world. For McGilchrist, each of these notions suffer to the extent that the central element of relationship is lost. Instead, McGilchrist considers the fruitfulness of panentheism, where ‘all things are in God and God is in all things’. He emphasizes panentheism as a position that does not abstract or collapse together God and the world, or transcendence and imminence, but rather preserves them through relational union. Panentheism permits something further: the possibility that God has a relationship, not just with the divine self, but with something other, and this is the drive behind there being a creation at all. We need imminence, which pantheism offers, but we also need the union of transcendence with imminence, which only some form of panentheism encompasses. Panentheism expresses a conceptual framework that preserves the coincidence of opposites. McGilchrist stresses the union of eternity and temporality, of being and becoming in God. What is more, he understands very clearly Whitehead's dialectical vision, where God and the world fulfill each other and bring each other into being such that the ‘one eternal’ becomes ‘many and ceaselessly changing’, just as the ‘many and ceaselessly changing’ become ‘one and eternal’. [McGilchrist also said "Panentheism is a left hemisphere way of thinking about animism."]
In quoting Whitehead's famous lines that “It is as true to say that God creates the World, as that the World creates God” (Whitehead 1929), McGilchrist recognizes the collective responsibility, indeed the co-creative communal imperative, that we (as world) have in light of this mutual relationship. If God is an eternal becoming, fulfilled (as God) through the response of his creation, and we (for our part) constantly more fulfilled through our response to God, then we are literally partners in the creation of the universe, partners even in the becoming of God, who is himself ‘becoming’ as much as ‘being’, in which case it is imperative that we try to reach out, and know, and love that God. Not just for our own sakes but because we bear some responsibility, however small, for the part we play in creation. How big or small, we cannot know given our limited experience of a finite world."
On logic
The examples given above of coinciding, complementary opposites help to illuminate the consequences that McGilchrist's hemisphere hypothesis has for the way in which we understand the world, and they inform the logical framework that he directs our attention toward. After providing far more exegesis regarding the Iroquois legend than I have space to recount here (please see his chapter, or a video), he wrote: "The principle for division and the principle for union need to be brought together, not divided. We need not either both/and or either/or, but both both/and and either/or. We need not nonduality only, but the nonduality of duality and nonduality." This exhaustive enumeration of the combinations which dual-aspect monism (aka non-dual dualism) allows could promote a sort of metacognitive awareness. It may be possible to form a much longer recursive sequence. (Try drawing a Venn diagram at the intersection of the circles in each Venn diagram to picture this sort of infinite recursion.) Symbols incorporating fractal shapes can portray both recursion and asymmetry very well. Examples include the Japanese inyo symbol and various Apollonian gaskets, which are an example of a limit set of a Kleinian group. (See this fractal by Jos Leys, showing torque that is reminiscent of binary black holes in the process of merging, or perhaps Yakovlevian torque.) A duality could be thought of as a partition of a single system into two (or more) subsystems such that we are now capable of characterizing a relationship between them. It is this relationship that 'exists', not the subsystems. (See ontic structural realism in physics.) Partitioning the universe or space might allow us to treat the part sectioned off as if it were an object or thing, but since there is no 'God's eye point of view' regarding the entirety of the universe, we cannot speak of it in this way. (For more on this, a great place to begin might be Rovelli's "Helgoland" and Lee Smolin's papers on a "causal theory of views").
With further reflection, the curious reader might note that there are other elaborate logical formalisms that have been developed, and which he could have referenced. There is dialetheism and paraconsistent logic, as well as anekantevada, the catuskoti (tetralemma), and saptabhangi naya (a seven value logic) within Eastern philosophies. So why didn't McGilchrist highlight any of these? I believe that it was partially due to his professed lack of familiarity with Eastern philosophy (perhaps false modesty on his part), but more importantly, these were not strictly necessary, nor as relevant to his main thesis. As he described it, the left hemisphere sees the world as an either/or proposition, which is to say, it tends toward an all or nothing point of view. The right on the other hand integrates diverse alternatives and entertains vagueness. So while alternative logics push just how far the tension between polarities can go (and the saptabhangi introduces the notion of indescribability, of being outside conceptualization), the simplest and clearest example of what the left hemisphere is trapped by is still just that basic yes/no logical dualism. As Gautama related in the Kaccānagotta Sutta, "For the most part, Kaccāna, sentient beings depend on two kinds of belief - belief that 'there is' (things exist) and belief that 'there is not' (things do not exist)." Recall also that MLK clearly saw the social consequences when the majority of people prefer the absence of tension to the presence of justice. ...Once this "stumbling block" is understood and overcome, all those more elaborate systems can and do develop quite easily.
So to recap, if the first and most basic sort of belief is the monovalent viewpoint, then the second would be a multivalent viewpoint. Progress has been made! But this is not the stopping point. The third step, recognized both by McGilchrist and many non-Western (and some early Western) philosophies, is to turn around and integrate the multivalent systems with the simple monovalent view preferred by the left hemisphere. Recall the Zen parable: "Before I had studied Zen for thirty years, I saw mountains as mountains, and waters as waters. When I arrived at a more intimate knowledge, I came to the point where I saw that mountains are not mountains, and waters are not waters. But now that I have got its very substance I am at rest. For it's just that I see mountains once again as mountains, and waters once again as waters." As I see it, it's this third step, to get to the very substance, that is being advocated by both Zen and McGilchrist, and still more vividly by the Iroquois legend.
Robert Benchley has been credited with the first know instance of a phrase that has long since entered common parlance. In a 1920 article that appeared in Vanity Fair he wrote: "There may be said to be two classes of people in the world; those who constantly divide the people of the world into two classes, and those who do not. Both classes are extremely unpleasant to meet socially, leaving practically no one in the world whom one cares very much to know." McGilchrist referenced either this quote, or one of the many variations that it has since inspired, in The Master and His Emissary. As he wrote: “It has been said that the world is divided into two types of people, those who divide the world into two types of people, and those who don’t. I am with the second group.” I think this might be called McGilchrist’s Paradox, a "true contradiction" or dialetheia. Because if one is "with the second group" this may be justifiably understood as acknowledging the existence of the very dichotomy it simultaneously refutes.
That is equivalent to the third tetralemma option of both: "it is" and "it is not". The tetralemma also includes a fourth option: "it is neither," which could be described as corresponding to a metaphorical or translucent understanding. As noted above, once we begin, these three options (trivalent logic) can be iterated endlessly. It is this 'aspect of the infinite' that suggests if we stop at any given point we remain incomplete, and thus "neither" (also translated as "undescribable" by the philosopher Walter Benesch), which is why nothing can be exhaustively enumerated, and reality can only be gestured toward. And so, consistent with his hypothesis, McGilchirst's Paradox only holds when it is viewed translucently. If it is understood literally, then it neither is nor is not. And that takes us all the way to viewing this paradox from the point of view of the final (seventh) conclusion of Saptabhangivada: "it is, it is not, and it is neither". Benchley's last remark suggests that the only pleasant people are those who are able to entertain these latter possibilities, which if we are to judge by the quality of popular discourse, may be rare indeed.
Choosing, in the abstract, which of several competing narratives is healthiest is impossible. It's like a game of 'rock, paper, scissors', in that in some situations a narrative may be best, while in others it will be worst. It all depends. So while there is definitely a structure of better and worse, it's contextual, and not absolute in any dogmatic sense. This gets tricky when we think about values. Union is better than division, right? But the union of union and division is even better still. So can we choose between union and division as to which of them is really better? If we choose division alone, we are wrong. If we choose union alone, we are wrong. If we choose both, we are better than either. But wouldn't the postmodern relativists choose both as well? Yes, they might, but they might equally choose either/or alone. However we must be able to see both either/or and both/and. The metaphysics of McGilchrist are necessarily inclusive (therefore paradoxical) and necessarily asymmetric or hierarchical (therefore translucent). Postmodern relativists are not bound to inclusivity (it's merely optional) and they notoriously dislike hierarchy (preferring a flat immanence without transcendence). Perhaps the example of Quaestio simpsonorum would help them understand asymmetry and translucency, and hence McGilchrist’s naturalized metaphysics?
Addendum One:
In a recent dialogue between Alex Gomez-Marin and Iain McGilchrist concerning chapter 20, "The coincidentia oppositorum", of his book The Matter with Things, McGilchrist once again related this story (edited slightly for brevity):
"There's a legend of the Onondaga people, who are part of the Iroquois Nation. It describes a situation in which, because of the gradual fading of light in the cosmos, it is decided that some cosmic forces must go and create the Earth and all the living beings of the Earth. This takes the form of two brothers. And they are not equal. One of the brothers is called 'He who grasps the sky with both hands' and the other is called 'Flint' or 'He who is crystal ice'. [Elsewhere these brothers are named Taronhiawagon and Tawiscara.] The thing about Taronhiawagon is that he understands where it is he's come from and why he has come, and he has true creative power. Whereas Tawiscara says "I'm not interested in where I came from. I'm very happy living here and using my arrow, which was a gift from my father". The arrow is a flint arrow which gives speech. So in this legend there are two things that alert us to the relationship with the left hemisphere: that there is this arrow that is going for its target (the prey), and the idea of speech (and that it can manipulate). Indeed this is what we now see.
Taronhiawagon sets about creating beautiful creatures. And Tawiscara is jealous. He takes his brother's creations and he walls them up in a cave. And so Taronhiawagon is very worried about this. Meanwhile Tawiscara tries to create creatures of his own, but effectively they are all misbegotten. He creates something that is rather like a human, but it screams and runs off and hides. It was a kind of nightmarish vision of a creation. To cut a long story short, what happens is that the brother that has the insight and the power realizes that the other brother can do good as long as he is under the tutelage of his own self, as long as he himself has the tutelage of the brother. So that means he must get quite close to him. But on the other hand he mustn't get too close to him because otherwise he might get swallowed up in the doings of his brother. So there is this kind of 'necessary distance' to be had. Effectively what happens is that they go ahead and Tarohiawagon helps Tawiscara to create a human being, which Taronhiawagon thinks will probably end up attacking him, and attacking the world, but he says "Let us see what happens with this new human that we've made". (Because he's already made a human, this is a new human they've both made together.) At the end of the legend, Taronhiawagon says "There is a place which is created from the jealousy and anger of Tawiscara and, if things go the way he wants, I will come and try and rescue you from going to this place. I will do it twice. But if it happens a third time I will not be able to save you".
So that's the story. it's an extraordinary story because it's one of an ongoing creation, a continuing process. It involves these two forces, one of which sees more and superintends that of the other. And it involves this conflict between them which can lead to strife and destruction. And this idea I find extraordinary: that there will be a "third time", because of course in The Master and His Emissary I looked at the history of the West, and suggested that twice already we had created a civilization which then decayed in this way [the Greek and Roman civilizations]. And now we are at that third moment. [From TMWT: "In the past this has coincided with the over-reaching of an empire, as today, and the collapse of a civilisation, as I fear awaits us tomorrow. But never has the hold of the left hemisphere on us been more complete than it is today."]
One of the things I argue is that everything is created out of the coming together of opposites, and that these opposites are therefore both needed and in fact essential. (As Alan Watts says "We can't keep the mountains and get rid of the valleys". I think that's a very very simple way of looking at the way in which opposites create one another.) Nonetheless, there is very rarely parity between them. One is usually the more important one, and it tends to be able to take the other one under its wing, under its aegis, and in this sense I talk about how all of creation involves, as Goethe said, the union of what is divided, and the division of what is unified. We need the union of the forces of union and division, not just one or the other.
'Dual-aspect monism' suggests we can have monism and we can have dualism. Well, yes and no. The non-dual quality of duality and non-duality is not quite the same thing… A number of writers have commented on the idea of 'staying with the contradiction'. Somewhere I think Joseph Campbell says "Stay with the contradiction, hold both elements of the contradiction, because there is always a third element that will arise from them." …Love necessitates making oneself vulnerable. Both receiving it and giving it are bound up with vulnerability. If you try to make yourself invulnerable you cannot either give or receive love. And so when people try not to be wounded, they see they succeed in not living."
In one of his (many) popular videos, Richard Dawkins said “Science proceeds, I believe, by intuitive leaps of the imagination, by building an idea of ‘what might be true’, and then testing it by experiment and observation in the second phase. It’s a kind of Darwinian selection of mutation, which is provided by the imagination. So intuition is very important, but it is important that scientists should not be so wedded to their intuition that they omit the very important testing phase, and if their hypothesis is disproved they should regard that as a reason to reject the hypothesis or modify it.” Others have noted that "all scientific hypotheses are just-so stories prior to being tested”. And so “the goal should not be to expel stories from science, but rather to identify the stories that are also good explanations." And then, following Dawkins’ urging, we should test these stories. One might say that although the scientific method begins with ‘just-so stories’ that are provided by intuition and imagination, it crucially doesn’t end there. The experiment and observation of the second phase is capable of ‘separating the chaff from the grain’ among the myriad creation stories, the ‘just-so stories’, and the hypotheses we entertain. While this particular legend is interpreted by McGilchrist as an intuitive insight into hemispheric differences and their implications, that’s by no means an obvious one! For many people, it’s simply a story about the struggle between good and bad (though this may be a reflection of more recent Judeo-Christian influences). So it’s perfectly reasonable to question the value of these stories, while allowing the possibility that the intuitive processes that gave rise to them just may have been onto something after all. It might appear to be a stretch of the imagination, but McGilchrist’s interpretation of this legend in light of the evidence that he assembled for his hemisphere hypothesis makes me wonder just how much insight into the workings of the mind is possible, given the limited tools and methods available at the time. We may never know for sure.
Addendum Two: Recursive series:
1. We need not EITHER both/and OR either/or, but BOTH both/and AND either/or.
2. We need not EITHER (both/and and either/or) OR (both/and or either/or), but BOTH (both/and and either/or) AND (both/and or either/or).
3. We need not EITHER [(both/and and either/or) and (both/and or either/or)] OR [(both/and and either/or) or (both/and or either/or)], but BOTH [(both/and and either/or) and (both/and or either/or)] AND [(both/and and either/or) or (both/and or either/or)].
Substitution: x="both/and", y="either/or"
1. We need not EITHER x OR y, but BOTH x AND y.
2. We need not EITHER (x and y) OR (x or y), but BOTH (x and y) AND (x or y).
3. We need not EITHER [(x and y) and (x or y)] OR [(x and y) or (x or y)], but BOTH [(x and y) and (x or y)] AND [(x and y) or (x or y)].
Substitution: j="x or y", k="x and y"
1. We need not EITHER j, but BOTH k.
2. We need not EITHER (k) OR (j), but BOTH (k) AND (j).
3. We need not EITHER [(k) and (j)] OR [(k) or (j)], but BOTH [(k) and (j)] AND [(k) or (j)].
4. We need not EITHER ([(k) and (j)] and [(k) or (j)]) OR ([(k) and (j)] or [(k) or (j)]), but BOTH ([(k) and (j)] and [(k) or (j)]) AND ([(k) and (j)] or [(k) or (j)])
Replacing the variables in the fourth iteration with the words they represent yields the very long sentence:
4. We need not EITHER ([(both/and and either/or) and (both/and or either/or)] and [(both/and and either/or) or (both/and or either/or)]) OR ([(both/and and either/or) and (both/and or either/or)] or [(both/and and either/or) or (both/and or either/or)]), but BOTH ([(both/and and either/or) and (both/and or either/or)] and [(both/and and either/or) or (both/and or either/or)]) AND ([(both/and and either/or) and (both/and or either/or)] or [(both/and and either/or) or (both/and or either/or)]).
Another variation: Recursive series (asymmetric inyo symbol, animated):
1. We need not EITHER both/and 2 OR either/or 1, but BOTH both/and 2 AND either/or 1.
2. We need not EITHER (both/and and either/or) 3 OR (both/and or either/or) 2, but BOTH (both/and and either/or) 3 AND (both/and or either/or) 2.
3. We need not EITHER [(both/and and either/or) and (both/and or either/or)] 5 OR [(both/and and either/or) or (both/and or either/or)] 3, but BOTH [(both/and and either/or) and (both/and or either/or)] 5 AND [(both/and and either/or) or (both/and or either/or)] 3. And so on...
Notice the recursive relationship among the circles in the Fibonacci sequence, progressively approximating the "golden ratio". Depending on the image orientation, the circles are similar to the inyo symbol, or the line could represent a shoreline with rising mountains reflected in a calm lake. If one wanted, the orientation of the circle pairs could be flipped on each iteration, yielding a variety of different visual impressions (although these would depart still further from the original inyo symbol). Starting with a Fibonacci Inyo, duplicating the pattern within each circle, under a quarter rotation for each iteration, yields a new pattern. And packing any number of these on a plane or in three dimensions (spheres) would yield the Apollonian gasket type of pattern. Many other patterns can be constructed using these circles, including the 'vesica piscis'. Since this is a recursive or fractal process, with potentially unlimited iterations, we could make infinitely long sentences and patterns. Friedensreich Hundertwasser did not like straight lines. As McGilchrist noted, they are merely the “limit case” of the curve, and in any event they are surrounded by broad arcs that expand outward into wide open space, all of which becomes visible when we finally lift our eyes from its “absolute tyranny”. McGilchrist again: "Straight lines, in as much as they can be said to exist at all, do so as the limit case of curves, which constitute all the lines in nature (even space and the paths traveled in it are curved). Linearity is the limit case of nonlinearity, and can be approximated only by taking ever narrower views of an infinitely complex picture... A curved line has fundamental properties distinct from a straight one. Just as there is no way you can get to extension in space or duration in time by the amassing of infinitesimal points or slices, there is no way you can get to a curve using straight lines: you can approximate it with evermore tangents but never actually achieve a curve."
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