Consciousness, Purpose, and Values - Dr. Iain McGilchrist

[Music] okay so everybody welcome to our first session today um the event theme is a day on consciousness i'm here with the first speaker dr e mcgilcust dr e mcgilcus is a psychiatrist and writer who is committed to the idea that the mind and brain can be understood only by seeing them in the broadest possible context he was formerly a consultant psychiatrist of the bethlehem royal and mostly nhs trust in london where he was clinical director of their southern sector acute mental health services dr mcgilkers has published original research and contributed chapters to books on a wide range of subjects as well as original articles and papers and journals including the british journal of psychiatry the american journal of psychiatry the wall street journal the sunny telegraph and the sunday times his books include against criticism the master and his emissary the divided brain and the search for meaning and ways of attending his latest book the matter with things which he will give a talk on today addresses some of the oldest and hardest questions humanity faces including who are we what is the world how can we understand consciousness is the cosmos without purpose or value and can we really neglect the sacred and divine you can keep up to date with keep up to date with his work at chat channel mcgillikers.com and follow him on twitter at dr underscore mcgillcrist this is dr mcgillicus third engagement with the weekend university and i'm sure you'll agree it's a it's a real honor to have him back with us for this event so dr mcgilligrass whenever you're ready um feel free to get started and really looking forward to this thank you very much nyle and thank you for inviting me back i've enjoyed my previous talks and today i've taken a very large and absurdly large canvas i'm going to mainly talk about values in a certain amount about purpose in a previous talk i think two hours i looked at consciousness so i won't i'll take that as read for today i won't discuss its nature except to say that in an earlier talk i explained why i believe consciousness is first irreducible and second best thought of as a flow or process rather than a thing that flow that process always being directed towards something and our experience being always an encounter well what are um values in the third part uh of the matter with things uh the book is divided into three parts there are chapters on space time matter consciousness but also on values and on purpose which might surprise people uh who are not um uh used to thinking that important parts of the universe include things like values purpose in the sense of the sacred well what are they are they just paint or wallpaper on the walls of our cell which we put there in order to brighten uh our prospects in this hermetically sealed box in which we leave lead our lives um or are they merely just less accurate ways of describing what we like and what we don't like we have terms for them good beautiful true but really uh it's just a matter of um our opinion about what works well for us well i'm going to suggest that that's very far from being the case and that's in valuing and coming to appreciate the value of things we are encountering intrinsic aspects of reality so i take values to be primary they're not derivable from anything else and they're not things within consciousness abstract things of course but still not things they're rather aspects of reality in other words they're not nouns but adjectives or verb adverbs that are revealed through the process through that encounter now in both the master and his emissary and much more in the matter with things there is an extensive survey of the brain literature on the differences between hemispheres and again i won't attempt to summarize that here except to say that overall the drift of the book the matter with things as the title suggests it's a pun on several letter levels that part of the problem we face is that we think there is only matter and that the world is a bunch of things in other words it's leading people intelligently to examine and i really find wanting inappropriate reductionism in our attitude to ourselves and the world a a too narrow materialism and an obsession with mechanism these are all aspects of the way in which the left hemisphere which is um preferentially serially and analytically inclined these are all aspects of the kind of world that the left hemisphere enables us to encounter whereas the right hemisphere enables us to see a broader picture a syncretic or synthetic vision of reality and one that works in or organically rather than simply as a mechanism so in thinking of values as non-reducible entities uh i'm not on my own um the great early 20th century german phenomenological philosopher max schaeler said just that but if you are more inclined to the anglo-american analytic tradition one of the greatest philosophers of recent decades in that tradition derek perfect who i was honored to have as a colleague at all souls also took the view that values are ontologically primitive and they're also not sort of piggybacking on human consciousness and so we've got consciousness so then we get values as part of the deal value writes thomas nagel is not just an accidental side effect of life rather there is life because life is a necessary condition of value now valuing depends on a relationship uh only in its being appreciated is value fulfilled as value neither we nor other living creatures originate values they are evocations and we fulfill those evocations in responding to them we are attracted to what is true beautiful morally good at a deeper level than mere cognition can provide what shayla called vert namung a formation by analogy with the german word varney which means perception meaning something like value-ception and he likened it to the way in which we see color we see it immediately we don't see it as the outcome of a computation or a rationalization it is a primary aspect of our experience well what is life for we're not funking any of the big questions in this talk by the way what is life for well i do attempt to answer this question at enormous lengths in in the matter of things but i suggest it's not for consciousness as you will know from my earlier more extensive lecture on consciousness i believe that consciousness permeates the universe well one answer could be that life brings the capacity to recognize and respond to value rather as thomas nagle says it vastly enhances both the degree and the speed of responsiveness to and within the world so inanimate elements do respond to the world in certain very simple and primitive way ways but they do so rather slowly processes may take billions of years in a living organism they may take less than a second and the degree of responsiveness we can't estimate what that is but it's very much less than the degree of responsiveness with any living being i suggest that i don't have time to unpack what i'm saying here i'm just giving you something to ponder on or reject life could be seen as the very process of the cosmic consciousness or the conscious cosmos continually both discovering and furthering in its unfolding its beauty its truth and its goodness both contemplating and not separately but in the same indivisible act bringing them further into being a process in other words so values evoke a response in us and call us to some end there what give meaning to life such things as beauty goodness truth and purpose which i will talk about briefly later but it has its own chapter in the matter with things science can tell us what their brain correlates may be the correlates of these values but cannot help us understand their nature it can though help us misunderstand them this is for three main reasons it may disregard disregard them on principle as is the case with purpose no assumption of purpose is made in the life sciences and that's a perfectly valid assumption to make if you wish to but it won't be surprised then if you find nothing purposeful after um carrying out your investigations on that basis and on those terms secondly you can attempt to account for them in terms of something else so it can say for example that beauty is simply a tool of mate selection or it can say that goodness enables priests to have power over the people or something of the kind you've heard it all i'm sure and thirdly and above almost importantly but probably less obviously it gets them wrong by treating them as things rather than encounters relationships in process i will just look look at the three main values that i've mentioned before saying a little bit about purpose but don't forget that science's disposition not to value is already value laden the belief that an inhumanly detached way of looking at our experience of the world is more valuable than one in which we encounter it and register its value expresses values of its own and one of those of course is truth truth uh deserves and gets a chapter of its own in my new book but truth is again not a thing whether conceived of us out there or in here but an encounter between whatever is our inner take on our consciousness and the rest of the consciousness that it encounters in what we call experience but let me ask a simple question why does science would be a truth science will not admit anything that is not empirically verifiable but the value of truth like all value is incapable of empirical proof so where does this intuition because that's what it is come from it can't be for its utility useful assumptions are not always truthful such as it's quite useful sometimes to consider for certain practical purposes an organism is like a machine but for roughly eight important reasons an organism is never like a machine equally true assumptions are not always a practical use you can't make this equation but my point is in a meaningless universe without ultimate values shouldn't we just maximize happiness why does a person who sees the universe as a pointless heap of material fragments here if you deceive yourself by for example believing in a guard which might bring comfort in adversity and encourage you towards leading what we call a godly life where does this idea of a transcendent truth that surpasses all other considerations including those with the greater happiness of others come from it makes sense to me but that's because i don't believe that the world is chaotic orderless and meaningless but if you do what is the virtue of truth truth is an act again it's not a thing it's an act of trust in or faithfulness towards whatever is it characterizes the proper relationship between consciousness and the world it is therefore not a function of some other value nonetheless it does imply that being faithful so not blindly so has value in and of itself and that the something else to which we're faithful has an intrinsic value of its own perhaps goodness or beauty or the faith would be blind as you see rather than closing down on a single foundational element in a causal chain we find this process of inquiry leading in the opposite direction to a web of interconnectedness that we cannot by any means get behind or beneath in which values cohere and sustain one another on that point i just like to reflect on something that will sound very strange for those of us brought up on science in the 21st or even the 20th century which is a relationship of love with value it was a point made by saint augustine but then later by pascal by nietzsche by max schaeler by eric fromm by simon vay not that we love things because we have learned to value them but that we can value them only or can value them correctly only if we love them so that there isn't a um a path to this once again there isn't a single step you take and then another but you must enter into an open relationship in which the capacity for love is present if you drive that out and say i'm going to have a cold clinical detachment from everything i look at you will see certain things but you'll see a rather skewed picture now what about goodness goodness we are ticking them off aren't we rather um goodness interestingly in the modern west at least in the world of philosophy faculties goodness has been reduced to a utilitarian calculus to call something good is to say that it brings happiness to the larger number of people and utilitarian philosophers are fond of uh thought experiments uh such as um a doctor has um a patient who needs transplants several patients who need transplants uh of different kinds a kidney a heart a liver whatever it may be and a healthy man comes into the surgery to um realizes that if he could um kill this patient he'd have healthy organs that would save five people's lives now the moral question in utilitarianism is would he be justified in doing so it seems in a way that he would but i imagine most of us think this would be a disaster um in terms of our relationships with the medical profession if not with ourselves and the world all together if i need to explain to you why it is not okay for a film of sadistic pedophilia to give pleasure to perhaps thousands of people across the world if you can't see that you can't have a reckoning of that against the suffering of the child then i really can't help you this kind of ruthless calculating is itself and one really interesting fact for me or range of facts for me as someone interested in neuropsychiatry is that people with frontal brain damage people with right hemisphere damage and people of low emotional and social intelligence and psychopaths all tend to make moral decisions on the basis of utilitarian calculus and this leads to the rather odd situation as one research group pointed out it leads to the counterintuitive conclusion that those individuals who are least prone to moral errors in the eyes of academic philosophers also possessed a set of psychological characteristics that many would consider prototypically immoral i don't have time to go into my beliefs about this and alternatives such as deontology but just to say that i think something that is known as virtue ethics um which is subtle and takes into account many factors is probably going to work better by the way when i say brain damage and so on it can also be done with normal subjects by simply suppressing certain parts of the brain so with the right temporal temporary parietal junction suppressed by transcranial magnetic stimulation people who would normally make a morally sound judgment will reach a bizarre conclusion on the basis of simply calculating outcomes goodness is irreducible and interestingly it's deeply bound up with the right hemisphere in fact david hecht who's a neuroscientist review goes if i was to state quite boldly that moral and immoral thinking are associated with activity in the right hemisphere and left hemisphere respectively and i wouldn't emerge from that there's also a difference between pleasure seeking of different kinds there's a difference between what's known as eudaimonic pleasure and hedonic pleasure hedonic pleasure is simply doing more and more of things that give one pleasure at the time in a rather direct way um the sort of goals that we might think you know making making money winning a game um eating a nice meal whatever it might be and this involves something called the hedonic treadmill that the more fulfillment you get on it the more you need and in the end you're never satisfied whatever you do get this could be contrasted with eudaimonic pleasure which is the sort of pleasure that one has from leading what would have been called in the past and might well still be called a virtuous life in which one's own goals and the goals of others are harmonized and one gets pleasure from leading a a good life and so those two things are interesting because he the pursuit of hedonic pleasure leads to ill health mentally and eudaimonic pleasure leads to good health mentally and also physically people who uh pursue only their own personal pleasure uh express proteins in the body in a way that those who are enduring chronic stress express them and when we act intuitively you may be surprised to learn we are most often gracious and generous it's a further reflection that we have afterwards that makes us selfish and greedy according to psychologist jamie ozaki and jason mitchell rather than requiring control over instinctive selfishness pro-social behavior appears to stem from processes that are intuitive reflexive and even automatic these observations suggest that our understanding of pro-sociality should be revised to include the possibility that in many cases pro-social behavior instead of requiring active control over our impulses represents an impulse of its own incidentally i think it's fair to say that the prevailing cost of mind in reduction is science whether biological or psychological is effectively cynical it takes the view that for instance where there is altruism it must be covert selfishness that we are maximizers of our self-interest that we are blind mechanisms there's a lot that could be said against that but i'd rather like this comment from philosopher david stove who writes of the belief that no one ever acts intentionally except for motives of self-interest there is a perennial human type to whom this belief is peculiarly and irresistibly congenial it is almost never a woman it's the kind of man who is deficient in generous or even disinterested impulses himself and knows it but keeps up his self-esteem by thinking that everyone else is really in the same case he prides himself on having the perspective to realize what most people disguise even from themselves that everyone is selfish and on having the uncommon candor not to conceal this unpleasant truth another interesting finding is that cynicism appears to be associated not with higher intelligence but relatively lower intelligence and appears to be a coping strategy by the cognitively less gifted to avoid being duped by others there is in fact a host of um types of evidence from both psychological literature in humans and from uh watching animal behavior to show that it certainly doesn't doesn't limit itself what at all to kin the selection uh animals are seen to risk their own lives in order to save creatures that are of a different species altogether for example and there are many reasons why humans choose courses of action that are not immediately advantageous to them such as for example having children what about beauty well beauty um is uh often thought of as a sort of a necessary cog in the machinery of evolution it serves as a means of ensuring sexual attraction and therefore the continuation of the evolutionary process problem solved except that this doesn't solve the problem in particular it begs a very first question where does beauty come from natural selection and sexual selection cannot be the answers they're the answers to a quite different question namely given beauty how might it be used to advantage having described how bright colors and other adornments in flowers and animals can be largely attributed to the agency of selection as they clearly can darwin twice makes the same puzzled observation how the sense of beauty in its simplest form that is the reception of a peculiar kind of pleasure from certain colors forms and sounds was first developed in the mind of man and of the lower animals how this was is a very obscure subject how the sense of beauty in its simplest form was first acquired we do not know and it's a very obvious point that beauty seems to be something much grander than anything to do with sexual selection um beauty and landscapes which for thousands of years not just since the romantic era beauty and landscapes has often been found in desert waste in dense forests not just in fertile landscapes and that's just the tiniest beginning there's a beauty of a single minor third never mind of a schubert piano sonata or of an elegant chess move or of a zen garden or the snow on a mountaintop or euler's equation e to the i pi equals minus one anyway beauty is there but we don't know where it comes from and i suggest it doesn't derive from other things it is a primary um a primary element of the structure of the cosmos and it's not a luxury or a superfluity that only comes to people who've already satisfied their basic needs neil mcgregor in his history of the uh world in 100 objects uh said something rather striking one of the greatest discoveries for me was that actually as soon as we start making things we start making beautiful things that it looks as though even one and a half million years ago we want things to be beautiful we want them to be complicated and we want that just as much apparently as wanting them to be fit for purpose in fact it's this is me now not not um mcgregor it's particularly perverse to attempt to subordinate beauty to utility since one of the distinguishing features of beauty is that as kant and not only kant pointed out it pleases us disinterestedly exactly what marks it out he says is its purposiveness without presenting any purpose another interesting thing is and i wish i had time to to give you some visual demonstrations of this but i don't think i do um there are common elements between different cultures certainly some things are found beautiful in one culture that are not in another but there's a remarkable shared sense of what is beautiful people in quite different cultures uh still find the objects of another distinct culture maybe on the other side of the world beautiful and vice versa indeed infants prefer faces judged beautiful by people within the culture of each face if you see what i mean they find them beautiful and are more attracted to them before they've learned to speak never mind anything else and that can be told from their gays if they spend more time gazing at beautiful faces so um beauty has a number of qualities it involves harmony um and judicious violations of harmony appearances therefore a lot of things but the relations between things that are simultaneously similar but different uh of ambiguity unexpectedness uh implicitness embodiedness irreplaceability uniqueness uh and it gives pleasure without concepts these all point towards the gestalt appreciation of the right hemisphere so um the prevailing dominant account of a meaningless purely material cosmos supplied by the reduction of strategy the left hemisphere fails to make sense of value whether that be truth goodness or beauty just as it fails to make sense of consciousness its answer in every case is the same that they must be emanations of a purely material cosmos that exists purely to further utility now it seems to me that if you believe that you'll believe anything you might even end up believing that consciousness is an illusion neither this point of view nor any alternative to it can be proved so our best recourses to apply science reason intuition and imagination to experience it seems to me that the reductionist account is contrary to scientific findings unreasonable counterintuitive and shows a complete refusal to exercise intelligent imagination all the hallmarks of its birth in the left hemisphere the real result is that values themselves become devalued beauty morality and truth have been downgraded dismissed or denied if you want to see the consequences you need do more no more than look around you now finally on the huge topic of purpose i've only got a short while to talk to you about it but it's a very interesting topic darwin was brought up to believe in god as a sort of benign maker and superintendent of the universe like a genial elderly engineer who's made a phenomenally complex structure and occasionally intervenes to drop oil on the cogs and he couldn't believe this when he looked around at the universe so this created a conflict for him in fact he never resolved it he said that on matters of the existence or otherwise of god uh this is completely beyond the human mind you might as well ask a dog to understand the mind of newton but we don't require an engineering god of any kind indeed this engineering god is itself a perfect expression of the left hemisphere mentality gone on the largest possible scale if the left hemisphere had to deify its own thinking it would be this cosmic or controlling god but actually a lot of what happens though it seems to be purposefully driven is not reassuring at all and i gave many examples in the book but i can't help making this rather wonderful example of a fun parasite there are many extraordinary things that parasites do such as toxoplasma plasma gondii which is an infection in rats which needs to get into cats in order to mature and if passed on to humans at least according to some people may be a causative factor in schizophrenia one of the first things it does when it gets into rats is to make them uncharacteristically unafraid of cats and they will even approach cats in order that this process may happen but just listen to this one uh a type of carpenter ant camponotus leonardiae which is extraordinarily sophisticated it forages and communicates food sources to comrades carves wooden galleries to live in indulgence in farming ants coral and protect aphids in order to get a sweet substance called honeydew from them and protect aphids in order to get this from them by stroking them with their antennae nonetheless these meet their nemesis in the form of a lowly fungus the so-called zombie ant fungus which exists in rainforests in asia africa and south america while the ant forages on the forest floor it is infected with a spore which takes several days to develop inside the ant's body the fungus then takes over the nervous system of the ant and makes it behaves entirely against its nature the ant climbs always to about the same height about 25 centimeters up a tree to a site which which has exactly the right amount of humidity for the fungus to grow the fungus then makes its host do something contrary to its nature to bite onto vegetation before killing it the ant clamps onto the underside of a leaf with its mandibles hanging above its colony and dies within 24 hours threads of fungus burst out of the corpse finally a stalk thrusts up out of the ant and starts to shower spores onto the rain forest floor where they turn in turn infect more ants so i hope you understand that i have no brief the idea of all this kind of strikingly directed sounding evolution uh being benign so the first difference one needs to make is between a kind of purpose which is thought of as being extrinsic and instrumental like the engineering god and this is like the purpose of any machine the purpose of a photocopier lies in the copied sheet that emerges from it or on the contrary we can think of purpose as something that's intrinsic and entirely fulfilled in the process itself for example a dance or a poem these things are by naming pointless but the point lies precisely within not like the copied sheet without the process that brought it into being and the second difference is that between a narrowly determined and mechanistic account of purpose on the one hand and a largely undetermined and free account on the other this shows an illustration from uh uh conrad hull waddington waddington who was a great british um natural scientist of the last century it shows an image of something he called creoles which were preferential powers if you imagine a landscape of pills and rivers and even mountainsides and water falling from the sky evenly on that landscape even though the fall of the rain is entirely random it will end up in various predictable places because it will be channeled by the force and energy of the shape of the landscape into going down certain rivulets and towards the sea only if there's an enormous amount of energy in one of the rivulets that it may get into can it hop over the um divide the raised threshold that separates it from a nearby channel so this is really the instance if you dropped a marble or something along this path it would probably get you might go down here it might go down there it might go to either of those but there are various points at the bottom where you can predict it will come out that's one of the ways in which um in itself random can end up um being predictable and leading to a certain predictable outcome i think nobody would hold that there are narrowly determined purposes uh in beings but there may be overall purposes towards which they generally tend for example there are narrow and localized tendencies for example a lioness may go on the kill because she's hungry and that is the purpose of her going on kill but is killing prey the purpose of the lioness i think not i would say that it was an expression of the vicinus of a lion that is in itself an expression of part of something intrinsic in the wealth of the creative cosmos it's a non-instrumental way of thinking and it changes with scale so you can at very small scale in a complex picture you can see little determinative chains but if you pan back and see the overall picture it's no longer narrowly deterministic but there's also something more active in the way in which animals even tiny organisms evolve take a single cell's response to the threat cells actively promote mutations under certain circumstances and this process begins not from dna but merely uses dna as a resource faced with the need for a new antigen the mutation rate of the genome can be accelerated by as much as a million times according to dennis noble so far as we know the mutations occur randomly but the location in the genome is certainly not random the functionality in this case lies precisely in the targeting of the relevant part of the genome so organisms do not it repeatedly turns out wait around for the chance to save themselves from extinction but both greatly accelerate and appear to select new mutations so they can recover something as complex as flagella within as little as a few days of them being removed from the organism rather than over the many millennia that chance mutation would require so as the philosopher leche kolykovsky put it evolutionary process teams with dead ends failures half-baked projects and circuitous routes nature proceeds somewhat gropingly often trying several roads before it finds the right one but it is driven constantly by an inherent tendency and to uncover this tendency would be be to understand the life of the universe in the face of this of course people have suggested that there must be an almost infinite number of universes uh in order to explain how something very improbable repeatedly keeps happening because if there's virtually an infinite number of universes um there's a high probability approaching a certainty that everything will happen once it's however worth setting that probability in context the chance of getting a universe which contains stars is estimated by the astrophysicist lee smallin as 10 to the power of 229. now to set that in context the visible universe contains a mere 10 to the power of 80 subatomic particles compared with uh 10 to the 229th that is a tiny tiny almost unimaginably small fraction of of of this very large um number and that's just to get to a universe that could contain stars it doesn't get anywhere in their life or consciousness if you hold that that somehow arises out of inert matter which as you know i don't but the existence of life in the absence of tendencies in the cosmos towards overwhelmingly unlikely ends takes improbability to a whole new level according to the paleobiologist simon conway morris the development of the eye an improbably complex mechanism as it is has happened independently ten times over the course of evolution the camera i6 times the compound i four times all life however simple is dependent as a minimum on systems which can replicate dna and translate it into functional proteins these systems are vastly complex eugene kunin the senior investigator at the national center for biotechnology information and a recognized expert in the field of evolutionary computational biology points to a problem here which i can express briefly like this in the simplest possible terms the problem is this for the evolution of life forms to get started a certain minimum level of accurate transcription must be achieved known as the eigen threshold below this level of fidelity there is too little stability however the achievement of this level of fidelity demands the evolution of a still more complex system to have been already achieved this makes no sense according to our conventional schemata and in fact the probability according to kunin that a couple translational sorry translation replication emerges by chance in a single observable universe is less than 10 to the minus 1018 uh impossible to imagine but effectively zero so life tends to complexity but why very few people have noticed uh says leon cass that non-teleological explanations have changed not only assume but even depend upon the imminent teleological character of all living organisms the desire or tendency of living things to stay alive and their endeavor to reproduce both of which are among the minimal conditions of such a theory are taken for granted and unexplained why after all make so much effort embrace so many sacrifices by far the best strategy for persisting in being is to avoid being alive at all being a rock gives you a much better chance how is it that life ever took off as a.n whitehead observes life itself is comparatively deficient in survival value the art of persistence is to be dead only inorganic things persist for great lengths of time the problem set by the doctrine of evolution is to explain how complex organisms with such deficient survival power ever evolved i i think that evolution did create them but i think it can only rationally be explained if there are what waddington called creates preferential pathways and it may be possible to explain the origin of species by the doctrine of the struggle for existence among such organisms but the struggle shows no it throws no light whatever upon the emergence of such a general type of complex organism which has faint survival power and after all once they arrived why did organisms further evolve towards creatures with vastly lower survival prospects a human life is not every 70 to 80 years but there are trees that live to be a thousand years and in fact there are individual examples of some actinobacteria that lives in deep waters the oceans that are thought to be over a million years old that one of the actual cells will be one of the bacteria will be over a million years old and it's still going strong so all i can really um say is in conclusion that beauty complexity and responsiveness seem to be drives in the universe and that again in the words of a n whitehead the philosopher a mathematician the teleology of the universe is directed towards the production of beauty and john dewey american pragmatist philosopher said the deepest problem of modern life is that we have failed to integrate our beliefs about the world with our beliefs about value and purpose which shows the pyramid of values um as max shayla the philosopher believed it to be he thought there were different levels of value and at the lowest level there were the values of use and pleasure then somewhat higher than this were the lebensvatar the values of vitality such as generosity bravery um and things like that then there were the guy seeker versa which are values of the intellect and the things like beauty goodness and truth and that at the summit was that's heiliger the the appreciation of and the drive towards the sacred and i believe that in the right hemisphere these values serve one another in the direction that sheila intended but that in the left hemisphere they go in the reverse order as served up to us by people like dawkins that the idea of holiness is just something that gives people satisfaction and holds communities together um the beauty goodness and truth are just elements of course um mate selection to work better and uh societies to hang together better and so on and so forth and all this is really just in the service of utility and pleasure so thank you very much dr mcgill chris for another fantastic talk um yeah we've got some questions here so i'm just going to invite people into the room now to um to ask them so first up is going to be ryder street so writer i'm just going to invite you in now my question is in your work is there any room for materialism or physicalism and if that's not the case then in your ontological view do you lean more so towards a idealistic viewpoint say bernardo castro for example or a constitutive uh pan psychism it's a very very good question there is certainly room for um for matter indeed i refer to materialists as people who don't over value matter but undervalue matter in fact i i think matter is a very important part of the phenomenological universe and to cut a long story short i believe it is a phase of consciousness using the word phase not in its temporal sense but in the sense that physicists use it when describing the different phases of water so it's the solid resistance-giving phase of consciousness but also i believe that there is not no value in um a mechanistic vision of small details um on which it can be quite a reliable guide it's just that when we project outwards um from our successes on tiny mechanisms to the view that the whole thing is just a material machine that's when i think things go wrong i'm not actually as pure and essentialist as um as i understand bernardo to be um but i the expression of my views on this can most succinctly be put in a paper which is on the essentia foundation's website and which i describe this neither being in here as it were the truth the reality is what we make it or that reality is just something out there that is untouched by our knowing it and it's our job to find it but it's in an encounter which has something of us in it and certainly brings forth something of the other never wholly so it can be seen differently but that that view is nonetheless perfectly real and it's not made less real because it has some of the viewer in it as well as some of the object being viewed or perceived thank you very much thank you my question was about the issue of moral and in general value relativism could it be that the relativism uh the fact that different people get different conclusions on what is good and what is valid could it be an outcome of instrumental rationality in the sense that values are reduced to interest and in general could this be the outcome of utilitarianism and according to you how much is important to overcome utilitarianism in particular in economics because i am working on a project of turning experiences of values into a sort of currency which substitute money which is value neutral so out is important the role of or utilitarianism for relativism and in economics it is important to go beyond it thank you thank you well um the relativism of values uh is worth just commenting on very briefly um for example there are certainly differences usually rather small than enormous differences um in the aesthetic appreciations the moral evaluations and so on of different societies but it would be a mistake to exaggerate these were very few societies in which it is thought good to rape murder and torture for example and just to take it as most obvious um and i'm very impressed by the commonality with which people find beauty and goodness in things that come from an entirely different culture i mentioned that already um so although there is a degree of relativity relativity in that way overall they tend not to be so um markedly relative but i think your comment about the impact of utilitarianism is a very good one i didn't have time to say as much as i would have liked about that but in the book i do examine it and the evidence seems to be that as i say people's intuitional evaluations are able to take into account more and more subtle strands of a situation than the one that they evaluate once they make it explicit in a few serial sentences and arrive at as it were a percentage value of of good associated with this particular outcome um in in some ways this is a perfect example of what people who have lost a moral sense or it hasn't developed in them do in place of morality in fact i say utilitarianism is not a kind of morality it's a substitute for morality in the same way that echolocation is a kind of site for the blind it's not really a kind of site although it may come to feel like that after years but it's a way of getting by if you can't see and i think that utilitarianism is a way of getting by if you really have lost your moral campus altogether and that's why i mean i'm sorry to say this to professional philosophers because the ruling philosophy is utilitarianism but it is associated with people with brain damage low um emotional and social intelligence psychopathy and generally undesirable features thank you thank you thank you so much yeah just to say your work is extraordinary and um it changed my worldview completely um my question was around um i suppose from my reading of your work there's a certain idea that um these ideas can be sort of redemptive that that um if you know in in kind of re-realizing that we have we have this other side of ourselves this right brain side of ourselves you know we can avert a lot of the destructiveness that comes from the you know decontextualized manipulative left brain do you have any sort of uh methods or activities that somebody who's very analytical should maybe engage in more of to realize that or do you think the process is just intellectual to realize that there's a other side to yourself well what i hope is to alert people to something that they already at some level have awareness of they may not have found a way of articulating it um and they may feel cowed into submission to um something that is extremely easy to voice it's just a mechanism get used to it you know it's very easy to say that and appear superior what is difficult is to articulate a different point of view and it's not um it doesn't that the fact that it's difficult to articulate is not a feature of its being untrue in some way it's in fact i would say an aspect of its nature that it is difficult to articulate so i think that um we do need to shift the balance of our take on the world from the um overall take of the left hemisphere exactly that and the subtitle of my book the matter with things is our brains are delusions and the unmaking of the world and i believe we are literally unmaking the world we're destroying nature we're destroying ourselves we're turning ourselves into machines we're destroying our hill history our traditions and our culture and we're destroying our sense of the spiritual and there are there is enormous scientific research which i cite in the book showing that not just social cohesiveness which i demonstrated at the end of the master in his emissary but also closeness to the living world of nature and having and adopting a spiritual attitude to life and to the existence of things have enormous benefits across the range so they produce cognitive improvements uh emotional improvements psychological improvements in terms of health and well-being and physical well-being so for example greater than those of stopping smoking losing weight going to the gym and so on on rates of cardiovascular disease and so on so it is a very very remarkable um area really anyway thank you very much for that i hope i've answered your question a little bit anyway thank you thanks very much dr mcgill chris i want to say thanks again for uh taking the time to share some of your wisdom with us i really appreciate it um for anybody that wants to follow up on this um after the talk the the first three thousand copies of your book they're they're sold out when will the next batch be available do you know the next batch was available from um monday of this week but it it it's only another three thousand and it's selling very fast we've sold nearly a thousand already so um but i i don't know i just have to be much more on the case of getting more books out but anyway there it is it's available on amazon at the moment in america and uh with britain it's also available through my website uh at a preferential um rate um so please buy and read so yeah dr mcgillicus thank you so much i really appreciate it and everybody else will see you back at 2 30. okay thank you thank you very much thank you

Channel: The Weekend University

Views: 23,979

Keywords: Consciousness, Behavioural, Purpose and Values, Mental Health

Id: MAkoPzulXwc

Length: 55min 55sec (3355 seconds)

Published: Fri Sep 23 2022