The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast - 278. The Matter with Things | Iain McGilchrist

Episode Date: August 12, 2022

The two hemispheres of the human brain are explicitly different and both incredibly complex. Dr. Iain McGilchrist joins to discuss and explore the science of philosophy, covering everything from our ability to reason to how art can cross cultures.Dr Iain McGilchrist is a psychiatrist, neuroscience researcher, philosopher and literary scholar. He is a Quondam Fellow of All Souls College, Oxford, an Associate Fellow of Green Templeton College, Oxford, a Fellow of the Royal College of Psychiatrists, and former Consultant Psychiatrist and Clinical Director at the Bethlem Royal & Maudsley Hospital, London. He has been a Research Fellow in neuroimaging at Johns Hopkins Hospital, Baltimore and a Fellow of the Institute of Advanced Studies in Stellenbosch. He has published original articles and research papers in a wide range of publications on topics in literature, philosophy, medicine and psychiatry. He is the author of a number of books, but is best-known for The Master and his Emissary: The Divided Brain and the Making of the Western World (Yale 2009), In November 2021 his two-volume work The Matter with Things: Our Brains, Our Delusions and the Unmaking of the World was published by Perspectiva Press.If you want to hear the rest of my conversation, please go to https://www.dailywire.com/watch and become a member today. Thanks.This episode is sponsored by Birch Gold. Text JORDAN to 989898 to get a FREE info kit on physical gold and silver.—Links—Read Iain’s book: https://www.amazon.com/Matter-Things-Brains-Delusions-Unmaking/dp/1914568060/ref=sr_1_1?crid=1YEB22LWWPYNX&keywords=The+Matter+with+Things&qid=1659967234&sprefix=the+matter+with+things%2Caps%2C153&sr=8-1Watch more @ Iain’s YouTube channel: https://www.youtube.com/c/DrIainMcGilchrist/videosVisit Iain’s Website: https://channelmcgilchrist.com/join/ // SIGN UP FOR DAILY WIRE+ //www.dailywireplus.com // SUPPORT THIS CHANNEL // Newsletter: https://mailchi.mp/jordanbpeterson.co...Donations: https://jordanbpeterson.com/donate // COURSES // Discovering Personality: https://jordanbpeterson.com/personalitySelf Authoring Suite: https://selfauthoring.comUnderstand Myself (personality test): https://understandmyself.com // BOOKS // Beyond Order: 12 More Rules for Life: https://jordanbpeterson.com/Beyond-Order12 Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos: https://jordanbpeterson.com/12-rules-...Maps of Meaning: The Architecture of Belief: https://jordanbpeterson.com/maps-of-m... // LINKS // Website: https://jordanbpeterson.comEvents: https://jordanbpeterson.com/eventsBlog: https://jordanbpeterson.com/blogPodcast: https://jordanbpeterson.com/podcast // SOCIAL // Twitter: https://twitter.com/jordanbpetersonInstagram: https://instagram.com/jordan.b.petersonFacebook: https://facebook.com/drjordanpetersonTelegram: https://t.me/DrJordanPetersonAll socials: https://linktr.ee/drjordanbpeterson

Methodopheles credo is that being is so permeated by suffering and catastrophe and tragedy and betrayal that it would be better if it was just brought to a halt. And, you know, in some sense, we're pulled in the world between those two poles, right? Because part of us would like to build something better and to bring what's greater and more magnificent into being. And another part of us is better and resentful about the tragedy and catastrophe of existence, and so... What Mephistopheles doesn't understand is that you cannot have a thing without its opposite, and so this left-hem is for a fantasy that we can create a world in which all is simply peace and joy. I don't believe that this is a possibility. Blake Hatcher also said that in heaven,

there must be some degree of suffering, otherwise there couldn't be joy. [♪ Music playing in background, playing in background, playing in background, playing in background, playing in background, playing in background, playing in background, playing in background, playing in background, playing in background, playing in background, playing in background, playing in background, playing in background, playing in background, playing in background, playing in background, playing in background, playing in background, playing in background, playing in background, playing in background, playing in background, playing in background, playing in background, playing in background, playing in background, playing in background, playing in background, playing in background, playing in background, playing in background, playing in background, playing in background, playing in background, playing in background, playing in background, playing in background, playing in background, playing in background, playing in background, playing in background, playing in background, playing in background, playing in background, playing in background, playing in background, playing in background, playing in background, playing in background, playing in background, playing in background, playing in background, playing in background, playing in background, playing in background, playing in background, playing in background, playing in background, playing in background, playing in background, playing in background, playing in background, playing in background, playing in background, playing in background, playing in background, playing in background, playing in background, playing in background, playing in background, playing in background, playing in background, playing in background, playing in background, playing in background, playing in background, playing in background, playing in background, playing in background, playing in background, playing in background, playing in background, playing in background, playing in background, playing in background, playing in background, playing in background, playing in background, playing in background, playing in background, playing in background, playing in background, playing in background, playing in background, playing in background, playing in background, playing in background, playing in background, playing in background Hello everyone, I'm extremely pleased today to be speaking once again with Dr. Ian McGill Christ. I've spoken with Dr. McGill Christ a number of times, the first time, very intense half an hour conversation, which was about one 50th as long as I wanted it to be, which was very well received. Ian and I have a lot of interests that overlap. I would say particularly in what you might describe the neuropsychology of philosophy,

because we both operate to some degree at the nexus between biological psychiatry and neurology and philosophy, especially philosophy that's associated with narrative. And so it's very interesting to talk to Ian. He's come to similar and different conclusions than I, from a similar and different pathway. And so it's a lovely interplay between things we're both familiar with and things we're not. I'll tell you a bit about Ian and then we'll jump into his new book, which is a masterpiece, a very long uvra, concentrating on this vital interplay between the scientific and the philosophical. Dr. McGillcrest is a former fellow of All Souls College Oxford, an associate fellow of Green Templeton College Oxford, a fellow of the Royal College of Psychiatrists and of the Royal Society of Arts, a consultant

emeritus of the Bethlehem and Modsley Hospital in London, a former research fellow in neural imaging at Johns Hopkins University Medical School Baltimore, one of the great world's great research institutions, and a former fellow of the Institute of Advanced Studies in Stellanbosch. He now lives on the Isle of Skye off the coast of North West Scotland, where he continues to write and lectures worldwide. Ena is committed to the idea that the mind and the brain can be understood only by seeing them in the broadest possible context, that of the whole of our physical and spiritual

existence, and of the wider human culture in which they arise. The culture which helps to mold and is in turn molded by our minds and brain. He is perhaps most well-known publicly for his best-selling book, The Master and His Emissary 2009, published by Yale University Press, which is sold, approaching 200,000 copies worldwide, which is what would you call, all bases loaded home run for an academic book and it brought them to very wide public attention.

So, Ian, it's a great, see you again. I'm so glad we have a chance to talk. So, we dive right into your, to the structure and the origin of your new book. Let's do that. It's great to be talking with you again, Jordan. Thanks. Yes, I would like to be able to talk to you a bit about my new book, The Matter With Things, which I think you have had a chance to look at, but it's quite long, and I know you're a very busy man. So it will be good for both of us to be able to just take a tour around it a bit.

It follows on from the book that you mentioned, the master in his emissary, but it takes the philosophical implications of the fact that our brains are divided and that each half of the brain produces a different version of the experiential world. It takes that much further. And it takes it in particular in relation to something that I know concerns both of us. And I imagine concerns many viewers and listeners, which is the devastatingly reduced vision of the world that we now have, this reductive materialist ideology, which is absolutely not compelled on us as people seem to think, by science or by reason. It's a version of the world which is very much constant with the view that one of the hemispheres of our brain takes, the left hemisphere, and we shouldn't be paying too much attention to what it has to say,

except for the business of getting our daily bread. But actually in terms of understanding the world, it's the right hemisphere that helps us here. And in what you said in your introduction, you suggested that I think context is very, very important. In fact, context is everything. Context can completely change the meaning of any situation, of any words or anything that we're trying to put across. And the right hemisphere is able to take in this broader context. Perhaps I just say something very brief about that. From an evolutionary point of view, we know that all the brains we've looked at going way back into prehistory, all seem to have this divided structure. And indeed, the oldest neural network, that of a CNM, an eclenemeter stellar of X-Tensis, 700 million years old, is already asymmetrical,

which is a fascinating fact. Why would it be asymmetrical? The world isn't asymmetrical in that way. And it seems that this is because all brains have to do two things at once, each of which could take up the whole attention of the brain. That is basically to focus on the details so that you can grab it and at the same time not yourself become prey to someone else who wants to grab you. So there's two kinds of attention that we all need to be able to pay. How we get food, I give the English sometimes a bird, picking up a seed on the background of grit or gravel and being able to get it swiftly, accurately and before anybody else. But if it's only paying that kind of attention, it will soon

become somebody else's lunch while it's getting its own, because it needs to be looking out for everything else that's going on for predators, for conspecifics for its kin, for those that it's looking after and so on. And effectively, this is something that is constant throughout the history of evolution, but has been taken a step further in the human brain. Because we're very good at standing back from the world. Our frontal lobes are highly developed, and they enable us, as you know, to stand back from the world and to be able to see things in a more dispassionate way, and to see them with more like a bird's eye view. But that has meant that we need to be able to devote a lot of time to theorizing,

to mapping the world, to exploring the possible, what would happen if we did this, what would happen if we did that. And one crude and simple way of putting it is that the right hemisphere is our anchor in reality. It's actually looking at what we're experiencing right now and enabling us to understand it in all its complexity. Whereas the left-hand atmosphere is giving us just a theoretical take on a certain kind of a situation. So is it reasonable to soon? So a bunch of thoughts have been going through my mind. And part of this is you need a brain if you start to move,

and if you start to move and interact with the world, then you have the problem of the part versus the whole. That's it. And you talked about the bird that has to distinguish something very specific, a seed against a background, let's say, of pebbles, but the same bird having to be concerned about the broader context for the presence of predators, for example.

And so the problem is as well, you're focused on something specific. The rest of the world is still there. And also that the separation between the part and the rest of the world is in some manner, what would you say? It's artificial and arbitrary. Because if you're trying to eat and then you get eaten,

that pretty much does in the utility of eating. Effectively, there aren't parts. Parts are an aspect of a certain way of attending to the world. There are only holes and things that we think of as parts, are holes at another level and things that we think of as holes can be seen as parts of an even bigger hole. But this business of carving things up into parts is an artifact of the left hemisphere's piecemeal attention.

So because it's trying to focus on this small detail, it's homing in on a certain little tiny bit, perhaps three out of the 360 degrees arc of attention. Right. And that leads to a different take on the world from that of the right hemisphere. And if I can just put this in a couple of simple sentences, the left hemisphere sees a world which is made up of fragments of tiny pieces that are familiar because they're what it wants, it knows it's targeting them. They are after missing and separate from the other parts. They're static because it freezes it, freezes its target, even if it's actually following a moving target,

like an eagle trying to catch a rabbit, it's as if they're trying to fix that rabbit in the frame. So this world is one that this left hemisphere is version of the world, is one made up of bits that are separate, distinct, fixed, certain, decontextualized, abstract, because they've been categorized. Oh, it's one of those. No, I know. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Right, it's, yeah, yeah. And this effectively is an inanimate, mechanistic vision of the world. Meanwhile, the right. Hey, so let me ask you, let me ask you, okay, I'll let you return to that sec. Let me ask you about that.

So I'm thinking as a way to help people understand this, do you think that that's akin to the difference between listening to music, let's say a piece of music and only hearing it note by note and listening to a piece of music and hearing it at the level of all of the phrases, let's say, and the sequences and the totality at the same time. Because those are obviously very different things. You could say that. And indeed, I sometimes say that the two kinds of understanding, given by the hemispheres, need to be combined. It's not that something's wrong with the left hemisphere's understanding.

It's just that it's so very powerful, so very simple compared with what it's actually, what is going on. That if we start believing the map instead of the world that's mapped, then we miss I understand. And I think that's one of the things that we're doing in our society now. But I think I need, anyway, before we go on, to be able to say something about the contrasting vision of the right hemisphere.

So instead of this vision of stasis particulate at a mystic elements that have to be put together in order to find any meaning or direction in them. The right hemisphere is seeing something which is coherent, in which nothing is ever completely separate from everything else, in which it's constantly moving, flowing and changing, in which it's embodied, and that embodiment, like the rest of its context, makes it what it is. When you take it out of that context,

it's something else completely. The right hemisphere understands the implicit, all the things that are not being said, the bits between the perception, the thing rich and make it live. And in fact, this world that it creates for us is a rich, embodied, implicit living world. And in fact, you can't experimentally suppress one hemisphere at a time. And what we find is that when the left hemisphere is working alone, it does see things that we would normally see as living, as mechanisms, as zombies, as inanimate. Whereas the right hemisphere working alone will see things that normally we would think of as inanimate as animate. So we'll see the sun, for example, as living, because it's a life force that's moving across the heavens.

So this is all very simple. And for the sake of the argument and for the sake of our discussion, I'm compressed in an enormous amount. But I expand this, as you know, into a section of about 450 pages in the new book, looking at these hemisphere differences. So, one of the things I noticed, and maybe this will help people get a flavor for this too, is I worked with, with anorexic clients for a good while. And one of the things I noticed about the anorexics, because they already have a problem of perception, not just conception. Absolutely.

It's a body image problem. But if you work with someone who's anorexic, what you soon learn is that they cannot see their body as a whole. No. What they're doing is, obsessively, they're very orderly people, and they fixate on parts. And so they'll take a look at their calf say and maybe there's some residual calf muscle and they'll look

at the muscle really independently of the rest of the leg and they'll try to figure out if there's any fat there on the muscle and the problem with that is that when you parse your perception of your body up too focally, you can't actually distinguish between what's acceptable in terms of, let's say, obesity and fat layer and what isn't. You have to solve that problem by glancing at yourself comprehensively, say, as a Gestalt in a mirror. So you see your whole body and then you also have to be able to do that while you're simultaneously remembering how other people look and contextualizing yourself that way. And so the anorexic is so focused on the part that they can no longer see the whole. And then they can't even see their body properly. And why this is so important to me is that

the right hemisphere sees the body as a whole, but the left hemisphere only recognizes parts. It doesn't contain the full body image, that is in the right hemisphere. And the several lines of evidence that suggests that anorexia nervosa is in fact a right hemisphere deficit condition. It has many of the elements of autism about it, which also simulates a right hemisphere deficit condition in some cases. I mean, I would say that there are autism rather than one single autism,

but that would take us perhaps too far away from where we are at the moment. So that means the body dysmorphias are at least in part a substitution of the map for the territory. And I wanted to talk a bit about that left hemisphere issue idea too. You know, so imagine when you detect something as a part and you've defined it as a part, you've also in some sense, like I'm looking at little black box in front of me right

now, and I can see it as a single pixel entity in some sense. So it's a black box. So black is a very low resolution idea. And box is a very low resolution idea. And if I really look at the box, I can see all the subtle variations of color because it's not just pure black. And there's all sorts of shades of gray. And I can see all the things that distinguish it from other boxes. But when I say box and I see black box, what I've done is I've compressed the world into a concept, which would be a map, let's say. And then you can see that we do that so much now because we communicate so much and our part detection has become so powerful, our ability to focus in on details, technologically amplified

our ability to exchange linguistic ideas and the power of our science. So you think maybe that as we've progressed over the last several thousand years, that intense social communication that's allowed us to parse up the world into finer and finer and more detailed bits has also suppressed our relationship with the right? Yes, I think it has, but it's, it will perhaps make a lot of sense if I were able to unpack the structure of my new book a bit because it will answer some of the points points that you're making. So in that first, the books divided into three parts. And in that first part, I am focusing almost exclusively on neuropsychology and the philosophical implications of it. And what I'm showing is that in all the, what I call portals, whereby we can gain information about the world. The left hemisphere is inferior

to the right. So it's not just attention. I've been focusing on attention because I think it's extraordinarily important. Attention helps us construct the world that we live in, how we attend changes what we find in the world and also changes us. So it's pretty important stuff. find in the world and also changes us. So it's pretty important stuff. But I'm looking at the attention perception, which is not the same, of course, as attention. Judgment, which is the kind of conclusions we draw from the basis of what we attend to and perceive, our emotional and social intelligence, our cognitive intelligence, good old fashioned IQ, and creativity. And in all these respects, the left hemisphere is inferior to the right. And it's interesting that I look at a lot of what must be to somebody not familiar with them,

really extraordinary syndromes that are familiar to people like you and me in the world of neuropsychology, neuropsychology, and the ones that are characterized by the grossest delusions and hallucinations are almost exclusively due to the damage to the right hemisphere, not to damage to the left. So it is, it is that it's a kind of important place to start because if we're going to talk about what is the world really like? What are we really like? And you've got two versions. In the past philosophers have said, well, some people see it like this, some people see it like that. And then they strike their shoulders and go, you know, but these are just two different ways of looking. We can now, I think, for the first time, and this is exciting, go further forward and say this has all the hallmarks, the characteristics

of the misperceptions, the misconceptions of the left hemisphere. And this, on the other hand, has the hallmarks, the stamp of coming from the right hemisphere, which is more veridical. And so that's one reason that I need to spend some time on that particular aspect in the beginning of the book, because as we go on and as we, if you like, pan back a bit from those portals whereby we get information about the world, the paths that we might go down when we're trying to understand the world like science, reason, intuition and imagination. We need, first of all, to establish something about the degree to which each of the hemispheres can be taken to be theoretical.

When I wrote maps of meaning, my first book, I structured it in some ways, similarly, because the first large chapter is this chapter on neuropsychology and hemispheric function. And I felt as you feel that it was necessary to make the case that there are these two fundamental differences in perceiving the world before investigating that both felt like philosophically and I would say at the narrative level and also conceptually. Now you let's talk about the last two parts of the book, the second two sections. And then maybe you could also describe a bit if you would why you think the right hemisphere and its concentration on narrative, per se, and narrative understanding is relevant to this venture. So, we have the right and the left, and they look at things differently. The right is contextual.

You spend the first third of the book talking about hemispheric differences and making a case that first of all those are deep and old and profoundly important and philosophically significant. The next part of the book deals with Yes deals with the ways in which we use the information that has come to us through those various portals those faculties that I've through those various portals, those faculties that I've described. And they are effectively science, reason, intuition and imagination. Science and reason, I don't think many people would quarrel with because there has been a motivated attack

on intuition and imagination in recent years. I think that people do, there are some people who might question the value of those. And I think that's kind of... Those are those left hemisphere types that you're talking about. Well, of course, yeah, I mean, you and I know that people are not so simple that they can simply be summed up in that way. But it is quite true that a certain way of looking at the world, that of the left, has a kind of cohesion of its own, and the way of looking at the world, the right hemisphere has, too, and yet they're not quite compatible. So in a world like ours, in which there's a lot of public

debate and public discussion as the way in which we come to our understanding of the world, this explicit difference between these two becomes more important. Let me just explain what I mean there. If you look back, most people until the last couple of hundred years have developed an understanding of the world through a consistent coherent culture, and co-herent culture, often partly a religious tradition, through living close to nature, through narratives, myths, as you mentioned, through drama, through poetry, and so on. And only part of the way in which they think about

the world will be due to public debate. And until the advent of modern media, probably very little of anybody's world was made up by public debate. But in the world where we are in, one of the worst things that can happen is people say you're inconsistent. They feel like, if you're inconsistent, that shows you must be wrong. It might show that actually what you're trying to do is to balance two things. And in slightly different ways, in different circumstances, are equally important, but appear to are rather simple, a mind-y-dew way of looking at the world, like contradictions.

You know, in the last part of the book, I have a whole chapter on the co-incidence of opposites. OK, so one of the things I found very interesting about the psychoanalytic tradition, and also some of the neurological work on dreams in relationship to this issue of hemispheric specialization was the idea that dreams which would be in the domain of imagination and intuition are willing to sacrifice consistency for inclusion

and so you can see these contradictory perceptual and conceptual elements being brought together in a dream because what the dream, this is a union idea, an idea derived from Carl Jung, that the dream extends the narrow range of what we might describe as left hemisphere consistency into a broader domain where that consistent theory is not comprehensive enough to account for everything. Because it's consistent but not comprehensive, it's going to produce paradoxes and then in order to increase the degree to which it's comprehensive, you have to introduce what

look like paradoxes within the system. From within the system, that looks like a categorical or a logical error, but from the broader context, it's actually a movement to a more inclusive and comprehensive way of perceiving the world. And dreams do that. And it's one of the things I loved about the Union notion was that we have this delimited domain of explicit propositional knowledge, but partly because of the requirements for consistency and our finite nature, it can't be comprehensive.

And so we need something to fill the gap between the consistent and narrow and the ultimately unknown. And that is in fact the realm of dream and imagination. Yeah, yeah. No, that's right. And there are virtues to the dream world, if necessary, but certainly to intuition that are not open to pure reason, which is not in any sense to devalue or disparage reason. In fact, I worry that in our age, reason is being sacrificed, that we are becoming completely unreasonable. There are two kinds of ways of thinking about reason. One is

a kind of logical formulaic carrying out of procedures and following of pathways that in the sense could be programmed into a computer. And the other is a very powerful idea that has been important in Western history for hundreds of years, which is the idea of being able to bring together what we know from logic, with what we understand from experience, from intuition, from context, from our embodied lives. The kind of wisdom that a good judge would be able to bring to a case, not just saying, well look, I've looked at the rulebook and it says in clause 186 or whatever, no, I mean, that judge should be a fully functioning human being. And this kind of reason, which is nuanced,

which is sober, which is much more inclusive and less competitive than the kind of, the very sort of skeletal kind of reasoning that now seems to have tossed the other kind of reasoning out of the nest, that's the kind that holds where at the moment. So what I, what I want to do is, go ahead, go ahead. What I want to do, perhaps I could just explain a little bit about this part of the book.

I want to take each of these things. I'm not going to go through what I say, of course, it would take far too long, but just to give people some idea of the structure. So I look at sciences having peculiar strengths, which are incredibly important, and on which everything that I do and say depends. But it also can't be taken in the way that scientism does as being able to answer all our questions.

That's simplistic and misguided. So it's seeing where it has strength and where it really needs to say this is not an area on which science can really pronounce. And so I look at the strengths and the weaknesses and I do the same with reason, and it has enormous strengths, but it can also lead us to certain kinds of abstract ways of thinking, which lead us to false conclusions. It is interesting that abandoning reason is dangerous and can lead to the wrong conclusions, but actually merely following it in a blind kind of way can lead to falsehoods as well. The patient of Damaceus called Elliot, who has lost his ability to use intuition and emotion. So he has to reason every single thing out from scratch. In this, he's rather like certain kinds of schizophrenia and autistic subjects, which

have no conception of the intuitive and have to base everything on reasoning from first principles. Of course, what it means is that they're often deluded and their lives are intolerable. Well, I had a client who had obsessive-compulsive disorder at a number of times. He was very, very intelligent and obsessive-compulsive disorder shares some features with anorexia. And part of it is this focus on the part to the exclusion of the whole. And he would ask me very complicated questions, which were deceptively simple. So he said, for example, lots of people with OCD,

they won't touch something that's contaminated because then they feel that they're contaminated and that they're contaminated others. And so that's a big part of the moral quandary that besets people with OCD. Because there is some possibility that if you go out into the world, you'll contact a disease, let's say,

if you touch something you shouldn't. And then there is some possibility that you'll bring out into the world, you'll contact a disease, let's say, if you touch something you shouldn't. And then there is some possibility that you'll bring that back, say, and transmit that to your children. And the question of exactly how much precaution you should take, therefore, becomes a very important question, especially if you try to solve it with the use of, let's say, a propositional expert system instead of being able to analyze context. And he said, look, I don't know when I'm sitting on a subway at night. And there's a newspaper that someone left behind.

I don't know when it's acceptable for me to pick it up and read it or not. How do you decide that? And I thought I actually have no idea how I decide that because I was trying to figure out how to guide him. They just said a principle. So it's like, well, do I touch it if it's little damn? Do I touch it if it has a footprint on it? Do I touch it if it's folded too many times?

Do I touch it if it's on the floor? Do I touch it if it's more than two days old? And the answer is, I have no idea how I know whether or not that newspaper or magazine that's been sitting there in abandoned by someone is an object that I would be willing to pick up, but I can more or less tell it a glance. No, no, it's a misconception that when we make things explicit, we're closer to the truth. Because often what we do when we make things explicit is that we conflate half a dozen or more different considerations that are intuitive and unconscious

minds are able to weigh remarkably effectively. We substitute for that holistic vision a single thing that is collapses into the explicit statement that we make. And so all the time that you're having to make explicit what you would do under what circumstances are, you're limiting the world, you're driving it down and down to less and less meaning. And one of the things that amused me, because I had, of course, patients with OCD as well, was that I had one particular one who was a philosopher, and he said that when he was studying Anglo-American analytic philosophy, his OCD got terrifically bad, but when he was studying

phenomenological philosophy, his OCD relaxed, and he was able to see things in a much broader wider and more sustainable and coherent way. So I thought that was a nice side light on this question of the ocean. But also one relevant for treatment considerations because if there are focal disorders of narrowed perception and that's a consequence of loss of context. I mean, I can't, I can't also help seeing the recent arguments, let's say, that are raging about gender identity, and exactly the same light, is that we've lost the context. And so we're producing these focal dysphoria, because in a real sense, we're using the wrong part of our brain to solve the problem,

and all the public clamor about that, as actually making it worse, not better. Okay, so you talked about the second part of your book about rationality and imagination and intuition and science. And what about the third part? Well, yes, just before getting there, if I may, I just want to comment on intuition and imagination because I think they are extraordinarily important for understanding the world. And partly due to Dan Kahneman's very entertaining and successful books, a lot of people have come away with the idea that intuition

would be a very bad thing to be guided by at any stage to any degree. But I say that these clever scenarios that are set up by psychologists in which you can show that what you would probably and sure to do you think is wrong, are simply the equivalents of optical illusions. They're optical illusions.

I am into that. There are so striking that, you know, I say look, those two lines are the same length. If you said they can't be, but they are. So, but I've never heard anybody after being shown one of those optical illusions going, oh well that does it, you know, from now on I'm never going to use my eyes again, but our intuition, you know, you can set up these artificial situations in which we're, we seem to be getting things wrong by following our intuitions. That's often

because 99% of the time we've followed this intuition, it would intelligently and quickly take us to the right solution. And so, I really want to rehabilitate intuition. I have some fascinating, I think, studies that came to me, people who wrote to me after reading the Master in his Emotions, ones are man who tips horses at races, and others, the physician who looks after the motorbike riders in something called the TT races and the I love man, the most dangerous sporting events in the world. And the reflections they have to make about how these people are able to do what they're doing through very much things that are identified with the right hemisphere and intuitive

cross, that if they stop and think explicitly, they're completely ruined, they'll probably kill themselves. So it's like thinking implicitly or explicitly when you're trying to play a piece on the piano. Absolutely. And it interferes right away. And I would say that's really relevant. We should make this case quite clearly.

I mean, one of the things that really disturbed me about the COVID response was we reduced the entire realm of political intuition to expert knowledge. And we made the assumption that we could focus on one thing at the expense of everything else. And that that was actually the right way to do it to follow the science, let's say. But the problem with that is that complex political decisions are often equivalent to diagnostic moves

on the part of a physician. And we haven't been able to develop expert systems that can do diagnosis worth a damn. And it's because, for however, we do diagnosis, it's obviously dependent on our ability to simultaneously apprehend a very wide range of potentially relevant contextual issues, rather than reducing it to this algorithmic process,

for example, that the person with OCD might demand. Yeah, well, I do discuss medical diagnostics in the book because interestingly, in thinking fast, thinking slow, there's a passage where Dan Carneman says some things that struck me as very odd about physicians' inability to be consistent in their diagnoses. And I have done a lot of spade work in research. There were 5,600 papers referred to in the bibliography

of the book, all of which it would consult it in the making of it. And when Kahneman quotes these rather odd things, I looked them up and found that they didn't show what Kahneman says they show it all. In fact, they showed the opposite. So it's always worth having a look at these things. I looked them up and found that they didn't show what condiments they show at all. In fact, they showed the opposite. So it's always worth having a look at these things. Well, there we go. This work by Conoman, you know, this sort of thing is really annoyed me too, because I read through these things and I think just and I think your optical illusion a

metaphor is really a good one, just because we can come up with contrived situations where intuition fails doesn't mean that intuition doesn't function properly in a huge range of appropriate contexts. Absolutely. And can be much more subtle and much more revealing. And we disobey it. I mean, it should always be something that we could be skeptical about. We should be skeptical about our reasoning. We should be skeptical about science. Science is a skeptical

undertaking. But there's nothing wrong with being skeptical about it as well, but we should at least attend to it. And I think, I mean, there's a lot more to say about COVID and maybe we'll come come there later because there's a lot of interest, I think, that connects the hemisphere hypothesis. How would you define intuition and imagination? Well, of course, they are almost impossible to define. And it's a mistake to think that we can't discuss them until we've clearly defined them. Often the only way in which we can understand them is by approaching them from different

points of view and working out what they are. I use about eight different categories of things as possible constituents of intuition, things like instinct, ready to go knee jerk reactions, heuristics, prejudices, which is an interesting area because it's not as anything like as dire a situation as people know think. Yeah, that's for sure. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Anyway, but I deal with those and with, of course, the AHA moment with scientific and philosophical

insights. And then in imagination, of course, I'm making the distinction, which is a very, very important one, between fantasy and imagination. I mean, this is, this, this originates with words from the cold ridge and no doubt probably with shelling. But the distinction is, fantasy is something that covers up reality and takes one away from it, but imagination is one's only chance of feeling one's way into reality. So the distinction that they were keen to make was between the sort of a pretty-fying or gust and pastoral in which lords and ladies rest up the shepherds and cheperdesses, that's fantasy. And imagination, which was this divine gift, as both words

of the encoded very clearly saw it, which enabled one by paying a certain kind of attention to have insight into the deep life of the world, obviously the living world of other creatures, but also of mountains of rivers, streams, lakes and so forth, to see them in a new way and actually experience them as real rather than just categorical examples in the way the left-handest species. So in any case, all I'm really saying is that I rehabilitate intuition and imagination somewhat but show their limitations and I hope, wave a flag for better science and better reason. And there's nothing at all wrong with science and reason in themselves. The problem nowadays is that science is not scientific enough,

and our reasoning is not reasonable enough. The science, I think the point there is that it has dogma. Science has, at the moment moment a number of dogmas where Jew, a paradigm shift and to be ruled by dogmas, not by following the evidence, is not scientific. I'm curious about a couple of things on the imagination and the hypothesis front. So I want to offer you another, what foray into defining where imagination might begin on the fringes of rationality. So if you do give people creativity tests, one of the things you can do is you can ask them, for example, how many uses can you think of for a brick, strike them down in three

minutes. And then you can categorize those by number of responses. So that's a fluency response. And then you can categorize them by originality. And originality is something like pragmatic utility, so you have to identify a real use for the brick, but also statistical unlikely hood. So the more original responses are pragmatically practical,

but also rare. So then imagine that there's a nexus of associations around any given concept, and the tighter the associations are, the more they look rational in the algorithmic sense, and the looser the associations, the more they look imaginative, and that as you move out into the looser associations, your probability of making a false positive increases, right? Because you're associating two things that shouldn't be associated. But your possibility of making a dramatic discovery,

also increases because now you're associating two things that have here to for being distinct. Of course. But, yeah, okay, so you can imagine that rationality shanes into imagination. And then you made this distinction that fantasy is the misuse of imagination to replace reality, which is a nice distinction.

And so, and then, so one twist on that too. One of the weird things about the way science is, science are educated, scientists are educated, especially to write scientific papers and to think about sciences. We think a lot about the method and we think a lot about writing the introduction to a scientific paper as this algorithmic description of the algorithmic process that we walked through to get to the hypothesis.

But that's rarely true. You know, like I had one student who was very creative, and she'd come up with an idea that was a leap, an intuitive leap, and then I could see where she was going, but why and why, but she didn't know how she got from point A to point B, and then when she had to write out the introductions to her paper, she had to come up with a story about how she derived that logically,

even though that had nothing to do with how she came up with it. And that's the typical thing that happens when we have to consciously say how we did something. it. And that's the typical thing that happens when we have to consciously say how we did something. The left hemisphere, which knows Didley's got about how we actually did get there, comes up with its own version of how it would have got there if it had been in control, which it wasn't.

So you're absolutely right that most of the great discoveries in science and mass were made intuitively through pattern recognition, through singing a gestalt. They weren't made by following a linear sequence. And even, I mean, this is a point that's made by George Gaye Lord Simpson, who's after all one of the founders of the modern synthesis of what is worth. But I mean, he says, you know, the scientific method, as such, is more or less a fiction, in that it's more honored in the breach than the observance, although it is a useful paradigm to have at the back of your

mind for a lot of the rather plotting early work in science and reason. So what I want to be able to say here is that there's no conflict between science, reason, imagination and intuition. In good science, they all work together. In good reason, they all work together. In good intuition, they all contribute and so forth. So there is no need for these things to be set up as they so often are, as in conflict with one another. And another important element is that it's actually the right hemisphere

contribution to them, more obviously in the case of intuition and imagination, but nonetheless, importantly, in reason and science, it is the right hemisphere's contribution that is the really important one. Well, I was just thinking about Einstein in light of our conversation. Yes. I mean, when Einstein published those three remarkable papers back, I believe it was in the 1920s, he had spent a tremendous amount of time in the world of the imagination, imagining, for example, what it would be like to travel at the speed of light, and we can also point out, I think, as well that the imagination differs from the

propositional in that it actually does rely on images more, and images are closer to the world in some sense than linguistic concepts. And so the imagination tends to be less linguistic and reductive and abstract than the purely linguistic. And so it's richer, but not as precise. No, absolutely. And in the book, I look at so many examples of how this is true, that what we need is this broader combination of intuitive work and more routine humdrum work. And Einstein himself famously used to say that it took him a long time afterwards to explain in words how he reached conclusions

that he found came to him sometimes while playing music and of course music is a perfect example of what I call betweenness. It is only connection, it is only gist out. The notes in themselves have no significance. It's only as they come together in the patterns that we call music that they come to have their meaning. And incidentally, you said that if we start breaking things up and get explicit about the playing of the music, we won't play it well, exactly. But that doesn't make a sort of left hemisphere procedural analysis of the piece worthless. So I sometimes say that everything has this structure that it's the right

hemisphere is open active receptivity that allows something to come into being for us, to presence to us. And that then it goes to the left hemisphere where it's seen as, oh yes, it's one of those, we put it in one of those categories and it's abstracted, taken out of context and so on. And then that work, having been done, it should be taken back into the right hemisphere where a new richer home can be created. Now that's perfectly image in a piece of music. You're attracted to it as a whole, the right hemisphere phase. You then start to play it and discover that you have to practice over and over again a certain piece of fingering because it's difficult. You look at the harmonic structure of the piece and that helps you understand it. But then finally when you go out on stage and play it, you must forget all of that. Otherwise you won't be able to play

a note. But that doesn't mean that time was wasted. The left hemisphere's contribution is very important. The point is it's always the intermediary stage. It shouldn't be the final stage, but in our culture, we take things apart, analyze them, fragment them, and that we have like a heap of bits on the garage floor where they're used to be a motorbike. And we go, oh, I have no idea what all this stuff means. That's where we end the story. And of course, a motorbike is a bad example of what we're talking about, because I'm talking about organisms, which are nothing, it's all like machines. But anyway, you wanted me to move on to talk about the third part, and so that we can

cover a little bit of that. Yeah, well, and then we'll go back to the first and start walking through it again. So, yeah, go on to the third part. Yeah, well, the third part is, so the second part is epistemology. That's what I've just described. And the third part is, so the second part is epistemology, that's what I've just described. And the third part is metaphysics. So what, when we've decided that we know how to weigh the different paths and the different portals to an understanding of the world, what do we actually find there?

And in the first two chapters of part three, the final part of the book. I look at two elements. One is, as I say, the conjunction of opposites, which is so important and it's something we've completely lost sight of and by the way, of course, Jung was cognizant of. But we often think nowadays that we think in a very linear, left hemisphere way that opposites are the two ends of a pole. And as long as you keep moving further and further in a certain direction, you'll get further and further away from the thing that you feared. But often we come back and find ourselves actually approaching

the very thing we fear, because famously, too much desire for freedom causes tyranny. And so just for one example, but so I look at that and there's a lot to say about that, but I shouldn't say it now. And then there's a chapter on the one and the menu, which is an ancient thing in philosophy, at least in Eastern philosophy,

but it is also something we can't ignore in any kind of philosophy. The difference between the individual and the unique and the value of it, and it's placed in a hole, which it doesn't, by its uniqueness and individuality, do anything to impair. It doesn't help disintegrate that hole. In fact, it enriches it. I sometimes give the idea of a bud or a flower that unfolds and you see all the different parts of it. But those parts have done nothing to make the bud less whole.

In fact, it's now made it a richer hole, the flower. So those are the two on structure. And then there are what you might call the constituents of reality. So I look at, guess what, time, I look at space, I look at flow, I look at matter and consciousness which I take to be aspects of the same foundational element in the cosmos. And then perhaps to many people's surprise, but to a lot of readers or already highly expressed delight, I look at values and purpose and the sense of the sacred as irreducible elements that we don't make up as we're painting them on the walls

of our room in order to cheer ourselves up. But we don't invent them, but we discover them. If we can. In the words, the business of living is about discovering, exploring, unveiling these values, that purpose and that sense of the sacred. So, so this is one of the arguments that I've been having with people like Richard Dawkins, for example. And sometimes when the religious types take Richard Dawkins on, they accept some of his a priori presuppositions, and that scuttles them from the beginning. And one of the presuppositions, and this allows the scientist, scientism types to win in religious

arguments all the time, is that they basically make the presumption that a religious system is a set of science-like propositions about the world and its description. When in fact the religious enterprise much more broadly construed involves no shortage of experiences like awe, which are, I mean, awe involves pylewarection and pyle erection is a response that's 60 million years old. And that religious experience, domain of religious experience, also involves phenomena like our sense of being intensely gripped and moved by the meaning that is produced by artistic beauty and music, and ritual and dance, and all these things that are embodied and emotional

and motivational far far deeper than any cognitive overlay and to reduce the religious enterprise to a series of descriptions about the world is to do it great to service but also to make it entirely demolishable on the scientific reductionist materialist atheist front. on the scientific reductionist materialist atheist front? Yes, you're so right about the importance of awe and wonder. And recently there was a day in Oxford of seminars devoted to my work on which that was a theme, and I gave a lecture at the end on that, which I hope is available somewhere. I didn't think it was filmed, actually, interestingly, but I think I may have put the text up on my channel, channel McGillicus, but it is a very, very important element.

And of course, it's quite different from sheer curiosity. We don't say, I'm curious to know what God is like. We don't say, I'm curious to know what the meaning of life is. Things that strike us as marvelous or inspiring or wonderful have a great depth. And once we lose that sense we collapse them into the little bit of the world that is illuminated in the dark when we flash our

Torture around a lumber room and we see little bits and pieces But actually if you didn't do that but allowed your eyes to adapt you'd see that there was a rich Sky our universe a cosmos beyond. So all of that is extraordinary and important. You're quite right about, it seems that scientists don't seem to understand different kinds of knowledge or meaning. They don't imagine that somehow King Lear would be less important as a play if one could demonstrate, as indeed one can, that if there was, indeed, a historic, historic, Lear, King Lear, the story of that king was completely different from one to all by Shakespeare. In evaluate, Shakespeare's play has more truth in

it than many of book of genetics, but it's just of a different kind of truth. Well, the best lecture on evolutionary biology, the difference is men and women in evolutionary biology. The best lecture I ever saw was Wagner's Dimastro singer, which nailed it. The bread O'nails, the difference between men and women in the psychological, sociological and theological sense almost perfectly. And Wagner went places that the evolutionary biologists haven't yet gone, as far as I can tell.

I'm writing about that in my new book. That sounds very interesting. So there is this. Well, I want to ask you something. You said something very deep, very in a very truncated manner that I wanted to return to. And I saw some of this emerging in the parts of your book that I was reading most recently. You talked about the collapse of the wave form and the collapse of possibility into actuality and the role of the right hemisphere in doing that. And you just walked through a sequence

of thoughts where you said that the right hemisphere in some sets presents the global, meaningful, contextual reality to us. And then we break it down into parts and master it. Jonathan Paziel told me, by the way, that when God tells people at the beginning of time that the purpose of mankind is to subdue reality, what it means is subdue to give everything its proper place in the hierarchy of being. And so that would extend all the way from the conceptual to the transcendent, let's say, but to, it's sort of like making Jacob's ladder. That's another image that I would say, and you're a vision

of the left hemisphere operating at the level of detail and the right hemisphere operating at the level of totality. And the need for all of that to be fleshed out simultaneously with no loss on either end seems to me to be in keeping with like the Jacobs ladder vision and the idea of sub-doing reality with with the logos, which is how it's laid out in Genesis. I just make an aside on Jacobs ladder to me what is completely wonderful is Blake's image of this, which is unlike any other image. Mostly the image of the ladder is a straight ladder like that, but Blake's image is of a spiral. And I think there's an enormous amount of depth in that.

The idea that as you go up, you, and approach nearer to heaven, your process is not just simply linear, but also in a way circular. But not in such a way that you come back to, as Eliot said, the place where you first started and know it for the first time. But you actually come back to a position which is similar to where you were, but now on a higher plane, and you can look down and see where you were before, and you can relate these two things. So you can see both the progress and the return in one. But anyway, what I wanted to distinguish was, I do talk about the collapse of the wave function

and quantum field theory. But what I don't think I do say at least explicitly because I don't know enough to be able to state that is that that collapse is caused by the right hemisphere. I don't know that at all. I mean what we know is that somehow it's connected with attention and there's plenty in the physicists suggesting that, and particularly in Pauli's work, that the quality of the attention paid may change how that process is carried out and what results from it. But I mean, that is speculative. Well, you know, that's worth wandering down for a second or two.

You know, it's definitely the case, if you think about imagination and intuition, that imagine that in some sense, you lay out or you ask for a revelation of a vision of the world that could be to guide you. And let's say that you would like to bring a better world into being. And so, and you make that part of your meditative practice and part of your ethical goal and it's true in a fundamental sense. And then what that means is that as a consequence of that practice, your attention is going to be paid to those pathways and phenomena that make the bringing of a better world into being a more real possibility. And we certainly do believe that we can dream

and then achieve, and we do believe that we can't even achieve without dreaming. And so obviously there's some relationship between our ability to intuit and imagine. And the manifestation of the reality that we experience itself, because otherwise, why would thought be useful or vision be useful, or planning be useful? So it's speculative in some sense, but in another sense, it's what do we do? We're going to operate randomly or we're going to operate with vision. We come back to the importance of attention and I sometimes say attention is a moral act

because it changes what actually is there in the world for us to find. And it also changes us, so it has very important consequences. It's not just a passive process, like the exposure of a photographic plate. It's an active open receptivity, which is going to meet whatever it is that comes out of that world to which we attend. So it is, it is a very important point there. Well, so, so let's delve into that because it's, I think it's a key insight So let's delve into that because it's a key insight to make the case that attention is a moral act. And I believe that our ideas of heavenly hierarchy in some sense are an intuitive representation

of the ethical hierarchy fragmented or united as it may be that actually directs our attention. And that a couple, I'll just decorate that a little bit. If it's not united, then it's fragmentary and that causes anxiety. If it is united, it has to be united towards some transcendent goal. And that would be something like, well, let's say, well, in the mythological sense,

that's something like the Parodysel vision, right? That's the best all things could be. You know, the idea of the logos that God uses in Genesis 1 to create the order that is good out of nothing, that logos is basically conceptualized as something like truth in language and imagination serving love. And so the idea in some sense is the direction of attention towards possibility oriented towards love

infused by truth produces the order that is habitable and good. And that idea is, and that's the image of God in man and woman, and God stresses that repeatedly in Genesis, right, that he has this intent that's logo-skided, and every day of creation, which is the interaction of potential to bring a new order, is then deemed as good. And I think the reason it's good is because it's brought into being under the auspices of love and truth. And so this idea that attention is an ethical act, man, this is a killer revolutionary

idea. Yes, it goes hand in hand with something else as highly relevant to what you've just been saying, which is that I argue that all that exists is in relation. One of the ways of, there are many ways of construing the meaning of the title, the matter with things, partly it's a panel in our obsession with material our obsession with the idea that the world is made up of things and never mind the reference of the fact that there seems to be something that is the matter but the things at the moment. But another way of thinking about it is that these things that we call things and I don't have any quarrel with us using the word in daily life are ultimately relations.

So that all that exists is relation. And that the relationship is prior to what we call the thing, the relatum. So the relationship, you can't, after all, if you think of anything as existing in a context, it is what it is because of its relationships. To try and suggest that it is something separate from those relationships is already to have made

an essential error in misunderstanding. So I argue that all that exists is relational and that of course is what attention is. It's a way of disposing your attention to the world. But what is lovely is that you raise this issue of love as a core part of creation, which is a common theme to every religious tradition all over the world. And that idea, of course, that whatever it is that we mean by God is a relation, love.

Love cannot be anything other than relational. And that the creation which you referred to, I see the story of this creation as the constant unfolding of some God and the universe that are in process together and each coming to know themselves more and more deeply in this process. This would be AN Whiteheads vision and I have more respect for Whitehead than for any philosopher of the last 100 years. Well, so here's another twist on that that might be interesting to you. So I've been thinking, I thought a long time

about the relationship between truth and love and their union in this notion of logos, which encompasses both logic and also the embodiment of something like the divine word simultaneously. And maybe that's the bringing together of the Greek and the Judeo-Christian tradition in some fundamental sense. But we can also think about the opposite of that. So in Gertus, Mephistopheles, in Faust, his character, mephistopheles is the great adversary. And mephistopheles, Credo, is that being is so permeated by suffering and catastrophe and tragedy and betrayal that it would be better if it was just brought to a halt.

And so his motivation is to destroy and eliminate the ultimate in nihilism. And in some sense, we're pulled in the world between those two poles, right? Because part of us would like to build something better and to bring what's greater and more magnificent into being. And another part of us is bitter and resentful about the tragedy and catastrophe of existence. And so, and I do believe that those fundamental polls, that's can enable in some sense, they war for a war for domination of our intentional resources, you know, and part of what religious practice is is to what fortify the your capacity to operate on the side of life more abundant and truth in its service and to move away from that nihilism that's terror-based

and a consequence of what would you say bitterly apprehending existential catastrophe and that this notion of that religious war that's part and parcel of that battle, it is a battle for the domination of the potential resources because that is key to what brings reality into being out of the realm of possibility. Yes. One way of thinking about the problem you were eliminated by referring to Mephistopheles in first, is that what Mephistopheles doesn't understand is that you cannot have a thing without its opposite. So, this left-hemisphere fantasy that we can have a thing without its opposite. And so there's this left hemisphere fantasy that we can create a world in which all

is simply piece of joy. And there is no suffering involved. I don't believe that this is a possibility. Blake Hatch also said that in heaven, there must be some degree of suffering. Otherwise, there couldn't be joy. But I think our way of thinking is to distinguish these things too

sharply. And I'm surprised in a way, I know why you've concentrated on the word Logos because it is that Greek word in the New Testament. But going back in history, the Greeks thought that there were two ways in which one could approach truth. One was Logos and one was Mythos and Myth has now changed its meaning to mean something untrue, but there's nothing in the word Myth that means it's untrue. Indeed, they believed that Myths were the only ways in which you could embody and communicate the really deep truths and that Logos was an essentially trivial thing that could be used in a bad way as it were by a lawyer in order to win a case. But the really deep truths and that Logos was an essentially trivial thing that could be used in a bad way as it were by a lawyer in order to win a case. But really when you're concerned

with finding out the depths of reality, then Mythos is important. That links to what you were saying, I think, earlier about the necessity for myths and narratives in order to be able to understand what it is we're dealing with. Science has its own myths and narratives in order to be able to understand what it is we're dealing with. Science has its own myths and narratives, that's the interesting thing. A lot of scientists think that there are no myths and narratives in science. But if you think that there isn't one, you have espoused the myth and the narrative of a science that always makes progress, and in which there is a mechanism in full that all can be reduced

ultimately to the idea of the machine. That is the model that is espoused by those people who think there is no model in the science. Right. Well, you know, one of the things that really struck me about Dawkins when I went to talk to him is that despite his atheism, so here's two things that are crucial as far as I'm concerned. Dawkins and scientists like him believe in the transcendent object. So they believe that there's an ontology outside of the domain of epistemology, unlike the postmodernists. And it isn't obvious to me at all that we can maintain our belief in the transcendent object without maintaining our belief in the transcendent.

And he didn't see that or doesn't see that as an axiomatic faith-based presupposition of the scientific endeavor per se. And then Dawkins, who I believe is an admirable man and a genuine seeker after truth because he is a credible scientist. And you can't be that without that. Dawkins always accepts axiomatically before setting foot in the scientific ring, let's say that the truth will set you free. Yes. So, and that's not a within science presumption, right? That's that's what you have to bring

to the table before you can engage in the scientific endeavor. I mean that that's a very nice introduction to the chapter I have on values in which I suggest that as I say truth goodness and beauty are things that we we find we this this cover not that we invent I mean although the particular ways in which we see them at any one moment in history may be slightly different, although those differences are greatly exaggerated. There's enormous confidence throughout the world and across time on what we find to constitute beautiful, good and true. But in any case, the question I ask is, if you believe that the universe is purposeless, meaningless, and a heap of material stuff that has no importance colliding with other parts of itself in an endless process of collision and destruction.

Why would truth matter to you? Why does truth seem so important to scientists? I know why truth matters to me. Yeah, exactly. That's part of that sad myth. That's part of that sad myth, because I believe that the universe is a much richer one in which values like truth have meaning.

But in that universe, why would truth be important? Because after all, if you really believe nothing, then the most you could do would be to say, but let's give people pleasure and comfort. But why would a scientist set out to destroy the pleasure and comfort that somebody might find in their religious belief, because they believed it wasn't true? The very fact that they elevate truth like that seems to me to suggest that they have, it's a fact, a belief in a kind of transcendence at a values.

Well, I think that's beyond question. I mean, this is why I was so convinced when I read Jung's work on alchemy in particular, that science was necessarily embedded inside a narrative tradition that was least implicit. And so we could say, the scientists ignore the mythos when they don't concentrate on the process of hypothesis generation.

And they don't look at the role of imagining a nation and intuition, especially in the revolutionary scientific process. And that's just a matter of epistemological and philosophical blindness as far as I'm concerned. And then the next thing is that it's clearly the case that science is embedded in a redemptive enterprise because part of the enlightenment ethos that motivated science and scientists was the notion that if we came in contact with the ontology of the object outside of epistemology and we were humble in face of the revelation of these new truths that what we would do would alleviate suffering and bring the world to a better state of being. And so to operate as a scientist to be so's an example, Ian, this is something. So I read this book a while back, KBGB agent wrote about some of the experiments the Soviets

were doing on the biological warfare front. And they were trying to hybridize smallpox and Ebola and then aerosolize it to produce a super bug that could be distributed in cities that would be extraordinarily contagious and extraordinarily fatal. And so here's the question, if you're a scientist, why isn't that as good a pursuit as any other? Because it's just a factual matter, right? It's just a clockwork mystery in some sense. Why not see how smallpox and Ebola go together? And you might say, well, it's preposterous to even question that,

but it's not. No, no, I would, I would, I can imagine an atheistic scientist saying, but there's nothing about being an atheist scientist that means that I shouldn't be kind and I shouldn't care about other human beings. And therefore, it would be quite wrong for me to do this dastardly thing. Yeah, but that's the issue. Is, well, there's a wrong there.

Okay, where does that come from exactly? And I don't see that it can be derived except from this superordinate mythos that we've been describing. Well, I think it's better. Based in a much bigger broader vision. I agree, but I still think that it's a perfectly sensible remark. And I think that Dawkins would probably say something like this. I mustn't put words in his mouth, but just because I don't believe in a divine realm

doesn't mean that I don't have moral values. I think it'd be wrong to suggest that. I mean, it would be a basic error to suggest that atheists are somehow therefore immoral. Oh, well, I definitely don't want to make the case that atheists are by, you know, as a class, any necessarily more immoral than any other class of people. I'm just pointing out, and maybe I will push you here a little bit. The thing is, even if it is kindness, and I'm perfectly willing to assume that it might be kindness, and that will get you somewhere, that kindness itself is outside the scientific domain, because we could talk about kindness in terms of kinship and we could talk about it in terms of relation and biological, what would you say, reciprocity. But it's in the ethical domain, specifically speaking and not in this reductive scientific

domain. Well, that's right. But I mean, the very fact that you talk in terms of biology and kinship and thriving and so on, it would be meet and drink to the kind of atheistic scientists that I'm talking about. I don't think it would be logical for them to say, but you know, that's perfectly incompressible in my way of thinking. I don't think that they can understand, I don't think that with that world picture, you can understand why there is goodness at all.

And I don't know why I don't think you can understand why there is beauty. Interestingly, scientists think that they've got a lot of beauty. The tougher one for sure. The really, really interesting one, because scientists think they've answered the question of beauty it's to do with a mate selection and so forth. But Darwin himself, Trice, points out that given the existence of beauty, it can be used by evolution in certain ways. But it doesn't explain what beauty is or how it ever came into being in the first place.

He said, why do certain colors, certain forms, so on, actually attract and have this beauty for animals, birds, and of course for ourselves, the humans? And there are many things that... Well, and it's that cross-species similarity that's so interesting. Butterflies, apparently, can detect a one-part in a million deviation from symmetry on the part of potential mating partners. And fair enough, but that doesn't explain why we think butterflies are beautiful. I'm going to do. I'm glad I'm not meeting with a butterfly. I know one one part, a million man. That's pretty, but I mean, it's obvious that butterflies high at have high standards. I mean, they have very high standards. But of course, what's interesting is that humans don't necessarily find symmetry more attractive. The rest of the studies that show that in fact human beings find faces that are symmetrical spooky, mechanistic, and they actually find an asymmetry in the face

or in the form more attractive. So an optimal asymmetry. There is an optimal asymmetry. Right. I often say that we don't want just symmetry or asymmetry, but we want the asymmetry of symmetry with asymmetry. Rather, as I say, the left hemisphere wants either, or it wants things black and white. The right hemisphere is able to see that it can be both hand. And I don't think we should dismiss what the left hemisphere has to offer. So we need not either either or both hand, but both either or and both hand. Well, you see that with music, you know, I mean, you want a certain degree of algorithmic predictability in any musical piece. but if it devolves into

algorithmic predictability it just sounds like a drum machine. Absolutely, and the whole business of Roberto, which is responsible for so much of the meaning in music, which is often so fine that it can hardly be specifically detected consciously, but it gives the life to the piece. And when you hear it played by a machine, it certainly seems completely dead. Right, and you see that difference too, and the difference between analog and digital musical instruments, because with an analog instrument,

you can capitalize on its imperfection in an unbelievably interesting way. You can really make an analog instrument like a piano sing. And it's really hard to do that with a digital instrument. And that is, I mean, digital instruments have their advantages, but they don't sing like analog instruments do. No, I've never tried playing a digital instrument, but I, what you say suggests, yes, suggests a likelihood that that's exactly right.

Well, you lose the context with a digital instrument to some degree, because if you're playing a piano and you hit the hammers, whole thing the whole piano and the whole room starts to vibrate and you can play with all that if you listen to it and you really can't get to do that with a digital instrument which like I said has their utility so tell me more about your fascination with beauty because I'll just do a little intro to that One of the things that really propelled me down the route of the investigation that ran on similar tracks as yours was my realization when I was in my mid-twenties that music had an intrinsic meaning and depth

that was neither reducible to propositions nor could be destroyed by propositional objection. Absolutely. You know, so you might say, well, the world is not meaningful. It's like, okay, what about music? or could be destroyed by propositional objection. Absolutely. You know, so you might say, well, the world is not meaningful. It's like, okay, what about music? Oh yeah, music is meaningful. Well, why?

Well, I don't know. Can you criticize it? Well, I can, but it doesn't have any effect on the meaning of the music. And so the meaning of the music, which is part of its beauty, clearly, and that spiraling you talked about, Bach did that perfectly with the Brandenburg Concerto, say. That continual Jacob's ladders spiraling that goes upward and upward, but in some sense returns to the same place.

It's a brilliant example of that. But so tell me what gripped you about beauty philosophically and why you decided to focus on that in relation to values? Well, I'm afraid I'm rather comprehensive in this, but it's why it's so long. So I do look at the various, at least the three most important values to me, which are goodness, truth and beauty. And whatever Keats who is a very fine poet may have said about this, truth and beauty can't simply be equated. We wouldn't have two different words and I'm afraid that sometimes beauty can be other than good and other than true. However, that's not to say that it always is.

Often it is a pathway to something both truthful and very good. What you say about music is important because it suggests a note has no meaning whatever. Put several hundred thousand together and you've got some Matthew passion. How does that happen? It's entirely to do with the relationships between the notes, which make the harmony, make the melody and make the ictus of the whole thing. So that's a very important part. And as you say, it can't be reduced to reason. So it's not for that reason irrational. I think we need to make a distinction between things that cannot be encompassed by reason, but are not for that reason irrational. They may be trans-rational.

Or epiphenomenal, you know, people like Pinker, one of the things I take issue with Pinker and those cognitive scientists types often is that they attempt to reduce the realm of the cultural, including the realm of beautiful to like a cognitive spandural, right? There's side effects of our cognitive ability and that seems to me to be put in the cart before the horse. Oh, absolutely. When I think some of Pinker says that music is a useless expectation of speech about it.

Right, exactly. Exactly. And he compares it to the other way around, actually, compares it to pornography and cheesecake. But anyway, we don't need to waste time on that. Why do I find beauty so very compelling, partly because of the part it's played in my life since my teens, the extraordinary power for me of poetry and art and music to which I've

more or less devoted a large part of my life? I mean, in a very, I'm not making a big claim, I'm not a creator, but I mean, they have guided my life. And they've also guided me towards the sense of the sacred. I think that if you listen to certain kinds of music, it's rather inane to say, to reduce it to, well, it's attractive in certain ways. It is, but there's a certain kind of music, and I think particularly of the 100 years of the great proliphany of the people like Palestine, of Victoria, Bird, Talis, Lazarus, it simply cries out for another category to be brought to bear on it, namely that of the soul or the spirit.

But it's greatly exaggerated that it's somehow a cultural artifact. So for example, we know that Norwegians who know nothing about the structure of Indian music, nonetheless, can say what the meaning of certain passages in a raga, what that meaning is, and it will go here with what an Indian intended by playing that piece. And you know, it's very obvious that we find oriental art staggeringly beautiful. Our museums are full of it, and our museums are also full of people from the Far East coming to visit them. They don't think that somehow it's ugly because it's not part of their education. One of the most moving things that I've seen, I just want to say this because I hope that some viewers will look it up. There's a piece on the internet of an Amazonian tribesmen being shown a film by a French film crew of snapshots as it were, a little short clips illustrating our way of life. And they express horror

at what we do to trees, what we do to animals, what we do to our elderly, how we have no respectful, the sacred, and the cosmos, all these things. And then there is this absolutely electrifying moment when they play Maria Callas singing Castadeva from Belini's Norma. And suddenly they all fall silent and something that has never happened before happens. One of the young men stands up and moves towards the camera and says, this is not our culture, but we feel there is something very special and beautiful in it. And then an old man says, to me, it is overwhelming. I feel that it is divine or sacred.

So I think that is quite extraordinary. And it gives the light of the idea that these things are simply made up any old how-by-a-culture. Well, the other thing too, we can afford to be dead serious about such things as scientists. If you look at the way the brain processes language, it's obviously the case that the musical element is not simply a secondary spandural of the novel. Absolutely, you know. Because we know perfectly well that when you and I are talking and when everyone is listening, a huge part of the emotional information that we're conveying and the motivational excitement, for example, we know perfectly well that that's carried by the melody of our speech.

And we know that music might be an elaboration of the melodic element of speech, but that doesn't mean that music is reducible to speech. Like I would say, if you were looking at this from the perspective of a hard-headed biologist, you would say what Nietzsche said, which was that language emerged from music, not the other way around. And that makes a lot more sense from an evolutionary perspective, because animals use sound, not language, to communicate, and the linguistic came out of the musical. And so it's set clearly not a secondary phenomenon. It's way deeper. And that

intuition of meaning, you know, that one of the things I want to tell you about my theory of music just for a second, I think you might like it. And so what I realized about music was that it consists of patterns, and that's not a brilliant observation, but then it consists of these interleaved patterns that are stacked on top of one each other, that work in a harmonious manner, all simultaneously. And you know, you can walk through a complex piece of music, listening to one musical instrument or another, participating in that guest-stalk pattern. And I thought, well, why is that meaningful? Why is that? And then people think, well, music isn't representational.

And then I thought, wait a second, that's wrong. Music is the most representational art form because the world isn't made out of objects. It's made out of patterns. And what music calls us to do is to attend to the harmonious interplay of the patterns of being and to bring ourselves into alignment with that. And there is no higher call than that. And the reason that music is meaningful is because that meaning really exists. Is that is what we need to do is to align ourselves harmoniously with the plethora of the patterns of being that exist at multiple levels. And so it is a call to proper action in the patterns of being that exist at multiple levels.

And so it is a call to proper action in the world, and that is meaningful. Yes, I wouldn't disagree. I mean, except perhaps to say, I prefer the concept of allowing something to presence rather than a representation. Music is representational. I know what you mean in that it acts on our bodies in a metaphorical way that rising and falling phrases affect our blood pressure, our muscular attention in our skeletal muscles, our blood pressure, our pulse, as you say, our hair stand on in, being tears or eyes. It's a very physical thing. And so in that sense, it's very active on us through what I would call bringing into presence

something rather than actually just representing it. So Ian, in some sense, I hate to do this, but since we are trying to build Jacob's ladder all the way down to the level of detail, maybe we can delve a little bit more into the practical necessity of such knowledge. So why do you think this matters in the concrete sense too? Why do you think that we're dominated now by what you might describe as this left hemisphere

reduced ideological view of the world? Yes. I may well have compiled one of the most comprehensive analyses of hemisphere differences in the 450 pages of the first part of this book, but it's not just of technical interest. It seems to me to be part of a very important overall philosophical project. As I explain, we don't know how to evaluate different things. I have a whole chapter on paradoxes, by the way, in which one can see that one arm of a paradox comes from the left hemisphere,

one from the right hemisphere. And guess what? The one that comes from the right hemisphere actually describes what we know to be real. Anyway, to come to pan back a bit, I feel that there is something, I think we all know that there's something amiss with the vision we have of the world at the moment. And that's the other meaning of the title, the Matter with

Things. And the subtitle is our brains, our delusions, and the unmaking of the world. And I think we're unmaking the world in several respects. One is very familiar, which is the dispoliation, destruction, desecration of the natural world of forests, of seas and so forth, and the consequences that that will have for us. But another is a complete misunderstanding of the human being who is now seen as a kind of a machine, perhaps even not a very efficient machine, perhaps it would be better if we were hybridized with a machine. All of this speaks to me of something that is profoundly missing the meaning of a human being and a human life. And we seem to have, we seem to have lost our compass, we seem to have lost all bearings.

And part of this is, I think, because we are dominated by the way in which the left hemisphere sees the world. The left hemisphere, after all, helps you grab stuff, but it doesn't do anything else in terms of helping you understand it. The understanding of the world comes from the right hemisphere, but it's the left hemisphere that makes you rich, powerful for a while. And it always seems to take over just as a civilization goes into tailspin and declines.

So you see this with the acquisition of two great terraces and both the Greek and the Roman civilizations. And you see it again with the expansionism of the West in the last 152-hundred years since the Enlightenment. And what seems to happen is that partly because of the necessity, we're administering a huge realm, whether that be a military realm or a civil realm or a commercial realm, that requires the generation of rather rigid in human rules that can be applied in all situations, and therefore the takeover of essentially the bureaucratic mind.

It's not to oversimplify to say that what many of the troubles that we have now are because of the extraordinary expansion of the bureaucratic vision of the world in which the human is left out. And it's not course, I think, by a sinister cabal. You know, the paranoid idea that there's a group of people who are really wanting to control the rest of us. I mean, I can't rule it out. But I think much more likely, from my experience in life, I believe that there are more co-cups and there are conspiracies. And that in this

particular case, it's something that is bigger than all of us, including those members of government, administrative bodies, bureaucracies themselves. They are the victims of this same thing. Well, you're talking about it as a neurological proclivity in some sense, which is way deeper and more profound than any mere manifestation. Let me ask you a mythological question. I've been spending a lot of time trying to unpack the story of the Tower of Babel. And so, what happens after the catastrophe of Canaanabal in Genesis is you get two negative outcomes, let's say, to, let's say, sinful existence. And one would be the chaotic

flood that envelops Noah and the other then. And so that's like the catastrophe of the natural world going completely uncontrollable. The next is the catastrophe of the bureaucratic state. And so the Tower of Babel is an attempt to replace the heavenly hierarchy by a human creation. And the consequence of that is the destruction of the ability to communicate. And so what happens is that fundamental perceptual categories, perceptual and linguistic categories, become, what would you say, they become unstable as this top heavy administrative process develops. And it is an element of Luciferian presumption. It's the attempt to replace the context by the part. I think it is. And it's interesting that even Adorno, back in the 40s, was describing what he saw then

as the administered world, deep for valetity, he said, which is, and I don't want anyone to think that I'm just talking about bureaucracy, but bureaucracy as an image of a whole way of thinking, which is the mechanistic one, the reductionist one, the one that the algorithmic one, that there are rules and so on. And what this does is it privileges the theory over the reality. So that's what the power is.

The theory has been pointed out, experience has fallen in value. And instead, theories about how life should be have become the reality. And this is something that you notice in bureaucracies that actually, having ticked the box is more important than the event in the real world, which that was supposed to evaluate. So for example, in medicine, it's quite possible to do extremely good medicine,

but if it's not cataloged in a certain way and certain boxes weren't ticked, it doesn't count and it didn't happen. So the... Well, and I do think it is important, as you point out, it's extremely important to note that this is a deeper problem than merely that which is manifested by any of its manifestations.

Exactly. We don't want to blame the bureaucrats and the notion that there's an evil cabel, well, there is the world economic forum and they might count, but fundamentally we're looking at something that's much more profound and it is something like I do think it's something that's represented in Christianity, for example, of the, as the Luciferian presumptions of the untrammeled intellect. And it is associated with this idea of left hemisphere domination. It's hyper-systematization at the context of, at the cost of the whole.

Yes, I think that's right. And one thing that struck me very much in the last few years is that the myth of the master and his emissary on which the title of the first book or the earlier book is based is something that actually crops up all around the world. There is a wise ruler and there is an intemperate, hot-headed general or underling who wishes to, who actually is put out by the feeling that there is this more powerful being and actually wants to use up that being. Now, very common theme and one and but there are actually this precise myth of the being two beings, one of them that is willing to take under its

eges, the other and to allow it to work well, but that other doesn't want that. Like Satan in Milton's paradise last. Absolutely, absolutely. It is a very expression of resentment envy and the desire to destroy if it can't own something. And this seems to be really important element in the picture that we're looking at. Yeah, well, I think it's the crucial element. I think you're putting your finger on Milton's Lucifer is absolutely perfect. You know, I thought about Milton in relationship to the rise of totalitarian states. And so Milton was writing about Luciferian presumption before totalitarian states in the modern

sense really came into being. And one of the things that his poetic genius intuited was that our Luciferian intellectual presumptions would entice us into producing representational systems that would then attempt to replace the territory with the map and to privilege epistemology and to privilege this narrow rationality that you're describing above all and then also to insist upon that representation and that replacement. You know, you really saw this with the Soviets, right? Where the Soviets and the Maoists, they were so insistent that their representation

replaced reality that it became criminal to admit that you were suffering. It's like you can't be hungry, the state is perfect. Yes, oh yes. And then when you went to Venezuela, they made it illegal. In Venezuela, they made it illegal to list starvation as a cause of death by physicians. Oh, wow.

But what fascinates me there is that denial is one of the key features of the left hemisphere's take on the world. And it's so striking in medical cases that people who've had a right hemisphere stroke will claim that black is white. They will just deny that a completely obviously, uselessly paralyzed limb is fully under their control and they can move, and there isn't anything wrong at all. Well, so in keeping with your notion and Goldberg's notion of the right hemisphere, let's say as an anomaly detection system. So imagine this. You know what happens when you have a tooth pulled, hey?

It takes your tongue and it'll do this all by itself, like three months of exploratory work to map out that new crevice. And so you imagine that your left hemisphere, built, or there's a representation of that section of your mouth that's unbelievably highly detailed. And then you upset it, and now there's an anomaly detected by the right. It says, oh, oh, there's something here that, where the map no longer matches the territory. And then there's all this exploratory work that has to be done in order to map out the contours of the mouth.

And the mouth is really relevant because you know the mouth and the tongue are unbelievably thoroughly represented at a neurological level. mouth is really relevant because you know the mouth and the tongue are unbelievably thoroughly represented at a neurological level. And so like it takes six months or three months of constant busy work to re-familiarize yourself just with the inside of your mouth. So now let's say you have right hemisphere damage in the Pridal Lope and you lose half your body, but you don't notice. And I think the reason you don't notice is because the left has no choice but to impose its axiomatic presumptions when there's nothing indicating the lack and there's no pathway

forward to a new representation. I've seen people who, I had a cousin who got really ill and she, she was diabetic and she had a lot of immunological problems and she had to radically modify her whole life to deal with what she couldn't, couldn't eat. And she didn't do a very good job of it. And my parents and other people, her relatives were often upset with her, not so much my parents specifically, but many people who knew her were hurt and upset with her because they felt that she was denying her illness. But I thought, man, if something happens to you that's cataclysmic and it changes your

entire identity in an extraordinarily complex manner, it takes you, it can take you months to years to re-adapt, three months just to remap your tooth. And then the left will insist that the pre-therry is the only one that abides. Yeah. Well, first of all, it doesn't happen the other way around. So you can have just a cataclysmic event like your right arm is paralyzed. And you don't deny it at all. In fact, you're appropriately upset about it. So it is right to do with the left-hand mysterious way of understanding things.

And what is really fascinating is that when something is not there, and there are these descriptions of patients who simply won't recognize the existence of half of their body and fail to dress it or shave it, but they also, as pointed out by Tsegnelau, cannot imagine that there ever was a left half of their body. Right, right, right. The ever will be again in the future.

In other words, once it's gone from the left hemisphere's attention, it ceases to exist. So it's not even not there. I know, it's so strange. It's not as though this, it's not as though this, it's not as though this left-hemisphere tendency is simply to deny something. It simply doesn't believe that it exists.

So, and when you put that on the cultural situation at the moment, you can, it begins to cast some light on how people who can't be that stupid and who can't be that perverse. Nonetheless, argue that black is white, you know? Yeah, yeah, well, I've been trying to think I've tried to think about the phenomenology of neglect a lot, you know, because it's such a It is such a weird thing that people even lose the notion that what's absent? What is absent? So it's not even not there. It's a category we don't even can't even comprehend. But imagine, so you look straight ahead, and you move your hands to the side like this.

And what happens is, when your hands are in front of your eyes, they're pretty high resolution. And then when you move them this way, they get lower and lower resolution. And then they get black and white out here, although you can't tell that, but scientific investigations have shown that. And then about here, they just cease to exist. And so I'm kind of wondering if that sense of neglect, phenomenologically, is akin to having that, which is on our visual field behind us, now moved three quarters of the way around,

instead of halfway around. I'm not sure I'd say that. Okay, okay. I think there's a distinction between not being able to see something but knowing that it's there. And the right hemisphere doesn't engage in this kind of denial at all. It's perfectly aware that it can't see something or it, you know, but the left hemisphere, for the left hemisphere,

if it isn't in the map, as it were, then it doesn't exist. Right. It's not on the map, so it can't be real. And this is a nice deconstructionism in a nutshell, right? Is there... There's privileging of the epistemology. It's image throughout various movements in the history of ideas in our lifetime. And it's getting more and more extreme,

so that people's theory about what the world should be like is now the only reality. And if things don't conform to it, it's because some terrible people have been deliberately trying to frustrate it. Right, well, so, okay, so do you have some sense Sociologically why this has intensified as of late? I guess it a necessary consequence of our Scientific and technological prowess and the philosophy that's come along with that and do you think technology is accelerating this in some sense?

Well, I think our success in technology has led us to believe that we Understand all sorts of things that we probably understand less well than at any other time in human history. We may know more technically about them, but we don't really understand what's going on or what the meaning or value or purpose of these elements in the world is or are. And that's, I think that's part of it. The fact is that when you begin to see the world as meaningless and purely mechanistic, then you lose the sense of value and it's extremely distressing. So it causes an epidemic of anxiety and depression and that's something that something we can we can see the evidence of all around us and when people are anxious and depressed like that They must have certainties. They cling to false certainties and they'd rather cling to a certainty that's clearly wrong Then face the fact that they really don't they're disorientated. So anything that comes along that, you know, becomes the, the element and particularly important is something that offers control. Yes. Because anxiety is, it's out of control. It's terrifying. I feel quote unsafe. I mean,

how often do we hear that these days? Yeah, yeah enough, but we do. But the great thing there is we have to get control back, and that leads towards intolerance and effectively things that can't be talked about. And the foundations, as Hannah Arrent said, as Simon Vays said, of totalitarianism. Okay, so imagine, imagine I'll take a bit of a detour here talking to Sam Harris. And so Harris is a reductive rationalist and he believes in algorithmic processing. He doesn't leave in free will. And one of the things that's happened that's really interesting to Harris, and I'm saying this with all due respect, I really like Sam and he's really smart. And I think his orientation is fundamentally

good. But what's so interesting to see what's happened to him practically is that he's really abandoned his rational atheism in a phenomenological sense to pursue meditation. And he's developed this meditation app, which is his central focus now. And he's teaching people all over the world to meditate. And what I see happening is that he's taking a respite from the narrow confines of his reductive materialism in the world of the transcendent right hemisphere. And it's he wants to keep that non-linguistic, and that's sort of the Buddhist twist on that, because if it was propositionalized and transferred into something like a comprehensible religion, then his intellect would just criticize it out of existence.

But he finds respite and suck or in these practices that I think produce a right hemisphere revelation of harmony and totality and love and all of that. And then you might imagine that absent that, so absent that proper relationship between the left and the right, so you can't find respite from your narrow preoccupations and your doubt in a relationship with the right, you have to start to depend on ideological certainty as a buffer against the anxiety, because you're not properly having, you're not properly integrated in the part of the contextual understanding that would lead you to genuine meaning.

And that's where that emersment meaning is like an antidote to anxiety. Absent that you have to occupy a narrow and narrow certainty to keep yourself from, well, from panicking in some sense? Well, attention is so fragmented nowadays because it's valuable and is therefore being grabbed at by so many different sources all day long. That we no longer are able to pay the sort of sustained, vigilant, non-verbal, non-judgmental openness of attention, which is the very business and mindfulness to try and nourish. Right.

And I think that people are gravitating to this because in it, for the first time, they can begin to see a world that makes sense, because as I say, everything depends on the attention. If your attention is fragmented and is making presumptions about what you're seeing, that it's purely meaning there's purposes of mechanistic, then you are trapped into something. And I suppose that what he is trying to do there

is to say, this is a way in which we can open that up. And I think that's welcome. I suppose I always worry about people adopting spiritual practices as it were for utilitarian purposes, but sometimes it's better that they adopt them and then see what comes of that than that they don't adopt them at all. I think it's a mistake to, you know, for example, to think that the point of meditating is to lower your blood pressure and make your mind work faster so that you can be a better stockbroker. That is really not, that is to misunderstand this process that you're entering into.

And it's typically to do what the left hemisphere always does, which is to turn it into a commodity. Right, right, to instrumentalize it. Yes, it is. It instrumentalize it exactly. Yes, yes, yes. Well, in a lot of these bureaucratic enterprises, ideological enterprises are also characterized by the instrumentalization of everything.

And the problem with that, in some sense, is that that instrumentalization, which would be a left hemisphere function, is extremely useful if you have a narrow, goal-directed necessity in mind, and you need to undertake it efficiently and in a short period of time. But if the question of, well, what's all this for in the broader sense comes up, then that kind of interfering, that kind of attention interferes with the apprehension that would allow you to conceive of the broader context. And I think there's a couple of things that are really key and important

in what we've been discussing that people should perhaps contemplate in a deep sense. And one is your insistence, which dovetails, I would say, with my insistence, that there isn't, in some sense, anything more important than trying to understand the processes by which attention is directed. There's something, you know, the Egyptian God Horus, that I, that everyone knows, the falcon that was Horus, that is that attentional capacity that you describe. And they worshiped that as the redemptive God himself, like the eye of Horace. Horace was the God who redeemed the dead state and who fought off Seth and Seth eventually turns into Satan by the way via the

Coptics, but Seth is exactly that force that always threatens the bureaucratic state. It's the usurping force. And so the Egyptians knew surfing force. And so the Egyptians knew in their mythos that the attentive eye, the eye of the falcon, right? And that's the bird's eye view, was the antidote to totalitarian, to the totalitarian proclivity. And the Mesopotamians knew this too because they're God Marduk, who was the top God, and also the model for the proper emperor, had eyes all the way around his head. And say they knew that it wasn't intellect that was the antidote to the totalitarian state, not this narrow left hemisphere intellect, let's say. It was the capacity for attention that we seem to be focusing on when discussing right hemisphere function.

There's a couple of ways in which one can see the eye of Horus and one is in the benign way that you do and the other is as the sort of somewhat predatory all seeing eye, the disembodied eye. And one day I want to write about this because it's something an enormous number of Egyptian symbols including the disembembodied eye, come up in the artwork of patience with schizophrenia who don't know anything about Egyptology. Oh, I would love to talk about that. One day, I'm going to write a book about that. Well, the Egyptian, I'd like, well, good, that's something else we can talk about. You know, the Egyptians knew this too because they, for them, the optimal Pharaoh, so the principle of sovereignty wasn't the eye of Horus. It was the eye of Horus having revitalized Osiris, who was the spirit of the state.

And so Horus gives one of his eyes to Osiris. Osiris is dead father. So they're union and, and yeah, so, so they knew that that- It's a very complex thing the fact that it is. How do we get onto the I.O. horrors? Oh, well, we were talking about the potential redemptive value of attention. Potential. Oh, yes, my goodness. Exactly. And the fight of attention against intellectual, arrogant intellectual, totalitarian presumption. Yes, and I just wanted to say something very briefly about purpose that I, people meeting

who dare, he thinks that as it were, there's an engineering God who's sort of got it all, the day is stick vision, you know, that God wound up the universe and that it'd go, or can occasionally move into the clockwork. That's not what I mean at all. I mean that there is some purpose that is transcendent, that is sacred, and is not deterministic, which is a really important point to me. Anyway, I think the science points in that, well, I think the science points in that direction too, Ian. So that's another place where we can be really hard headed about this. I talk to Roger Penrose about this because Penrose does not believe that consciousness itself is reducible to an algorithm or computational. And he believes that I believe on grounds that

from the physics perspective are similar to the What would you say they come from the can say same conceptual universe as the ideas that you're propounding in relationship to the idea of consciousness at the forefront of let's say the revelation of possibility Something like that. So we can nobody can come up at let's say in criticism The the ideas that we're discussing you and I, by saying, well, the biology doesn't point in that direction and neither does the physics. It's like, no, the biology points very strongly in this direction, and so does the physics. I mean, it does.

I mean, the argument that there is no direction, no drives, no purpose in biology, but it's all simply accidental. I think there must be a few people left in the world who still in biology, but it's all simply accidental. I think there must be a few people left in the world who still believe that, but I think it's largely being discredited completely. It's very obvious, in fact, that biology is highly expressive of purpose, but I think even the inanimate universe is as well. And I adopt a rather unusual position, but perhaps you mustn't go there, because it will take us for a long time to discuss. But the inanimate and animate worlds are not totally distinct from one another.

Obviously, they are distinct in the sense that they are completely different and have different kinds of qualities, but they're not ultimately divided. They're not ultimately separate. There is a continuum is the best way of putting it. I'm going to talk to Ian a bit more for the Daily Wire, plus folks. For another half an hour or so about, I would say his intellectual biography and his personal pathway through the intellectual and philosophical world to the point pathway through the intellectual and philosophical world to the point where he's developed the ideas that we've been talking about.