Are we unmaking the world? Iain McGilchrist & Bonnitta Roy in Conversation

listen it's wonderful to see you all all 334 and Rising um I'm Jonathan Ryerson I'm chief executive and co-founder of prospectiva who are putting on tonight's event um we're also very proud Publishers of Ian's most recent book the matter with things I'm going to work on the assumption that you know Ian pretty well but he is as well as uh now quite famous author and I use quite there more in the North American sense of very rather than the sort of British sense of not so much um really you know now you're very very much uh famous and celebrated um writer and thinker uh with it increasingly International reputation so it's no wonder that so many of you are here to see him um tonight we're going to carry on our series um called attention as a moral Act and we've spoken already in the first session about what we meant by that we might sort of reiterate it a little bit tonight some of you may know the first session was between Ian and I uh we were sort of trying to reassert reaffirm re-establish the nature of Ian's most fundamental argument we spoke a little bit about my own take on it calling it The mcgokris maneuver and we tried to establish what that was and we just more generally sort of updated ourselves prior to the plunge into the more specific aspects of the book um in the second session we spoke with Zachary Stein who had an amazing conversation with Ian about value as a fundamental feature of the cosmos it was a very uh richly metaphysical somewhat spiritual um fundamental conversation about the nature of reality and we've had a great deal of positive feedback about it since um as some of you may not be know in between our sessions we also have bi-weekly uh in connection and inquiry sessions which are run by Michael and Lee my colleagues and so if you if you have questions or you want to have further conversations uh you're welcome to just go to those events and um you know if they're quite informal and you have a chance to reflect and do some practices and get to know the work a bit more deeply and tonight we have an unusual situation which is that um earlier today I was in touch with Bonita Roy whom I've known for quite some time and she gave me chapter and verse on how she's prepared for this evening's event um and she will be joining us very shortly for some reason we can't currently contact her and we're um waiting for her to arrive so I'm going to briefly introduce her um I hope that she shows up and if she doesn't show up I'm going to begin speaking to Ian myself partly based on Benito's notes um but it's just a matter of time until she shows up because we have now reminded her and she my only assumption is that um she may have got the time zone conversion mixed up because of some daylight saving time change um which we thought we were on top of but evidently not so give us a few minutes as she manifests herself Bonita many of you will know already um but many of you may not and she's really a rather extraordinary human being with a multitude of different uh character traits skills assets interests um it's quite rare for someone to get deeply into metaphysical philosophy and by that I don't mean so much the metaphysical and the sort of new age sort of irrational kind of philosophy I mean more profoundly an engagement with metaphysics as it studied in classical philosophy and in analytic philosophy um and she's written papers on why metaphysics matters she wrote one of the um one of the most profound chapters in a book released by prospectiva press called dispatchers from a time between worlds and it was about the idea of metamorphosis and a lot of Bonita's work is about emphasizing not just the kind of how we have to improve things but also a little bit about how we have to allow things to end Michael are you showing me Signs of Life there or am I imagining it I'm imagining it okay um so Bonita is also a horse and a horse trainer a farmer and like Ian she describes yourself as a Taoist um she one of my favorite conversations with her was when she spoke about the enormous tomatoes that she had in her Farm after after using some a new unsuspecting variety of manures to make them grow which will switch from that to speaking about you know Whitehead and heart short and so on so um Berita is a rather extraordinary person and I'm very much hoping she'll join us in just a second um I'm just noticing I have a problem with my battery so if I if I disappear too Michael you have to pick it up um I think I've got it covered but in just a second so I want to start Ian with a question that Bonnie was going to ask you um she had something else to say first but I'll let her say that because it's very personal to her she was very interested in your subtitle um she wants to understand a little bit more about after the matter with things which you might want to remind us why you chose that title more precisely the subtitle our brains are delusions and the unmaking of the world and I know it took you quite a while to come up with that but if you can share anything about why exactly those words and what you're getting at I know that's one thing Bonnie wanted to ask you well of course in in choosing the title in math the matter with things I was addressing myself to the idea we often have problems understanding um elements of our experience because we thingify them we see them as as things and um in in essence many of the things that we think of in this way I think are better thought of as adverbs probably in other words they are not um elements that we have to pin down or we can find in certain places but there are ways in which we relate to everything else that exists and so um the idea would be that you don't you don't look for an entity but a web of relationships that allows what this entity is thought to refer to to become real it's always a reverberative relationship um why I chose the subtitle is of course it has a kind of glancing nod towards the subtitle of the master and his chemistry but what I'm what I'm talking about there is that I believe that we've started to use our brains in in a particularly limited way uh when I say started I think we've been doing it now for a couple of hundred years at least uh in in which we disattend to whatever it is the right hemisphere is able to tell us and instead focus on what the left hemisphere would have us believe and the delusions comes from as I demonstrate in the the first nine chapters of the book which are all dedicated to neuroscience and it's more fascinating I hope and that makes it sound it's not abstract it's looking at what actually happens to people and their lives and their world and their whole way of being when part of their brain is not functioning correctly and this may be because of an injury to the right Hemisphere or a stroke in the right hemisphere but it may also be because of developing a disease such as schizophrenia which has many many many parallels where the right hemisphere deficit State and I I go in all of that in in that chapter so um and the left chemistry is literally deluded that's not just me who says that I mean I'm very happy to quote other and I do other neuropsychiatrists who say yes the left hemisphere is on its own deluded sorry Jonathan are you just just for a point of clarification because the word delusion is used a lot and and I know you're very precise with your words it's one of the reasons people love your word so much um what exactly is a delusion I mean you know as opposed to it unreality an illusion and lots of other Concepts around it what makes a delusion an illusion as such well I think the the the standard definition is something like an incorrigible false belief that is not explained by the person's culture or other um context right so you know there are things that we would call unexplained false beliefs but they're part of somebody's religion and it doesn't mean that they've become um crazy it means that because of belonging to that religion that's the way they think for example um and and so it it's it's got to be something and it's not just false but it is in this sense incorrigible because there are false beliefs um which uh can be corrected but in the case of a delusion it is pointless arguing with somebody about it because you're relying on a shared way of seeing the world it is as it were yours and mine and the patience in order to explain to the patient that this cannot be the case but you've got to remember that for the patient the whole world that they are experiencing is based on this certain way of that certain disposition towards it this way of experiencing it and so it's it's um a very obvious and common observation that however bizarre a delusion is it is absolutely fruitless trying to argue with the patient about whether this is evidentially likely right right and and and also it it's um gray area where for example you may believe that your spouse is unfaithful to you and your spouse may be being unfaithful to you but there is still a delusional way of believing it because you believe it not in the way that somebody would normally frame this but you believe it with a sort of um determination and on the basis of evidence that other people would not consider a reasonable basis for making decisions so it's a it there's no very very clear way of putting it but when you meet somebody who's deluded you sure know what you're encountering and and I believe that we as a society have started to believe obviously false things about ourselves that experience intuition the business of living would tell us must be false and have always been seen by people as false but we now believe them to be the case so that's that bit about the delusions and the unmaking of Joe before you get to the end making I just want to get the delusions very clear because again as with last week or like sorry two weeks ago when we had the the necessary but sometimes confusing religion between value and values um with delusion and delusions I'm just curious you you're speaking in the subtitle about particular delusions that you you outline in those chapters that you mentioned but there's also something you say about shared reality here so I'm just getting wondering the relationship between particular delusions which might make it difficult for people to interact in a shared reality and the idea that the whole perception that shared is somehow deluded and and what it's like we're living in both of those kinds of delusion or and if so what's the relationship between them and if you don't mind why you answer that I have to go and get another charger for my computer or they will disappear so I'm still with you on my video and I'll be back so make it a long good answer I'll be back in two minutes [Laughter] okay I'll do my best and yes I see the distinction that Jonathan's making there um and yeah you know for example if we are as a whole society seeing things in a certain way is this still delusional since part of the idea of delusion is believing something that cannot be explained by your societal beliefs and I I suppose this is a very new situation I don't think there's been an example in the past where a whole society has been in the grip of ways of thinking that are frankly delusional and like those that are held by patients with major psychosis who are out of touch with reality um and and so this this is a new era that we've entered where um as it where there is a mass psychosis um and I don't think I mean any person actually who's used that conception of a mass psychosis but what we see is that um for example people with delusions based on the fact that they have got a psychotic illness will find many things um apparent that we would not think apparent and make things that we do see a parent as completely um probable or impossible and and I I I I I I I mean I could go back to chapter nine which is the chapter in which I do look at schizophrenia but just illuminate the I don't know possibly I would say about 30 different ways in which people with schizophrenia demonstrate the same sorts of aberrational thinking that we do right and and one thing that's interesting about this is that it it I mean a lot of it one might think is because we're interacting with machines people with schizophrenia see themselves as machines often and and call themselves machines and have been known to do things like cut open their wrists to see whether there's blood or engine oil in their veins so they they can often have this very disturbing feeling that nothing is is right it's all mechanical it's all abstracted um engineering rather than anything embodied sorry are you I put my hand up because I've got an email notification from our esteemed guest that she's waiting to be let in oh good yeah I just want to say hey so here we go you've managed to bring fabulous yeah up to speed then and let you take over from there hi Bonnie nice to see you are you with us I am sorry I'm so sorry about my tardiness no that's okay that's okay don't worry with us um you may not I know you've been in touch with the invite email but nice to introduce you I'll be in front of 300 odd people um so um you know I've spoken with many times and I think you'll know um Bonnie I've already introduced you to some extent to the audience what I didn't mention is that over the last year or so you've uh maybe more than a year now you've created um something with a lovely fetching straightforward title a pop-up School and um just briefly tell us what a pop-up what your pop-up school is so that before we get into the discussion people get a better sense of where you're coming from well um hi Ian nice to see you hello um so um for almost 15 years I talked a taught a master's course in Consciousness studies and transpersonal psychology ecology or transformational psychology which we called it at the end and um covid pretty much was the star that broke the back for that program which was always kind of an Off-Broadway struggling uh private program and um so um I graduated my last cohort in August of 2022 and in August of 2021 kind of anticipating the end of that I wanted to uh offer something similar that was equally robust that could speak to what people were starving for but had a much lower onboarding uh um threshold so instead of paying 17 000 a year you could pay like forty dollars a month and I um kind of modified sub stack so people could enroll on and off or enroll on a yearly basis and I called it the pop-up school because in Zack Stein who you met a couple of weeks ago in in his book he predicted that schools might be these little pop-up initiatives and I wanted to give it this sense of um like serial learning like you could pop in and pop out and um yeah so it's been almost uh two years now and it's quite a growing growing community and I suspect there's several of the students or our community on this call today okay great well I'm glad to hear it and Bonnie why are you getting settled just as far as I understand it where we were in the conversation was I asked I I I didn't say anything about your observations about the book but I did use your email from this morning to ask Ian about the subtitle and so we we spoke a little bit about why the matter with things we spoke to a little bit about um brains which could somewhat self-evident we spoke a little bit about delusions and the difference between delusion sort of singular and delusions plural and individual and Collective delusions but only really scratch the surface of that and Ian was just about to come on to the unmaking of the world when various things kicked off including my computer running out of battery so um Ian if you want to finish that all on why the unmaking of the world allow everybody to get settled and once you finish that I'm happy to disappear until the Q a so if you can go on the unmaking of the world Michael you can allow me to disappear yes and then you carry on talking together and I'll be back with a q a in about 50 minutes yes what I wanted to indicate by the phrase the unmaking of the world is that the various habits of mind that I believe are toxic which we've adopted more in the last few decades but certainly going back further than that for the last century or two lead to us no longer having a world and a world is a very special thing if you like to put it that way it's an experience really like like all the things I talk about that it's not really a thing but it's a place in which we dwell it's a home it's a living thing and therefore in um schematizing mechanizing abstracting decontextualizing ignoring the uniqueness of individual cases in ordering in ignoring the individual uniqueness of people we have come to inhabit an enormously impoverished version of what that world should be we're in a sort of lost place um which has none of the the feel of a living vibrant World in which we are committed orientated and find a place of being that's really what I was getting at yeah so thank you you know when I read that I was struck by I just had this this impression you put a lot of thought into the subtitle and that it was very uh it was it was a more poignant message maybe than a lot of people might uh think about at first um and um you know something that strikes me as being of grade cons I think there's a lot at stake I think you would agree that there's a lot at stake and I think sometimes people think um yeah they take they take you seriously but they think it's like a metaphor and I I think that it's more than a metaphor it's more than a passing concern it's more than you know almost a sci-fi movie let's say some people who's like all these crises go into their Consciousness like it's almost a sci-fi movie you know it makes us nervous but I think that like for me a lot of what you're talking about I see every day I've seen the erosion of the adult Mind through the 15 years that I've been doing teaching and you know of course my course uh selects so people who have maybe um a little bit of uh spiritual emergencies and stuff but the nature of the question of whether reality is real is is extraordinary now and these in these uh programs that people go to that question whether we share the same world or we all have different worlds you know there's this and I know the sense in which we all live in our own perspective but the emphasis is always on it the world is a simulation that we share different worlds like this sense the the humanities and the science are teaching this extraordinary fragmentation and lots I call it uh locked in syndrome that we can't perceive the world really and and my question for you is is Where is the where is the uh fever why are we so feverishly trying to convince ourselves that we live in a simulation I mean where is that pain coming from that we don't want to live in let's say the natural world gosh there's so many things to say about that um well one is that the natural world imposes limits on us like we we die and we have bodies that have certain inclinations and so on we're busy trying to pretend that none of this is true and we can remake everything according to a whim but that is not the case and in fact the the the limits that are imposed by life are extremely healthful and important it's a mistake to think that we ought to be railing against them and trying to get rid of them in my view um but of course like everything it's it's it's um a matter of degree nature is something that medicine has always interfered with nature tries to a medicine tries to overcome some of the unnecessarily adverse effects of of disease and so forth so we are always juggling these things I think another reason why um we're addicted to this idea of a representation is because the left hand we say is a representation of the world the right hemisphere has a presenting of the world it is allows the world to presence to us that is a vibrant two-way experience but the once it is taken up by the left hemisphere it is dislocated dismembered analyzed categorized and turned into something abstract a map of the world and you cannot live in a map you have unmade the world once you do that but the left hemisphere can only trust the things that it has it is itself has made it wants to Heidegger actually said that he was of course not talking about um hemispheres at all but he did say that modern man needs to be able to tell himself that he is the giver to himself of everything that he has and that is part of this a problem that we have that we must be the all-powerful and we must be the um the one that can do anything this is extraordinary in a way because I you know for decades I've been puzzled by the the kind of um Paradox that at the same time we believe ourselves to be capable of doing almost anything we want to and believe ourselves to be basically pointless worthless so the Dignity of humanity has hugely plummeted and so is its happiness and its sense of belonging and everything else at the same time that our hubris about Humanity has has gone through the roof so adopting a certain degree of modesty and um a sense of um proper limits to what we can do and what we can know would actually perhaps help us to regain a sense of respect for what we in fact are and what we can do but those would be some of the thoughts I'd have about why that is so promoted and I'm afraid it is very much promoted and I I just like to say that there are a number of philosophers quite amongst the foremost at the moment is Donald Hoffman who says that what we see is a readout of an instrument panel this is an idea that has been offered many times in the past and was really in dimassios early work as well for which I criticized him and for which he hasn't forgiven me but but this idea that actually what we're doing is we're reading out something um which is what the left hemisphere does but in fact we're experiencing something real that are things in the cosmos that correspond to all those things that we perceive and value now I'm not saying that it was only one way of seeing them but once again in our culture what we've done is we've taken a partial truth and made it the whole story so it is true that everyone to some extent sees the world differently and that's an important and beautiful fact but it is also a very important and beautiful effect that generally speaking we see we see things um in a common world we don't all live in So vastly Different Worlds that we have no common ground and at the moment there's a general tendency to say that if something is um is the case up to a degree which wasn't thought to be so perhaps recently then it's true to the max across the board we we go to extremes we have black and white positions and I you know I'd like to present myself as a foe to black and white positions that is very important that there are matters of degree and things that are um implicit and not fully made explicit you know so you said that you know kind of have this huge that we imagine ourselves are all powerful that all the gifts we have we've made ourselves and um and it seems to me that there's a pickle in this because somehow deep down inside we do know that we haven't made the Earth and we haven't made the trees and we haven't made ourselves in everything that we actually are has been given to us freely by Nature through no account of our own I mean this is more it's you know people will when I say that they'll say oh that's very spiritual and I say no it's just a strong naturalism it's just actually the case it's rather mundane and for me um there's something that um if I thought I was responsible for uh booting up my enthusiasm every morning I would be overwhelmed you know it's like so much of who we are that gives us the possibility to Pretend We're all-powerful comes to us through this intelligence that we don't we we don't don't maybe you know we don't have um you know it's not it's not been it's all given to us and and um so it seems to me like the thing I can't understand is that um and I don't know this is seem off topic to you or is this kind of interesting yeah so I went to a conference the other day and this young man was um presenting an argument that that uh the world is intelligible and that communication between people is possible and to do that he took this huge journey through theoretical cognitive science and opponent processing and and free energy principle and I thought something very odd is a very nice man and I thought something very odd is happening here like if if people had to understand all that to understand that the world is intelligible it's a possibility in communication than most people would be lost and I thought like I told my dog you have absolutely no no chance at all for being in the world you know and so this question this crisis of how so this is an example of something that looked like a well presented presentation but it really was to me a sense of collective Madness and and yeah no well this kind of thing goes on all the time uh it's just that we've completely lost any kind of contact with the the live intuitive reverberative business of experiencing the world in which the world approaches us becomes available to us and we to it and it's in this encounter that whatever it is that we we we know comes about so but what you're describing is this unnecessarily um complex way of approaching it and there's a lot of this in science in which frankly the extraordinarily opposite is I'm sorry obvious I meant to say extraordinary obvious is is demonstrated at costly and great length where at the same time oddly there are things that are completely obvious that are wholly denied and people go around believing them because they think oh well people say this so I better believe it um but I I want a bit of the touch of the the little boy who said the emperor's wearing no clothes yeah I mean I'm sorry guys he's nude there's just so much rubbish talk for these days and it's very confusing disorientating to people and leads them to a sense of desperation they don't know what to believe who to believe what to believe in the intuitive spirituality has been deadened by the way they've been brought up and by everything they experience in the world their capacity to pay um continuous sustained Vigilant attention open attention respectful attention the sort of attention that leads to real sense of meaning and or is has been undermined and they've been told they have thousands of choices that in reality are not helpful and it's a well-known fact in in psychological research that Beyond a few choices too many choices make people less happy more stressed than they would have been content with fewer choices so it's not as I'm always saying it's not an argument for having no choice but it's an argument of saying that choice doesn't get better and better if you try and say well you can be anything you want you can't I mean get real it's a horrible fantasy that creates enormous stress and the fear of missing out and the fear of having failed and the need to do all kinds of incompatible things at once in order to prove that you're okay it's a horrible world to bring up young people in I mean I I just feel for young people whose rates of mental illness are sort of zooming through the roof yeah so we do live live in a Mad World my masters when you think of young people it's really very sad and and um uh I read in uh statistics that one out of every 16 kids in the United States is diagnosed with a severe mental illness and whether it's because the DSM has gone mad or the children have gone mad it doesn't really matter um it's an alarming um alarming fact and you know I talked to sometimes I coach some young parents and um we we try to teach parents how to have unstructured time with their children and and I often get the response you know I I blocked out time she was playing I was there nothing was happening but I got bored I don't know what to do with my body I don't know how to put my body in a PL in play I don't I'm just stiff and I pretend and and and this is all by way of trying to say to the listeners like it's not a joke and it's not science fiction and something really disturbing is happening right in front of our eyes um but I thought you know I have this this note here and there's this beautiful word that you use uh it I don't know how to say IP City IP City um and uh I you have a quote from sass in his book about this crucial self sense of self-saneness a fundamental and therefore nearly Indescribable experience of existing as a vital and self-identity identical subject of experience and action and and I thought um this is one of these experiences that we can no longer take for granted that people have any intuition of and so I thought maybe you could if you were talking to aliens who had had not this experience what what what is what is that experience the trouble is that it's not something that's improved by being put into words it's something that has to be experienced and I take the word obserity largely from Louis sass um a very great mind I think um and what he's talking about there is the natural um unself-conscious uh awareness of a continuous functioning itself we've so eroded our intuition and we've been encouraged to attack our intuitions to reject our intuitions that we can no longer act unself-consciously and this happens in schizophrenia people say I don't know how to walk I have to think put one foot in front of the other and so on I don't know how to sit down and or whatever it may be so they've become Paralyzed by a kind of Gorgon stare of the intellect on everything they're doing and the beauty of life is that things work well only when it's not like that imagine um how bad the performance of a piece of music would be if The Pianist was thinking all the time consciously about what he was doing with his fingers imagine how um how diminished an act of sexual love would be if it was entirely contrived according to a plan an algorithm or a worked out schema it's this way of thinking that is absolutely crazy and a huge Affliction and makes life impossibly difficult for us the trouble is that if we adopt a legalistic frame of mind I mean a lot of this comes back to a sort of legalistic um incorporation of um the redressing the the redress for any kind of wrong that happens to you is to accuse somebody so nowadays we we have this sort of idea or some people seem to have this idea that we're owed a pain-free life and if this pain there's suffering things are not good in it there's somebody to blame for that and they must be brought to account preferably through the law this has a deleterious effect on whole sways of life where in fact we need to trust and to accept that there will be ups and downs and things but not to become um you know reaching for a handy attorney at every turn in events this is the problem and this is why schools schools find that the teachers harder to recruit hospitals are finding doctors harder to recruit because first of all they've been told that unless they follow certain written procedures they will be vulnerable to being sued and that will completely destroy their career and and that you know nothing any longer can be done according to the wonderful way in which I was taught and it was taught medicine too which was from experience from people who'd had you know 40 years of experience of whatever it was talking to me from that base of what goes well and what doesn't and and you know the teachers at school were people who had had an enormous enthusiasm for things that they had learned to love and they communicated that to me and that's in in itself worth a thousand hours of just following rules and procedures it's this awful business of rules procedures theories that have overtaken our ability to be naturally responsive creatures and when we can try to recover that we may be able to get back some of our moral self because that's also a very important thing isn't it I mean since we have rules about absolutely everything now I think back to when I was was young and when I mean it's a it's it's a cliche but one didn't need to have the same numbers of locks and there were cameras watching everything and so on but on the whole although certainly crime existed it didn't seem to exist on the level if it would if we now took away all the the locks and the and the cameras that we've since instituted and there's a sort of belief that if you can get away with it then you're entitled to do so there's no kind of strong inner sense of I would never do this because I'm not that kind of person and I don't want to live in a world where human beings do this kind of thing that seems to me one of the most important moral acts um stimulator action I don't want to do this because I don't want to be in a world where we can assume that people will do this unless some law restrains them from doing it so we've moved such a terrifically long way from anything intrinsic and spontaneous and intuitive um to the world of somebody who is unable to stand unless they've got scaffolding all around them a support and of course such a person is a feeble version of a healthy living individual would you think about that yeah and of course there's actually fragmented right just like yourself I was thinking of the other day we were talking about wisdom like what is it to cultivate wisdom and I was saying that years ago both of us will use that phrase quite a bit I think um doctor for example could grow wise in his career right so he would give birth to Children he'd watch them grow he'd put their help their parents in the dying process he'd be in the community and this kind of embedded in the community in the local with his expertise um having what I call a voluntary obligation to his practice um through the thick and thin and the difficulties this is a formula for having wise people embedded in relationships but a doctor's career is not a formula for wisdom today not at all it's completely fragmented and they're systematically standardizing things so all the doctor does is go on the computer and tell you something so pretty soon you don't need the doctor and we feel exactly we we've we've slowly redefined intelligence as something machines are good at and so you see the standardizing of teaching the standards of this is what machines are good at and now we have you know chat GPT is going to be our teachers because it's better at that than we are but we've been we've redefined intelligence is what people are good at well we need to redefine intelligence I I mean I I I always say AI is not artificial intelligence it's artificial information processing and that's what it does with intelligence involves a full understanding and that can only come if you if you are embodied if you have emotions if you form relations on the basis of that and if you're aware that you're only here for a while and are going to die the all these things are very important to making us what we are we need all these elements including the element of death which is not our foe but in many ways our friend that's a whole other topic but but I what I'm really saying is that intelligence isn't is is is at risk and I think you're saying this as well um have been replaced by just very rapidly and mechanically following every kind of um pathway that a computer can find but having no sense of a context in which to properly evaluate these things and and will fill in things which are absolutely not true on the basis that it looks like in this passion um this ought to be happening so it actually states that certain things have happened in a person's life for example based on the probability but they didn't and that person rather specifically didn't do those things so I mean not only have you got the problem of telling true from false in educating children and and students who may waste their time and their teachers Time by um using chat GPT to write their essays um but it will also make the the fear of the law very difficult uh is the evidence fabricated what do we really believe here um can we believe something we see our politicians saying when you can't believe and you can't trust the civilization collapses and you know that's this wonderful saying uh Chinese third century is saying um one of the Emperors that for a society for a civilization to thrive you need guns food and Trust And if you have to do away with one of them do away with guns and if you have to do another one do away with food but the one you cannot do away with this trust and we've done away with it sorry I hope I haven't depressed you too badly let me think of something else no no no no um no I think that I what I'm trying to collaborate with you on is it's really to open people's eyes you know we get so habituated to the way things are and open people's eyes to see how extraordinarily unmade the world is I mean it we we think we think we have to encounter people who are paranoid schizophrenics to understand what you're talking about and yet this kind of unmaking of the world is the world that is being unmade right right in front of our right in front of our very eyes and um if the world is an organism it's not a machine and the trouble is the way we think is that we think it's just a machine and can therefore be reduced to parts and all we find after we've done this is a lot of material elements that have been broken out of a whole and the whole cannot conceivably be reconstructed from these bits these inanimate bits and what I mean by the unmaking of the world is all that structure all those relationships that enable things or people and the feelings that they have the experiences they have to interrelate with one another are being shown away the world view is becoming simpler and simpler and simpler not because it's approaching truth but because it's moving away from truth it's it's running away to a blatant falsehood which it feels it can't escape because of a certain way of thinking which is that the only thing that matters is that we should be able to be in control and amass material Goods those are the values of the left hemisphere and all the other important values are better served by the right anyway that was what I talked about last week's we won't go there now I I think that and another thing that um the way to another way to look at it and of course you've done incredible detail on this is people a lot of times people are um let's say their teachers or Educators or their psychiatrists or their spiritual teachers they assume that the kinds of Minds we have is the nature of mind and then they try to work with that or or um you know people will say because our minds are constructing reality and and I always say no that's the kind of mind we have thinks it's a simulation but I hear you saying is that this integrated mind and of course we have to we're off balance so we're gonna emphasize what the what we've lost with the right brain uh contribution this kind of mind looks at nature and sees home and and and moves around the world and sees that Every Act of life is a gift from nature from my home from where I've become um this kind of mind um trusts that um there's such a larger intelligence that an envelopes envelops all of us and that's like a tissue from which we dialogue is possible you know the left hemisphere like the difference between you know you hold your baby like this and it's right hemisphere it's a right hemisphere and yet we're talking at odds like we think that if we can come to some conceptually agreed upon solution then there's a possibility of a communication and I'm saying that like because we our bodies are inhabit the tissue of the Living World then this is why the communication is possible not because it's an effort in this direction it should be a joy in this direction and and yeah I I totally agree with that and I think you know the phrase constructing the world is is very important because it's a professional conception has been since the 60s that effectively um we make up the world according to um you know who who we are and what we what we want but um I I reject this idea that we um fabricated because that is dependent on this idea that we are cut off from any kind of reality and that all we have are the bits that come to us in our in our mind and we put together a world out of those but that is not in my view the case because we do have contact with something Beyond ourselves and unless you tell yourself that that cannot be and cut yourself off from it in which case of course you won't find that there is anything beyond yourself if you don't do that but cultivate a kind of humble awareness of things that are far beyond what we know right now you you start to feel experience those things they start to to give you something with which to build the world and so it's not a fabrication or a construction of the world it's a helping to bring into being something that is there to bring it more into being and we play a part in that and so the world comes about for each of us in a slightly different way because if each of us brings something different to it but this is wonderful it's not a negation of the idea that there is a common core to the world it's the idea that each person's contribution brings a slightly different uniqueness to an aspect of the world we still have something that is vibrant living evolving it's not a finished product it's a thing that is in process as we ourselves are in process and that process is a resonant thing between our Consciousness and whatever the rest of the conscious Cosmos gives that's my my view of it so instead of saying that we construct the world we make it up in some mechanistic engineering way which is exactly how the left hemisphere would think was the only possible way we are in fact if you like midwifing into existence helping to birth something that is natural something that is nature which is that which is always about to be yeah so I want to move on a little bit and um there's this notion this philosophical notion which I think is is true and that is that um reason I'm going to use the word reason because rationality is is associated with just like left brain typically that reason is isomorphic to reality in the sense that there's something about human reasoning and I'm not just talking about the brain but you can unpack this that is isomorphic to reality such that there is the possibility for a direct Attunement let's say yes and um and so that's the first question and she can speak to that then there's a question just to build after after that to kind of yes I think that's a wonderful um observation and I certainly believe it and I think I've made it myself and in a way it was what Einstein was saying when he said what is so wonderful and so unexpectable is that the world is understandable why should the world be understandable by our minds and and the idea that our minds [Music] um would evolve naturally to understand the world is not necessarily correct it might have adopted various kind of um entirely false positions for a while um in order to deal with a certain situation but over time our understanding of the world has increased I mean we I'm not saying that we most of us in in the modern world are making the best of that fact but there is something heroic about the degree to which over thousands of years we have come to understand more and more as well and that the world is um as David Deutsch says speaking to us in English I mean he means if English is your natural language why is it that when you approach the world the world speaks to you in your own language which is another way of putting Einstein's uh remark about extraordinary fact and I think what this gives us is the opportunity to trust what reason tells us not as you say I make this distinction between it's not really one that's a core English distinction but we have to have two different words for it one is for simply the following of rules and procedures in the way the computer would and the other is tempering all that with the wisdom that comes from experience the understanding of context and so on and so forth in fact we're a wise judge would do you know you're talking about wisdom and interestingly judges are being more and more constrained by mechanical sets of rules and procedures so that they're no longer free to use um wisdom that they've acquired over an arduous training in and Decades of experience so that's what I say is is that these things are naturally resonant and I do also believe the imagination is like this and unfortunately we haven't got time to go into that enormous topic of what is Imagination but with coverage and with shelling and so forth I take the imagination to be a faculty which enables us to be in touch with reality beyond the things that we can reason about it's not fantasy which takes us away from reality he makes a very strong distinction between fantasy and Imagination and Imagination on the other hand is our one chance of actually feeling our way into the inside of the world and experiencing it yeah that's that's beautiful and that is so we have this notion that reason is isomorphic with the world so there's a possibility for not only Attunement but yeah for deep mutuality um so the question and then is what is the relationship between goodness and reason because it's a little hard tricky to say they're isomorphic um we're talking in a different way than we were about where the reason is isomorphic with reality or perhaps even with truth I I distinguish between different kinds of meaning of Truth one being something abstract that we have an analytic pass towards and we get closer and finally we catch it and a different one which is a form of Attunement of coming together of meeting of um resonating a completely different kind of sense of Truth and of course the word truth has is it core this idea of being true to something of surfaces being true to one another as a carpenter says or a couple being true to one another if they love one another so it is about a relationship that is that is truthful and real um goodness uh um well all I would say is that reason is obviously another tool that we can use in helping work out what is um good but it shouldn't be the only or the limiting tool because there is very much more to goodness than calculation and one of the things that um I I write about in chapter 26 I think is the way in which in Academia in the west um the philosophy of utilitarianism has more or less ousted every other kind of way of thinking about what is naturally good and the odd thing is that what is being praised is a way of thinking which is archetypally not good immoral to always calculate about things is is immoral and often leads you to horrible conclusions that it's okay to kill one person in order to um Harvest their organs and give them to five other influating transplants for example so a reason has a dual aspect as they're often that it can be extremely helpful but if used in a rigid fashion it approximates what people who are mentally ill do with it people who have frontal lobe damage right hemisphere damage who has Psychopaths and who have schizophrenia or have in common that their idea of morality is based on rationalizing calculations whereas I hope that most of the rest of us see it in a broader sense yeah that was the trick I think now that I now I understand what what was the tension in his question was in the assumption that goodness is utility right so that he it was like well when I'm reason when I'm reason I don't always get the good but I but that was more like he yeah so now I understand what that tension was but when I reason and I don't get what I want it may be the good and so then you start to see that there is the potential for more Attunement between reason and the good versus reason and then thinking of the good as a utility especially an ego referential utility so that was that was very helpful thank you very much I knew there was a thank you that kind of tension where there's an assumption that is yeah yeah creating the tension in the question so yeah thank you very much thank you Bonnie and um yes you could you can uh I'm aware of money that another question might come to you as you're um you know watching the questions that follow um but I want to give a chance for the audience to come in now um before that I just wanna I wanna ask you one question um about something Bonnie alluded to earlier visually what's at stake here um because we don't often flesh this out you know the source of the sense of mattering um because you know there's a certain intuition about moral acts and our proximity about good behavior with our peers and then our society and then you get into the health of the planet you might think about the cosmos you might think about the ultimate nature of reality you might even wonder about life on other planets and other forms of intelligent life as many do and I feel of that because I've noticed between the two of you a sort of difference in tenor um if I can if it's I think it's reasonable to say that Ian you um although this you you offer a great deal of uh emphasis on beauty and love and goodness and there's a great deal of positivity in your work it's also true that you lament a great deal about the world and there's a a certain um Spirit of let's say Melancholy about about how things are turning out and a sort of urgency to to redirect things and we perceive them the supremacy of your work only with us and something altogether more chipper something altogether more kind of lively and playful and I don't know I don't want to sort of make this too personal but I am just trying to get at this idea of you know when we what's at stake are we talking about the end of human habitation on planet Earth are we talking about um the capacity to destroy ourselves with exponential technology are we talking about the intrinsic value of things that will be destroyed pointlessly can you give me some sense when you this question of what's at stake both of you please like what's your sense of um why we should care about any of this if I can ask such a big context question like ultimately at the end of these searches what are we trying to protect what are we trying to safeguard what is it that actually matters to you both um I think even yours will be more more familiar to people so I'm gonna come to Bonnie first question we I'm trying to say I'm trying to say don't think what's at stake in the future don't worry about what's coming don't take what we're saying and and draw it out in a narrative Arc and figure out what's going to be left right we just be with reality right now every single person alive is going to die is that a crisis it's just just you know what I'm saying if I put it within all the meta crisis and everybody will die you have a different reality to it if we put it in re right here now what's at stake is every person in this call could be deeply wedded with reality deeply feel belonging to the Earth feel the generosity of having been given a life experience the pers beauty of the perceptual World um when you listen to read Ian's conver writing a music that people don't have those experiences anymore the the completely robbed of who people are the the Fantastic joy and Voyage of being a human being is not present in people's lives they don't know how to get to it this is what's at stake and in young people there's a struggle because they haven't yet forgotten something and um you know used to be when I worked with young adults going through the individuation stage let's say the problems were like problems with the intergenerational change between their families how society's conventions have changed now they say things like when I was seven I felt like I was hooked up to a machine that was sucking out my blood this is like the the metaphors that seven-year-olds use like it's so bad now that young people who are still kind of like organisms and then they don't blame their parents because they're like their parents are sucked into the machine you know they use these metaphors it's extraordinary how poignant the lack of world living world is for them and so for me what I think what's at stake is you know trying to connect with young people make a world for them but right here and now all the things that you may imagine were possible are possible as long as you're still a living breathing organism and people don't believe that anymore thank you Bonnie and um yeah it's lovely to hear you say that I've heard that you say similar things but be great to hear it again um you know makes me think of the unmaking of the world again are we to understand that the world is inevitably being unmage that it has to be unmade for it to be remade or that we're called in some sense to protect what is already made well I think what I'm saying is is that we are in the process of unmating the world not that it has to or not that it can can't be reversed or but that we are we're simply unmaking it and and that's the predicament we find ourselves in and there's nothing just to be clear there's some people who the reason I asked that question in that way is there are some people who want to tear it all down I have met people over persuasion and and are they entirely wrong I mean how how do you see this quite simply anybody who wants to just tear down a civilization or tear down well it is is crazy foolish arrogant um what we need to do is to work with what is in fact as I say not a machine but an organism to change the parts that we feel need to be changed and to respect the wholeness of it and I find myself after your um perfectly accurate portrayal of me as a miserable old kid I find myself I find myself curiously more um optimistic perhaps than um Bonita in that I don't think that people lack all these things I mean I'm sure she's right that the world is a much less hospitable place than it was but finding these things for being encouraged to to to to nourish oneself on them um we're offering children a diet to grow and which is a great shame but but there will always be people who will gravitate towards the magnificence of what the you know what there is and who will see life as you and I I think both see it as a an awe-inspiring gift and and that this is a very important way to be I I often think you know when people say what do we do and this is a famously difficult question to answer but I was thinking that there would be some value in saying pray and what I wouldn't mean by that is well the only thing that's left open to us now is to pray and hope that there's some Divine being that will change it all that's not at all what I mean what I mean is by adopting a devout um overfilled compassionate vision of the world not striving to know altertake and all the rest but actually too first of all to understand is in all its awe-inspiring complexity and that if we did that a lot of things would start happening differently because so much of what's wrong is due to simple hubris the pronouncements of people who think we can do it all and only a few more tweaks and we'll be able to achieve this that and the other one this is this is how things get destroyed it's it's in all the old mythologies the The Arrogant know it all upstart who doesn't realize what he's destroying and becomes that um damage that that brings the cosmos to ruin so that that's that's my thinking about that I'm not surprised though um that you ask Jonathan to say what is it that is worth saving or what is it that we're trying to save because surely the answer to that is everything that inspires in us love and and beauty and and it speaks to us of all these things that are so life enhancing I mean you can live in a world in which everything is is is is is Bleak meaningless pointless I mean you can create that for yourself but don't kid yourself that that's necessarily the reality you can also live in a world where you are maximally responsive to what is what is um good beautiful and true and worthy of our love and respect and and don't get me wrong good beautiful and true there's a reason we have three different words they're not interchangeable with one another they sometimes conflict with one another but nonetheless they have this family relationship with one another in which all these positives come together they don't have to be mechanically related they don't there hasn't doesn't have to be an algorithm saying go to Beauty then if this then go to good or it just doesn't work like that right so I I got a lot out of that answer because um you know to be maximally responsive to the possibility of Love or those were not your words but but paraphrasing the idea being maximally responsive for what is good beautiful and true um is what's at stake in some sense and also reminds me in one back in the day at one some seminar or event you were at I once remember writing something down quickly because the turn of phrase was so beautiful when you put it you said that life is life is a Superfluous gift calling for gratitude and tenderness and you said it off the bat as if it was one of many lines but I'd love that particular formulation a Superfluous gift calling for gratitude and tenderness with that thought um I want to bring in the others now the the technicalities of what's about to follow are not altogether trivial so please pay attention and if you have a question you'd like to answer ask um please type it in the chat while also putting your hand up it's a double whammy we're asking you to do both because it helps us to find you you might think it's just self-evident but we are we do have a 380 participants and we can only see them on a relatively small screen a certain number at a time so if you raise your hand through the reactions icon I believe um or at least one of the icons down below while simultaneously typing your question and in some cases we'll ask you to speak it in some cases we'll read it out um also let me say this quite important Point um we're very keen to hear from all kinds of people um that I mean men and women I mean young and old um and so if if you're in any doubt about answering asking a question um can I particularly encourage you to do so if you're feeling that you're somewhat uncomfortable or not too sure if you should and we're very keen to get from here from a wider variety of people if possible and we'll do everything we can to make that happen okay with that thought in mind I'm going to look at the Google Doc that Michael has helpfully prepared for me um and I'll take a take one and while you're asked while you're answering I'll look for others okay um the questions so far are very technical um but actually there's one here from James Van Lewin which I think is a good one it's a direct message he says um and this comes to the premise of tonight's talk is there a root mass delusion um is there something is there something I think that if I understand the question he's trying to get it um is there something inherent like a premise or an axiom or a fundamental part of the delusion that we need to take stock of collectively and if so what is it and that's initially a question for Ian while I look through the other questions well I I suppose that um I I would say inevitably that there is a core Mass delusion which is indoctrination into the vision of the world which is delivered to us by the left hemisphere untempered or relatively untempered by the right and so it is one orientated towards um greed gain power and effectively it's about power and control and it it's lost intellectual subtlety because the left hemisphere doesn't have much intellectual subtlety and it's literally less intelligent than the right it also has no no we're near the understanding of Social and emotional methods of intelligence and so inevitably once this this way of thinking becomes the standard way in which all discourses is carried on in the public sphere and children are brought up no longer to believe in or take pleasure in all the the beautiful things that are now associated with the past because we've now moved into this Brave New World where we we have technical machines we don't need to read literature and look at painting and listen to music and view drama and all these other things or or for goodness sake and develop some kind of spiritual sense of something Beyond you know that's if we're like that then that is it is a mass delusion which will lead to Great unhappiness conflict and and um distraction the destruction of the valuable that's what I see around me people at loggerheads much more than they were um 30 years ago interestingly the relationships between all the societal groups that are now so strictly policed and and boundaries and so on have become worse rather than better through this process anyway there we are okay thank you Bonnie do you have a direct answer to that question or should we take some more questions I think that causes or or the root problem I think it's one of fragmentation and alienation at all scales so um the the left hemisphere wants to analytically reduce something to study it and so it feels fragmented and separated we feel that matter is different than life in in a kind of alienated way we feel that humans are separate from nature we feel individualistic we feel our countries are separate and Sovereign so this whole notion the I guess the left brain thinks it's separate from the right brain I would say that the lack and loss of any kind of sense of understanding a deep continuity at all levels vertical and um vertical dimensions and horizontal Dimensions uh could characterize the the sum total of the problem okay thank you Bonnie and I'd like to do a question from Lisa maros marowski if I say that correctly Lisa you're welcome to ask it yourself but yeah there you go hi uh thank you for hosting these wonderful talks I really enjoyed them um the context from my question um to to both of you is Imagine is the imagination so I'm not really looking for a factual response um but given uh as you've said that the world is an organism and yet is being unmade uh are there models such as uh the caterpillar becoming butterfly that uh Barbara marks Hubbard refers to um that uh you know show us um or could help us understand what is happening to us help us get through this process of unmaking and remaking um and and then second to that what might be we what might we be remade into like as the next phase of evolution um my own hunch is that endosymbiosis might give us a clue um but not the answer so so this is an imaginative question thank you very much and Bonnie I know you might have an angle on the butterfly uh caterpillar metaphor from a piece of writing that I'm familiar with um Ian if you have any thoughts initially well um the the the caterpillar butterfly flightings is is extraordinary in in nature and as we know the butterfly actually has a completely different genome from the caterpillar so what we're seeing there is transmogrification what um what I think I'm being asked to do is to say what this butterfly is going to be like and um how we can bring about its release and and I first of all what is it what it is like I would be extremely cautious in predicting because I do believe that one of the Glorious of existence is that things are not determined fully and that we when we predict the scripture we are very often wrong so I I would resist being asked to make any prediction about that I mean although I have my own hunches which are limited by my imagination which are that probably some people will survive and Will Survive by leading much more simple modest lives Closer To Nature and closer to one another than our human lives have become so I I I I don't know quite how to exercise the imagination that you were asking me to exercise except that I guess that my books are I hope works of imagination and that I feel to many great works of art and literature to illustrate my my drift but I I think I'm not entirely in tune with the the drift behind that little thrust behind that question thank you Ian um Bonnie I want you to answer this because I know you've got a great take on this but while I'm doing that if Celeste for having computer a hand up please because I want to take your question but we can't find you um after this but Bonnie first of all on uh caterpillar butterfly and what lies between we and I think this is a little bit building on what Ian said is that we can't we we shouldn't imagine that the caterpillar imagines itself to be a butterfly it's much more scary than that right like if we if we had to voluntarily go through the metamorphosis process without understanding it um that would truly be an act of imagination um to be to be open and welcome and inviting surprise um but you said something beautiful you talked about Endo I think endosymbiosis and what I wanted to say is there's many places where people are using their imaginations to thread a different story through the scientific facts so Ian uses scientific facts any any threads a beautiful story and other people can use the same facts and they'll thread a different story um and so we need all all Science is based on what are called interaction metaphors they're deep metaphorical um assumptions about the way things are into what we need are people who are understand the science and using it to thread a different story um and so that actually separates I think imagination from fantasy so that's that's one thing and the work on counterfactuals is very important so you might say but what if what if the darwinian attitude of the survival of the fittest and complex adaptive systems is not true is there a story that threads the same evidence that is more aligned with goodness truth and Beauty so I've done that in writing speculative philosophy on complex potential States it takes into account everything that that darwinian attitude takes into account but it tells a different story so endosymbiosis is one of those great imaginative things that are emerging in our culture that want to be true to the science but understand that there's a different story that can thread it and that's a power of the imagination and the other thing I want to say that is something that I think is we should do I see there's a question of Education um there's something called empathic projection and kids do it really well when they're young and that is they imagine what it might be like to be a pencil and they imagine what it might be like to be an aunt and they imagine and in this experience it's not like fantasy where you go away from the world you enter the spaces in between the world that you don't understand and um this is a valuable exercise in um in becoming attuned to the reality of things and nature and animals so it's a process of the imagination it's impact called empathic projection thank you Bonnie I'm just going to get other questions in um Celeste you're welcome to ask it yourself if you're happy to do that I think we find you now can we hear you I'm not sure we can hear you I can see you but maybe your volume's not on or what's the shall I just ask it for you or are you ready to go yeah or a thumbs up okay I can ask it for you well thank you Celeste it was really a question about poetry I'll it's to do with Precision of language being a kind of antidote I'm going to get the exact wording here um with Celeste asked here we go can language especially that which is used with extraordinary deliberation and Care I.E poetry be an antidote to this wide scale delusion can we use the tool that makes us feel Tethered to our humanness to combat feelings of robotic or unintuitive existence so you can already see the poet in the question um Ian I'm assuming the answer might be yes but what's the what's the sort of bigger answer it's very much yes I I would say um and it's interesting this idea of the carefully considered uh or precise because of course both here and in science there is this interplay between the the precise and the imaginative which which means that although in science you're working with something that seems very strict in its structure in fact the discoveries comes through the exercise of intuition and Imagination there's just so many examples of that this in the history of mathematics and science and something similar um could be said of course about poetry but it what I was alerted to by your question was the idea there's a certain sort of precision involved as well and that we needed to be precise as the situation will allow us to be but not a wit more than that in other words there is a word that is precisely right because it opens itself to a number of possibilities being experienced or felt at the same time so the great thing about poetic language is it's ability to be single and multiple at once this is really a theme that should be throughout everything we've talked about this evening that it the the I feel at some points there was a tendency to say that you know it's bad that there are individuals um but I'm sure that wasn't what was was was meant by Bonita um but but individuals are terrifically important what's important is that the distinction and the um um the differences don't imply a severance in fact do they imply something bigger out of which they come and to which they contribute in turn so it's always this Alliance of division with Union of the individuation with togetherness and integration and so I would say that poetry is an example of this because in poetry we are trying to bring together we're not trying but allowing things that are multiple to come together in our minds in a very clear and precise way that if you've changed a little bit of it would ruin it so it has a very individual existence but it arises from a process which is unconscious and which is about the coming together of the many into the one thank you Ian Bonnie don't have to add to that if you don't want to but you're welcome to I um thank you Bonnie um madelina Machado uh great question you're welcome to ask it yourself or give me a thumbs up if you're happy for me to ask it but you're welcome to I'd rather you asked it much rather you asked it you do it yeah so you're on YouTube now you're welcome to go ahead well um I'm I'm actually quoting Gregory Bateson when he says this question what have we here um 400 plus people on a zoom call is this not radically new what sense does it make to speak of what we've lost does this mostly apply to accidentals in a cosmo vision of domination which is now eroding is it not about time we learn planetary interdependency for the first time together as online ancestors because we're all online ancestors this is basically 10 years old this duality of technology versus life with manichaistic nothing on this planet is not natural there's nothing not natural it's Spinoza said that 24 years old 400 years ago with the printing press we began propaganda propaganda PD that was the Vatican now we are in a participatory age for the first time ever can we give ourselves permission not to know and honestly this is what I feel Bonita is teaching at the pop-up school which I've joined and it has for me for example I'll just add one little footnote in the 2p language in the Amazon there's no word for sin there's no word for Temptation there's no word for Kingdom I mean what would our language be languaging had those Concepts not you know abducted our capacity to think differently thank you well well I would love to ask you some questions madalina another time maybe but for now Ian do you want to respond to that foreign if you want to pause for some thought Bonnie do you have a more immediate response the previous question on polices so so Magdalene is saying what would our language be like and I think um you know there's poetic language is a contemplation on ideas or things that language seems to contradict right so how can everything already be nature and is nature then destroying itself is nature unmaking the world is like the question if everything's nature then isn't this just make nature unmaking the world and I think this kind of tension if you sit with it in a certain way so so you have both trust and doubt and belief and skepticism and confidence in the in the intellect the let the intelligence of the world and humility then something like poetry comes out and we might imagine that that's something that shares with earlier languages so I would say that that that's that's how it seemed to me that as the question came up right after the last question um Ian I wasn't really quite sure what the question was I I heard that we that we were in a more positive way we could communicate with one another and so on then there was a sudden remark about the word sin which by the way not only in the toupee language but also across many parts of the world there isn't such a word um but what I might suppose to you okay if I um give my own interpretation the reason I chose madelina's question it it actually it was it reminded me of our colleague and friend idra Adnan who was on a zoom call a bit like this one with several hundred people from across the world and one of the speakers also mentioning how disconnected we all are all were how we've lost connection with each other and just saying what the hell are you talking about look at this extraordinary process that we're part of who knows where this might lead this is the beginning of something amazing and we should all get over ourselves and stop complaining and start using the technology we have to you know reckon with the no doubt profound problems we have but also to trust that something is emerging that's of Great Value and promise um yeah Madeline this question I think she's just using that as a counterweight to the sense that things are inevitably collapsing something is also arising that that is right and if we could find a way of using the interconnecting capacity sparingly when it is really important and not allowing all the drops that comes with it to drown out the good then that would be a marvelous thing and I remember when I went to Johns Hopkins in in 1922 um 1922 1992 I'm not that um in 1992 um we were I was in a in a lab um looking at scans uh of brains and the head of the department came in and said you guys are great you know the work you're doing is great but you know what we need is more communication and I was already aware that in England it started this sort of over communicative style and in America it was already a huge problem people spent so much time um recording communicating in someone that the actual business of what they were doing got somehow left behind and I said actually what we need is to communicate less but to communicate when it's really important so I do think this is a I'm not saying this just to be sort of a bit different um there is a huge problem with what technology is doing to our attention it is it is fighting for our attention which has been monetized and destroying our attention is destroying our intelligence destroying our capacity to imagine it is degrading at the level of our experience and of being so this is a worry to me I I love the fact that we're all here on this call and so it's best to focus on the good bits and um but there are a lot of Mighty problems as well also I'd just like to say in the way that The Coincidence of opposites works is that if there is too much cacophony and too much actually people fall out with one another and don't actually become closer to one another it's a really difficult one to to call that life is complex it's not just a simple question of there being more or less communication what is the quality of that communication is a very important question can I just follow up I think I think to put it short I think um I think communication like this is neither necessary nor sufficient for to to stop the unmaking of the world and so when but it can be helpful or it can be harmful but to think that it's either necessary or sufficient I think is is both of those are a mistake um and I agree with Ian the the cost in general is currently out outweighing the benefit the the new chip the non-heroclaitian Ian says um well it's it's not um uh sufficient but but it might might be necessary to have these sorts of conversations technology yeah okay well I I do like the I do like the chipper Ian as you know um listen um can I encourage everyone here to please take a look at the chat um because there are some mind-blowingly good questions in there and I'm really very grateful for all of them um back in the day when I worked at the RSA I um I chaired quite a lot of events and before I started doing that Matthew Taylor who is the chief executive at the time taught me that it's always better to end an event leaving people wanting more rather than drag on with further questions even though there are great questions to come so I'm going to leave leave you with that thought and end now um I'm very grateful for all the questions I haven't been uh aired but they are there in the chat you can write them down we will take note of them they may come up again another Summer by education about parenting about love great stuff there will be more there will be another of these events um in two weeks and another two weeks after that and another two weeks after that watch this space for more information and there's also a connection inquiry session as I say um those of those of you on this event will now be signed up the perspectives mailing list so you will hear from us about all of those things very shortly um but I really want to just thank you all for being there it's been a great attendance and some lovely questions um and I'm very well particularly grateful to Bonita Roy for beaming in from Connecticut to Ian mcgilchrist of course for being in from Sky um and I just want to thank you all for coming and I hope you'll come back and bring your friends so uh with that thought enjoy the rest of your day or evening and see you again soon take care thank you

Channel: PERSPECTIVA

Views: 25,321

Keywords: Iain McGilchrist, philosophy, Bonnitta Roy

Id: yH7f7ZchGsU

Length: 99min 39sec (5979 seconds)

Published: Fri Mar 31 2023