“Every disclosure is also a concealment.” - McGilchrist
“The pursuit of Tao is to decrease day after day.” - Laozi
Among the more metaphysical chapters in McGilchrist’s The Matter with Things are chapters 20 and 21, which are titled The coincidentia oppositorum and The One and the Many. The relevance of the whole/parts dynamic is perhaps the more obvious of the two, so I’ll jump straight into chapter 21 first. We might wonder, with William James, why "should the absolute ever have lapsed from the perfection of its own integral experience of things, and refracted itself into all our finite experiences?" (To rephrase James’ question in the context of phenomenology, why was a 'nihilistic' hemisphere paired to a 'living' one?) And how should we, as ‘whole brains’, relate to those qualitative differences, those ‘finite experiences’ that we recognize in the world? Recall that McGilchrist describes how the hemispheres align with the difference between ‘presencing’ and ‘re-presentation’, and that each of these hemispheres has a distinctly different take on the ‘One' or 'integral experience' and the ‘Many' or 'finite experiences':
"The RH is better at seeing things as they are pre-conceptually – fresh, unique, embodied, and as they ‘presence’ to us, or first come into being for us. The LH, then, sees things as they are ‘re-presented’, literally ‘present again’ after the fact, as already familiar abstractions or signs. One could say that the LH is the hemisphere of theory, the RH that of experience; the LH that of the map, the RH that of the terrain." - McGilchrist, The Matter with Things
But although he establishes a role for each hemisphere in this asymmetric way, McGilchrist has had difficulty communicating to his audiences that we still need both:
"There are a couple of things that people want from my story. They want me to be able to say that one hemisphere is good and the other one's bad. But no, the left hemisphere is enormously important and serviceable, as long as it remains guided by the overall view of the right hemisphere. The other thing is people want me to say that if there are two things they must be equal, but I find that they're not, and this is in keeping with the rest of the world, in which I find that no two things are ever equal.” - McGilchrist (in conversation with David Bentley Hart)
"I'm not saying "it's all this" or "it's all that". It is both, but they're asymmetric. And the great beauty of the asymmetric relationship between the hemispheres is that the right hemisphere can take both perspectives. We live in an age in which it is almost impossible for anybody any longer to think that if there are two things one of them may be more important than the other. We live in an age in which symmetry and equality is the truth. And it isn’t." - McGilchrist (in conversation with Jonathan Rowson and Philip Goyal)
So what can explain this difficulty, which persists even among people who are in other respects very receptive to the hemisphere hypothesis? McGilchrist writes (paraphrasing):
“There is a tendency in the human mind to want to embrace either unity or multiplicity, but not both… ‘All is One' and ‘All is Many’ to the left hemisphere demands an either/or resolution. For the right hemisphere it is a differently structured problem, since, for it, what one might call differentiated wholes – not created by an effort of cognition, so much as by one of recognition – are all that there is… [But] there has always been an important dialectic between the distinguishable and the whole of which it is one element, between the specifiable (because limited) and the unspecifiable (because infinite) context which qualifies it… We need both, and each gives rise to the other, not in sequence but simultaneously. Once again, the opposites that are indicated by the One and the Many, the unique and the general, remain opposite, while being nonetheless coincident; and hence generative.”
“The claim that All is One is well-intentioned, but, it seems to me disastrous, because it is just half a truth. We sense that we are not as separate as our everyday manner of thinking implies, and that is wonderful. But the impulse to simplify causes problems – because the other equal truth is All is Many. I would suggest that this attempt to have it one way or the other comes from the left hemisphere’s urge to resolve what it sees as a contradiction.”
McGilchrist is asking his audience to “stay with the trouble”, to borrow Donna Haraway’s phrase (and one of the few posthuman/postmodern views he would likely agree with). The presence of a paradox always reveals a difference between the phenomenology of the brain hemispheres. We are therefore implored to embrace this paradox without reducing it to either polarity. He cites Hegel in support that “sameness and difference, unity and division, have to be unified”. Explicit statements of this kind, often in reference to his conclusions concerning asymmetry and limit cases, have made him vulnerable to both his friendly critics (such as Robert Ellis and Rupert Read) who are otherwise receptive to his ideas, and his less friendly critics, all of whom accuse him of contradiction and paradox, those cardinal sins of Western thought. The simplest response, as abstract as the question itself is, may be that if we recognize the value of ‘provisionality in all things', then to some degree we should be amenable to the value of contradiction and paradox. (As Martin Heidegger wrote, "The evil and thus keenest danger is thinking itself. It must think against itself, which it can only seldom do.") However because this would explicitly defy popular Western logic, for some it is a bridge too far.
The chapter makes many other points, including that a tendency to recognize uniqueness can thwart overly reductive thinking. Which raises the question: What is the motivation behind reductive thinking anyway? The answer proposed is that it is usually engaged in to serve the LH value of control. Here there are striking parallels with remarks made by Nietzsche. Toward the end of the chapter McGilchrist addresses the concept of the self with reference to Carl Jung:
“In the discourse of spirituality it is sometimes mistakenly assumed that the contradictions between ‘no-self’ and self can be resolved by declaring the first to be true and the second an illusion. However, by neglecting the other ‘arm’ of the dipole we create difficulties in understanding – difficulties that are not, however, overcome by merely recognising the need for both in some additive sense, rather through a synthesis that creates something new and beyond what was in either of the alternatives identified.”
“For [Jung], the self is the product of psychic integration over time… the ego is that part of the self identified with the conscious will, and which… comes to be transcended in the process of spiritual growth. In being transcended it is not abolished, but changes its nature by being taken up into a new whole where its role is altered… In its proper place, no longer master but faithful servant, it comes to perform a useful function. It can be redeemed: transcended but included. We would not be better for its non-existence."
Having quickly reviewed “The One and the Many” I’d like to turn now to The coincidentia oppositorum (aka 'coincidence of opposites', or 'complementarity of opposites'). These two chapters address substantially similar subject material and draw on the same sources, so perhaps shouldn’t be seen as separate but themselves forming a unity together. McGilchrist quotes Schelling: “Existence is the conjunction of a being as One, with itself as a Many.” He also notes that “Hegel believed that otherness was actually prior to sameness, sameness being merely an unusual subset of opposition in which the opposites happened to be wholly reconciled. Sameness is, indeed, sterile, and cannot give rise to anything.” This suggests that symmetry is the ‘limit case’ of asymmetry, to reference another key idea:
“And, just as there is an asymmetry in the relationship of the hemispheres, there is an asymmetry in the coincidentia oppositorum. We need not just difference and union but the union of the two; we need, as I have urged, not just non-duality, but the non-duality of duality with non-duality; and we need not just asymmetry alone, or symmetry alone, but the asymmetry that is symmetry-and-asymmetry taken together… We need not either both/and or either/or, but both both/and and either/or… In terms of the hemispheres it is once more not a symmetrical, but an asymmetrical, arrangement: not just between two dispositions (that of the left hemisphere and that of the right) towards the world, but between a disposition (that of the left) that sees the two dispositions as an antagonism that must ultimately lead to the triumph of one and the annihilation of the other, and a disposition (that of the right) that sees they need to be preserved together, neither being allowed to extinguish the other – even though they are not of equal value… We need both division and union. We need both analysis and synthesis. We need both left and right hemispheres. This is clear.”
In addressing the coincidence of opposites he also arrives at a sort of ethical conundrum. If, in fact, opposites do coincide, then what does this say about value? Xunzi noted "There are two things it is important to do in the world: to perceive the right in what men consider wrong, and to perceive the wrong in what men consider right." (page 136, Hsun Tzu: Basic Writings) Should we value, as Nietzsche suggests, vices such as “hatred, jealousy, stubbornness, mistrust, hardness, greed, and violence” as well as the more commonly lauded virtues opposite them? McGilchrist wouldn’t go so far as Nietzsche here, but perhaps insofar as our virtues imply their own opposites in potentia, we should recognize their inseparability, and moreover the generalization that friction (in all its various forms) is essential:
“It seems rational to strive to make life easy, to minimise effort: yet exerting oneself in a cause, neglecting one’s ease for the sake of others, finding solutions to difficult problems, and overcoming resistance, all make for fulfilment, while a goal that is too easily achieved fails to satisfy; and what we come by too easily may lack meaning or value… Delimitation is what makes something exist. Friction, for example, the very constraint on movement, is also what makes movement possible at all. In its excess, true, we are immobilised; yet so we are in its absence… Architects are now being asked to make designed environments somewhat more difficult to move around in the interests of human health.”
The chapter opened with a Haudenosaunee story of how all things arise from opposing, but nonetheless related, drives or forces, an insight found in one form or another in most ancient cultures. McGilchrist writes “The most sophisticated of these, because of the detailed and refined exposition it has given rise to in China, is that of yin and yang, contrary forces that fulfil one another by their complementary nature.” He quotes the well know popularizer of Eastern philosophy, Alan Watts, who said “we often appear to believe we can keep the mountains and get rid of the valleys”, as well as Zen master Shunryū Suzuki, who echoed the Sandokai when he said “We have to understand things in two ways. One way is to understand things as interrelated. The other way is to understand ourselves as quite independent from everything.” McGilchrist did not, however, reference the second chapter of the Tao Te Ching, which may be the most well known exposition on the coincidence of unity and division. Here is Wing-Tsit Chan's translation (1963) of the second chapter, followed by a more literal translation that appears in The Annotated Critical Laozi by Guying Chen (2020):
When all the people of the world know beauty as beauty, There arises the recognition of ugliness.
When they all know the good as good, There arises the recognition of evil.
Therefore: Being and non-being produce each other; Difficult and easy complete each other; Long and short contrast each other;
High and low distinguish each other; Sound and voice harmonize each other; Front and behind accompany each other.
Therefore the sage manages affairs without action And spreads doctrines without words.
All things arise, and he does not turn away from them. He produces them but does not take possession of them.
He acts but does not rely on his own ability. He accomplishes his task but does not claim credit for it. It is precisely because he does not claim credit that his accomplishment remains with him.
All under heaven know beautiful as beautiful, then [there is] yi 已 [already, afterwards, then] e 恶 [ugly, evil, bad] all know shan 善 [good, fine, nice] as shan 善 [good, fine, nice], then [there is] yi 已 [already, afterwards, then] not (不) shan 善 [good, fine, nice]. You 有 [presence, having, being] and wu 无 [non-presence, lacking, non-being] generate each other, difficult and easy complete (成) each other, long and short xing 形 [shape, form, to shape] each other, above and below ying 盈 [fill, full] each other, tones and voices harmonize [with] each other, before and after follow each other. Therefore, the sage (圣人) takes on [the task of] non-action (无为), performs no yan 言 [speech, speak, language] instruction. The ten thousand things arise, but [the sage] does not (不) initiate [them]; [the ten thousand things] come into life, but [the sage] does not (不) possess (有) [them]; [the sage] acts on [them] but does not (不) rely on [them]. Deeds are accomplished (功成) but [the sage] does not reside [therein]. Only because [the sage] does not reside [therein], [the sage] not to be removed [away from the accomplishment].
The purpose of mentioning this short chapter, aside from its connection to the coincidentia oppositorum, is also to highlight some of the rich commentary that it has generated. Roger Ames and David Hall, in Dao De Jing: A Philosophical Translation (2003) draw out the implications for how we might relate to qualitative differences in the world (p94-95):
"Distinctions produce their opposites. For the Daoist, dividing up the world descriptively and prescriptively generates correlative categories that invariably entail themselves and their antinomies. Way-making as the field of experience does not resolve itself into onto-logical distinctions. In fact, on the contrary, there is an ontological parity among the many events that constitute this process, with none of them being more real than any other.
This correlative sensibility in the Daoist process cosmology is the functional equivalent of the dualisms — good and evil, true and false, objective and subjective, theory and practice, reason and emotion, spirit and flesh, and so on — that constitute the familiar vocabulary of a reality/appearance metaphysics. In the process cosmology, with the absence of a putative ontological disparity between reality and appearance, the interdependent binaries, far from the “real” negating what is less so, require each other for explanation. Unlike “Being” and “Non-being,” the “determinate (you) and indeterminate (wu)” (or “something” and “nothing”) are not ontological categories at all, but are rather conventional distinctions that have explanatory force in giving an account of how things hang together.
Insight into this process cosmology and the interdependent character of the correlative distinctions used to interpret it provides a kind of sagacity in dealing with the world. The sages do not take sides, but are catalytic in facilitating the flourishing of the process as a whole. To favor one distinction over another — for example, the beautiful over the ugly — would make it exclusive and thus impoverishing. Given the continuity assumed within process cosmology, these categories are correlative and mutually entailing. Not only do you not get one without the other but, simply put, every constituent is necessary for every other constituent to be what it is. The job of the sage, then, is to enable each participant in the drama to contribute itself fully to the performance."
It appears that one significant effect of this process cosmology is to shift our attention when we encounter an evident inequality or asymmetry. For example, in some situations we may ask ourselves which half of a given pair is preferable to the other. Usually this is an important question to ask, since the answer can have existential consequences. However having thus decided our preference, according to Laozi (in the above passage) it would be a grievous mistake to thereafter exclude or ignore the lesser half of the couple. However today, in our blind quest for "maximization" (per both Richard Watson and Daniel Schmachtenberger), this is commonly the case. Instead, we should recognize the essential, and fundamentally inseparable, role that it plays in allowing the larger whole to come into being. As Ames and Hall noted in their comment to the first chapter, "Experience is most replete when we entertain it in both its determinate and its indeterminate aspects, appreciating both the contingent boundaries that mediate it and make it meaningful for us, and the spontaneous emergence of novelty that can only be immediately felt." The question for the sage (and presumably anyone reading McGilchrist) is then: How do we facilitate the flourishing of the process as a whole, and enable each participant to contribute itself fully? Can we see mutual entailment in our lives, and from that the implications for what we value?
A note on the historical context and cultural milieu in which these ideas developed. Before the Han dynasty there were no real "Taoists" or "Taoism”. Instead, there were various sets of early behaviors, practices, and interpretative frameworks. These included Mohism, Confucianism, Legalism, the School of Naturalists, and the Chinese classics (such as the I Ching and the Lüshi Chunqiu). Other pre-Taoist philosophers and mystics influenced Taoism, including shamans, naturalists (skilled in understanding the properties of plants and geology), diviners, early environmentalists, tribal chieftains, court scribes and commoner members of governments, members of the nobility in Chinese states, and the descendants of refugee communities. But the easiest way to contextualize the second chapter of the Tao Te Ching may simply be by viewing it within the book itself. It develops the themes introduced in the first chapter, which is probably the most well known statement of Chinese philosophy. That is a description of cosmogenesis as a naturalistic process in which an apophatic undifferentiated potentiality (elsewhere referred to as wuwuji, "without non-differentiation") naturally unfolds into wuji (primordial oneness, "non-differentiation"), which then evolves into taiji (i.e. yin-yang) and finally into the myriad beings. Having thus established the relationship between the one and the many as a given, the second chapter elaborates on the second half of the process: how the many exist as a coincidentia oppositorum, in relations of mutual harmony and interdependence, and how we in turn should view our lives within that context.
Another note concerning the application of this line of inquiry into McGilchrist's larger oeuvre. Here the Tao Te Ching, and the commentary from Ames and Hall, is being pressed into service to help elucidate the relationship between our ways of attending. That we can in fact access more than one disposition toward reality is the single, central motivating thesis behind McGilchrist’s work. So a minimal understanding of that thesis (the hemisphere hypothesis) as proposing a relational, one might say Heraclitean, sort of phenomenology is needed, if nothing else is known of what he’s said or written. And after all, one may not need much else in that regard. As Zhuangzi wrote, “Your life has a limit but knowledge has none. If you use what is limited to pursue what has no limit, you will be in danger.” It is possible to pursue a subject to depths that exceed one's pragmatic concerns. So taking his thesis as our given, the above inquiry into the form of the relationship between coinciding opposites is intended to be an explication, a developmental understanding of the nature of that truth. But the specific form of that explication is not a matter of necessity; it may take many different shapes and be delivered in any manner. There is an entire spectrum from implicit to explicit, from concrete to abstract, and references to one or many aspects of embodied experience are equally possible. Mythos leverages more of the implicit and concrete, so it is described below, but only as an addendum to the more sparing description given above, which can feel very remote from lived experience in its abstractness.
As noted, the preceding review, carried out in the manner of "logos", can appear quite obscure and abstract. So one might say that it has both absolutely nothing, and absolutely everything, to do with presencing to the world. Who can say? People of either opinion may be right in some essential way. Can this be presented in more familiar language? In recognition of this need, many Taoist stories, such as those in the Zhuangzi, also provide an easier "mythos" route to truth. It is very awkward to make abstract ideas explicit, but it is pleasing to allow what is concrete to reveal implicit truth. CS Lewis wrote "every myth becomes the father of innumerable truths on the abstract level". Which mythic insights gave rise to the abstract truth of mutual entailment? And do we still use the mythic form today? The image accompanying this post is from Hayao Miyazaki's film "My Neighbor Totoro", a story about a young girl who befriends a large forest spirit. The two embody traits that could hardly be more different. Whereas the child is relatively small and powerless to confront the forces at work around her, Totoro is big and commands the forces of nature itself. And yet these differences are somehow the very thing that unites them. We don't question their friendship, nor are we particularly surprised when they eventually work together to achieve what neither could have alone, lacking the insight or abilities of the other (revealing the skillful integration of opposites). We merely recognize that ‘this is what one does’ or ‘that’s what it is to be a sagacious being’.
Priorities in a translucent world
In The Matter With Things McGilchrist described what he considers to be one of his main contributions:
“When faced with two differing accounts of the world, we can tell from the characteristic ‘imprint’ of either hemisphere on each account which is more likely to be reliable. Without, of course, wishing to discount either of them altogether, we can make a shrewd assessment of which we ought to prefer. …If I am right, this is a genuine advance in philosophy.”
This is often repeated by him because it’s an important point. One might be tempted to say “Well you know one school of philosophy says this, another school of philosophy says that, take your pick”. This is the extreme relativism of postmodernism, favored for its absolute symmetry of bias. But in actual practice this symmetry produces ‘axiological nihilism’: the value of any choice is morally equivalent to any other choice we might make, and thus effectively meaningless.
McGilchrist steps into this void, which exists in much of contemporary Western philosophy, and claims he has something to add: “I can see the hallmark of the left hemisphere at work, and I can see the hallmark of the right hemisphere’s broader vision, and if we have to make decisions about which way we're going to lean, then I think it's wise to lean towards the one that tends to be more veridical.” His contribution, in other words, is to enable us to see axiological asymmetry and thereby prioritize the Master over the Emissary, returning them to their proper asymmetric relationship, particularly concerning questions of value.
We know that when the RH is captured by the LH we have great difficulty understanding questions of value beyond simple quantitative measures of power, generally conceived in terms of pleasure maximization, and the instrumental means by which that can be achieved. However when we return the LH to its proper position under the guidance of the RH, then we can understand more qualitative and numinous aspects of value up to and including ‘the good, the true, and the beautiful’, and so on. If we have been captured by the LH, and thus are unable to recognize value asymmetry, then a Gestalt shift that inverts the relationship of the hemispheres relative to one another will produce a corresponding inversion and complexification of our notion of value. Instead of all values reductively understood in terms of power, a much more nuanced understanding comes into view.
What I want to address here is how a Gestalt shift not only inverts our values, but also (1) implies a flip in how we prioritize choices for action. And (2) implies an inversion from either/or ‘exclusive symmetry’ to a sort of both/and ‘inclusive asymmetry’ in how we relate to these choices for action. By this I mean that if one is given two or more possibilities to attend to, under the Gestalt of the LH such an individual would tend to view these as an ‘either/or’ completely relative choice, and exclude the lesser choice after having made their preferred selection. However after a shift to the Gestalt of the RH, we “make a shrewd assessment of which we ought to prefer” without “wishing to discount either of them altogether”. This is a very important point, and there’s much more that could be said about it.
The RH is capable of recognizing a more nuanced and complex prioritization of tasks according to asymmetric qualities, and this impels us not to exclude the lesser choice, but rather to prioritize one over the other. Particular attention is given to the aspect of temporal depth in making this decision. While the LH may be more attracted to comparatively shallow considerations of short term reward, the RH is less influenced by temporal discounting. Again, the RH is able to value and retain both choices without necessarily excluding either altogether. This broader understanding is much more sensitive to the actual limitations of embodied context, and thus can help to shift the individual and society from a misaligned and diseased state to one more consistent with the qualities of flourishing.
McGilchrist’s thesis rests upon the simultaneous unity and incommensurability of two Gestalten and what this tells us about the world in which we live. It is generally incompatible with the hyper-rationality of LH modes of thought, but it would be a mistake to dismiss it too quickly on account of that. Paradoxes of this form appear to be a fundamental feature of our world, and hence our neurology. McGilchrist tells us that whereas TMAHE was about how “the two halves of the brain pay different kinds of attention and the way in which this has played out in the history of Western Europe, TMWT is about the most basic questions: Who are we? What is the world? and What is our relationship with the cosmos?”
Attempting to answer these more metaphysical questions is a job widely viewed with deep suspicion, but it directly follows from what McGilchrist believes to be his main contribution. Not only is he providing a methodology for making judgements and decisions, but he actually thinks that, from the perspective of a brain whose hemispheres are in ‘right relation’ to one another, we can say something meaningful about the world in which we live, even though such efforts may only produce what appear to be paradoxes where opposites "give rise to and fulfil one another". This is important, because if we cannot perceive the asymmetries within the world (esp. in terms of values such as truth), then we have nothing upon which our methodologies for making judgements can operate on but delusion. McGilchrist describes how radical the phenomenological asymmetry between the hemispheres is:
"Most of us live in a world that is semi-transparent, or, as one might say, ‘translucent’, in the sense that the eye rests temporarily on the surface, but does not stay there, instead passing through and beyond to something deeper and broader beneath, the nexus in which it is embedded, which gives it meaning. But in schizophrenia, the plane of focus has changed: the gaze stops short, the surface obtrudes and becomes opaque."
Crucially, to those for whom the world is translucent, opacity is understood as well. "We see it all right, and yet through it to something beyond." But for those to whom it is only opaque, transparency is much harder to understand. The practical effect of the hemisphere hypothesis is to enable us to recognize if we have been captured by the left hemisphere, if the world appears 'opaque'. And from this recognition to begin to understand transparency and generate a Gestalt shift within ourselves. Attention "is a profoundly moral act" we are told, and so we have a moral obligation to understand this difference, and to understand the implications for how we prioritize actions when we have more than one option.
We are not limited to prioritizing a merely instrumental ‘choice optionality’ and maximizing power or pleasure over the short term, while procrastinating on doing what that 'still small voice' says is ‘the right thing to do’. There is the possibility to invert this, if this is indeed the sort of position we find ourselves. What does that look like? We can understand the transiency of good fortune. We can realize that the temptation to overindulge in empty hedonism should be subservient to our ability to provide undistracted attention to the full depth of experience to which we are present. And we can recognize a broader understanding of virtue that gives voice to such insights. So it’s not just a simple inversion, it’s an inclusive asymmetry, one that reflects the embodied paradox of living in a translucent world.
Priorities, dopamine, and addiction
Addiction is a reinforcing feedback loop that can have tragic consequences, affecting our ability "to be a good parent, spouse or friend", and whose costs we don't "fully recognise because it’s hard to [see it] when you’re in it". Effectively, addiction upends our priorities in ways that we feel helpless to change, and so we may seek to rationalize the addiction to reduce this cognitive dissonance between our "second order desire" to stop or reduce consumption and reduced ability to actually do that due our altered brain chemistry. In her conversation on Hidden Brain (see part one and two), Anna Lembke said (t=42:00) that "rising rates of depression, anxiety, and suicide are due in part to an overload of too much dopamine. Our brains try to compensate for an excess of pleasure by downregulating our dopamine production below baseline, creating a constant physiological craving for more pleasure. We are in a dopamine deficit state." She calls the smartphone "the equivalent of the hypodermic syringe delivering 'digital dopamine' 24/7 for our wired generation." And she later said "Addiction is really only a little bit about pleasure and reward. What it ultimately becomes about is control. It's narrowing the scope of my experience down to this tiny little action-perception loop that I can 100% predict where it's going and how it's gonna make me feel. And that's where I feel safe because I'm suddenly not having to deal with this world of chaos out here."
Lembke's work is also featured in an earlier article by Jamie Waters, titled "Constant craving: how digital media turned us all into dopamine addicts", Waters writes: "The main message is to stop hunting for pleasure all the time. It’s too much of a good thing, and all that... We’re losing our capacity to delay gratification, solve problems, and deal with frustration and pain in its many different forms... Our consumer culture has created an expectation “that life is supposed to be so fun!” Lembke says. “And really, it’s not. Life is a slog and I think if we could admit that and take comfort in knowing we’re not alone in the day-to-day struggle, paradoxically, we would be happier.” The paradox of pleasure and pain (aka the 'plenty paradox') is an important insight.
Lembke advocates replacing some pleasure-seeking vices with “painful” pursuits. When we do things that are challenging, instead of receiving a dopamine boost beforehand we experience it afterwards. “Doing things that are hard is one of the best ways to pursue a life worth living, because the pleasure we get afterwards is more enduring,” she says. So the way we respond to stress (fight or flight) may determine if we are driven to seek the pleasure that comes from hard work. Professional athletes like Shaun White appear to share this disposition, which can be leveraged with knowledge, planning, and the formation of healthy habits that increase the threshold of stress tolerance. We tend to forget that earned highs are that much sweeter. The goal is generally not to banish pleasure-seeking vices forever, but to figure out how to enjoy them in moderation – that most elusive of things. It's more manageable "to go from abstinence to moderation, than from excessive consumption to moderation." This isn't a fast from dopamine (what has been misleadingly called "dopamine fasting"), but a reduction in the consumption of supernormal stimuli, not altogether unlike the religious observance of Lent, as David DeSteno would point out.
She often recounts a famous rat experiment. "If you engineer a rat to not have dopamine in its brain and not have dopamine receptors in the reward pathway of the brain, and if you give that rat food, it will eat the food. But if you put the food even a single body length away, the rat will die of starvation. It won't get up and go and get the food. So dopamine is important for pleasure, but even more important for the motivation to seek out the pleasurable reward." See the paper "Dopamine-Deficient Mice Are Severely Hypoactive, Adipsic, and Aphagic" for more on this.
This motivational role of dopamine is fascinating. As cited in TMAHE, the left hemisphere of the brain is more reliant on dopamine (as opposed to noradrenaline for the right hemisphere). And interestingly enough, dopamine is linked to exploitation in the "exploration-exploitation tradeoff". This suggests that not only has an increase in the consumption of supernormal stimuli resulted in dopamine deficits and the harm resulting from addictive behavior, but also that these changes may asymmetrically affect the normal functioning of the brain, predominantly acting on the left hemisphere, but with cascading effects throughout the brain and body as a whole. It has been noted by both Yogi Hendlin (citing Niko Tinbergen's research), and separately by Daniel Schmachtenberger, that pursuing supernormal stimuli, which are so seductive to a particular form of attention, can lead to 'evolutionary traps' (or cul-de-sacs).
If the hemisphere hypothesis is incontrovertible, and the action of dopamine within the LH is as described above, then rectifying this situation by stopping the 'dopamine deficit' as a result of overexposure to supernormal stimuli is necessary. People may do this for a variety of reasons, maybe as part of an institutional subculture, as with the government ban on social media apps for one example, or being embedded within a community in which such behavior is not normalized, as with Karl Friston's daily routine and perhaps more significantly, his belief in Markov blankets. In the final analysis exercising this sort of agency over one's future, against temptations to allow our attention to abscond, almost always only follows from resolved belief, as Jung recognized (and which became a key insight into the formation of Alcoholics Anonymous). In the case with McGilchrist, it proceeds from a belief that the world is indeed 'translucent', as one might say. Only the form of attention deployed by the RH can see this. In life we pass through many stages, and some are more difficult than others. Addressing LH capture and the various means by which it can occur may be one of those stages we enter into, because as McGilchrist has shown, the lateralization of how attention is deployed (opponent processing) appears to have begun deep in our evolutionary past. And in the rare case of the genus Homo, this appears to have inexorably escalated, carrying us to our current predicament where we are captured by 'hypostatized intelligence', nihilism, and face collapse. There's an alternative path toward awakening to wisdom, recognizing our biologically instantiated, embodied paradox, and overcoming of collapse. Rather than material determinism (historical materialism), this is a bio-, eco-, or neurological 'determinism' or telos. The responsibility to choose is imposed upon us. Attention is not only a profoundly moral act, it carries profound existential consequences as well. Which way...?
In TMAHE McGilchrist writes: “In the real world... we do not choose to engage in activities because they release endorphins… endorphins merely [are] part of the final common pathway for happiness at the neurochemical level…” We can interpret what Lembke says from either a LH perspective or a RH perspective. From the LH perspective, pleasure is “explained away” in terms of deterministic neurochemistry. And that is the end of the story as far as it is concerned. But from the RH perspective, these chemicals are just a means to a greater end: the very real experience of pleasure. Having addressed which is more ‘ontologically primitive’, we can also ask a related question concerning causality: What really causes depression? Is depression caused by an overload of chemicals that induce too much pleasure? This explanation would be favored by the LH perspective. Or is depression caused by people who engage in too much pleasure seeking behavior? Perhaps this explanation (or one that is less victim blaming, a bit more contextually sensitive, but nonetheless agent oriented) is favored more by the RH.
The answer is most likely ‘both/and’, which is a possibility that the RH alone could entertain. I think Lembke does a fairly good job of giving voice to both of these viewpoints, though she makes no reference to the hemisphere hypothesis to support that. One interesting implication of this ‘dual description’ of addiction, provided both in terms of neurochemistry and personal agency, is that just as we shouldn’t minimize our role in initiating and sustaining these dynamics, we shouldn’t underestimate the embodied chemical reactions that mediate, and ultimately constrain, our experience and freedom to act.
