McGlossary

There's a short list of terms that McGilchrist (and his popular interpreters) have introduced. We have the "hemisphere hypothesis," the notion of "left hemisphere capture (or insurrection)," the "McGilchrist Manoeuvre" (via Rowson), and "McGilchrist's Wager." There are certainly many others. To these I have suggested a few additional ones to describe concepts that I think have been either stated or implied:

The McGilchrist Paradox:

In The Master and His Emissary he wrote: “It has been said that the world is divided into two types of people, those who divide the world into two types of people, and those who don’t. I am with the second group.” I think this might be called McGilchrist’s Paradox, a "true contradiction" or dialetheia. Because if one is "with the second group" this may be justifiably understood as acknowledging the existence of the very dichotomy it simultaneously refutes. The metaphysics of McGilchrist are necessarily inclusive (therefore paradoxical) and necessarily asymmetric or hierarchical (therefore translucent).

A Multiscalar Interpretation:

The hemisphere hypothesis is intended to be understood not only at the individual level, but at the integrative level above the individual, which is that of the group or culture. It is here that the collective dynamics have significant existential consequences for the species (and levels adjacent to or above that, such as civilizations and ecospheres). As McGilchrist wrote in The Master and His Emissary: “...genes which, at least partly through their effects on lateralisation, result in major mental illnesses, such as schizophrenia and manic-depressive psychosis (now known as bipolar disorder), and developmental disorders, such as autism and Asperger's syndrome... [may] have been bred out long ago, if it were not for some hugely important benefit that they must convey. If they also, through their effects on lateralisation, in some cases led to extraordinary talents, and if particularly they did so in relatives, who have some but not all of the genes responsible, then such genes would naturally be preserved, on purely Darwinian principles.”

Stereoscopic Thought (independently suggested by several):

Jason Seed remarked that "If having two eyes gives us a visual ‘depth of field’, do two hemispheres give us a kind of ‘depth of thought,’ like the difference between monovision and stereoscopic vision? How do the fields of vision work together?” In this "depth of thought" metaphor, we need both the right and the left hemispheres to both see the big picture and yet limit our attention according to the situation. That is, the phenomenological analogue of stereoscopic vision, where two eyes complement each other to generate a single image, is opponent processing, where two hemispheres complement each other to generate a single phenomenology. The tendency to prefer visual input from one eye to the other, called "ocular dominance" suggests a possibly corresponding phenomenon in opponent processing. But the metaphor of perceptual depth or "thinking in stereo" breaks down when we consider that the world as revealed by either eye is substantially the same, whereas the world as revealed by either hemisphere is markedly different. (cf. "Etuaptmumk" the Mi'kmaw word for "Two-Eyed Seeing")

As Zak Stein described it, "Our hemispheres should be maximally doing two different things and then coordinating those two different things. In an ideal situation there is that parallax, which means two views simultaneously over-crossing to reveal the thing that's real."

McGilchrist Invitation:

It was noted “McGilchrist has found a way to talk about spirit that materialists can understand. He’s using language that is accessible to rationalists to point beyond rationalism.” ...What does this mean? McGilchrist shows how the objective, physical evidence of biology (something eliminative materialists can understand) points to the need for dual modes of perception. Not just a single mode of perception. That is, evolution apparently saw fit to equip organisms with the neurological capacity for (to use the podcasters terms) both ‘material’ and ‘spiritual’ modes of perception. That evidence provides rational materialists with an access point for engaging with this other mode of perception which they had heretofore neglected. To be sure, it’s only an invitation, and anyone unwilling to take it can easily find some excuse to decline it. McGilchrist: “What I am trying to do is introduce people to a world that I believe they already know about, but they've been taught to disattend to. They've been taught to devalue it, even dismiss it.”

McGilchrist Commision:

This was implied in a conversation he had earlier: "I love that whole story from the Lurianic Kabbalah of the shattering of the vessels and the repair of them. It speaks to us as a metaphor or fable, but what's so special are two things: the vessels will be better and more beautiful once repaired than they were before they were shattered (reminding me of that Japanese ceramic art kintsugi, in which a vessel once broken is repaired with lines of gold), and the other thing is that in the Judaic tradition it is our duty and obligation, but also our honor, to be the means for that repair. That is why we are here: to repair what was shattered. I think that is something very rich and deep." (What was shattered? The rift between mind and matter, between science and the humanities, and between left and the right hemisphere views of the world. For example, citing page 1333: "It is our duty to do the more difficult thing: to find out the core of wisdom in [what cultures wiser than ours were trying to express by speaking of God].")

McGilchrist's Crypto-theology:

In conversation with Segall and Davis, McGilchrist said: "I see [The Matter with Things] really as a work of crypto-theology. Not that it's expounding anything in terms of academic theology, but that it's encouraging us to look at the world with a different disposition, which is one that would be open to what is needed if one's going to understand the divine."

Naturalized Metaphysics:

In Philosophy Now (Issue 164: October/November 2024) Rogério Severo writes: "It seems there was a time when metaphysicians were all of a single species. Now they appear to make up at least two. Of the newer kind is the psychiatrist and neuroscientist Iain McGilchrist, most famous for The Master and His Emissary (2009). His work is a notable contribution to what one may call ‘naturalized metaphysics’. It differs from classical metaphysics in that it justifies its statements empirically rather than by reasoning alone. Unlike traditional metaphysics, it grounds its claims about the nature of reality on the findings of natural science."

McGilchrist put it this way: "In writing a book called The Matter with Things, what I was daring to ask (but not able to fully answer of course) was an audacious question: Can we take a look, starting from first principles that have arisen from some new work in neuropsychology, and putting it together with the best streams in philosophy in the last hundred years, and some of the findings in physics, to say something about the nature of things?" 

McGilchrist Key (or Compass):

The McGilchrist Key is a practical application of the hypothesis for catalyzing a shift away from the world of the LH and towards that of the RH, whether that shift occurs at a collective or an individual scale. Thus unlocking the potential for transformation (RH liberation from LH capture). It mediates the tense space between two hemispheres with opposing modes of attention. It permits us to see the choice implicit within the opposition, where before we may not have recognized any (particularly the case when captured by the LH). As McGilchrist put it, "we can now make more weighted decisions about which, of any two paths, is likely to prove in the long run more veridical, more helpful." This draws upon Marcel Kinsbourne's neurological application of "opponent process theory."

McGilchrist's Metapolitics:

Jonathan Rowson: "The question about the politics of Iain's work comes up in different forums. One way I think is helpful to think about it is that it's not so much political as metapolitical. It's about looking inside "what politics is" and recasting "what politics should be about". Clearly there's a relationship between the left hemisphere and power, for example, and clearly there's a sort of vision of the world presented by the right hemisphere. When you look through those lenses the whole idea of the political spectrum should dissolve. A new set of priorities should come into being. If the cosmos is as Iain describes it, "politics as we know it" changes fundamentally. So it's not as though the thesis says "therefore vote this way or that way", or prioritizes economic growth or something else, it's more that it recasts the very idea of "what political practice should look like" because it reprioritizes the sacred, education, imagination, and so forth. And through that a different kind of politics should arise."

McGilchrist's Bridge Laws:

Michael Spezio wrote, "Bridge laws perhaps are best understood as the theoretical-philosophical theories, maybe even one’s scholarly commitments, about how measured signals from the brain and the rest of the body (e.g., heart rate, skin conductance, pupil size) convey information about the processes involved in a given cognitive mode or task or experience." According to a theoretical-philosophical commitment to a reductive, mechanistic model of life, which is all the vogue within contemporary Western culture, we should "decompose the brain," from the macro-structure of hemispheres, all the way down to the synapses, and still further to the "computations" themselves, before we can be satisfied that we've found the "locus" of consciousness, the 'what-it-is' that engenders a mode of attention. This has led to a "bridge law objection" to the hemisphere hypothesis. However McGilchrist’s theory about the higher level structure of the brain derives from a more process-oriented philosophy that interprets the evidence of lesion-deficit studies within a relational context, where what is absent can be as significant as what is present. This philosophical inversion has asymmetric implications when it comes to accounting for phenomena such as gestalt perception. By comparison, eliminative materialism problematically disposes one more toward runaway reductionism and a flat ontology. These sort of considerations should preface any discussion of what might be called "McGilchrist's Bridge Laws," which are central to his larger project of reuniting the sciences and humanities.[1]

Another possible response to the bridge law objection might be found in the paper "The False Problem of Consciousness." Gómez-Marín writes: "Our approach endorses... accept[ing] negative proofs as ways forward. ...Differentiating between solidarity (as brain lesions demonstrate) and equivalence (as no data does) offers an alternative point of departure for understanding consciousness...  Negatively, the Chilean biologist, philosopher and neuroscientist argued that there is no “theoretical fix” or “extra ingredient” to bridge lived experience and the objects of science. Positively, he proposed the phenomenological method to explore the “mutual constraints” between them... Evan Thompson argued that both philosophers and neuroscientists should try to understand the relationship between brains and consciousness differently from the “matching-content doctrine.”

But solidarity probably won't satisfy Thompson. I believe he is wary of (what he might perceive as) a methodological weakness of "negative proofs as a way forward." I think this may be because of how they work. A "positive proof" allows us to completely reduce the "terrain" to the "map" and thereby it excludes alternate interpretations by definition. But a "negative proof" does not allow any such complete reduction to a map, it only suggests a kind of associative relationship, and therefore doesn't exclude the possibility of alternate interpretations. It leaves the door open to the potential that further analysis may yet reveal that something closer to a one-to-one mapping was actually possible after all. For example, the lesion studies, by negative proof, support the hemisphere hypothesis. But further analysis may yet reveal that although we thought the hemispheres had the strongest correlation for these modes of experience, it was actually some other more distributed brain network, and we just hadn't had the tools or data to more accurately isolate this. This difference between positive and negative proofs might be seen as a comparative weakness for negative proofs, but I think scientific integrity requires an awareness of our limitations (vis-a-vis the "blind spot"). Over time, I do think we will see some more refinement in the body of research upon which McGilchrist places his work, but (perhaps unlike Thompson) I doubt this would radically upend or invalidate the main broad arguments. It will hopefully add more nuance and depth to them. 

What neither Spezio nor Thompson address, though McGilchrist places special weight upon, is why would "Nematostella vectensis, a sea anemone over 700 million years old, already exhibit lateral asymmetry"? This creature has nothing we would recognize as cerebral "hemispheres" at all. And that suggests to me that what McGilchrist is advancing isn't merely a "hemisphere hypothesis" (or theory) at all, but rather a new philosophical/ conceptual approach, a new paradigm. It could be called "antinomic neurology" (a play on McGilchrist's own description of "Heraclitus' pervasive antinomic ontology," TMWT p431) to help distance it from the pop-psychology associations of the word "hemisphere." The paradigm advances many claims (as he well described in his books) but two of them are clear from the outset. The first is that there are these modes of attention (notably Thompson agrees with this). The second and more controversial claim is that they lateralize to the hemispheres, and this is where Thompson is reluctant to follow. But even if they didn't lateralize in precisely the way one might imagine (and neuroplasticity already admits of this possibility, as this is a generalization after all) it needn't be fatal to the first claim, from which the most important implications follow.

In his paper "Ingressing Minds," Michael Levin provided another possible response to the "bridge law objection." He wrote that "the mapping between the interface you make and what comes through it is not linear or simple and must be investigated." He described a view that "breaks with the implicit metaphysics underlying the daily work of biologists and cognitive scientists because it loosens the relationship between the properties of physical embodiments (nervous systems) and the cognitive propensities that they enable. In my view, the relationship is indirect (brains etc. are pointers and interfaces, not direct determinants)."

McGilchrist’s Three Levels of Response

McGilchrist: "I’m often asked, “So this is all very fascinating about hemispheres, and your analysis of how we got to be where we are, but it's pretty important, isn't it? So what are we going to do about it?” [2]

People can easily become overwhelmed by the scale of the ecological crisis that threatens many forms of life, and maybe our survival as well. And they may therefore think “But I'm so small and the world is so large.” This is very sad. One is given life as a gift, and one is never asked to solve all the problems of the world in which one lives. One is asked to live the best human life, to realize the best human life that can, under the circumstances, be realized. So how should we respond? There are really three levels:

There’s the ‘mega level’ of join Greenpeace, become an activist, and all that. Not everybody can do that, but it has its necessary purpose. We would be neglecting something if we didn't act at the governmental level to try and reduce and reverse the damage that we are doing to one another and to nature. 

Then there’s the ‘intermediary level,’ which is something that I was alerted to by my friend Dougald Hine, who has written a very good book called At Work in the Ruins. The idea is we may have to accept at some point (we may have to accept it now) that this civilization won't last in its current form. So are we just going to despair or what are we going to do? And one of the most important things that we could possibly do would be to help model and begin to create small seeds, if you like, of a way of living that can survive and could become a functional way of living when this dysfunctional way of living has finally become impossible. 

I'm very proud to say I'm allied with (though, sadly, not a very active member of) a number of organizations that are exploring how to change education, how to get people to work together, learning crafts, cultivating food, doing things together and trusting one another and realizing how very fulfilling that is. And if we can seed that around, who knows where that will lead. At the beginning of a process it looks very small, but as it grows, it exponentially enlarges. That is a message of hope. 

But the most hopeful thing of all is you can begin with yourself, the one thing that you do have control over, what you do, how you think, and what you value. That can be done here and now. It doesn't necessarily involve persuading other people. If we start to ensure that at least we are aligning our own lives with the things that are deep and important, then a lot of things will follow instinctively, and they won't need to be formulated in the way that people want me to formulate them, “Well, what we should do is change the curriculum, and we should…” Those things are important. But once you begin to see the world differently, you begin to act differently, to prioritize things differently. And different things follow effortlessly. There’s a stream that is currently blocked in us, a stream that can become unblocked and allowed to flow. And that's true of every one of us." 

McGilchrist provided an analogy: "The distinction is very much like the one described in the Gospel of St. Matthew. The Pharisees come to Jesus. And you know, the Pharisees were very concerned with rules and procedures and the legalistic details. And they said to him, "Which of the laws is the most important law?" It's almost like saying, "So which is the one that I really must obey?" And Jesus said, "Love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy mind. And the second is like unto it, Thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself. On these two commandments hang all the law and the prophets." In other words, our tendency is to get things back to front, to think the rules, the procedures, the things we do are the important things. But it is the disposition that matters. And from that comes, on that hangs, "all the law and the prophets."

Attention Hazard

According to myth, the first skirmish of our psychomachia, the first information hazard, was perhaps the tree of the knowledge of good and evil described in Genesis (Garfield: His 9 Lives explores an alternate ending), a second may be contained in the ancient myth of Orpheus and Eurydice. But arguably, the most recent infohazard is the proliferation of supernormal stimuli within our contemporary attention economy. Which prompts a question: If you can reasonably assume that something you might attend to, by the very act of attending to it, would likely diminish your capacity for a RH mode of attention, and thereby your ability to be responsible and caring, would you then be obliged to take steps to avoid attending to it? From the Introduction to The Matter with Things: 

“The choice we make of how we dispose our consciousness is the ultimate creative act: it renders the world what it is. It is, therefore, a moral act: it has consequences. ‘Love’, said the French philosopher Louis Lavelle, ‘is a pure attention to the existence of the other’.”

There may not necessarily be anything intrinsic to what one attends to that would set it apart as an infohazard, so much as that in some contexts the attention thus given would not be resonant with higher values, while in other contexts it may be more responsive to those same values. Recognizing the difference between these, and supporting ways of engaging with the world that reflect such contextual distinctions, could then be very important (not to mention beneficial for those with poor impulse control and self-restraint, as they may need the additional support more than others). 

Certain forms of censorship, such as content warnings, age appropriate prohibitions, and limited advertising for harmful products, are socially sanctioned. As they say, sometimes less is more, or conversely, more of a good thing isn't necessarily better. McGilchrist has underscored these points, as well as the need for inter-hemispheric inhibition. Given such considerations, and how vulnerable some of us are to becoming caught in positive feedback loops between "LH cognition" and "LH reinforcing environments," it may be worth taking a closer look at the existential risk posed by information hazards, particularly the narrower category of "attention hazards." (I consider that to be inclusive of the "distraction and temptation hazards," "neuropsychological hazards," and other attention related hazards described in the somewhat unwieldy typology proposed by Nick Bostrom in his 2011 paper Information Hazards.) 

Margulis-McGilchrist Paradigm

The Margulis-McGilchrist Paradigm identifies the broad consilience between symbiogenesis theory (Margulis) and hemisphere theory (McGilchrist) as manifestations of the same process relational phenomenon. Formerly these have been analyzed and evaluated independently, but they should be viewed as deeply consistent from a metatheoretical perspective. This is about the embodied processes and structures of life and mind. Specifically, this is an evolutionary-developmental paradigm that purports to explain how the later concerns of the humanities may have an origin in simpler processes, such as the minimal ecological interactions of parasitism and mutualism. But the labels 'parasitism' and 'mutualism' may be best thought of as a sort of metaphorical evolutionary 'common denominator' between the work of Margulis and McGilchrist that points us to their unfolded theoretical corpora. Precisely how complex goals like friendship, confidence, creativity, and morality (not to mention meaning) would later develop and be supported by the bifurcation of neural processes, which recapitulate the sort of synergies we see in basal symbiotic processes, is part of the story that we are still unfolding. This paradigm draws heavily upon the "Mutualism-Parasitism Continuum," with comparisons between brain lateralization and function (McGilchrist), and binary oppositions in ecological relationships (Margulis). These share many features (synergy of opponent processing, directionality in development and evolution, qualitative differences, asymmetric relations, gestalt effects, etcetera). A minimal dyadic relation can be represented as either 'zero sum' or 'positive sum.' Relationships that are initially exploitative or competitive can evolve to become commensal and cooperative, and these are possibilities of human societies as well. Explaining how this occurs is easier if we expand our scope with this broader paradigm.

Notes: 

[1] McGilchrist: "One of the things that I notice is that very few people in the neuroscience world have said that the neuroscience that's in either The Master and his Emissary or in The Matter with Things (where it's more extensive) is wrong. A number of people have said, 'As far as the science goes, this is good. We’re on your side. But, then you go and apply it to the lives of people in the world.' And on the other hand, there are philosophers who understand what I'm saying about the world, and about what a human being is, and they say, 'Well, I don't know about the science. Of course, it's very interesting, but wouldn't it stand up on its own without the science?' So you've got these two factions that I'm trying to bring together, each in their way saying, 'Well, yes, the bit that's in our realm is okay, but why have these two together?' One of the things that I'm hoping for is that there will be a revolution in the way we think, an expansion of vision in the sciences and in the humanities that will enable each of them to see the value of the other. And one of the messages I'm trying to get across is the need for science and the humanities to come together again. ...The advantage of linking them is that this alerts you to things that you otherwise wouldn't necessarily think of." And again: "I agree with A.N. Whitehead, who said that the divorce between science and metaphysics has, like all family quarrels, been a disaster for both parties. They need to be brought back into conversation. And I suppose that in The Matter with Things I was trying to do exactly that by using science and philosophy together to illuminate one another."

[2] McGilchrist: “There are three levels on which we can respond, which one might call the global, the local, and the transcendental. These are in ascending order of importance. In the first two, global and local, the left hemisphere can play a useful role as the servant it is designed to be, rather than the ignorant and headstrong usurper of the master. In the third, it's out of its depth.

What do I mean by global? I think we have a duty to resist what is wrong in whatever way we can. Stop the erosion of the forests. Halt the poisoning of the seas. Try to reverse these. What do I mean by local? We must build communities that operate locally on trust, that bring back the important elements of love and respect. Such things need to be sustainable, and they need therefore to be somewhat more modest than our current projects. (Some that I am connected with include The Fathom Trust, Moral Imaginations, Da Vinci Life-Skills, and Local Futures.) What do I mean by the transcendental? The ultimate question is what is of primary importance, what is most valuable? I would suggest love, beauty, goodness, truth, and our relationship with one another in society, our relationship with the natural world, and our relationship with the divine. There's a vast body of evidence that shows that those three relationships have many benefits and are in themselves profoundly healing. Yet they are the things that we are doing away with. According to certain people, believing in God is something that only a halfwit would do, nature is a field of resource for us to exploit, and our duty is not to worry about the rest of society but just to do our own thing.

My recommendations are really quite simple. The way in which we think and attend brings about whatever is in the world in the end. Attention is a moral act. If we could recover some humility in the face of our ignorance, some compassion for others and for all the living world, and some sense of awe and wonder before the extraordinarily complex and beautiful cosmos, we would be already a long way along our journey. What makes life worth living is what can only be described as a resonance, an encounter with other living beings, with the natural world, and with the cosmos at large. It’s only in encountering the uncontrollable that we really experience the world and come fully alive. The resonance of a real relationship with a truly sentient other is not possible where there's no freedom, no spontaneity, and no life.

Reinvigorations of a culture have always looked backwards, but stepped forward. This is true of the origins of the Roman civilization, of the Renaissance, of the Reformation, for what it's worth. Most changes in the history of ideas have come from a retrospection which gives power to move forward into a new area. By far the most important aspect of their success was a spiritual and moral quest, one that cut across political and other allegiances and involved allegiance instead to ultimate values.

I believe there is, to use a technical term, a “psychomachia” in which we are involved. That means a “battle of the soul.” People through history have talked about the need to be fighting for something, resisting something, being tempted by something, by something that was very real, not just something made up by the cognitive areas of my brain, but something that is real in the cosmos and is real for us. There is a spiritual battle in which it's not given to us to take no part; we play a part whether or not we know it. Carl Jung had inscribed over the door of his house the words "Vocatus atque non vocatus, Deus aderit", which means “Called or not called, God will be there.” In other words, there are things that are happening that are not up to us except to know how to respond to them, and to make ourselves aware of them, and to act in the cause of all that we believe is good and loving.”