Theories of Everything with Curt Jaimungal - Iain McGilchrist on the Existence, Being, the Limits of Reason and Language, and Schizophrenia

Episode Date: March 29, 2021

Iain McGilchrist's website: https://channelmcgilchrist.comMaster and His Emissary: https://www.amazon.com/The-Master-and-His-Emissary-audiobook/dp/B07ZJQ4QG7/ [not affiliate link]Patreon for conversations on Theories of Everything, Consciousness, Free Will, and God: https://patreon.com/curtjaimungal Help support conversations like this via PayPal: https://bit.ly/2EOR0M4 Twitter: https://twitter.com/TOEwithCurt iTunes: https://podcasts.apple.com/ca/podcast/better-left-unsaid-with-curt-jaimungal/id1521758802 Pandora: https://pdora.co/33b9lfP Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/4gL14b92xAErofYQA7bU4e Google Podcasts: https://play.google.com/music/listen?u=0#/ps/Id3k7k7mfzahfx2fjqmw3vufb44 Discord Invite Code (as of Mar 04 2021): dmGgQ2dRzS Subreddit r/TheoriesOfEverything: https://reddit.com/r/theoriesofeverythingSubscribe if you want more conversations on Theories of Everything, Consciousness, Free Will, God, and the mathematics / physics of each.* * *I'm producing an imminent documentary Better Left Unsaid http://betterleftunsaidfilm.com on the topic of "when does the left go too far?" Visit that site if you'd like to contribute to getting the film distributed (early-2021).

Alright, hello to all listeners, Kurt here. That silence is missed sales. Now, why? It's because you haven't met Shopify, at least until now. Now that's success. As sweet as a solved equation. Join me in trading that silence for success with Shopify. It's like some unified field theory of business.

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you're one of the best interviewers that I've come across. So thank you. I could talk to you all day. I wish we had time. thank you. I could talk to you all day. I wish we had time. Ian McGilchrist is a psychiatrist, a writer, and a former Oxford scholar who came into prominence after the publication of his book, Master and Its Emissary, which is a fantastic book, by the way. Links are in the description. This book is about the fundamental realities we experience that are different, complementary, yet incompatible and rooted in the bi-hemispheric structures of the brain. Each time I think I can't top a podcast, somehow the guest surprises me and Ian is no different. We touch on the problem of the modern

world with its overemphasis on rational mechanistic explanations while it simultaneously eschews meaning. We also talk about consciousness and how can one be a moral person if there are no objective truths. Are there objective truths? We also talk about schizophrenia and I get fairly personal in this interview and the reason is that I am driven by the screenwriting adage which says the more general the pain the less personal it is and the more personal the pain the more general it is. This means that ultimately people will relate more to someone speaking their experience earnestly and candidly rather than generic platitudes. Unfortunately, there were connectivity issues with Zoom as usual and some of his points were crushed, omitted, or overly compressed.

There's very little that can be done about this because, for whatever reason, the backup recording on Ian's end stopped. If you would like to contribute to watching or listening to more conversations like this, then please consider visiting patreon.com slash kurtjaimungle. Every dollar helps, not only financially, but motivationally. Thank you so much. Enjoy. I've heard about your book. I don't remember exactly where I heard about your book, Master and Its Emissary, and I believe I even came to watch the film version of it. Enjoy. a fascinating fascinating it's a it's a it's a frightening book at least i find it to be so i

find it to be unnerving and subversive we can talk about why i find it to be that later this channel is about theories of everything and usually that involves talking to physicists string theories included and so on and so but the way that i conceptualize the theory of everything is there's no english word for it. There's a German word. It's called Weltanschauung. That means a framework through which to interpret the world. It's more than a worldview.

A worldview would be not selling it properly. And I believe you have a Weltanschauung. Yes. Well, I don't know how you did it. I also have a Gesamttheorie. What's that? A theory of everything. Okay.

Well, this is a great time to give the audience a quick recapitulation of your main thesis of the master and its emissary. Yes. Effectively, people think that they noticed there was a difference between the two halves of the brain in the late 19th century. And then this took a step forward in the 1960s and 70s with the first split brain operations in California, in which people's brains were surgically severed in the middle. The connection between the two halves of the brain, the corpus callosum, was severed. And so it was possible to interrogate and to investigate one hemisphere at a time.

And a number of theories arose out of that and most of them are now considered wrong and correctly they're considered wrong. But the problem that we have two rather different hemispheres doesn't go away. Why if the brain gets its power from making connections should there be an enormous divide right down the middle of it. And this is not just for humans. This is for all animals that we've studied. They all have an asymmetrical neuronal network with some kind of division between the parts.

So I set about investigating that, and it occurred to me that what was the difference was the need to pay attention to the world in two different ways at once. And that's a very important point, because how we attend to things changes what we find, not just whether we're aware of them, but the quality of the awareness changes what it is that we find there. And it also changes us who are doing the finding. So attention is a moral act. It creates or destroys. Different ways. They will bring into being two different versions, if you like, of reality. And I then started investigating, 20, 30 years, what these differences were. And effectively, they aren't what people used to say. They used to think it was, you know, as you think of a machine, well, what does it do? Well, the

left hemisphere does language and reason and the right hemisphere does pictures and emotion. But this is not right since all these things are looked after by both hemispheres. But we should have asked a different question. If we've been thinking in terms of a living being instead of a machine, instead of asking what does it do, as though it's just a functional utility, we'd ask in what manner, how does it do it, and to what sort of end? Because things evolve in living beings in ways that answer to existential needs, to being able to carry on being. So, and I think there is an answer to that, that we do need in order to be able to pay attention

to little details of things, which is mainly things that we're going to use, like food or, you know, if you're a bird picking up a twig to build a nest or catching your prey, you need a certain kind of attention that doesn't really need to know the whole picture. It just needs to know the little tiny bit in the middle of the picture, which is very highly focused on. But if it's only paying that kind of attention, it will not survive because it will become prey to another creature very quickly. So it needs to have a different attention, which is a broad, open attention and a sustained attention. Now that's a very, you know, a very brief remark,

but on it hangs just about everything because these two ways of attending bring about two different Weltanschauungen. They bring about two different ways of looking at the world. In one, there are things that we can use, and they're essentially fragmented one from another. We can pick them up. They're isolated. We put them together to make things that we want, and it has no meaning, and it's not really connected to us,

but we can manipulate it, and that's the left hemisphere's picture. The left hemisphere enables us to manipulate the world. And in survival terms, that's obviously very important. But it doesn't help us understand the world at all. The right hemisphere, meantime, which doesn't usually have access to speech, it contributes to language, but it, for most of us, doesn't actually speak, is seeing a completely different world, one in which things are never entirely isolated or atomistic. They're interconnected. They are, in fact, everything is connected to everything else, ultimately.

And it's a field that is changing all the time. It's not just made up of things that sit in the field. It's the whole field of things that we see and perceive and we relate to it. We don't sort of see it as a thing and then relate to it. It comes into being through our relationship with it. So that built into it is the idea of relation. And so this is a very, very different world. And it sees things as special, unique. That's a thing we might come back to because people might say, but surely if they're unique,

then what's this about them being all interconnected? But it seems to me the whole business is to be able to maintain together uniqueness and individuation with togetherness without collapsing into fragmentation and atomism so it sees a world made up of unique individuals that are constantly changing it sees all the stuff that's implicit left hemisphere understand to stand only understands the most explicit stuff this is the world that we live in every day. Nowadays, nobody picks up the messages. And if you do, they become something quite different. Try explaining a joke. Try explaining a poem. Try explaining a piece of music. You can't because it is an experience in which all the important stuff is implicit. realm of what we seem to have completely abandoned, the idea of there being a sacred world, a divine element in the cosmos. These things don't make sense to the left hemisphere.

It seems obviously a mistake, but that's because it hasn't seen so much of the picture. Anyway, I'll leave it there and you can ask me some questions. You mentioned that the right hemisphere is involved in understanding and understanding meaning. Okay. What does meaning mean? Well, yes, a very good question. There are any word you like the left hemisphere has one idea of it and the right hemisphere, a different one. So to the left hemisphere, meaning is something that is, as you might expect, put together from bits. And it could be something we create by, you know, words are tokens, they're put together by systematic syntax, and they turn into a meaning the computer might be able to find

out of a combination of a dictionary and a book of grammar rules. But meaning is not that. When I say that there is meaning in certain experiences, like the, you know, my wife means everything to me, or this piece of music means so much, or, you know, just being able to walk in wilderness is so important and brings meaning to things. Now, what I want to stress is that nowadays when people allow that there could be meaning coming from certain experiences, they see that as an invention of ours. So we do this and we think, okay, now we've added some meaning, but that's not the image. That's the left hemisphere image of something that is added to something else mechanically. What I'm saying is we are in certain experiences made to be more receptive,

more aware of something that is there to be brought into being through the commerce between ourselves, our own consciousness, and whatever it is that we're conscious of. So it's a relational thing. Absolutely, at its core is relation, and at its core is consciousness. So in this way, I found that you're a physicist, that surprisingly, a lot of physicists have written to me since The Master and His Emissary was published, saying this is very important and interesting from our point of view. And in the book that I've just finished and want to publish in the next few months called The Matter with Things, I take three ways of looking at the world. One is neuroscience, one is philosophy,

and the third is physics. And I show that quite coherently, by pursuing each of these paths, we can come to a vision, a Weltanschauung, a picture of the world, which is very, very different from the one that we're taught and which the popular media and the vox pop of sort of scientists who do too much talking and not enough thinking as it would suggest something that impresses me to an extreme amount about your book at least the i've only i've only read the master and its emissary in that one it's quite a tome and you see someone you don't just see them compile chapters together you see them work through their life

in these pages. And I'm wondering, okay, how did you go about doing this? Because it seems like to me, there's a plethora of data. At first, you have to just accumulate and dispassionately view so that you don't bias it beforehand with your own worldview. And then you had to cohere somehow what you saw into a unified message. long was the researching process and then how long from once you started did you find enough of a through line that you're like i can legitimately start writing instead of just researching yes well it's easy to say about the gathering of the data that took about 20 years. But really the core of the idea was that I felt already that there were two kinds of ways we could think about the world,

two kinds of awareness of it, that we needed both and we used both. And as always, it's not either that you just collect data and then look at it and something happened, nor is it that you have an idea and you collect the data just to support it. It's like everything. It's a kind of an encounter, a rapprochement coming together of two things that sense each's existence, as two loving people understand, come to understand one another. And as indeed we understand the sacred and the divine, it's a coming together of something that speaks to us and we speak to it. And if you don't speak to it, you won't hear anything back from it. So, most people think that science is made out of just doing hundreds and thousands of tests and then following an entirely logical path. But, in fact, a lot of great scientists have pointed out that what happens is you have intuitions of a shape, of something that is, you know, you can't put your finger on it, but you know there's something here. And you start to look at the data, and you find that some of the data fit with it, but some of the data don't.

And that's really important and interesting, because then you say, okay, I was thinking of it like this. Now I see I need to accommodate this other thing. So for 20 years or 25 years, this is what I did. I saw things, and I changed what I thought. It evolved as all things evolve. The whole cosmos evolves. Evolution isn't just something that Darwin spotted in animals. Evolution is being. Being is becoming.

And this is a cosmos that is becoming, not one that is just static and being. So that process of creation was like all processes of creation. The sensing of something that at the moment you can't put your finger on. Like a painter doesn't know exactly where all the bits in the painting are going to go when he or she starts it. The poet doesn't know exactly, but he has certain, the shape of a few lines and images, and then it starts to grow from that. So science is not different or opposite to, different from or opposite to the creative arts. It is in fact, very similar to the creative arts. Is there a reason why God is associated with becoming rather than

being or rather than a combination of both becoming and being? Well, there are as many ideas of God as there are traditions in the world and probably as many as there are people. So ideas about God can be very different. But I have noted a very interesting strain in the mythologies and anthropologies of peoples around the world, from China and India, from the circumpolar regions, from the Native American peoples, and so on, that speak of a world that is becoming, not just made, but is constantly coming into being. And I think that ultimately, you can bring together the idea of a God that is eternally, and a God that is coming into being. But if I had to put my money on one or the other, it would be the coming into being.

It seems to me that that is utterly primary. And interestingly, people like Pauli and Heisenberg and Schrodinger and so forth in the 20th century thought similarly that becoming was more important than being. David Bohm said that as well. And I think Niels Bohr. Okay, this reminds me of another line from your book. And it could be you said the mind or the brain. I don't remember which one, which we can talk about.

What's the difference between the mind and the brain? But regardless, you said either the mind or the brain. It's not correct to think of it as the brain slash mind is grappling with the world, but instead it's bringing the world about. Okay. Now to some that conflates the objective world with the phenomenological one. So I'm wondering, can you explain what you mean when you say it brings the world about? Well, I may not be able to explain it very well in language because I think our language is not very well suited to describing reality. It's very well suited to describing everyday things like getting lunch and building

a wall. But when it comes to actually understanding what we're dealing with, we don't necessarily have the words for it. And, you know, Bohr himself said there is no way we can talk about physics eventually, except in the language of poetry. And he said the same thing is true of philosophy and of the talking about the divine or whatever it is. So, yes, what I've struggled with very much is not collapsing into one or other of two major errors of our age. One is to say, quite simply, it's all made up by us. So it's like we're sitting in a little cinema inside our heads, sitting on the sofa, little homunculus watching the scene.

But we have no contact with the world of anything else out there. And the other is that, you know, just the world is out there. And it's just a matter of going out measuring it, photographing it, and you've got it. So, you know, in one case, you've got very simplistic materialism. And in the other, you've got very simplistic idealism. And I don't think that either of these positions gets us very far. I think the important thing is to see these bridges because as I say, everything is actually connected and it's through the connection that they come into being. So let me say that again, because it's something that again, as a physicist,

you will understand, you probably know David Mermin, the physicist, he says, relations are prior to relata. Now I I was delighted when I heard that, because I have been working on that basis for most of my adult life. And that sounds nonsense to most people. How can relations exist before there are things that relate? But actually, the things only become what they are in the process of the relationship. Indeed, we only are what we are as human beings in the process of the many relationships we have with other people and with the world at large. And there's an image in the Vedic tradition, which I like very much, of Indra's world. And in it, at every place where the threads cross, there is a little jewel. And in this jewel are reflected all the other jewels and the whole of

the net. So it's like a hologram in a way. But what is fabulous about it is that they point out that the threads, the connections exist before any of the points that make a net. The things that make it a net are the crossings. That's what we see. But they just stand forward after the relations have done what they are. So I think that's a good image because I think we tend to focus on certain things that stand forward to us in the world immediately and neglect the background out of which they emerge

and from which they're never separate. And this is a very basic neuropsychological distinction between the left and right hemisphere, which you can demonstrate in the lab any day. The left hemisphere sees a single thing of interest that is foregrounded, and it ignores the rest, whereas the right hemisphere sees the whole scene with whatever it is embedded in it. Now, this reminds me of in one of your talks you were talking about, it was an offhand comment. You said that existence is predicated on resistance. And so what I'm wondering is, is this resistance akin to a relation? Yes, but it's not the same thing. But without some degree of resistance,

without some degree of opposition, nothing comes into being. Nothing can do anything. I mean, in a very simple way, motion is only made possible because of friction, which is the thing that itself brings motion to a standstill. So, I mean, I know that's a folk sort of idea, but I think it's helpful that actually

what comes into being is shaped. It's not just formless. There are forms that shape what comes into being. And we, our minds partake of those. And of course, any form, any shape is already a denial of something else. Because if it didn't deny or negate anything, it would be just a formless chaos, a bag of nothing, because it would be everything and everything would be nothing because there'd be no differentiation

of anything from anything else. Nothing would exist. Right. Or everything would have to exclude. Right, to dominate you have to exclude. You have to exclude, you have to limit, and that is the process of resistance. And you know, there are lots of ways in which you can think of this, but there's one that I like particularly if we're going to talk about consciousness, because I believe that our consciousness, your consciousness, my consciousness, is not entirely separate from other consciousnesses. But for the while, it is shaped by whatever form it is that our consciousness is instantiated in and William James who I think is one of the towering intellects of the last couple of hundred years said about this that it is like the breath passing over his vocal cords

that if there were no vocal cords the breath would say nothing it would mean nothing. But because there are vocal cords that restrict it, it becomes the voice that is him. So I think, you know, we can, you can allow that to germinate in your imagination. But I think the point is that things are not isolated by resistance, but actually strengthened by and come into being by resistance. Let me just mention another very interesting small insight. You know, there are these, forget they're called, but these ecodomes in which plants, some of them are very large, plants are grown in a protected environment under glass. Biosphere? Some of them are biospheres. That's it. Thank you. And people were puzzled to begin with that trees in these biospheres kept falling over before they had any maturity.

And it turned out that trees, in order to grow properly, need wind. They need wind to blow them and challenge them. And they produce a core of strength in the wood and in their roots, which enables them to thrive. There we are. It's just another image of the same thing. Let's talk about the title of your book, The Master and Its Emissary, which I believe is derived from the Nietzschean story. In the Nietzschean story, the emissary is contemptuous of the master. Now, that has me wondering, does the left hemisphere have some emotional reason that it thinks that it is primal or that it has an emotional reason to usurp the right brain? Because people normally associate emotion with the right and the left is just calculating.

Well, it's interesting because all those things that people used to say that they're just, you know, emotions in one hemisphere. That is entirely wrong. As I say, what is different is the way. So they each have emotions. They just have different ways of relating to the world. And interestingly, the emotion that most lateralizes is anger, and it lateralizes to the left hemisphere, not to the right. It's tempting and not perhaps entirely wrong, since after all, the brain is part of a person, to think of these two hemispheres as having personalities of a kind. I mean,

of course, one immediately invites the post that one's anthropomorphizing a computer or something. But of course, one's easily sort of skewing the picture by thinking of the brain as a computer because it's obviously part of a living person as well. Anyway, to cut a long story short, yes. When you isolate one hemisphere at a time, the left hemisphere is more confident, even when it's entirely wrong, and tends to increase its sense of conviction when it's presented with data that suggests that it might be wrong. Whereas the right hemisphere tends to be more open to,

well, it might be something different. Ramachandran, you know, very well-known neuroscientist, says that he calls it the devil's advocate, the right hemisphere, because, well, the left hemisphere is jumping to conclusions, which it does very quickly. The right hemisphere is going, yes, but on the one hand and on the other. the right hemisphere is going yes but on the one hand and on the other and you know another element that we miss very much in today's culture is that ability to nuance position opinions and see there's good and bad in many things that more and more of something you think is good is not necessarily good and so forth but to come back to the hemispheres it's also true that the left hemisphere sees less. I mean, it literally sees less in the sense of it attends to less and therefore takes in less of the world. And when

you see or understand less, you think you know it all. There's a phenomenon in psychology called the Dunning-Kruger effect, which basically is that when people are very bright, they think they don't know very much, but when they're stupid, they think they know everything. And so it's the people who are least intelligent who are most dogmatic about their views. And I think that you could say that the left hemisphere suffered from not really understanding, jumping to conclusions, and tending to be rather impatient and angry. So yes, I think you could say that about them. And what I've been amazed by is in how many cultures there is a story, like the master and his emissary, of two brothers or an emperor and his general or whatever it is,

these two powers, and one of them is clearly sort of superintendent of the other, but the other thinks that it should be the master, even though it doesn't really understand what it's doing. And it tries to resist and even to try to destroy that force. Now, that story exists in Iroquois legends. It exists in Chinese 8th century literature. You know, it's there all around the world. It's there in Inuit mythology. What is this that we're seeing?

I think it is an understanding that there is a part of us that is somehow unwilling to accept um that it knows very little and if only more people einstein actually said in a in a letter to the queen of belgium he said if more people understood how very little we know the world would be a much nicer place to live in. Speaking of stories, I'm reminded of one by Hildegard de Bingen. It's one of my favorite quotes. I'm not sure if you're aware of it, but it goes something like this. And pride germinated in the first angel as he could no longer comprehend the source of his own light. And so he spoke to himself, I want to be master and want none above me. And that one is powerful.

I think about that often. In one, so the first angel, Satan. And then two, through his own radiance, he couldn't comprehend the source of his own light. And then three, and so he spoke to himself. And so he spoke to himself. And that to me is, there's something about being overly self-conscious and just simply speaking to yourself and not talking to others. Yes.

That breeds, well, it reinforces arrogance, but it also wants you, there's something evil about it. Yes. I'm interested that you use that word. Most people these days are frightened of using it. you use that word most people these days are frightened of using it having spent a long time as a psychiatrist i've certainly seen sickness and i've seen unhappiness but i have also at times seen evil something that is not fueled by any need or anything except the desire to destroy and to hurt and i think that does exist in all cultures people have thought that he did and that it's probably not just confined to us so i mean the absolute locus classicus in the west is milton's paradise lost which is whose

theme is entirely this because of course course, it was Lucifer, the Lightbringer, as the name means, who became the chief of the devils. And in that sense, he was exactly like the emissary to the master. Because in the story of that, the reason the master appoints the emissary is that he's such a good emissary. The trouble is he's not a very good master. And this unequal dynamic is very important. And I think it's very difficult for people to understand these days, because we'd like to think in a rather left hemisphere way that things should be just symmetrical, that if there's A and B, they should be just symmetrical, but they may not be. One of them may be much more important and creative than the other. So I think these drives, if you like, that are in things are

different, not necessarily easily reconciled. And this has nothing to do with a particularly religious point of view. I'm sorry to say that I don't really, I mean, I certainly honor religions and spiritual traditions, but I don't myself feel that I have any particular connection to the divine. But I do, I would hate to lose the sense that there is something beyond the material that is very important and powerful and beautiful in this world. powerful, and beautiful in this world. Part of why your book is so fascinating is there are sentences embedded within paragraphs, which are already far-reaching implications. So there's a set of three sentences. I don't recall where.

Somewhere chapter seven, chapter eight. I wish I'd written them down, but I just wrote down a note. What you've done in these three sentences is connect nihilism, boredom, the platonic realm of timelessness. And then to me, that also connects Eastern mysticism and then the idea of the present moment. As for the exact connection, the relations between those, I'm still cogitating. I'm still trying to understand. But you said that in almost an offhand, with an offhand remark. And I was wondering, I don't know if you realize the profundity of those statements. I don't remember actually the words, but I could have said something like that. Definitely. I know I say, which I believe is correct, that the concept of boredom

and the word for boredom arose in the 18th century when we first began to feel that we really had control of everything and that the whole of life and the world around us was under human control. We could have it the way we wanted it. And it was then that people started to feel the sense of emptiness of, as you say, the beginnings of nihilism and so on. So I do think it's very interesting. And in the book that I've said an awful lot more about all this in the book I've just written called The Matter with Things, and the last part of the book, I look at the building blocks

of the cosmos. I mean, a daring thing or perhaps a stupid thing for somebody to do unless they think they somehow have an insight into physics, which I rely very much on colleagues and on guidance from physicists. But to talk about time and space, and I think these things are very, very very important and one of the things that people believe in the real world a lot of people who have a spiritual take think really time is an illusion really time is just a mistake it doesn't really exist but i with leeolin, who I very much admire, I'm going to be interviewing Lee.

Oh, well, for what it's worth, I'm an acolyte. I think he's very, very interesting. And I quote him a lot in my new book. But with him, I think I'm right in saying, I consider that time is absolutely primary, ontologically speaking. And there is a saying of Dogen, Chinese sage, that even God cannot exist without time. Now you can, I mean, that would be a fascinating conversation all on its own, but there is such a thing as time moving and developing and at the same time not running away.

An image I quite like is the idea of being in a stream and if you move with the stream you don't stop the stream moving, but as far as you are concerned the world is permanently there with you because you are moving with that stream. It's only if you're standing on the bank impatiently with a clipboard and a stopwatch watching things pass from outside that time appears to have this erosive quality. Instead, it's part of the experience of becoming, which is what it is to be a human becoming. becoming, which is what it is to be a human becoming. Speaking of streams and time, Heraclitus' river, this is mentioned quite a bit in your book. And I have a speculative question here.

Okay, I'm just going to read it because I don't have it in my working memory. So the right brain is the type that, when I say right brain, I mean hemisphere. So the right hemisphere is the type that would come up with the statement that there's unceasing change. It's constantly, constantly changing. And then the left is the one that needs to stand back and abstract and see some constancy. And then it made me think about time and then the arrow of physics. And I'm wondering if you had any thoughts on the nature of time or the nature of arrow of time in physics. or the nature of the arrow of time in physics? Well, I do, Kurt, but I don't know how good they are.

But I've thought about it an enormous amount. And physicists themselves are divided on the arrow of time. But I tend to be with those who say that without the arrow of time, nothing could mean or be anything at all. That all that we know of physics, even down to the most rarefied kind of contemporary physics, none of it could be without the existence of time. There can be no processes, in fact, without time. And I believe that the processes are prior to things,

which is partly why I entitled this book The Matter with Things. It's a pun on various levels, because I think there's a problem with our material obsession and there's a problem with our thinking the world is made up of things. So I think, you know, I don't take the block theory of time, you know, that it's really a static thing, but we just sort of move about in it. Nor do I take the view that it's something that most of the philosophers who try to approach time, with the single exception of Bergson, seem to me to have confused what they're talking about. And unfortunately, most people nowadays

don't read Bergson. And the reason they don't read Bergson is they've inherited a prejudice that somehow Bergson was wrong because he had a debate with Einstein in which it said he didn't understand Einstein. But which it's equally true that Einstein didn't understand Bergson. They were looking at two different things and they weren't necessarily at odds with one another. things and they weren't necessarily at odds with one another. Einstein was looking at a kind of time like a clock's time, whereas Bergson was looking at time as not something that can be measured in that way. And the distinction between a flow and a series is absolutely fundamental. And Bergson spent most of his life trying to help people see why this was so fundamental and when I saw it it was absolutely one of the three or four great eureka moments of my life I saw that a lot of the problems that we have philosophically speaking and

with our attitude to the world come from us having seen a seamless motion as a concatenation of an infinite number of slices. And that sounds like an almost technical difference, but in fact, it goes right to the core of the two versions of the world that come into being. Because the left hemisphere is always trying to stop time. It's always trying to freeze time. Because imagine, its idea is to pick something up or to catch something so it it wants to freeze it and catch it and get it and have it and hold it but you know as girter said as blake said when you try to freeze the fleeing

moment then you're lost because all is in this process of change and flow and it's respecting that and attuning yourself with it that is wise not trying to resist it or pretend it doesn't exist so those are some of my thoughts about time what is the other model then so i know you can't go through berkson's entire model and i'm assuming you're talking about Berkson as in Henry Berkson? Absolutely, yes. Okay, okay. All I know about Henry Berkson is that he's associated with Bohmian mechanics, and I need to investigate more about Berkson's theories. I've been told to, so that's on my list for those who are listening and are eager.

I'm working on it. What's the alternative to viewing time as an infinite slices, infinitesimal slices? Well, what he noticed, and it's very important, is that it only can be turned into slices retrospectively. And it's like a point on a line. When you draw a line, you don't draw a point infinitely small and then another one and so on. The line is there. In retrospect, you can find a point at which your pencil was at point A in the line. You can designate it. But actually, there wasn't a business of going from point A to point B or whatever. Similarly, if you move your arm, it is a single seamless motion.

And you can't say I move it to A to B to C to D, you don't. But in retrospect, the representation of motion can be dissected, but motion itself can't be dissected. Similarly, the representation of time can be dissected, but time itself can't be dissected. Now, why that is so important to me is that one of the most fundamental differences between the right hemisphere and the left is that the left hemisphere deals with representations. So the right hemisphere deals with things as they are present more. So it deals with them as they presence as heidegger would have said has they at the very moment that they are not just present because that sounds rather passive and mechanical

but as they presence they come into being for you they come into your your field of of being an awareness and the right the right hemisphere is therefore with that living moment, but the left hemisphere is categorizing things. You can only categorize them a small time after you experience them. So if you like, its world is a world of a schema, a representation, a map, which can only be made to make any sense when there's something that can be schematized, when there's something that can be mapped. So the difference between what is in the present moment and what is reflected on later and dissected is profound. And what he noticed was that in our thinking process, because we stop and talk and reflect on things, we think that we find

the world as our left hemisphere intellect presents it as a thing that's divided up into areas and so on, whereas actually the experience of it is not like that. And because we're so used to seeing it the left hemisphere way, most people wouldn't see what I'm talking about. They'd just say, well, I don't know what he means by that. I mean, how? It's almost like having to see a spiritual insight or sort of, you know, it's almost like something one would get from meditation

to be able to see this difference between, and once you see it, it's obvious, it's everywhere, that the world is this seamless flow, and it's quite different from a dead concatenation of tiny elements. You point out beautifully at one point that language is like money. And I believe it's because it only takes its value at the terminus, but you have to cash it in. So, for example, with cash, it's meaningless until only takes its value at the terminus, but you have to cash it in. So,

for example, with cash, it's meaningless until you buy something with it. And then this place in which it bottoms out is the body in some sense. Okay. Can you explain what you mean by that? Well, again, what I mean is that we can be led into thinking that the world is the world that we describe. The world is the world as we reflect on it and verbalize it. But because that's the bit that we're used to attending to, in fact, the right hemisphere can't speak for the vision that it sees. So it has to somehow convey to the right hemisphere can't speak for the vision that it sees. So it has to somehow convey to the left hemisphere how to use language to convey things that are not structured serially and analytically in the way that the left hemisphere prefers. This is why, as I mentioned earlier,

Bohr said, you can only talk about physics, you can only talk about the sacred by using poetry. And the whole point about poetry is that it allows one to see beyond the everyday meanings of words to a web of interconnected meanings that are hinted at. So in a good poem, a phrase has resonances that may set seven or eight different things going in your mind rather than the clinical and illusory antiseptic nature of the words taken out of context and put into a kind of manual of instruction. So words arise out of our bodies, they arise historically out of emotional responses. historically out of emotional responses. Animals in their own way have a kind of very primitive language. They make sounds that mean things and they express themselves in gesture and in words. And there's a very long-standing tradition

coming forth into the 20th century um that language evolved out of the generation of embodied meaning in sound in other words out of music and this is where although i very much admire steven pinker in many ways i do rather take issue with his notion that music is a sort of about as useful as pornography or cheesecake. Music is terrifically profound and is actually more profound than language, which is why we often say, well, it's beyond me to express and so forth. But it's not just the very rarefied things that are beyond language. The philosopher Brian McGee makes a very good point that from the most exalted things to the most humble things. So he says, for example, the towel that I've dropped on the bathroom floor, there is no language to describe the shades of color in it, the configuration of the folds,

the way in which it relates to everything else in the room. And yet my consciousness immediately takes all that in. I'm aware of it. I know it. But there's no way I can do it in language. And how can I say Leonardo's Supper? You know, how do you? So language, we fool ourselves when we think that language is where we live. Language is something we use to try and communicate a certain level of meaning about the

world, but not all of its meaning. So what if someone says we can, using language or some language, give a representation, a fairly accurate one of The Last Supper by taking a picture of it and then the zeros and ones that are the RGB values, you're not able to read and consciously comprehend it as a human being. But in some way, shape, or form, it's information. What if someone says that? Well, they've just deftly sidestepped the problem by saying that if we take all these ones and zeros, which if you look at them and I look at them,

there's no Last Supper there, we can put them into a machine which creates a simulacrum. We've developed a machine with instructions on make this come to be something like the Last Supper. So that's really, that's just a way of circumventing the point, which it has not been expressed in words. I mean, there are certain things you can try to express in words, but you immediately come down to a handful of cliched terms. As Nietzsche says, language makes the uncommon common, you know, because there's only so many words you can use to describe someone's appearance. You know, they're tall or short or thin or fat or black or white or whatever they are. And they have this colored hair and that colored eyes and so on.

But that doesn't get you any nearer to what your loved one looks like, you know? So language is a very useful tool, but that's all it is. And it comes about, we learn language, and I know you're going to be talking to Chomsky, and you may have noticed that I gently disagree with the, I dare to gently disagree, but I'm encouraged by the fact lots of other people do too, with the idea that it is something like an abstract system in the brain, like it could be in a computer waiting for stuff to be filled in. Because in fact, we develop language through the process of interrelationship

with other people in an embodied way which involves emotion and feeling and gesture and so on this is how children learn words and so language has its roots in emotion in the body it's not some abstract clinical thing that then gets closed in emotion in the body. It's not some abstract clinical thing that then gets closed in emotion in the body. It starts from those places. That's my point. Metaphor is language's cure for the ills entailed to it by language.

Explain that. That's another one of your beautiful... That's a quote. Okay, well, it's a beautiful quote. Yes, yes, yes. Well, it tries to compress the idea that what are the ills i'm referring to well the ills are as i say that something that is only a symbol or a representation of something has to the thing that it represents. And in this way, it's like money, that money can mean ultimately

that I can have lunch tomorrow with a friend or I can buy a car or whatever it is, but the money itself only has that quality when it's cashed back into life, which is a very complex thing. And language is rather like this. We can refer to things, but the experience that we refer to is no longer in the representation or the reference. It's implied by it that it isn't actually there. But that doesn't matter because we think metaphorically all the time and all language is metaphorical interestingly the language of science and philosophy is particularly heavily dependent on philosophy on metaphor a point made by lake off and johnson in their wonderful books metaphors

we live by and the philosophy in the flesh so um metaphor literally means a carrying across. And so if you imagine there is this sort of divide or gulf between what the word love means and the experience of love, metaphors can carry us across that linguistic divide. They can take us back to the experience of love. And so something as metaphorical as a Shakespeare play or a piece of music or whatever, and music is metaphorical. It uses metaphors based on bodily movements. So risings and fallings and resonances and all those things that are experienced in a bodily sense.

So these things are evoked in great art, in ritual, in religion, in narratives, in mythology and so forth. And they take us back across the divide from those sterile words to the thing that those words were trying but not able to evoke speaking of lakov and johnson you mentioned well it's in your book a couple quotes from them one is that reason doesn't separate us from the animals but instead puts us on a continuum with it because we're in well reason is predicated in embodiment. Now, I'm wondering if you can explain that, because reason to me has to do with logical inference and so on, like if-then statements.

How is an if-then statement related to my body per se? Well, I think the problem might be in thinking too literalistically about what your body is. body is. I mean, it might not be as it were in your thumb, I agree. But your body is everything that is you apart from, well, not apart from anything, really. I mean, we are, for the time on this earth, what our bodies make us. And animals that don't have language and don't apparently have any kind of schema of logic can solve logical puzzles. They can reason things. You know, crows and magpies can give correct answers to logical problems that an eight- or nine-year-old human being won't.

I mean, that's just one example. But, I mean, the more one reads about animals and even insects, the more one realizes that the concept that only we can act reasonably or rationally is wrong. only we can act reasonably or rationally is wrong. You've probably seen on YouTube, there is in fact a filmed episode of a crow solving an eight-step logical puzzle. And although it has solved each step of the puzzle in isolation before, it has never solved this particular sequence. And in a matter of about three minutes or five minutes,

it's not a very long clip, it has actually taken the eight steps that will allow it to secure the food that it's after. Now, I mean, that in itself, what do you say about that? You know, is it the crow's language? Is it its mathematics or what? Somehow from experience, and our bodies are the repositories of all our experience that is that is solving this problem and we don't solve half as many things as we think by thinking about them in fact nine-tenths of all the great decisions we make are done unconsciously we arrive at them unconsciously after thinking about other things, sleeping,

and then saying, I think I'll do that. And when we are not aware of things, as Julian Jaynes first did out to me anyway, in his 1976 book, The Origins of Consciousness and the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind, we don't really need consciousness for very much. We can weigh options, form judgments, solve puzzles, evaluate beauty, fall in love, and do many, many things without thinking about them. At some level, we are working on them. But what the left hemisphere privileges as thinking is just the left hemisphere's kind of thinking, which is explicit in language and foregrounding whatever is in the mind. But there's a whole, what we're conscious of is only 1% maximum of all that there is that's going on in our minds. So the idea that, you know, we have to be conscious and reason in order to think cleverly is wrong i mean my one of my favorite philosophers is a.n whitehead and um

in the book in fact on the structure of mathematics he said um i can't remember the exact phrase which is wonderful but he says says that conscious thought is like cavalry charges in battle. It's expensive, it's wasteful, it requires fresh horses and can only be done at unusual moments. So most of the time we're living perfectly rationally, perfectly intelligently, but without actually thinking about things explicitly. If we had different bodies, or if we grew up on a different planet, a different evolutionary chain or tree, would we have reasoned differently? Would we reason differently? Would our inferences be different? Or is logic universal? Well, how would I know? I mean, there are too many counterfactuals in that. You can't extrapolate from us to a being that we can only imagine.

And we don't know everything. In fact, we can only know what it is. Hava, let me rephrase it. Is logic or the way that we formulated logic and rationality and reason, which I'm conflating, and I know there's a difference between them but for the sake of this are they substrate dependent so the fact that we are human we came up with reason in this particular manner and that aliens might not share our reason they would come up with different inferences and it would be valid well i would i mean again i don't think anyone can be certain about such things, but my intuition would be that reason and logic are, if you like, substrate independent, that they're not just a human invention.

a human invention. But then I think that about a lot of things that are not so much inventions as discoveries. I mean, confusingly, the word invention originally meant to find something, but it now means to make it up. And so what I think we do in experience is come to an awareness and an understanding of things that are not entirely dependent on us, let me put it that way. And I think these things include essential values like good, goodness, and evil, and beauty, and things like that. So, and this is not unusual. Derek Parfit, who is a colleague at All Souls, and I say a colleague, I mean, in that we were both fellows at the same college. But I mean, he was a very great philosopher and an atheist, but he believed that goodness and beauty were ontological primaries, that they weren't things that were just valuations we put on things because we happen to like them or not like them. And I would be rather inclined to that position too. You also talked about, okay,

so inventiveness is the etymology of it is related to finding. And then also being originative. So being original has to do with the origin going back. Can you explain that? Because that was one part of your book. And your book is quite lengthy. And I wanted to finish this in time. I spent the past week or so just absorbing pretty much pure Ian. Pure Ian for this.

And I made notes where I wasn't able to comprehend fully. And I just had to move on. And that was one of them. So do you mind expounding on original thinking? Or coming up with some original object? And its relationship? We think of it as a new, but you also made an analogy that it's original. That is, it's going back. Yes. Okay. Again, I can't remember exactly what it was I said that you're referring to, but I think I can see what's being hinted at. referring to but I think I can see what's being hinted at. It's partly a distinction if I may say

that is in similar structure to that between fantasy and imagination. So fantasy is the putting together in a novel way of things that, elements that really we have experienced and are aware of, but we put them together. Rather, as I say, like those children's books where the pages are divided into three parts and you can turn the pages and create animals with the head of a seal and the body of a goat and all that sort of thing. So that is fantasy.

But imagination is looking at something that you think you know, and it seems entirely ordinary, and suddenly seeing it for the first time. This is something that Wordsworth wrote about a great deal, that it wasn't about striving for something outside of the ordinary. It was finding the extraordinary within the ordinary. Now when you talk about the origin or original thinking, many great revolutionaries, and I don't mean to say political revolutionaries especially, I mean people who brought about paradigm shifts in our thinking, did so by going back to a perception that had been lost sight of, sometimes a thousand years ago or more.

And they renovated something that had been lost from the culture. And that was what was revolutionary about it. So that I don't think that an original thinker is somebody who just makes it all up, because none of us do that. We are all the repositories of centuries, millennia of other people's experience that has gone into the making of us and into the ideas that we believe. And so to strive to be original is to cut yourself off from that and to cut yourself off from the rest of humanity saying look i did this on my own whereas

i think that is a you know a typical problem of our age that it's great that we're individuals don't get me wrong and i think that you know conformism is a problem but we are only also individuals because we also belong together in the society that both brings together and nourishes individual flourishing. Curiously, the coming together helps the being different. I sometimes talk about a couple in a relationship, that a good couple is one who become more themselves through the relationship, not less though, sacrifice their individuality, but it is actually realized and enriched and

brought forth in greater being by the relationship. Going back to where we started, that relationships create the things that are related as much as the other way around. Okay, here's what occurs to me when you say that. So let's say you have a great couple. Let's say you,

are you married? I was, but I'm not. Okay, so I'm married. So let's just you have a great couple. Let's say you, are you married? I was, but I'm not. Okay. So I'm married. So let's just take me as an example. Let's say me and my wife, I find that the longer I spend with her, the more I do feel authentic, but at the same time, and the more she feels authentic, but at the same time, I can imagine we're becoming closer and more and more akin to one another's personality. So then I wonder, is the most authentic self for each individual, as we come closer and closer to our core, is it the same, or extremely similar? Because otherwise, I can't make sense of this paradox of you becoming authentic as an individual, but at the same time becoming

closer to other people. Well, I think that the deep structure of reality is entirely paradoxical to the left hemisphere's take on it that things that are opposite are absolutely bound up with one another and it's the left hemisphere that wants things to be either the one thing or the other either to be separate or to be together but the right hemisphere sees it it doesn't to be either or. It has to be both and. And what's more, it has to be both either or and both and. I don't know if you've heard of paraconsistent logic with Graham Priest. I have, yes. Yes.

And I'm not sure I entirely understand it, but what I know of it, I rather like. Yeah. Okay. So explain to me, to the audience, how can something be and not be? Well, that's a big question. But when we say something is something, we may well mean when viewed in this way or in this context. Change the context, change the point of view, and they're equally something different.

So the trouble with the left hemisphere is that it decontextualizes. This is a very, very important difference. The right hemisphere alone understands that what a thing is, is what it is only because of the context in which it is. And that context doesn't take away from its being what it is, but contributes it to its being what it is. If you take the context away, you diminish it. Now, that's just a very obvious down-to-earth example

of what I'm really saying, that we form social contexts, we form loving contexts, and in those contexts, we are changed, we are altered. Everything we do, everything we do everything we think alters us which is why we need to be careful about how we think as i say attention is a moral act it changes us and it changes the world well that's one of the most frightening aspects of your book and okay you know we can get to that part later. A distinction that's important for the audience, was important and enlightening for me, was between Wissen and Kennen.

I believe they're German words about knowledge. Yes. Do you mind expounding? Yes. Or if you prefer Savoy and Connette in French. And the simple way of saying it is that Savoy, Wissen, is knowing that something is the case, whereas Cornet or Kennan is knowing something direct. So I know that Paris is the capital of France.

I know Paris because of the times I've spent there and what they've meant to me. they've meant to me and I know that um you know that the tree in my garden is of a certain species and a certain um height and so forth but I only know it because I walk past it stop under it and experience it so really there's a distinction between a kind of abstracted form of knowing data, knowing things about things, and the knowing of them rather than about them. I'll tell you one of the aspects of your book that I found unsettling, let's say. I've had this experience. I think I've talked about it before on another podcast,

perhaps at the Bernardo Kastrup, if you've heard of him. I have. Where it was the middle of the night i'd woken up from a dream and then as i was falling back to sleep in this hypnagogic state i heard my wife say a word i don't know what she said i don't know i don't i still don't know if she said it or didn't say, but it could have been. It doesn't actually matter. It was like yes or okay. And then I wasn't sure if she had actually said it. And I started to go into a spiral of extreme anxiety. And I'm not a person who's ever had a panic attack in my life. But then I started to feel like, am I going crazy?

Am I hearing voices? I don't want to hear voices. Oh, my gosh. And then I started to think, okay, don going crazy? Am I hearing voices? I don't wanna hear voices. Oh my gosh. And then I started to think, okay, don't hear a voice, don't hear a voice. But then I was thinking about Freudian repression. Am I now repressing a voice that will come back even harder later?

Oh no, so should I move toward a voice? And what if the voice tells me to kill myself? I'm not suicidal. I don't hate my life, not in the least. What if it tells me to harm someone else? And then I had to wake my wife up and tell her please help me because i'm i'm i'm i need help breathing and then so she'd come through the next day i had a similar panic attack and then two days later had half of one then it just went away

i even talked to my doctor about this she said you should go to psychotherapy to talk talk this out but admit it ameliorated on its own. Then a couple days ago, this is fresh, but this came from your book. This is why I love you. But then I curse you at the same time. There's plenty of talk in your book about schizophrenia. And each time that would come up, my heart would race. And I'm hearing myself in it, where I'm not the type of person that, as you know, if I'm talking to you, I'm not a fundamentalist materialist who dispenses with the divine and so on. In fact, I'm extremely open to it. And the eulogisms I get for this channel is that I'm extremely open and I'm actually trying

to understand, like I'm trying to understand your point of view. I'm trying to morph it with mine. I'm trying to understand other people's, but that's extremely difficult because it puts me on such unstable ground that I don't know what's real. And then I'm constantly questioning what's real. Is this real? Am I the only one that's real? Am I fake? Is, are people lying to me? And sometimes just when I say it out loud, it, it helps me through it.

Part of it is like, I'm keeping it in. I don't want to scare my spouse. i don't want to scare someone else but i also thought another part is that there's no one else that i hear talk about this much not no one in the public sphere and so i thought one time i heard peterson was schizophrenic it was it turns out to be false but that actually gave me gave me hope because i was like oh my gosh someone else is experiencing this and then i thought okay kurt why don't you talk about it first of all it's curative to myself second of all someone else might hear it and be like okay this is i'm not someone who's asinine and and so maybe someone else who's somewhat normal is going through this castrop said kurt don't worry this is

part of the spiritual journey when you question consciousness and you involve yourself in these subjects this will happen. But either way, what you said, which is that you view the world more and more mechanistically, that's the left brain. Now that's my entire life up until maybe a few years ago, because I'm trained as a physicist,

a scientist and that, and that you're extremely self-conscious speaking to yourself over and over and over. And I feel like that's what I do. And I've, I've eschewed music too for the past 12 years i haven't listened to music because i just find it to be a time waster and i'm wondering how much have i hurt myself by doing so and i wanted to say this to you because well at first i just wanted to hear your thoughts and then you can also relate it to the world at large. Yes.

Well, I think it's not unusual for people to have these experiences. And people who think a lot, ponder a lot, philosophize a lot, conceptualize a lot, do come to this crisis of doubt, if you like. And the first great exponent of this was Descartes. But for his age, he lived a remarkably ungrounded kind of existence. What I mean is that most people then still lived a more rooted, embodied existence. And he probably, by his personality as much as anything, was inclined to, I think he had a schizoid temperament actually.

is important is that there's a wonderful book which I often mention and will mention again by Louis Sass, a psychologist at Rutgers called Madness and Modernism and it's a fascinating work and it was completely another of these sort of eureka moments for me when I read it because he drew so many parallels between schizophrenia and modern culture, I mean, even including high culture. And he drew 25 or 30 parallels that are clear to anyone like him or me who has treated many patients with schizophrenia, between the way they encounter things, experience them, and aspects of modernity. And this comes together for me in the fact that the left hemisphere is in a way ungrounded. It has taken things, taken them out of context, taken them out of the lived experience of the

body, detached them from what they mean to us, and then said, I don't know what this means. Because, as it were, having taken it out, ripped it out of the context that would give it meaning, it no longer has any meaning. This induces a sort of what's real, what isn't real. The only people who live the sort of very strange lives that we do are likely to be tormented by this because they don't see consciousness as something in here and a reality that's just out there we come back to something we talked about a little earlier and could talk about a lot more which is how are these two things related co-creating it's neither that there's just an in here and an out there, nor that it's all

made up or it's, you know, so it's a connection. We are beings that can attend to the world. That is our essence. And as Louis Lavelle, 20th century

philosopher said, attention is love but love is a pure attention to the existence of whatever is other another person another thing and I think that that is how we relate to the world that it is not it's not alien to us at all nor are we alien to it it's not that we have to figure it out as if it were an odd thing that had dropped in our past. You know, Paley in his deism thought that gave the image that the universe was like a watch that some, sorry, Paley, an 18th century bishop, yes, yes, Thomas Paley, I think he was, said that, you know, imagine the world is like a watch. You walk on a heath, you find this watch.

You immediately know there must be a watchmaker. I mean, this thing didn't just happen. So he says the world is like this. And Dawkins says, and I think very fairly, that he is himself a Paleyist without God. says, and I think very fairly, that he is himself a paleist without God, because he, just like Paley, thinks there is a mechanism here that is working itself out. He just doesn't think it's God. He thinks it's genetics, that there is something, as it were, in a gene, the robot that controls, etc. These images of control are there in him, as they would be in the idea of a deistic God. What I mean by a deistic God is an engineering God, an engineer who is separate from creation, winds it up and

occasionally teeters with it. Whereas I believe whatever is divine is in the fabric of the world and is not known, not certain, even to whatever that divinity is. It's a process of true creation, sort of exhilaration of that, that carries the whole process of creation, of a creative cosmos. Anyway, I'm probably not making sense. It's so hard to convey these things briefly, but Schelling in the 18th century, who's one of my favorite philosophers,

was able to express this, not very easy German, I have to agree, but this is at the core of his perception that the inner and the outer, as is often said in many non-Western cultures, they are distinct, but they're not separate. And that's a very important point, that it comes back again to the business of not being lost in um a context you're distinct from another person but you're not separate from them or sort of divided from them you're connected to them but you're still distinct and i sort of think of the world as being seamless, but you can go seamlessly from red to green without even knowing that this has happened. In a three or four minute film, the colour can change.

Nobody knows is the colour changing, but it's changed completely. So it's possible to move along a continuum and the spectrum of colours is an example of something that is not a concatenation. It's not lots of little separate colors. It is simply a spectrum that can be moved along in such a way that you can go from something very distinct to something else distinct. But they're never been separate. They've never been cut off from one another.

They're part of the same whole. And I think that a number of physicists that I've read in my attempts to understand modern, well, quantum field theory actually is the theory that I find most congenial to my philosophy and seems to be being espoused by a lot of physicists. But in that case, again, things can be distinct, but not ultimately separate. They belong to fields which can be more concentrated or collapse in certain ways

at certain times in certain places. Actually, speaking of quantum field theory, on these pages that I have notes for you at the back because i thought that we were scheduled for two hours earlier by accident so i was just doing some quantum field problems just to get myself more familiar with it because i've i've been out of the game for a little while okay why is it that you mentioned one day you'll be able to explain it to me what why is it that non-rhythmic music is salutary compared to rhythmic music? See, let me explain my reasoning for this. Well, first of all, you mentioned it in the book.

But second, I told you, I don't listen to music. I don't get pleasure from music. And I haven't done so for maybe 12 or even 14 years. I play music. Like I can play this and sing. I like to do that. I like to listen to Eminem occasionally. But I don't like to listen to music.

And for me, it's because I'm so in my head. I'm such a child of the enlightenment, let's say, that I see that as a waste of time. And I just need to be thinking. And it came from when I was around 18 and I was on a train and the train ride passed in like two minutes when it was a 20 minute train ride. And it was because I was listening to music and I stopped and thought, that's not good because I could have been thinking, could have been solving problems. So then I'm like, from this day forward on the train, you just think, think, think, think,

think. It reminds me of the first angel, then he spoke to himself. And I feel like I have inadvertently been harming myself. And now what I'm doing is a slow process of undoing. And your book is helping, but it's also unnerving. Thank you. Either way, you said that, okay, listen, music these days is rhythmic. And that's not the best kind for embodiment. Non-rhythmic music is. So can you explain don't i don't think i said that i i really don't um i haven't got anything against

rhythmic music i just said that the most powerful expressive elements in music include melody and harmony and that rhythm is only a part of music and it is the only part that the left hemisphere really understands especially very basic pounding beats that are repetitive and mechanical because even complex beats with cross rhythms and syncopations are better understood by the right hemisphere but melody and harmony are really very much dependent, for most people, non-professional musicians, dependent on the right hemisphere. And all I was really saying is that in our culture,

I was just pointing to the 101 ways in which we can see what I consider to be the dire impact of not using or paying attention to what our right hemispheres will still tell us if we just listen to what they're enabling us to understand, experience and live in. One of those 101 things is the way in which music has changed, interestingly, to be largely a matter of rhythm and that

melodies and harmonies are not as subtle as they used to be and are in many kinds of music. But there's nothing wrong with rhythm in itself, although there is something very important about variation in rhythm. So certainly in playing, if you're a great pianist, Certainly in playing, if you're a great pianist, you wouldn't play something in the way that a computer would play the notes with exact same lengths and exact same intervals. There's something called rubato, which you may know of, which is the business of very slight variations from bar to bar in the movement of the music.

bar in the movement of the music. And this is a parallel to the fact that living rhythms are always variable. They're not mechanical. And I was absolutely amazed when I was on the obstetrics woods when I was a doctor in training. and it just begun, that attachment, to learn that when the fetus, the heartbeat, the fetal heartbeat is entirely rhythmical, the baby is an emergency. The baby is in danger of dying. And a healthy fetus has a variable heartbeat. Now, I mean, that's an image to me of many other things that, you know, that there is a beauty in the slight hesitances in dance, in music.

It's very hard to put your finger on what they are. And they're within an overall frame of irregularity. So there's irregularities within the overarching frame of irregularity so there's irregularities within the overarching frame of regularity and this comes to something very very deep for me which is that we need togetherness but we also need distinctness we need individuality, but we need the whole. But the important thing is, we should be under the embrace of the force for togetherness, not the force for separation. So, in brief, we need the force for division and we need the force for union. We need both. Both need to be present. We need to be unified, not divided.

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and no planned obsolescence. It's also extremely affordable. The Henson razor works with the standard dual edge blades that give you that old school shave with the benefits of this new school tech. It's time to say no to subscriptions and yes to a razor that'll last you a lifetime. Visit hensonshaving.com slash everything. If you use that code, you'll get two years worth of blades for free. Just make sure to add them to the cart. Plus 100 free blades when you head to h-e-n-s-o-n-s-h-A-V-I-N-G dot com slash everything and use the code everything. This reminds me of longing versus want. In your book, you mentioned longing is a unification, a stretching out to, but want is a desire which puts you separate from. Yes.

Is there a connection or is that just in my head? No, I'm delighted that you made that connection i think it's it's exactly right from from my point of view and in fact there is um if people are interested if you if you google mcgilchrist longing and wanting i think it's called i gave an hour-long talk um in london about four years ago on the distinction between longing and wanting. And nowadays, it seems to me that we have lost the sense of a longing for something to which we already feel an attraction and which is calling to us

and which we are sort of rather blind way trying to reach towards, but constant reaching out to. Instead, we have once you know i want that that you get it and put it in your little bag of stuff what do you want in a relationship you even say that well i think these words all have their meaning and they all have their value and they they all have their place but but no i think there was a very i mean it's fascinating the word long literally comes from an Anglo-Saxon root langian which means to stretch out something that is gone from you but which you are still connected you want to reconnect with in fact it is this

systole and diastole if you like which are from the heartbeat you know the systole followed by the diastole the lup followed by the tup, there's this kind of contraction and release, is the way in which movement happens in nature by alternations of that kind. To do something that is just a kind of addition of the two in some neutral way or perhaps a compromise, a 50-50, it produces something completely new. This is the point. It is the creation, the creativity of your life, of this world, of the cosmos, depends on our ability to see that opposites need to be held together. The world is not as simple as we think it is. Things that we think

are good also conceal something that is bad. The things that we think are bad also conceal something that is good. And we need to think are bad also conceal something that is good. And we need to finesse these things in order to find our way in the world. What I mean by the opposition bringing something new into being is the tension of a string, of a guitar or a violin.

It's important for that that it's pulled in two directions at once. In fact, if it weren't pulled in two directions at once, it wouldn't work it weren't pulled in two directions at once, it wouldn't work. You might say, well, that's a waste of energy. Why pull things in two directions at once? Why not come to an agreement and a compromise

and just stop pulling? Well, then you don't have a string anymore. You don't have a violin anymore. You don't have any music anymore. Something comes out of that conflict, which is very important. Sorry. To be fair, in string theory, you can't have't have closed loop strings and you just give them attention it's just like a variable you

oh i i really wasn't um pretending to talk about string theory i don't really don't understand i know okay when you say you're like we need to we're separate but we're also together and this impulse to be separated should be there. And the impulse to be together should be there. We should be guided by the together one more so than the separate one. That's the individuality. Ultimately. Okay.

That to me reminds me. I'm not meaning this, by the way, can I just say, I'm not meaning this principally or only to do with social relations. I'm thinking of it as a metaphysical structural feature of reality, that it has this structure of the need for difference and togetherness, not just we as human beings have it. Okay, well, now you gave me another idea. So let's say I'm walking along the beach. Yeah. And I'm looking at the waves and the sand and the soul. Am I

supposed to feel or is it good for me to feel connected to it and feel as if the waves are alive in some manner? And I'm speaking to the rocks, because in the dead end left hemispheric view, I see them or one would see them as impressions, picturesque impressions upon my slate of sense, sense data pressed upon me. But then I know that that's associated with schizophrenic ideation in its extreme. Okay. But then in the other extreme, I can see someone going and talking to the rocks and holding them up and kissing them as that its own form of psychosis, but I'm not sure.

I don't know if that's actually associated with schizophrenic thought. Either way, I want to hear. So which one should I do? Should I stand back passively of you, or should I treat it somehow, emulate it in my brain as this is living, be Kurt, be in this world as if you're living, engaging with it. But these are not just plastic objects of wood. They're also not beings, let's say, but there's something to them. There's some life that they have. So how does one dance that web? Because I can see inane craziness on both ends of the spectrum.

But does it have to be one or the other in keeping with what I've been saying? Isn't it an error to go to one extreme of either of these? Not because the reality exists in a compromise, but because there is a wholly different position that is only found when you reconcile the two opposites. That is my point. And it's imaged in that taut string. But I think it's a very unusual view we have of the world that we are separate from it and it is dead and that any life in it is something we attribute to it. I argue, and it's too long an argument to do now,

I even argue that inanimacy is, if you like, the ultimate limit case of animacy. Not that animacy is some weird thing that popped into the cosmos. I think animacy is of the essence of a conscious universe in different ways, in different degrees. Animacy as in animosity or the Jungian animus?

No, no, as in things being animate. Oh, animate. Obviously, yes. But we don't have to go to that, well, not an extreme, but to that length, if you like. I wouldn't have time to justify that position, but I think I do in my book. But in any case, most people at most times in the world have not failed to make a proper

scientific assessment and come up with a theory that things around them are alive. They know they're alive because they actually experienced that. And we have told ourselves that we can't be experiencing that because it's just not wrong, isn't it? I'm in an age of science. But what do we know about that, actually? Science is not dealing with that question. Science is not able to talk about whether there is something that has consciousness or animacy in the world outside of our own heads.

So I don't think that one needs to either tell oneself one's wrong when one feels a sense of connectedness or think that being properly connected means you're being being swallowed up and you don't you know love those waves so much that you go into a rough sea and get drowned so you need to keep keep walking this balance and it's all about the balance or harmony harmony was the greek word and it's a word that we've lost because, I mean, our world has so little harmony in it. Things that we call harmony are actually dictated fiats

that things must be like this. But no, true harmony is a kind of thing that has to evolve between things being fully themselves and not pretending to be something they're not. So, yeah, I think it is a very very important element i wrote also an article for the journal of consciousness studies on the question of the self because i think there's a confusion you know that the holy person or the wise person has no self

and i think i know what is meant i think i can see very clearly what is meant not a narrow egotistic selfish um fragmentary atomistic self of course but at the same time by growing in richness and thinking and meditating and creating and just being, you are growing a soul, you are growing a person, you are growing, fulfilling an individual element of the cosmos that will never be there again. And surely to say that that's all valueless and the whole business of existence is to try and deny that and get as far away from it as possible, seems to me a little bit negative. Because even the Buddha, you know, had to sleep, had to eat, had to go to the lavatory. And if somebody shot the Buddha, he didn't go, well, he didn't shoot me because he did. You know, every everybody has their individual self, but there's a very big difference between what Jung called the self, which is a sort of mature thing that you grow into, and the spiritual philosophies of most cultures.

The renouncing of power, because power is very much the left hemisphere's major tool. It exists in order to make us powerful, to get things, to grab things, to get prey, to build things, to make things, and thinks that we will become happier or better in doing so, although all the evidence is very clear. We don't become happier or morally better people by doing it. What you say just makes me think of, there's quite a few thoughts. I'll splay out two of them. One is, Freud said, or at least Freud surmised that his id, ego, and so on would have some morphological equivalent in the brain if neuroscience would just progress. Now, it sounds like what you're saying is to some degree that's true,

because the left hemisphere is associated with the ego. Is that correct? I don't really want to say yes to that or no to it, because in some senses, yes, in some senses yes in some senses no it it depends too much what you mean by ego and some aspects of the superego might be better identified with the frontal lobes rather than with either right or left hemisphere and certainly it wouldn't be right to say the right hemisphere is the id the right hemisphere is the morally self-abnegating part of us, the part that enables us to be good friends, parents, and citizens. It is the bit that David Hecht at UCL in London says quite straightforwardly, and I think I'd sign up to it largely, that the right hemisphere is moral in its attitude, and the left is basically immoral. It is there for what it can get.

Is the left hemisphere immoral or amoral? Immoral. In other words, it has a morality. And it has really no sense of, well, let me just go back on that. In the book, this new book, I argue that the left-handers can't really understand morality. It hasn't any really a sense of morality. So it substitutes for morality calculation. It says if I weigh up the consequences of this act and the consequences of that act, I can find out which is the morally right act. That sounds very good. But there are many circumstances in life in which it would be profoundly immoral even to carry out a calculus of that kind. And it's in normal circumstances, apart from one or two philosophers,

it's mainly people who have right hemisphere damage or frontal lobe damage, right hemisphere damage or frontal lobe damage or are very severely autistic who think in that way, most of us have a sense that morality is something more complex than that and that we don't do. It would be quite wrong to make decisions based on an entirely dispassionate mathematical. In fact, mathematical in fact how would you attach the values i mean would a would the value gained by many sadistic um pedophiles around the world outweigh in the pleasure given to thousands of people the suffering of one innocent child that is tortured for fun well if you have to do a sum on that then you something wrong with your moral sense. And I know that's an extreme case, but I'm afraid it's a rather important indicator of something that is wrong with utilitarianism on its own. Utilitarianism has

a place sometimes. But again, it's this problem that the left hemisphere thinks that whatever it is it does is the only thing and the best thing whereas it's actually not even core to morality utilitarianism i believe in a kind of objective moral that i'm so sorry do you believe in objective morals well it depends what you mean by objective i I don't believe that they're just subjective in the sense that they're made up by us, but I don't believe they're objective in the sense that a machine would be able to calculate it. I mean, when I say objective, I mean that there's something at the structure of reality, at the fundament, at the abutment that has morals, and that it's not just our own.

No, no, thank you for clarifying. No, definitely. No, I think the cosmos is moral, which isn't to say that it's all good. Of course, because morality includes the whole spectrum. But I don't think morality is an element that we've somehow, we've come to, is simply an expression of things we like and things we don't like. I think it is a very profound aspect of the business of being alive, as is the appeal of beauty and of complexity, of mathematics, of music, of landscape. All these things embody something that unless we are, you know, something that unless we're, you know, crippled, cribbed and confined by the left hemisphere's take on things, obviously speak to us about something more important than what the left hemisphere alone can tell us. There's nothing wrong, you know, it's not that we all be better if we had a left hemisphere stroke, of course not. As I often say, it's my second favourite

hemisphere, it's terribly important. But it's, you know, it got to be under the supervision of the right. It's a very, very good servant. It carries out very useful tasks, but it hasn't got the sight to see which are the useful tasks. So it must be under the aegis, the protection, the supervision of the right hemisphere. It's a bad master, but a very good servant. In Christianity, there's a heavy, heavy emphasis on both love and truth. And it's not just speak the truth, no matter what, it's speak, speak the truth guided by love. So the truth has to serve love. I'm wondering, is that mirrored by the bi-hemispheric structure? Is that one right brain is the love in this sense,

and then the left is the one that's associated with truth, at least objectively can be associated with some form of objective truth? Or am I just going off on a limb? Am I seeing connections? I think you're going an awful lot further than i would go i i don't think i would say any of that um but i think it's perfectly legitimate to speculate when you're thinking about the richness of an idea or an image or a metaphor about what it can illuminate so i don't think there's anything wrong with having an idea and thinking, well, maybe not. But I think, honestly, I'd say maybe not to that one. What do you make of Daniel Dennett's explaining consciousness or consciousness explained? Well, I think it's a perfect expression, a very intelligent expression of a certain kind of take on the world, a Weltanschauung which is,

to use the term that you invoked at the beginning of our talk, that is I think rather sadly impoverished. And it's not a thing that can easily be solved by argument. These are things that you come to through experience. In other words, they involve canon as well as Wissen. And they come out of the fruit of many kinds of attention to the world, not just the claim that comes from arguing in a seminar room. And so not that there's anything wrong with doing that, but again, it's a supplementary aspect of what philosophy is. Philosophy has got a little bit lost, I think, as a sort of technical department in the university, somewhat like engineering. And interestingly, Dan Dennett says that if he hadn't been a philosopher, he'd probably been an engineer, which seems to be intuitively right. But it also points to perhaps a certain, I don't know,

unwillingness to accept that things might be beyond what he knows and more complex. It's interesting that engineers, for example, have a very high, I did a study on this at the Morton Hospital, which I've never actually got around to publishing, but it was very clear that I didn't expect the results, that people who became mentally ill at university with a major mental illness, those who became manic depressive, i.e. had an emotional disturbance as a primary element in their psychosis, were not principally philosophers or engineers. But those with schizophrenia were massively more likely to have been studying engineering or philosophy than any other subject. and it's also come to light that terrorists who are fundamentalists have engineers are more represented amongst them than amongst other people I you know of course I'm not trying to say that that all engineers are like this but I'm just pointing to a sort of certain kind of, I don't know.

The predilection for engineer-like thinking is what is also associated with... Well, it's a predilection for categorical thinking and for a lack of willingness to accept that things are not certain and maybe much more complex than when there's given them credit for being. Let's see. much more complex than when there's given them credit for being let's see i wanted i'm trying to find this one question about well okay before i find that question i'm curious how is it that you were able to pin down the insights about the right brain by using your left brain because this is a book written in language and so on so did you engage in meditative exercises did you speak

to spiritual gurus how did you do it or did you just read dispassionately the literature? And then you said, okay, this is what the right brain does. Let me write that down. Well, I think it was very like my idea of the right brain guiding and the left hemisphere doing much of the sort of procedural work. So it's often been pointed out to me that without a highly active left hemisphere, I couldn't possibly have written that book with its attention to expressing extremely difficult things that are not intuitively the things that most people nowadays in the West think in language and arguing for them and adducing an enormous amount of scientific evidence um so i think the left hemisphere as i say was a valuable servant to me but what i hope is that i was guided by a sense of a something that i was i was aware of but not fully aware of and wanted to explore more and to bring into, more into the light, really, never fully into the light, but a bit further into the light,

so that it could be better seen. I think this is the process. It's more like seeing a gestalt, seeing a form, than it is culminating an argument in which step A leads to B through to Z, and then you switch off and say, right, proved. That's never going to be a success in philosophy, in my view, I say rather controversially, because the world is not like that. And Plato right at the start thought that we shouldn't even write philosophy down, that it could only be done by people, living people, talking to one another for a long period and getting to know one another, and that then an intuition would come about, like a spark would be kindled. Now that's right at the founding of modern Western philosophy, but we've got a very long way from it. Yes, I think the image that I like, and it's occurred to me when I was writing my very

first book in my twenties, was that what I was trying to say was that we have understandings of things, specifically works of literature or of music or art or whatever they are not by a linear chain of discovery but by circling them and seeing them from different aspects and that it's more like a picture that gradually comes into focus or even quite suddenly at some point comes into focus so at the time you're looking at it it doesn seem coherent. But then gradually you see bit comes and you see, I see you have an aha moment, and things begin to fall into place. And then other things refuse to fall into the picture that you've got, and they help guide the next stage so that a new Gestalt, a better one replaces. And indeed, in philosophy, what we're doing is always just replacing one gestalt with another. What I mean by a gestalt is a form which is a whole, which is more than

any of the parts. I know you know this, but I'm just saying it in case any listener doesn't define the term familiar, but it's the whole idea that there is a whole of something that can't be accessed fully by simply dividing it up into its parts. Something essential to it is loss. I have a quote here. It's you quoting Sass from Schizophrenic Mind. And I'm not going to, I'm just going to paraphrase it because it's a quite a long paragraph. It says that when you engage in the world in a passive disengaged, self-conscious, stare at the world in an objective manner it becomes bizarre alien frightening and that's akin to the schizophrenic mind however yes the process of mindful that mindfulness meditation seems shockingly similar where you're supposed to

stand back and you simply observe no judgment don't engage it's all just being fed to you yes but yet on the one hand mindfulness meditation is seen as salutary but then obviously schizophrenia is not it's unadaptive so how do you yes balance those two or solve that antinomy well in terms of hemisphere the hemisphere paradigm one is what happens when you allow the left hemisphere only to be working this is the standing back so that your body is not involved so that your feeling self is not involved so that you have deliberately cut off all the contacts from something and then see it as something utterly alien whereas the mindfulness uh is and in interestingly and perhaps not essentially but interestingly the science of mindfulness shows that it does rely more heavily on right hemisphere um activations than left and indeed on changes

practitioners in the structure of the right hemisphere but i don't think that's the important point i think what is going on in mindfulness is that you are adopting the the position of the right hemisphere towards the world which is in fact although you might think it is similar it is the exact opposite because where as the one It is the exact opposite because where as the one is, as it were, isolated and detached, the other is standing back enough to allow the self not to crowd everything out. Where the one is actually thinking about things all the time, the other is saying, no, I'm not going to think at all. I'm just going to be there with it.

no, I'm not going to think at all. I'm just going to be there with it. Now, in the first case, in the sort of frightening, alienating way, which interestingly, Schreber describes the 19th century judge who became schizophrenic in his middle years and wrote a wonderful journal of his mental illness. Schreber describes exactly this that the world becomes alien as soon as you start reflecting on it so much that you you drop all the connection with it now in mindfulness you are not absent from the world it's about being fully present in the world the the idea is that in normal life you're not fully present you're not actually there with the world at all because your thoughts your ideas judgments, your self is crowding it all out. So, in fact, they're quite opposite in their tendency.

I sometimes talk about something called necessary distance. And what I mean by that is exactly that kind of distance that enables you to see something properly as a whole, not to swamp it. But it doesn't mean being so far detached from it that you can't see it or understand it or relate to it. That would be the opposite of necessary distance. That would be toxic distance. And there is such a thing as toxic fusion in which you can be so close to, you can't see it, make it out or accept its being at all. Why is it that you associate it in a metaphor, the rising up and floating with the left hemisphere and then being on the ground with the right hemisphere?

Because to me, I would think that the left one is the one that's on the ground manipulating and the left, sorry, and the right hemisphere is the one that can see the whole picture. And the right hemisphere is the one that can see the whole picture. Yes. Well, you very, I think, entirely rightly put your finger on the way in which any one metaphor breaks down in these circumstances. And you have to use a whole variety of them. What I was really thinking of was that it was like the difference between someone who is actually living a life on the ground and somebody who is doing a sort of aerial photograph of it in order to map it. That, as it were, all that is there on the ground is present to the person who's experiencing it headlong in the business of life, who actually sees the garden, sees their children, hears the wind and sees the stars, and the mind that is already dissecting, analysing and remote.

So you're quite right that the left hemisphere, this is another way of putting a finger on what I was trying to say, is there is a kind of distancing which can be remote, but there is a kind of distancing which can be remote but there's a kind of distancing which enables you to see the whole picture just as the kind of being fixed on the here and now which is generous and wise and allows you to understand it and they're being fixed on the here and now which is just about acquisition and accumulation of power and influence. So they each contribute to both, as you would expect. Each has a version of closeness.

Each has a version of distance. As I keep saying, every concept you care to name has a left hemisphere take and a right hemisphere take. So it's not, as I say, that they do different things. They do the same things, but they do them always from a coherently different perspective. I see. Coherently different? Because I can imagine they don't cohere. Yes, coherently different.

Yes, what I'm trying to suggest is within themselves coherent. I see, I see. Like a self-consistence. Yes, self-consistency. Yes, self-consistency. So that, for example, you might say, so how does the left hemisphere view language? How does the right hemisphere view language? How does the left hemisphere view distance?

How does the right hemisphere view distance? They don't sound like they've got very much in common. But when you come to look at how each of them looks at everything, there are very common threads that are consistent through how the right hemisphere deals with every aspect of existence, and very common threads that characterize the way the left hemisphere does. So they're not coherent together so much as coherent within themselves. But the art of life is bringing these two things to bear in such a way that the richness that they can only really come from them both is not swamped by the left hemisphere trying to take over the whole show. It doesn't happen the other way around because the right, people often say,

well, you've put your finger on, you know, what a left hemisphere world looks like because at the end of the book, in the last chapter, I sort of describe a world in which the left hemisphere world looks like, because at the end of the book, in the last chapter, I sort of describe a world in which the left hemisphere, based on what the reader knows about it, would make of a world. And in reading it, I think most people see a very clear portrait of what is happening to us now. So people say, but what would a right hemisphere world look like? The answer is, well, it would be a very balanced one. And there's never been a civilization that didn't have its left hemisphere aspects. Because the right hemisphere sees more, it therefore knows that it needs the left hemisphere. After all, if it's the master, it appointed the hemisphere because it realized it needed the hemisphere. The hemisphere coming into existence and being crowned as this you know very wise minister thinks it knows

everything when it doesn't and that's the problem it's people who think they've got it all in the bag now it's our consciousness i think sorry sorry i was wondering is our consciousness residing in the left brain or residing in the right hemisphere or is it in the interplay between both or is it being fed from both because as i hear you say the left thinks it's in charge it reminds me of our consciousness that thinks we're the ones that are in control and then it has and then we have to be confronted with a myriad of psychological studies that show no you're a monkey on a elephant's back and you think that you're controlling it but this elephant's going to go wherever it wants so are we when i'm speaking with you right now or when one is speaking with you

are we either engaging in one of those modes are we primarily on the left or are we both somehow being fed from each when you start talking about the relationship between consciousness and the brain then you know you really are in very very rarefied areas and i don't shy from talking about it in the book, a chapter, which is the length of a short book on its own, on it. But I think that, you see, let's start with the monkey on the elephant. In my experience, the elephant is all that we are not currently aware of. And the monkey is just that foolish little bit that is doing the thinking and talking consciously now.

So earlier I said, most of everything we are doing is not stuff we're doing consciously. In fact, if we try to do it consciously, we do it very badly. consciously. In fact, if we try to do it consciously, we do it very badly. It's one of the interesting things is that the better you get as a chess player, the less you think consciously about it. So the same is true of a surgeon or a pilot. They have to think a lot to begin with, but as they get better, they think less and less. So the role of that monkey is rightly considered not important compared with the elephant, which is wise and has memory. So that's the way I look at that. I don't see those images as therefore telling us that we're just the puppets or playthings of something else. I mean, that's a very, very skewed left hemisphere way of thinking about it.

Of course, it's only interested in power and control. But actually what it is, it's saying no. What you are is rooted very deeply in the whole of your experience, including the bits that you're now conscious of, but including many that you were conscious of in another moment and aren't now, and things that you were perhaps never conscious of. So anyway, and complicatedly consciousness has two meanings. One is as against the things you're not aware of, like, oh, at that moment, I wasn't conscious of the fact that it's, you know, my friend's birthday or something like that. But it also is used in the sense

of what you lose when you go into a coma or die. So what I'm really saying is there is a kind of consciousness that we find all too obvious and overvalue, which is the one that does the chatting and talking and thinking right now. But what I mean by our conscious awareness of the world is a deep thing that is going on in both hemispheres all the time. When we narrow down to the conscious mind, we're talking about that focus of the left hemisphere. An image I sometimes use, I don't know if it's helpful, is that we sometimes think of the unconscious as underneath the conscious, as like a sort of a deep tank that you would come to if you went through the floor of your conscious,

the conscious tank. But instead, I would think of it as a stage that is basically in darkness, except where the floodlight, the spotlight happens to go. And when that moves to a certain place, something suddenly shows up. But when it moves away, that something doesn't go away it's just at the moment you're not looking at it you're looking at something else so we are a field of consciousness in fact lichtenberg says and schelling says it thinks in me so as it were there is a field of me which is the minus of me and all that goes into that. And it's not something alien from me. It is who I am.

And it's out of that that my thinking comes. The Cartesian idea that there must be a little chatty ego for there to be an I helps us forget or miss the true depths of our being. forget or miss the true depths of our being so anyway when you when you do spit brain experiments um you can interrogate each hemisphere at a time and each one is conscious it's just that the right hemisphere can't in that moment though those things sorry sorry sorry to interrupt because i'm super curious about this okay so you have a colosotomy. And then you're asked a question. And then you confabulate an answer because you don't know it or at least a part of it. Okay.

But that's the part of you that is conscious. And it seems like the consciousness is still in the left and the right is in control, but it's unconsciously in control, doing a process. So is that another way of thinking about it? Or can you attribute consciousness to the right hemisphere? Well, I think consciousness is, it's not a thing. It is, of course, a process. And indeed, the brain itself is not a thing, but a process. I mean, every cell of your body is a process. It's much more like a process than a thing. It looks like a thing because you can photograph it or do a diagram of it. But actually, that thing that looks like a cell membrane is actually very fluid, and it's changing its position and its composition all

the time. So even a single cell is actually a sea of things that are changing and moving and interconnected. Now, the brain is like that on an infinitely larger scale. I have a feeling that your new book, this is pretty much what it's talking about, is that there are no things, there are only processes. Is that correct? It's into it, yes. It's not that I think there's anything wrong with conceiving of things as things. I mean, for example, this laptop on my lap is perfectly properly described as a thing in a certain way. It's just a way in which we encounter the world for certain purposes, a very good one. It's just that on the whole, it's a mistake to think that the world is

structured out of things. Anyway, when it comes to the consciousness and the brain, I mean, I think of consciousness as being sequestered for a while in a kind of area. And I sometimes think of this as like the outpouching of a membrane. I mean, if people remember looking down slides or down microscopes or seeing slides of organic membranes of living tissue, they will often see that they have sort of outpouchings called villi, or that an amoeba has something called a pseudopod that it can extend. And if you're in the middle of one of those, those long things, you can think you're completely surrounded on all sides, but at the foot of it, you're connected to the main. And I think that our

consciousness is quite rightly seems to us, and it would be no good being flooded with everything else going on in the universe or nothing original would ever happen. Nothing would be creative. And I keep saying the only way I can explain the cosmos is through a deep creative urge. That's the most I can say of it. And one that probably is connected to to love which is relationship anyway um what I'm saying is that our consciousness my consciousness whatever it is my brain

is experiencing as consciousness is for the moment absolutely connected with my brain you know if I get an injury in the brain to affect the consciousness. And to go back to James's thing about the vocal cords, if he has an injury to the vocal cords, his voice will disappear and so on. But he and his thoughts and his everything that were expressed through that will carry on. I know it's not an exact analogy. Another image I use sometimes is of the it's not an exact analogy. Another image I use sometimes is of the consciousness in the brain being able to divide and go round an island. So at a certain point in the flow of a stream, there may be two seemingly quite distinct streams that don't know much about one another at that moment. But if you moved 100 yards down the river, you'd see that they came together as they'd been together before. And they weren't, therefore, entirely separate

streams, although it would be perfectly reasonable to talk of them as separate streams at the time. But ultimately, they are connected. And of course, the image of the stream, which is the image that my all-time favourite philosopher, Heraclitus, said was at the heart of, you know, everything flows, is a brilliant perception because the stream both remains, there's a stream that passes my house

and it will be there tomorrow morning with luck as it is now. But it's also true that it's changing all the time and even changing its boundaries a little and what goes on in it and so forth so i recall you talking about heraclitus and saying that it is both that the stream is the same and that it's you and that you don't step in the same river twice it's more like exactly you're it's more like those are two different modes of being with the river or the screen okay

now see that's different than the standard analytical answer would be the wittgenstein which is while you're playing different language games and so it depends on what you mean by so and so but you're saying you've changed it from the analytical to saying no no it depends on how you be okay yes mind outlining that briefly or as lengthily as you like for the audience? I think that was incredibly insightful. Well, in a way, it's another way of saying something I said before, which is that it's not either or, or both and. It's both either or and both and.

So it is both true that the stream is the same stream and that it is a different stream. Each of these has a sort of truth. And in an either or cast of mind, you can go, well, come on, which is it? But in another, you can say it's perfectly coherent that it is both. Not actually because in some part as i've just suggested with an image of an island uh but all the time uh it is one and the other and there are many things uh in in life uh and in the wider structure of things, it seems to me, that have this dual, not dual quality exactly,

but this unwillingness to finally split it into it's got to be this way or that. In fact, the further you go towards deep things, the more you find that opposites come together. And I know I'm hardly the first person to have said that, but it still needs to be said. It still very much needs to be said. Sorry? Is that why you said at one point that the logical mind,

while it reinforces, it's self-reinforcing, at its extreme, you would get to the right mind? Well, I think at the extreme, it ought to be able to encounter its own bounds. So, for example, in a way, Gödel demonstrated that a certain kind of entirely logical thinking eventually demonstrates its own limitations. And Pascal said that reason is feeble indeed if it cannot see its own limitations. And don't forget that Pascal was a great mathematician

and logician. So, I mean, as well as being a great spiritual thinker. So, if you take the left hemisphere thing far enough, it will encounter its own self coming the other way. And we sometimes see this happening in the world that if you take a certain point of view far enough um if you take um an intolerant attitude that's dogmatic and cruel on the right and a similar one on the left you can hardly tell the difference it's in the mentality it's in an approach to the world um And, you know, by going further and further away to the right or the left, you don't avoid the fate that you're trying to avoid. The nemesis will come to you if you insist on having a black and white either or way of thinking. for our own sakes get back to seeing that it's a both and world in which you may have truth on your side and I may have truth on my side and we ought to respect one another and talk about it in a grown-up way not vilifying hating and silencing people but listening to people who

say things different from ourselves that's's so fundamental. It's how our civilization got to have a culture and now we're throwing it away. Anyway, sorry, it does distress me very much, this sudden rise in the not being shades of meaning. I think it's to do with the way we're educated. I don't think we're taught any longer to think. There's a phrase in Greek, in classical Greek, men, there. And in many of the great philosophers of Greek, they would say men, on the one hand, this,

there, on the other hand, that. And in a way, that was part of the way I was taught to think, that you should see yes as good in that, but there's also something else to be said that, you know, you need to be aware of. And in the last year or two, I've come across a couple of Zen sayings that I like very much, and I think I might write a book with one or other title. And one is, yes, but, And the other is, not always so.

And that really brings one back into the world of the right hemisphere, because the right hemisphere thinks, yes, but. It's the one that always says, yes, but hang on. It inhibits headlong action. It's actually more intelligent. And it literally is a more intelligent hemisphere, in the sense that if you have damage to the left hemisphere, damage to the right hemisphere,

overall damage to the right hemisphere will drop your IQ more than damage to the left hemisphere. Oh, that's extremely interesting. I know that you can function in the world more adaptively if you have a left lesion, not the right lesion. You can certainly function more because your emotional intelligence is not impaired and your understanding of human beings is not impaired.

But your good old fashioned cognitive intelligence, whatever it is IQ measures, is also more highly dependent on the right hemisphere than the left. study by barbie et al in 2013 where they looked at um 150 people who'd had strokes and had a pre-morbid iq measurement and looked at their post-morbid iq measurement and the and then they put the maps over the top of one another and where were the really key areas for dropping your intelligence hardly any was in the left hemisphere. Interesting. Almost all of them are in the right hemisphere, which is not, of course, again, part of that bad old caricature difference between the left and right hemisphere. Well, you know, the right hemisphere is all very well, dear, but it's a bit, you know, kind of not very reliable and silent, right. But yes, but actually, it's both more reliable in the sense of more likely to make the good decision and more intelligent.

But anyway, there we go. But let's say about inhibition, because you said to me earlier on, and then I actually I really must stop. I'm enjoying this conversation so much. No, no, bless you. No, I could I could talk to you all day. I wish we had time. But I said early on something about inhibition. Well, here's a fascinating thing. First of all, the corpus callosum, which started up, that's the band of fibers that connects the two hemispheres at the base of the brain, started out largely facilitatory. In other words, it was largely conveying information

from one to the other hemispheres. But it has now come to the point where much of its actual outcome is inhibitory. So much of what it is doing is saying, you keep out of this, you'll confuse the picture. I need to deal with this. And when the mammalian brain evolved from, you know, the mouse or whatever, therew up to ourselves if we can think of it as a road upwards and it involved more and more inhibitory neurons and mammals

have more inhibitory neurons primates have more inhibitory neurons than other non-primates and humans have more inhibitory neurons than any other primate and the really important neurons for the effectiveness of carving experience coming back to the idea that that as it were like carving a statue in this in the stone something only comes into being by the the turning away of something else so that the inhibition of the this is something that might have been brings the thing into me i'm gonna i'm gonna stop yeah sorry about that you could actually keep i mean i could keep talking to you for ages it's lovely quick comment on that i was always wondering if there's a more precise marker of intelligence or sophistication than the encephalization quotient or the brain to body mass ratio. And I was wondering if you can use the inhibitory neurons and the proportion of them.

said for it and quite a lot to be said against it okay one of the things again you know think about the crow able to solve all kinds of problems a brain the size of a pea though birds do have a higher encephalization quotient than us well there's a higher encephalization quotient that is correct but nonetheless the actual number of possible connections is very much smaller, which is probably why they're not building things that are destroying the world. Okay, this one comes from Sam Ford. Nice one. I'm a big fan of Ian McGillicrist. I think he's perhaps one of the most important thinkers of recent times. He cites Jung a few times in The Master and His Emissary and mentioned Jung in his first talk with Peterson. I've always wondered how well he thinks Jung's ideas

about the different aspects of the psyche map onto his own. He gives a little post-amble. It seems to me that maybe the persona slash ego and the left hemisphere may match up to some degree and that the unknown greater personality of self matches up to the union of the left and the right hemispheres, maybe. Either way, I would like to know his ideas on how Jung matches up with his. Well, that's a very nice question and a good one.

I have to say right away that I've not really made any systematic study of Jung. I read Modern Man in Search of a Soul when I was a teenager, and it struck me as a very important and powerful book. And since then, I've read bits and pieces here and there. So I don't really, I wouldn't say I'm a paid up Jungian or anything like that although I do find that Jungians like Buddhists and I'm also not a Buddhist although I have great sympathy with both Jungians and Buddhists and they seem to come to my my talks and write to me so obviously in their probably better informed minds and whatever it is I'm saying has resonances and I'm always interested in those.

I think the key thing about Jung for me, I can't really talk definitively about things like the ego and the animus and the anima and all these things, but I can say that his general world picture is very sympathetic from my point of view. And one of the most important points, which is something that he shared with Goethe, was this sense that opposites come together. And that's something that I do strongly believe as I've said earlier when we were talking about that so yeah but I'm afraid I'm not really in a position to it's slightly like the Freudian question you asked about you know can we line up the id and the ego and the superego with I think to an extent you can but and I'm sure that you know it's possible to make

good analogies um between Jung's uh work which I don't you know as I say I don't know the detail of um I've always thought of him as a very um sympathetic soul basically um So I'm afraid I'm going to have to disappoint Sam there. But the thing that interests me though is you know that although you see looking back over history there are so many people who long before even Freud and Jung and who knew even less about the structure of the brain than they did have posited something very like what I think I've discovered and am promulgating from the basis of modern neuroscience. It's very exciting that in a way these great archetypes,

these images from wise minds in the past, they had intuitive understanding of something that can now be more objectively demonstrated you mentioned once in your book about the greeks that they had some intimation about the left and the right hemisphere either one is for i think perception and the other one was for understanding that's's right. Yes, and it's fascinating that so long ago people were speculating on the uses of the two parts of the brain. I mean, what one has to remember is that in Galen, who was one of the first great physicians,

he thought that the brain was actually a kind of air conditioning system. He thought that it helped the person lose excessive heat. So clearly they were a very long way off modern science. But I do cite and footnote the sources for, I think they were 3rd century AD suggestions, that the right hemisphere was perception and the left for understanding. Now, unfortunately, it's actually true that the right hemisphere is better at both perceiving and understanding. But one sort of knows what was being got at. The right hemisphere is definitely better at perception

and at the sort of taking of things as reality rather than having an idea about them in the way that the left hemisphere has. So, you know, that is also hemisphere has so you know it is that is also remarkable thank you for reminding me yeah well thank you for pointing it out i make extensive notes okay that's another reason when i was telling you before that this podcast is killing me in many ways in one way in a salutary manner hopefully in in one way it's destabilizing in another it takes so much preparation and hopefully the preparation shows in the questions and um sometimes i read the comments and often

they indicate that they do but i always wonder how much am i overextending myself no no well look i mean let me say quite genuinely that you do your your questions are some of the best um they target very important areas and no i think you're you know from that point of view you're one of the best interviewers that i've i've come across so thank you okay well thank you thank you man it makes me blush i'm brown you can't tell but but I am blushing. Okay. Joanne Dong says, can you ask McGillicrist about the substitution effect from psychology and its impact on the imbalance between the right and the left hemispheres over the course of Western civilization?

Daniel Kenneman states, in thinking fast and slow, when faced with a difficult question, we often answer an easier one instead, without noticing the substitution. Thank you." Well, yes. Well, first of all, let me say about Daniel Kahneman and the hemisphere hypothesis, it would be wrong to suppose that when he talks about thinking fast and slow, he's talking about the two hemispheres. In a conversation that we had, he confirmed my impression that he's talking about more top brain versus bottom brain than right versus left. So the frontal cortex of both hemispheres taking more time, being more thorough, and the posterior cortex of both hemispheres being more likely to be jumping to conclusions

or going for the familiar. However, having said that, your questioner does touch on something very interesting because research shows that the left hemisphere jumps to conclusions and tends to see what it wants to see in what is being presented or what is being asked. It will actually ignore or just not hear or just not see things that invoke something that it's not interested in or not aware of. So in that sense, our tendency to give a fast answer to something we can answer rather than a slower, more thoughtful answer to something that would require deeper reflection, that is a left-right distinction. So the left hemisphere being the more superficial and quick and dirty hemisphere on this, and the right hemisphere having more of a capacity to see several sides to something,

to think more carefully about it, and to inhibit the immediate response of the left hemisphere. Okay. C. Wren Dudley, hopefully I'm pronouncing that correctly, says, By positing an absolute division between the brain hemispheres, aren't we already thereby engaged in wholly left-brain thinking? In other words, isn't the notion of different sides, quote-unquote, confined to only one side of the brain, namely the left? Yes. I mean, sorry, the answer to that question is no um i i have talked about this quite a bit i certainly addressed it in the in the uh in the new introduction to the master and his emissary the new new edition that came out a year or so ago but i do also address it in The Matter with Things. There's a sort of sense that,

you know, you're dichotomizing, aren't you? People sort of say that. I remember your exact line about this, because, sorry to interrupt, for the people listening, the preface alone of The Master and Its Emissary is already one of my favorite books of the past few years. The preface alone. I remember listening to the preface. I had to listen to it because I was driving and so on. So the preface alone had me pausing so often and thinking. And I'm just wondering, how the heck is Ian coming up with this?

Anyway, if you buy the book and you can only read the preface, do so. I would point out that the preface I'm talking about is for the new version, 2019 onwards. It has a green cover. So if your version doesn't have the green cover, then that doesn't have the preface. But it's very nice that you say that, because actually somebody sent me a very nice email saying, man, I've just read your preface. And, you know, it's worth buying the book just for that. So it's almost exactly what you said. Yeah. But I try to encapsulate, you know, some of the questions and answers there. some of the questions and answers there.

But in life there are things that are false dichotomies and there are some that are genuine dichotomies, even if there is a degree of overlap. So, for example, bad drivers versus good drivers, that's a false dichotomy. I mean, it's a matter of degree and it's all on the spectrum. And then you could take some other things like being a tree or being an animal, you know. There is a kind of pond life that's very hard to say whether it's actually a plant or an animal. But nonetheless, on the whole, we can tell

the difference between an elephant and a tree and this is the this is a perfectly good dichotomy if you like so what I would say about this the divide between the brain is that I always start off very early in any book I'm talking about it I say yeah there is a certain degree of overlap that's necessary and important but nonetheless don't reject the fact that there are very startling differences just because you have to have you happen to think that dichotomies are impossible it's you know dichotomies can be simple but it can also be simplistic to reject a dichotomy if there is one and in this case there is one and let me this case, there is one. And let me just repeat, because people don't find

this easy to take in, there is overlap. There is overlap. And an example I give is between the culture and climate of Iceland and Indonesia. Okay? So Iceland is a very cold country. And its landscape, its vegetation, even the kind of temperament of the people is bound to have been molded by its climate. Indonesia has a different climate, a much warmer, more humid climate. And again, the vegetation and the history and the culture and even probably the temperament is different. But it is still true that the hottest year ever recorded, the annual average temperature in Iceland, was higher than the lowest average temperature for the year ever recorded in Indonesia.

So it's perfectly possible for there to be overlap in things that are radically different. So I'm sorry, the questioner gets a no from me on that one. All right. Actually, that line, it's burned into my memory. The line is, people don't like dichotomies because they say dichotomies are simplistic, but it's also simplistic to dismiss something just because it's burned into my memory the line is people don't like dichotomies because they say dichotomies are simplistic but it's also simplistic to dismiss something just because it's a dichotomy now that one i'm gonna take i will credit you don't worry but i'm doing interviews i'm being interviewed because i'm putting out a film soon on the extreme left what makes the extreme left extreme on the political spectrum right not because i'm a right winger in fact i'm apolitical

but because it's it's difficult to analyze what's extremism on the left extremism on the right is just it's blatant anyway i well i think extremism on the left is is also blatant but and they as i said earlier on when we were talking they have an enormous amount in common. Right, exactly, exactly. So that's why I was like, okay, that's the horseshoe theory, I believe, in a nutshell. And that's interesting because the further you run away from a point, the closer you get to it after a certain location. So it's like a circle. In some cases, that is absolutely true, yeah. Maybe you want to quickly comment.

This is something I was thinking about as I was reading your book. Is there a way of mapping the hemisphere, differences left right onto our left right spectrum maybe it's inverted like the right brain is the left and the and the reason i was thinking about this is because while the french revolution is posed as a left phenomenon and they espoused rationality and so on but that's a left brain but then on the other hand they lovedousseauian thinking, which seems to me to be more romantic, which is right-brained. So there's many contradictions I see, and I couldn't map them on directly. And I was wondering if you had any experience or thought about this much. Well, to come back to the previous question, this is a case where it would be simplistic.

So any culture is a mixture of many things. And what I say about this is easily to identify right hemisphere style thinkers on the right and on the left and left hemisphere style thinkers on the right and on the left so that you get thinkers that are dogmatic, uncharitable, angry, Mr. Right knows what's good for people. You know, that is your left hemisphere type, and there's plenty of them on the left, just as there are on the right. And there are thoughtful, flexible, compassionate people who don't treat people as belonging to boxes or categories or ticking something,

but are actually complicated human individuals with many, many facets to their experience, to their personality. Now, that exists on both sides. So it's quite coherent, I think, to say that, no, it doesn't map on to right and left in politics at all. to say that, no, it doesn't map on to right and left in politics at all. In fact, in some ways, you know, the interesting thing is, if anything, the left hemisphere is much more theoretical and the right hemisphere is much more interested in experience. And one way of thinking about the divide between the political spectrum is that the left end of it tends to prioritize theories over the experience

of history of culture whereas the right wing or the writer wing of of thinking tends to be very interested in history and culture and context and embodiment not in a theory that on paper looks like it's going to make everybody happy. So I think there is an argument that if you had to put it either way, I would associate the right spectrum with the right hemisphere and the left spectrum, particularly the extreme left, with the left hemisphere. Interesting. But as I say, I don't think that you can make a clean mapping, no. Right. Nietzsche, to me, was paradoxical because he repudiated

rationalities, and then that, to me, puts him on the right hemisphere, as well as loved the passions. But then at the same time, had the will to power as his primal motive, at least toward the end of his life. So then that's the left. Okay, Daigo Pinto says... Can I just say something quickly about that?

Yeah. I do want to get away from the idea that somehow reason is associated with the left hemisphere and emotion with the right. Reason is associated with both hemispheres, and so is emotion. They are both capable of being emotional. The left is actually more intemperate,

less inhibited when it gets emotional. And the right hemisphere plays a very important part in reason, which is the coming together of thoughtful reflection on experience. And even in some kinds of logic, it is actually superior to the left. So it's a very complex picture. This is a good point for you to delineate the difference between rationality and reason, because I just used the word rationality, and I often conflate it with reason as well. But in your book, you do give, I think you cite the newest for reason.

Well, it struck me that in most languages, rather as we don't differentiate between Wissen and Kennan, we just have one word to know. We also don't, like many other languages, have a different term for a sort of isolated, abstracted formulation of rational processes in the sense that a computer could be programmed to carry them out. And reason, which is often in conflict with that, being reasonable means taking into account rationality, but also taking into account what one knows wisely from experience and from living.

And in German, there's a distinction between Verstand which is more like this rather abstract theoretical reason and Vernunft which is a kind of quality that you get from being wise and living which means you're able to reason but do so as a wise judge in a court would do I mean a judge in a court shouldn't really be just applying rules in a computer-like way, but should be thinking contextually. And that is what we used to mean by reason. And that's what we used to think was the flower of education, that the reason for educating people was they could think in this very balanced, flexible way,

taking many sides of things into account. But in our world today, where everything is very much skewed towards the left hemisphere, we tend to think of reason as like a kind of rote rationality. And I think that's a huge loss. So, yeah. You mentioned the judge, and that reminds me, I had a speculative question or speculative thought about Jesus who had an emphasis on the spirit of the text versus the text,

and one is in keeping with God and the other is pharisaical, it's a literal interpretation. And Jesus said, you keep with God, you take the spirit, and that to me was more right-brained. And then I wondered, does that mean there's a theological argument for the primacy of the right hemisphere? Well, there is actually, and I make it in the matter with things but it's a long argument and it needs to reflect on many many many things I can't wait to read that book man but what I would just say is there's an interesting

you know how my vision is that the left hemisphere is either or, but the right hemisphere is sort of both and. Well, the left hemisphere tends to be very given to the letter of the law, as you hinted, but the right hemisphere is able to see that sometimes the letter of the law needs to be respected as well as the kind of spirit of the law, because the spirit of the law is generally what one

wants to find, not the letter of it. But if a person has relied on the letter of the law, because that's what it says, then they ought to be given some protection under law, because they did abide by what the letter of the law said. They might find themselves still open to the criticism that they didn't understand the spirit of it but i think that a wise judge would take both into account and it's not necessarily one way or the other that they would i think they depend their judgment would depend on the circumstances and the person and the case before them i know i want to get to daigo's question

but you just said i i please i have to interject with one thought pascal in your book you mentioned that he had a quotation about the whole point of reason i believe it was reason not rationality but let's imagine it's reason that the whole point of reason is to realize that there's an infinitude of more important aspects to life than reason. And then I was wondering, well, what does one say to the retort that when giving a reason to not use reason, you're still appealing to reason? So it's somewhat self-defeating. How do you get out of that? I didn't quite catch the meaning of your last okay remark let's say you're giving let's say you're explaining to someone here's why you shouldn't use reason alone or if it's rationality alone but either way you're

giving a rational argument or you're giving a reason to well there are different levels of reason and there's a kind of meta-level of reason. And I think the meta-level, the overarching view that takes in both, is usually the one I would say is best associated, more likely to be associated with the working of the right hemisphere. And so, as I say, the right hemisphere is no stranger to reason. Absolutely not. And it would be a big mistake to say that

it in any way rejected it, but it's more likely to see the limits of it because it's able to stand outside of its own viewpoint and see there are things that it doesn't know, which the left hemisphere is very bad at doing. So it thinks, I've got this schema which will solve all my problems. I run them through this mental computer and a solution comes out which is the right answer. And the right hemisphere is going to say no there could be many right answers that are not you know they're not necessarily compatible with one another but they might apply in different circumstances at different times with different people. So to see a more nuanced and more complex picture I

think the right hemisphere is the one that would be using elements of reason, and there's nothing wrong with reason in itself, to show the limits of reason. This is really what Pascal was saying and you've just demonstrated that that is okay. He made a distinction between what he called geometres, geometers, and esprit fin, fine spirits. And he says the fine spirits, by the word fine, he means subtle. So the subtle spirit is different from the slightly bull in the china shop, black and white, hard and fast, black and white, hard and fast, inflexible, geometric spirit in which he's saying, you know, you churn away, you do a diagram and you've got the answer. Whereas the esprit fin, he says,

can see things, understand things that can hardly be put into words, but are very, very important. Now, coming from a mathematician, and a very great mathematician, that's very very important now coming from a mathematician that is a very and a very great mathematician that's a very important thing to hear is this related to at one point in the book you referenced that we need to transcend utility and i always wondered well tongue in cheek what's the use of that but also how does one transcend utility is this related to or is it not related to it or is it all related because at some point is it all related? Because at some point, everything's related. a contemporary of Heidegger's but died much younger, whom Heidegger called the greatest philosopher in Europe of his age. And he focused on values more than Heidegger. And he added a hierarchy of values, which at the bottom is things that are merely useful or pleasurable,

the sort of things that actually any animal would go for. And then there are higher values that transcend those of pure utility. And I think those are the very important values that render us moral beings and give our lives meaning. And that just to be following utility and pleasure is self-defeating. In fact, by doing it very much more than any previous civilization has ever done, we are endangering our very existence as a civilization. We're just grabbing things as they're useful,

taking courses of action because they're easy and pleasurable, whereas when a civilization is at its height, it inculcates a spirit of self-denial to a point of, you know, a certain degree of bravery, of courage, of humility, of, you know, moral consideration of the value of others, and that this is not the way that we now think. I'm assuming then when you use the term utility, you mean in a short-term or short-sighted or self-centered manner?

Because we could always say that, we could always reposition utility to be utility for God, so that if we're acting in accordance with our morals, then that's useful for the group as the whole. But that would be a terribly debased way of thinking about one's attitude to God. It's rather like the old argument that if you believe that you will go to heaven if you're good, then you're just really basically pursuing a good for yourself. But that is really to completely stand on its head. I'm not saying there aren't people who can be motivated wrongly in this

way. I'm sure that there are and were. But I'm really saying that a true understanding of morality excludes the idea that you're moral simply in order to get a benefit for yourself. I mean, that's not morality. That is a kind of, yes, a kind of selfishness and and it's what we mean by hypocrisy you know where people say things and do things in order to look good and you know um sound like they're something that they're not okay daigo daigo pinto says his book the master and his emissary is one of my favorite books about the brain if you could sneak in one of these questions, I'd be appreciated. He has five. Sorry, he has four.

I'm going to briefly outline them, and then you can answer one or two if you like, okay? Okay. So he says a section on the book that deals with evolution of the solid self, though he uses in brackets that I'm using these words on my own here. He didn't use these words. There would be a non-unified voice or several in an individual which could be interpreted as an outside other being. And then you make reference to Moses and the ancient Greeks

and so on as hearing God's voice as an example. He said, could he elaborate on this and point out other sources on the topic? That's number one. Okay, so save that. Maybe you want to respond to that. Number two, he mentions that language and the music have a common ancestry, and then gives some evidence for the claim, and I'd like to hear if he's learned anything new since the publication of his book.

There's that. Okay, so that's the other voices, language and music. Then, what are his thoughts, if any, on Chomsky versus Lakoff ideas about language? That's number three. And then number four, what does he think about objective truth? Can we apprehend it? Pretty much just that.

Wow. Okay. Okay, so again, to briefly outline, the God and the other voices that are internal, but perceived as such. Number two is language and music, and then Chomsky,

and then objective truth. Well, I think the first two I have covered, either in what I've said or in the book, actually, to some extent. But the last two are both very big questions and to me more interesting ones. I very much think, like Lakoff and Johnson, about language. like Lakoff and Johnson about language.

And I find Chomsky's views, I may simply not have given them the credit that's due to them, of course, but I find them less attractive because they seem more schematic, more programmatic, more like there is a sort of software in the hardware that does certain things. Whereas I'm a great believer in what one might call the power of imitation in humans. And I spend quite a lot of time on the fact that humans are particularly good at imitating, at imitating, not just copying, but actually imitating,

and getting into the skin of another creature or another person and feeling something about how they are and why they are doing and saying what they're doing. So I think language grows in this way, as I've said, from a sort of a basic sense that is embodied, profoundly embodied in movement, in the voice, in music, in the voice and the business of breath. And that it is not really an abstract code. It can become that, but it actually,

I don't know that Chomsky gives enough credit to the way in which language is constantly metaphorizing embodied experience. And Lakoff and Johnson very much do show how everything we say has a reference that is understandable in terms of the body. And we can't get deeper than that in a way, than our embodied experience. It's where, as Wittgenstein said, I hit bedrock and my spade is turned.

You know, one can't dig down any further, but it's from there that that language comes. And I've got time just to say a little bit about the objective thing do i believe there's objective truth annoyingly i'm going to yeah i'm going to say yes and no um and i think we do yes we do to a degree have access to it um i i think very importantly that like many other things it's a journey as it were not an arrival I mean it's not something we get and then we have it it's a cast of mind or disposition for exploring life in the world which enables one to have more solid grounds for believing what one believes. So I absolutely repudiate the idea that, which is a devastatingly destructive idea, and a very silly one, that anything that anybody says

is equally true, because there's no criterion by which to judge it. by which to judge it. It's almost beneath rebuttal, but it's so obviously wrong. If I believe that, as Sokal says, that I can walk out of the 22nd floor window of my apartment and survive on landing, I'm wrong, or very likely to be. So on the other hand, it's not at all true that there's a single truth that is the truth because all truths are contextual. And that doesn't mean that every context renders it completely different.

There are trends. And for me, the important thing is to see that the path to truth is not a line, but a matter of circling or spiraling. So the important thing is not to say, I've taken this step, now the next logical step is this, and at the end of the road, there will be truth. You might even say, well, I know I'll never get there.

That's true. But at least I can see exactly where I'm going. But I'm not sure that truth is of this kind I think truth is of the kind where you you look at something from as many different viewpoints as you can and when you hear somebody say something else about it you don't just rule it out and you know dismiss it you think now let me search for what's the truth in that because there are aspects of truth in it. And I sometimes quote Dunne on this, the poet John Dunne, 17th century English poet,

one of our great poets, who says words to the effect that truth is like a castle that stands on a steep and cragged hill and who wants to arrive at it, doesn't go straight up, but has to circle round the hill to get there and that image is a very useful one to bear in mind in fact i returned to the image of the spiral path in which it's not exactly a circle which means that you just end up where you were when

you when you when you when you get around the circle but actually a spiral whereby you are you you come to somewhere like where you were before but the view is now different. A little bit like T.S. Eliot's famous thing about arriving where we started from but knowing it for the first time. And so I think life is a series of these things and the path to objective truth is to commit yourself to this process of spiraling around and learning as much as you can about it

and knowing you'll never get the absolute truth, but that you can get much, much closer to truth, and that matters very much. So truth matters. And it is not the case that, you know, well, I just see it differently, so my truth's as good as yours. Your truth may be as good as mine. It may be better than mine,

but it may equally, by the same token, be worse. So, you know, there is meaning to this idea, a very important meaning to it. And I do find earphones very funny. I don't know something about my ears, but they always keep flopping out. Anyway, there we are. That's that. Thank you, sir. we are um that's that thank you that's that sir i appreciate it you should read just as we go you should read this book by douglas hofstetter your your chapter on imitation reminded me of it it's called surfaces and essences it's about analogy okay uh is that in the mind's eye or is what is that no no no it's its own book. It's a huge book, just about how analogy is the core of cognition. Even the fact that when we imitate, I don't believe he uses the word memes,

but Susan Blackwell even points this out, Blackmore points it out, that to imitate is extremely complex. To copy is rote, but to imitate is complex. You have to take the essence of it. Yes, no, that is extremely complex. To copy is rote, but to imitate is complex. You have to take the essence of it. Yes, no, that is exactly right. And what's also nice about it is that, again, the right hemisphere is better at this business of getting into the skin of somebody else

and understanding the complexity of it. But it is also the one that thinks that understanding is analogy. So that these, when I talked about mathematicians and scientists having a sense of a form and then finding that through a revelation or intuitional insight, they saw the solution to a problem. That was by analogy, not by going, well, I'm nine-tenths of the way there down this path, and if I just do a few more pages of work, I'll have reached it.

Nothing is an understanding in that way. We don't just gradually work our way along a line. We have to see and feel analogies. And this is how Einstein described his own discoveries, that he would play a piece of music and he would ponder about it, and then he'd get up from the piano and go, I've got it. Or at least his daughter, I think, describes him in this way. And he always said, you know, that I don't think in words,

I think in musical forms and muscular movements. Well, how remarkable is that? So anyway, we've talked an awful lot. Have a great day, man. Have a drink. Get some rest. Well, for you, I don't know what time it is. I got the Chomsky interview, so...

It's just a little early for a drink for me, but I'll get onto it in due course and drink to your very great health. And I look forward to talking again perhaps in a year when you've had a chance to take a look at the matter with things. Thank you so much. I keep wanting to call you professor. I was surprised that you weren't a professor

because the corpus of Master and its emissaries, it's a huge intellectual achievement. Well, I'm a maverick and Jung and Freud were doctors. I'm a doctor. I like that. True, true, true, true, true. My wife liked the advice that you said

about me taking some time off and having a break. So we're likely going to do that after the Chomsky interview. Okay, have a great one. Very, very good. I want the audience to look up. Okay, first of all, where can they find out more about you?

The best places to go is channelmcgilchrist.com, which you can just put in as a URL, or you can Google my name. It will automatically come up. google my name it will automatically it'll automatically come up um the main book of my thinking is the one that you referred to but in the next few months i'm publishing a very large book which is my attempt to explain why the whole way we think about ourselves nature the cosmos and reality is mistaken and it's based heavily on the hemisphere hypothesis and i think it shows a way in which we could go forward in the world and flourish and survive

rather than come to a disastrous end so there we are i'd love to talk to you again one day but right now we're going to go and have a drink. Okay, go ahead. Go have a drink. At some point, I did want to ask you about cognitive behavioral therapy for what I was going through, but what I am going through. I want to know, should I just be out in nature more? Should I listen to more music?

I'm definitely going to stop or try my best to stop being so self-conscious and let's say left brain. I think being able to be mindful being out in nature listening to music slowing down and doing precisely what your left hemisphere is telling you you mustn't do which is waste time would be a terribly good idea i mean i think that's such a destructive idea that time is a resource it's typical left hemisphere idea that time is money as jeremy bentham a man with no right hemisphere detectable to the human eye, said. And it's this idea that we husband time as material.

And the more we do that, the less time we have, the more hurried we are, the less we inhabit the world at all, and then we die. are the less we inhabit the world at all and then we die so i think it's a very good idea to slow down and to learn to listen and not to be too active i mean i don't always take my own advice i have to say yeah well you're i don't know how you were able to do that i i have no idea how you were able to come up with that book it you know 14 years sounds like quite a long time but as i have done my own research i feel like in 14 years i would have come up with 20 of what you came up with so that's a tour de force man well i sometimes think the mice came in the night and wrote it for me yeah okay thank you so much thank you please get some rest have a drink i i feel like in many ways this podcast is killing me because i planned so i have so many pages here i go through such lengths

to for each guest but we can hey we can do this again if you don't mind i would i would love to i don't want to you're too kind i'll tell you what yeah no no look what about we do it again in say a year's time my book will have come out you can yes yeah sure we'll have another go that would be great yeah great great okay where are you by the way are you in la or what i'm in toronto toronto ah yes that's right because yes because you said i i attended the the first showing of the film which and that was the one in toronto somebody had some sound engineer got a very red face afterwards yeah yeah that's right we could barely hear you and i think peterson had to talk to you over a phone i know all right then lovely to have been your guest thank you very much we'll meet again it was a

pleasure thank you i honestly mean it like your book is life-changing at least for me and i think slowly it's going to dawn on me your the realizations that you've just incepted or implanted thank you thank you very much hopefully it's not too destabilizing for me well all the very best have a great one thank you okay i'll try and be more embodied i'll try my best because i don't i definitely don't want to hear voices okay have a great one man all right thank you bye you