Carve nature at its joints

Homo sapiens

Carve nature at its joints

Matthew H. Slater and Andrea Borghini observed: Good chefs know the importance of maintaining sharp knives in the kitchen. What’s their secret? A well-worn Taoist allegory offers some advice. The king asks about his butcher’s impressive knife-work. “Ordinary butchers,” he replies, “hack their way through the animal. Thus their knife always needs sharpening. My father taught me the Taoist way. I merely lay the knife by the natural openings and let it find its own way through. Thus it never needs sharpening” (Kahn 1995, vii; see also Watson 2003, 46). Plato famously employed this “carving” metaphor as an analogy for the reality of Forms (Phaedrus 265e): like an animal, the world comes to us predivided. Ideally, our best theories will be those which “carve nature at its joints.” 

 

To hear the way people talk these days, identifying themselves as either "believer" or "nonbeliever" in what one might call a spiritual or religious aspect of life, one might conclude that this is among the most important distinctions we can make, and carving our society up using these categories makes a lot of sense. But McGilchrist begins with a different distinction. It's not between believer and nonbeliever, but between two discernibly separate ways of attending. One implication we should draw from this is that these "ways of attending" are even more fundamental, in some sense, than the distinction between spirit and matter. I mean this in the sense that one can produce more or less dogmatic approaches to any topic. (For example, we now have that strange neologism "spiritual materialism" to describe a characteristically left hemispheric way of attending to the numinous aspects of life and living.) In short, the phenomenologically different worlds sustained by the bihemispheric brain may be the most parsimonious way to "carve nature at its joints", or one might say, at the corpus callosum. Divided yet united.

 

Irresolvable postmodern problems? 

 

David Hume’s "Treatise of Human Nature" (1739) says the ‘is-ought problem' cannot be solved, just as David Chalmer's "Facing up to the problem of consciousness" (1995) says the 'hard problem' of consciousness cannot be solved. But we've seen there is a solution for each of these, and the underlying explanation is revealed by the hemisphere hypothesis because it has to do with the assumptions that correlate with two different ways of viewing the world. For the left hemisphere morality and consciousness are fundamentally inexplicable because they are irreducible phenomena (strong emergence is irreducible by definition). Insofar as they have causal power this correlates with complex systems, but 'philosophical zombies' would provide the same explanatory power. Thus, these problems persist. Now by comparison, for the more veridical right hemisphere, axiology (morality, value, etc) and animacy (consciousness, etc) are simply ontological primitives; they are not terms requiring explanation, rather they are that by which all other things are explained, that by which the world comes into being for us. These separate viewpoints are consequential. 

 

The view of the right hemisphere is consistent with the view of the Confucian philosopher Mencius (372–289 BC). In a well known passage he used the example of a child falling down a well to illustrate "the mind that cannot bear" to see the suffering of others: "Witnesses of this event immediately feel alarm and distress, not to gain friendship with the child's parents, nor to seek the praise of their neighbors and friends, nor because they dislike the reputation [of lack of humanity if they did not rescue the child]... The feeling of commiseration definitely is the beginning of humanity; the feeling of shame and dislike is the beginning of righteousness; the feeling of deference and compliance is the beginning of propriety; and the feeling of right or wrong is the beginning of wisdom. Men have these Four Beginnings just as they have their four limbs. Having these Four Beginnings, but saying that they cannot develop them is to destroy themselves... When they are fully developed , they will be sufficient to protect all people within the four seas (the world)." 

 

Mencius is claiming that whether or not we understand our capacity for valueception will determine our fate. It will result in either our future destruction, or our flourishing. That's a big claim. 

 

Klee Benally 

 

Late last year a friend of mine recommended Klee Benally's book No Spiritual Surrender. Then about a week ago he also reported his untimely death. In this interview, only weeks before he died, I hear many of the same themes discussed in The Matter with Things: "I repeat this quote over and over through the book, from my late grandmother Roberta Blackcoat who is a resister from the Big Mountain area, and she says "This land is sacred land, the man's law is not our law, and the nature, and the food, is the way we live our law." This embodies the teachings of my father. Literally every time I talk to him, and he's in his 90s right now, he says the same thing. He says "Their laws are just temporary, it's not our way. We live with nature, we belong to the Earth, we don't control it." There's a whole cosmology to understand with that. It embodies this idea that can only correlate with autonomy, but it has an interesting resonance with anarchism. But to me it's a contention because I think it's really a misstep, and that's why I say unknowable, to force indigenous existence into a political category, in a box so people can define it, which inevitably becomes objectified." https://youtu.be/wEXCb3uI1VY?t=1334

 

Klee is delivering solid content here; no postmodern bullshit, no flat ontology, no hubris or delusions of grandeur. He reminds me of "He Who Holds the Sky with Both Hands", the protagonist of that story dictated by John Arthur Gibson, former chief of the Seneca nation of the North American Iroquois confederation. We're going to need more people like this if we are to make it through the time we are in now. This raises the distinction between the "law of man" and the "law of nature", which would seem to loosely correlate to the left hemisphere and the right hemisphere. And to be sure, for all the many reasons McGilchrist has laid out for why we need both hemispheres, I can see why we need both the law of man and law of nature, recapitulating the relationship of the former in service to the latter. We have inverted the proper order, of course.

 

There are many different corners of society calling for inclusion of "aboriginal ways of knowing". Not only is the "woke movement" doing so, but so does McGilchrist, who in some regards can be rather critical of wokeism. However in this regard, as in others as well, he does agree with it. Another point of confusion is in regard to what these "aboriginal ways of knowing" actually consist of. Not only has there always been a plurality of views among a very diverse group of peoples, but there is also a plurality of contemporary exponents and interpreters of those views (as Benally was well aware). Which is all just to say that knowing the context (who, what, and why) is going to be just as important here as in anything else. I haven't seen Benally's book yet, but if his interview is any indication then I think there are going to be more interesting resonances to uncover between him and McGilchrist.

 

The Friston AI saga

 

There is an ominous sounding line in this Friston et al paper titled Designing ecosystems of intelligence from first principles: "...some combination of novel social policies, government regulations, and ethical norms are likely to be required to ensure that these new technologies harness and reflect our most essential and persistent values". This presupposes that we recognize and hold values, which is sadly not a given today. One of the introductory paragraphs says: "AI... “scales up” the way nature does: by aggregating individual intelligences and their locally contextualized knowledge bases, within and across ecosystems, into “nested intelligences”. This suggests a hierarchical ontology and leads to the conclusion of "stages of development". Once one reaches "sympathetic intelligence" the preconditions for valueception appear to be in place. But we could tragically scale up nested intelligences that are more aligned with psychopathic power than with truth, beauty, and goodness. The Friston et al paper, while pointing at the possibility of either outcome, doesn't appear to address the conflict between these opposing scenarios (or attractors) nor suggest a way to avoid the former. 

 

If we take the biomimetic metaphor seriously, then at the last stage of development, "shared intelligence", we might see a functional (if not actual) bifurcation of the cognisphere (Hayles) into two specialized halves, thereby recapitulating the bihemispheric encephalon. And the contrast between these could provide us with a dichotomous key to value (the conflict btw 'psychopathic power' or 'truth, beauty, and goodness'). Which might be akin to restating McGilchrist's hemisphere hypothesis using the FEP-AI formulation. And that may be necessary to understand why, as Matthew Segall recently noted, "organism presupposes and includes but transcends mechanism". It's a point that both Alex Gomez-Marin and Iain McGilchrist have also made. With their frequent references to biomimesis and biological systems, the authors of "Designing ecosystems of intelligence" appear to tacitly acknowledge that transcending mechanism is their objective. 

 

Representation Disillusion

 

I took a photo of my wife at the airport. One last photo before she flies to Japan. Moments later one of those fleeting, neurotic thoughts passes through my mind: What if this is the last? We joked on the drive to the airport about how a plane door plug blew out during a recent flight from the same airline. And how another plane burst into flames after it crashed into another in Tokyo, which is her destination. And then I wondered: Have I taken enough photos of my wife? Have I taken enough video of us together? Or for that matter, of my children? When they grow up and are no longer the kids they used to be, will I remember who they were? I save the bits and scraps of paper from their youth, their drawings, letters, school essays. Not all of them, but the best ones. And when I re-read their first words, misspelled but phonetically readable, I remember how they thought and how they viewed the world around them. In a way, more than any photo or video, these scribbles are a truer representation of who they were. Their own tiny hands created the lines on this paper. ...Today we are able to record the most mundane images and audio from our daily lives and filter them however we want. But I wonder if these high fidelity representations are really an improvement over the small handwritten notes, drawings, and other keepsakes we begin with. The tangible embodiments that reveal more about what's within us, who we really are, much more than any high tech video, photograph, or (who knows?) virtual simulacrum ever could... I wave goodbye to my wife one last time as she passes the first stage of the security checkpoint. She gives me the thumbs up sign and then places a bag containing some toiletry items, maybe it's her contact case and lens solution, into a plastic tray to be scanned by X-rays. I turn to my son, a young man as tall as myself, and we walk away.

 

Alpheus glaber

Dragon of Possibility

 

Jai West has created something very powerful in a recent multimedia celebration of contrast and harmony that could only have emerged from his unique cultural perspective. He titled it Dragon of Possibility: Act 1 Spoken Things. 

Unflattening

Nick Sousanis is an Eisner-winning comics author and educator. His graphic novel, "Unflattening, originally [his] comics dissertation, was published by Harvard University Press in 2015." And is "available in French (as Le déploiement), Korean, Portuguese (as Desaplanar in Brazil), Serbian, Polish, Italian, and Chinese." I mention this here because on page 63 of the book he illustrates and briefly describes the hemisphere hypothesis, which you can see on his blog. He shares his reasons: 

 

"For some time, I’ve been working on comics as integrating the sequential and simultaneous reading modes, but it was through Lynda Barry’s blog for her class on creativity that I came across Iain McGilchrist’s work on the brain. In short, McGilchrist dispenses with the old left/right verbal/visual distinction and talks instead about them as fundamentally different ways of perceiving – which more or less correspond to sequential and simultaneous. Pieces just started to synch together. The background brain image refers back to the hierarchical tree/rhizome distinction from earlier in the chapter, which also aligns with this way of thinking about the hemispheres."

 

It's a beautiful illustration, and the entire book contains many gems of wisdom.

A critique

 

With apologies to legal professionals, most people think like lawyers - they reason backward from a preferred conclusion to find the premises and evidence they would need to support it. Likewise, the hemisphere hypothesis advanced by Iain McGilchrist is often evaluated according to whether it confirms our pre-existing beliefs concerning the world, or unacceptably conflicts with them. If the latter, then we will often just look for further evidence that would allow us to easily disregard it. The interesting question here is: Which beliefs conflict with the hemisphere hypothesis? Samuel Watkinson writes: "It's a valid abstraction to make, but it's a dichotomy which can too easily lend itself to a sharp division that corresponds to ideal "types" of people and societies. Oh, and also it's significant that there's an asymmetry where the "right-side" has ontological supremacy (hence it's the "master" over the "left-side" which is the "emissary"), which seems as [much an] ideological [claim] as purely scientific a claim."

 

The heart of the issue for Watkinson is asymmetry and inequality, which are ultimately truth claims. These have strong ideological overtones in Western culture (despite being thoroughly natural phenomena). The idea of inequality comports far far better with the rhetoric of the political Right, which takes it almost as a given, than it does with the political Left, for which it is almost anathema. Rupert Read was also sensitive to whether McGilchrist was making "dogmatic claims", as was evident in his earlier conversation with him. In sum, the combination of someone like McGilchrist, who is a member of a highly privileged class, justifying inequality (both metaphorically and literally) and axiology (what's good/bad, right/wrong) with his theory that claims these are central features of phenomenology... folks who are sensitive to historic and contemporary abuses of power will have a difficult time with this. Even though McGilchrist extols the virtues of humility and vulnerability, he's still making ontological (metaphysical) claims that at the very least postmodernism, beginning with Nietzsche, has declared to be firmly off limits. Thomas Ellison suggests a possible reconciliation (bold is my emphasis): 

 

"I will say that I agree with you, Samuel, that Iain McGilchrist is a bit of a close-minded curmudgeon when it comes to language, politics, identity, political correctness, and changing social mores in politically progressive circles… which I find comprehensible on the one hand, given his own social and intellectual background and the perspectival limitations inherent therein; but on other hand, I think his research and conclusions—which I find quite profound, engaging, and true—what with his engagement with brilliant thinkers like German Romantic philosophers, William James, Alfred North Whitehead, that point towards the processual nature of life, the relational nature of Being and perception as it exists in the direct encounter of consciousness, and the isolating effects of rationality when employed in a dissecting manner as the basis of an anti-metaphysics metaphysics (aka scientism). With this said, I think that one could make a devastating critique of his own Traditionalism by appealing to the same logic of his own research’s conclusions! Because all things flow, because being is relational (and not absolute), there ought to be more of an allowance for change, fluctuation, and evolution in our language for understanding identity and historical interpretation, which more Traditionalist minds might see as “destructive of Western culture,” or whatever. I think McGilchrist’s major flaw is his own unwillingness to allow his conclusions to penetrate into all arenas of intellectual and political history, not just those that he himself is comfortable with allowing it to make a change. To me, this is a charitable critique: pointing out the importance, profundity, and validity of his research, while also demonstrating that the author has blindspots that might otherwise be made visible and repaired if he were to open up parts of his thinking that have not yet come to fully accept his own conclusions."

This is one of the best attempts at reconciliation that I have seen. And there are indications within his books that he has taken steps in that direction. (For example, the group selection benefits of neurodiversity, which I've referenced before, contradict any claim for absolute "ideal types". These are all implications of the "opponent process" theory, the "no free lunch" theorem, and "gestalt perception", all of which are foundational to hemisphere theory.) Ellison is separating McGilchrist (the person) from his work by suggesting that, while it's certainly possible that any of us might disagree with McGilchrist's personal opinions on some topics, his thesis is "quite profound, engaging, and true" and should "penetrate into all arenas". Like all of us, McGilchrist has blind spots. And he certainly admits as much. So Ellison's recommendation to allow his thesis to reveal, both to himself and to all of us, where all of our blind spots are so that we can transform ourselves is the logical next step. That's good advice. Individual and collective transformation is the whole point. That's the spirit, the raison d'etre. Our attention is back on the thesis itself, while holding the possible implications a bit more loosely and open for discussion. And that can go a long way toward addressing the fears of Samuel Watkinson, Rupert Read, Robert Ellis, and anyone with postmodern inclinations or suspicions that conservative dogmatism is lurking behind all this. ...In my experience, calling someone a curmudgeon (close-minded or otherwise) is mostly a friendly jab intended to humanize us and remind us that everyone is fallible, after all. 

Some of the most consequential thinkers have also been among the most controversial, for any of a variety of different reasons. Which isn't to suggest that controversy is or should be a proxy indicator for how significant a new paradigm may be. Rather, we simply should not be surprised to see controversy associated with paradigmatic thinkers (and a paradigmatic thinker may be "totalizing" in the sense that you can see everything through the new paradigm). Distinguishing a new thesis from its possible implications is important, since while a new paradigm may come to us, it does not therefore naturally follow that we would understand what the actual fuller implications of that paradigm may be. And at the same time, we cannot necessarily reject it on account of that difficulty. The power of a new paradigm can inspire both hope and fear. The hope lies in what it might reveal about us and our world. The suspicion lies in regard to what nefarious purposes it might yet be put. Wisdom and prudence suggests maintaining an awareness of each. 

 

A response 

 

A (perhaps surprising) statement from McGilchrist, during a recent conversation with Damien Walter: "People see the meaning that I'm trying to propagate, and I think young people in particular are more open to this. The people who are a problem are the established smug intellectuals, they're practically all white and they think they know what's best for people of all races and people of different sexes, and so on. It's a played out story. What we're experiencing is a conflict between an enforced ideology which these people insist on, and what our heart is telling us, and that's a very uncomfortable place to be. I think that's what's causing a lot of the grief, the fear, the panic, the anxiety, the stress, and the gloom... But as I often say, I'm a hopeful pessimist. There is something amazing about human beings, if we can live in harmony with the rest of the natural world. And there's no reason why we shouldn't; we need to be encouraging ourselves to do that. So I am very hopeful of what will come forth, and it will come from young people because young people are less indoctrinated. Max Planck famously said "science moves forward one funeral at a time". It's not that you convince the oldies who hold the power that you've got something to say. It's the young people who say it." 

Alpheus heterochaelis

A different critique

Andrew Davis: "What sort of push back have you received? What are some of the critiques, either in the theory or in the metaphysics which you have found to be significant?"
McGilchrist: "One group of people say "The neuroscience is very interesting, no problem with that, but then you start trying to relate it to the world of ideas, and I'm not comfortable with that". And another group says "The analysis of civilizational history is fascinating, but I don't think it really needs all this neuroscience." So you get these two factions, each of them saying "As far as our stuff goes, yes, that's right. But why put these together?" Now that is fascinating, because I think it's part of the way in which our whole intellectual world has fallen apart into silos. ...If each of us just carry on taking a very particular stance, we won't be able to see what is going on as a whole, and it's that that needs to be seen. You know, we talk about the metacrisis. There's not just a crisis in what we're doing to the natural world, and another crisis to do with the fragmentation of society, and mental illness, and so on. They all come together. And they come together, for me, in something that is profoundly illuminated by hemisphere theory."

Education or propaganda? 

 

In "Human ‘behavioural crisis’ at root of climate breakdown" Rachel Donald writes: "The Merz Institute runs an overshoot behaviour lab where they work on interventions to address overshoot." The article is about the recent paper "The behavioural crisis driving ecological overshoot" which states: "A values revolution is unlikely to occur in a time frame rapid enough to restore humanity to a survivable limits to growth scenario. In order to effect the rapid changes necessary to secure our long-term survival, we must consider how marketing, behavioural science and other direct instruments of social influence, including but not limited to the media and entertainment industries, might be used in an emergency response to accelerate the process."

 

The paper begins with a famous quote from Edward Bernays' Propaganda (1928): ‘The conscious and intelligent manipulation of the organized habits and opinions of the masses is an important element in democratic society. Those who manipulate this unseen mechanism of society constitute an invisible government which is the true ruling power of our country. We are governed, our minds are molded, our tastes formed, our ideas suggested, largely by men we have never heard of’. We are already, and always, being manipulated. The question is, of course, which values is this manipulation in the service of? These are not new observations. Zak Stein's 'axiological design', Shoshana Zuboff's 'blindness by design', and Amy Westervelt's penetrating account of the history of propaganda have all shed light on these effects, among the accounts of many other observers of social dynamics. This paper may only be remarkable for highlighting the existential consequences of inaction in stark relief, as well as begging the question: Where is the line between education and propaganda? 

 

We routinely conceal from ourselves what might be considered inconvenient facts every day, preferentially directing our attention to that which gratifies our self conception most. Consider the paradoxical observation that placebos still work even when people know they're receiving pills with no active ingredient. The same is true for propaganda. And the explanation may be as simple as human beings are not rational in their decision-making. Rationally, we may know the pills don't work, or the politician is biased, but if the behavioral pattern of taking medicine is present, or the appearance of power and authority accompanies the message, then we will often fall in line and respond accordingly. In a similar manner, even if we know that we are being manipulated to uphold a certain value the effect may be just the same as if we were ignorant of that fact. 

Life after Death (Michael Levin article)

I'm going to temper expectations by first saying that what Michael Levin writes about here is arguably no more "life after death" than reproduction is life after death. And yet, it points to something that might be more fundamental and surprising than reproduction, or equally transcendent. Levin writes: "In brief, cells from a human or non-human animal, at death, start to turn on expression of specific new genes. Why do cells turn on new genes? Why these specific genes? What, if anything, do they do? What is the evolutionary significance of this? Is it adaptive, or a side-effect of some other aspect of animal biology? ...There are way more questions than answers about these fundamental issues of embodied minds and the active information that animates them. ...An exciting new research area is emerging – the thanatotranscriptome." Cue comparisons to Dr. Moreau and Frankenstein (the modern Prometheus). 

 

The relevance here to McGilchrist, as I see it, is teleology, a topic which they have discussed together several times as well. Levin is showing how the traditional boundaries we inscribe around our bodies and our lives are far less distinct than most would imagine. When our organic integrity dissolves we transform into something different. But the native telos to re-pair and re-incarnate that shattered integrity remains within each of the parts, even as they are severed from the whole. Life responds to intrinsic purpose and value. Indeed, a biological or evolutionary theory of value and purpose was one of the themes that Zak Stein explored with McGilchrist last March: 

 

Zak Stein: "Life emerged to respond to value, which pre-existed it. That the evolutionary process responds to value makes it teleological. It also means that there's a dimension in biological evolution that is responding to the same field of real value that we are responding to. That's a position that humans have believed before... One way to think about human development is just then maturation, this 'deepening appreciation' of the field of value. It's not making up more things to care about, it's getting deeper in touch with reality. Today, a lot of what occurs is just the absence of support for that skill, and things that counteract it, which is to say 'anti-value'. Consider 'preference falsification', which is the root of advertising. And advertising suffuses our environment. So there's an intentional thing in our culture to actually disrupt the ability to truly perceive value. That's something that we need to think about. How do we protect ourselves from being confused? ...We either participate in the evolution of value or fail to do so, and the tragedy is that at the moment we're failing to do so."

 

To wrap this up, Levin is uncovering the physically embodied aspect of the axiology described by Stein and the phenomenology described by McGilchrist. And all this underwrites the need for the "values revolution" that Merz and others advocate for (as do Stein and McGilchrist). Like the fictional Dr. Ian Malcolm from Jurassic Park said, "Life, uh, finds a way", even, it would seem, when it appears that all is truly lost. Our failure to participate in the evolution of value is costly, and imposes significant suffering, but in the end it may only be postponing the inevitable. How long can we deny such a fundamental telic drive? 

 

A top-down neurodevelopmental process?

Mark Solms recently shared a paper online titled "Vascular Underpinnings of Cerebral Lateralisation in the Neonate" which may be interesting for those who like to get into the weeds a bit more. Solms introduced it with the teaser "It seems that few people are still interested in the origin of cerebral asymmetry, but it has continued to puzzle me since the 1980s. Herewith, possibly, the final piece of the puzzle." I appreciate the use of hyperbole to encourage greater engagement with a paper and research topic, but by no means is this the final piece of the puzzle. Nonetheless, there's some very interesting content (my emphasis): 

"The cerebral hemispheres have... been shown to be asymmetric not only in function but also in morphology and cerebral perfusion. ...Neonatal arterial asymmetries are meaningfully related to future manual preference and therefore to cerebral dominance for language and practic functions. From a functional point of view, the direction of this asymmetry potentially accommodates greater perfusion demands in the hemisphere dominant for language and manual dexterity. ...The present findings do not exclude the possibility of a top-down, possibly demand-driven, neurodevelopmental process, in which greater left hemispheric resource utilisation culminates in commensurate compensatory changes in vascular supply." 

And this, to my understanding, is where the relevance of McGilchrist's work comes in. A substantial portion of his thesis is devoted to exploring what exactly that top-down process might be, and asking the question "What is driving it all?" Or as Matt Segall recently phrased it: "Why is it that the world would give rise to a divided brain in this way?" The Matter with Things presents a “recapitulation theory” of its own; biology recapitulates metaphysics recapitulates biology. 

Homarus americanus

"The Crusher and the Cutter" (an alternative metaphor to "The Master and His Emissary")

 

On the topic of asymmetry in biology, Sebastian Ocklenburg and Annakarina Mundorf are unequivocal: 

 

"While symmetry may arise more commonly in biological structures with low complexity, there is evolutionary pressure to develop asymmetry in many biological structures with high complexity. The emergence of symmetry cannot be fully understood without considering the emergence of asymmetry as well. Take, for example, the human brain, one of the most complex biological structures on Earth. While the two halves of the brain look roughly symmetric at first glance, a recent large-scale neuroimaging study in PNAS (2) has shown that structural left–right asymmetries are the rule, rather than the exception, for cortical brain areas. In the study, Kong et al. showed that 91.1% of cortical regions showed significant asymmetries of their surface areas, and 76.5% of the regions showed significant asymmetries in cortical thickness. A comparable large-scale neuroimaging study focused on asymmetries in subcortical structures found similar results (3). Besides these structural asymmetries, the human brain shows functional asymmetries on many different levels, for example, left–right differences in how language, faces, or emotions are processed (4).

 

Importantly, the human central nervous system is not the only one that shows such striking asymmetries. Comparative research has shown that brain asymmetries are common across all major vertebrate groups (5) and can even be observed in the comparably simpler nervous systems of insects and other invertebrates (6). Why do nervous systems develop these asymmetries? In a highly complex and energy-hungry system like the brain, asymmetric organization has several advantages (7). These include improved multitasking capabilities, a more energy-efficient design by avoiding unnecessary redundancy of processing units, and improved action control by avoiding bilateral interference (7). This suggests that, for complex biological structures such as the brain, symmetry may not always be positive, as it would lead to reduced multitasking abilities, an unnecessarily high energy consumption, and issues in bilateral action control. Breaking symmetry is therefore a crucial step in the development of all nervous systems (8). In this context, it is particularly interesting that many neurodevelopmental and psychiatric disorders haven been associated with reduced brain asymmetries, for example, higher brain symmetry (9, 10)."

 

Source: "Symmetry and asymmetry in biological structures" (2022) https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9282387/ 

 

Of course, this is the empirical starting point for the hemisphere hypothesis. "The theory that two hemispheres have differences comes from a simple Darwinian point: In order to survive, we need to be able to do two things at once. We need to be able to be busily focused on something that we’ve prioritized, like the bird needing to focus on picking up a twig to build a nest. At the same time, if it’s going to survive, the bird also needs a wide-open attention, looking out essentially for predators, not just in a threatening way, but also for its fellow creatures; indeed, for its mate," per Dr. Iain McGilchrist.

However direct observation that would allow one to make a connection between behavior and the underlying neurological structures, can be inconveniently difficult to demonstrate. Hemisphere asymmetries are hidden behind an ostensibly symmetrical skull. So to help make functional biological asymmetries a more salient subject it might be helpful to point to the wide variety of other biological structures that also display asymmetry. One can point to lobsters, eusocial pistol shrimp, odobenocetops, sperm whale, and some owls.

 

Have a look at the asymmetric claws of the box crab, genus Calappa. "Members of several decapod families possess dimorphic chelipeds in both sexes, each cheliped having a different function during feeding. Typically, one cheliped is larger and possesses large bluntly-tipped teeth, the major cheliped or crusher. And the other cheliped is smaller and possesses small sharply tipped teeth, the minor cheliped or cutter."  (Cheliped Laterality in Callinectes sapidus, 1976). https://www.jstor.org/stable/1540680

Chirality, at both cosmic and cognitive levels

Lee Smolin is perhaps McGilchrist's single most cited (living) physicist, particularly concerning the nature of time. In this recent interview he dropped the highly provocative statement "Space doesn't exist, time exists, and is fundamental. And space and space-time emerge from the fundamental world." There's a lot of context surrounding that, but the importance of time for Smolin is clear, and shapes his entire approach. It's far from the only feature of his thought that resonates with McGilchrist. As their discussion continued, Peter Wojt's recent paper concerning the chirality of the universe was brought up. Smolin remarked "We want to understand why our world is chiral. I don't know why the world is chiral, but I think it's very non-trivial." Incidentally, we also don't fully understand why the brain exhibits chirality at the anatomical level, and yet it clearly does.

From the abstract of Michael Levin's article "Left–right asymmetry in embryonic development: a comprehensive review" we read: "Embryonic morphogenesis occurs along three orthogonal axes. While the patterning of the anterior–posterior and dorsal–ventral axes has been increasingly well characterized, the left–right (LR) axis has only recently begun to be understood at the molecular level. The mechanisms which ensure invariant LR asymmetry of the heart, viscera, and brain represent a thread connecting biomolecular chirality to human cognition, along the way involving fundamental aspects of cell biology, biophysics, and evolutionary biology. An understanding of LR asymmetry is important not only for basic science, but also for the biomedicine of a wide range of birth defects and human genetic syndromes." An earlier paper has the more fantastic sounding subtitle: "Toward a chiral psychology of cognition", which could easily serve as a succinct description of the hemisphere hypothesis. The hemisphere hypothesis is often associated with duality, but it is far more accurate to say it is about a kind of axiological or qualitative chirality.

Darwin College Lecture

McGilchrist: "Even if we were, by a massive effort and a massive stroke of fortune, enabled to prevent any further loss of the world's forests, reverse the pollution of the oceans, reverse the decline of species, and similarly tackle the other aspects of the metacrisis I have mentioned, this would be in vain if it simply meant that we did not change our hearts and minds. For we would still be the same hubristic, entitled, resentful, power hungry animals that we have become...

So my recommendations might be quite simple. Begin by cultivating a sense of awe and wonder rather than clever knowingness about the extraordinary complex and beautiful cosmos, which it is a pure gift that we have been given a life in. Think about what we're to do with it. And in order to do that well, to have compassion to others and to all the living world, not a sense of aggressive embattlement against forces that we quite probably misunderstand, and to begin to adopt a sense of the little that we can know. In other words a kind of, not 'willing ignorance', but the beginnings of 'true knowing', which is when we recognize how little that we know. That is the first step towards true knowledge. For this to happen we need to understand ourselves anew. Gnothi seauton. Know thyself. We need every insight we can get into what we're doing to ourselves, to life itself, and to our inexpressibly beautiful and complex world. I hope I may have here offered one such insight, however small. The work is great, but we are capable of greater things than we know." https://youtu.be/AuQ4Hi7YdgU?t=3434 

Joint agent-environment systems

It may help to view McGilchrist as providing an alternative way to describe joint agent-environment systems. It's been remarked that, fundamentally, an agent and its environment are not fully separable. There's a coupling between them, a common phenotypic space that they share. And over time they tend to synchronize. This convergence emerges as the agent and environment ‘get to know each other’. How do we understand this ‘fit’ or 'attunement' wherein 'appropriate action' is being in tune with our environment? We are in a 'dialectic' with the world around us. And it is the nature of this dialogue (or dance) that determines which hemisphere will dominate at any moment. Typically we might ask "What kind of stressors does the agent need to respond to?" McGilchrist would add to that the question "What kind of values does the agent need to respond to?" The answer to those questions determines which mode of attention is best suited to the context. Today we are in dialogue with an increasingly artificially controlled environment, and we have been provided numerous tools that predispose us to a sort of manipulative form of engagement with that environment. All of this tends to reinforce the use of one hemisphere over the other in a kind of positive feedback loop, obscuring a more global and values-based form of engagement.

Getting from a "picture of the whole contextual world" to a "linguistic equivalent" involves a process of model building, of taking the "terrain" and simplifying it in various ways to produce a "map". This process was described by Jonathan Rowson as the "McGilchrist Manoeuvre". We analyze the whole by breaking it up and constructing an artificial model, an aid to mental and linguistic manipulation. Then we reintegrate this model with the terrain, such that we gain a deeper understanding of the world by 'seeing through' the linguistic model that was thus produced. The two then work together in a cyclic pattern of fragmentation and reintegration that promotes the dialectical synchronization between agent and environment. ...Unless or until we spin off into a positive feedback loop from which we don't escape. Which is of course the challenge today. So there are many dances, many complementary oppositions, in play: agent-environment, map-terrain, emissary-master, and so on. These are all, in a sense, one single process that is merely viewed from different perspectives. And that underscores how important our awareness of this may be.

"Holding power to account" can be viewed in these terms as well. It is simple in theory, but seems to be harder in practice. An 'opponent process' theory for 'joint agent-environment systems' might tell us that power dynamics play out among agents, but if we view the entire agent-environment system as a whole, then the nihilism of zero sum thinking becomes apparent. We can oppose the game theoretic approach of zero sum competition among agents with the positive sum gestalt perception of the entire agent-environment system. These two opposing views are in many ways inequivalent. Holding power to account means exposing the former as an incomplete aspect of the latter. It's the difference between a runaway positive feedback loop and a balancing negative feedback loop. Currently our counter-balancing forces are too weak and we are spinning out of alignment. We need a better understanding of what healthy opposition really is, and why we need it, if we are to avoid the "great filter".

The Moral Landscape

 

In The Moral Landscape Sam Harris appears to take for granted the very thing that philosophers since Hume have considered to be the biggest question of all: How do we get the 'ought' from the 'is'? Why does he make this assumption? In his Response to Critics he writes: "There is no problem in presupposing that the worst possible misery for everyone is bad and worth avoiding and that normative morality consists, at an absolute minimum, in acting so as to avoid it. ...Our "oughts" are built right into the foundations. We need not apologize for pulling ourselves up by our bootstraps in this way." And so Harris asserts that the flourishing, the "well-being of conscious creatures", is good. For Harris this is equivalent to and defines what is good. (By comparison, utilitarians typically substitute 'happiness' for well-being. But as Gotthold Ephraim Lessing said, "What is the use of use?")

Why is it good? He appears to suggest it's just a self evident precondition, a foundational axiom. However what he takes as his starting point is for some philosophers the end point of a deeper look into the foundations of ethics. He may be right, but not for the reasons he thinks. Notably for McGilchrist, there is a vertical aspect (some may say a 'nested' aspect) to value, morality, and all axiological considerations. In his short article on Scheler we read that 'sinnliche Werte' (values of the senses) are below 'Lebenswerte' (values of life or vitality) which are below the 'geistige Werte', (values of the intellect or spirit) which are below 'das Heilige' (the holy). So for McGilchrist the "well-being of conscious creatures" may be seen to correspond with Lebenswerte. Thus they are in some sense more important than our immediate gratification (and here he and Harris might agree), but less important than spiritual and holy values. And those latter values are likely unintelligible to Harris.

I would say that, like Robert Ellis, Harris has what I call a "system orientation". Consequently any aspects of reality to which we might presence with the RH, that however cannot be accounted for nor explained by his LH systemic approach, are effectively invisible and have no influence. ...In his recent lecture McGilchrist noted that goodness is the grounds of human flourishing, not human flourishing the grounds for goodness. This reasserts the proper asymmetry, which brings with it transparency and thus unity. Axiological aspects (like value) are ontologically primitive, and they become manifest in our embodiment. In other words, we presence to values when we are able to 'see through' the embodiment. If all we see is the surface level of 'things' then values are virtually invisible to us. The relationship between values and embodiment is of the sort that characterizes all coincidentia oppositorum (much like the McGilchrist Wager links the transcendent and immanent into a single process). In regard to values, McGilchrist seems to be suggesting an inversion that shifts from the surface emphasis of consequentialism to something more akin to the depth of virtue ethics, while preserving an asymmetric union between them. Maybe we could just as well flip Hume's question and ask: How do we get an 'is' from an 'ought'? https://youtu.be/OpCIHhw4i8g?t=1208 

(This vertical aspect, this asymmetry or inequivalence, is also what frequently gets McGilchrist into trouble with some of his critics. Johnathan Cobb wrote "Go fuck yourself Iain" after describing, in his words, "McGilchrist's disgusting ableism toward autistic people". This seems to confabulate a number of different things, but I think it illustrates both the extreme confusion within contemporary society concerning how we understand and relate to axiological matters, and why some people would rather avoid the topic altogether. One might say it is a feature of Harris' framework for morality that it is not as vulnerable to this same kind of criticism. At least not nearly to the same degree that McGilchrist is vulnerable.)

So to recap, Harris and McGilchrist both agree that morality is foundational. As others have surmised, it's impossible to have any observation that is totally value-free. However Harris' foundations are his particular conception of what "natural phenomena" are, whereas McGilchrist's foundations are his conception of what "ontological primitives" are. So they have very different ideas concerning those "foundations". For more context, Harris wrote in his article:

Harris: "For those unfamiliar with my book, here is my argument in brief: Morality and values depend on the existence of conscious minds... Conscious minds and their states are natural phenomena... Therefore, there must be right and wrong answers to questions of morality and values that potentially fall within the purview of science."

Harris therefore reaches his "core claim that moral truths exist". What's more, he's "claiming that there must be frontiers of human well-being that await our discovery". Why does he focus so much on a scientific explanation for morality? It follows from his earlier work. Harris wrote:

Harris: "Are the Taliban wrong about morality? Yes. Really wrong? Yes. Can we say so from the perspective of science? Yes. If we know anything at all about human well-being -- and we do -- we know that the Taliban are not leading anyone, including themselves, toward a peak on the moral landscape... Unless you understand that human health is a domain of genuine truth claims -- however difficult "health" may be to define -- it is impossible to think clearly about disease. I believe the same can be said about morality. And that is why I wrote a book about it."

Harris now has what he wants - a scientific justification that moral pathologies (and in particular Islamic fundamentalism) are indisputably wrong. He could have titled his book "The Health Landscape" no one would've objected to that, and it would've been a better fit for his definition of morality as well-being. Thomas Nagel had some pointed criticism that McGilchrist might assent to as well:

Nagel: "Harris is a utilitarian, in the style of Mill. The structure of utilitarianism as a moral view suits it to someone who wishes to emphasize the role of scientific knowledge in settling moral questions, for it depends only on one simple evaluative premise... there may be other ways of taking into account the multiple values present than by simple cost-benefit maximization of the total. More happiness is always good, and more suffering is always bad, but the reduction of arbitrary inequality between persons and the protection of individual liberty may also be important, in ways that cannot be fully explained by their contribution to the maximization of total aggregate welfare. These debates lie outside Harris’s interest, and competence.

The case for moral truth, as he recognizes, has to come from within morality, as the case for scientific truth has to come from within science, and the case for mathematical truth from within mathematics. The true culprit behind contemporary professions of moral skepticism is the confused belief that the ground of moral truth must be found in something other than moral values. ...Some things are just true; nothing else makes them true. Moral skepticism is caused by the currently fashionable but unargued assumption that only certain kinds of things, such as physical facts, can be "just true" and that value judgments such as "happiness is better than misery" are not among them. And that assumption in turn leads to the conclusion that a value judgment could be true only if it were made true by something like a physical fact. That, of course, is nonsense."

Not only does Harris presuppose what he purports to explain, as Thomas Nagel, Russell Blackford, and Sean Carroll all point out, his focus on 'maximization' of well-being also appears to run afoul of what we know about the 'hedonic treadmill' and the coincidence of opposites. But perhaps more significantly, Harris prioritizes the relata over their relations, and this inverts the proper asymmetry according to McGilchrist. Here's a ridiculously simple thought experiment to explain why values make no sense under this inversion: 

 

Let's suppose there is a system. For our purposes it makes no difference whether that system is Western civilization or a bacterial culture. This system has characteristic behavior patterns. One day the system changes, and consequently so do the patterns of behavior. The value question we can ask is: Should it have changed? Would it make a difference if the change eventually leads to the system collapsing? 

 

Objectively, when our only consideration is the system itself, we might say that whether it lives or dies makes no difference. Taken in isolation, there is nothing from within a system that can tell us whether it should or should not change. What values actually do is impose upon the dynamics of a system in ways that tend to perturb its trajectory. And they become salient through the encounter between one system and another lying outside of it. Value always points to some other system or attractor.

 

Even if we know everything about a system in isolation, we cannot say anything about ethics without some understanding of the dynamics between it and some system separate from it. So, contra Harris, value is not about the 'greatest good for the greatest number'. It has nothing to do with that sort of utility maximization (or disutility minimization). Rather, it's about the quality of our relationships. It's the dance, not the dancers; the song, not the singers. And as Pythagoras reportedly said, "physical matter is music solidified".

 

Put another way, when we talk about values, we are not talking about our intra-systemic well-being. Rather, we are making inferences about the quality of a relationship we have with an extra-systemic dynamical attractor. There may be multiple attractors operating at different scales, but it is this extra-systemic relationality that grounds value. 

The Bishop’s Day for Clergy and Licensed Lay Ministers

 

McGilchrist: "Science rules out values and purpose from the word go. That's not a criticism of science, that's an important part of its method. It wants to do things without getting involved with ideas of purpose and value. It just wants to work out what happens when you do certain things. So to believe that science has somehow told us anything at all about the big questions is to misunderstand what science does. It's rather like, to use an image by CS Lewis, (A Preface to Paradise Lost, 1941) a policeman who, having himself stopped all the traffic in a certain street, should then solemnly write down in his notebook "The stillness in this street is highly suspicious.". I think that that's what we do. We go "Well, we've broken it all down. There's nothing there." https://youtu.be/VTTrqboQDsM?t=3296 

 

"There is something that is not separate from God, but is other than God. I'm very keen on making the distinction between a 'distinction' and a 'severance'. We nowadays think that if we distinguish between things then we must be saying they're entirely separate from one another. But often they're mutually dependent. The distinction is still important, it just doesn't imply a severance. So we are not separate from the field of consciousness, nothing is. And therefore presumably neither is God. And when I talk about the values of the beautiful, the good, the true, the holy, whatever it is, these seem to me to be the divine aspects of the cosmic consciousness. And it's those things that are so basic, so essential, so 'than which nothing more fundamental can be', that they are what call to us and make our lives meaningful. It's not that we invent them, but they are there and they are the reason for our being here at all." (Presumably we are to understand "they are there" from the perspective of a process-relational metaphysics.) https://youtu.be/AVuGTlmS-Zw?t=464 

 

"In certain circumstances organisms can develop a mutation that is important for them in about four days. But if done entirely by chance it would take literally millions of years." (This recalls work done by Denis Noble, one of the key figures behind the extended evolutionary synthesis.) https://youtu.be/PhDSrOXZyiw?t=1109 

EMDR therapy

 

Todd Pringle: "There's a therapy method that's got a lot of traction. The process itself makes me think of inter-hemispheric stuff. I'm curious if you've heard of EMDR (eye movement desensitization and reprocessing)?

McGilchrist: "Oh yes, I've worked with EMDR therapists.

Pringle: "So for the audience, roughly speaking, if you have trauma or PTSD, you can do eye movement back and forth (there's more to it than this obviously). You do a sort of controlled saccadic eye movement, and there's ways to do it with your body as well while you're sort of reliving and processing the trauma that's giving you PTSD. Empirically, there's a lot of people that absolutely swear by it, and it's gotten a lot of traction. I can't help but wonder if it involves some sort of visual and spatial inter-hemispheric processing as a result of going through the hemifields back and forth, and if that's somehow 'lubricating' a kind of interaction to deal with what might be a discordance between the hemispheres on the actual traumatic event. Do you have any thoughts on that?

McGilchrist: "I certainly do. As I say, I have myself had patients to whom I've recommended EMDR, and they've done very well with it. Interestingly Jaak Panksepp, who unfortunately died a couple of years ago but was the world's greatest authority on affective neuroscience, himself had an experience after which he had EMDR. And he said it worked wonderfully well on him. What we do know is that there is a 'switch' in the tegmentum of the midbrain, which is not the middle of the brain but is the name for the top part of the brainstem. On a millisecond to millisecond level it is sending stimuli to one or the other hemisphere. I think that what happens in trauma is that the right hemisphere is very powerfully 'fired up' and eventually becomes stuck. And there are only two alternatives for it, and these can be seen in following a patient with PTSD. Often there's an early phase of dysfunction because of, as it were, unfettered emotional release, and then it can be followed by a period of cold detachment in which, because it's too painful, all affect is cut off.

Now these are both extreme positions, and for health one doesn't want either to be swamped by unhelpful emotions or to be cut off from emotion. This eye movement process is a bit like kicking the washing machine. You know, if it doesn't go you give it a boot and it's working again. We don't really know what happened there, but I think that it was released, it was no longer stuck. So the PTSD patient is 'stuck', as it were, with a dysfunctional relationship with the right hemisphere, and because of this need to keep going backwards and forwards with the hemispheric switch it is 'freeing it up' again. That's all I can say about it. And that's a speculation, but all we have at the moment are speculations, and I think it's as good a speculation as any." https://youtu.be/3Jik-_E0FfY?t=2113

The Trump Effect

Journalist Andrew Gold interviewed McGilchrist on his Youtube channel "Heretics" and, predictably, he asked him "Who's a heretic you admire?" McGilchrist responded:

McGilchrist: "Henri Bergson. He saw a lot of things that we've lost sight of, which are to do with the difference between the parts and the whole. And he had an amazing ability to understand the difference between time when thought of as moments in a line, and the idea of it as something that is indivisible. That may sound like a small point, but actually a lot hangs on this. It has to do with seeing life as more like a melody or seamless whole. So I think he's very great. Who do I admire that's writing and speaking now? I like Douglas Murray, and Lionel Shriver who I think is a very clever writer and also very brilliant novelist. I think her novels are full of interesting ideas." https://youtu.be/lxupgRr-qwI?t=4070

Incidentally, Dietrich Bonhoeffer once described life to his friends as a polyphonic composition, with God's love as the cantus firmus and our life stories as the counter-melody. All together they make up harmonies and the beauty of a musical piece... There were a few other interesting portions of the interview. Particularly when he talked about the contemporary discourse on social identity, and what he called the "Trump Effect", which he described as a political paradox in which something like the inordinate pursuit of equality, at the expense other values such as justice, counterintuitively results in effects that nobody wants (somewhat like enantiodromia).

McGilchrist: "I think what we ought to do is redevelop a sort of wisdom and kindness, which is we do what seems reasonable and right. We don't get dogmatic about it. We don't force it down everybody's throats the whole time. In the course of my career as a psychiatrist I looked out after a couple of people who were, as we now say, 'transitioning'. I didn't think anything of it. They were perfectly happy doing it. They didn't need anybody crusading for them. But I think that what's happened is that, in a rather patronizing way, a white middle class "liberal" culture, which is actually profoundly illiberal, has taken the role of speaking up for people that were never asked whether they really wanted this bunch of people to be speaking up for them in this way. I mean, when I ever raise this, or have the conversation raised around me, with people who might belong to, as we call it, protected identities, they tend to be rather unhappy and unwilling to be treated in this way. They feel like it doesn't give them a chance to stand on their own feet, to demonstrate that they can do this for themselves and all the rest. So I think it's problematic in a lot of ways." https://youtu.be/lxupgRr-qwI?t=813

"Resentment has grown even as we've fallen over ourselves to try and not cause offense. This is a paradox that the left hemisphere doesn't understand, because it's very simpleminded. One of the effects is what I call for short the "Trump Effect". Now lots of American viewers and listeners don't like me using Trump as an example of somebody who's not too bright. But I think the explanation for why a lot of educated and intelligent people vote for Trump is they think that somebody's got to take a stand against the whole culture of political correctness, the distortion of the educational system, and the injustice that's meted out to anybody who won't get to university because others have preference, even though they may be the strongest candidate. It's extraordinary that people can do that in the name of justice and not expect there's going to be a strong reaction to it." https://youtu.be/lxupgRr-qwI?t=2765

Kauffman's "Kantian wholes"

Stuart Kauffman is a theoretical biologist who studies the origin of life. In an article titled "The End Of A Physics Worldview: Heraclitus And The Watershed Of Life", Kauffman wrote:

Kauffman: "At the dawn of Western philosophy and science, some 2,700 years ago, Heraclitus declared that, "the world bubbles forth." There is, in this fragment of thought, a natural magic, a creativity beyond the entailing laws of modern physics. I believe Heraclitus was right about the evolution of the biosphere and human life. We live beyond entailing law in a natural magic we co-create. ...Kantian wholes co-create with one another. And we may become re-enchanted and find a way beyond modernity." 

Kauffman's emphasis on wholes, downward causation, and our participatory, co-creative role in the universe are all themes that should be very familiar to readers of McGilchrist. In an interview with Jim Rutt, Kauffman discussed a few of his more recent papers with co-author Andrea Roli. In the selections below, he provides a more detailed description of "Kantian wholes" and how a "third transition in science" has implications for the global economy.  

Kauffman: I want to jump to an idea due to Immanuel Kant around 1790. He had a marvelous idea that’s laid dormant. Kant said, thinking of organisms, an organized being has the property that ‘the parts exist for and by means of the whole’. So the parts exist because they’re part of the whole, and the whole exists because they have the parts. So you’re a Kantian whole. You exist because you’ve got a liver and a kidney and a spleen. They exist as a part of you.

 

Every living thing is a Kantian whole, turns out. A crystal isn’t a Kantian whole. The atoms in the crystal can exist without being part of the crystal. A snowflake’s not a Kantian whole. The water molecules can exist. A pile of bricks is not a Kantian whole, the bricks can exist. Most things aren’t Kantian wholes. You are. And of course you’re not equilibrium, you got to eat. So it’s a very important, novel structure. Second, we can now define the function of a part. The function of your heart is to pump blood, not make heart sounds. That means something very specific that we’re going to need. The function of a part is that subset of its causal properties that sustains the whole. For your heart it’s pumping blood, not making heart sounds or jiggling water, right?

 

So we have a non-circular definition of the function of a part: The function of a part is that subset of its causal properties that sustains the whole. Next step: Selection acts at the level of the Kantian whole, and indirectly on its parts. So why do hearts evolve? Well, there was some organisms with early hearts. Those organisms that had genes for better hearts had more offspring, because they survived. So because of selection at the level of the whole, the parts evolve, selection is acting indirectly on the parts. And when two Kantian wholes unite, it’s a new Kantian whole. It’s now a more complicated, nested Kantian whole. So selection always acts at the level of the whole, and that is downward causation. 

 

...So a cell has got thousands of kinds of proteins, and they can be used for indefinitely many functions by different subsets of causal processes. But those novel functions better all coordinate, because selection acts at the level of the whole cell. So all of the new functions have to always be coordinated with one another so that the cell stays alive even as the functions of the parts change.

 

Selection is downward, it’s acting at the level of the whole, and the parts are evolving indirectly. This is strong emergence, and it cannot be deduced. We cannot deduce the new uses of a protein. Now what this says, and this is the third transition in science, is that we cannot deduce what the biosphere is going to become. That means, if the final theory in physics is supposed to unite quantum mechanics and general relativity and deduce the evolution of the universe, including biospheres, then there’s no final theory. There is no ‘God equation’ to be on somebody’s T-shirt. There’s not.

The first transition in science is the Newtonian paradigm, quantum mechanics is the second. All of science, essentially all of physical science is a Newtonian paradigm. But the evolution of the biosphere is beyond the Newtonian paradigm. We can’t use any mathematics based on set theory to deduce what the biosphere is going to become. The way that the Kantian whole gets to come to exist, and the ever new uses of the parts that sustain the whole, cannot be said ahead of time. It’s strong emergence. It cannot be deduced.

This is radical creativity in the universe, and it means so many things. In the Jewish Bible there’s two readings of the first sentence: God “created” heaven and earth and gave Adam mastery, or God “creates”. Well, if God creates, he doesn’t give man dominion over what hasn’t been created before. That’s Western science - science is to have dominion, command and control over nature. If Andrea and I are right, we don’t have any dominion over the ongoing biosphere. We have no idea what it’s going to do. We become participants with the rest of nature. I think it’s a profound transition. And what does it mean for science? I want to ask: How does the evolving biosphere keep creating novel possible ways of things getting to exist together? It’s been doing it for four billion years. 

 

I’m trying to get together with my friends and write a paper saying “life will find a way”. Meaning that if you have a sufficient number of species, and the species have a sufficient number of processes and enough molecules that could be used in enough, or wacky, ways, what’s the chance that there’s some mutually consistent way that they can make a living together? And I bet that “life will find a way” is fundamental to life. So we’re going to work on that paper.

 

The same thing is true for the global economy. You’ve got all of these things and processes. How many ways are they able to be recombined so that they can manage to make a living together? They might screw up, but roughly suppose you gathered together 10,000 different technologies all over the place, could they do something useful with one another or not? Well, we’ve never asked. But anything can be used for indefinitely many functions if you have enough things, each of which can have indefinitely many functions. That’s like having indefinitely many reactions that could be catalyzed. What does it take for there to be a mutually consistent way of doing it? [Does the field of industrial ecology pay adequate attention to the dynamics of Kantian wholes?]

 

Goods and services are niches for new goods and services that are compliments and substitutes of the goods that are around. So the thing that’s coming out of this third transition in science is to ask: How does the living world keep creating new possible ways that things get to exist together in all of these wacky ways? We don’t know. We haven’t asked the question. I’m really thrilled by this. We give up the Newtonian paradigm. The evolving biosphere is beyond the Newtonian paradigm, and it can only be beyond the Newtonian. It’s non-deducible. We can’t say what it’s going to do. But we can start to study how it does it, and that's just so enthralling.

This inevitably invites questions. Kauffman's initial description is “In an organized being, parts exist for and by means of the whole.” To which he adds "Kantian Wholes are a special class of dynamical physical systems." For Kauffman, this is just a necessary, but not sufficient, condition for life. What then might be sufficient? Kauffman tentatively proposes: "This newly recognized union of four closures: Kantian Whole, Catalytic Closure, Constraint Closure, and Spatial Closure is Bergson’s mysterious élan vital... Life arises as an expected phase transition in the evolving universe." What I want to draw attention to here is that Kauffman is pointing us to a conceptual shift from parts to wholes. And although he didn't specifically say it, in connection with that shift we should begin to think of the right hemisphere, of integration, and of Gestalt perception. Recall that McGilchrist suggests we can view anything from the perspective of either hemisphere. So all things can be seen in two very different ways. This means that, viewed in one way, a body isn't a Kantian whole. We can certainly reduce everything to atoms. This is the standard eliminativist move of scientism, which by reducing everything to 'matter in motion' we are able to conclude that meaning, purpose, and value (and Kantian wholes) do not exist.

Viewed in another way, a body is a Kantian whole. In fact almost anything could be viewed as a Kantian whole, at least if we restrict the definition to the ambiguous "parts exist for and by means of the whole" without any of the later qualifications Kauffman added in his papers. But that said, if we compare a machine to an organism we do see some differences. How do we describe these differences? Again, there are two different approaches. The left hemisphere prefers definitions that provide us with a clear division line and mutually exclusive categories. But the right hemisphere recognizes that reality presents us with something more like a continuous spectrum, where there are things that are "more like" a Kantian whole and things that are "less like" one. A machine can be disassembled and left on the shop room floor, then reassembled a week later without too much harm. By comparison, on a hospital operating room table doctors generally have a shorter window in which to reassemble a body after removing critical parts from it, after which point irreparable harm may result.

Both Robert Rosen and Kauffman appear to be in broad agreement. Kauffman compares the Newtonian and quantum mechanics paradigms and concludes "it's the same thing". Rosen gets high praise from McGilchrist. Another outstanding theoretical biologist, but one who doesn't get the attention deserved, is Stanley Salthe. Arran Gare (a prodigious reader and writer himself) mentions Salthe in connection with Rosen in some of his papers and books, remarking on the similarity of their approach. Terrence Deacon, perhaps most similar to Kauffman, gets a mention in the interview with Jim Rutt as another well known theorist. These two are very good in interviews, but all four are singing the same convergent tune, with slight variations.

Robert Rosen believed that the computationalist perspective of the Church-Turing thesis was inadequate. He argued that life itself has to be understood as the product of an interacting system, rather than being the separable parts into which the organism can be broken down. Furthermore, his emphasis on how 'function is spread over the parts' suggests that our folk assumptions regarding 'system boundaries' are indeed illusory. This is also an implication of the 4E framework (embodied, embedded, enactive, and extended).

Living systems relate to their parts in a different way from machines. Robert Rosen noted that an organism differs from a machine in that it has causal closure of the functional components (not material parts) of the system. Function is distinct from, and irreducible to, the parts. It is "spread" over the parts of the system in a manner which does not map 1:1 onto those parts. Function is also contextual or situated. It is able to leverage physics, the nested systems of "enabling constraints" present in the world. Without seeing the entire integrated system (Kauffman's "Kantian whole"), the functional components are themselves meaningless.

Rosen noted that organisms work toward fulfilling their existential needs before these become a crisis, but their models are only as good as the information they are based upon, and so they are vulnerable to "quick" and "radical" changes (Rosen, 1980); “as a result, they are often incapable of dealing with or surviving change that is unprecedented. But, as long as environmental changes are slow enough and congruent with what the model entails, the system is robust and remains stable”. Today we know we are heading toward a future of radical, quick environmental changes, the effects of which could be devastating.

The process philosopher Whitehead believed that causal connection takes place, not in virtue of the cause, but of the effect, in other words that causality pulls us ever toward the future. As John Deely wrote "the future beckons the present", or as Rosen said, models pull "the future into the present". As the present begins to merge with the future, we see all the more clearly the possible effects of the actions we take today. The theoretical neuroscientist Karl Friston wrote that "beliefs about outcomes in the distal future influence beliefs about states in the proximal future and present. That these beliefs then drive policy selection suggests that, under the generalised free energy formulation, (beliefs about) the future can indeed cause the past." Life both predicts external causes of sensory states and causes the external causes of sensory states through action, in processes of active inference (Friston) or inferential entailment (Rosen).

Stanley Salthe wrote: "Final causes are informational constraints. And they may be viewed as teleological without confusion; an organism can be said to want to persist, and so, on the basis of both specification and scalar hierarchies can a population or ecosystem. ...the encompassing system constrains, regulates, controls and interprets the behaviors of those nested within it merely by forming the superstructure for their activities." (Development and Evolution, which includes outlines of these hierarchies) Similarly, Ulanowicz writes: "The direction in which a system is headed (its telos) is not only an integral element of its integrity, it also can impart a legitimacy to ethical considerations of how society should interact with the system." (Ecology, the Ascendant Perspective 125)

In “The System of Interpretance, Naturalizing Meaning as Finality”, Salthe writes: “Subsumption connects closely to finality. In a subsumptive hierarchy, lower integrative levels subsume all higher ones, while higher ones simultaneously contextualize (integrate) all the lower ones under their own rules. An organism, city, ecosystem, or storm system are good examples of integrated systems. In particular, the storm, by being embodied at no higher than the physico-chemical levels, is more vaguely embodied than are systems at higher integrative levels like organisms. Macroscopic particularity and precision increase as we ascend to higher integrative levels. ...Thus, we ourselves, materially, are states or configurations of lower level entities – cells, macromolecules, electrons, and so on. But these are not us. We are integrating them under our own organizational rules. In an internalist sense we could be said to be the integrative experience itself, in the process of intending/entraining/attending to that experience.” ...Note that our current situation today in regard to global health, depending as it does on our ability to integrate lower hierarchical levels, is marked by the general breakdown of these very processes.

Lovisa Sundin writes: “Any “system”, is simultaneously a part and a whole – equally dependent participants in a higher-order relation and self-contained entities themselves. We may dub a recognizably multi-leveled tendency “arborization”, and horizontal interaction across such systems “reticulation”. And so what crystallizes in this arborizing brew, when left to seethe, is an underwater coral reef of interlocking hierarchies, not entirely decomposable (but nearly so) and teeming with desire to self-complicate. ...The most important insight carried by hierarchy theory is that the continuum between simple systems and complex systems – between rocks and organisms – makes ontology applicable to them all.” You may recall that Arthur Koestler coined the term “holon” from the Greek “hol” meaning whole and “on” meaning part. A holon is something which is simultaneously a whole relative to its constituent parts, and a part relative to some larger whole.”

One thing I find fascinating is the discussion on teleology that writers like Stanley Salthe, John Deely, Robert Rosen, Peter Corning, Arran Gare, Terrence Deacon, and Robert Ulanowicz turn to. "Inevitably," Ulanowicz writes, "the rehabilitation of formal, and especially final, causalities will elicit strong, but misdirected criticism from those who abhor teleology in biology." Nonetheless, final causality may be critical to addressing societal dynamics and our relationship with the environment. The ability of hierarchical systems in ecological relationships to entrain lower levels illustrates a kind of final causality that we need to address, for example in the context of climate change policies.

If we understand these dynamics it becomes more clear in which ways our actions, at all scales, either support or undermine other processes within our environment. With that understanding we can be better prepared to chart a course into the future. The incorporation of a living cosmology, where organically developing processes are fundamental, is a radical but necessary departure from our current understanding. Ulanowicz writes that if one wishes to understand living systems "one must abandon the assumptions of closure, determinism, universality, reversibility and atomism and replace them by the ideas of openness, contingency, granularity, historicity and organicism, respectively." There's a lot of potential in that replacement. What if we understood the contingency of economics? Or the organic nature of society? How would this shape policy, public planning, and research priorities? McGilchrist doesn't mention Ulanowicz, but the contrast here appears to correlate to the contrast between the hemispheres.  

Surrogate predators

The context of early human evolution was a far more precarious existence. It was a world of megafauna, literal giants. In the dialectical dance between man and nature, we were not the main characters. This, Ehrenreich suggests, provided us with a palpable sense of humility, which of all virtues mitigates the excesses of the left hemisphere, supplying the negative feedback we need. Today we find ourselves 'the victim of our own success'. Dual inheritance theory may explain megafauna overkill, and both of these led to the ecological release of humans and the tendency toward phenomenological inversion that McGilchrist describes. So in short, why should the emissary have ever had the capacity to usurp the master? An evolutionary response to McGilchrist's implicit question is that it was ultimately only a lack of means and opportunity that held it in check. But after it was liberated, and its power and control extended (and extends still further today), its grasp tightened. With our tools in hand and our predators vanquished, we have allowed ourselves to fall under its spell, and we've forgotten the Faustian bargain that always attends to acts of hubris and self deception. Many writers have explored the generative tension between constraint and possibility. For example, and in connection with the current topic, Arran Gare wrote:

"Humans coevolved with other species in Africa, and evolved as relatively insignificant components of African ecosystems. Their numbers were kept in check by predators and diseases. However, when they invaded other ecosystems - Eurasia, Australia, the Americas and New Zealand - they had devastating effects, leading in each case to vast numbers of extinctions. The only real opposition to humans came from other humans. So while humans developed more complex forms of semiosis than had ever previously existed on Earth, and while this facilitated complex forms of cooperation, initially this semiosis in no way served the ecosystems they invaded. Only later, it appears, did humans come to appreciate their environments and through their unique semiosis develop constraints on their interactions with their environments. Subsequent history has been characterized by further advances in semiosis simultaneously augmenting humanity’s destructive potential, but also our capacity for self-constraint."

"Nothing that is good can come into the world without directly producing a corresponding evil" Jung wrote in 1933, adding several decades later in 1959 that "we are the origin of all coming evil". Heinlein concurred, “By the data to date, there is only one animal in the galaxy dangerous to man – man himself. So he must supply his own indispensable competition. He has no enemy to help him.” What can restrain our ambition and restore a sense of humility, this virtue we have neglected at no small cost? Meditation, mythos, memento mori, megafauna, or...? Daniel Schmachtenberger described the possible emergence of the first wisdom traditions as an attempt to bind our hubristic excesses in light of this "first anthropogenic crisis", the extinction of megafauna. Our metastable psychology guarantees no final resolution to this generative tension, but it does make our keen awareness of it all the more important, especially given the reification of our “maps”, which simulate the world in ever greater detail and trap us in labyrinthine positive feedback loops, replete with addictive supernormal stimuli, and from which escape seems all but inconceivable. As Zizek noted, even the ‘end of the world’ can seem more likely than the end of the powerful systems we've created that now entrain us.

“To everything there is a season… A time to get, and a time to lose; a time to keep, and a time to cast away.” But all the LH wants is to get and keep. And its outsized influence has allowed us to create a world in which we think this is an option. For some, this may be truer than for others, but we all share a common fate. We need continual reminders that none of these things will last, that there are more important considerations to which we must attend, and that the animate world of the RH relates to time, things, and experiences in a way (through a set of values and mode of perception) that is for the most part incoherent to the LH. We live two intimately intersecting lives in parallel. One sees the rhythms and relations, and the other manipulations (without intrinsic meaning). Change need not be unreasonably feared, things need not be hoarded, and experiences can be fully inhabited. Nothing can be held onto forever, despite the best attempts of the grasping left hemisphere to do so. We hoard belongings, memories, money, knowledge, and chase after new highs and experiences, ticking them off a bucket list. “He (or she) who dies with the most wins.” This is about power, control, greed, hubris, and projecting our legacy beyond the grave. 

But time, the universal solvent, washes away all trace of our LH representations, leaving behind only the RH aspects of who we are that have nothing to do with conventional notions of identity. What is your “original face”? “When buddhas don’t appear and their followers are gone, the wisdom of awakening bursts forth by itself," Nagarjuna tells us. If we can let go of transient things, it may be easier to live the life we are given. Letting go implies the choice is ours. But history tells us that this wasn't always the case, and certainly it wasn't before our ecological release. There's a sort of paradox here. We are not free to be completely unconstrained (compare with the paradox of tolerance). In other words, constraint is not a matter of choice if we want to preserve the freedom to choose. A possibly controversial conclusion is that insofar as we are reliably good, virtuous, and cooperative, it is not merely because we want to be, but because, as Hobbes and many contemporary evolutionary psychologists might argue, we have to be. And if that is the case, then our restraints and frictioins cannot be internally motivated alone; there must be an external environmental component as well. 

But we've let the genie out of the bottle, and cannot return to our prehistoric cradle. If Gare is right, and further advances in constraint are required, then in light of the hemisphere hypothesis, what if anything can we say about the place of external constraint? Many have looked at self-constraint, but who is looking at the constraints we have little to no power and control over? From environmental constraints of age, infirmity, and death, to lack of food and shelter, to loneliness and depression, and all physical, emotional, and mental limitations, there is a spectrum of these. They are simultaneously our friend and foe, and come uninvited. We must look to these today and not ignore them, not necessarily with the aim to eliminate them (though many certainly should be mitigated), but to see these uncelebrated burdens as the "thorn in our flesh" that leave us "utterly undone" like the Biblical Job. They are the safeguards of our humility and appreciation of life in place of the predators we have lost, and like those predators, eventually they catch us. Donna Haraway famously wrote "we have never been human". We have never escaped limitation; the conceit is that somehow we have. We cannot give up an abstract freedom that we never had, but we can give up the deluded belief that we, or anyone else, ever had it to begin with.