A Brain Divided | Iain McGilchrist | Jordan B Peterson Podcast - S4: E21

hello if you have found the ideas i discussed interesting and useful perhaps you might consider purchasing my recently released book beyond order 12 more rules for life available from penguin random house in print or audio format you could use the links we provide below or buy through amazon or at your local bookstore this new book beyond order provides what i hope is a productive and interesting walk through ideas that are both philosophically and sometimes spiritually meaningful as well as being immediately implementable and practical beyond order can be read and understood on its own but also builds on the concepts that i developed in my previous books 12 rules for life and before that maps of meaning thanks for listening and enjoy the podcast [Music] i'm pleased today to be talking to dr ian mcgillcrist i met him in 2018 um in london and we had the good fortune to have a relatively brief conversation which was taped and put on youtube and it was very productive and so now i get to talk to him again and hopefully for a longer period of time um ian is a psychiatrist dr mcgillcrist is a psychologist a psychiatrist a former fellow of all souls college oxford an associate fellow of green templeton college oxford he's lectured all over the world he's published a number of scientific papers he's most well known for his book the master and his emissary and i think you have a copy of that i asked you to get that so that you could show people um the master and his emissary the divided brain in the making of the western world which is an analysis of hemispheric specialization and its philosophical and scientific significance um and he's working on a new book which i have and have started to read a long ways into it at the moment called the matter of things which will be forthcoming at some point in the future and will shape some of our discussion today he's published broadly scientifically and publicly a study of paintings on of subjects with psychotic illnesses that's coming out i believe i'm planning that and a series and also forthcoming a series of essays about culture and the brain so welcome thank you very much for agreeing to talk to me oh it's a huge pleasure jordan thank you very much so one of the things i was rereading the introduction to your new book this morning and i was struck by many different topics but i was particularly interested in your conception of attention and so you talk about attention as something that in some sense brings things into being i don't think that's a misreading of your of your of your writing and maybe i could get you to expound on that a bit and to tell me what you think attention is because i've had a hell of a time differentiating it from well from fluid intelligence for example or from consciousness like it's a word that makes sense when you hear it in the context of a bunch of other words but when you extract it out from that context and try to grip it it falls apart in your grasp so i think one could say that attention is the way in which the individual disposes his or her attention it's it's a disposition of one's consciousness so attention is how you dispose your consciousness towards the world and uh when i discovered when i was researching the master in his emissary the book that's now 10 years old i came across this fascinating thing that one of the most fundamental differences between the hemispheres is their way of attending and it didn't entirely hit me at the time how important it is but we can talk about that later but you were asking the rather sort of interesting philosophical question about how attention helps to bring things into being and i think it does both generally and rather particularly very particular sense in the left hemisphere generally what i mean is that how you attend to the world depends you know on that depends what world you find the qualities of the world that comes to your attention is determined by the quality of the attention you bring to it and that's a very significant that's a very significant statement i was talking to someone the other day who's somewhat theologically minded and um he was also very interested in the role that attention played on in constituting the world i mean you pay attention to things that you value one way or another and what that means is that the world tends to manifest itself in relationship to your value structure and that that's very troublesome idea in some sense with regards to our conceptions of the objective world because it's not easy to it's not easy to parse out what's objective when what manifests itself to you is dependent in large part on what you value it's very complicated to sort that all out well possibly very much later we can come to the question of what objective and subjective mean and how one can i think it's a mistaken dichotomy i think one can interpret the words in important ways that give them meaning but i think to think of the just being an objective world out there and a subjective world in here is one of the problems with modern western philosophy but um to come back to the creation of the world i was going to say that not only does it sort of bring into the world the world that you know which is after all by definition the only world you will ever know but it also changes who you are so the quality of the attention you pay changes you the attender so it's a very profound difference and in the first book the master in his embassy one of the things i was expounding was how this business of attention creates a whole distinct world so the the hemispheres have have evolved to to two different sets of values you mentioned values and it's very germane they have different reasons for existing and therefore have different things they respond to um and what i have tried to explain in that book is that this gives rise to a whole way of seeing the world in the whole world which is not just for the individual but also at times it becomes the way of looking at the world for a whole culture because of course when as individuals never entirely distinct from our culture we partly created by our culture and make it what it is so it's a very fundamental thing well you take pains in in the master and his emissary to to promote the idea or to call attention to the idea that something extremely mysterious is going on in relationship to hemispheric specialization so yeah it's a very ancient phenomenon yes many creatures or most creatures with developed nervous systems have a bifurcated brain and yes the the hemispheres differ substantially in terms of their neuro anatomical structure and the question arises why is it necessary assuming that that differentiation of structure reflects some profound differentiation of function why is it necessary to look at the world so to speak in two ways and why is it so necessary that that bifurcation is conserved across evolutionary history you'd think that one way would be sufficient but it doesn't seem to be and so the first question is why do you have to look at the world in two ways and the next question might be well what what are those two ways one of the things you outline that's particularly fascinating to me is that the right hemisphere seems to be specialized more for what you don't know well whereas the left hemisphere is specialized more for what you do know and i've sort of defined knowing pragmatically um you know something if you undertake an action and the outcome is what you specified and you don't know something if you undertake an action and the outcome is other than what you specified and that sort of reflects that novelty organization um division that that was goldberg i believe that that originated that that the neuropsychologist well jordan you've raised a whole bunch of points there so i need a little bit of time to to explain that um first of all every neural network that we know of is asymmetrical going down to the very most basic network that we know and the most ancient one that we know nematostelovectensis um a sea anemone that is 700 million years old is already asymmetrical in its neural network and that's the earliest neural network we know of and it's true of insects it's true of worms it's true you know all the way up to to human beings and the three questions that really got me going on this was if the brain is there for making connections and its power is largely lies in the question the connections it can make why is it divided down the middle whoppingly divided i mean most people don't realize quite how big this this differentiation is and if they haven't actually seen a brain um the second thing is why is it asymmetrical because if you just need to grow this brain you'd grow it symmetrically the skull that contains it is symmetrical and the third thing is why is the connection the principal connection between the two hemispheres at the base of the hemispheres the corpus callosum why is it at least as much if not more in the service of inhibition than facilitation so it's as though there's something really important about keeping two things apart now my my hypothesis and it's just that is that this results from something that all creatures need to do all creatures without exception need to eat and not be eaten they need to live and to manipulate their environment to get food to catch something to pick something up quickly deftly to pick up a twig to build a nest in other words for all the kind of day-to-day stuff food shelter they need to be able to manipulate the world very precisely but at the same time they must pay a precisely opposite kind of attention which is sustained vigilant open without presupposition to as to what it may find and so on the whole uh the way in which this has been addressed by evolution is that there are two neuronal masses that can direct attention at the world and the left hemisphere tends to specialize in targeted precise attention and the right hemisphere in a much broader vigilant kind of attention which actually sustains the being of the world nothing about these tiny fragments that are isolated disconnected meaningless gives you any idea of their meaning it's only when you see the broad picture and you understand that they're not actually things that go to be put together to make that broad picture but things that are isolated out of an already connected picture um so that's the basis of that i just wanted to pick up your thing about um because i don't think it's quite right to say that the left hemisphere is about what you know and the rights what about about what you don't know somebody i can't remember who um some philosopher said that knowledge is what we're uncertain of uh things we're certain of are things that we don't really know properly i think there's a good deal of truth in that the left hemisphere tends to jump to conclusions it's much more quick and dirty than the right hemisphere the right hemisphere is the one that says hang on wait a moment you may be getting this wrong because it wants to get things quickly it's it's job is to manipulate its job is to get it's to catch it's to grab stuff it's the one that controls the right hand that does all the grabbing so the left hemisphere tends to certainty and it's very uncomfortable when there's ambivalence uh whereas you can't act exactly whereas the right hemisphere seems to appreciate the possibility that we have to hold multiple views multiple possibilities together and so it has a quite different take on reality it's more interested in discovery and exploration rather than capture the left-handers more interested in capturing a thing that it thinks it knows often you know not in any deep way it's just identified an object it needs but to understand things the right hemisphere is better and the idea of the master and the emissary is is i i won't go through the the myth of it i've explained it so many times but the basic idea is that the master the right hemisphere knows that it needs an atmosphere to do the sort of functional administration work so it's aware that the stuff that it mustn't get involved with and that it can't know whereas the left hemisphere knows everything as it were in its eyes because it only knows a tiny bit which is explicit and you know there it is in broad daylight down in black and white no uh no shades of meaning no nuances no nothing implicit about it so it thinks it knows it and if you like the downfall of the left hemisphere and therefore if i would go of the society the civilization as it once was that we belong to is that the left hemisphere doesn't know what it is it doesn't know it's you know it's you know the famous thing the dunning-kruger effect the the more you know the more you think you don't know and the people who know least think they know everything uh it's a little it's not quite fair but there's something of that about it yeah but can i pick up something that i touched on earlier we just do we were talking about creating the world through attention and i think that is that is true um and there's a very big question there about what i mean by that do i mean just as you say subjectively or objectively maybe we should perk that for the moment but um i don't mean either in a very simple way but what is fascinating is that the right hemisphere as i say knows that there are things that it's not aware of but the left hemisphere seems to take the attitude that if it's not attending to it it doesn't exist this is very dramatic in clinical neurology so people who've had a right hemisphere stroke they not only as it were don't now pay attention to something but they deny that that thing ever existed this wonderful uh you know very rich accounts of patience one of the ones that i really like is a is a experiment done by who was it uh biziyak and luksati i think back in the late 1970s where they got a couple of highly educated people with right hemisphere strokes and they are they was in milan at the time and they said you know these these people lived in milan and they said imagine you're standing in the piazza del duomo in front of the cathedral and looking at the square describe all the the buildings in the square and they would describe only the ones on the right side that the left hemisphere only pays attention to whereas you know but i need to say for the viewers that the right hemisphere pays attention to both halves of the world so when you have a left hemisphere stroke the world is relatively preserved globally but after a right hemisphere stroke you're only relying on this left hemispheres interested in the bit of space which it can manipulate the bit on the right so they named the buildings down the the right hand side of the view of the square they had then and then the experiment asked them to go to the other end of the square and look at the cathedral facade and name the buildings and this time they named all the ones down the other side of the square but didn't mention any of the ones they just mentioned so there's something it's been commented by one philosopher that it's almost like there's an ontological landslide things come in and out of existence for the left hemisphere and when it was pointed out to these people what they'd missed they became angry irritable and frustrated which is a typical left hemisphere emotional term impatient to dismiss this um so i think that's intriguing it's just one image i mean the very dramatic one is to do with denying that you have parts of the body and as was pointed out by um fritz langella i think way back in the second decade of the 20th century they don't only deny after a right hemisphere stroke that they have the left half of the body which is not functioning because of the right hemisphere stroke they will become very irritable if questions are asked about it or they will just go blank i mean they will be talking perfectly coherently and they're asked about that they will go stum or they will become very irritated and if you force them to recognize that they have a body on that side although they're perfectly intelligent people they know they must always have had a left half of their body they will deny and he says it's as though they never had a left half of the body it's not only that it's not there now it never was for them and never will be now that's what i mean when i say that there are different levels of creativity of the world or the creation of the world through attention i should say um in the two hemispheres now you're in your new book and and to some degree in the master and this emissary you're also making you're mixing your neurological analysis with philosophical speculation and you're trying to solve a problem so maybe you could tell us what the problem is that and and and then we can discuss the solution well i suppose the problem is the one that i mentioned that there is a puzzle about why uh brains are set up in this rather odd way that but you're also pointing to a kind of philosophical malaise right so there's a there's a conceptual problem but also an emotional or or broad scale philosophical problem and there is there is indeed and indeed if i may say so the book that i hope will come out fairly soon called the matter with things which is a pun on several levels because i think it's a critique not only of the way we think now but of our obsession with thinking of the world as composed of things and that only matter exists but anyway in that book what i'm really trying to do is marry science and philosophy again they they never should have been separated science cannot properly be done by philosophy many without philosophy many scientists and philosophers have commented on this over the years and the divorce has been disastrous for them both you get a mindless kind of science that jumps to very naive conclusions that everything is mechanical and you get a kind of philosophy that thinks it's above dirtying its hands with science now i think each of these parties can benefit from a refrosmal which is long overdue and it's that that i try to do in this very big book to show how strands of neurology philosophy and physics and even of world mythologies come together to show the same very similar pictures the same gestaltene the same differences between a world such as the world brought into being by the left-handed and a world such as is brought into being by the right hemisphere and perhaps before going on any further you did invite me earlier to say something about what those differences are well to try and sum it up very quickly what i'd say is for the left hemisphere things are known familiar literally things that are unfamiliar are better dealt with by the right hemisphere until the left-handers can go oh i see it's one of those and put it in a category box they're more distinct in fact they're probably entirely fragmented or isolated in the left hemisphere whereas there the right hemisphere sees that nothing is ever ultimately um unconnected from everything else um things in the left hemisphere are frozen they don't move they don't change things in the right hemisphere constantly flowing and changing although flowing and changing and remaining the same are not necessarily um a an opposition as we know uh heraclitus my favorite philosopher said by changing it remains the same which is the image of a river which is never ever still for a moment but the river outside my house that was there at breakfast time is probably there now um so in that sense it's remained and we're all i believe like these rivers all living beings are in fact probably everything that exists is as heraclitus pointed out so what other things the left hemisphere abstracts it tends to abstract from the body it tends to abstract from the context and something i learned very early on in life was the importance of context how it utterly changes anything that somebody says or any image and this is particularly true of course of literature which i um you know studied and taught for for a certain while when i was a young man that once you start paraphrasing a poem and taking its sentiments out of the context they've utterly changed themselves and no longer what they were and the left hemisphere is more interested in categories the right hemisphere in the unique case so it sees that you're not just a member of a certain group you take certain boxes you fall into that category but that you're massively complicatedly different and i mean this has a very real basis you know when you look at neurological patients people who have right hemisphere strokes are examples uh two i know of that both come from uh the same research group in switzerland but uh involve um a farmer who used to know all his cows by name and after the right hemisphere right parietal stroke he couldn't really well he not only couldn't tell his cows one from another but he could hardly tell a cow from a horse and another woman who very plaintively commented after right hemisphere stroke she'd spent her whole life studying the birds of switzerland she was an authority on them and she said all the birds look the same so that's what happens in the left hemisphere world quality is replaced by quantity uniqueness is replaced by the category and then again the the left hemisphere um tends to see things as um inanimate where the right hemisphere will see them as animate well a category a category implies in some sense that the the members of that category are indistinguishable right because otherwise you don't have a category you just have particularity and so you can imagine that that i mean to understand this completely you have to understand to some degree what categories are for but or what yeah what categories are for at least in part you put things that you can act towards the same way in the same category and so young children might think of cats and dogs as dogs all of them as dogs because they're cuddly petable entities not because they have four legs or because they have fur but because you interact with you the same way then you can differentiate cats and dogs as you get a little older but the first category dog which is petable things is a perfectly reasonable category and you can imagine that once a categorical structure has been imposed that it's easy just to see the category i i wrote an essay in my new book um which is called beyond order about the function of artists and i believe that part of what artists do and i think this is maybe you can tell me but i think it might reflect the differences that you're talking about when i was a kid i lived in a small town and i can remember all the houses on my block i can remember them in detail they're familiar to me as individual entities but now that i'm an adult i live i've lived on this street for like 20 years but the houses are indistinguishable to me i can't see them as different entities and i think it's because i'm so familiar with the category house which is a practical category that i can't see beyond the category and it's very efficient because i know what houses do they sit there you don't have to pay attention to them and so it's really a useful perceptual shorthand just to see the category and but what an artist will do is take you outside the category and make you see that the particulars again that you're missing that the and i i guess that's partly the context to remind you of what's beyond what your memory forces you now to see and is that akin to the to this distinction that you're making between the left and the right well it is a distinction it's a related distinction but not exactly the same distinction i mean interestingly it relates to the difference a very important difference in fact i think probably the single most important difference of all which doesn't at first strike people partly because they're so used to living in a world of representations that is the distinction between the presence of something as it comes into being for you and your mental representation of it which is like a caricature or a category thing or a verbal sign so that the left hemispheres addiction if you like to understanding things via language is very important because after all um language makes everything the same you know as as nietzsche said it makes the uncommon common because you know when you say somebody's got brown hair or something then you've got everything just like in a category but when you see that person there's something quite different about the way their hair is and so forth so and you'd find that out if you painted it you know because you wouldn't paint it with brown paint you'd paint it with a multitude of colors if you were really looking you certainly would and you'd see that it wasn't bro and i mean artists play with was it manet who painted the haystacks in or monet i don't remember in at multiple different times of the year and the haystack i mean the shape was the same but the haystack was completely different and that's really in some sense what he was portraying was the category is haystack but the reality is is extraordinarily complex and but well this is the category the category seems to have functional significance so you dump things together that you can act towards the same way and then a word is labeled on top of that to to to to serve as an even further compressed shorthand for that category so you have a complex world that's that's yes it's multitudinous and and too complex to even see and then there's a perceptual act that categorizes that into like a perceptual image house say and then there's a further compression and eradication of information that enables that to be represented by a word um and now well the greek philologist max mueller said it's interesting that we read encyclopedias we have dictionaries we read books and we are with all the his words but none of the things that these words represents actually exists because in the act of being represented they are no longer the thing that was present the very fact of representing it suddenly stops the presence of the thing for me this is very vivid in wordsworth and this comes back to some of the things you were saying about the liveliness of the childhood mind that when he was a young man and 50 years a boy rambling in the lake district the world was very much still alive to him and coming into being for him but that as a man he can't went back there and as it were couldn't avoid seeing the landscape as oh a picturesque mountain a picturesque lake one of those if you like and this is what he means by the phrase the shades of the prison house growing around the growing closing round the growing boy in his intimations uh of of um immortality on refugees yes so early childhood so um this is from this book there was a time when meadow grove and stream the earth and every common sight to me did seem appareled in celestial light the glory and the glory and the freshness of a dream yes that's it this is what i'm referring to and this really is one of the more important differences i would say probably the core difference that as it were one world is real vibrant unknown in part only known ever to a degree and ever more coming into being an ever more coming into knowledge for the right hemisphere and for the left hemisphere already cold finished known dead put in a book stuffed on the shelf filed away and we now live so much in this virtual represented world partly because we're very much cut off from nature which constantly reminds you of its vivid uncertain liveliness it confronts you with its audacious beauty and vitality all the time partly because we've learned to cut our minds off from our bodies and so we think in this enormously abstract way and partly because of city life partly because of technology which means we interact with two-dimensional screens rather than the three-dimensional depth which is in a room when you're with someone which is why as you know and i know because we both help patients in our time that it's very important to be in the room with the patient it's a completely different thing that happens from anything you can do on the telephone or even like this so part of the the philosophical case that you're making is i believe that while we're we we have a terrible conundrum as human beings we we need in some sense for the purposes of efficiency to move towards the most efficient representations possible and this has real bearing on the nature of perception itself so i know for example that even in the primary visual cortex so in principle you know this but i'm going to explain it for people who are listening as as the signals as the pattern signals from your retina move back towards your brain they move upwards so to speak through a hierarchy of processing units and even at the first stages of that processing there's still more top down input from other brain centers than there is input from the retinal structures themselves and so what that implies is that even at the beginnings of perception you know if you think about it as being built up from perceptual elements up towards the whole gestalt which isn't exactly accurate but it'll do for now even at the beginnings of the visual process there's more input from what's inside than there is from the external world so to speak or at least as much and then what seems to happen as we age is that perhaps is that increasingly that perception becomes solipsistic and so we're only seeing what we know and that's externally efficient because it's very hard to build up a new perception you have to really investigate something in detail to see it anew whereas if it's the same old thing that you've seen 10 000 times you can already use what you know and it's not surprising you'd be annoyed if you were forced to jump out of that because there's a tremendous amount of work that has to be done if you want to see something for the first time again well as we both know people would rather deny obvious truths than let go of a cherished belief so um that that's certainly right and we don't perceive the world as um you know in a naive way we come to the world with with our history with our vast range of experience and so as you say there's top down effects on on the lower end of things of the lower end of perception from higher cognitive functions but that's an image of something very important to the philosophy i try to put across in the matter with things which is that in order to understand any element in experience it's at least as important to see what holes it goes to make up or potentially can go to make up as it is to see what it turns into when you break it down in fact often it's not very revealing to find out what happens when you break it down and so in a way every suffers from that it's like psychology is a discipline that consists at least in its present form mostly of disparate experiments which demonstrate very particular things about people about how people behave in very particular circumstances but there's nothing there's very little that unites that back up to something that's that's that isn't merely fragmentary observation and so it's very difficult to get a grip out on and there's billions of potential separate observations and and they're not that helpful in some sense well it's all part of the world picture which from the philosophical point of view is the purpose of the long book which i sent you in manuscript the the matter with things effectively i can state quite simply that i i want to give a considered um response to the philosophy of our age which is that there is only matter and that things are understood by reducing them to their parts and this doesn't change them it's a very naive philosophy it's simplistic and it's immoral because it changes the way we treat the world and other people and nature it changes our idea of who we are in a very damaging way ruling out things that other traditions have traditionally held as very powerful and you know coming back to your comment about how people cling on to things that they believe and it's much more difficult to try and see something in a different way especially with age this is why of course most traditions of spiritual growth um enjoin on the person paradoxes to see things in a completely new way that violates all the ways that they thought they knew so i use paradox in this new book but not in some blind way in fact i showed that what we mean by a paradox is that the view of the left hemisphere of something and the view taken of the right hemisphere of the same thing can never actually completely marry up they they have different qualities and if you push the comparison or the the desire to make them logically come together too far you end up with a paradox and this started happening you know early on in the greek uh the ancient greek period of philosophy with zeno this is where the first paradoxes come from and i have a whole chapter on paradox which i see as generated by the desire of the left hemispheres to say it must be this or it must be that clinging on preferentially to the very fragmentary view of the left hemisphere see the left hemisphere is not good at understanding that sounds a very blanket statement and it is but the whole of the first part of that book the the new book is massively more thorough um neuropsychology than is in the master in his emissary so it's a it's it's about as thorough as i could possibly make it and what i do is i look at the ways in which we have any chance of getting an idea of what the world is what are the portals of entry of if you like information about the world to us and i take it that they they it depends very much on our attention how we dispose our attention perception the judgments we form on the basis of perception um the ways in which we uh apprehend what we're dealing with rather than comprehend it in other words grasp it as we say with the right hand of the left hemisphere take it use it um how we understand it in terms of emotional intelligence which is not a small thing it's the whole way in which we understand everything human by emotional i don't mean sort of um in some you know what i mean i i'm talking about social and emotional understanding the sort of thing that is absent in people with autism um and cognitive intelligence this may surprise people but that all these things and creativity so creativity intelligence of the cognitive kind iq kind emotional and social intelligence apprehension is a separate case i'll come to that in a second perception and attention and judgment all these are better performed by the right hand is the only apprehension is better performed by the left hemisphere so the only thing the left hemisphere is better at is getting a hold on either an idea very precise clear one or on a a thing that it wants to use but all the manifold complexity which our intelligence brings to bear in order to understand the world all of that is better done by the right hemisphere and i can say that on the basis not just of experiments in normal subjects but on seeing what happens when you have either left hemisphere damage or right hemisphere damage to to summarize a vast chunk of information which i hope will be you know there for people to read very very soon um to summarize that very briefly what one would say is that when you have damage to the right hemisphere your grasp of reality is the main thing that's impaired you don't understand it you don't connect with it your ability to understand what's going on disappears whereas when you have a right hemisphere sorry when you have a that's when you have a right hemisphere when you have a left hemisphere stroke the main things are you have difficulty speaking and using your right hand they're practically very important but the essentially the understanding of the world the grasp of the meaning of the world so as you see towards gratification but the overall comprehension of the world is sustained by the right hemisphere okay so let me ask you a question can i sure go ahead right okay and then all right okay let me just make this point because i want to you people might say well okay but so what we've both got right and left hemispheres so we're not missing anything so does it matter well yes it matters very importantly for my philosophical project because as i show in the second part of the book where i look at the proper contributions to understanding made by reason science intuition and imagination what i can show is that in those attempts to grasp we are we can see the world we can see the signature of the right hemisphere or the signature of the left hemisphere on a particular model so if we have two possible models of a certain action or an aspect of reality or of space or time which i deal with in the third part of the book and indeed in philosophical history and in the history of physics and so on there have tended to be opposing views of the world once you know how the left hemisphere sees it and how the right hemisphere tends to see things you can see the hallmark of the left hemisphere's understanding on a certain philosophical standpoint on a certain scientific take of the world and you can see the hallmark and the the imprint of the right hemisphere in certain other ways of reasoning and of science and philosophy so this is very important because up till now we've never been able to judge between these two we've got a we've got b we just have to go can't tell we can't reconcile them we can't do without either of them that's true we ultimately that's true but we can get a very sharp idea i believe now of which of these is fallacious which one is going to lead us down a blind alley which one is out of touch with reality and which one is more in touch with reality i just wanted to say that because it's behind the whole philosophical drift of my book which is how do we know who we are i asked platinus this question who are we that's effectively the question what is the cosmos what is nature and how do we all relate sorry hand over to you no no that that's good um okay so to do something you have to zero in on it so let me lay something out for you and and then i'm gonna ask you a specific question about it so imagine that i'm i'm concentrating on the computer screen i'm attending to it i'm writing a book okay so the question might be well what am i doing while i'm writing that book what is it to write that book well in in at the at the most focused level of my consciousness the most focal level that involves voluntary control of my fingers i'm going to be typing single letters and there are muscle movements that are associated with that but i don't really know what the muscle movements are i know how to move my fingers that's the highest level of resolution i can manage i can press t with my left hand and h with my right hand and and with each with these two fingers and so that's sort of where the pedal hits the metal in some sense that's where my intent meets the world okay so but i'm not typing letters sorry i am typing letters but at the same time i'm typing words and at the same time i'm typing words i'm typing phrases and then i'm typing sentences and i'm typing paragraphs and i'm typing chapters and then i'm typing books and then the book itself is an artifact that's nested inside higher order structures so while i'm i'm writing the book but the reason i can write the book is because i'm i'm imagining a world within which the book is nested and so i'm focusing on something very specific like i can't write the book without pushing the letter t with my left index finger but i also can't write the book without apprehending the book as a whole and you know when i edit i edit not letters because i can spell but i edit words i substitute one word for another i edit phrases i edit sentences i edit at the paragraph level like all of these levels actually exist now is it reasonable to suppose so sorry i'm going to add one more level outside that so you might ask well why am i writing a book and it might be well because i'm a practicing scientist and and why is that uh uh important it's well i'm uh i'm a dutiful citizen let's say trying to uphold my moral responsibility and you might say well why is that important i would say well that's part of my my proper moral engagement with the world and then i can't go farther outside than that now is it reasonable to suppose if you think about that whole structure as a kind of lens that focuses us in the world is it reasonable to suppose that it's the left hemisphere so to speak that's concentrating on the t's and the h's and that as you move up that hierarchy to broader and broader levels of conceptualization that that that the manner in which those higher levels are conceptualized shifts more and more to the right or is processed more and more by the right is that a reasonable way of looking at it i think you could but i i'd need to sort of gloss it a bit um and what you've beautifully described is what the right hemisphere knows and which john summarized by saying if you try to get hold of any one thing and pull it you find that they bring with it the whole of the rest of the universe yet that sentence you're writing is is uh informed by your personal history and the history therefore of your culture and therefore and so on and so on and so forth so everything that has gone to make you is present in that business of the book um and so you're not of course at any one time aware of more than a tiny bit but there's a very f uh fallacious and uh superficial uh argument that if you're not conscious of it in that sense of the word conscious then somehow you're not doing it but of course you are the whole thing emanates from what i call the field of view now suppose rather than you know we can take the example of the typing but you wouldn't be able to type at all if you were thinking about what your fingers were doing um and you know but nonetheless it would be stupid to say that you're unconscious while you're typing of course you're not unconscious somebody playing a bach fugue has got to use all their fingers and their hands you know and their feet at the same time and if they concentrated they could only concentrate and focus on one finger of course that would stop the whole music for a start but they're they're conscious of course they're just as conscious when the whole thing's happening as they are if they think about the finger and stop it so what this illustrates is what alfred north whitehead was keen to point out that as soon as we master something we relegate it to another part of the mind that we don't any longer have to focus on and the focusing of of tension is costly he said it's like um cavalry charges in battle it should only be done rarely uh you need fresh horses and it comes at a high cost so that's a good analogy because you build up you build a little machine that the things the things the things that the things that we do unconsciously are in no way inferior stuff so for example the bar fugue is not inferior when a surgeon is learning he or she has to be very conscious of what he or she is doing the actual business of the hand cutting but when the surgeon is very skilled he can hum listen to the radio chat with colleagues and it's all happening similarly a chess player a bad chess player has to be conscious of every move but a really good one it's not unconscious it's very very highly conscious but it's not focused now my distinction to sorry finally answer your question is that is that focused tension this focal attention detail is what the left hemisphere does it can only take in about three degrees for the attentional arc so it's incredibly limited and as as whitehead says it has its uses in an emergency but really it's not a satisfactory way for living and what i think is happening is that we are now more and more saying anything that i'm not actually focusing on right now doesn't exist all the implicit stuff all the unconscious stuff all the things that go to make up the richness of our both cognitive and emotional and embodied cells isn't really important we focus down on this tiny bit that the relatively unintelligent left hemisphere knows about and is aware of so when i say conscious and unconscious i like to say don't think of these as two separate realms like you know two tanks with perhaps a trap and things can pop up from the lower tank into the higher tank or whatever but instead think of it like a stage and there's a spotlight and the spotlight may just illuminate one part of the stage but the rest of the stage hasn't gone anywhere it's still there and you just need to move the spotlight and suddenly it's there again in the in the middle of what you're thinking about that's how our that's how i would see that question okay so so let's go back to this typing example again just so when you learn to type you're going to be paying conscious attention to pushing the t's and the h's as you learn to type you start perhaps being conscious more of maybe you're attending at the level of the phrase like you don't have to be consciously attentive to those things you've built automated machinery for now they say when kids learn to read it isn't enjoyable to begin with because it's effortful to learn to process the letters and it's effortful to learn to process the words and it's not until they can automatize the letter and word processing and so they can read the word at a glance that they start to be able to be conscious of the phrase and the sentence and that's when they get the meaning from the text and that's when it starts to become enjoyable right it's not just effortful and then so the consciousness of a reader isn't consciousness of letters and it's not consciousness of words it's consciousness of something like the interplay between sentences and paragraphs and it's like your consciousness floats above the highest level of automatization that you've been able to manage is it does that seem reasonable to you well i mean when you're playing a musical piece for example you don't pay attention to what you've practiced because you've got that you pay attention to the sequencing of what you've practiced and the the greater a musician you are the higher up in the abstraction hierarchy you can focus because you've you've automated all the lower stuff well and that comes back to to what i'm sorry no i was i was i'm trying to get the relationship between that and the hemispheric specialization well i i i think i've done my best to point out that the the right hemisphere is the one that is able to attend to the whole gestalt ultimately is dealing not in fragmentary entities that have to be put together but in gestaltene that already exists and unnested so that you go down from one level and you find another you know famously you can go from the from the body to the organ to the tissue to the cell to the organelle to the you know and each of these at each stage um is a whole that has its own qualities and its own rules really and works in a semi-autonomous way so there's always freedom between the levels of understanding there's always space it's rather like the gaps in the structure of where the light gets in you know if you tighten everything up then you've got total darkness so what we're trying to do all the time is to know enough to be able to act but to leave it open so that we can know more and really understand where we are and what we're doing when we're acting so i think these are significant differences between the left-handers which is utterly goal directed um and very direct in that in the way in which it achieves or aims to achieve its goal and the right hemisphere which is sustaining this and also seeing the goal in a wider whole you know the the reason of typing these letters is not just to make the keys go up and down and to have a bit of paper at the end of it but because you want to influence minds that are now unaware of this but we'll know about it soon so i think it's the difference between this very again whitehead says as a civilization advances by the number of uh actions that can be made automatically or below the level sorry without thinking without thinking because thinking thinking is thinking is a very complex thing isn't it i mean what is it and a number of people have commented rather along the lines that i'm saying that it's not so much right to say i think as in cogito but uh in the words of liestenberg the 18th century german philosopher and physicist um esdenkt estanktinmir something is thinking in me and that is the me it's not separate and it's not unconscious in the sense of it's it's it has no life it has no meaning it has no purpose it has no direction absolutely not it has all those things and one of the things i'm trying to argue in the last part of may i say something just about the structure of this book i started off on it this new book i'm just going to say a little bit more about it yeah yeah so yeah well we're trying to grasp something large going through its parts so it's not such a simple thing to do it's not a simple thing to do so the first part of the book i've explained it gives one an insight into a simple fact that in terms of having access to the reality of the world the right hemisphere is better than the left and it has a special take if you like which we can recognize so that when we're having to choose between two opposites we can choose one if we want to over the other in the second part of the book i'm looking at the pathways to knowledge using attention perception judgment intelligence on how do we put them to use well i think the main ones are science reason i think most people would say they're important i would say intuition and imagination are also vastly important now none of these is infallible none of these can say that it can deal with everything there are proper limits to science otherwise you're peddling untenable naive scientism uh but it is a very important thing for us to respect and to do honorably and reason is enormously important i use science and reason as the basis of my book but again reason as pascal famous mathematician and philosopher said reason is poor if it cannot see its own limitations and so it has limitations but it can achieve a very great deal and the same actually is true of intuition it's had a very bad press in recent years because i think again psychologists i think you've alluded to this they like things that can be taken down into bits and shown them we can find the mechanisms intuition is a bit hard for that and imagination has been again relegated to the sort of children's play box that this is something um to do with fantasy whereas in fact i argue that quite the opposite that whereas fantasy may be an interesting decoration on things that we already know and the left hemisphere can do that imagination is actually how we go to meet the world and understand it and we have to imagine it into being there is no alternative if we are not imaginatively engaged with the world we just can't see a lot of things that are there so together not just one or two as we now do sorry carry on well i i wanted to comment on your your your discussion of imagination and and the manner in which it brings the world into being so we've already discussed the fact that the realm of your experience is dependent to some degree on your attention and that that's associated with intent and intent seems to me to be it's future oriented to have an intent intent means to attempt to move from one place to another and hypothetically it's a better place because why move otherwise and so to act in the world with intent means that you're playing out something that's imaginative because to posit that one thing is better than another and and therefore want to move towards it you have to have imagined up a better world and so what that means in some sense is that we're always meeting the world in a way that imposes our imaginative attempts to make it better upon us upon the world but that also brings the world into being and so so and i guess i'm i'm saying that because i'm trying to grapple with the why of your book again you're you're implying throughout and more than implying that that we we have a paucity of viewpoint that's demotivating and dangerous and you're implying as well that that has something to do with our obsessive concentration or utilization of left hemisphere functions that that reminds me of heidegger to some degree in his claim that moderners use the world as produce you know that we tend to reduce everything to its functional utility insofar as it can be exploited like i have some sympathy for that because we have to exploit the world to live but yes it it it it so let's say we do lose something by being specific we and narrow we gain something which is functional utility what do we do about that you're trying to understand it and why it is what do we do to fight against it well um that's a whole separate question but at the moment i'm trying to unpack what the problem is and okay well i won't push it i think congratulations i mean i mean quite what we do about it is the million dollar question and we may not be in a position unless we radically alter the way in which we think about the world understand it and feel it and experience it and interact with it we may not have a world in which to live so it's a pretty important topic but um so having sort of more or less as it were gone over what are the portals to understanding what are the paths to understanding and then in the part three which is really if you like the reason we've had parts one and two you can't get to part three without them but when you get there we want to know so what is the world like and so i look at the structure of the world the theories about it and what we can tell from physics and from the hemisphere hypothesis what parts of it we may be perceiving with the left hemisphere and what we may be seeing with the right and i look at the structure in sense of the coming together of opposites and the very interesting philosophical question of the relationship between the one and the many and then in the rest of the book i look at time space motion meaning largely flow but all kinds of motion matter and consciousness uh value purpose and the sense of the sacred now i argue that these elements like consciousness are not secondary they're not derivative it's actually irrational to suppose they are reason is on the side of the fact that they are ontological primaries and i argue that actually also unpack that for people because it's there's a lot but it would take it's very interesting well i can unpack the phrase what i mean by ontological primary is that it can't be reduced to um other terms it can't be said that as long as you look at um a brain in a certain way you can work out what consciousness is consciousness is sue generous it is of its own kind it is not something that is derived from anything it has to be a primary constituent of the universe this is not a particularly um any longer controversial view um it's held by many philosophers now in the form of pan psychism in which something like consciousness is in the cosmos and the cosmos perhaps exists inside consciousness not my consciousness but a consciousness field um and there are plenty of neuroscientists who who say this too um colin blake more um not known for for being kind of away with the fairies but they say this too um but i would also argue and it's a perhaps um harder thing to make comprehensible in a very short space but then actually values are things that are there they're not things we make up they're not things that um are like i rather like that they are they are built into the drive of everything and i think that the cosmos has drives you can describe them in all sorts of ways it has the fact that it changes and moves in certain ways according to quote laws which may actually not be laws but maybe temporary habits we don't know they may be evolving too but the very fact that this thing has this energy to evolve to differentiate to produce differentiation within union this is a value of a kind you can't get behind these and most of our values other than those of utility this is good for me and i want to have more of it which is what the left hemisphere is devoted to most of those other values are not reducible to sheer in a material greed or or you know feathering your own nest they're often actually the things that are vastly important probably the whole point of the being consciousness at all is to come to appreciate the meaning of truth goodness and beauty to have a sense of something or inspiring which is really what we mean when we talk about the sacred that we're humble enough to say we don't know everything we probably will never know i mean why should we that's also a totally irrational idea that our brains are so constructed that we should know everything i mean i might mouse might think that if it could think that much you would think it knows everything but it doesn't you know um so and we're evolving there may be creatures in the future who think what the hell did homo sapiens in 2021 know you know so i just want to get back into the frame that not all the things that matter to us they are enormously important aspects of the of a universe that is not dead and static unless given a push not without purpose not without meaning not without value these things are in the grain in the warp and the weft of the cosmos of that i'm certain and the job is for us to find this and most philosophers um wise people sages whatever you like to call them in the past have adopted a view of the cosmos which is exactly the one that one would expect the right hemisphere to hold which is one which things are not always certain or known they're changing they're interconnected but the whole thing has a meaning it is not a heap of fragments that don't mean anything um the modern malays so that's really where i'm driving at if you see that that's that's the that's the philosophical goal is to help people see something that i think they already intuit i mean that was a response to the the master in his m3 um apart from people enormously movingly writing to me saying things i never thought i would ever hear from writing a book like your book changed my life and i'm sure you've had this too but you know people saying what you're saying i kind of knew i've known this but i couldn't find any way of articulating it well there's a reason why you couldn't find a way of articulating it and that is articulation in language is controlled by the left hemisphere it developed very good tools for mapping out the world in a way that is very useful to its purposes but the the important things are hard to articulate in words they're implicit meanings all the deep things like love religion poetry music how do you say these in words how do you say them in language but they have extraordinary meaning and power they're the things we live for not for the things that we can say put down in a notebook if you know what i mean so what's what's driven you in this direction do you think i mean you made a very large number of claims in that last section of thought um yeah for example you you've come to the belief that value is somehow implicit in the structure of being that's what i understood what you said and correct me if i'm wrong that's right okay that it's unfolding across time and i mean i've been thinking about this this that exact issue an awful lot um do you it's very difficult to formulate this question so imagine that imagine that we're drawn towards an ideal human beings are drawn towards an ideal and imagine that you can you can you can detect that draw by your own dissatisfaction in part is that you don't feel you're living properly or your conscience is bothering you you feel that there's something more to be attained you're embarrassed at your insufficiencies right so there's this ideal that's pulling you onward and judging you at the same time and that ideal might be well the ideal human being that's one way of thinking about it and that's partly why i got so interested in hero mythology i mean do you is it re is it a reasonable conclusion of your line of thinking that the notion of the ideal human being is somehow built into the structure of the cosmos because the classic i don't i don't know how to no it it's it's not no i don't think that at all i want to scotch that immediately okay well how do you scotch that if you start with your presuppositions like well because i don't my presuppositions have nothing to do with an already conceived plan that is just being acted out this is not what i wasn't implying it wasn't necessarily all right well okay but let all right okay well i'm glad you weren't but a lot of people think that if i say these things i must be positing an engineering god who sort of tinkers with things and makes things happen according to his purpose yeah okay that's fair i mean i was implying i was implying that in some sense i mean the question would be where does your where does your insistence that values are part of the structure of being like where does that find its limit because the classic limit of that is something like is in fact the definition of the utmost place of value in some sense is almost indistinguishable from the claim that there is a god and so a god is not the same as an engineering god and i i take enormous pains in the book it costs me more than anything i've ever written to write the chapter called the sense of the sacred in which i try to help people to a place where they can understand why people use this extraordinarily difficult word god you know it's not a satisfactory term but it's the term we have to have to name an aspect of our experience that if we don't name it disappears from our lives and that's not to say that there isn't something there that is that merits whatever we mean when we say divine i mean we we haven't defined we haven't defined what we mean by divine and we're back in the nets of language we're trapped in the nets of language as shelling said but what i'm suggesting is that as whitehead suggested and come on whitehead was also the co-author with russell of the principia mathematica he wasn't um a fantasist he had this i think incredibly deep idea that whatever one likes to call the divinity god whatever is the thing that the cosmos has relation with relation is at the core of being i even argued that relation is prior to the relata prior to the things that are related that sounds nonsense how can you relate how can you have a relation if there isn't anything yet to relate but there's a wonderful image called um in indian mythology called indra's net which covers the universe and in it the idea is that the filaments of the net exist before the net before the crossing points which are the things we see and on those crossing points there are little gems which reflect every other gem in the net and that's a that would take a very long time to unpack but perhaps it can set things going in people's minds but the idea i gesture to the right hemisphere is that relation is prior to anything at all really and that therefore the the whatever you mean by god and whatever we mean by the cosmos are in some sort of dynamic relation which is an evolving one in which the outcome is excitingly not known if it were known it would all be some horrible possibly sadistic um play uh by an all mighty all-knowing god i mean then look i'm going to be talking to rowan williams shortly but i don't want to go go into all that i mean by that i don't think god is omniscient and omnipotent omnipotent but i don't think he's not either just in the same way i don't think he's green and i don't think he's not green i think the terms are wrong uh but you know we can go there if we want them later or another day but the thing what i'm what i'm saying is that these that god is discovering becoming unfulfilling whatever god is through the relationship which classically in most religions is described as love which is after all just a like a form of gravity in the world of of life and emotion rather than just in the world of of of um the so-called inanimate um so that therefore we are coming into being god is coming into being and we're necessary to one another's coming into being it's not that god does a bit to us and then we do a bit back to god it's like i've read a very good book i keep mentioning it by a young microbiologist in america called kritishama called interdependence and she argues very importantly that it's not just that um certainly it's not just that an animal or an organism molds its environment nor is it just good enough to recognize that while an animal affects and shapes its environment the environment shapes the the animal or the organism but that this is not a you know uh turn-by-turn process it's not that the animal shapes the environment should then uh in its turn shapes the the animal it's an entirely simultaneous process of coming into being of co-creation if you like now this idea of simultaneous coming into being is an ancient one but i think it's a very deep one philosophically and a very important one so that accounts for your objection to the idea of the omniscient determining god ab absolutely absolutely because the the god has god would have no creation creation is not really just the unfolding of something that's already there creation the name of the book what's the name of the book by the microbiologist it's just called interdependence it's by kriti sharma can you spell her last name s-h-a-r-m-a it's quite a short read okay i'm i'm mentioning her quite a lot these days okay so let me let me ask you a question so to get now i'm gonna try to pack up what you're doing and so again tell me if i'm wrong so we have these opposed viewpoints of the world paradoxical viewpoints they're expressed they make the hemispheric differences necessary or they're a consequence of the hemispheric differences if there wasn't a paradox we wouldn't need the two hemispheres we need these two different ways of looking at things we've tilted we're in danger of tilting too far to a left hemisphere view and that's keeping us from from what it's keeping us from apprehension of the relationship with the sacred that you're describing the co-creation relationship is that is that reasonable well it's ruling out so much i mean i can't begin to tell you but you can imagine all the things that this very reduced abstract schematic bureaucratic essentially it's a bureaucratic um you know you push something it has an action on something else and you know we can predict the outcome we can organize it that's the left hemisphere's vision of the world inanimate stuff that it can move about very much the industrial revolution was a kind of acting out in the outer world of the world picture of the left hemisphere in some ways i talk about that more in the master in his emissary but um but it's phenomenal it's ruling out it's ruling out everything really it's ruling out our ability to understand to see to see at all i mean a number of very important people one of them goethe said you know thinking is good but seeing is so much better and i think we just don't see things anymore because we don't expect them we don't understand them we've ruled them out from the word go because our world picture just doesn't contain them and if you stop doing that and start attending in a more flexible way you find there's a massively complex and fascinating rich nourishing response to your attention it's the absence of that that causes the meaning crisis which is constantly being banded about christ you know the egyptians knew that the ancient egyptians knew that yeah because they they they um they're the god horus is the eye and its attention and it is horus that revitalizes osiris and he's the god of structure and they saw the the the proper sovereignty was a combination of attention and structure a dynamic combination of attention and structure well this is absolutely brilliant well i quite agree but this is where we come to i need to make a correct a possible misapprehension there is absolutely nothing wrong with the view of the right hemisphere it's in fact necessary it's part of a of a dialectic backwards and forwards between these two ways in which things can be built you can't have the one in a way without the other you're quite right we need them both but but we live in an age which is completely obsessed with the idea of equality as some eternal sort of truth about the cosmos i i have i can see no evidence for this idea it's a lovely idea a humanly invented idea which is which is a good one in society although it can't be realized and it may actually not be necessary or even good for it to be ultimately realized it might lead to a horrible kind of totalitarianism as many 20th century philosophers pointed out but but the problem with elevating one virtue above all else well ideologically well no the point is this we need the left and the right but we need the right to be in control now this is very important this is the image of the master and his emissary the embassy and the master are not equal the master needs the industry and knows he needs the emissary the emissary being inferior doesn't know that he needs the master so the emissary is good as long as he's under the control of the master now that image is extraordinarily important for understanding this picture of the cosmos and he's actually present in ancient chinese navajo not navajo iroquois mythologies and so on this idea of the being an unequal pair that one has to be the guardian of the other and as long as the the one that is as it were a potential problem remains under the supervision of the wise and one that sees all everything works well for everybody and that's why in the master in his emissary i suggest there were three periods in the west in early greek civilization in the peak of roman civilization again at the renaissance in the west where these were working well together but in every case it slid further to the to the viewpoint of the left hemisphere and in every case the civilization has crumbled and i see the evidence for that all around me now so i'm not saying that we we just need these two things i'm saying we definitely need them both neither of them is bad but what is bad is for the the inferior one the one that sees less to take control and it's very easy for it to take control because like the less intelligent person that thinks it knows everything it thinks i've got it i've understood it there's no more you know we do three more experiments and we've cracked the universe you know it's all just a matter of you know a few more years of science and we'll understand it i believe that's the case let me let you in on some of the things i've been grappling with here so i talked i talked to matt ridley and bjorn lawberg recently and their um enthusiastic enlightenment rationalists i would say they're they look at what's happened as a consequence of the industrial revolution and the tremendous technological advances that that's produced and the immense increase in human well-being and they say we can continue with that into the future we can produce a world and perhaps are already producing a world where poverty is increasingly going to be a thing of the past and we can bring the rest of the world up to the standards of living that characterize the west and and we can continue to expand the pie and i'm not interested in discussing whether that's possible or not because it's possibly possible and possibly not but it's a particular vision right it's a vision of the extension of material comfort to everyone and that comfort has been extended tremendously over the last two or three hundred years it's it's absolutely amazing and i would say in large part it's a consequence of that left hemisphere reduction of the world to manageable bits and the manipulation of it and and this is not to say anything negative about your thesis whatsoever but one of the things i've noticed is that that materialistic utopian vision and i'm also not insulting ridley or lomberg who i admire greatly that materialistic vision of incremental material progress has very little motive power like it isn't an exciting story for some reason i and you know what do we want incremental improvement when do we want it in due time it it it's not a gripping story it's lacking something and you you're you seem to be pushing towards something that might be the medic medication for that lack there's there's nothing in that vision that speaks of like a grand destiny for the individual for society and there are many religious traditions that insist that human beings exist in a relationship with the divine and that it's only in in living out that relationship that life is imbued with the proper kind of meaning and proper means sufficient to keep you from malevolence i suppose sufficient to be in love with life now you posited in some of your statements a while back that when we're in this co-creation relationship with the divine and that isn't too far off from my understanding of many classical religious propositions that human beings participate in the act of creation whether we participate in the act of creating god is a whole different question but we can leave that aside i mean you're so then the question is what's the question that arises out of that i'm still i'm still trying to drive down at exactly what the main point you're making you've worked on this book for a tremendous amount of time something's driving you hard and it's the revelation of a solution to to a very important problem and the revelation seems to be something like an attempt to explicate a higher order vision for to explicate a higher order vision something that we can aspire to and the the drive to this is that i don't think that we live in an enlightened era we live in what david bohm called an undarkened era in which what we think is enlightening us is in fact inducing misery the strange thing is that unarguably when people are enormously um poverty-stricken and of course one needs then to define what poverty is are people who lead um the lives that their ancestors have lived as hunter-gatherers are they poor or do they only become poor when their whole world is ripped apart and they're brought into the nearest large industrial slum and have no bearings on their life no relationship with the world no pride and their health suffers and they kill themselves so what is poverty that is a very important question first but also remedying poverty extreme poverty is of course enormously important no feeling person could could argue against that but it's not enough you know as um yes one rather well known uh one rather well-known historical figure said a man cannot live by bread alone and the thing is that there's only bread in this story but that leaves out everything peter cook he plays the part of a publisher who says the trouble with your book is that it lacks everything and i feel that these this kind of philosophy lacks absolutely everything it's got nothing whatever to offer now let me just put that some facts to this because it may sound you know it's just my opinion what what do we know well fortunately going back to the 30s school children in america in a certain system have been asked the same questions about their happiness in life at the same age going back now 70 years and gene twenge who has looked at this data which avoids all sorts of problems of defining what you mean by happy and uh you know retrospector scopes and all the rest you've got the data from the 1930s the 40s the 50s and nowadays um the numbers of of children that would um qualify uh by a very well authenticated and commonly used standard as being depressed is five to eight times what it was in the 1930s when poverty was a big issue so five or eight times not five or eight percent more so there's something horrendous we're doing to ourselves suicide rates are going up particularly among women who register much greater dissatisfaction with life now than they did 20 years ago interestingly um because one might think that a number of things that would have made life hard for them have been removed but it just shows how complicated it is knowing what works well for people and three things overall three things seem to be incredibly important for human fulfillment and happiness and one of them i touched on at the end of the master in his emissary which is feeling socially connected being bound into a meaningful community of trust that's one the second is being in the presence of nature just going off for half an hour into a forest and being quiet has an effect on your blood pressure on your physical health and so on and these effects if practice are greater than those and going to the gym and the thing that really struck me is that in oxford there is the oxford handbook of religion i think it's called but it looks at enormous bodies of evidence about the well-being of people who are adherent to a religion and those who are not and not only as you very well might expect are the people who are not adherent to religion much more prone to anxiety depression drug addiction uh they cope less well with crisis uh that they're more vulnerable generally but um they're actually physically not so well so for example rates of of stroke of heart disease are are comparably better amongst the um the believing group than the unbelieving group with the difference between those who do cardio exercise you know for several hours a day so and even smoking it it is a more powerful effect than smoking social connectedness is more powerful than smoking being in nature i think is more powerful than smoking and um being a part of a religious uh community that worships is and even holding um spiritual or religious views to some extent is uh a mitigator against um unhappiness and illness so you know is that any answer to your question of why you know why i don't think that matt ridley's idea of it's totally left hemisphere idea we just sort of crank out some more government departments do some marvelous technical things and everybody gets to be living in a fantasy land of happiness i don't believe this well i don't i don't think he i don't think he believes that i mean he's a complicated person and he's more concerned with applying material resources where they could be most effectively applied i think the question of what what material comfort and plenitude needs to be embedded in is a different question i think it's reasonable to say well we should do what we can to alleviate destitution and and and and catastrophic poverty we should improve child nutrition we should eradicate tuberculosis in to make it available and you've come to this conclusion was this a shock to you over the years that you came to the conclusion that okay why not i mean the reason i'm asking is because it isn't an everyday occurrence in some sense for a committed scientist to point out that the scientific viewpoint needs to be embedded inside it a broader what value-oriented viewpoint it's something i believe but it isn't an everyday occurrence for that to be stated forthrightly and as a scientist isn't necessarily the first thing that would come to mind like have you always thought this way or have you come to this as a consequence of your thinking well i have the advantage of having come to science from a fairly thorough grounding in the humanities so i had a philosophy of life that was based on reading thinking talking and i was a relatively aged customer when i started to study medicine uh compared with most most people who do that um at least in this country um so i brought a background which has always been my passion an interest in philosophy but not just a kind of um forever analytic philosophy in which you it's more like more or less like sort of angels dancing on a pinhead and breaking everything down to the tiniest parts this doesn't really particularly interest me but a kind of more human philosophy um which doesn't become theology but which is open to the idea that there is more in the world than we can know or understand um but it does sound it sounds like it is that it has become theology this isn't a critique like it's it's an attempt to observe what what you're telling me it's not a critique at all it's i'm trying to understand this um and and well it depends what you mean by theology you see i don't think the most important part of the relationship with god is necessarily theology i i'm not disrespectful of theology but well when you're claiming that i've read a lot of i've read a lot of i've read a lot of for example the kabbalah i've acquainted myself with buddhist philosophy and i've always been very interested in taoism hinduism and the deep wisdom of these things including as i say north american native people um and even circumpolar people i mean the the wisdom is embodied in their mythologies we think of these as somehow childish myths but in fact these myths contain and in fact are the only way of containing or not containing because they're not ever contained but of transmitting um bringing into into being for other people the things that are the deep truths and it's that that motivated me i have only one you know i'm not going to be alive much longer i mean i'm not in in imminent danger of dying but i mean we're all actually here for an extraordinary short time and there was great wisdom in the past in having a memento mori on your desk you know skull and we're not here for very long and it behooves us to to behave and to understand the world in the most fruitful way for human fulfillment and happiness and for the greater fulfillment of whatever it is that we sense in in whatever is around us in the being of the world and you know the word cosmos keeps coming to mind which also in its root means beautiful because i think what one sees when one looks at the natural order is that it is as scientists and mathematicians are constantly saying it's outstandingly beautiful complex and orderly why where does that come from well i don't pretend to have an answer but i see the difference is between people who think they know the answer and people who don't i'm one of the people who don't think they know the answer so please don't ask me what the answer is i think i would disqualify myself from having anything worthwhile to say if i thought i had the answer the difference is not you hinted at not between atheists on the one hand and and um and believers on the other but it's between fundamentalist believers and fundamentalist atheists on the one hand and people who often call themselves honest agnostics on the other that openness of mind that willingness to acknowledge that one doesn't know everything that one's reaching and searching for something is far more fruitful and spiritual to me than saying i know it it's written down in this book and these are the rules the i want to go back to the i listened to all of that and and i want to go back to the this co-creation idea because that's like that's a that's not a trivial idea that's that's an overwhelmingly massive idea and it see i've the audience i've talked the audiences i've talked with i've i've talked about the necessity of a vision of life that's sufficiently demanding meaningful to justify the trouble of existence and you it seems to me that it's necessary psychologically to be in pursuit of a noble goal and there isn't a goal that's more noble than the one that you outlined virtually by definition right i mean if if you're co-creating the cosmos but also if you're in a co-creating relationship with god that involves you at the highest level of being with the structure of being well i you know again because we're talking inevitably in shorthand because this is why this book is so colossally long i mean it's apparently as long as the bible the reason i had to do that is that i'm what i'm doing is is nothing less than this i'm saying the whole way in which you are taught by your education by science popular science not by um you know quantum physicists who have a very much more sophisticated grasp of philosophy but by the sort of 19th century mechanists who still dominate biology unhappily um a version of some engineering if you ever liked um this is not a good way to think this is not even likely to be true it doesn't answer to any aspect of experience of the world except the most tinyly detailed so for example what i think is that the whole structure of things is infinitely complex and has many recurring loops in it and when you try and it just an organism is like that or even a cell or even you know part of a cell an organelle is amazingly complex the the number of interactions the number of chemical reactions that are going on there is colossal and they all have cascades that interact with one another however if you take from this very large picture right down to the tiniest tiniest bit of light you can see a little chain of arrows this leads to that leads to that you can't see that all kinds of other things going on and you can identify that and that's what we're good at doing and we say if i interfere in that i can cause something to happen which might be beneficial for example to somebody who has a health condition so i'm not saying there's anything wrong with with any of this again i come back to there's nothing wrong with the left hemisphere there's only something wrong with it when it adopts the hubristic cloak of knowing everything and when you said scientists are not often heard to um voice the sort of things that i'm saying and that you are saying um i'd like to say that physicists very often do but the biologists relatively less often do now although in the early part of the century there were many great biologists such as jbes haldane his father john scott haldane conrad howard wallington um you know ludwig von vertolanti in austria who who saw a very sophisticated vision of the living world of biology but what happened was because there were great successes in molecular engineering after the war this vision which as i say is technically correct that you can interfere as a detail and do something very valuable but the mistake is to extrapolate from that to say this is the structure of the whole thing we're looking at it's not it's not like that there are at least eight or nine ways in which a living being is not not like a machine so i am sorry that scientists diminish themselves by adopting this very narrow vision of what life is because after all the whole point of science the schroedinger said is to answer the question who are we and if it's not answering that question and it's not assumable into an answer to that question it's not really getting us to what the meaning of our life demands from us that we have not an answer to the question who are we not an answer to the question what is the meaning of life of course by definition there isn't one but the very knowledge that we have to strive for it and not lose sight of it is very very important there's a a saying in the midrash you you are you're not obliged to finish the work but you are not permitted to cease from it and i think that is i mean i would say that is my vision of what i do i think it's what all seekers after truth have to do whether they're philosophers or scientists and you know i would love science to be more scientific i i the curious thing is i honor science deeply and i think that it has nothing to lose by making you know being a little bit humbler than it is by accepting that there is a lot that is deeply puzzling and that the more we know about physics for example the more we understand what we don't know and it's not scientific to rule out certain ways of thinking to say that thinking in terms of organic wholes in terms of um gestalt gestalt and so forth is is somehow not scientific no it's just not the way that a certain very narrow form of science is practiced and i i want science before i die to become more open as science should be to be more questing more imaginative you know in writing this book i've had a lot to do with the story of how scientists made their discoveries how mathematicians made their discoveries and they very rarely if ever as george gaylord simpson himself said you know one of the great mainstream um molecular biologists of the last century it's very rare that they make them by following the scientific method the scientific method is a retrospective thing that is fitted on to what actually happens which is extraordinary insights of intuition seeing shapes testing them out of course which is a scientific method of course um but it's not this kind of boring rule-bound thing that it's often made out to be well i think with that statement that's a good place to end for today it was a nice conclusion um gone for an hour and a half or so and uh i appreciate you all right with me very very much you talking with me hopefully we can do this again i want to get further through your book i'll keep everybody posted as to the progress of the book and to where they can obtain it when that becomes possible is there anything else that you wanted to to mention today that that you want to bring up before we before we close well no i i mean i i want to say first of all which i haven't really had an opportunity to say how enormously glad i am that you are you know back in debate with us all um and long may that be um and i do i think the conversations we have are good i hope other people may think that too um well we're going to put that to the test and i'd like to just draw people's attention to the fact that in the last six months um which is six months i think six or seven months um we've developed something called channel mcgill chris which is uh a place on the internet where you can find out more about my stuff you can see um talks lectures podcasts things i've done what i'm you know and generally keep up to date there's a forum there where you can enter into and discuss my work and there's a place where you can ask questions of me so once a month i answer four questions out of a list of things that members of the because you can either be a non-member or a member but if you remember you can ask me a question which i will then spend quarter of an hour answering so you know that that's that's my attempt to try and give back something that isn't just you know the odd book every 10 years so well we'll make sure that we put the links and all of that in the description of this video and with any luck we'll get a chance to talk again in the future after we've both digested this and this conversation it was really good to see you again oh and you thank you [Music] you

Channel: Jordan B Peterson

Views: 424,090

Keywords: Jordan Peterson, Jordan B Peterson, psychology, psychoanalysis, Jung, existentialism

Id: 0Zld-MX11lA

Length: 105min 24sec (6324 seconds)

Published: Thu May 13 2021

Reddit Comments

[u/xsat2234]

Outstanding! Towards the end of the conversation, Ian was articulating the very same concerns about a purely rationalist point of view that JP spends so much time on, and even references "panpsychism" (the idea that consciousness exists as a fundamental constituent of the universe). Sam Harris and his wife Annaka seemed sympathetic to this view point on their podcast a while ago, and I always pictured Sam as the proxy for materialist rationalism.

Exciting to see these viewpoints evolve and converge in conversations like this!

[u/femme123]

Aww man, my two favorite internet people!!!

[u/Mikesapien]

This is one of the richest episodes of JP's podcast yet produced. It's about 1/3rd as long as it could be. Get McGilchrist on for more episodes!

[u/SurfaceReflection]

I just started listening and am still on the start, but the themes and Ians approach are well known to me. I just wanted to point out something they talked about at the start, around 9:00 the question of why we and all living beings have two hemispheres, or the asymmetric neural systems.

As I've been saying, the reason is the fact that living beings started comprehending reality through physical sensations first. What do you do with physical sensations? You feel them, right?

What you feel enables you to quickly react to the environment and survive. So its favored by evolution and is a type of understanding of reality, physically. Those sensations come in wide ranges and often mixed together, combined, not in separate specific bits and pieces. So thats how you get feelings.

And so you feel the reality - even if that's constrained and limited in many ways, but what you feel is a "whole" sensation or a feeling of the environment and other living beings. At the start these physical sensations are simple, because living beings are simple and their interaction with nature and other living beings is simple. Temperature, pressure, light or no light, (no eyes around yet but light is felt as energy), chemical differences in environment and physical touch of other beings and nature.

Then things slowly get more and more complicated and the feelings become more complicated, more complex.

Thats why, when few billion years later brains start to evolve their earliest part is the limbic system.

That ability is so valuable, so important - because it enables living beings to understand things almost instantaneously - that when other parts of the brain get added a half of it is dedicated to that primordial type of understanding of reality.

Bits of the left side are important too, but without the ability to feel we would all be like those people with only their left side working, seeing half of the picture and unable to understand how the bits fit together. Like David Chalmers zombies thinking about each separate strand of hair in the fur of the charging tiger.