Education for Gestalt perception

"When you stop educating your people you start to destroy your civilization. I believe we're taking a sledgehammer to our civilization right now." - Iain McGilchrist, Interview: "Asymmetry and Symmetry" (2022)

"The only true voyage of discovery, is not to visit strange lands but to possess other eyes, to behold the universe through the eyes of another, of a hundred others." - Marcel Proust, In Search of Lost Time (1923)

"Don't blindly follow in the footsteps of the wise; seek what they have sought." - Matsuo Basho

"Experience is a master teacher, even when it’s not our own." - Gina Greenlee, Postcards and Pearls (2008)

The civilizational consequences of left hemisphere capture are many. We live in a fragmented society running on a hedonic treadmill to the point of exhaustion. Human relationships and qualities are increasingly marginalized, while the "Internet of things" and the "quantified self" are optimized, part of the left hemisphere's last ditch effort to create a simulacrum of the right hemisphere world. Nonetheless, both of these are for the most part devoid of intrinsic significance. This fractured view of the world spills over into education, work, and the economy in extremely harmful ways affecting each of us. Western civilization has been swallowed by an idealized version of the market, infecting our cultural psychology and social norms. 

But here I want to focus on the very high cost this imposes on youth. For many of the youth alive today, as they grow and mature to become "productive members" of society, this widespread representational thinking within the economic sector, to the almost complete exclusion of right hemisphere forms of engagement, is often felt most acutely when they face a choice to either enter the workforce or continue education and training for a more specialized position. Not only is the choice itself artificial and unnecessary, but many youth are asked to make it effectively blind.

They are given a very fragmented view of the world in a thousand pieces. From these they must try to assemble a coherent whole without having much of a clue beforehand of exactly what it is they are putting together. As McGilchrist has noted, seeing the whole before the pieces is a far more natural and intuitive form of engagement. But the guidance and understanding necessary to make an informed choice has not been provided to many youth today. 

“No one sees trees. We see fruit, we see nuts, we see wood, we see shade. We see ornaments or pretty fall foliage. Obstacles blocking the road or wrecking the ski slope. Dark, threatening places that must be cleared. We see branches about to crush our roof. We see a cash crop. But trees - trees are invisible.” ― Richard Powers, The Overstory (2018) 

Some years ago Finland mandated that "phenomenon-based learning", a process where new information is applied to a phenomenon or problem, was to be provided alongside traditional subject-based instruction in schools. This is a positive development, as it places subjects within a context. One might describe it as a kind of "Gestalt education". Compare this to what confronts most youth in America who may be considering a college education: a list of fields of study, often numbering over a hundred, arranged in several subdivided groups, with an obligatory nod to the value of interdisciplinary study. However well intended, I don't think this is sufficient. 

It is the right hemisphere that is engaged in Gestalt perception. "The right hemisphere sees... a multitude of individually unique wholes, or Gestalten, that themselves form part of an ever greater Gestalt" (The Matter with Things). While the left hemisphere is more engaged in abstract representations of isolated features and relationships. Although these models can and do have their uses, particularly in revealing otherwise invisible patterns, the resulting complex network often lacks a "feel for the whole" (Christopher Alexander), and may hinder understanding if it obscures the terrain to which it ostensibly refers. Gestalt perception of the economy is needed, not so much to control it as to understand it. The kind of attention we provide may determine whether we see "Moloch" (Schmachtenberger's 'game theory monster') or a "Social-Ecological System" (Ostrom). Local level interactions will invariably be understood within that larger context. 

Like many of you, I know young people who are trying to find their way in the world. And I think it's our responsibility to help guide them as they make education and work choices. The topic has been addressed many times before. John Ehrenfeld has written on it, both in his books, articles, and commentary. Others have more recently described the importance of doing the real work of caring for people. 

This falls under action, because either we are making choices for ourselves with immediate consequences for personal finances, quality of life, and larger social impacts, or we are advising others for whom these consequences are very real. Education and work is also a theme frequently addressed in conversations with McGilchrist. And even though some of us may have left the workforce, I'd wager many of us are either still very active or pursuing other goals that involve a similar commitment of time and energy. (I still put in a full work week, on top of all those other pursuits.) 

The implications of the fragmentation of education extend still further. Consider the inversion of contemporary values. Insofar as any are still salient, they have been reduced as far as possible, another consequence of the disintegration of Gestalt perception. If this were rectified it could invert the relative attention, prestige, and remuneration accorded to various occupations. Clearly, for the most part, this hasn't happened in the world today. The pure instrumentalism of money management still demands the highest salaries. But as Tom Morgan noted, work in finance is "spectacularly meaningless", unless it is synthesized with spirituality (the jury may be out on whether that's possible).

My own views on work and education have shifted over recent years. During the early months of the global response to the Covid pandemic, like many people, I went into 'survival mode'. To describe this using the language of Max Scheler's hierarchy of values, I was focused on the base of the pyramid, the utilitarian importance of "universal basic services" for meeting basic needs, and the "essential workers" who were placing their personal health on the line for the rest of us, with or without hazard pay. Essential workers occupy important 'bottleneck points' in the economy. At the time, we collectively faced a situation whose full consequences were still unknown.

Some of us still live in crisis response mode, in an uncomfortable position of not fully trusting larger social structures, while still to some degree dependent upon them. And accordingly, the desire to be able to live locally and resiliently is going to be relatively more or less important. (Localism was a key focus of Helen Norberg-Hodge's recent Planet Local Summit.) But even in a crisis we need the sacred to survive. As Thich Naht Hanh has shown, anything can be done with the full attention of our heart and soul.

Indeed, just as important as "what" we do is "how" we do it, as has been recently noted. Is the LH in service to the RH? Are the utilitarian tasks of life in service to the sacredness of all? Are the technologies, design, and structures of our lives truly responsive to life? This is axiological design (Zak Stein). Or, are all those blind by design (Shoshana Zuboff). Are the hemispheres working together, drawing upon their uniquely asymmetric strengths to achieve something that neither alone could do? Before abstraction and analysis, job seekers and students begin with a feel for intrinsic value, an ability to perceive the Gestalt, the implicit phenomena, and respond to a motivating telos, among other things. But I think the Gestalt may be the most glaring omission today. Can parents, school counselors, occupational therapists, and academic advising centers prepare people in this way?

Much of the bloated bureaucratic structure of school and work stands in the way of encouraging the natural inclination of youth to apprehend the Gestalt through direct engagement and "imaginatively inhabiting" the lives of others, whether human or animal. (Anarchists like Carne Ross are perhaps among the most critical of bureaucratic overgrowth.) The memetic practice begins in make-believe and apprenticeship, and culminates in mastery and leadership, creating learning situations in which youth learn through working alongside more expert peers or adults. Rather than segregate children from an early age, we should include them in all work. This is the norm in many non-Western cultures, and helps to promote a sense of self-efficacy and responsibility. Rather than isolating phenomena artificially according to feature, one field of work and study interpenetrates with another. The contemporary educational model in America, of imposing a dichotomy between college-educated versus trade-school or working class upon our career options, is another strange artifact of Western society as the most rewarding work tends to reflect an interdisciplinary approach that combines aspects of both academic and trade work. Each informs and enriches the other. 

If a Gestalt is acquired through a shift in perspective (most dramatically from the "emissary" to the "master", but also from one person to another) then we must equip the youth with a wide corpus of perspectives in this way. Instead of handing a college applicant a list of major fields of study, they might select from among a variety of unique perspectives that yet merge and interpenetrate with each other (Anaxagoras), setting them on course for a career that evolves and enriches the Gestalten thus beheld. And so, as Stephen Asma would write, imagination "should stand as the interdisciplinary foundation underlying both art and science." McGilchrist described the perspectival shift of imagination as "seeing into the depths of something that you think you know, but seeing it for the first time. You're finally making contact with it." But this can't be compelled. We can’t incept a perspective within someone or force contact with a Gestalt. Cristine Legare said "innovation always builds upon imitation", but insofar as imitation requires one to perceive a Gestalt and take the perspective from which it is held, it's not a simple and straightforward process. Since each of us has a singularly unique perspective, when it comes to imitation, in sameness there is difference (Sandokai). 

Now put all this into "plain English" (or whatever the vernacular language may be) for a young man or woman of 16 or 18, full of enormous potential, staring at a list of job options and major fields of study as though it were a labyrinth of pathways, each as indecipherable as the next, and about to commit their time, energy, money, hopes, and dreams for the future. This is the situation many face today. These youth encountered their first role models for "how to live" within their families. As their social circles expanded to include larger community groups and broader social movements, they learned about other leaders and role models, and why they are those particular individuals.

Such exemplary people see the Gestalt of their movement or field of work (the larger mission, vision, or pattern of engagement) more clearly than most. They become living archetypes, as it were. And so imitating them and taking up their perspective on the whole can provide one with a view upon that Gestalt. To be sure, some youth have made a confident choice already. But for those who are still seeking, perhaps the most important goal of education is enhancing our innate capacity for Gestalt perception via introduction to the perspectives of others upon the whole. These are the processes of mimesis/alterity (Michael Taussig). This is the "imaginative inhabiting of the other" (McGilchrist). The arts and humanities are critical to this process, but even a brief biographical sketch or mini-documentary can introduce a new world. Paraphrasing McGilchrist once again:

"This can be driven by a feeling of attraction which results in our apprehending the whole and trying to feel what that must be like from the inside - by so to speak an imaginative inhabiting of the other, which is always different because of its intersubjective betweenness. The process of mimesis is one of intention, aspiration, attraction and empathy, drawing heavily on the right hemisphere. It is not mechanical reproduction; copying is the following of disembodied procedures and algorithms, which is left-hemisphere-based." (121, 240-256 The Master and His Emissary)

More context

"It's not new procedures we need: it's new shapes, new Gestalten - new wholes. ...We need to bring ourselves to see a new Gestalt, one in which what seem like fragments of knowledge form part of a coherent whole." - McGilchrist (The Matter with Things) 

"When you come to look at the stories of many great findings by mathematicians and scientists, they made these discoveries by having a broad attention which saw new shapes, new forms, new Gestalten, which are wholes that cannot be decomposed into their parts without loss." - McGilchrist (interview with Damien Walter) 

"What the right brain delivers is wholeness, and in this again it has a peculiar resonance and relationship with therapy. For the whole purpose of therapy is wholeness – the very word “health” (as in “mental health”) means wholeness (O.E. hælan, “to make whole, sound and well”). And wholeness is the result of integration: “healing emerges from integration”, note Siegel and Solomon, again pointing to the intimate connections between healing, health, and wholeness." - Rod Tweedy (2020)

"The Sympathetic Mind... looks upon people and other creatures as whole beings... it is the mind of our wholeness." - Wendell Berry, "Two Minds" (Citizenship Papers, 2003)

I live and work with many youth, some within my family, who wrestle with these sort of questions. And I can certainly relate to their concerns. I can also relate to the efforts of the parents and educators who are trying to guide them as they make some big life decisions. If I look back on my own early educational experiences, I struggled mightily in many ways. To be sure, it wasn't only for lack of sufficient Gestalt perception that the experience wasn't as smooth as it might've otherwise been. There were other problems. And it would be foolish to think that it's possible, or even desirable, to eliminate the challenges of youth, many of which are in some sense necessary for growth and maturation.

Furthermore, it's not to say that there was absolutely no movement in this direction. More than a few people tried to convey the "big picture" view to me. And I met many exemplary role models, each of whom was able to introduce me, in some way, to the Gestalt they beheld from their perspective. So then, did these attempts simply not go far enough? In short, I do suspect that they were not sufficient to counteract the overwhelming effects of a cultural zeitgeist of fragmentation pulling still stronger and more persistently in the other direction. As Duncan Austin wrote:

"The left brain divides and divides again to end up chasing the Higgs Boson. The right brain patterns gestalt after gestalt eventually reaching Lovelock’s Gaia Hypothesis – ‘it is all one thing’ including this mind thinking this thought – and from there, perhaps, out beyond ‘science’ and towards the sacred."

I'm not advocating for anything as specific as a "McGilchristian school system". But I am considering what effective interventions, across all scales, might look like. There are of course many different approaches to education out there, such as the Montessori method. And there are many different kinds of charter schools, apprenticeship programs, etc. No doubt some of these focus on Gestalt perception (by any name) more than others. But do they put this into practice and apply it broadly? This cannot merely remain some abstract idea or minor adjunct, there's a more pragmatic and central need for this. Maybe a review of prior work on the place of "Gestalt perception" and the importance of "exemplars", and how each of these in turn reinforces the other within the context of both educational and occupational development, would turn up some results. The question is: Can we take those results, reintegrate them with the implications of the hemisphere hypothesis, and then put all this into practice? 

While there are many articles outlining the use of exemplars in education, these typically refer to "key examples chosen so as to be typical of designated levels of quality of competence" in student work. In other words, these are exemplars of student homework, not exemplars of the future occupational role a student may be considering that could provide a bigger picture view of work and life after graduation. Gestalt perception should extend beyond the classroom into all forms of social engagement, including political commentaries for example, and provide an overall moderating influence on the vicissitudes of life that by turns both humble and lift us up (often when we least desire or expect either of these). Speculatively, would it be possible to leverage LLMs (large language models) like chatGPT, in the role of a "good servant", to help provide a narrative structure or mythopoetic description to promote a more holistic Gestalt perspective? One might engineer a prompt such as "Who are the most accomplished people to have worked in the field of [blank]? Please provide a short biographical sketch of their life. Include how their educational (hero's) journey contributed to their current work, what their work related accomplishments have been, how these have affected the lives of others, and why they find it meaningful." A start, perhaps. 

In so many words, this might be an alternative educational classification system or form of "knowledge organization". In this case, it is the organization of knowledge according to Gestalten. This may be challenging because it is not clear whether these are distinct, overlapping, or hierarchical Gestalten, in terms of their overall scope or nested structure. On the one hand, they may simply be different views upon the same reality. And so in light of such instrumental deficiencies, as a method of classification it will always need to be supplemented by, and advanced in parallel with, the more "left hemisphere" classificatory systems, which for example can be seen in the Wikipedia articles titled "outline of academic disciplines" and "list of academic fields" (no comparably exhaustive articles appear to exist for occupations, though this may be because these are in some sense subsumed within the academic categorization articles). The result would be a dual description of the school-to-work pipeline that corresponds to our two principle ways of attending to reality - as fragmentary pieces and integrated wholes. And this might allow students to better apprehend the educational experience and the larger economy that they increasingly participate in. 

Can a searchable database or "outline of academic disciplines" be paired with an "outline of academic Gestalten"? Can a "list of occupational fields" be paired with a "list of occupational exemplars"? The right hemisphere must compliment, or rather underwrite, the left hemisphere. If this can't be done, then a separate "exemplars in education" or "New Gestalten" website might be created to serve this sort of purpose. Currently "job fairs" provide an opportunity for students to learn the broader Gestalt of occupations, and business consultants help existing employees in the same way, but some of the most desired positions are also the least advertised. As they say, it pays to do your homework. How valuable might it be for a student to be able to search for the most employable occupations (volume), the most critical services (basic needs), or the fastest developing area (research and technology), then compare these isolated features with the corresponding Gestalten so that they can evaluate them according to how well they align with their own aspirations for a good life? Again, the currently available scholastic aptitude tests and career quizzes are inadequate. They fragment a student's Gestalt into a collection of isolated features in a very left hemispheric way. And more importantly, they fail to increase a student's understanding of the overall Gestalt they aspire to apprehend, imitate, and eventually embody. [Another question is whether freelance job sites like FlexJobs, Upwork, and Fiverr, and employment websites like 'Craigslist Jobs', 'Indeed', and others can be redesigned to display a 'gestaltic organizational format'. Advertising local position availability using gestalt analysis, highlighting the gestaltic aspect of work, would be an interesting twist on the employment matching services market.]

In practice, local colleges and universities rarely offer a comprehensive selection of fields to explore, and more confusingly they often use parochial terminology for what are often the same subjects. However they do offer a valuable entry point from which to begin the journey to competency within any given field. So if we begin with the simple desire to learn more about what a good life might look like (RH), then explore the Wikipedia outline of disciplines (LH), correlate those to exemplary Gestalten (RH), and find the corresponding major course of study offered by the local educational/training institution (LH), we may have a way to navigate this labyrinthine world and "begin with the end in mind", an integrated view of what the journey for us might be, now enriched by a broader and more detailed Gestalt (RH). Beginning with the end is of course Stephen Covey's famously telic advice.

In the Introduction of The Matter with Things, McGilchrist lists some of the "headline differences" between the versions of the world revealed by either hemisphere. The left hemisphere view is of a world composed of "fragmentary elements" that are "relatively uncomplicated by issues of beauty and morality". Whereas the right hemisphere permits both Gestalt perception and value-ception. If we were to dissolve Gestalten, values essentially disappear as well. And if we lack a capacity for Gestalt perception to begin with, all this "value talk" is essentially incoherent. These are mutually reinforcing, inseparable aspects of the phenomenology of the right hemisphere, both of which, along with all those other headline differences, deserve greater attention in education. Gestalt perception (the antithesis of reductionism) appears to be in some sense a prerequisite for value-ception. It underwrites a lot of other capacities we rely upon as well. So many, in fact, that it is generally taken for granted, even in our left hemisphere captured society. But it is also under-developed and often misunderstood. For example we tend to view complex (highly polyphyletic) units of selection (such as holobionts, ecosystems, and Gaia) as collections of parts or abstract patterns more often than intrinsically unique wholes. Hence this mini-essay. By comparison, value-ception may be a more highly refined capacity, and is not nearly as widely understood or accepted. Which would explain the relatively greater amount of space and time McGilchrist devotes to describing the importance of value in both his writing and speaking.

More quotable lines

• "You could know all about a crow flying but you wouldn't know a flock.” - Amy Hodler (2019) 
• "We are in a period of science in which we have reached the current limits of reductionism in many domains. Despite their typical presentation as a mutually exclusive dichotomous choice, it seems that science requires both reductionist and holistic approaches to be successful." - Borrett, Moody, and Edelmann (2013)
• "The fragmentation of knowledge proves helpful for concrete applications, and yet it often leads to a loss of appreciation for the whole... [this] can actually become a form of ignorance, unless they [the parts] are integrated into a broader vision of reality." - Laudato Si' (2015)
• "One thing you might try is to study the magic key. You might try to prove theorems and so forth about what the key can do. But while this work is very important and interesting, in order to solve the puzzle, you have to also study the locks!” - Henry Lin (2017) 
• “I did not train you to be a demon or a human. I showed you how to be an artist… Swords, pots, noodles, death. It is all the same to an artist…. There may be a demon in you, but there is more. If you do not invite the whole, the demon takes two chairs, and your art will suffer.” - Master Eiji, Blue Eye Samurai (2023) 
• "What pattern connects the crab to the lobster and the orchid to the primrose and all the four of them to me? And me to you?" – Gregory Bateson
• "Wisdom is related to wholes and wholeness. The underlying cause of the problem is a consciousness that perceives parts rather than wholes or the nature of wholeness - that which guides our manipulation of parts, i.e. technology." - Daniel Schmachtenberger
• The sum of its parts is lesser than the whole. [Kaufman compares left/right hemispheres to 'task positive'/ 'task negative' networks, finding overlapping themes. While either hemisphere in isolation can sustain something like a personality, neither network could do the same, at which point the comparison breaks down.]:

Kaufman: "I can't help but notice linkages between things you wrote in 1982 in Against Criticism and things you wrote in 2021 in The Matter with Things. You say in Against Criticism, "The understanding of any one thing requires an understanding of the whole of which it is a part". That seems to capture a lot of your interest in brain asymmetry, right?
McGilchrist: "It does. I just see this as being a very important issue throughout. At school I already thought the whole is not the same as the sum of the parts. And people would say to me "Okay, so what's this extra something then that you put in?" At the time I didn't think of saying "It's not that something needs to be put in, it's that something has been taken out in the process of disassembling it."

The Psychological Drivers of the Metacrisis

The recent conversation between Daniel Schmachtenberger, Iain McGilchrist, and John Vervaeke titled "The Psychological Drivers of the Metacrisis" advances us a bit past the usual "McGilchrist 101" sort of content that viewers have gotten used to seeing. (Jonathan Rowson even released a short commentary of what he thought about it today.) After watching the conversation, I edited the transcript with a heavy hand to pare it down to size, given the dense three hour length. So in what follows below there's more missing than has been included. But I didn't want some of the very interesting exchanges to get passed over simply because they came later in the video. I also added my own subsection headings here. As usual, refer to the video for the full, unedited content. And feel free to correct any misrepresentations I've made. 

A few of my impressions. At one point McGilchrist suggests that if panentheism were taken seriously it would "stop fighting between religious groups, and would stop us despoiling the natural world, and would instill a sense of proper reverence". I thought that was an uncommonly strong endorsement, but a lot of groundwork had been laid in the conversation building up to it. The single unifying theme over the three hours could easily be described as the importance of the sense of the sacred. And a second theme might be the impression we get of Schmachtenberger's dogged pursuit for specific, effective strategies. Though he tried to unearth those actionable, pragmatic gems from McGilchrist, he doesn't seem to get the explicit answers he wants. Instead he more often gets the opposite, since McGilchrist rarely strays far from his characteristic response that one cannot compel that which can only be freely entered into, as he remarks: 

"Logic has this compulsory kind of nature, if you like, that it’s trying to compel a position. But the things that really matter, like wisdom and love, can't be compelled in this way. And if they are, then they’re no longer wisdom or love. There is always a vulnerability involved here. That's terribly important in my view. And it's not necessarily anybody's fault if that vulnerability leads, as it usually does eventually, to some kind of a downfall. But without actually taking the risk, we can't have the great things that we have had. So it has its own value and purpose, even if we can't actually always guarantee what kind of an outcome there's going to be."

The indirect, the implicit, and an awareness of an opposing, paradoxical power that never reveals itself, it all sounds very Taoist (unsurprisingly). The dynamic between this implicit 'sacred power' and the explicit 'instrumental power' is touched on again and again, particularly in regard to how the later becomes covetous of the former. It's that theme that has been given almost universal expression in the cautionary legends of divine twins or siblings who have an asymmetric relationship. It's not uncommon in these portrayals for the lesser half of the pair to become jealous of the greater. 

The portion of the transcript excerpted below begins with an examination of game theory, perhaps the epitome of this sort of instrumentalist and highly explicit perspective. Later in the conversation Schmachtenberger describes the possible emergence of the first wisdom traditions as a response to the first anthropogenic crisis, the extinction of megafauna (otherwise known as the overkill hypothesis). The moral, if it isn't obvious, is that it is time for yet another "Come to Jesus" moment for humans. We need to realize, once again, that "we're too powerful to be this dumb". Instead of letting our technologies dictate our values, maybe our values should bind our technologies. That isn't a new idea at all really, as many thinkers, including Elinor Ostrom perhaps most notably, have shown how important values can be, and have been, for sustainable societies. Schmachtenberger is clearly still trying to understand the contours of this nontrivial problem. 

One wonders if Schmachtenberger's repeated emphasis on hyper-competitive exclusionary multipolar traps is best seen as further evidence for the long legacy of idealized "tragedy of the commons" type thinking when it comes to economics and game theory, and not actually representative of real world economic interactions. At one point even Vervaeke remonstrates him, saying "You've made this argument before, and I find it compelling, but I also find it frustrating because of the way the argument is set up." David Roberts once wrote that, where neither cooperation nor competition predominates, the economy is mostly guided by historical accident: "real-life markets are failures all the way down — irrational behaviors, asymmetrical information, barriers to entry, monopoly control, the distorting influence of status quo interests, and more... believing a single tool will accomplish everything requires seeing the economy as a frictionless machine, a spreadsheet, not what it is: a path-dependent accretion of past decisions and sunk costs, to be tweaked and unwound." One might even conclude that Hanlon's razor (a succinct description of the outsized influence of blindness, denial, and neglect in society) steers the course of economic relationships more than the minority of sociopathic defectors and opportunists in positions of leadership. To be sure, all of this plays some role. But choosing to focus inordinately on power and not on neglect (the flip side) as an explanation for possible evolutionary cul-de-sacs may itself be a kind of blindness. It's a Catch-22. McGilchrist illustrates this by recounting a patient who once said "If it is not there, how can you neglect it?"

Returning to values, a notion of "values-guiding-technology" (see Zak Stein's axiological design) may be a preferable alternative to that of "wisdom-binding-power", as it illuminates how the metaphysics of value (that which is presenced to) can be leveraged by the phenomenological aspects of attention (that which is doing the presencing). This navigates that delicate balance between sacred and instrumental dispositional capacities. It leverages their internal "subjective" asymmetric capacities for engaging with external "objective" processes, but without imposing upon or directly attempting to contravene what those subjective capacities are, such as the necessary vulnerability of the master. This was the main objection McGilchrist expressed when it was suggested that the master had "a fiduciary responsibility to prevent exploitation [bind the emissary]", because that lies outside of the master's capacity. This clarification might've allowed a fruitful entry point. Fostering wisdom (and allied capacities like value-ception) involves thoroughly implicit processes that we are ultimately helpless to directly cause and unable to explicitly describe. It cannot be compelled. But once such capacities have been allowed to grow and develop, the orienting effects of presencing to telos and values, as felt for example within authentic religious experience, can be used to guide (constrain and direct) how we respond to processes of technology development, design, and system structure. This is how the emissary fulfills its role as a "good servant," by taking its cues from the master. This is what it is well suited to do.

The relationship between values and technology takes us back to the primary asymmetries Bernard Tannett described toward the end of his review of TMAHE. We might put it in this way: value-ception (asymmetry of means) influences technology (asymmetry of structure) which in turn influences feedback loops (asymmetry of interaction). Unfortunately, positive feedback loops were not discussed at any length during the conversation for lack of time. But it is a critical subject, since intervening on feedback processes plays a central role in strengthening or weakening either of the polar dispositions, and thus the underlying motivations behind pursuing sustainability and flourishing, which reflect whether that is for intrinsic or extrinsic reasons. And that is what McGilchrist is ultimately concerned with, as he notes during the conversation. In short, wisdom guides power through its capacity to presence to the implicit. But because power is able to unilaterally inhibit that process, wisdom must remain ever vigilant. Fiduciary responsibilities have to be understood within the context of the inherent capacities and limitations of the master and emissary. The fiduciary responsibility of the master then is not to prevent exploitation (it cannot guarantee this), rather it is to exercise foresight sufficient to both understand and leverage whatever asymmetric advantages it has (which were far from exhaustively described during the conversation) in order to guide the emissary, that power-technê thing, and thereby reduce the chances of  an "insurrection" and the consequent exploitative dynamics that would result. Asymmetry is in many ways the key to all of this, and perhaps somewhat ironically, it is a key that is only understood by the master. 

The transcript below begins about an hour in, after the introductory "McGilchrist 101" material has been all laid out and the implications begin to be explored. https://youtu.be/-6V0qmDZ2gg

Game Theory (LH) and Sense of the Sacred (RH)

Schmachtenberger: So I want to say something about how the hemispheric model ends up getting imbalanced, almost obligately gets unbalanced in a way that leads to the world situation we have, and see if you agree with that. You mentioned that the primary value of the left hemisphere is utility. You also mentioned the word power. Civilizations have a relationship with each other that we can use social Darwinism to describe. The culture that has those utilitarian, power-oriented views will win at war. It's a “they're going to, so we have to” kind of mentality. Then there's no sacred, there's just 'that which is good is that which doesn't lose'.

I think it's very interesting that game theory was developed by von Neumann at the same time we developed the bomb, at the same time we developed AI, and it was game theory and economics as kind of the height of the reductionist’s experiment. Based on a kind of is-ought distinction, that says, since philosophy of science is going to say what is and can't say what ought, then our best basis for ought is that which doesn't lose in an assumed competitive dynamic. So game theory is the only thing guiding us. And I would argue that if your only ought is game theory, and you have the ability for recursive technologies that turn into exponential technologies that are in an exploitative relationship with the environment, and in arms races with each other, that that civilization is self-terminating.

But it's also easy to see how it emerged that way, because any civilization that oriented itself that way a little bit more was going to grow its population more, was going to advance its tech, was going to win wars, and then other ones kind of had to do similarly. So the values or the sense of sacred or the connection to nature or each other that the Native Americans had before colonizers went there didn't matter that much if their weaponry and technology and whatever was not going to compete.

So the left hemisphere might be less intelligent in some very important ways, but the utility emphasis of the left hemisphere is very good at game theory, and it creates almost an obligate trajectory. Nobody wants climate change, but nobody can stop it. Nobody wants species extinction, nobody wants desertification, but nobody can stop it. The overall topological features defining our world, nobody wants, but the game theoretic relationship between “we can't price carbon properly because if the Chinese don't they’ll economically beat us, therefore we have to externalize the cost.” That game theoretic relationship creates a topology that is actually driving us in a self-terminating direction, and nobody’s steering because there is no sacred. We're very good at solving problems, but not very good at defining “Is this the right problem to solve?” Right? “Is this the right goal to achieve?”

That's actually why I was drawn to your work, because I was thinking of this in terms of capacities and predispositions of mind. That the nature of mind that is oriented to parts is very good at technê and was very oriented to power, and the power-technê thing together was going to win over the other ones and then create this kind of obligate trajectory. I would love to hear you respond to that.

McGilchrist: There's very little in what you said that I would disagree with at all. We're in a bind which is to nobody’s benefit, really. Game theory explains why we get these things wrong, and we need to find a way out of this which involves restraint. It's that lack of restraint that is very unwise. And there are two levels to that. There's restraint in general and self-restraint. And the idea of self-restraint used to be intrinsic to the rise of most civilizations. They were founded on a generation or several generations that were prepared to make sacrifices on a personal level in order to achieve something greater. That has moved out of the picture because the value now is about our personal gain. If we can restrain ourselves from just pursuing personal gain, we could produce an outcome which would be far more beneficial for all. Of course, this is very famously a difficult thing to achieve, because some people defect from the program.

We're in a situation where we need to ultimately come round to a certain way of thinking if we’re to survive. Now how can we do that? Can we do it at all? I don't know, but I believe that if enough people are committed enough, and model their lives on the shift in relations with society, nature, and the divine, if they can reorientate their values and stop seeking fulfillment in a very simplistic and direct way which doesn't actually achieve its goal, and worse, is destructive, then we could produce an outcome that would be satisfactory. I don't know if we can achieve that. It sounds like we'd have to convince everybody. But if you can convince about three percent of people, then we might be onto something.

Schmachtenberger: You said maybe we only have to influence three percent, but a moment before you said if anyone defects then they create a world that orients to the more short-term power thing. So defection: sociopathic, narcissistic defection is pretty key to this thing.

McGilchrist: It is. 

Vervaeke: You can break game theoretic circumstances when you have people who want to belong to a just world, and that is more important to them than their own individual, immediate gain. Robert Nozick made a good point about this. We didn't put that into a lot of game theoretic modeling because it messes up all that modeling in a lot of ways. We will significantly undermine our subjective well-being if we have a reasonable belief that we will get enhanced meaning in life. This is part of our evolutionary heritage. The prototypical example is having a kid; they connect us to a reality beyond ourselves.

Power... bound by wisdom?

Schmachtenberger: What is the evolutionary niche for the sociopathic, narcissistic property to be selected for? And how would we close that niche? Because promoting wisdom where it will always lose game-theoretically is not that interesting. I would say wisdom has to bind. If the master doesn't bind the emissary, then everything's broken, and so that which is power-seeking has to actually be bound, which requires power from something that is not power-seeking in the same way. So I'm curious to hear your thoughts on wisdom binding power, closing the evolutionary niche on power-seeking, those types of things.

Power, whether it's economic, social, or political, follows a power-law distribution. Humanity is a result of this, where realistically the actual power influencing things says that a tiny percentage of people that are three standard deviations psychologically different than almost everyone have most of the determining power. And they create conditioning environments that everyone else is conditioned by. I think that's really important. You know, hyper-agency. 

About Christianity binding game theory, the fact that, under the name of Jesus Christ, who said “let he who has no sins cast the first stone,” we were able to do the Inquisitions is a really interesting act of mental gymnastics. Wherever there is a relationship to the sacred that is authentic, and it starts to develop the ability to really move people, there's power in that. Then those who are seeking power, seek to capture and corrupt it. So then all the religions become these mixed bags of an authentic, beautiful thing and the way power ends up capturing them. And if they don't orient to power, then they usually lose in a holy war, their population doesn't become very big, or something like that. So how do we have a proliferation of the sacred for which someone will make real sacrifices, and for which whole populations will, that doesn't lose to other populations that don't do that, and that doesn't get captured by power, and perverted and distorted?

The question I wanted to ask is, in the parable that you told of the master and emissary, I might argue that the responsibility for the failure of that civilization or tribe, whatever you want to call it, was the master’s, not the emissary’s, because the master obviously misassessed.

McGilchrist: The master would probably have agreed with you.

Schmachtenberger: And so rather than say, the master was wise and the emissary wasn't, and so the emissary did a Dunning-Kruger thing and messed it all up, maybe the master was missing a certain kind of wisdom in his assessment of the actual realistic capabilities of the emissary. There was some stuff in his noticing the whole that he wasn't noticing that was really critical for him to ultimately still hold responsibility. So there's an uptick in the master capability that could have kept that relationship right. So there's something about needing to be power-literate, to be able to keep power from corrupting a relationship with the sacred.

McGilchrist: Rather than say that the master was deficient in some way, one would say that there was an important relationship here which required a certain degree of vulnerability. So the master couldn't remain invulnerable, because he realized that he needed to not concern himself with certain things, if things were to survive. So there isn't a squeaky clean answer to this. He had, in a way, to trust. In some ways it's very like the story of God and Satan, that Satan was Lucifer, the light-bringer, the brightest to the angels, God's right hand. And because of his power-hungriness and his envy of God, everything fell to ruin. (I'm becoming more and more convinced during our conversation of how very important the sort of overarching effect of a religion such as Christianity is for the survival of a civilization. I see it more and more in what we're talking about.) What you’ve adverted to is a necessary sort of supervision. And that is a difficult balancing act, as it is for the master and the emissary. To preserve a degree of independence they can't fuse, but one needs to be subservient to the other. There's an Onondaga legend I tell at the beginning of part three of The Matter with Things about that.

So you can never have the situation where the one that is wise has that power, because one of the terms on which wisdom exists is that it sees beyond power. Now I know that you've made a very good point, that there needs to be a certain degree of sort of watchfulness and power-awareness. I agree about that. Quite how this is managed in a way that doesn't actually vitiate the whole business of wisdom; we have to somehow find a way of making that work. And I don't know what your ideas about how that could be made to work are.

Schmachtenberger: Zak Stein talks about how information asymmetries in a relationship imply an ethical responsibility, a fiduciary responsibility to prevent exploitation. If those who are pursuing the true, the good, and the beautiful, those who are pursuing a deep relationship with the sacred and wisdom don't do anything and don't develop any levers of technological or economic or other types of power — “lotus-eating” so to speak — then they're leaving the direction of the world to those who maximally seek power-orientation for the illegitimate use. And so then you have to say, is it really wise to say, “I cede power. I cede power of the world to the sociopaths,” including in the risk of imminent extinction and the destruction of the sacred, and not just a future destruction, but the 10 to 20 animals that go extinct every day from human action. There's some ethical obligation of those who give a shit about that, to have that “give a shit” do something, to be actual, as you say, “actual” meaning that it acts. So are our values actual? If they're actual, do they have a causal effect? Are they obligated to?

McGilchrist: I'm not suggesting that we just sit back and roll over and let everything go to hell in a handcart. That's very far from what I'm saying. But what I'm saying is that even if we were to find ways of reducing certain kinds of harm, unless they were accompanied by a growth in wisdom, that really wouldn't achieve what we need to achieve. We would leave the psychopaths in charge, actually. So it is a difficult one. I mean, once you start looking at the outcomes of actions rather than the motivations behind actions, you get into trouble.

I think the problem comes when we give too much power to the emissary in that myth. So to begin with in civilizations, the left hemisphere and right hemisphere work very well together. The left hemisphere is given exactly that kind of a job that it's good that, and — if you like to put it this way, I'm being ridiculously anthropomorphic — but it is happy to be in that role. And to contribute. But the problem comes when we start to lose — I'm going to come back to this thing about the value difference between the right and left. I think it's absolutely essential to the situation we're in. It’s our complete loss of orientation towards the right values, and what happens then is that the values of the left hemisphere are encouraged, and the left hemisphere starts to see only its own point of view. And it thinks itself in a Dunning-Kruger-like way to be more intelligent than it is.

Vervaeke: The left hemisphere has some reverence for the right hemisphere, but reverence is properly a property of the right hemisphere. And so you've got this weird catch-22 thing going on.
Schmachtenberger: How can the left hemisphere have reverence for the right if it doesn't have reverence as a capability? I think this is what Gödel did with the incompleteness theorem, was use math to show the upper boundaries of math.
Vervaeke: That’s the Socratic project. Almost all of the dialogues end in aporia for that reason.
Schmachtenberger: And it's what the jñāna yog path in the Vedic tradition...
Vervaeke: Or koans in Zen...
Schmachtenberger: It's what Tarski did with formal logic, using formal logic to show the upper bounds, and I think it's exactly what Iain is doing in describing the master-emissary relationship in a way the left brain can understand. Because, you know, I was saying earlier, wouldn't the master be the more responsible party? So there is a reverence the left hemisphere has to have for the right. There is a recognition of the developmental maturity, capacity, and relationship with the environment the right needs to have, right? And I think the very best thing that the parts-based mind can do is recognize its own upper boundaries being insufficient to what is actually worth caring about, in which case it has its own kind of transcendence, right? It has its own recognition of something beyond itself worth listening to.

Schmachtenberger: Can we imagine a civilization with the wisdom to steward exponential power? Because you can't apply apex predator theory to humans and have a biosphere that doesn't self-destruct. One very simple way I would sometimes describe the generator of the metacrisis is that a polar bear can’t make nukes, and an orca can't kill all the fish in the ocean. But we can do both. And so we're obviously not an apex predator. We obviously are something well beyond that, because the evolutionary process having most of the adaptive capacity in the other animals be corporeal, and very slow-evolving, and slow-evolving through processes that create co-selection, creates a symmetry of power. Whereas the orca gets faster so do the tuna and they get away, and as the polar bears gets faster, the walruses get bigger and all that kind of thing. And with the complexification of all our cognitive processes that could start to do technê, and I would say — I'm just going to call it technê in general, both physical technologies and language, capitalism, et cetera — that our adaptive capacity and our predative capacity increased rapidly faster than any of the rest of the environment, increased its resilience or relative capacity.

McGilchrist: Absolutely.

Schmachtenberger: Humans have been a very mixed bag. Our abstraction allowed us to search a very wide search base, so the most kind of beautiful, numinous stuff in the most kind of horrific stuff. What I'm arguing is that that mixed bag that we have been, with exponential tech near planetary boundaries self-terminates, and that we don't get to keep being that mixed bag. And this now comes up to the vulnerability of, if the relationship to the sacred is forced or compulsory, it's not actually a relationship to the sacred. If you remove choice, it's not ethics anymore; it's mechanism. And so there's a vulnerability in the recognition of actual choice and in the honoring of choice. But we have to do that fundamentally differently than we've ever done. The question that I'm really curious about is, can we imagine a humanity that has the wisdom to steward that power reasonably well? 

I would argue that we have examples from the past that, temporarily, were able to use restraint via wisdom, via relationship to the sacred, adequate to have their own population in some relative sustainability with their environment, and some reasonable quality of life. I have Indigenous scholar friends who've said that the early Indigenous wisdom traditions — we're talking 40,000 years ago — actually emerged in relationship with human extinction of megafauna, and that they had already messed stuff up and were like, "Whoa, we're too powerful to be this dumb. We have to be a lot wiser. Humans are not the web of life. We're a strand within it. Whatever we do to the web, we do to ourselves." That the first wisdom traditions were already their response to the anthropogenic crisis. And so then they might have had a while of relatively good binding of that level of tech. Then someone else got a higher level of tech, didn't have the same binding, and then those people got wiped out or had to join things. So I'm not saying we have no precedent of people doing a wisdom-binding-power thing. I'm saying we have no adequate precedent to the current situation because obviously we have a totally different power dynamic. So this is an innovative question. It’s an “innovating in the domain of wisdom” question that of course draws on, but is not limited to what we have done. What are the necessary criteria of a civilization that could steward the amount of technological power we have well?

So this relates to what you said a few moments ago when you said, “If I'm getting anything out of this conversation, it's how powerful something like Christianity must be.” So, you were speaking to this hierarchy of values and the utility values at the bottom, which obviously is not how the world is oriented currently, and some sense of the sacred at the top. We mentioned wisdom being something that has a concept of restraint, bound so that utility is not always maximized, that power is not always maximized, in service of something that is other than utility.

McGilchrist: Absolutely. 

Power... serving wisdom?

Schmachtenberger: You're proposing that religion has served this function before, and that something like that is probably needed. Obviously, we know the history of why church and state have been separated. We know all of the critiques of religion that are worthwhile. What do we imagine the relationship to some sense of sacred that is developable, that creates something like wisdom, that creates something like restraint and power-binding, that creates something like increased felt meaningfulness, increased sense of coordination that is other than game theory, what might that look like? Because it probably won't be just religion as its own domain. It’ll probably be how it relates to the educational system and to media and even how it's encoded in economics. What are some of your thoughts on what the criteria of such a religion might need to be, and what it might look like, and what the transition from here to there or its development might look like?

McGilchrist: I think the sacred is beginning to speak to us again. That's my observation. And I notice one of the nice things for me is that a lot of young people are very interested in my ideas, and they’re extremely dissatisfied with the thin gruel of, if you can call it, a philosophy by which our civilization now lives or fails to thrive. And so I think there's a thirst for it, and I think it can't be compelled in any way. I don't believe you can invent religions at will at any rate. We don't need to think about reinventing religions. There are religious traditions, wisdom traditions, spirituality traditions that are very robust. A religion carries with it a lot of power. It is one of the few ways in which power can be exerted through us for good. I'm not saying it couldn't be for bad as well. That is part of what I'm saying. But if we’re to think of the things that we really need, like this closely or more closely bound society in which we learn to trust one another and share values, that's extraordinarily important.

There's a sort of way in which people now think, which is that if I can get away with it, I should. So in other words, we’re relying on external pressures, external constraints, external restraints on us, and if they aren't there, well, we can just do anything, which is not—obviously it's not any kind of morality, but it's also very dangerous, because at some point, faced with that kind of philosophy, it will be impossible to constrain and restrain everybody who wishes to do wicked things. So I think it will provide many things. It will provide a kind of structure, philosophical framework, a sense of a tradition through which we can re-experience something very beautiful— beautiful, good, and true, in my view, which is what the greatest art of our civilization has produced. And I'm not here excluding other civilizations. As anyone who reads my work will know, I derive a lot from Chinese, Japanese, Indian and other kinds of cultures.

McGilchrist’s Wager is that maybe we play a role in the development, the evolution, the furtherment, the fulfillment of whatever is divine. And if that's the case, then once again, we have an incredibly ennobling obligation, which is to make sure that we do help that good progress in the world. So on various levels to do with how we dispose our attention, the role we play in repair, the role we play in furthering and bringing about the divine, we can influence things. We may not be able to stop certain specific wars or whatever, but that's never been part of what is imaged here. Part of what is imaged here is that we, like it or not, are gathered up into something that we have to respond to. And I believe that the reason for there being life at all, and especially human life, is because whatever it is that is the Ground of Being needs response. It needs that response.

And while it can be satisfied by the response of the inanimate world up to a point, what life brings is that it can respond enormously fast. With creatures like us, there can be an acceleration of the evolution of the cosmos and the divine Being that grounds that cosmos together. So all in all, there is an enormously optimistic, in my view, and real — and I know I'm a skeptical person in many ways, but I'm also skeptical of skepticism when it rules things out that we should open ourselves to. And if I'm honest about my thinking, my reading, my experience of life as a person, as a doctor, and so on, I do believe that this is the way the cosmos is and how we relate to it. And that is surely something that brings hope, brings dignity to the human condition. And it also takes the burden off us of having to solve certain specific problems.

I'm not saying we shouldn't try to solve those specific problems. We must, but it's in a sense secondary. It's like the role of the emissary is to get on and find ways of, you know, purifying the oceans. This is terribly important, but it mustn’t stop there because, as I say, you can purify the oceans, you can save the rainforests. And if the only reason we did that was because of our own economy and for our own flourishing, we would have lost the main reason, which is because these things are powerful, beautiful, rich, complex entities that have value in themselves. Intrinsic in their nature, not merely for their extrinsic use.

I'm a panentheist, it goes further than animism, and it manages to bring together immanence and transcendence. So, pantheism simply says, God is all the stuff that there is. Panentheism says God is in all the stuff that there is, and all the stuff that is is in God. Now, I think that is a — maybe you don’t need to explore that too much, but I would say that is a very, to me, important, and sounds to me, feels to me, a wise way of thinking about the world and would also, if taken seriously, stop us fighting between religious groups, and would stop us despoiling the natural world, and would instill a sense of proper reverence.

There's nothing in religion that says that we've got to see ourselves over and against other people. In fact, in many religions, your first duty is to those who are not of your kind. I mean, I know that's part of Zoroastrianism, actually, but it's also in Christianity. That doesn't mean that the history of these religions has not been a war between those who really understood the mystical meaning of it and those who used it as a lever for power and influence and for adversarial approaches, power grabs. 

Religion and Sacred Stewardship

Schmachtenberger: You could say that there might be certain underlying structures all religions have to have to orient the human adequately. There's almost like a meta-metaphysics that is necessary.

McGilchrist: Exactly.

Schmachtenberger: Where does it get the relationship of the one and the many, or the relationship of the determined and the freed? Where does it get all of those things? Might it be that those meta-dynamics have the capability of giving rise to new philosophical inquiries, reifying the versions of the existing ones that are capable of being in a harmonious relationship with the other ones, and have the capability of being able to understand and steward the power of our technology well? I would say, if a religion doesn't do that, it's not adequate for the purpose of being able to orient humans in the world today to steward the world.

So then I think one question I have is how might we imagine the reification of the existing religions in a direction that allows them to have something meaningful to say about ecological overshoot and planetary boundaries, and AI, and synthetic bioregulation, and the war in Ukraine, and whatever? How might we orient them to be able to play a role in the stewarding of the world, and in the development of wisdom, individually and locally, and not just locally. How might we see the reification of those religions and the development of new ones, or at least new philosophical and metaphysical systems? And how do we see the interface of those with the other systems of human coordination?

If I value things differently, does my economic system change? If I have a different relationship to what is a good problem to solve, does my tech design change? How does education and media change, since those are affecting the nature of the human mind so profoundly? So the reification of the religions, but also the development of new philosophical traditions. You say you can't force it, that you can only garden or nurture it. How do you imagine being able to garden and nurture the type of wisdom adequate for moving forward in all these ways?

McGilchrist: Can I just ask you a more terminological thing? You used the word “reify” and “reification” a lot. Do you mean “validation”? Because “reification” to me means “thing”-ifying, “making it a thing.” And of course that's what we don't want to make it.

Schmachtenberger: By “to reify” I mean to be able to interpret the religion in a particular direction that is commensurate with what it must be, given the constraints humanity faces. So there’s kind of like a pragmatic forcing function on the metaphysics. What is the “real” interpretation, is what the scholars will argue on. So there's an interpretation of, what does this really mean, that can be different. And also, as you said, we're not just painting meaning on the walls of a meaningless universe, but there is actually something intrinsically real they're pointing to.

McGilchrist: There is. But there's no one way, as it were, of saying it.

Schmachtenberger: Right. So the pragmatic question I'm asking is, how would you change the way we approach our practices, philosophy, et cetera? I'm very interested to hear your thoughts on how the institutions could start to actually implement wisdom-development practices. Practices, insights, and philosophies, rather than just compelling a person on YouTube.

McGilchrist: If you change the grounding that has led to the problems we have, it will lead naturally to these things flourishing. But at a slightly higher level, how we do that has got to be through an implicit process, because if we try to — as I’m constantly saying — if we try to instigate the things we think are valuable into people, we have not instigated those things. Instead, we've instigated a kind of chain of thought, which is actually contrary to the way in which we want.

Schmachtenberger: That was the topic of your first book, Against Criticism, right? You cannot make implicit things explicit without damaging them.

McGilchrist: That's right. We can't do it by the direct approach, but we can do it by a more implicit and less direct approach. And that approach is actually to start educating. I think we stopped educating children about forty, fifty years ago. We started indoctrinating them and giving them information and testing them on how much of that they retained. But we didn't do the really important things, which are relational. All the people who really inspired me and taught me did so by their being who they were, and by the way in which the spark jumped across the gap.

So we need to reimagine what an education is. That would mean freeing up teachers from a dead weight of bureaucracy. In fact, that's one of the very practical things that could be done tomorrow. We should go around universities, go around hospitals, go around some schools and look very critically at all the superstructure of management and so on. And I reckon about 80 percent of that could go tomorrow and nobody would suffer. In fact, there'd be a lot more money for doing the things that we really want to do. We've become sucked by parasites, if you like, which is the externalization of the left hemisphere's drive for control, which is administration. And so, I mean, that's a practical answer to the question, but also we need — apart from freeing up teachers to teach in a way that is individual, responsive, and alive, rather than just the carrying out the procedures, we need actually to give people back their cultural tradition. They need to read literature that — it's not fashionable to say this, but they need to understand the last two thousand years. Otherwise they don't know what they're doing here. They have a very shallow rooting, so we actually do need to teach history, literature, philosophy, music, all our culture, not just IT, not just procedural learning, but actually creative, empathic understanding of other people, not sitting in judgment on our forebears or on other cultures, but in fact trying to see our way into how they sort of work, because they’re no stupider than we are, and they might actually have seen something we’ve lost.

Schmachtenberger: I think when people look at the arguments about all the things that are supposedly getting better in civilization, they relate to things that specialization does well. And when we look at the things that are getting worse and heading towards global catastrophic risk, they arise from the lack of integration across specialty areas.

In light of the current situations in the world, some new institutional design may be needed as well. You said something else that I found really interesting when you talked about cutting some of the bureaucracy and administration, which was almost like an externalization of left-hemispheric dominance, what David Graeber calls “bullshit jobs,” that there's this recursive relationship between kind of left-hemispheric process and building a world that is the result of that, that in turn conditions that, and that kind of recursive relationship means we're not just asking, how can we develop things that will give people more wholeness, more integration, more numinous, more sacred, but also how can we undo some of the things that are excessively making us hypertrophic on the wrong modes of mind? And I think we have to do both.

McGilchrist: Well, one good thing that might come out of a scarcity crisis is that we find quickly what are the things we can dispense with and what we can’t, at least if you maintain enough right-hemisphere overview of what's going on. But I fear that now the power is concentrated in the hands of, frankly, mediocre people who occupy administrative jobs, and that they're not willing to really relinquish that power — it’s their validation. But we do desperately need to do it. And you're quite right that what happens is, in a culture like that, people are trained to go into jobs like that, and the people who fit the role best are not the people you'd want to be making big decisions about our lives, but they go into it. And the thing is a positive feedback loop.

Schmachtenberger: So how do we break the positive feedback loops that orient us towards futures nobody wants, or at least weaken them? And how do we simultaneously develop other positive feedback loops — because they have to have some positive feedback or they won't be able to do anything — that move us in a recognition of the sacred ways, individual and collective governance?

My kind of closing question is, if some people do listen and respond and there's interest, maybe we'll deepen this conversation and explore some of these: How do we weaken the existing positive feedback loops? How do we deal with the fact that power is entrenched in certain ways currently? But for the listeners who have made it through all of this, any closing thoughts that might give them some sense of orientation and or agency in the relationship to all these topics?

McGilchrist: Well, I'd say, don't despair. That is achieving nothing whatever, and it's bad for the soul. So we have a duty to see what is hopeful. And we can only do the best that we can. (We’re not asked, nobody is asked, to do the impossible.) And that means doing things in our own life and with our own life and furthering larger causes in the way that we are best in a position to do. But we all have a role, and I think one of the things I tried to emphasize was that although the materialist, reductionist picture results in a vision of the cosmos as a heap of junk with no meaning, beauty, or purpose, and that we have no role here, I would, you know, I’d go to my death to defend the opposite point of view, that actually it is beautiful, it is rich, and it is our pleasure, our duty and something we should be grateful for to help further that.

Schmachtenberger: I think the concern about religions that many people have actually has to do with people orienting to certainty with them, and then closed-mindedness and holy wars and whatever, as opposed to the exact opposite: holding the mystery at the center, holding the unspeakable, the unknowable, but the real, and so there is an epistemic humility that is built in forever. When we spoke about this yesterday, and you said don't despair, you were saying when we are actually open to the beauty of reality there's a sense of awe and gratitude and humility that comes from that. But when we're open to the beauty of reality being harmed, which is within the factory farm and on the war field, and whatever, we also feel the suffering of others, such that it's overwhelming, and the overwhelm in the suffering and the overwhelm in the beauty are related, because if the reality wasn't beautiful, you wouldn't care. And both of them make you transcend your small self, and both of them motivate the sacred obligation.

So there's something where the sacred obligation just comes from seeing, from letting yourself be moved by the beauty of reality, and associated with that the meaningfulness to protect it. And the role of religion, philosophy, and whatever, insofar as it can help people be more sensitive to both the beauty and the sacredness, and thus a protective impulse towards reality, is what I am hoping people take away.

Positive Feedback Loops

Referring to the metaphor popularized by Iain McGilchrist, if we were to ask "Why is the Master vulnerable to the Emissary? ...Why is the right hemisphere vulnerable to left hemisphere capture?" I think the answer has several parts. Each hemisphere has deficits which the opposing hemisphere is able to compensate for. But these contrasting features of the hemispheres align in such a way as to make the potential for LH capture possible. Could they have been arranged in a different way, so as to mitigate the threat of LH capture? Consider that the capacity for presentation (to flowing ineffable animacy), and the capacity for representation (of fixed graspable things), appear to be incommensurable ways of attending.

Nonetheless, we find them paradoxically united within us (and speculate that this is a manifestation of some deeper truth regarding the complementarity of opposites throughout the cosmos). When we look closely, we see that there may be something inherent to the capacity for LH representation that makes it vulnerable to entering into positive feedback loops that fragment the Gestalt of agents, transforming them into "things". By comparison, the inverse (and asymmetric) capacity for RH presentation does not have this same vulnerability because it is able to maintain negative feedback loops and allostatic regulation.  

On the one hand, the master cannot keep the emissary on too short of a leash, otherwise it would not have the opportunity to be a good servant. But on the other hand, provide too long of a leash and the emissary may betray you. There’s a happy medium somewhere between these extremes. And discovering where that is may be a process of trial and error. Perhaps this necessary learning process is why the master must place its trust in the emissary. Making itself vulnerable to the emissary's inherent instability is in some sense unavoidable. And thus LH capture via processes of cascading positive feedbacks may simply be the result of erring too far on one side of that equation. Letting out too much rope as it were. “Give someone enough rope, and they will hang themselves”. …McGilchrist addressed the danger of positive feedback in TMAHE:

“One way of thinking of this is in terms 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’, the most familiar example of which is the operation of a thermostat: if the temperature constantly tends to drop, the thermostat triggers a heating system that will act to bring the temperature back to the desired level. However, systems can become unstable and 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. The right hemisphere, then, is capable of freeing us through negative feedback. The left hemisphere tends to positive feedback, and we can become stuck.”

“This is not unlike the difference between the normal drinker and the addict. After a certain point, the normal drinker begins to feel less like another drink. What makes an addict is the lack of an ‘off switch’ – another drink only makes the next, and the next, more likely. And, interestingly enough, lesions of the frontolimbic systems, mainly in the right hemisphere, are associated with addictive behaviour. Pathological gamblers, for example, have frontal deficits which are mainly right-sided; by contrast, in cocaine addicts, for example, stimulating the right prefrontal cortex reduces craving for cocaine. And denial, a left-hemisphere speciality, is typical of addiction.”

“I believe that we have entered a phase of cultural history in which negative feedback between the products of action of the two hemispheres has given way to positive feedback in favour of the left hemisphere. Despite the primacy of the right hemisphere, it is the left hemisphere that has all the cards and, from this standpoint, looks set to win the game.” […] “Instead of a corrective swing of the pendulum, therefore, there is a loss of homeostasis, and the result is positive feedback, whereby the left hemisphere's values simply become further entrenched. (...it only discovers more of what it already knows, and it only does more of what it already is doing.)” […] “[Anthony Giddens] sees a dangerous form of positive feedback, whereby theoretical positions, once promulgated, dictate the reality that comes about, since they are then fed back to us through the media, which form, as much as reflect, reality.”

In short, an inter-hemispheric positive feedback loop can be entered between the hemispheres whenever the LH constructs the world to which the RH presences, and this can reinforce or supplement the intra-hemispheric positive feedback loop to which the LH is already prone. To escape LH capture we need to break out of these nihilistic feedback loops. Are we able to intervene proactively, or are we resigned to a more reactive stance of harm reduction? Characterizing LH capture in this way was recently done in conversations with Charles Eisenstein and Philip Goyal. Daniel Schmachtenberger also referenced it with the term “runaway dynamic”. Erica Thompson, Zak Stein, Tristan Harris, Donella Meadows, and many others addressed it as well. It's a centrally important way of approaching this subject. 

Bernard Tannett also described "the self-contained inner connectivity of the left hemisphere, trapped as it is in its own positive feedback loop." As he put it, "a combination of hemispheric inequalities and recent cultural history" are undermining the hierarchy of attention. These inequalities are the asymmetry of means, structure, and interaction. And it's the last of these, the asymmetry of interaction, that seems most significant. Tannett again: "The left hemisphere has transformed negative feedback loops into positive proof of its own invincibility. In earlier times the left hemisphere's 'will to power' was counterbalanced by forces outside of its closed and self-referential system, but under modernity the routes of escape from the virtual world of the left hemisphere are being closed off."

There's an important link here to Gestalt perception, which is necessary for both understanding and addressing issues of global significance. We particularly see this in the context of any discussion about the threat of environmental harms, the decline and potential collapse of social structures and civilization, and so on. Compromised Gestalt perception may be the single greatest obstacle facing a civilization such as ours, composed of diverse groups some of which are attempting to escape our capture by the left hemisphere (or at least raise the issue). Because without the ability to perceive ‘the whole’ one is blind to the threat of its dissolution. Furthermore, to those for whom it does not exist, the attempt to address its loss therefore has no meaning. It is simply incoherent. Once a society is entrapped and blinded in this way, and without a sufficient compensatory response to address the loss of the whole, corrosive feedbacks inexorably compound. In the end it only becomes harder to extricate ourselves. And impaired Gestalt perception might also explain a lot of odd behaviors, such as a tendency to “cherry pick”, or only highlight fragmentary aspects of reality. Not only does cherry picking serve to confirm one’s preferred theory (in contrast to actual reality), but it also becomes much easier when one is already blind to the larger whole to begin with, to the Gestalt that would have easily contradicted said theory were one only able to perceive it. Such behavior is exactly what one might expect from someone captured by the left hemisphere.

Not a gorgon, but you get the idea.

The Gorgon stare

 

When we think of positive feedback loops we tend to see these as “runaway” feedbacks of “cascading“ interactions that are continually speeding up faster and faster. And indeed our contemporary age has been called the "Age of Acceleration". But in the case of left hemisphere capture, this is an acceleration that brings us to the point of immobility, to perseveration, and to the "catatonic paralysis of overdeliberation and self-consciousness" per Louis Sass. Note the contradiction here. The trapped person imagines they are free because they are moving faster, but they're actually going nowhere; the first paradox. Consider the visually arresting metaphor of the "fixed stare" as described by McGilchrist:

 

"The idea of a fixed stare (of the Gorgon, or of the basilisk, for example) that immobilises and kills is embedded in the mythology of, certainly, Western cultures going back to the Minoan civilisation. It is also relevant (a topic that I have explored elsewhere) that when we find ourselves to be objects of attention, we respond to the quality of attention to which we are subjected, and experience ourselves as transformed by it: when we are stared at, we feel ourselves immobilised, which is perhaps why prey seem – and indeed are – transfixed, as we put it, by their predators. ...knowledge, as an instrument of human progress’, writes physicist Claudio Ronchi, ‘can become, like the Gorgon, a goddess that transmutes anyone who gazes upon her into stone. ...closing down to narrow attention is what needs to be avoided, whether by depriving the serial-processing left hemisphere of time, or by distracting its Gorgon stare elsewhere.”

 

Although the stare is dangerous, it is strangely irresistible; the second paradox. Any connection to the modern Panopticon? It may not be surprising to see John M. Hoberman write that "Sartre's primary interest is to show the fact of human freedom and the flight from freedom, the nostalgia of the for-itself for the condition of the in-itself (a nonhuman stasis). The temptation, as Kierkegaard points out in the second journal entry on vertigo, is to construe a pressure that comes from within as one that comes from without. To avoid anguish and vertigo, says Sartre, it is necessary "that I apprehend in myself a strict psychological determinism." Kierkegaard is far less interested both in the illusion that such a determinism represents and in the attendant wish to reify oneself.  It is not Kierkegaard but Sartre, with his affinity for images of petrification, whose gaze is transfixed by the Biblical "heart of stone."

 

Now that we've read about this immobilizing stare, and its attraction for those like Sartre, let's connect this back to the asymmetries of means, structure, and interaction (as succinctly laid out by Bernard Tannett) that are making escape from the 'Brave New (virtual) World' we are in very difficult. A important thing to note about this stare is that you need to anticipate it. Because, according to the myth, once you are transfixed it is too late. You are dead. You can no longer intervene. The left hemisphere's desire for stasis has trapped you in a positive feedback loop. So is there anything that can provide the leverage needed to oppose this? What can allow one to break free from "the self-contained inner connectivity of the left hemisphere, trapped as it is in its own positive feedback loop”? How does one re-engage in the "McGilchrist Manoeuvre", that "movement or series of moves requiring skill and care", per Jonathan Rowson? 

 

Many forms of mental health therapy (CBT, mindfulness, philosophical counseling, religious practices, “kairotic knots” etc.) might be seen as attempts to return to a process oriented psychology, or a way of living that prevents stasis, and thereby productively addresses the blindness, denial, and neglect that negatively affects quality of life. But therapeutic interventions, if primarily reactive, may not work after one is already caught in the trap, consumed by addiction, or turned to stone. Do “thought stopping" techniques resist positive feedback, or "thought accelerating" techniques reveal their ultimate futility? A more proactive, preventative approach may be needed, one involving embodied therapies of practice. To be sure, that may involve many of those "reactive" therapies as well. Preventing left hemisphere capture in the long term may require an approach of radical embodiment and movement. For example, a meditative practice involving fine motor skills, such as calligraphy, both encourages one to release excessive tension and have a more fluid relationship with the world. But more generally, perhaps simply learning how to cycle between a more RH way of attending (freedom from "Gorgon stare") and a more LH way of attending (the fixed stare) can allow us to navigate the world of experience in a healthier way. Perhaps there are times to "release the kraken/gorgon/basilisk", and then there are times to rein in it's petrifying stare.

 

Confronting stasis (and illusory movement) with real movement, the movement back to "attention to the field as a whole", movement back into Chargaff's darkness, movement back to the right hemisphere, seems possible. A more explicit form of process or “movement therapy” may be a bit broader than “cognitive therapy“. I'd like to reintegrate this into those three asymmetries of means, structure, and interaction. Beginning with the last, movement applied to the 'asymmetry of interaction' is the return to healthy forms of allostatic regulation and right hemisphere negative feedback, which mitigates positive feedback loops. Movement applied to the 'asymmetry of structure' is the raison d'etre of Zak Stein's axiological design. Consider the "three things that make us fully human, and make us fulfilled: belonging to a cohesive social group, belonging in the natural world, and belonging in the spiritual world", how do our designed structures and environments interact with these? And movement applied to the 'asymmetry of means' might suggest that our means (language, logic, linearity, etc.) should always remain transparent to deeper meaning, and not overly literal, opaque, and ossified. ...The paradox we encounter is that to really rest (or achieve any of the goals of the Slow Movement) one must be able to move.

 

To what extent is the Gorgon fixed stare a metaphor for the left hemisphere’s objectifying form of attention? To what extent might it be an observable feature of various forms of interaction along a neurodiverse spectrum, to a greater or lesser degree? (Maybe McGilchrist is referring to the fixed stare in both the literal and the metaphorical sense.) Is it possible to design one's life, or the culture and civilization to which one belongs, in such a way that stasis and the "fixed stare" never gain a firm hold? The fixed stare immobilises; it turns people into objects. And so if we interact with others in ways that are consistent with the "ethics of care", consistent with virtue ethics and supportive of a cohesive social group, then we can better resist that objectification. Such ethical approaches take relationality as central. And they tend to resist the opposing tendency toward fragmentation. 

The sociopathic fixed stare can be seen when, knowingly or not, we view others as just another tool we can manipulate, that can serve some use for us. The judgement and evaluation is implicit, and the verdict has been rendered: life owes you something. Entitlement. Privilege. It happens when we expect something from others, and so we stare. Just waiting until we get the response that we want and are looking for, which is often an expectation of assent, praise, or some other ego gratifying validation that we are smart, funny, or valued in some way. "What do you want, a pat on the back?" It can feel both too intense and too expectant. The other feels uncomfortable and objectified by being placed into a role of serving someone who feels entitled. Curiously, that feeling of entitlement is blind and completely lacks any self-awareness. It feels genuinely miffed and affronted when it isn't bowed or curtsied to. No human or animal wants to be stared at, nor do they want to show obeisance. Why recognize another's unearned feeling of entitlement? Nature's way is to be grateful for anything we receive. Only the fool expects something in return. The onus is on you; the response is yours to give or intiate, not to take or passively receive from others. "You know what to do. Stop waiting for others to do it for you and just do it yourself!" Or as McGilchrist described what amounts to appropriate self-care: "Accept responsibility for yourself and your life". And when others do provide, show gratitude and appreciation. There is a fine line between expecting goodwill in the context of an ethic of care and reciprocity, and expecting it as a "matter of course" and taking it for granted. (Compared to prior ages, is this an age of entitlement? The evidence is still being evaluated.)

McGilchrist recommends preventing the fixed stare through 'deprivation and distraction', or in other words, moving on to something else. And in social contexts, this might help relieve some of those long, pregnant pauses that can give the impression we are "fishing for the right response" from someone else. If the response we want is not spontaneously forthcoming, it will certainly lack any authenticity if it is coerced. Deprivation and distraction forecloses the possibility of a prolonged, fixed, immobilizing form of attention. And in its absence the ethics of care may be better able to grow and flourish. McGilchrist's advice for how to address an immobilizing, "stuck" form of attention is just one part of his larger project to return to the more fluid world and balancing feedbacks of the right hemisphere. And I think it's helpful to describe how, in a very wuwei manner, by staring expectantly one may actually prevent the reception of that which one would gladly receive (unless, like a predator, all you want is a dead and lifeless thing, in which case this is probably the recommended approach). Maybe understanding our subjective experience of the emissary's petrifying stare, from both the giving and receiving end of it, can help us break free. 

Taken out of context, deprivation and distraction have a lot of negative connotations and not a lot to recommend for them. But viewed within the context of avoiding closing down to narrow attention they seem to make sense. Of the two, distraction seems the least appealing given its association with attentional problems. And since that is a major concern for McGilchrist as well, it does seem odd to hear him suggest this might be helpful. But recall that it is the context that makes all the difference. If it is possible to "think against thinking" per Heidegger, then perhaps we can "distract from distraction". That is the sense I get here. What distracts us in this beneficial way? A capacity for thinking several moves ahead to outcomes remote from us in space and time, for attending to this telic depth (or larger cognitive light cone per Michael Levin) and, crucially, taking the responsibility to fulfill it. It's not the narrow attention that needs to be avoided so much as the closing down to it when we forget this. This "closing" is synonymous with stasis, immobilisation, LH capture, and so on.

Postscript: For the most part, the hemispheres do the same things, but it is how they do them that is different. Regarding this "how", I think we can say that each hemisphere functions in a predominantly inverse capacity to that of the other. So for example, taking the idea of power/weakness, for the LH power is understood as direct, explicit, manipulation of the world (to impose one's agency). But for the RH power is precisely the inverse of this, it is the power to permit (to recognize another's agency).  This inversion extends to almost every quality, which we can see in the list of "twenty contrasting features of the brain hemispheres". So when McGilchrist writes "the right hemisphere places itself in a position of vulnerability [submission] to the left" we can understand this in two different ways. If power means imposing one's agency, then the RH has less power. But if power is recognizing another's agency, then vulnerability may mean greater power.