Within Reason - #69 Iain McGilchrist - The Mind is More Than a Machine

Episode Date: May 26, 2024

Iain McGilchrist is a psychiatrist, writer, and former Oxford literary scholar. McGilchrist came to prominence after the publication of his book The Master and His Emissary, subtitled The Divided Brain and the Making of the Western World. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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Conditions apply. Ian McGulgris, welcome to the show. Thank you very much, Alex. Delighted to be here. Why is the brain separated into two physical hemispheres? It's a basic and very good and important question. And it's not really discussed very much, but we know that all the brains that we've ever looked at

are divided in this way. So it's not a human thing only. And there are three important oddities. One is that it's divided at all since the power of the brain is to do with making connections. Secondly, that it's asymmetrical, which is very odd because there's no reason for it to be asymmetrical. If you just needed more space, you could just produce more space symmetrically, you would think. And the third is that there is a band of fibers at the base of the brain. But first of all, this is a new thing.

It only started in mammals. Amphibians, reptiles, frogs have brains, birds have brains that don't have even this body of fibres called the corpus callosum. And what's more, a lot of the import of the traffic across the corpus callosum in humans is inhibitory. So its final effect is to suppress a contralateral homolog. In other words, a bit of the other hemisphere that would be its partner, if you like. So these were questions that I thought were interesting and were in part a reason where I started to go into this area. And I suppose the first thing I have to say is that most people who don't know about the recent developments and particularly about my work on hemispheres, think that they've heard it long ago was,

exploded. It was a myth, a popular piece of psychology that had no basis in fact. And this is sort of slightly right and mainly very, very wrong. The slight bit of right is that the questions were good. Why are the hemispheres separated? How are they different? It's just that we didn't get the right answers at the time. And when people start asking questions in science, they don't expect to find the right answers immediately. they expect to have to do further thought, further gathering of data, and to be able to come up with something that actually does fit to the realities.

And the answer is, if you like, to cut to the chase, that all creatures in order to survive have to do a remarkable feat, which is to pay attention to something that they need to get, and at the same time look out so that they're not themselves got. And for this, you need two types of attention. And these types of attention are so different, that they require neuronal masses, each of which can sustain conscious attention independently. One of them is going to pay very targeted attention, very narrow beam attention,

to something that it wants to get, that it knows is important, usually food, or eventually something like a twig to build a nest or in apes to get something to use this as a tool. And that is the left hemisphere's attention. narrow, fragmentary, piecemeal attention. But at the same time, the brain has to be able to look out for predators, but also for kin, for your mate, your offspring and so on, so that while you're busy in surviving by getting stuff to eat,

you're also looking out for the whole picture. And that has evolved in the right hemisphere. And so effectively, the right hemisphere is looking out for everything else, for the big picture of the world, while the left hemisphere is concentrating on a detail that it already knows it once. And this has important consequences because the way we attend to things changes what it is.

We find there, changes what comes to our attention. And in summary, what we find is that the two halves of the brain sustain two different versions of reality. It used to be said that one, did reason and language and the other did pictures and emotions and so on but all that is wrong we know that both hemispheres are involved in

everything but that doesn't mean that there's nothing there that doesn't mean we've met a dead end is that we were asking the question in a slightly wrong way which was what do they do these hemispheres as though they were machines it's the question you ask of a machine but in fact they're part of a person

and there's important question to ask about anything to do with living beings and human beings and human beings is how, in what way, with what reason, with what purpose are we doing, what we're doing, why are we attending, and in what way are we attending? And so in the left hemisphere, there is built up a phenomenological world which is composed rather of discrete fragmentary pieces that are decontextualized, static so that they can be easily frozen and picked up rapidly and effectively inanimate.

And everything that it understands is clear, explicit, cut and dried, it's a seed, it's a rabbit, it's whatever, it's my lunch, I need to get it. Whereas the right hemisphere is very much more subtle. It's looking out for everything else. It sees that nothing is ever ultimately completely devoid of connections with everything, really, everything else, that things are always in motion. They're never actually finally static. They're also never wholly certain that they may carry a certain degree of conviction, but they're not black and white and cut and dried in the way the left hemisphere makes them. The left hemisphere really understands what's explicit and the right hemisphere understands what is implicit. And that's a very big thing because all the things that really matter to us most need in a way to remain implicit because they're reduced by the process of bringing them into prosaic everyday language.

And effectively, this is an animate world. So those are the two different worlds, and you could put it this way. The left hemisphere creates a map, a diagram, a theoretical structure of the world, which is very thin, very sparse, very jude, devoid of complexity, devoid of really anything that makes the thing live. But it has the schema. And the right hemisphere, meanwhile, is seeing the whole complex picture in all its ramifications and its beauty.

And it's that, it's in other words, it's the world that the left hemisphere is mapping. So that's a good enough place to start, really. A map in the left brain and in the right brain, the thing that is mapped. The world that is mapped. The world that is mapped. So we've essentially got here two brains. And the thing that I find fascinating, reading the master in its emissary, which is an extraordinary volume

I sort of only got a little bit into it and was already thinking this is kind of blowing my mind or my minds I suppose I should say one thing that caught my attention is that

this isn't something that people I mean people might think that well there are sort of two brains right now that are doing different tasks super specialised but you know if we evolve if we evolve further they'll probably sort of merge into one big brain It seems like evolution is selecting for this asymmetrical brain separation. And as you've already said, the corpus colossum or colosum that connects the two does more to inhibit communication between them than it does to facilitate it.

I mean, that's an extraordinary finding that the connector between the two parts of our brain is purposefully trying to stop them from communicating and that this is something that is evolutionarily selected for. I thought that was absolutely incredible. And I suppose what you're suggesting here is the reason for this is because what, if they were to communicate too much, then maybe one would get in the way of the other? Yes, there needs to be a necessary balance between separation and togetherness, if you like. And funnily enough, nature in general works with competition and cooperation. One of the myths that really needs to be revised is the idea that evolution is all about competition and that we are somehow competitive apes. There is no doubt that competition plays a very important role in evolution,

but actually those species that have really thrived have been those that have learnt to cooperate and collaborate. So in fact, the situation is the same in the brain. Everywhere in nature there is, and this was an insight that Gerta had in the 18th. century, that in nature, all that is unified is being divided and what is divided is being unified. I think that it doesn't perhaps sound very important, but it is actually a crucial insight. And hence that the hemispheres need to work together, but part of the way of working together is not to get in one another's way and try to compete to do the same task. I sometimes say, you know, in order to carry out a successful operation, there needs to be a surgeon and there needs to be a scrub nurse as a minimum.

And without the scrub nurse, the operation would be extremely difficult without the surgeon impossible. But it doesn't make sense for the scrub nurse to make the incision. The scrub nurse needs to do the job of the scrub nurse, and the surgeon needs to do the job of the surgeon. So that's the way it is. What I would say is you're completely right to say that the tendency of evolution is not towards homogenization, but towards preserving this distinction. And I just want to comment on your remark, which I know was in a way just a relatively off-the-cuff one, about two minds. I think the reality is that our mind is, at least our conscious mind, is not aware of this division. Our unconscious mind is at some level bringing this information from the two hemispheres together in a way that we should not be aware of.

If we were aware of it, it would hinder us. So nature has taken care that all this is done at a level which is probably in the, the midbrain, which is the head of the brain stem. I mean, yeah, inevitably, when you learn about this distinction between the different hemispheres, especially when you learn that like the left hemisphere governs the right eye and the right hemisphere governs the left eye, you inevitably sort of start closing an eye, looking around the world and seeing if maybe can I sort of, am I seeing things a bit differently? Am I noticing, you know, narrative more and objects more in this eye? I'm not really sure.

And obviously, it's a bit ridiculous because that's not how it works, but that just speaks to the fact that, yes, this is something that is not a conscious phenomenon. Yeah, I don't want to be annoying and chip in, but I have to say that actually it doesn't work like that in humans. So in humans, the left visual field of both the left and right eye goes to the right hemisphere. And the right visual field of both the left and right eye. goes to the left hemisphere. In many animals, they have eyes on the sides of their head, and there is almost literally just a straight crossover. But because humans have eyes on the front of their head,

partly because we evolved from apes that needed to be able to judge distances of branches ahead, they needed to be able to do this, you know, bifocal way of seeing. things. And so it's not quite true. It is true that the right ear feeds pretty much to the left hemisphere, and the left ear to the right. That's probably why it wasn't really working for me when I was switching back and forth. Has that got something to do with the fact that the ears are literally on the side of the skull in a way that in many birds, for example, the eyes are on

the side of the skull? It's like the position of the organ that changes its relation to the brain? it does yes and I was wondering if you could tell us I mean you list a few in the book I'm not sure how many you could think of the top of your head but examples of so in birds for example with their eyes on opposite sides of their head

and governed by different hemispheres seemingly being able to perceive the world differently through different eyes so for example if I'm not mistaken at least some birds will be better at spotting predators with one eye rather than the other, and you hypothesize that this is because of the fact that they're seeing the predator in an eye that is more apt to looking out for predators, right? Yes, well, you can actually see birds turning their head in a way which would be abnormal

for the situation. If there's a predator that's in the wrong visual field, they will turn so that it's in the visual field, the left visual field, that comes to the right eye, because the right eye, the right brain is, sorry, the left eye to the right brain. The right hemisphere is the hemisphere which is looking out for the predator. And experiments have been done in lizards in which one eye was experimentally taped over and a predator was produced. And obviously when it's the right eye that's been taped over, which feeds to the left hemisphere, they look through the un-taped eye. But when it's their left eye that has been taped over,

which is the eye through which they would normally inspect a predator, they turn their heads to try and look through the taped-over eye. They try to look through it because that is their habit. So I just say that because it illustrates very clearly that there are these differences. They're not 100% difference. There's nothing in biology ever is, but there's a statistically highly significant difference between the use in a bird of its left and its right eye. We'll get back to Ian McGilchrist in just a second, but first,

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for as little as $5 a month. That said, back to Ian McGilchrist. So you've given a sort of sketch of what the different hemispheres do, And I know it's quite tricky to pin it down exactly. And like you say, they're both involved in everything. But if you had to sum up, you say that it used to be the case that people would think left brain is like, I don't know, reason, rationality, you know, language maybe. And the right brain is like art, music, poetry.

And that's misleading. It seems like you're saying. Could you give us maybe three better words on each side of the brain to try to approximate what it is that these hemispheres are responsible for? Well, I think the point is I mean, if I was to answer your question outright, I mean, one pairing

would be the left hemisphere is in a way only aware or only interested in what can be made unambiguous and explicit, whereas the right hemisphere is capable of sustaining things

that are on the surface of them, of them perhaps opposites, but that coexist and need one another and are perhaps at the same time in different ways present in the situation, it's also much better with understanding the implicit. So there was some truth in what you just said, but let me try and separate it out. So as I said, the difficulty with the way we used to think was it was about what they were doing, so reason, language, pictures, emotions. But In each of those cases, I can very clearly explain that, for example, language, some of it is very much a part of the left hemisphere.

And what is very, very largely true is that speech, the articulation of speech is in almost everybody in the left hemisphere. But that's not the whole of language. And the most important part of understanding language actually is supplied by the right hemisphere. So the left hemisphere is a little bit like a computer that's been given the Oxford English Dictionary and a book of rules of syntax, and it's trying to decode the message. Whereas the right hemisphere sees that the meaning of this is something that is not being stated, that is quite different. I mean, a very, very simple everyday example is if you're speaking in an

auditorium and you say it's very hot in here. The left hemisphere is saying he's pointing out that on a hot day in a room with a lot of people is getting warm. No prizes for that. But the right hemisphere understands what he's really saying is could you switch on the air conditioning or open a window. So the implicit meaning is what the right hemisphere understands, only the explicit, the left hemisphere. And when you think about it, so much of what what is truly important in language. Even in everyday language is metaphorical in nature, sometimes ironic, oblique.

It may be as important what is not being said as what is being said. Poetry, in fact, is something the right hemisphere is much better at than the left. And that's because its linguistic capabilities are different from those of the left. The left are to do with narrowing down on the certainty. In fact, if you wanted to make another difference

between the left and right that is global. The left hemisphere's whole raison d'ertre, if you like, is to try to narrow down to a certainty, whereas the resonant d'etre of the right hemisphere is to open up to a possibility. So it's always saying yes, but it might not be that. Ramachandran calls the right hemisphere

the devil's advocate, because it's seeing other possibilities here. So that's true of language, it's true of reason too. So some kinds of reasoning are better done by the left hemisphere. But when you get beyond the carrying out of rote procedures, often the right hemisphere is better able to understand the meaning of a calculation.

So the left hemisphere is better at times tables, partly because they're all recited and ingested in that way in childhood. And it follows rules and procedures. They're very good at that. It is, in fact, a bureaucrat. It was appointed as the emissary, you know, the one that would go about.

and be a high functioning bureaucrat for the master of. The master's the one that sees the whole picture. So this is true of reason and language, just as much as anything else. And to come to emotions, the most lateralized of all emotions is anger, and it lateralizes to the left hemisphere. The left hemisphere is not a cool customer.

It is not without emotions. It tends to have more self-centered, self-righteous emotions and more social emotions, that the deeper ones like empathy and melancholy and so on are more appreciated by the right hemisphere. And so on, I could go on. But what I'm really pointing out is it's the mode in which you're thinking about whatever it is will tell you which hemisphere is more important, not the actual sphere of activity, of human activity. Yeah.

Yeah. What I'm interested in, I suppose, is what this means for us, because we've got these two different hemispheres sort of governing different ways of being in the world. Like you say, it's not so much a different way of thinking about the world, but different ways of being in the world. It's just a different way to react. I mean, you often see people have discussions with each other, and it feels like they just don't understand where each other are coming from. And the terminology of saying, one, is being to left brain and one as being too right brain can be very helpful there. It's kind of like if you see Jordan Peterson and Richard Dawkins have a conversation about God and religion. And Peterson is talking about sort of narrative and how things are truer than true and that, you know, it's kind of fiction, but it's a special kind of fiction. And then Richard Dawkins being like, I want to know if you put a camera in, you know, if you put a camera in front of the tomb, would you see a man walk out of it like did it literally happen and it's it's extraordinary i mean it seems more understandable to me that richard dorkins is baffled by jordan peterson being asked did the exodus story

happen and peterson responds it's still happening that's his response quite quite baffling um but it seems equally baffling to jordan peterson when somebody asks him you know do you think it actually happened though like literally do you think that a man rose from the dead do you think that Jesus was born a perversion. And he's like, I don't even know how to begin answering that question. I don't have the requisite understanding of the terms that you're using. That seems absolutely baffling. Do you think that that is a sort of a conflict like that, something like a battle between left brain thinking and right brain thinking? Well, I rather resist these rather simple ways of using the terms, but I can't

entirely disagree with you. I think that ultimately when you start unpacking the way in which the right and the left hemisphere see the world, you can see that there are such differences. I mean, in many ways, Richard Dawkins is a scientific reductionist. He's a reductionist materialist. I hope I'm not doing him an injustice in saying that. But I think he therefore misunderstands the meaning of many things.

And one of them is that when it comes to certain things like, for example, consciousness, the ability to grasp it, to pin it down, to say what it is and where it arises, this is almost the wrong way to approach it, because it's not a thing like that. It's not another thing in the world alongside the things that consciousness allows us to be aware of. And God is not a thing in the world in the way that a rock or a stone or a tree is a thing in the world. Or at least we, I would begin to want to qualify that as well. But, you know, for these purposes, let's say a bicycle is a thing in the world. But God is not a very complicated machine.

He's not a very complicated anything of the kind that we know. And so to try to approach God in that way is going to produce no insight into what people mean. And you have to be either very arrogant or a very confident person to say, well, all these people who think that they understand something that I can't see, they're just wrong because I can't see it. another way of looking at it would be well maybe I need to revise my thoughts about what is true and I know this sounds like sort of hedging one's bets but is there a truth that can be stated in words that is true to what human nature is so is human nature in other words something that can be written down in a scientific text, and that pins down and exhausts what a human being is. Now, human beings we know exist, and we all have experience of them.

But in order to convey the realities of what a human being is, encounters, and is capable of, you'd have to turn to art, you'd have to turn to the works of Shakespeare, you'd have to turn to narratives, you turn to stories, to great myths which explain our relationship to a divine realm or to the cosmos or to one another. And if you don't have, and I think some people are just born without the capacity to feel what it is that art tells us, what poetry tells us, what music tells us, what rituals tell us, what narratives tell us,

then you won't understand why you're missing a very great deal because you're trying to make it all fit into a very onto a pro-crustian bed. You're trying to cut off everything that doesn't fit into this one way of looking at things. And to make this clear, in the ancient world, in the ancient Greek world, and these people were by no means fools. or, I mean, they were the first scientists in the modern sense. So Dawkins should hold them in great respect. And they did make extraordinary scientific advances.

But they didn't think that these advances would tell them the answers to the big questions, like what is a human being? What is it? What does consciousness mean? Where is it? Who has it? What is the divine? What do we mean when we talk about the sacred? Which almost everybody experiences and has, finds a need to talk about the sacred, even if they don't use the term God, it doesn't really matter.

And so in this ancient Greek world, there were two conceptions of truth, mythos, or muthos, as it would be originally, and logos. And mythos has given us the word myth, and logos has given us the word logic. But they believe that the big truths, the really deep truths, the great truths, could only be encompassed by, by poetry, by narrative, by what falls in the realm of myth. And that logic was the sort of thing that a lawyer would do in a courtroom to settle a dispute and decide how much money was owed by one person to another. So it operated on a much more trivial realm. Now, you can say I'm only interested in that trivial realm

in which things can be measured and demonstrated by a photograph and so forth. But do you believe in love? Do you think that love is real? If you don't think it's real, I pity you because it's the most staggering experience in life. And it has many forms. There's the loved one has erotic love for a partner. There is the love one has for nature. There is for those of us who sense something greater and divine.

There is the love one has for that. But love cannot be demonstrated in laboratory. It cannot be manipulated. It can't be measured in any way. Does that make it unreal? Not at all. So I feel this is just a huge discrepancy between a very narrow idea of what truth is and a broader one. And if you'll permit me, I just want to say something about truth there, that there are two, well, there are many ways, of course, to think about what truth is and many types of theory and philosophy about how to think of truth. But two that are very important because they're quite different and we can recognize them are truth as correctness, which is really this closing down on a precise form of words or measurement that encompasses what it is that we are looking at.

There's something out there, which is the truth, and I'm going to take steps which lead me in a linear fashion towards that truth. And I get closer and closer to that truth, which is an entity somewhere. And the other is that truth is a process of discovery, of unveiling. And when I say discovery, I mean literally uncovering, uncovering the accretions that have come between us and a deeper truth that is not discernible by the everyday eye of reason. The everyday eye of reason is very valuable. I very much respect reason and science. And they've served me well for many, many years. And, you know, I worry that nowadays, in fact, both of them are coming under attack.

People are discrediting science unless it fits with the narrative of what they would like politically to think it's true. People are discarding reason if they don't find that it leads to the place they want to go. And I'm not attacking them. I'm just saying they have limitations. Intuition has limitations, too, but it also has. great powers to put us in touch with things that science alone won't take us to. And indeed, much of science was actually solved not by the scientific method, but by a process of intuitive approach towards a gestal, to shape, a form, which gave the answer to a mathematician or to a scientist.

And imagination is also a very important tool. And it seems to me that what Dawkins is saying, I don't say he has no imagination, I don't know him that well, but he wants to say that what imagination reveals to him is not true. But that's because he's got an idea, I suspect, that imagination is something that takes you away from reality. It's what I would call fantasy. Whereas, as was known to the great philosophers of the late 18th and early 19th century, imagination was the way in which one felt one's way into the true reality of something other than oneself. And without imagination, one couldn't reach it. So where have we gone wrong here then?

Because the kind of Dawkins-esque approach of the primacy of, I suppose, in a way, left-brain thinking seems to be dominant. And I think you've said in the past and recently that the world is sort of becoming a bit left-brain dominant or is a bit left-brain dominant in a way that maybe it once didn't sort of used to be. be. And I'm interested for two reasons. The first is sort of like, you know, when I say how does that happen? I don't just mean what are the social conditions that make people think this way. But I mean, how is it that the brain starts acting differently? Is it like this mind that connects the two hemispheres just sort of starts ignoring one side? Are we able to train the mind into sort of residing more in the right brain or the left brain? That seems very strange. If you have one brain that is all connected and communicating with each other,

How could it even be the case that people would just sort of switch one of them off in a lot of these conversations? Well, because they're not, I mean, you're thinking in terms of an alternative, this is on, this is off or whatever, whereas what I'm talking about is, is a spectrum, if you like. So it's more like, it's not like a switch that's on and off of one or the other. It's more like a slider in which, you know, one hemisphere can be more. attended to or it can be more in use in our attention to the world than the other. And I think that what has happened is that it's not so much that our brains are any different. I mean, of course, they're always different and evolving slowly over time as everything evolves. So it is true that our brains are probably subtly different from those of Achaean Greeks.

But if you put them into a scanner, if you did the thought experiments and put them into a scanner, you wouldn't expect to see their brains very different from ours. So it's not that the brain itself is the key here. It's how the brain is being used. I think the way to think of it is rather like if you bought a new radio and you listen to a couple of stations that are your favourites, after a while you begin to listen only to one. I think that's more the way it is.

And I should emphasize that I don't think that the great changes in cultural history that I map out in the second half of the master's emissary in which I look at the West from the time of the ancient Greeks through to the present day, I look at the sort of great changes, moments of change in the history of ideas and in the rise and falls of the Greek, the Roman and, if you like, the modern civilization. And I'm not saying that the brain causes these changes, but what I'm saying, the causes of changes may be many, many things. They may be economic, they may be environmental changes,

they may be wars, they may be political upheavals, they may be many things that cause people to change the way in which they they live or think. But inevitably, their thinking is, if you like, molded by the brain through which it is brought to be articulated. And so it is perfectly coherent to talk of a period during which you can say that most of the phenomena of that culture appear to be expressive of a more left hemisphere-dominated take on the world or a more right hemisphere take. And that's really all that I'm saying when I'm talking about those things.

And I do, to come back to your earlier point, I do definitely think that at the moment it's quite extraordinary how much this left hemisphere take dominates and that we are not any longer apparently aware of all the richness, the beauty, the complexity, the meaning that the right hemisphere gives to life. that we live in a world which is constituted by random lumps of senseless matter bumping into one another and none of it has any purpose, meaning, or direction, or any beauty for that matter. So I'd strongly differ from that point of view. But it's also, you've said that the hemispheres are not two different ways of thinking

about the world, the different ways of being in the world. It's like no one is more legitimate than the other they're not they're not sort of competing hypotheses or something they're just both ways of approaching the world and so when somebody says yeah well when i observe the material world and i see atoms and i see them bumping into each other and i don't observe anything else are they making a a mistake there i mean the way you've just described it sort of parodying this person who says you know there's nothing i mean earlier you were talking about somebody who you know doesn't have meaning or love because all they see is sort of materialism. And I guess, you know, there's a sense in which I agree with you.

I saw someone put it like, you know, do you kiss your mother with that worldview? Like, do you really sort of believe that? Do you live like that? Maybe not. But are they like making a mistake? Well, I think a very simple point, which can be made in a sentence, is do you think love is real? If you do think love is real, then you have to accept that something that, we don't know where it is, we don't know what it is, we don't, we can't measure it in the lab,

we can't manipulate it in the lab, we can't see it or photograph it, we don't have a dial or a meter which will respond to it. We can find, but this is a very erroneous way of thinking, you can find a kind of different, you can find something that you can find something that you, presume is a proxy for love. But mistaking things for the proxies that can be measured is a fundamental, a very basic area of thinking.

But as you say, the difference between the hemispheres is not just in ways of thinking. It's in ways of being, which includes thinking and feeling and behaving and a way of approaching the world, a way of attending to it,

a way of being in it. In other words, it affects every aspect of your life. It doesn't just stop with an articulation of a few paragraphs of rather simple propositions. It's a whole way of being, and a civilization can adopt a way of being and a way of thinking, which it's hardly aware of as peculiar

because it's forgotten the alternatives. and that this can be very destructive and I believe that's the world we live in now where I think a lot of people are simply no longer aware of what the world can offer because we've disengaged ourselves from all the ways in which we used to be made aware of it I mean number one living in close proximity to the natural world which until very recently almost everybody in the world did living in a culture which has evolved over time and has evolved in such a way as to help stabilize that culture so that it can live in harmony with its environment, so that it can understand its experiences, worship of a divine or sacred realm.

These are all the ways in which we can be reminded of things that are bigger, more complex than we are. And we've lost a sense of wonder before the world. We've lost a sense of modesty about what it is we can know. In other words, we've become arrogant and simplistic in our thinking. And the result of this has been known since time immemorial. It's what Greek tragedy was about, the hubris of a hero, somebody who had the potential to be great. But because he overreached himself and didn't know what it was, he didn't know,

he brought everything down on his head. And that is what we are now living out, I'm afraid. We're destroying society. we're destroying the planet and we're destroying ourselves. I want to talk about how we might go about fixing that shortly, but first I do want to, I suppose, push back on this idea. I mean, you said that the position can be summed up in a single question,

do you believe in love? And I think a lot of my listeners will say it sort of depends on what you mean because I experience this thing love, you know, at least... sometimes and a lot of people are satisfied to say that this is an emergent property of atoms bumping into each other and it's an interesting one and a fascinating one and one that we still have a lot to learn about but can essentially be understood by reducing it to its material parts that is a very left brain way of thinking about what love is and a lot of people are simply satisfied to say well, that's what love is. It's a bit cynical. It's maybe a bit depressing. It's maybe not sort of how you

behave, but then people are constantly exercising self-delusion all the time and that this is what love is. I mean, what would you say to somebody who says that? I'd say a lot of things. I mean, first and most trivially, of course, people are, believed that if they're being cynical, they're being more intelligent. Unfortunately, all the psychological research, shows that people who are cynical are less intelligent than people who's... Yes, I quote it in The Matter with Things. The matter of things took my thinking very, very much further

than what is in the Master of His Emissary into these realms particularly. But I just say that trivially. So don't pride yourself on being cynical. But I'd say it's simple-minded because, you know, It's promissory materialism. We can't tell you how the feeling you have for your partner, your loved one, emerges from colliding atoms.

We're just going to say so because we're going to stick to our dogma. That's stupid. That's the kind of thing that people who have no flexibility, no imagination do that. You're going to say, oh, it's all going to be atoms bumping into one. How do they know that? Where did they derive that? Is that really science? Let's go to physics.

Let's go to the physics of atoms. We now know that atoms had nothing like little billion balls bumping into one another that we thought we were. We now know that the basis of matter is interchangeable with energy, first of all. Matter is interchangeable with energy, if that's what E equals MC squared means. And what exists, and we call the basis of matter, is probabilistic form fields. and those things that we used to call particles have no existence in the sense of like little tiny balls straight out of school you might go around thinking.

So forget all that. Spend a little time acquainting yourself with what physicists actually say. So physicists are much more in my experience philosophically sophisticated than biologists. Biologists have been subjected to a really It's thoroughly uninteresting, unethical, intellectually barren way of thinking, which physics jettisoned over 100 years ago. And I'm very relieved to say that biologists are beginning to realize they've got to jettison

it as well. So just in the last 10 to 15 years, there have been enormous steps forward in biology in which we now realize that organisms, living things, are nothing like. machines and that the machine model is an extraordinarily dangerous model to apply. It can help you solve small problems in a complex system. I don't know how much to go into this. But the complex system is different. Humans are not like computers.

Yeah, I want to get into it. I think it's interesting. What do you mean when you say the idea that humans are like the machines or computers is totally wrong? Well, first of all, you can switch a computer off. and come back 10 years later and switch it on, it'll probably work. You can't do that with a living organism.

I mean, it's a simple point. It's an important one. Machines can't themselves in the process of making themselves write the instructions that are the instructions to make themselves. A machine can be made by another machine if the instructions are put into that machine, the first machine. It can make a second machine. But there is no machine.

that in its coming into being, it is capable of planning its own existence. I mean, I know that in the genome that was going to be the blueprint, there's almost no information. I mean, it's so vanishingly small. It can't conceivably give the information of even quite simple things. We look at, I mean, look at a nematode worm. You can cut its head off and it will regrow a new head.

And in that head, it will have the memories that the old head had. Where do those memories come from? Yes. I mean, I don't know where to go. There's just so many things to say here. The human brain in utero develops on average 4,000 new neurons every second, 4,000 new neurons every second. And when you look at the brain and you realize how complexly it is constructed, how important it is that different neurons are in the areas they are.

Where is the map for that? It's certainly not in the genome. And you know, a machine can't love, a machine can't feel awe, a machine can't feel emotions, a machine hasn't got a body, a machine can't know it's going to die, it can't project a delighted future. It has no memory. It has data banks, but it doesn't have memory, which implies a consciousness. A machine is completely different from an organism.

And what is really essential to this, but will sound rather superficial, not superficial, but kind of like, well, I don't really get that. But is the difference between a complex system and a complicated system. So a complicated system is one in which you just keep adding modules. And so, for example, a fighter jet engine and the whole jet plane is a very complicated system. But it's not a complex system. A complex system is a system in which there are whole ranges of processes going on that interact with one another in ways that we can hardly describe, in which bits of one cascade will then link into another cascade.

And we couldn't plan this even for one second in a single cell organism. We couldn't map it. There are in that single cell, in a second, millions of interactive processes going on, including feedback loops. So the process is coming out of one of these processes, it's feeding into another process. It is nothing like a machine. Machines are not like this. The parts of machines are not changing as a machine is moving.

But an organism's parts are changing and rebuilding and re-building. configuring all the time. So if I might say so, a living being and a machine are almost as different. In fact, I can't think of any two more different things in the entire cosmos. And what's more, I would say that there is nothing in the cosmos that is like a machine, except a few million lumps of metal that we created in the last few centuries. So nothing in the universe is mechanical. We know from physicists that the inanimate universe is not mechanical. And at last, biologists are waking up to the very much more obvious point that organisms life are not, is not mechanical either.

So, you know, as I say, I hardly know where to stop and start with this one. Yeah, and this is definitely not just a case. Because the thing about, like, biology, evolutionary biology, is that given the amazing span of time, just unfathomable amount of time that there's been for evolution to work on organisms, and given sort of how evolutionary pressures will just like perfectly curate absolutely everything,

the most minute details, the most incredible detail, it is possible for this to evolve on a naturalistic framework, at least that's what the naturalist will say. Is it definitely not the case? case, and I mean, I think you're going to say yes, but I want to make sure that the differences you're describing here, you know, the inability of a machine to create more machines without sort of exterior input, that kind of thing, the inability of a machine to develop something like consciousness. No, I didn't say that, Alex, because somebody could reply, well, I can make a machine

that I can leave alone and I can program it and it will make more machines. That's not. the point. The point is no one machine can write its own program in the process of coming into being. Right. And it's, and what I'm asking is that's, that's definitely a distinction of, of principle. That's not just a case of like, you know, machines being a couple of hundred years old, as you say, and biological organisms being literally billions of years old. And so having much more time to develop complexity and abilities that machines haven't sort of been able to muster yet. In other words, I'm trying to preempt what somebody listening to this might say in objection, which is that, yeah, of course, machines are totally different from organisms. But, you know, give machines four billion years to sort of evolve and communicate with each other and artificial general intelligence and all of this kind of stuff.

And eventually you'll end up with something that looks just like an organism. well there are two separate points here is it legitimate to make an organism more comprehensible you think by comparing it to a machine the machine's the only machine to we know and have and the answer is definitely no so the other point you're making is a quite separate one which is again a promissory one I mean nobody knows what in millions of years There won't be machines in millions of years because we'll have destroyed ourselves on the planet. But let's just suppose that machines could evolve. It's really a bit of a cheat to say, I say now that if they're given millions of years,

they will come to this. Because we didn't, life didn't start in machines at all. People say, oh, well, they could become conscious. But how do we know that they could become conscious? Where does that idea itself come from? The other thing that's quite interesting, just because people say, oh, nonsense, evolution is completely un...

Has no purpose. And I'm not going into intelligent design. I'm not saying, I'm talking about intelligent design. I'm referring to things that we do actually know. So what we know, and Barbara McClintock, won a Nobel Prize in the 80s, I think, of the last century, for her discovery that cells can, first of all, a part of a cell can respond to another remote part of the cell in an intelligent way when that cell needs something from that other part of the cell in ways that we don't understand.

But it can also very rapidly invent a way of dealing with a threat that it has not been prepared for by its genes or by its heredity or by its own experience. So in other words, it is intelligent. I say that, you know, a good criterion of intelligence is if this organism can see a new way of tackling a problem very quickly that it has not been prepared for in any way. There is no antecedent for it. So you find that, for example, a particular change needs to happen in an organism, a metabolic change needs to happen very rapidly.

And it's not one that it has any known mechanism for achieving. Sometimes within as little as two or three days, it will have made a change that helps that organism persist in being. And it doesn't have to wait for the two billion years that that change. would have taken to happen randomly. So biologists are realizing that very little is random in that way. There needs to be a degree of order and a degree of disorder. Not so that there's chaos, but so there is flexibility in a system.

And it's that flexibility that comes from a pairing. You know, we started talking earlier about pairings of division and union. But another important pairing is order and a degree of disorder. something that's too ordered can't be responsive and reflexive, something that's too chaotic, can't be. It needs to have this completely extraordinary capacity to be largely ordered but capable of completely new turns. And that is what life gives us, and that's what organisms are like. Circling back to this point about consciousness that you mentioned a moment ago, you said machines becoming conscious, how could we know that that's possible? and I just wanted to check, would you go as far as to say, not just that we have no way to know that machines could one day be conscious?

Do you think that you'd be more confident in saying that machines cannot become conscious, if you do what I'm saying? Are you saying that, like, in other words, is it just, we have no reason to think they could become conscious, or is it actually, we have reason to think that they will never become conscious? Because, of course, this is like the debate around artificial intelligence at the moment. that and I suppose the sort of ethical implications of it. But in terms of the sort of philosophical implications, this is the debate about what AGI is. Yes. I think that nobody can ever be 100% certain of anything, actually.

There is literally no certainty in the cosmos. We know that. So I can't completely with certainty. The left hemisphere would like me to say, well, you must say it certainly can, or it certainly can't. I just, it's a question that I really haven't got

enough information to answer, and I don't think any living person has enough information to answer. I want to say that the Turing test is in my view a really rather silly idea. I mean, it doesn't prove anything. It just says, I can't tell whether this creature is a real... For the sake of listeners,

the Turing test is that a proposed idea of how to tell if a computer has consciousness, and it's something like a test as to whether or not it's possible to tell whether or not you're talking to a computer. Like if you're speaking to something and you don't know if it's a computer or a person, then if in fact you are speaking to a computer, that's an indication of consciousness. That's right. And it was an idea proposed by Turing, who's, of course, a brilliant man,

who was really in at the very beginnings of computers. But it's not a good test of anything. I mean, because I'm sure, after all, what a computer is, is a mimic, and you can make it mimic anything. In the 18th century, they had speaking heads. They were very clunky and they were made of bronze and all that sort of thing. And really, all we've done is make these much, much more sophisticated. But there's still machines that are made to mimic and be parasitic on human minds and human intelligences. So I can't rule out, I don't propose to rule out anything, but I think it, let me put it this way,

I think it would be, first of all, impossible to prove one way or the other, and secondly, enormously unlikely. Because there are no complex entities that we know other than the ones that are in organisms that have this capacity. So this takes it on to the question of the relationship between consciousness and matter, which I'm happy to go to if you want. Well, I would like to, but perhaps before that, there's another thing you mentioned, which is that you said, I'm not doing intelligent design here. I'm not talking about God. Given the nature of my channel, we're very interested in religion and philosophy of religion. I have to ask the question, does this not all point when you talk about sort of non-randomness and complexity, and the impossibility of biological matter

just sort of springing up out of nowhere randomly by chance. It sort of sounds a lot like many conversations I've had with theists. And I'm not going to ask you if you don't want to say. It's in many ways a personal question whether you personally believe in God. But do you think that this is pointing

to some kind of intelligent design? Well, to answer your difficult question, I think the answer is yes, but of course, rather like all the difficult questions, the writer, it does depend what you mean. And what I don't mean by God is an engineer in the sky. And it's that kind of idea of intelligent design that I would not accept. In fact, I think that's a very left-hemispheric idea.

It's the left hemisphere's way of flattering itself is to say, well, yes, of course, it could be a God. It really has a kind of intelligence we have. and simply is applying it on a large scale to a cosmic machine. What instead I am suggesting is that the ground of being, which is another way of saying, the god that is the source of being in the cosmos, is not chaotic, is not random,

that is beautiful and has purpose. In other words, has direction. When you look at the cosmos, I mean, one thing you can say is that the movements, both inanimate and animate in it, certainly seem to have direction to them. They don't just go in any old direction. They do tend to have consistent tendencies. And those consistent tendencies are, if you like, either attractions, which I prefer to the idea of drives, but it may be more comprehensible to be to say those are, that drives in the cosmos, but they might also be the response to attractive forces in the cosmos that lead things into certain directions and shapes.

But exactly what they are is not determined. So it is both an open system and one that is not devoid of meaning or direction. And if your idea of intelligent design were compatible with that, then I would say, okay, well, maybe we're talking about the same thing. Unfortunately, a lot of intelligent design, and I'm not sure it's true of all of it, but I think a lot of it and what gives it a bad name is the idea that there is a cosmic engineer who is fiddling the numbers, if you're thinking. But I think what has happened is that the universe has been created so that it makes use intelligently of the possibilities that are open.

So the future is not foreclosed, but it doesn't mean that it could be random. It has directions, exactly what they will lead to. I don't think even the divine source knows. I argue strongly that if there is a God, that God is not omniscient and not omnipotent, but is also not not omniscient and not omnipotent. What do I mean by that? If you think of these things in a very left hemispheric way, the omniscience would mean that God knows everything that ever has been, ever will be,

and all the possibilities. and therefore the future is known, everything is closed and the whole business of us leading out our lives is really a sorry charade because we have no freedom and as it were the cosmos is not achieving anything creative, it's just unfolding something that's already there. And omnipotence can be of a similar kind, that it means that God can just do anything, can make two equal five or whatever. I don't believe that God is of this nature, but I don't think that you can say, well, God is not omniscient or not omnipotent. You can only say he's not, not omniscient and not not omnipotent.

And what I'm getting at here is that those terms don't really apply. It's like, if you ask me, well, is God green? And I say, well, no, God, well, it's not green. But, you know, he's not green either. I mean, it's just that it's the wrong kind of term. Yeah, so it's like asking it if God is even. And it's like, no, he's not even. Yes.

But he's not odd either, you know. It's just like the wrong terminology. I mean, famously, Thomas Aquinas is famed for pointing out that all religious language is analogical. That is God is not omnipotent. God is not loving. God is not powerful. God is none of these things because these are human terms to sort of approximate the kind of thing that God might be like. And maybe the only way that we really have the authority to use these as analogies is because we have. like scripture using these terms so we know they must be accurate at some level but we have to keep in mind that God is not any of these things these are just essentially essentially metaphors so I think I understand what you're saying that although it does sound you know when you when you first start talking in those terms well it's not that he's omnipotent it's that he's not not omnipotent people are probably going to be a bit sort of befuddled by that but if I'm understanding you correctly you're you're meaning something a bit like that I am meaning exactly something like that. I'm meaning that you're asking a question, which is the question you could ask of

something that is already a creation, a machine or an object. But God is not a machine or an object. God is the terms as it were on which there can be anything. So God is not, God is not the first cause in the sense of a first actor who temporarily started a process. But God is the the prime cause in the sense that the without which there can be nothing you know so the the basis on which there can be something and the questions you can ask of that are different questions i mean we we came there earlier when talking about Dawkins but of course this is right and this is a point that is um i mean no doubt some people will think well that's just a sort of get out clause and so on but i can't help people like that because you've got to actually broaden your

mind to see that there are different ways of knowing things. There are different kinds of truth. And you can either accept that or not. And in a way, you have to live with your choice about whether you do accept that or not. But I would recommend opening your mind and reading more philosophy and seeing that there's more going on than just mechanical, certifiable facts that can be put into a textbook and verified by an experiment. So, but I do think it's a very important point you've raised because it's a very, very difficult one to articulate as everything to do with God is.

As soon as you start saying something, you can be misunderstood. But my point is that God is my idea of God, and the first thing one has to say is one's bound to be ignorant in talking about these things, including people who say. isn't one. I mean, it's just one of those areas. My idea, my hunch, my intuition, what speaks to me is the idea of a cause, a god, an ontological cause, a source of being, the ground of being, that, as I say, neither has determined everything, but nor is completely absent. He's not that sort of God that has, you know, disappeared off somewhere and is not at the least bit interested. I believe that God is himself in evolution. I'm an evolutionary, a process philosopher. If I'm a theology at all, I'm a process theologian.

So I believe that the divine essence is in process all the time. And some people like Ron Williams, to whom I've often talked, doesn't like this. He agrees with me about almost everything. I think I can say that I have written on these topics, but he's very cautious about evolution, not about process theology. And I can see why, because he wants to be able to say that God is single and perfect.

And I don't see why it should not be possible for God to have manifestations in both, realms. If Christianity is true, its strength is to be able to say that God can be both transcendent and imminent in his creation. I think that is an extraordinarily powerful idea that is best expressed through the Christian mythos. And I use the word mythos without any sense that I'm talking about something true or not true. I'm just saying it is a very powerful mythos and may very well be true. But if that's the case, then God can be both in one sense, that transcendent being that is beyond and beyond all change and knows everything and so on. But the God that interests

me is the God that is in communion with this world and is in fact changing in response to it. So Whitehead, A.N. Whitehead had this vision that the divine cause and the creation were evolving in tandem, responding to one another. And I actually mean that the reason there is life at all is to have something that can respond to that divine source of being. Because, again, as Whitehead pointed out, the business of life is a puzzle.

First of all, it acts against the second door of thermodynamics and kicks against entropy. it's enormously expensive in terms of energy. It produces creatures that don't really last very long. And as Whitehead said, if you really want to last for a long time, the secret is never to have been alive. Mountains last for millions of years, but living things only last for a short while.

So why is the life at all? And I think the answer is that life speeds up and enormously magnifies the process of response. So if you like, the inanimate world is very limited in the responses it can make. When a rock is eroded by water, it is in a way responding to that water and so forth. But this is, life goes to a whole other level. What life produces is creatures that can respond almost infinitely faster and respond to many more things that are in consciousness.

So I believe that this ground of being is conscious, and that all things that we call material are manifestations of consciousness. Now, that is not quite the same as panpsychism in the sense that I believe that a rock has consciousness, if it does, and I couldn't rule it out, any more than I can rule out that one day in the future a machine might become conscious, or I doubt it. I can't rule out that a rock has consciousness, but that's not my meaning. My meaning is that all things are in consciousness. This is like a distinction between pantheism and panentheism.

So panentheism, pantheism is simply the idea that God is simply the sum of everything. But panentheism, as I imagine you know, is the belief that God is in everything and that everything is in God. And my belief about consciousness is like that. I don't believe that consciousness is just, as it were, literally in a teaspoon or something. At least if it is, it's not the consciousness I can recognize. But I believe that all the things that we encounter in our consciousness are manifestations of consciousness. is one way in which consciousness can manifest it's a it's a far cry from the way that people will have been talking about God at a popular level you know 10 20 years

ago at the height of new atheism and their debates with evangelicals that was all very I suppose left-brained it was all syllogisms it was all debates about premises and and technicalities and fallacies this is like a totally different approach to the question, which makes it difficult. Like, suppose that we were sort of pitted in some kind of debate about God's existence, and I'm the atheist, and I'm here to criticize what you've just said. There's kind of, it would be a very difficult thing to do, because what you're doing is sort of telling a story about the nature of human beings rather than sort of making

a syllogized argument. And I think that that's an approach to the question, which I've begun to find much more interesting. And you've said a moment ago, you know, you encourage people read a bit of philosophy and try to sort of open their mind a bit. I would like to see, or I'd like to hear some advice on exactly how that can be done. And the reason that I ask is because, I mean, you said before, some people are seemingly just born with an inability to, I don't know, appreciate painting and art and poetry. And for what it's worth, I think that I at least used to be one of those people. And this is why I find, I think this is why I'm particularly interested.

in this. Just yesterday I was taking part in an event where we were discussing and debating the revival of Christianity and whether we're about to see a big revival of Christianity. And I'm sort of skeptical of this. The statistics show the opposite, but it's never as simple as that with religious demographics. But the thing that I have been talking about recently a lot is this abandoning of the propositional way of thinking, that narrative and and poetry and that kind of way of thinking. It's sort of making a bit of a comeback, and people are beginning to realize

that that's not actually how we interact with the world. We don't tend to interact with the world through syllogism. And my own self, I'm thinking about how, you know, 10 years ago or so, I really wanted to understand poetry, for example. I try reading poetry because the people that I loved would always reference poems. And, you know, I'd look at what it said, and then I'd have to look up who the person was, what they were writing about. What does the poem mean? And eventually I'd be like, okay, no,

I can see why that's why that's useful. And every now and again, there was a line that I understood. And I was like, yeah, okay, that's really powerful. And so I'd use it in a talk or I'd use it to illustrate a point or something like that. It's quite a functional relationship to something like poetry, which is probably deeply inappropriate. And at some point, something shifted, where now I think I have this appreciation for, I won't say understanding of, but appreciation for poetry and now I can go to an art gallery and not be bored out of my mind. And I'm not quite sure when that happened or how that happened. One hypothesis I have is I've spoken a few times now on the channel about how I had some experiences on psychedelic drugs. And the thing that psychedelic drugs are

famous for doing is just like blowing open, not just what you think about the world, but the way you think about the world. And I wanted to ask you whether you think something like a psychedelic experience could be responsible for like an unlocking of a right brain way of thinking or perhaps if you're very right brain, an unlocking of a left way of thinking. And after that, or as well as that, what else could somebody use as a tool to do that unlocking? Because you said, you know, read more philosophy, for example, but I think it's impossible to read continental philosophy and sort of find it useful if you don't already have a bit of a sort of a right brain engagement, you know?

Yes. I mean, I want to shelve for the moment. I will come back to it. I've got nothing interesting to say about it. Psychedelics. I think they're overhypes and I'm rather cautious about them. So I don't deny. I mean, I can't deny that some people tell me they've had experiences that have altered their spiritual sense. And if they say so, I'm not contradicting them. I'm just, I don't find it a very, interesting way for this conversation to drift, partly because I can't contribute anything to it. I don't have negative experiences of these things, and I really mean negative. I've not really tried them, but when I have tried them, they've been either very unpleasant or simply haven't worked at all, mainly they never work on me. I mean, I've had everything, including intravenous catamine, I've eaten mushrooms, I've had cakes, none of this touches me. But what matters to me is really imaginative experience, which I've had, very much all my life in response to nature to begin with,

and then very much poetry and music and art and so on. But I want to just go back earlier to where you were saying, you know, you were sort of setting up this atheist who would only talk in syllogisms. And then you said, but, you know, you say that it, they'll be suspicious of you if we can't produce them. But let me just point out, I try to point out about what can be studied in the lab. Sylligisms have their limitations. Sylligisms can lead you to only certain kinds of conclusions. That kind of logic is based on certain presuppositions.

There's nothing wrong with that. It's not a weakness. It's the conditions on which you can carry out these processes. The mistake is to think that this can answer all our questions. So what has happened to Anglo-American analytical philosophy, what I call triple A philosophy, is it's disappeared up its own fundament. It's become more and more petty. It's become less and less in touch with any of the really important questions.

And all the great philosophy of the last hundred years has been in other traditions. In the pragmatists, particularly people like CS Perth, William James. I mean, I defy anyone to tell me that they weren't insightful and thoughtful. highly intelligent people. And then I think that not everything that comes out of the phenomenological tradition, but not everything that comes out of any tradition, particularly the purely analytical one is worth listening to. And Wittgenstein and other philosophers who were trained in the analytical tradition,

eventually found that they had to go beyond it, beyond it. Heidegger studied Aquinas and then decided that. actually in order to understand the deep things in being, you had to go beyond it. And Aquinas himself, who was certainly the greatest systematic philosopher since the classical era, himself had an experience one day in which he said, I have seen something which is so great and so important that all that I have written. I think by then he'd written 33 enormous volumes of philosophical attempts to come at the nature of God, all that I have written is but as chaff or straw.

Now, so when you get that, you sort of, if you don't think, okay, there are certain things that cannot be approached in this way. But let me take it just a bit further, because I don't want people to get away with the idea that there's something soft going on here in a dismissive way. And this is to do with something you said about, the only way you can approach God is metaphorical. And I think that is true, up to a point.

I'm not even sure you can do that. I think the only way you can speak in prose about God is by saying things that God is not. In other words, following the so-called via negativa or the apathetic path towards truth. And interestingly, science is like this. Science can never assert a truth. It can only say that certain alternatives look to it to be

untrue on the basis of the evidence so far. So it's not such a different process, but neither is metaphor. Metaphor is behind all our language, including very much the language of philosophy, of mainstream analytical philosophy, and of science. So, as I sometimes point out, even the words like abstract and immaterial are themselves entirely metaphorical. The word abstract comes from Latin roots, meaning to be dragged away from somewhere, in other words, taken out of its context and physically dragged somewhere else. That is what it comes from. Immaterial comes from a root originally, Marta meaning mother, and going on from there

to mean wood and as a symbol of things that are material and so forth. So all our thinking, we couldn't get to first base without metaphors. All our thinking is based on metaphor. And you probably know that that is a highly recognized and respected stream in mainstream philosophy. And I'm talking of people like Lakoff and Johnson here. And if you do know enough about mainstream philosophy, you see that there are really great names here often trespass out outside of it and went into other realms. And what you get is a massive surface.

sophistication of philosophy after Kant, you get, I mean, there were others, of course, but after him you get people who are sometimes inappropriately called the German idealist philosophers and so forth, then you get into an era in which people's philosophy, including that of Schopenhauer and Nietzsche at times and so on, is capable of tackling things that this very arid, we must have it clear now, is it this, or it? is it that, we'll never, never reach. You see, it's the insistence on clarity. And I think you should be as clear as the subject matter allows, but no clearer than that.

And if you try to make it clearer, you are now moving into error. You're moving away from truth, towards falsehood. And the really big questions are of this nature that they can't be clarified in that way, and they can't be made consistent with the law of the excluded middle. That all started with, of course, Aristotle. And it has had an unfortunate effect that people are unwilling to see that a thing in its opposite may often obtain. I mean, you can say it's like that the law of the excluded middle is that any proposition P must be true or false. It can't be both.

It can't be neither. Yes. and I'm saying that sometimes not only can it be neither, but it might be both. And here again, we have to say the stuff that deals with the every day is not a good way of dealing with the rarefied area we're going into of consciousness of God and so forth. I mean, let me quote Neil's bore, I mean inaccurately, but I mean at least the gist of what he was saying was that a thing and it's, opposite may very well be true, and he had the yin-yang symbol, the Tai Jitsu, on his coat of arms when he was ennobled by the Norwegian, I think it was the Danish government, I can't remember. But in any case, he said that the thing in its contrary are often true, but this is not true

of the trivial. So, you know, for example, if I had coffee this morning, either I had milking it or I didn't. There's no sense in saying, well, it's not really one or the other. But when you get to the realm of the things we're talking about, they are manifest more by contradiction than by simple statements where the contrary is obviously wrong. So does that mean that it's inappropriate to approach those questions at all with sort of an empirical, material, worldly approach, that is the approach of the new atheists of the Richard Dawkins who say, and suppose they agreed with you that, of course, there's a sense in which religion is a subject. God as a being is a being of the right brain, of the right hemisphere, is a being

of narrative and story, and these are the kind of things that can be true and false at the same time. But, however, you know, the question of, I don't know, causation in the universe or the question of specific claims about Jesus dying on a cross being born of a version, though these are scientific questions that can be answered with specificity and empiricism. Is it totally inappropriate to discuss this subject of religion with the sort of left brain approach? Well, you have to understand the way in which I don't want to repeat myself, and we haven't got time to repeat myself. But this distinction between mythos, you see, mythos is not what we mean by myth is a lie. A mythos may contain truth. And when one talks about God being born in this way and suffering and dying, there is a truth in that,

which is not equal by any other story, any other revelation, any other idea about the nature of, the creation and the nature of the cosmos that I know. And people understand things in different ways. And that's not just so it's all untrue. No, it may be very true, actually, that God does suffer. I don't know. I can't limit this being. I can't limit this being and say he couldn't actually be in,

I think there's something divine in all of us, and indeed Christ himself thought that there was. the sayings of Christ are very difficult to arrive at because it was all written down a long time after the fact and so on. But I would sort of say about the story, I can't rule out that very odd things do seem to happen at times, that the ordinary laws of the way things are are not necessarily universal in experience. And I couldn't rule out that somebody who had indeed been dead could, in fact, come back to life. We don't really know what happens when people die, actually. And people can be brain dead and have completely flat EEG traces for considerable periods

and come back and not only come back, but come back with memories of what happened during that period. Now, you know, you can argue about this. And there are people who will be never convinced, and there'll be people who will, whose conviction cannot be shaken, as in most of these things, I tend to be a skeptic amongst believers and a believer among skeptics. I tend to think that it's important to bear both possibilities in mind and not necessarily to have to collapse them to one or the other. That's the left hemisphere going, oh, it's got to be a very narrow, simple truth like this. It's got to be this if there's a camera there and so on. I don't know. I'm not saying that that camera might not

have recorded. I just don't know. And frankly, I don't. I don't care because the truth of this mythos is what is enacted in extraordinary services of worship in rituals, in ceremonies that are ancient and are, that bring one into contact with something, laugh at it who may, that is profoundly real and important. So what are we to make of that? We should set aside these very simple-minded, almost adolescent ideas, that it's got to be this, it's got to be that, and I need to know. As I get older, I realize that there are fewer and fewer certainties, and there are very few certainties in science. One way of describing science is the pursuit of knowledge that is forever mistaken.

It's always being superseded by better knowledge. And so knowledge is always a process, and knowledge of the spirit. is a kind of process, and I think you can only hope to get somewhere if you engage in it with a mind that is not closed. So, you know, in clever people go, ha ha, ha, ha, your mind can be so open, your brain can fall out. Yeah, yeah, yeah. But actually, everybody needs to have a pretty open mind about things that they're not so clever that they can close their minds.

See, that's really all I'm saying is that there is almost nothing. of which we can be certain. I'm not interested in certainty anymore. I'm interested in the shape of things that speaks to me as real. And there are many things that speak to me as real. The friendships that I have had, the love I have experienced, the beauty of the natural world, the astonishing richness of what science has revealed to me

about the scale and the size of the universe, about the miracle of biology, all these things are things we cannot grasp fully. And we need to get back to a place where we have more modesty and humility about what the human brain can do. It would be, you see, it's irrational, this is my point, it's irrational to suppose that we can rationally achieve answers to the big questions. There's a completely irrational assumption. It's a leap of faith, but not an accurate way.

one in my view, not a good move. We need to get back to a degree of humility. We are evolving creatures. If we evolve for millions of years from now, we could be capable of all kinds of things and know things we can't know now. Why suppose that at this moment, I, Richard Dawkins, or whoever may be, can know the answers to all these questions, at least potentially. I may be very willing to say there's an infinite number of things I don't know the answer to, but I'm not prepared to accept that, you know, I can't find them by doing science and following a logical path. I mean, what's interesting is that most scientific discoveries were simply not made by the

scientific method anyway. They were made by imaginative leaps. And I discuss a lot of these, both mathematical and scientific discoveries, in the matter with things. So perhaps... So at the end of the day, I just want to make it very clear that there is nothing smart. There is nothing clever about being dogmatic about these things. And I'm not pleading for a kind of inherently wishy-washy position. As I say, I believe in being lucid and clear.

People sometimes say to me, your writing is very clear. You make very difficult ideas accessible, to which I say thank you. It costs me enormous pains and a great deal of time to do that. I believe in trying to make my thinking as clear as I can. I haven't done a good job today. I'm sorry. I'm just speaking off the cuff and my mind's not at the right place. But I do do that. And I don't value lucidity and clarity,

but only as far as they can be applied to the question that there is there. And what is clarity? What is seeing something clearly? I say in the matter of it, in the master, And, you know, as Raskin pointed out, I see a white square on the lawn. And from a distance, I think it's a handkerchief. And I go close and I see it's a book. And I look closer at the pages of the book.

And I see that there's a sort of rich substance like this with black smears on it. I get a microscope. I got an electron microscope. I go down deeper and deeper. which is the true thing that I saw, which was the clearly seen thing. Seeing clearly is only a function of the degree of resolution that you are choosing to apply to the situation. I'm sorry, Alex, I'm guffing, but I feel you're touching on important things, and I don't want to give the wrong impression here.

No, it's wonderful. I really, I love that analogy you've just given at the end there. I suppose the only thing I want to ask in closing here then is for somebody, I think a lot of my listeners will be hopefully receptive to what you're saying, but perhaps feeling like they've inherited this left brain world and this left brain tradition and this analytic philosophy and this idea that any time you talk about narrative or poetry or anything like that, it's all kind of a bit wishy-washy. As I said a moment ago, there's an extent to which you can just advise those people to, well, try reading some non-analytic philosophy, but I think if the brain isn't already

sort of primed to get at that, then that's not going to be very useful. So what I wanted to ask you in closing is, what advice you would have, practically speaking, for people who feel listening to this that, gosh, I must be incredibly left brain, because a lot of this seems a bit inaccessible to me, but I'd love to be able to start engaging with that. What can you do to train your brain to unlock that more right-brained way of thinking? Well, I suppose a useful thing to tell people is that I get constantly messages from readers of many kinds, of course. But one quite common one is I always have been looking back on it a very left hemisphere of person. I didn't realize why people valued certain things.

But after reading you, you've opened my eyes to something. I now kind of suddenly aware of things that I hadn't understood. And as a result, my life is richer, my partner is happier with me, I seem to be doing better at work, and so on. So I never thought that I was doing, you know, that kind of work by writing these books. But I think the first thing is to see what it is you're missing. You can't know something until you have some idea of what it is that you're missing. But what I try to do in my writing is open people's eyes to what it is that they have lost. Because they believe me they have lost an enormous amount.

The kind of ways in which people talk, the limited kinds of visions they have of the world are so sad these days because they rule out all the greatness that humanity has actually achieved. We're so full of flagellation of ourselves, which is entirely merited for things we've done in destroying this beautiful world we've inherited. But I'm not one of those people who throws away that humanity is just bad. No, humanity is only capable of great harm because it's also capable of great good. you've never lost the capacity to recover that sense. I think there is a way, though, that you're right when you say you need to have an intuition of something before you can begin to, you wouldn't really get very far with the phenomenological philosophers if you didn't already understand something that they were getting at.

But I think that most people who've read philosophy of an open mind have a sense of, this is all very well, but there are whole areas of experience that is just not being touched on here. You know, the outbreak of the Second World War, the three greatest philosophers in the world, were talking about an entirely imaginary situation to do with imaginary numbers when civilization was crumbling, and that's probably not the way to do philosophy. I think the first thing, therefore, is openness of mind. And I know you want me to give a kind of six-point plan, but that's extremely left-hemisphere thing to do it. and, you know, do the following things, and your right hemisphere will spring interaction.

And so I'm very wary of saying them, but I mean, if you bring it down to the really kind of every day, I think we need to think differently about how we educate people. I think we need to reverse the idea that what's important is that day job in the city making money and that going to Covent Garden in the evening and listening to Mozart is just a bit of nice relaxation. The Comet Garden Mozart is probably the nearest chance you'll get to see something that's real and important. And the days you spend, you know, whatever is it, Pricewaterhouse, Cooper under strip lighting is not going to be the one that will give you access to anything truthful or enrich your life except in the sense of making you richer monetarily. What people crave is spiritual

richness and they've been trained to drive it out of their lives. They've been trained to think that religious thinking is childish or foolish in some way. I cannot tell you how wrong I think that to be and most of the very clever people I know are very open to that realm. I think we've been divorced against our will from the natural world and spending more time in nature, not looking at your phone, not measuring your steps, but actually being quiet, being receptive. And that would take me to the idea of practicing something like meditation, particularly mindfulness meditation, because mindfulness is as close as you can go to deliberately sitting down and saying, I'm going to still my left hemisphere, the one that does all the talking,

the conceptualizing, the judging, the schematizing, the rationalizing. And instead, I'm going to, for the first time, try to clear away, like cleaning the windows from the beauty of the world and see what is there and be present to it and allow it to become present to me for the first time. Because I believe, as I say, that everything is relational, that everything comes into existence out of an encounter. And that encounter is between my consciousness and whatever it else that is that exists out there. And I can't get outside my consciousness. Everything we know, everything we believe, a decision is made by our consciousness. And so at the end of the day,

we need to be rather careful about how we dispose our consciousness and what we allow it to bring into being for us. And that is a reality. So you change the world by attending to it in a different way, and you change yourself. So by a certain kind of ruthless, acquisitive, detached, merciless attention to the world, you turn yourself into a person that is not a very nice person to know, and you deprive yourself of access to all the rich, deep and beautiful things

that can nourish a soul. And don't laugh at the idea of a soul. I have a thing on the internet, whatever happened to the soul, which is a talk I gave at the RSA very shortly after publishing the Master in his Emissary. And I said, suggest that, you know, there is room not only for a word like soul in our vocabulary, but when we take that word out of our vocabulary, we miss a whole range of things. It can't be substituted for by mind or heart or whatever. So, questioning the ways you think is a very good practice as well, and I believe it should be taught in schools that people should be taught, okay, argue this case, now argue the opposite

case. In brief, I think that is what an education should teach you. And the people who are most dogmatic and most angry and vehement on the internet are people who have, it's never occurred to them that the other person is anything other than stupid because they don't believe the way they do. So practice a bit of compassion and practice humility and practice a sense of wonder before the real world, bringing it into your presence and your attention, your being into its presence. And I can't tell you what will happen, do it and find out that's the only way. Ian McGilchrist, thanks for coming on the show. It's been a fascinating one.

Thank you.