Dr. Iain McGilchrist: Consciousness as relational

[Music] [Music] i'd like to move on to introduce the final speaker of today's session that's dr ian mcilcrest ian is a psychiatrist writer and a former oxford literary scholar scholar he first became well known with his bestseller book the master and his emissary which was subtitled the divided brain in the making of the western world which was published in 2009 in it he argues that the hemispheric specialization in the brain is not so much one of left brain equals analytical and right brain equals creative so what the hemispheres do but much more one of how each hemisphere processes information with the left left hemisphere being detail-oriented in the light more holistic and furthermore he argues that this has led to the evolution of western culture ian read english at new college in oxford and then later he trained in medicine and worked as a new imaging researcher john hopkins in baltimore and he's worked as a consultant psychiatrist in in the at the maudsley in london he lives on the island of sky which i know to be a very beautiful place off the coast of scotland and he continues to write and deliver many lectures and interviews he has a new book coming out very shortly i think it might be next week which is on episode epistemology and metaphysics it's called the matter with things and in it he argues that consciousness should be conceptualized as being a relational thing rather than object and he's going to tell us all about it ian the floor is yours well thank you very much sarah and thank you for inviting me to such an interesting event because i'm rather keen on abiding by rules i i decided to make sure i would be less than 25 minutes and so i have written a script so here goes in a very short presentation there's no possibility of arguing for a position on consciousness so i'll simply state my conclusions argued for at length in my new book the matter with things our brains are delusions and the unmaking of the world consciousness is irreducible primordial and omnipresent not a thing but a creative process matter is a theoretical abstraction that no one has seen the term clearly has meaning however it refers to the qualities of certain elements within consciousness which offer relative resistance and relative permanence as a necessary part of that creative process i cannot avoid referring or pass on to the hemisphere hypothesis expounded in the master in his emissary and greatly developed in the matter with things again there is no possible way i can give an account of the argument here what one needs to know however is that the two hemispheres have evolved so as to attend to the world and therefore bring into being the only world we can know into largely opposing ways the left hemisphere paying narrowly targeted attention to a detail that we need to manipulate the right hemisphere paying broad open sustained vigilant uncommitted attention to the rest of the world while we focus on our desired detail this means that each hemisphere brings into being a world that has different qualities these could be characterized in the simplest possible terms something like this in the case of the left hemisphere a world of things that are familiar certain fixed isolated explicit abstracted from context disembodied general in nature quantifiable known by their parts and inanimate in the case of the right hemisphere a world of gestalten forms and processes that are never reducible to the already known or certain never accounted for by dissolution into parts but always understood as holes that both incorporate and are incorporated into other holes unique always changing and indeed flowing interconnected implicit understood only in context embodied and animate the left hemisphere is a world of atomistic elements the right hemisphere one of relationships most importantly the world of the right hemisphere is the world that presences to us that of the left hemisphere a representation in other words after the fact when it's no longer actually present the left hemisphere a map the right hemisphere the world of experience that is mapped in this talk i've chosen to make some very simple reflections on one aspect of consciousness its relational nature indeed i hold that everything is relational and that what we call things the relata are secondary to relationship consciousness is always of something what is the nature then of that something that is both in part constitutive of and in part constituted by that relationship in the last century or so there's been a tendency at least in popular discourse to pull reality in opposing directions some scientists whether they put it this way or not when they're asked to reflect still carry on as if there just exists a reality out there which conveniently spells rot the nature of which is independent of any consciousness of it naive realism these are usually biologists you won't find many physicists who would think like that in reality we participate in the knowing there is no view from nowhere as john archibald wheeler put it this is a participatory universe of crucial importance is that this fact does not in any way prevent science legitimately speaking of truths far from it we desperately need what science can tell us and post modern attempts to undermine it should be vigorously resisted two important truths then science cannot tell us everything but what science can tell us is pure gold any attempt to suppress science i distinguish science sharply from technology for whatever reason is dangerous and wrong meanwhile on the other hand there are philosophers of the humanities who think that there is no such thing as reality since it's all made up miraculously by ourselves which fortuitously spells mumbo naive idealism such people by the way never behave as though there was no reality nor of course by its own logic can they claim any truth for their position these viewpoints are closer than they look one party fears that if what we call reality when any sense contaminated by our involvement in bringing it about it would no longer be worthy of being called real the other fear is that since we manifestly do play a part in its coming about it's already the case that it can't be called real but just because we participate in reality doesn't mean we invent it out of nowhere or solipsistically project it on some inner mental screen much less does it mean that the very idea of reality is thereby invalidated i take it that there is something that's not just the contents of my mind that for example you exist there is an infinitely vast complex multifaceted whatever it is that exists apart from ourselves the only world that any of us can know then is what comes into being in the never-ending encounter between us and this whatever it is what is more both parties evolve and are changed through the encounter it is how we and it become more fully what we are the process is both reciprocal and creative you could think of it as like a true and close relationship between two conscious beings neither is of course made up by the other but both are to some extent perhaps to a great extent made what they are through the relationship the relationship comes before the relata the things that are supposed to be related what we mean by the word and is not just additive but creative there is no one absolute truth about the world that results from this process but there are certainly truths some things we believe will be truer than others the nature of the attention we bring to bear is of critical importance here a maximally open patient and attentive response to whatever it is is better at disclosing or discerning reality than a response that is peremptory in the sensitive or above all shrouded in dogma importantly what we experience is not just an image of a world outside in some sense some sort of projection on the walls of a cartesian theater inside our heads and watched by an intracerebral homunculus on an intracerebral sofa such a viewpoint could be predicted to arise from the left hemisphere's attempt to deal with a reality it does not understand and for which everything is a representation true we can deceive ourselves by mistaking our own projections for reality and we often do but that does not entail that we're always victims of self-deception when we are properly attentive what we experience is the real deal though it be only a tiny part of all that is to appreciate that you need the right hemisphere and preferably of course both hemispheres to be in play it's true that we can see the world only partially but we still each see the world directly it's not a representation but a real presence there isn't a wall between us and the world our experiences of whatever it is and not another thing even if we can't get away from the fact that it is we who experience it yet i say we take part in its creation how can that be an analogy may help get closer to what i mean there is such a thing as mozart's g minor quintet it is in a way quite specific it certainly is not a fantasy and it cannot be made up by me any way i want however it doesn't exist in the closed score on my bookshelf the potential alone is there it doesn't exist in mozart's mind either because he's dead and the moment when he died made no difference whatever to the existence or the nature of the quintet and there isn't a single ideal quintet in some platonic sense that we're always imperfectly imitating in our encounters with it it keeps coming into being it keeps becoming each time a mind with all its history and preconceptions encounters it or when many minds do so together each time it will be real and each time it will also be different in other words it's inexhaustible although it will be recognizably the same piece of music it's certainly not a matter of anything goes not every rendition will be equally good or equally true to the spirit of the quintet and saying so should not be a problem in life we don't find it difficult to discriminate between better or worse performances crucially we expect at least a degree of consensus on the matter among those who know enough to recognize a good performance when they hear one however no one would expect me to say precisely how i know that it is a true performance of the work let alone to prove to them that it is at best i could point to certain aspects of the performance and hope my fellow listener picks up and that's not just because of the particular nature of music no one expects me to say how i know that my understanding of hamlet is more or less true either as a critic of hamlet i state what i see people either click with what i say get an insight from it or don't they either feel that i and now they know more about hamlet or they don't this is not to give a single crime of comfort to the my view is as good as yours types there are very clearly better and worse interpretations i could get it indisputably wrong for example by claiming it's really an account of peasant life in azerbaijan in the 10th century or less dramatically but nonetheless clearly by claiming that it is primarily a critique of james the first foreign policy there are in fact an almost limitless number of ways in which i'm free to get it wrong philosophy may at times aspire to be but cannot ever be coercive it cannot compel to a point of view it can only allow an insight to dawn plato described the process as a spark that crosses the gap suddenly a light as it were is kindled in one soul by a flame that leaps to it from another that's a quote from the seventh epistle the experience of understanding involves a shift from what seems initially chaotic or formless to a coherent stable form or picture a gestalt or from an existing gestalt to a new and better one that seems richer than the one it replaces the flow of the universe is always creative though it has order and is not random or chaotic the world is always a matter of responsiveness though it's equally not a free-for-all it's a process of creative collaboration of co-creation in that spirit i now want to modify my image of the quintet which corresponds to some but not all aspects of reality what if the music is not mozart but something more like some sublime jazz or an indian raga or portuguese fardo something we improvise within bounds whatever it is will emerge from a balance of freedom and constraint it won't exist until it's being performed no one can know exactly what it will be like but it will not be random it will emerge from the player's continuous interaction and from the music's own history as it unfolds what comes next will be anticipated by what has gone before it will also be molded by the imagination skill and training we bring and shared expectations quite apart from the fundamental laws of acoustics our co-creation of the music doesn't occur ex nihilo and it's not just a projection of ourselves yet we and you partake of its making even if we are only listeners our immersion in a culture of recorded music in which we are passive and inert consumers encourages us to think of music as a thing separate from the hearer and the musicians who make it yet any performer who's had the experience of being taken up by the flow of music or dance or song of being in the groove knows this is a dreadfully reductive account to be in the groove in the flow is to feel oneself played by as much as playing the music as yates says how can we know the dancer from the dance again just because i use music as an example i'm obviously not making a point specifically about music music happens to be a very clear case of how what we take to be a thing emerges from a complex of relationships both those between notes and those between individual consciousnesses but all our experience not just in music but in life both mental and physical is of such a complex flow a constantly unfolding responsive dance of reciprocal gestures it exists in process and in relationship our taking part in that reciprocity does not leave us inhabiting a solipsistic fantasy but precisely confirms that it is not a solipsistic fantasy we interact with one another and the world at large in myriad ways without being able to have more than limited control of the outcome what comes to be does so through an interaction of a multiplicity of elements some are some not whatever it is that exists apart from ourselves then creates us but we also take part in creating whatever it is by this i do not only mean the common sense view that i have an impact on the world as the world has an impact on me that i leave my footprints that would lead immediately to the reflection that i'm very small in relation to the world and so effectively my impact is so small that for all intents and purposes it can be ignored there is it might seem an inexpressibly vast universe and an inexpressively tiny individual consciousness such a reflection seems to posit an objective position a view outside of history or geography time or space a view from nowhere in which all can be measured and compared it implies in fact a measurer of all the measurers measuring the other scales and putting each part in its place according to its overall worth but though that cannot be the alternative is not just a merely subjective position either this very polarity subjective objective is misleading in the fado in the rag in jazz it is what it is because of me and i'm what i am because of it similarly whatever it is is potential only until the encounter in each authentic encounter one in which the individual truly apprehensive is apprehended by this other the other becomes fulfilled each time this comes about in a unique fashion but one that is not alien to the coming into being of that other as a whole and the actualization which at first seems to be a narrowing or collapse of potential positively added to the now enlarged field of the potential which only discovers itself through the repetition of such actualizations within my experience of the world very much can be changed by my response to whatever it is in a sense everything can be changed though that may seem to be just for me how big or small is that we cannot weigh consciousness against the universe it's like trying to say precisely how much you love someone if you really love them it's not fixable in space or quantitative but qualitative and experienced in the living flow of time and if things turn out to be interconnected not atomistic and they are each consciousness has its impact on the universe that cannot be quantified does this mean that there's no such thing as being wrong of course not though there can be no rules for jazz indeed if it merely followed rules it would no longer be jazz there are many things that just can't be done much as in the middle of a flamenco dance whose form is not predetermined one cannot suddenly start balancing on one's heels or stop and scratch one's nose or do the can can without the dance ceasing to be flamenco is more formalized than jazz but even in jazz there's literally no end to the list of what one doesn't do however there's no recipe no procedure or algorithm to follow for getting it right either an algorithm is what the left hemisphere wants the recognition that it's got to be free of any algorithm yet not at all random is characteristic of the understanding of the right hemisphere we can specify what is not jazz but not what is our knowledge of anything unique is similarly apathetic just as and is not merely additive not is not merely negative both are highly creative indeed resistance not-ness is an absolute necessity for creation that of which i have no inkling whatever i just don't get or see doesn't exist for me that manifestation of whatever it is is simply not available in my world but this doesn't mean that things come and go from everyone else's reality dependent on my understanding of it if i can't see the moon that doesn't mean it stops being there for others if we're all tuned into the same whatever it is and i believe it makes no sense to assert that we are not something very like what i can't see is probably being seen by others and ultimately that will affect me it's perfectly possible to be deceived about or to be in denial about an aspect of whatever it is truth like reality is an encounter it is in the nature of an encounter that more than one element is involved and what i find in whatever it is does not pre-exist my encounter with it there must be a potential true enough but it is actualized only in my encounter with it the encounter is genuinely creative the whole universe is constantly creative but not out of nowhere we're dealing here with a phenomenon or process whose shape can be intuited but to which our everyday language is not well adapted when the world is viewed as a flow rather than an aggregate of bits mechanistically related and understandable only by reduction to parts when the world is viewed as a flower as i say albeit a differentiated one rather than just a succession of points or a world of things these problematic formulations can be approached from a fresh point of view wherein many of the difficulties get to be resolved the world i suggest is a seamless always self-creating self-individuating and simultaneously self-uniting flow that is only truly knowable as it comes to be i say it for convenience it's a question worth considering whether this is the appropriate pronoun it is like a stream with its whirlpools and eddies that come into being for a time and resolve while they're there they're present to all observers even measurable up to a point and yet while distinct they're inseparable from the stream not just in the sense that without the stream they do not exist but in the sense that they are the stream we are just such eddies in the stream and creativity is always discovering the as well as of the other once one sees this the objectivizing time denying change denying diagrammatic mentality of modern western thinking appears as i believe it is a hindrance not a help on the paths of truth the world we know then cannot be wholly mind independent and it cannot be wholly mind dependent once again this leaves no room for a philosophy of anything goes what is required is a maximally open attentive response to something real and other than ourselves of which we have only inklings at first but which comes more and more into being through our response to it if we are truly responsive to it we nurture it into being or not in that it has something of the structure of love thank you thank you that was inspiring i'm sure we have plenty of questions but i'm going to take the moderator's prerogative and maybe ask you the first one you speak about it being very important that we have a maximally open attentive attitude so that we can respond appropriately to whatever comes at us in this flow how would we do that how do we create an open and attentive attitude well i suppose at the most trivial level one can there are exercises that can be done in which one practices paying different kinds of attention to the world they're meditative exercises but i think being aware what i've tried to do is to raise awareness of the way in which our particular culture tends to use just one kind of attention which is detailed focused reductionist and only works from the bottom up so that whatever we find at the most reduced level must be essentially what the whole complex out of which those details have been taken is like but unfortunately that doesn't happen to follow um and so what i'm what i'm really um contrasting here is this attention which is very narrow already committed to what it knows it's looking for then only finds what it was looking for finds it familiar can see something new sees it as isolated decontextualized abstract and disembodied instead of this living flowing uh universe which i believe is consonant with the best philosophy the best spiritual traditions and contemporary physics yes thank you we also have a viewer question fraser asks language is symbolic and allows communication between consciousnesses can you not hear me i can see all the speakers doing this is can you the speakers hear me yes good okay he's okay you can good um so language is symbolic and allows communication does that go against the bicameral understanding of the human brain do you think um well no it doesn't um language is a very complex area and i devoted a long chapter in an earlier book called the master and his emissary to the nature of language it's contributed to by both the left hemisphere and the right hemisphere and importantly different ways it's a far too big an area to give you a summary of that chapter but i would recommend you to it it's chapter three it's called language truth and music and it's about the different aspects of language differentiating between the kind of language which is purely denitative um and other aspects of language which interpret meaning in context understand um the the intonation and the all that is not said the implicit in language all that is metaphorical and so on and it is actually through these elements which are largely right hemisphere based that we are able properly to communicate otherwise we would be like computers constantly talking across purposes but language is a very interesting element that partakes of enormous amounts of um humanity not just the two hemispheres but also very much the whole of the human body and beyond that thank you okay we have a second question from the audience which is would you say that an encounter a human encounter between two human beings is a process or an event or does it matter what we how we view that i didn't hear what the crucial word is a human encounter a human encounter a process or an event a human encounter is a process and an event um what it is not isn't is a thing what i um described as an important concept is something i call betweenness which is not just the gap between when there is a relationship but something new that comes into being by the very coming together of these two elements which can't be separated from the whole one very concrete example is that of an electric circuit is the electricity in the positive terminal no is it in the negative terminal no is it just in the space between the terminals no it's in the hole betweenness as i call it of the coming together of these two poles and whatever new emerges from it now a human relationship is that and you can describe that as a process or an event what you mustn't describe it as is a thing yes thank you okay we have a question from bernardo and he says if consciousness is irreducible what then ontologically speaking are the hemispheres and their correlations with qualia states well the hemispheres are obviously matter their material elements within consciousness like other matter and they matter and consciousness are not somehow incapable of interaction they constantly interact and what the brain does with consciousness is not in my view and i argue for this at some length in my new book is not to emit consciousness nor even simply to transmit consciousness but to permit consciousness by which i mean it doesn't make consciousness up and it doesn't simply act positive passively as a transmitter but actually shapes consciousness william james has a wonderful expression he says that in it's an analogy to the way the brain works with consciousness is that if it were not for the obstructive effects of his vocal cords on the passage of air through his um airways he could have no voice it's that obstruction um that permits only certain frequencies that enable something to come into being so a theme of my new book is that resistance is essential to creativity of every kind and in my view the brain is that element of resistance that shapes human consciousness it doesn't originate consciousness but it shapes our consciousness i think that all that exists exists in consciousness that consciousness is the stuff of the cosmos matter is a phase of consciousness it's not a a separate thing it it any more than ice is separate from water it's a phase of water it's neither lesser nor nor more than water it it's not separate from water it's a kind of water and matter is a kind of consciousness for a time that has certain quite marked properties that are different from the way we normally think of consciousness just as you know water is transparent and flows and all the rest and ice is hard and opaque and can split your head open so that they're they're different but they're part of the same ontology so for me the the idea that um the the consciousness and matter have to be uh they can they must be distinguished um i argue strongly that they are distinguished just as ice and water are but they're not somehow there should be no need to have to set the one against the other and fields of energy our energy is is into um convertible with matter obviously that's what e equals m c squared in a way tells us and so fields of energy are also aspects of consciousness consciousness has fields thank you that's very clear all right um i'd like to ask the other two speakers whether they have questions they'd like to post to ian before we move on to the panel discussion thank you so much ian for this really beautiful book it really resonated with me everything you said and then very eloquently phrased um yeah i have a lot of things i was thinking of um i wondered do you also relate this idea of the two hemispheres to two ways to look at particles like that they can be waves or particles um is that related how you perceive that yes that's a very very interesting question um and i'd like to just take a few sentences to answer it at some very basic level it would look like the left hemisphere collapses things into particles by its very specific attention to this measuring element and that the flow of the wave is what exists until that attention is brought to bear on it and that may well be true um but there is something else which is that there is a distinction between the ways in which the two hemispheres see the world that the left hemisphere wants desperately to have something be either this or that it wants black and white it wants certainty and it wants to know which category can i put this in come on make up your mind whereas the right hemisphere is able to entertain ambiguity and ambivalence it can do this cognitively in terms of ideas better than the left but it can do it also in something called perceptual rivalry which is um where you can you can can you you don't have to collapse with wittgenstein's famous duck rabbit into either it's a duck or it's a rabbit it can be a duck rabbit and it can have both facets so um i would say if you like the left hemisphere once either or the right hemisphere wants both and but it also wants to bring the two hemispheres together which the left hemisphere doesn't the left hemispheres an antagonistic relationship with the right hemisphere the right hemisphere has a cooperative collaborative relationship with the left hemisphere so at the end of the day the right hemisphere understands that we don't want either both and or either or but both both and and idol thank you as may did you want to follow up i could you may you might be yeah that's that's really a beautiful description of how i always feel these hemispheres are interacting i wonder another thing i was thinking of was how do you relate this because this is something i'm always struggling with with this idea of you're kind of in the sphere of the earth and then at some point maybe through imagination and mathematics we perceive this idea of this fear when and that makes you into an observer of something you're in right in a way and i always find this very interesting kind of dualism which actually is not a dualism how do you can you also put this into your hemisphere theory being part of this fear and seeing this fear while you're in it well i can because once again some people think that maybe it follows from my exposition based on a very extensive survey of of the neuroscience of hemisphere difference which is a very rich area largely neglected because of pop psychology and people think that they've got all which they have false ideas but people think that maybe the difference is that the right hemisphere is subjective and the left hemisphere is objective but no the difference is this it is the left hemisphere that polarizes into this there must be the subjective and the objective whereas the right hemisphere sees that it is something that as it were bridges these two because it's much more interested in relationship in fact so it's not that it collapses the distinctions of individuality but it shows that they're not ultimately separate a good example of this from another physical image is a magnet it's it's quite clear that the north pole and south pole are distinct and separate but there isn't or at least there's a distinct but perhaps i should say they're not separate in the sense that there is not a hard line between them and you cannot have one without the other but they together make a magnet and in in a sense what i i mean obviously you can't immediately map that onto what i'm saying or have been saying but my idea there is that rather than have this idea of an objective reality and a of reality that there is a reality that the relationship that we have with it helps to form it and helps to form us so that there is a union there that cannot be artificially split into subjective and objective if people say to me so do you reject the idea of objectivity altogether i say no because i think i honor what is meant by it which is the idea to try to get away from too individual and limited a point of view and the way to do that is not to inhabit no point of view which can never be done the sort of idea of having no personal point of view but to inhabit as many points of view as possible and and if you do that you are less likely to be caught out by reality than if you stick to one particular point of view only [Music] [Music] you

Channel: Essentia Foundation

Views: 8,317

Keywords: idealism, metaphysics, ontology, analytic idealism, objective idealism, absolute idealism, analytic philosophy, philosophy of mind, neuroscience of consciousness, mainstream physicalism, physicalism, substance dualism, panpsychism, constitutive panpsychism, nature of reality, foundations of physics, quantum entanglement

Id: fciCsq0uBUI

Length: 41min 35sec (2495 seconds)

Published: Sun Nov 21 2021