Dr Iain McGilchrist reads part 1 of the introduction from his new book The Matter With Things

the matter with things our brains are delusions and the unmaking of the world by ian mcgilchrist volume 1 the ways to truth epigraph from wild at penfield the problem of neurology is to understand man himself from platinus but we who are we introduction epigraph from ludwig wittgenstein yes a key can lie forever in the place where the locksmith left it and never be used to open the lock the master forged it for this book is an attempt to convey a way of looking at the world quite different from the one that has largely dominated the west for at least 350 years some would say as long as 2000 years i believe we have systematically misunderstood the nature of reality and chosen to ignore or silence the minority of voices that have intuited as much and consistently maintained that this is the case now we have reached the point where there is an urgent need to transform both how we think of the world and what we make of ourselves attempting to convey such a richer insight is the ambition of this book we have been seriously misled i believe because we have depended on that aspect of our brains that is most adept at manipulating the world in order to bend it to our purposes the brain is importantly divided into two hemispheres you could say to sum up a vastly complex matter in a phrase that the brain's left hemisphere is designed to help us apprehend and thus manipulate the world the right hemisphere to comprehend it to see it all for what it is the problem is that the very brain mechanisms which succeed in simplifying the world so as to subject it to our control militate against a true understanding of it meanwhile compounding the problem we take the success we have in manipulating it as proof that we understand it but that is a logical error to exert power over something requires us only to know what happens when we pull the levers press the button or utter the spell the fallacy is memorialized in the myth of the sorcerer's apprentice it is hardly surprising therefore that while we have succeeded in coercing the world to our will to an extent unimaginable even a few generations ago we have at the same time wrought havoc on that world precisely because we have not understood it this book then is about the nature of reality it's about how we are equipped by our brains to try to understand it and what we can learn from that it's about the approaches that are available to us to gain an understanding of reality given that equipment it attempts consequently to give an account of reality that seems truer to the evidence than the one to which we have long been accustomed one that is far-reaching in its scope and consistent across the realms of contemporary neurology philosophy and physics and from that follows an account of who we are on which nothing less than our future depends what in particular i offer here is a new synthesis of philosophy and science which i believe is importantly and excitingly liberating to both parties as a rule philosophy and science go on as if the other did not exist scientists tend to see philosophy as a luxury they can't afford to get involved with a ball and chain that will slow them down in their race for the next discovery philosophers to see science as somewhat beneath them and in any case irrelevant to the ponderings of the mind on itself but as the great physicist alvin schroedinger in science and humanism it seems plain and self-evident yet it needs to be said the isolated knowledge obtained by a group of specialists in a narrow field has in itself no value whatsoever but only in its synthesis with all the rest of knowledge and only in as much as it really contributes in this synthesis toward answering the demand dines de hey mice who are we here schrodinger is remembering plutanus one of the greatest greek philosophers but his point is of a contemporary relevance that it is impossible to overstate seventy years on from schrodinger's pronouncement specialization makes it even harder to expect more than a tiny handful of scientists and philosophers to be in a position to venture into a genuinely new understanding of their in reality common enterprise one that has the potential hugely to enrich both parties when any attempt is made to reach out a hand across the distancing void it is almost invariably an exercise in reinforcing the status quo the scientists telling the philosophers that they find only machinery and the philosophers reflecting back to the scientists that a mechanistic view is the best option on offer since what you find is a product of how you attend this is a more or less pointless exercise in making sure that both parties sink to the bottom in the shortest possible time philosophy is engaged in weighing evidence so as to decide between conflicting ways of understanding the world each of which has something to be said for it this is why philosophy never ends but what if among the evidence there was some way of recognizing a particular take on the world as not just floating in a contextual void but rather the predictable result of paying a quite particular kind of attention to the world and what if we happen to know a great deal about the evolutionary purposes and the consequences of such a way of attending including what weight we should attach to its findings and what if such insights gained from science and explicated by philosophy could be applied in turn to the science of mind itself then might we not begin to see a fertile symbiosis of philosophy and science helping one another each turn building on the next to rise to a new more truthful vision of who indeed we are rethinking some assumptions at the core of the contemporary world is the reductionist view that we are nature is the earth is nothing but a bundle of senseless particles pointlessly helplessly mindlessly colliding in a predictable fashion whose existence is purely material and whose only value is utility neither platinus nor schrodinger would have been impressed i cannot remember a time when i thought this sounded at all convincing and a lifetime thinking and learning has done nothing to allay my skepticism not only is it mistaken i believe but actively damaging physically to the natural world and psychologically morally and spiritually to ourselves as part of that world it endangers everything that we should value reductionism can mean a number of things but here i mean quite simply the outlook that assumes that the only way to understand the nature of anything we experience is by looking at the parts of which it appears to be made and building up from there by contrast i believe that the whole is never the same as the sum of its parts and that except in the case of machines there are in fact no parts as such but that they are an artifact of a certain way of looking at the world for this reason it is every bit as true that what we call the parts can be understood only by understanding the whole to which they belong and with the reductionist outlook goes determinism the belief that if we knew enough about the position and momentum of every particle in the universe we could predict everything that happens from here on in including your every thought desire and belief even if contemporary physics did not demonstrate that this is an impossibility there is a problem with this kind of argument reductionists and determinists unerringly fail to take account of the fact that their own arguments apply to themselves if my beliefs are nothing but the mechanical products of a blind system so are all views including those of the reductionist if everything is already determined the determinist tendency to embrace determinism is also merely determined and we have no reason to take it seriously since we're all determined either to believe it or not already as the philosopher hans jonas observed there is an unspoken hierarchical principle involved the scientist does take man to be determined by causal laws but not himself while he assumes and exercises his freedom of inquiry and his openness to reason evidence and truth his own working assumptions involve free will deliberation and evaluation as aspects of himself but these qualities and capacities are stripped away from and denied to the human object or thing that he is inspecting if it were not for the fact that this world picture is mistaken you might argue that we ought nonetheless to man up and accept it but it is as i hope to demonstrate massively mistaken my aim is to show the reader the magnitude of the error and its consequences i say show because i cannot any more than anyone else prove anything finally and irrefutably the material with which we are dealing makes that impossible but rather i wish to take my reader by degrees to a new vantage point one built upon science and philosophy from which in all likelihood the view will appear at the same time unfamiliar and yet in no way alien indeed rather the opposite more like a homecoming from there the reader must of course make up his mind for himself to put the matter in a nutshell wrote the philosopher friedrich weissmann a philosophical argument does more and does less than a logical one less in that it never establishes anything conclusively more in that if successful it is not content to establish just one isolated point of truth but affects a change in our whole mental outlook so that as a result of that myriads of such little points are brought into view or turned out of sight as the case may be such a whole shift of view rather than the adjustment of a few points within a familiar landscape is what i hope for my reader and that process must begin with the very idea of things the world is not just a set of separately existing localized objects externally related only by space and time right tim moordlin professor of philosophy and physics at nyu something deeper and more mysterious knits together the fabric of the world indeed according to richard cohn henry professor of physics and astronomy at johns hopkins to see the universe as it really is we must abandon our tendency to conceptualize observations as things reductionism envisages a universe of things and simply material things at that how these things are related is viewed as a secondary matter however i suggest that relationships are primary more foundational than the things related that the relationships don't just connect pre-existing things but modify what we mean by the things which in turn modify everything else they are in relationship with that is because what we are dealing with are ultimately relations events processes things is a useful shorthand for those elements congealed in the flow of experience that emerge secondarily from and attract our attention in a primary web of interconnections i have nothing against things provided we don't see them as primary in our ordinary way of thinking things must be established before there can be relationships and so this about turn would seem paradoxical but as i shall explain paradox very often represents a conflict between the different takes afforded by the two hemispheres however we must also be prepared to find that as niels bohr recognized whereas trivial truths manifestly exclude their opposites the most profound truths do not this is itself a version of the realization that what applies at the local level does not necessarily apply in the same way at the global level the failure to observe this principle underlies some of the current misconceptions of both science and philosophy i believe that nowadays we live no longer in the presence of the world but rather in a representation of it the significance of that is that the left hemisphere's task is to represent what first presences to the right hemisphere this representation has all the qualities of a virtual image an infinitely thin immobile fragment of a vast seamless living ever-flowing whole from a standpoint within the representation as a necessarily diminished derivative of it we see reality as merely a special case of our representation one in which something is added into animated in this it is like a cine film that consists of countless static slices requiring a projector to bring it back into what at least looks to us like a living flow on the contrary however reality is not an animated version of our representation of it but our representation a devitalized version of reality it is the re-presentation that is a special wholly atypical and imaginary case of what is truly present as the film strip is of life the representation is simply what one might call the limit case of what is real stepping out of this world picture and into the world stepping out of suspended animation and back into life will involve inverting many of our perhaps cherished assumptions the concept of the limit case is one i will refer to i'm using it to mean that what is essential to the phenomenon has in this case reached its minimum without being actually extinguished it should not be taken as typical but as the very opposite thus reverting to the example of relationships and the things related relationship is the norm isolation if it could ever be wholly achieved which it cannot would be the limit case of interrelation or again to continue the image of the cine film in the newtonian universe the natural state of anything is status according to newtonianism motion is an aberration from this primal state of perfect inertia requiring the equivalent of the projector some energy conceived as added from outside to set it going however nothing we know is in reality ever entirely static and relative stasis not motion is the unusual circumstance that requires explanation stasis is in other words the limit case of motion in which it approaches but never completely reaches zero motion then is not an unusual departure from stasis but stasis an unachievable imaginary state which in reality can be approached only as an asymptote let me give a few further examples which i grant may seem at first sight surprising even nonsensical we could start with your own thought processes and their expression in language the explicit is not more fully real than the implicit it is merely the limit case of the implicit with much of its vital meaning sheared off narrowed down and finalized the literal is not more real than the metaphorical it is merely the limit case of the metaphorical in which the wealth of meaning is collapsed into a one-to-one correspondence for a useful temporary purpose more importantly is the wider cosmos whose deep structure we are inclined to misunderstand it may seem obvious that randomness is the primary condition and that order is an unusual phenomenon that emerges from how and is supervenient on that primary chaos however order is not a special case of randomness but randomness merely the limit case of order which is the universal norm indeed true randomness is a theoretical construct that does not exist complexity and simplicity are relative terms however complexity is surely we imagine a more unusual state of affairs arising out of the agglomeration of more simple elements isn't it i believe that this is a mistake one all too understandable given our world view but a mistake nonetheless rather complexity is the norm and simplicity represents a special case of complexity achieved by cleaving off and disregarding almost all of the vast reality that surrounds whatever it is we are for the moment modeling as simple simplicity as a feature of our model not of the reality this is modeled in keeping with this and don't worry right now this should seem crazy inanimacy is better regarded as the limit case of animacy something i will come to later in the book potential is not simply all the things that never happened a ghostly penumbra around the actual the actual is the limit case of the potential which is equally real the one into which it collapses out of the many as the particle is the collapse of a quantum field the particle is not more real than the field rather it is a special case of the field in which its field-like characteristics are at a minimum similarly the wholly determinate where it to exist which it does not would be the limit case of the indeterminate straight lines in as much as they can be said to exist at all do so as the limit case of curves which constitute all the lines in nature even space and the paths traveled in it are curved linearity is the limit case of non-linearity and can be approximated only by taking ever narrower views of an infinitely complex picture the discontinuous in as much as it can be said to exist at all is the limit case of the continuous which is the norm total independence is an imaginary construct the limit case of interdependence which is universal and the whole is shot through with purpose a notion by the way that has nothing to do with some sort of engineering god and endlessly creative not pointless and passive this cosmos is one from which we are never separate but out of which we arise in which we dwell and to which finally we return my ultimate aim is to contribute a new perspective from which to look at the fundamental building blocks as we think of them of the cosmos time space depth motion matter consciousness uniqueness beauty goodness truth purpose and the very idea of the existence or otherwise of a god these will form the subject of the last part of the book of course these are vast topics ones that have been grappled with by the ableist human minds for millennia naturally i don't presume to try to settle the disputes that have arisen moreover i'm very far from being the first person to argue that the prevailing view is badly mistaken but i do believe that the hemisphere hypothesis casts a very revealing new light on those disputes and strongly suggests that the view that has prevailed a view heavily indebted to a belief in reductionism very seriously distorts the evidence of the nature of reality that is before our eyes if only we would attend to it fully it provides a genuinely new and compelling context in which to revisit these issues one that may encourage us toward very different conclusions at the end of the book i shall return to considering the possible relevance of all this to the crises the world so palpably faces and the condition of our own culture in the west by then though i hope the relevance will have become all too obvious to the reader through following the arguments of the book a brief clarification before i go any further i'm going to offer some indications towards an important aspect of the philosophical position i have come to espouse and which i will advocate in this book it is one that has arisen slowly through reflections on experience and in a way i would rather have left an expression of it to emerge more slowly and organically out of what i will be going on to discuss but i think that without some preliminary statement however brief the reader might jump to erroneous conclusions which may ultimately make it harder to see the fuller picture when we arrive there i hope that questions i raise without addressing them immediately here will be found to be addressed in due course my position will become much clearer as the book unfolds these are my first words by no means my last i wish at this stage to do little more than clearly distance myself from two positions in the last century or so there has 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 brackets 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 that in reality we participate in the knowing there is no view from nowhere of crucial importance is that this fact does not in any way prevent science legitimately speaking of truths far from it a point i will return to in subsequent chapters we desperately need what science can tell us and postmodern 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 there is no such thing as reality since it's all made up miraculously by ourselves brackets 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 where in any sense contaminated by our own involvement in bringing it about it would no longer be worthy of being called real the other fears that since we manifestly do play a part and it's 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 there is something that is not just the contents of my mind that for example you my reader 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 i will claim that 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 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 their relationship if this seems at this point a step too far the reader can i hope embrace a weaker position that at least as i say our world is what comes into being in the encounter between us and this whatever it is 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 a maximally open patient and attentive response to whatever it is is better at disclosing or discerning reality than a response that is peremptory insensitive or above all shrouded in dogma importantly what we experience is not just an image of a world outside some sort of projection on the walls of a cartesian theater inside our heads and watched by an intracerebral homunculus on an intracerebral sofa as i will explain 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 are always victims of self-deception when we are properly attentive what we experience is the real deal though it'd 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 is 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 is not a wall between us and the world our experience is of whatever it is and not another thing even if we can't get away from the fact that 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

Channel: Dr Iain McGilchrist

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Keywords: iain mcgilchrist, iain mcgilchrist new book, iain mcgilchrist the matter with things, the master and his emissary, dr iain mcgilchrist, right brain, left brain right brain, ian mcgilchrist, iain mcgilchrist the master and his emissary, iain mcgilchrist john cleese, iain mcgilchrist new book the matter with things, dr iain mcgilchrist new book

Id: rkD4Gh7BDr0

Length: 31min 26sec (1886 seconds)

Published: Sun Aug 08 2021

Reddit Comments

[u/Mr_Koreander]

"There is no view from nowhere"

He's ravishing to listen to.