Why should more light diminish what we are aware of? By disclosing one aspect of our world with greater clarity, other aspects are concealed from our awareness. It not only happens in this way, due to the optics of our eyes, but also with the ‘light’ of attention when we become hyper-focused on certain features of the world. And this is why McGilchrist referenced that line from Chargaff in The Matter with Things. We have both the ‘torch’ (British term for flashlight) of the left hemisphere and the right hemisphere’s ability to remain with the ‘fertile night’, which allows us to see the heavens. The naturalistic Confucian Xunzi wrote that we "must be capable of embracing all changes, a single corner will not suffice". As he wrote, a person capable of doing so "may sit in their room and view the entire area within the four seas, may dwell in the present and yet discourse on distant ages" (Hsun Tzu: Basic Writings). This may also help us understand the potential problems that the “bright torch” of chatGPT could produce. AI will enable us to know some small corner of truth in far greater detail than we could without it, but at the risk of blinding us to still more. Returning to Chargaff's metaphor, it could prevent our eyes from adjusting to the dark and seeing what the world of the right hemisphere has to say about life and living. In The Matter with Things McGilchrist wrote:
McGilchrist has described the LH as "a good servant, but a very poor master". And I think chatGPT, despite the appropriate cautions described, can be a very good servant indeed! In that recent conversation between Jordan Peterson and Brian Roemmele, it was very interesting to hear them consider the advantages. Among the topics they discussed was the capacity to make new connections within an immense corpus of training data. With targeted questions we can find those which we are looking for. So, to the extent that the process of creativity relies on uncovering these new connections, this is very useful. Another interesting topic is that of "prompt engineering". Psychologists and non-STEM majors are perhaps better equipped to handle the input and output of chatGPT because prompt engineering is different from computer programming languages: it is all done in the language of human thought and psychology. But, given that human psychology is vulnerable to confabulation and confirmation bias, some additional work with the output is still required (as we've seen recently).
So combining the capacity to form new connections, with that of writing the prompts needed to uncover them, it appears that chatGPT is very much like that "narrow beam" of the LH, focusing in with laser precision to "get and grab" what it wants; it's a supercharged left hemisphere. Language has been the most powerful tool for our LH, so the capacity for chatGPT to be the best polyglot in the world is especially interesting to me. Particularly in that it can help to translate non-human communication as well (we might decipher the speech of animals). Given all this, anyone who wants to look carefully at a topic would be foolish not to use chatGPT. Predictably, it has become an invaluable tool for almost all knowledge workers. One might say this is an inevitable result of the extended mind thesis of Andy Clark and David Chalmers. (Often cited among four qualities: embodied, embedded, enacted, extended.)
Returning to Chargaff, there's a few longer passages that resonate with McGilchrist's description of the right hemisphere:
"...I have always oscillated between the brightness of reality and the darkness of the unknowable. When Pascal speaks of God in hiding, Deus absconditius, we hear not only the profound existential thinker, but also the great searcher for the reality of the world. I consider this unquenchable resonance as the greatest gift that can be bestowed on a naturalist. [...] It is the sense of mystery that, in my opinion, drives the true scientist; the same force, blindly seeing, deafly hearing, unconsciously remembering, that drives the larva into the butterfly. If he has not experienced, at least a few times in his life, this cold shudder down his spine, this confrontation with an immense, invisible face whose breath moves him to tears, he is not a scientist. The blacker the night, the brighter the light." (Heraclitean Fire, 1978)
Chargaff's insights take on a deeper meaning when viewed in the context of McGilchrist's hemisphere hypothesis, and the consequences of LH capture that may result when the asymmetric relationship is inverted. And Xunzi was not the only one to have intuited this danger. For the Buddhist Hui-neng, "no thought" simply means "the seeing of all things with your mind without being tainted or attached to them." And Wang Yang-ming wrote that "people fail to realize that the highest good is in their minds and seek it outside." He appears to have interpreted the Diamond Sutra's advice to "let the mind function freely without abiding anywhere or in anything" to mean that "once it is realized that the highest good is in the mind and does not depend on any search outside, then the mind will have definite direction and there will be no danger of its becoming fragmentary, isolated, broken into pieces, mixed, or confused". This condition is precisely that which McGilchrist diagnosed in contemporary culture (though the etiology he describes is different). Hui-neng, Yang-ming, and the author of the Diamond Sutra were all specifically describing nonattachment. Unlike Xunzi, they didn't allude to the polarity between narrow and broad attention and its qualitative attributes, which Chargoff did most poetically, and McGilchrist via the neuropsychiatry (the neural correlates of the phenomenology).
People will often devote a lot of time trying to understand conscious awareness, when what they really should be looking at is inattentional blindness: neglect, denial, and indifference. If consciousness is the primary condition, then blindness (or unconsciousness) is the limit experience. So rather than explain the primary condition, the real mystery to be explained is where our attention is lacking. And of course, this is the entire raison d'etre of McGilchrist’s books; as usual, he is inverting the contemporary approach. As noted below, a 'failure to attend to' or a 'failure to permit to come into being' may be explained as a failure to inhibit the LH world (the opposing process) or a failure to facilitate the RH world (the primary condition). But moreover, perhaps blindness and neglect (and paralysis and perseveration) is a failure to maintain that generative tension between "both mutual potentiation and mutual inhibition" (TMWT).
Inhibition
"As iron sharpens iron, so one person sharpens another." - Proverbs 27:17
"The heart’s wave would never have risen up so beautifully in its cloud of spray, and become spirit, were it not for the grim old cliff of destiny standing in its way..." - Friedrich Hölderlin
McGilchrist references the role of inhibition throughout his work: “Inhibition at the neurophysiological level does not necessarily equate with inhibition at the functional level... the net result is functionally permissive.” (TMAHE) It "does not mean repression: research shows that activity inhibition is often associated with more, not less, physiological activation and expressive behaviour.” Consequently, “impairment of the right hemisphere’s capacity to inhibit the left hemisphere could result in functional interference…” (TMWT) “Inhibition is creative.” “Negation at one level can allow something at another level to flourish untrammelled.” “The inhibitory action of the corpus callosum enables the human condition. Delimitation is what makes something exist. Friction, for example, the very constraint on movement, is also what makes movement possible at all.” Incidentally, this could be the very root foundation for a McGilchristian perspective on daily exercise.
McGilchrist writes “In order to achieve many musical effects, whether between the singers in a choir, or the members of a string ensemble, or the two hands of a pianist, especially where there are fugal elements, discords, cross-rhythms and syncopations, it is equally vital for the performer to be sensitive to, and attentive to, one set of experiences, and simultaneously to be taken up in, and express, another, that may appear, at the local level, to be in conflict with it. We must inhibit one in order to inhabit the other.” (TMAHE) “[T]he creativity of experts was proportional to the degree of dominance of the right prefrontal cortex over the left. The results suggested that there was a direct, suppressive, effect on the left parietal cortex, while the activity of the right prefrontal cortex was facilitated. In expert artists only the right prefrontal cortex and right parietal cortex were activated, whereas in the novice group the activations were bilateral: it was suggested by the authors that in artists a transcallosal pathway was exerting inhibitory control of the right on the left prefrontal cortex.” (TMWT)
“...‘most cases of delusion’ are due to left hemisphere overactivity combined with right hemisphere underactivity. Since the relationship between the hemispheres is a dynamic one of reciprocal inhibition, it is in a sense irrelevant whether what happens is that the right hemisphere is underactive, or the left hemisphere is overactive, since the effect in either case is the same... Delusions have consistently been linked to either right hemisphere dysfunction or left hemisphere overactivity (or both).” Fascinatingly, “in the intact situation it is the will of the left hemisphere, at a more conscious level, that normally inhibits the will of the right.” (TMAHE) And again, “the left hemisphere is better able to inhibit the right hemisphere than the right is to inhibit the left.” (TMWT) Why is this? McGilchrist suggests “[T]he concerns of the left hemisphere with getting and using make it by nature competitive – it may be remembered that it is confident, unreasonably optimistic, unwitting of what goes on in the right hemisphere, and yet in denial about its own limitations.” (TMAHE) At first, this asymmetric capacity for inhibition appears to be an inversion of the master and emissary metaphorical description. After all, one might infer that a 'master' should be more capable than an 'emissary' in most regards. But the Tao Te Ching chapter 68 (Wing-Tsit Chan, 1963) suggests a deeper principle may be involved:
A skilful conqueror does not compete with people. One who is skilful in using men puts himself below them.
This is called the virtue of non-competing. This is called the strength to use men. This is called matching Heaven, the highest principle of old."
According to McGilchrist, the 'right, left, right' move from the "presencing of a particular lived context (right hemisphere) to the re-presentation of that context into elements for analysis (left hemisphere) and then back into a perception of context" is a process whereby the "initial perception of context is enriched and enhanced". (This is also the familiar "waters and mountains" verses of Zen Buddhism.) This imagery, of hemispheric inhibition and facilitation in a reciprocal cycle of withdrawal and approach, suggests the ebb and flow of waves washing over pebbles on a beach in the "swash zone". (Examples: looking down, looking across.) With each pass the small rocks are picked up and rolled about, moving up and down the gently sloping beach. And through the imperceptibly slow processes of surface abrasion and polishing, they become smooth. (Incidentally, these same processes have produced the famous marimo balls of Lake Akan in Japan, though they are algae instead of rocks.) Continuing with this metaphor, the RH wave of fluid presencing washes over the LH firmament of solid stone. Each wave crashes on the beach, then (like Ein-Sof) withdraws into the ocean. The stone fractures, and those fragments are pushed and pulled, alternately reintegrating back into the ocean and being left exposed to the light and air. Through countless cycles of this process the familiar appearance of the shoreline is created, enriching the quality of the beach to the benefit of both the organisms who live there and the people who visit.
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| Image: Neil Yonamine |
We have all seen how the way we view something changes over time. In a moment of embarrassment our friends may counsel us "some day you'll look back on all this and laugh." At other times we may have counseled others to exercise forbearance and restraint, "Don't make any rash, impulsive decisions. Sleep on it first." ...And ever notice how things become much clearer when you get a chance to just "get away from it all" for a while? Leave town and go on vacation. Take a week or two off. Try something new, or alternatively, maybe rekindle an old passion. A mid-day siesta or lunch provides a break in the day. Just enough distance from the work routine to re-energize before returning. My first employer, Duane Giarratana, made this point. At the time I thought a lunch break only needed to be as long as it took me to eat. When it comes to stimuli (affecting attention deficiency disorders, for example) increasing one's distance can reduce stress... and the desire for immediate gratification (distance as friction). In other words, it doesn't just 'make the heart grow fonder'. But one must find the frequency that works. If you can't take a good break
every day, then try ever other day, week, year, and so on. Get into the
rhythm right for you. (And trust. A highly variable cycle over the short term often reveals a more stable trend over the longer term.) Understandably, religious leaders need some distance as well. I once knew a Lutheran pastor who lived in a parsonage beside the church. He moved to a house on the hill a few miles away. He too needed the space, the psychological distance from work. That's certainly not without precedent. The followers of many religious traditions have long sought the quiet solitude of remote retreats.
This is a meditation on the importance of division, separation, and "necessary distance", in every sense of the word: space, time, and of course phenomenal experience. If our proximity to events is too close we risk losing the broader perspective and context that provides that essential feeling of ease and comfort in life, that enables better decision making. With distance comes depth. McGilchirst notes that the "relatively abstracted and virtual world" must be kept apart from the "immediate world of perceptual experience" if each is to work efficiently, "and yet together". But "insufficient separation of function results in an impairment". In what might appear to be a plot twist, the division of the brain into two hemispheres, according to McGilchrist, is chiefly for the benefit of the right hemisphere. After all, of the two hemispheres it is the one whose functions are more likely to be colonized by the other. Note the irony here: the hemisphere that gives us a holistic view on the world relies upon separation and distance for its very being, and thus do we as well. A world without division would neither have unity. What would become of our telic capacity without it? In the immortal words of the punk rock band The Offspring, "you gotta keep 'em separated".
“Ultimately I believe that many of the disputes about the nature of the human world can be illuminated by an understanding that there are two fundamentally different ‘versions’ delivered to us by the two hemispheres, both of which can have a ring of authenticity about them, and both of which are hugely valuable; but that they stand in opposition to one another, and need to be kept apart from one another – hence the bihemispheric structure of the brain.” - The Master and His Emissary
“The evolution of what I have called necessary distance actually brings one into connection with that from which one is appropriately distanced; it is not a distancing that separates. Necessary distance is what makes empathy possible. It would seem that this is what lies behind the importance of harmony, balance, equipoise... when we have been sufficiently detached to be looking at one another, but not yet so detached that we are inappropriately objective about, or alienated from, one another.”- The Master and His Emissary
“Those who have accompanied me on the trip so far will recognise in North American native myths, ancient Judaic wisdom and Chinese philosophical literature analogies to the myth enshrined in the title of The Master and his Emissary. Versions of this insight into the over-reaching nature of mere left hemisphere ‘intellect’ exist, in fact, in many cultures. (I put the word intellect in inverted commas because, as the reader will know, intellect must not be confused with intelligence, which it often lacks.) The insight is present in Rumi; it is present in the Jewish legend of the Golem; and versions are also found in Sanskrit literature including the Mahabharata. All of these, including The Secret of the Golden Flower, were unknown to me when I wrote that book. Yet these ancient insights were exactly where neurological research has led me.” - The Matter with Things
Our contemporary society is precisely one of LH capture, a world in which most of the asymmetries have been inverted. And this could have some important implications for how we view inequality and social justice (though opinions may differ here). For example, the relationships of status and prestige, and the remuneration provided workers in the vast majority of occupations, are likely to have been inverted to some degree or other. We should expect to find that those at the top and bottom of the pay scale, and those accorded the lowest and highest prestige within society, are reversed from the proper order. We've got it all backwards. As the author of the book of Matthew wrote, "so the last shall be first, and the first last."
And correspondingly, in a society captured by the LH where these positions are reversed, there may be a lot of confusion in how we talk about this. We must be careful. For example, McGilchrist helpfully clarifies how one should read Hegel: “Hegel is using the term ‘master’ here to refer to the usurping force that I associate with the left hemisphere – in other words to the emissary turned despot, known as the ‘major’ hemisphere – and the ‘slave’ to refer to the true Master, ill-treated by the usurper, which I associate with the right hemisphere, the ‘silent’ or ‘minor’ hemisphere.” ...In contemporary Western society, it wouldn't be inaccurate to say that those who are treated as slaves are faced with a struggle to challenge the supremacy of an arrogant, plutocratic minority that has chosen to ignore them. Or rather than challenge, to transform the system into something altogether new for the benefit of all. Some conservatives have claimed McGilchrist as one of their own. Progressives have done the same, and this 'radical reading of McGilchrist' suggests one reason why. But ultimately, simple political divisions fail here.
Opponent process theory suggests that there is always some tension between the hemispheres, and this is kept at a manageable level when lines of authority are clear, as when that authority rests with the rightful Master, or even conversely in the case of a LH insurrection where authority now predominantly rests with the Emissary. (Of course, the insurrection transforms the tension from productive to destructive, both for the individual and society.) But what about the possibility of intermediary states where the master/emissary relationship has been disturbed, but not yet completely inverted, and the asymmetry is merely reduced? I would suggest that at these times the tension between the hemispheres would be greatest, as would be the internal conflict within the individual. Such a person might experience significant attention and self regulation problems, and one's actions would frequently appear to violate, or be misaligned with, one's stated values, causing difficult to manage cognitive dissonance upon reflection. McGilchrist has noted that "no two things are ever equal", and so perhaps this is why he primarily describes the hemispheres in either their regular or inverted relations, and not in an equal relationship with regard to authority. Though he has noted that symmetric hemispheres are correlated with a number of psychological disorders. All the same, one might surmise that the "limit case of equality/symmetry" would at least be approached as the threat of insurrection increases (or as the Master begins to reclaim authority). At such times, careful introspection (and extrospection) may be needed to back away from the precipice.
Recall that old aphorism about how "power corrupts'', and regardless of whether that is necessarily so, it may nonetheless be true in some sense that the power to manipulate the world may be a kind of intoxicating and potentially self deluding power which blinds us if left unrestrained, and for this reason it is going to tend to be antagonistic to wisdom. This kind of power the Master cannot have if it is to fulfill its role. Why? The Master must be in touch with reality. This is the Master's principle virtue and raison d'etre. If the Master incorporated a quality that placed it at risk of losing its capacity for 'presencing', then all would truly be lost. And yet, manipulation of the world is necessary, at the very least for evolutionary reasons, so an Emissary who wields such power is a necessity. And thus the Master must be vulnerable, or be no Master at all. As has been shown many times, the LH and RH embody entirely incommensurable ways of being that are nonetheless paradoxically united.
McGilchrist tries to clarify our situation: “In other words’, writes Barbara Goodrich, ‘the whole system of the brain is cooperating so as to permit the different frequencies not to entrain each other'... And she continues: “In summary, Buzsáki views the mammalian organism as the most complex system of nature’s devising, one which is built from elements relying on opposing forces, including... the non-predictability of non-linear interactions among neurons kept in a metastable condition.” Balance needs to be constantly disturbed and restored.”
Indeed, this entire arrangement appears to encourage a kind of metastable equilibrium. Our vulnerability to delusion, LH capture, and all manner of misfortunes seems consistent with maintaining this metastability, which despite these obvious drawbacks must also confer some advantages. Perhaps the cliff edge is, paradoxically, the safest location. Recall that Taronhiawagon "comes to understand that it is right that he maintain a small distance from his brother, while at the same time keeping his attention upon him, neither letting him drift too far from his awareness, nor letting him blend with him." And it may not be so much that the RH "lets the left hemisphere enjoy its delusions without interfering", so much as the LH has the power to inhibit what the RH has to say. Now if, for whatever reason, the Master did have the power to "verbalize its worldview for all the world to hear", on the one hand, that metastability would be lost. But more importantly, and philosophically, verbalization (representation) of the RH worldview (presentation) is precisely what cannot be done - it is impossible to put that into words without losing it in the process.
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| We may need some "necessary distance". |
The role that the observer plays in the selection, interpretation, and utilization of scientific theories is of central importance to Thomas Kuhn. He argued for a 'third position' that elided the simple categories of relativism and absolutism (roughly synonymous to realism and nominalism). As Cornelis de Waal wrote: "Whereas the nominalist claims that only individuals are real, the realist holds that relations are as real as the individual objects they relate." There is "revolutionary science" occurring today, for examples I'd point to McGilchrist's study of brain lateralization (The Master and his Emissary), Rovelli's relational quantum mechanics (Helgoland), Hoffmeyer's biosemiotics (Signs of Meaning in the Universe), and Friston's active inference framework based on the free energy principle (which has been described as "a nuanced form of realism"). It is interesting to note that how these thinkers are interpreted, and whether they are held in low or high regard, depends on the characteristics of the currently ascendant paradigm. The rise of perspectivism, as we near the second quarter of the 21st century, is finally showing signs of eclipsing the nominalism of the 20th century.
Those who criticize these bodies of work from a nominalist paradigm inevitably find them largely unintelligible, and their arrows fail to reach their target, but from a perspectivist paradigm they often can be seen to provide a more coherent explanation of evidence, accounting for apparent anomalies under the dominant nominalist paradigm. This isn't to say that such work is without errors, but that those errors are rarely exposed and addressed without understanding the relevant paradigm within which the work is situated. Kuhn famously argued that the accumulation of a sufficient number of anomalies can trigger a crisis leading to a paradigm shift. This is what appears to be occurring today - a shift back to a form of perspectival science that better accounts for the role of observers. "The one thing I think you shouldn't say is that now we've found out what the world is really like," Kuhn said in one of his last interviews, "because that's not what I think the game is about." There are several complementary perspectives upon the world, but no absolute answers.
Three Levels of Response
The Buddhist notion of the Eightfold Path was an early attempt to create a set of guidelines for knowing the right way to flourish, and to be able to evaluate if one was progressing along the path of love and wisdom (or deviating from it). There has been some debate within Buddhism concerning to what extent this is actually a useful heuristic. While there is significant emphasis in East Asia on practice, there is also a three part movement that culminates in the sage’s ‘practice of no practice.’ In other words, it's the idea that when we are born our actions are guided by intuition and we have shoshin (beginner's mind), but as we grow older they become constrained by discursive thought. So the sage seeks to return to beginner's mind, although this is called senshin (enlightened mind).
Of course, the Eightfold Path isn't a strictly linear progression, but like many other schema the various steps are more or less intended to proceed in parallel. Similarly, McGilchrist's three levels of response also should proceed in parallel. If that's the case, then why is the individual level apparently given inordinate emphasis? A few recently available lectures may shed light on this. The first is a point he's raised many times, here while at Ralston College in 2024 March:
"I think the first thing is to see what is wrong. So as a psychiatrist I know that the first way to help somebody is not to tell them what to do. It's an error that I made when I was a young psychiatrist. I could tell (and I was right) within an hour or an hour and a half of hearing somebody talking basically what they needed to do. And I was stupid enough to tell them. And of course they didn't do it because they didn't see what I was talking about. Because if they had seen that already they wouldn't have needed to come to me. So the first thing to do is to lead people to a place where they can see for themselves, and then they won't need to be told what to do. It's really a matter of not having rules or procedures, which of course is the very culture that we're both despairing of, but of inhabiting a certain cast of mind, a certain disposition of our souls towards the world. Consciousness is a disposition towards the world, and how we do it, which in shorthand is how we attend the world, is as I say a moral act. Because it changes the world, and it changes us, so that's what we need to be focusing on."
Once enough people take the invitation to "see for themselves", perhaps a critical mass may be reached and those large scale actions (or cessation of action, as the case may be) will proceed naturally. The central premise here is that "how we attend to the world changes the world." And I do agree with that, though if there is disagreement on that point I'd be interested in hearing it. So in the meantime, McGilchrist remains a kind of proselytizer for his self-described crypto-theology. And a critical mass is needed, as Zak Stein noted:
"We need to become people who have rich languages of intrinsic value, a shared sense of what is actually at stake, and what types of futures would be valuable. It’s not a homogenizing value set, but it is a planetary scale macro ethics that agrees upon the value of certain things, the most minimal of which would be the biosphere as we know it, for example. Without this even the most capacitated and intelligent technologists, politicians, and others will be in a difficult position. So we need to become a very different type of human and re-infuse our most important endeavors with a language that refers to intrinsic and real value."
I should note that re-humanizing ourselves (a more accurate description) is a collective effort. And one I am glad to see John Ehrenfeld a part of. Zak Stein also advocates very strongly for changes at both the individual, regional, and global levels with articulate proposals for change. So it's rewarding to engage with his thought as well, as he can put more flesh to the very vague framework for action we get from McGilchrist. And they often promote each other's work.
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