Welcome, everybody. Thank you
for coming through the rain on this evening. I am so delighted
with our guest who's gonna be talking to us tonight. And last
week or a couple of weeks ago, we had Nick Cave, the rockstar
here. We had a really interesting and surprising
evening. Tomorrow we have a comedy night. So we are really
catering to all tastes yeah at the UnHerd Club How come you picked the boring
evening to come? That, it definitely will not be.
Dr. Ian McGilchrist is someone we have been trying to persuade
to leave his beautiful home in Skye and come to the metropolis
to talk to us and we finally succeeded. He is, as many of you
will know, a neuroscientist, turned philosopher. Can I call
you that? You can call me what you like. An extraordinary breadth of
interests. He studied literature at Oxford, where he began his
academic career. He's a fellow of All Souls and he's written a
series of extraordinary books. He kind of rose to stardom with
a book called 'The Master and his Emissary', which set out his
central thesis, which is what we'll be talking about tonight,
and has followed up with a very substantial and very profound
two volume book called 'The Matter With Things', which I
very strongly recommend. It's absolutely worth the effort, and
that's really what we're going to talk about today. If any of
you have copies, I'm sure Ian would be happy to sign them
afterwards. let's begin in it's okay. With what I'm sure you
have been asked many times, which is to sort of start with
the basic assumption for us, many people here will will no
more than that. but for those of them who don't tell us about the
two hemispheres of the brain, and how they each have a
different perception of the world. Yes, this is a difficult topic,
because people either know something that is entirely
wrong, or know that the whole subject is wrong. And so it's
very difficult to get people to listen. Or it was initially but
I'm very glad to say that I carried the day with a lot of
people. Many of you, if you don't know my work will think,
if you know anything about hemisphere difference, that the
left hemisphere is rather, rather boring, but reliable.
It's like a decent accountant. It keeps good records, but it's
not actually great company. And the right hemisphere is this
flighty thing that is given to fits of passion and painting.
And this is not a good way to think about it at all. There
were some conclusions drawn from some early procedures in which
the brain was split. There's a band of fibres at the base of
the brain that joins these two hemispheres, a bit like a
walnut, called the corpus callosum. And for certain people
who had intractable epilepsy, a curable condition, it became
when they were able to divide the two hemispheres one from
another. So that if there was an electrical storm, if you'd like
to think of it that way, in one hemisphere, it didn't spread to
the other. So the person was able to remain conscious and
carry on functioning. And after that, there were a lot of rather
interesting experiments that could be done. You could address
things purely to one hemisphere or to the other. And on the back
of that the sort of myths that I mentioned, grew up. And between
the 70s and the 90s, people experimented more and more, and
they found it in fact, all these cliches were completely wrong.
And so they gave the whole thing up as a bad job but I'd like to
suggest that that was dogmatic and premature. First of all, the
brain consists only in making connections. It's lots and lots
and lots, billions of neurons, nerve cells that connect and its
power consists in the connections. So, why would
nature have endowed us with a brain that has a whopping divide
down the middle with just a small connection between the
two? That's the first thing. The second is that the brain is
asymmetrical. Why would it be asymmetrical? The skull is not
asymmetrical, the world around us doesn't divide neatly into a
left world and a right world, so why would the brain? And the
third, which was something I discovered in medical school,
was that this corpus callosum, this connecting band spent at
least half its time, if not more, sending messages to the
other hemisphere, 'you keep out of this, I'm dealing with it.'
So it wasn't so much necessarily facilitating as inhibiting. And
just as an aside, primates have more inhibitory neurons than any
other mammal, and humans have more inhibitory neurons than any
primate. In fact, about 19% of the human brain consists in
inhibitory neurons, which would take us somewhere that we may or
may not go, which is the important part that resistance,
negation plays in creation. Anyway, there we are. So that's
the first problem. And then I started to look at the
literature and I was fortunate enough to come across a
colleague who had been working in that area for 20 years, John
Cutting and effectively what he had found is that there were
significant differences, but they didn't follow the map, you
know, reason and language, emotion and pictures, for
example, because it's quite true that both are involved in both.
But now, each of them are involved in all those things, in
everything that they do in a different way. So it was not
about the what, but about the how, you see what I mean? And
that actually turns out to be very, very important. They each
contribute to reason and language and emotion and so on
and the left hemisphere is not you know, unbiased and
unemotional, it's actually prone to anger and aggression. It's
very far from being calm. It also tends to jump to
conclusions more than the right hemisphere, which Ramachandran,
the great neuroscientists called the devil's advocate. Anyway,
what my researches over 30 years and my collaboration with John
Cutting in the initial phases of that, reveal is that these two
manners of being in the world that these hemispheres bring out
are to do with the way in which we attend. Now, that may not
sound very exciting. In fact, when I first realised that the
basic thing here was attention, the penny didn't immediately
drop. Attention? It could be memory, it could be calculation,
it could be anything. What's special about attention? Well,
the answer is that attention is actually how our world comes
into being. We can only know the world we experience and how we
experience that world depends fundamentally on the type of
attention. So if you attend to something in one way, you see
one thing. If you attend to it in another, you'll see something
quite different. And they sometimes talk about a mountain
behind my house. I live in a place called Talisker on Skye,
which is not actually where the whiskey is made. It's nearby.
They tried to keep it out of my It's four miles away, but it's
called that because it's from a reach Norse word 'talasgar', which
means the sloping rock. Now what that tells you is this mountain,
which is a very extraordinary mountain, it has this sloping
silhouette from the sea. So what one knows is to the Vikings 1000
years ago, what that mountain meant was safety or danger,
because it alerted them to the fact that they were in a very
treacherous piece of water there, and the bay was full of
rocks. But we also know there were Picts living there 1000
years earlier than that, and they have their brochs, the
ruins of their brochs, they're still there. And to them, this
mountain offered both shelter and was the home of the gods.
Then in the 18th century, people started visiting Scotland to
draw it and see the beauty in the sublime landscape. And so
for them, this mountain was a many coloured, many textured
form of great beauty. And in the 19th century, people got much
more interested in geology for the first time. And it happens
to be an extraordinarily good example of columnar basalt
formation, the same as... It is in fact, in line with the Giants
Causeway in Ireland. And so it's part of the same formation. To
somebody who wanted to mine basalt, this mountain means
money, money, dollars. To a physicist, what it is, is
99.99%, nothing and then the other point 0.001%, we don't
really know what's going on. Now, which of these is the real
mountain? Which of those is the real mountain? They're all real
mountains. They just depend on the way in which and the goals
with which we approach it. Everybody sees what they are
interested in finding and way they attend makes all the
difference. So basically, attention helps shape the world
and these two kinds of attention came about for an evolutionarily
important reason. And I should say that it's not just the human
brain that is asymmetrical. All the brains of all the creatures,
we've looked at, birds, reptiles, amphibians, insects,
they all have ganglia or brains that are distinct left and right
and asymmetrical. And even the oldest extant organism
nematostella vectensis, 700 million years old, off the Isle
of Wight, where it blends in very well with the average age
of the community, it has a an asymmetrical neural network. And
it's been described as the origin of the mammalian brain.
So there's something there that seems to involve all living
things that requires this asymmetry. What was it? It's
that every creature has to solve this conundrum, how can I eat
and yet stay alive? That doesn't sound difficult you but if you
think back for most of history, a creature has to be able to
target something and follow it with its eyes and get it very
accurately. And to do that it has to have a very narrow
attention, because that's the only attention is paying, it
won't last very long, because he won't see the predator overhead,
it won't see its mate and its offspring that also need
feeding. So there needs to be two kinds of attention and so
different are these kinds of attention that they can only
come about by having two centres of awareness. And the left
hemisphere has this very narrow beam, perhaps three degrees out
of the 360, targeted on a detail, it can see very
precisely. It fixes it and it grabs it and the left hemisphere
controls the right hand with which most of us do the grabbing
and the getting. Whereas the right hemisphere has this broad,
open, sustained vigilant attention, which is on the
lookout for everything else without preconception. So on the
one hand, you've got an attention that produces a world
of tiny fragments that don't seem connected to one another, a
bit here a bit there, a bit elsewhere, that are
decontextualized, that are disembodied, abstract, become
examples of a category of things, and are fixed by the
stare of the left hemisphere. So you've got these static, fixed,
known familiar bits and pieces, 'oh, it's one of those, that's
what I eat,' and so on. Whereas, with the right hemisphere, we
see that nothing really is completely separated from
everything else, or indeed, from anything else, ultimately, that
all is that some level of seamlessly interconnected, that
it's flowing and changing rather than fixed and static. That
everything is what it is because of the context it finds itself
in. That embodiment is essential to the nature of what we're
looking at, both our looking and the thing we're looking at.
There are unique individuals that it's not just person, but
it's Sue or Fred, or whatever it is. Those distinctions, the
uniqueness is something the right hemisphere sees, but the
left hemisphere sees just an example of something that uses
needs. The left hemisphere as well is thus lifeless, literally
inanimate kind of a world and the right hemisphere is an
animate one. And you can in fact, now temporarily disable
one hemisphere at a time in an experimental subject, completely
painlessly. And when you do that, you find that the left
hemisphere sees things that are animate as mechanisms. When you
have the right hemisphere alone functioning, it sees things that
you would normally think of as inanimate, as alive. So the sun
is alive, it's moving across the heavens, it's giving warmth. So
these are very, very fundamentally different ways of
looking at things and the last thing I'm going to say is that-
and again, this may not strike you as so fundamental, but
believe me, it is- the right hemisphere sees things as they
come into being for us. I use the term 'presence' they
'presence' to us, which is a term philosophers use
translating, Heidegger's Unreason and what he was getting
at was that things are not just given, stati, there but they
come about for us as we look at them and pay attention to them.
And we see more what they are, they become what they are for
us. And that's not to say that it's all made up by our mind.
It's not as simple as that nor is it that there's just a world
out there and it's completely passive. There is an
interrelationship between our minds and the world. It is all
the time constructing it. The right hemisphere is aware of
this and is part of it. The left hemisphere sees representations
which literally means 'present again', after it's no longer
present. The right hemisphere as well, is the world in which we
live, the left hemisphere's world is, if you like, a map, a
schema, a diagram, a theory, something two dimensional. And
it's got none of the richness that's in the right hemisphere
as well. There's nothing wrong with that, because actually a
map is very useful. And the map doesn't get more useful by
including more and more detail about the names of the people
who live in the houses and the plants they grow in the garden.
No, a map to be useful has to be selective. And that's how it is.
So we've got this one world, which is composed of things that
are mechanical, useful, inanimate, reducible to their
parts, abstracted, decontextualized, dead, and
another world, which is flowing, complex, living, changing and
has all the qualities that make life worth living for us. That's a wonderful explanation.
Let me let me ask you now to do another 300 pages in three
minutes. These two modes of attending have with them,
accompanying philosophies, accompanying ways of seeing the
world. yes. And your thesis seems to be that
not just as individuals, but as a whole society, and recently-
I'm keen to know how long you think that's been true for- have
become overly dependent on the left hemisphere or giving the
left hemisphere too much attention, too much power in
shaping the world, as we understand it, and has neglected
this wiser hemisphere that, as the 'Master in his Emissary',
that book I mentioned, hints at should actually be in charge,
using the left hemisphere. So tell us how this has happened,
as wide as a society? How can it be that we start using one more
than the other? Yes, I mean, the title of 'The
Master's Emissary' refers to the idea of a much wiser master who
has a servant who thinks he knows everything but because he
doesn't really know very much, he thinks he's got it all. But
the wiser master knows he needs a lot of work to be done,
administrative work by the emissary. So you're quite right,
the right hemisphere... Things work well, there's vast amounts
of evidence of this, as long as the left hemisphere is carrying
out work it's disputed to do by the right hemisphere. Rather
like we use a computer. The computer doesn't really
understand the data we draw from the complexity of life. That's
not its job, its job is to process it very fast, and hand
us back some data which we then take back into the world and
make sense of. What seems to happen in civilizations and in
the second half of 'The Master and his Emissary', I trace
Western history from the Greeks, through the Romans, to
the Renaissance, the Reformation, the Enlightenment,
Romanticism, Industrial Revolution, Modernism and Post
Modernism. And what I think I can share is that in two
previous cases, the Greek and the Roman civilization began
with a sudden outburst of flourishing in which the two
worked very well together. And then over time, it got more and
more towards the left hemisphere's point of view.
Apparently, I think this is because civilizations tend to
overreach themselves. They tend to amass an empire, and then
everything has to be administered. And there are
rules and procedures, and everything is rolled out under a
bureaucracy. And what this privilege is, is a simple,
sequential, analytic way of understanding rather than the
more complex, holistic understanding that is required,
and is provided by the right hemisphere. So to come to where
we are now... What I think happened was the Renaissance was
this sudden flowering in which- and it's not about the
humanities versus the sciences. Neither by the way, is it true
that the humanities are somehow right hemisphere and sciences
somehow left hemisphere. Good science, good reasoning involves
the right hemisphere as much as the left but what happened was,
there were great steps forward in so many aspects of life, a
great richness, and then towards the end of the 17th century,
becoming much stronger in the 18th century was a sense that
science had solved all the problems and we were beginning
to understand how to control everything ourselves.
Unfortunately, the kind of thinking that gets drawn into
that is also rather simple minded, and it therefore doesn't
see what it is it doesn't see. And I think that's where we've
got you is that we've trusted a way of systematising,
rationalising, and we believe If the if we just had a little bit
more power, which is the raison d'etre of the left hemisphere,
to grasp, to ge. If only we could do a bit more
manipulation, we would solve everything. But at the same
time, we're making an unholy mess of the world in so many
respects. We're destroying nature, we're destroying
humanity, really. We're just certainly destroying this
civilization. I'd say we're taking a sledgehammer to it. And
so this is a very sad outcome for this know-it-all left
hemisphere. One of the reasons I think it's become- well,
there're several reasons why I think it's become more potent.
One is that of course, it's the one that makes you rich. It's
the one with which you do the grabbing and getting and that's
easy and straightforward. Another is that it's much easier
to explain the left hemisphere's point of view. It's money for
old rope, say, 'well, look, if we do this, it least it leads to
that.' Whereas actually, what the right hemisphere is seeing
is a complex system, which is different from a complicated
system. A jet engine is a complicated system, but it's not
complex. It's not. A complex system is one which is
inherently unpredictable. It's not disorderly, but it's not
determined, and it has recursive loops within it so that things
become enormously complex, you don't have this a leads to B
leads to C. And another is that when you start to articulate
what it is your civilization is about, rather than getting on
with it, once you start openly analysing it, then you lean more
and more to this left hemisphere point of view. A.N. Whitehead,
Alfred North Whitehead, who I consider one of the all time
greatest philosophers, and certainly of the last 100 years
said, 'a civilization flourishes until it starts to analyse
itself'. And that's remarkable because Whitehead was a
mathematician and a physicist, and he was the co author with
Bertrand Russell of 'Principia Mathematica' but he was able to
see beyond, he was able to see limitations of science,
limitations of reason, which is not to disrespect science or
reason. I happen to believe our science is not scientific
enough. It's too dogmatic. I happen to believe our reason is
not reasonable enough, too dogmatic- and it's dogma, that's
always the problem. We need science we need reason but we
also need to see that they can't answer all our questions. Love
is very real. Anyone who's experienced it knows that it's
one of the realest things that can happen to you but according
to science, for it to be real, you've got to be able to see it
in the lab, measure it, manipulate it. You cannot do
that. And then you start thinking about all the other
amazing things that we experience, goodness, and beauty
and love and all those sorts of things come under this. There
are proper limits to science, proper limits to reason music,
wonderful, can change your life but it's just notes. What is the
note? Absolutely nothing? Well, let's have another one, then.
Still nothing, let's have thirt thousand. Thirty thousand
nothings are going to make up Bachs B minor Mass, which can be
one of the most powerful things you can here. How did that
happen by amalgamating so many nothings? It's because it's all
in relation. It's all in relationships. And what I'm
suggesting is that relationships are primary. They're even
primary to the things that are related. The things that are
related, and what we call the things we notice, only become
what they are because of the relationships they stand in. So you started us off with the
Enlightenment there. Is that where it all went wrong, then is
it? It feels like, even in just the past five years, the world
is more dogmatic? More, as it were, left brain? It's accelerated. So, the chronology then, is it
just gradually more and more left brained? And then more and
more so or are there particular points and are we in one at the
moment where it's suddenly speeded up? Well, I mean, how long have you
got? But I mean, to put it very simply, there have been
movements, back and forwards. There have been corrections at
various times and after the Enlightenment came Romanticism,
which- the name 'Romantic' sort of seems to mean that it's not
serious or important- but in fact, the thinking and the art
that came out of it is very great indeed. And so there was a
correctionbut then the power of the Industrial Revolution led to
this machine-like way of thinking about living things,
and we've never really lost that. And although there are
great artists in Modernism and Postmodernism, it's
interesting... The ways of seeing the world that normally
would only happen to somebody who had an injury in the right
hemisphere, start to be represented in the visual arts
in the 20th century... It's just a fact. And I'm not saying it's
all rubbish, I'm just saying, things that we would not
normally experience unless we were not using our right
hemisphere start to be visualised. And there's a
wonderful book called 'Madness and Modernism' about this topic,
how twenty or thirty types of things you find in schizophrenia
are now happening, and are being portrayed in our culture. And
it's not that we've all got schizophrenia. Of course, we
haven't but what I think it is, we're all neglecting the right
hemisphere. And if you like, schizophrenia is a case in which
the left hemisphere has gone into overdrive, and the right
hemisphere has been wound down or is not really being listened
to and this leads to delusions and hallucinations. I think we
are now in a world, which is fully deluded. We're all fairly
reasonable people I imagine in this room, but now it's quite
common to hear people say, and for them to go completely
unchallenged, things that everybody knows are completely
impossible. They don't have any science behind them and no
reason in flat contrary to experience. Such as? I think you know what I'm
talking about. So there are aspects of our culture that have
become very vociferous and very irrational, and very dogmatic
and very hubristic, 'this is right, and anyone who says other
is wrong.' And that is, that's the way the left hemisphere
likes to be. Cut and dried, black and white, but the right
hemisphere sees nuances, gradation, so there's good and
bad in almost everything. So do you think we have ever
been in as left-hemisphere-dominated a
moment as we are now? No, I think this is
un-hitherto-seen. Do you think technology has
something to do with that? You talk about how it's a
representation, we now literally look at a representation in
screen form every day, it feels like we are further and further
removed from a kind of intuitive present experience in the world.
Do you think that could be part of it? I think it definitely is.
Physics a very long time ago, at least 100 years ago, learnt that
the Universe was not as Newton had described it as a vast
mechanism. It didn't have any of the features of a machine. And
unfortunately, biology was a lot slower in catching up with this.
So you had the rather extraordinary position where the
science of the inanimate showed a universe that had to be
perceived in a consciousness. And the science of the animate
world, suggested that we were all just machines and
consciousness didn't exist. I think that's beginning to shift.
Now, there were very hopeful signs that biologists are
beginning to see that it's far more complicated than that and
the machine model doesn't work. But that has left a legacy that
only somebody who thinks in this mechanical way, is being
rational. And I'd like to make a distinction, by the way between
what I would call a sort of rationalistic approach to
something and being reasonable. Being reasonable was something I
remember from when I was growing up. There were reasonable people
and they were admired and the idea of an education was to make
you reasonable. But now, that has been supplanted by something
quite different, which is a rationalising framework such as
a computer could follow. So we've been pushed by the
development of our machines, the increasing sophistication of
machines, the intoxicating feeling that we have power over
the world, into viewing it in this reductionist, materialist
way. And the trouble with power is that it's only as good as the
wisdom of the person who wields it. And I don't notice that
we're getting wiser. In fact, I think that would be an
understatement. So it's rather like putting machine guns in the
hands of toddlers and then hoping there's going to be a
happy outcome. So we're not living in an age of
reason, after all. Is that fair? Absolutely. We're living in an
age of rationalising and reductionism in which everything
can be taken apart, and it's just a bit. And yet it feels like the people
in charge, whoever they are, whether it's in charge of the
culture, or in charge of the media are in charge of the
political institutions, are very committed to this rationalist
framework. And reading your book 'The Matter with Things', I was
just continually reminded of what we come across in the day
to day political conversation, which is an absolute insistence
that particular mechanistic world is the only option and
those people who take a different view or don't sign up
to whatever the current precept is are considered outcasts, yes?
Do you recognise that in the in the more day-to-day political
world as well? Do you think we can learn from your framework
when just reading the paper or watching the news? Do you think
we need to be remembering Ian McGilchrist and thinking, 'this
is left brain stuff, block it out'? I hope people will apply these
ideas. I find that people spontaneously do in all walks of
life, which is very pleasing to find out. But yes, I do think
that. I suppose there was an almost equivalent period- it was
very short lived- of Puritanism, when it was absolutely not
tolerated for you to disagree with a certain way of thinking,
which was, in fact, a very dogmatic, reduced abstracted way
of thinking. But I think at that point, we hadn't reached the
stage that we're at now, very, obviously, where it's harder and
harder to articulate, but very much needs to be articulated.
Because at that time in history, people lived close to nature.
Almost everybody was surrounded by nature. Most people belonged
to an inherited culture, a coherent culture, which also
involved a religious element. And art had not been turned into
something conceptual, but was visceral and moving. And
religion had not been presented as something that only a fool or
an infant would believe. These are all very arrogant positions
that we now hold but what I'm saying is that those things,
proximity to nature, to the place where you live, and the
people, you live with, a culture, some sense of something
beyond this realm, which is important, it might be
religious, or it might just be spiritual, we know that these
things are the key to human flourishing. They make people
healthier, both physically and mentally, if they have this
context in which to live. We've done away with that and so now
all we're left with is public debate about things. And it's
very easy for somebody to say, 'well, you've just contradicted
yourself'. But in fact, if you're onto the truth, at some
level of reality you will contradict yourself, because
there's something called the coincidence of opposites, which
I have a whole chapter on and it's foundational, I think, to
my view of the cosmos, is that if you push farther and farther
in one direction, you don't get farther and farther away from
the thing you hope to flee, you start finding that you're
approaching it again, like in Alice, where she was told to
walk away from the door if she wanted to go into it. And this
is where we now are that we think, 'Oh, this was good. So
let's have more and more and more of it.' 'Let's have more
and more freedom' of a certain kind. That in history has always
ended in tyranny. Things lead to the opposite if pushed far
enough. We need to be harmonious in our thinking, we need to be
balanced. We need to have some equilibrium to our thoughts, and
we don't at the moment. Those people who do dissent from
this rationalist framework are often demonised as kooks or
worse yet, and you see it all the time. It's a very heretical
and big thought that they may actually be the wiser ones in
our society. How should we think about that? The people in
charge, who are so sneering often at people who, either
because of religious belief, or because they don't sign up to
whatever the current thing is, they suffer kind of a great
deal. I'm just wondering, how can we distinguish between those
alternative voices that are actually wise, versus the ones
that are kooks? Well, I was going to say yes.
The first thing is that just having a differing point of view
doesn't mean you're necessarily wise. You could be kooky and
some are, but nonetheless, I think those who are wise do have
a position far different from the one that is now instilled in
us in schools and through the media and so forth, which is, in
fact, a very impoverished vision of life. It's lost all its
beauty, its richness, its complexity and become very
simple, sterile, repellent. And so, I think, if we could begin
to suspend our judgments that somebody who differs from this
is automatically wrong and listen to what they have to say,
we'd be making steps forward. I would say that a civilization
cannot thrive. If differing points of view cannot be heard.
Hannah Arendt, one of the greatest philosophers of the
last 100 years, who was herself, a German Jew, and experienced
Nazism, said that 'once something can't be said, you're
already in a tyranny'. So, it is indisputable that we are all now
living in Britain, in 2023, in a tyranny, because there are
people who say, 'you can't say these things and there will be
terrible consequences if you do'. And you know what I mean . Let's talk about science a
little bit. You have a big section on science, and in
particular, how, although you're a big advocate, of course of
science, you are a scientist- I'm a scientist. You feel like it's taking a
wrong turn. When does science become scientism? When it quite simply says that
he can answer all our questions. A moment's reflection shows that
there are so many things that are important in our life, that
science can't fully explain to us, the beauty of a rainbow, of
a wonderful landscape, of a piece of music, its importance
and meaning, which is very real. It's not irrational or
unscientific. t's just beyond the grasp of science and reason.
It's illogical, irrational and itself unscientific to suppose
that science can answer all our questions. Science is only
supposed to admit things which can be proved to be the case but
it cannot be proved to be the case that science can answer all
our questions. It's not a scientific assumptio, it's an
assumption of faith. And scientism is a faith. Much as I
would say, there are fundamentalist religious, who I
very much regret. And there are fundamentalist atheists who I
regret just as much. I think the reasonable person is somebody
who has an open mind. And it's only by opening your mind that
you experience what it was you were missing before. It's rather
like a figure of fun in earlier philosophy called Simplices, who
wants to learn to swim. And so he just sits on the bank, and he
reads about how to swim but in fact, you can't learn how to
swim until you get into the water. To actually understand
many of these things, you have to behave at least as if for the
time being, you're willing to be part of it, and then you find
out what it is that you didn't see before. and at the moment,
we are just too rigid. And science has become dogmatic, for
example, for a long time, it's been saying there cannot be
fields of form. In a way, Rupert Sheldrake has been the person
who's promoted this idea. And he has always been rigorously
empirical. He's always said, 'look, here are experiments you
can do, carry them out.' And if he says that to dogmatic
scientists, some of whose names begin with D, they say, 'we
don't need to do the experiment, because we know it's wrong.'
Now, that is not science. That is the opposite of science. So
now we are discovering that there are fields of form that
are important in physics, and are probably the explanation for
how organisms are aware of a form. You see, we thought that
once we decoded DNA, we'd found everything in there, but it's
just a strip as it were. And where in that do you find the
exact position of something in the brain that has a nucleus
that- no, it's a form. And if you cut something off a certain
organism, it will regrow to that form? I don't know the answer to
where this is but what I like to think is, I was a representative
of a science that was interested in all the possibilities, in
testing them and looking and finding out, not just shutting
one's mind saying, 'no, no, no, no, can't be!' And that's where we are? I think that's the worst of
science. I think there are good scientists, and there are now at
last good life scientists, biologists who are who are being
imaginative and seeing these things and talking in a much
more holistic way about things. And they've got a long way to go
yet to catch up with physics. I find that the scientists who are
most interested in my work are actually physicist. Lots of them
have written to me out of the blue and said, 'it's absolutely
fascinating what you say'. Because these two different
ways, if you'd like to give a simple taste of this, rather
like the differences between the wave and the particle, the one
is specifiable here exactly at this moment in time and the
other is actually existent over a broader area and is not
certainly specified. You had an appendix in the first
volume, entitled 'Why we should be sceptical of public science?' Oh yes. Which went into some examples
of- and this clearly was annoying you- that there's
actually... The way public science is conducted... Well,
you tell us. Public science is not the same
target as science. Public science is run by
administrators. And they have various bees in their bonnet,
that we should all do this and do that and do the other in
order to be healthy. And usually, when you come to
examine the science, it's much more complicated than that, and
often doesn't support the position at all. There's also a
problem with the idea of, I wish I had time to explain all these
things, but with the idea of peer review. Peer review is the
basic idea of science, you send it to another scientist, what do
they think about it? There are all kinds of pitfalls in this.
It can be corrupted, and it can not happen at all. And there are
journals that will publish for a fee- and a lot of them now have
come into being, they're called predatory journals. In order to
survive as a scientist and have a career you have to have
published. One of the problems for many scientists is finding
anyone who's willing to publish what they've done. And there are
now journals, a lot of them based in China, I regret to
report that solicit articles and will basically publish anything
as long as you pay them to publish it. So that's not how
science should work. And there's an amusing example of this.
There's a man, a computer scientist in Australia called
Peter, I think, who was annoyed by constant solicitations from
the International Academic Study of Computer Science or something
like this. And so he wrote to them, finally, to ask them to
take him off their mailing list. He submitted a paper, which was
called 'Take me off your fucking mailing list'. And the paper was
seven pages long and consisted only of the sentence 'take me
off your fucking mailing list', repeated to the end of the
paper. It also had a diagram in it, a flow diagram with little
circles leading with arrows, 'take me off...!' It was
brilliant and he was flabbergasted to discover that
the journal wrote to him and said that his paper had been
peer reviewed and accepted for publication, on a fee, which he
declined to pay. But this is, I mean, that's an extreme example,
but there's an awful lot of this now. You'd be very credulous to
believe that everything that you read is said to be science is
science. But this is a problem of living. Intuition is a very
important faculty, it has been now been programmed into
distrusting. And in fact, that's made us as stupid as we are. A
lot of the really stupid things that we know seem to believe,
the sort of mass delusions would never have come about if we'd
use our intuition. But intuition can be fallible. Absolutely,
reason can be fallible. One way of describing schizophrenia is,
and this has been said more than once by people who didn't know
that they've said this, that the madman is not somebody who's
lost his reason. It's the person who's lost everything but his
reason. And, in other words, leads by causation chains, to
conclusions that are logically possible but to anyone who
actually lives experientially, they're not likely, for example,
there are voices in the room, and there's nobody there. So it
must be coming from the electricity socket, or from the
neighbours or from outer space. But most of us don't think like
that because as well as having a chain of reasoning, we also have
a faculty of reasonable judgement based on experience
that says, well, this is extraordinarily unlikely on what
I know. And this is more likely. So, I'm not attacking science,
I'm just saying that science is not immune from all the problems
that go with being a human being. It's practised by humans,
with all their greed, their ambitiousness and so forth,
competitiveness. And so it's a minefield, you have to use your
discrimination, you have to do a lot of hard work. When people
say something, look it up. I spent thirty years looking up
things that people said were true and finding out how
evidence based they were. The world you describe has gone
it would seem very wrong. And it almost seems bewildering, how to
set about fixing it. You have moved to a The Isle of Skye- Everybody's followed me
unfortunately. Yes, you were saying that the
tourists have followed you. But do you have hope that this can
be fixed, that this civilization can be righted? Or do you think
now it's the time just to withdraw and hope for the best
or wait for some new civilizational cycle or
something? Is it worth fighting every day to try and fix it? I think it is but in order to do
that, effectively, you have to see what's happening. And I
think if I may say so, that for many people, what has opened
their eyes to what is happening is reading my work. Because once
they've read it, they see what's happening everywhere. They see
these patterns forming. And it's therefore easier to see what you
need to push back against. I think it is possible that we may
survive. I think is extremely unlikely that this civilization
will survive but most civilizations have not lasted
for more than a few 100 years. So we're just seeing parts of
what happens. I think life will go on, but it won't be life as
we know it. It's very unlikely to be but why should we
privilege that? We've had that gift for a while, none of us is
going to live forever, I'm sorry to tell you. We're all only here
for a while and we enjoy the gift we've been given. And then
the world moves on and something else will come and they will
have their gifts and their problems. So something will
survive, possibly some of us human beings will survive and I
think that if they were able to gather together in small
communities, small enough to trust one another, because trust
is crucial here. And you can't trust when you're in a virtual
sphere of billions of people. Trust is the most important
thing for civilization. They can trust one another, honourably
work together with much simpler needs closer to the earth, not
the extravagant and fantasy kind of lives that we know lead. What
can we do now? Well, there's a whole lot of things really. We
can begin the work of limiting the damage we do to nature and
that's, of course, the obvious one and is underway in many very
good organisations and human beings in the world today. But I
think we also need to reestablish some sense of who we
are and what we're doing here. And I think that although we've
got all this power and machines that can quote 'think', they
can't think at all, they can process information extremely
rapidly. We're not really wise. And one of my answers to when
people say, 'what should we do?' is pray. And by that, I don't
mean as Heidegger said, 'only God can save us now'. I didn't
mean that God will suddenly come down with his divine hand, sort
everything out and it'll all be okay. That's not gonna happen.
But what I mean is that if we adopted a different, less
arrogant, less you hubristic attitude to the world, if we
incorporated some sense of the limitations to what we know and
can do. If we have some humility, if we re-kindled in
ourselves a sense of awe and wonder before what is still
there, in this beautiful world. And with it, brought some
compassion to our relations with other people. Not shouting them
down, vilifying them, telling them they're frightful, because
they disagree with them, reasonably talking and saying,
'okay, you disagree with me. I'm interested, explain your point
of view.' And then there should be a discussion. So we become
capable of rescuing the mess that we've got into but what we
mustn't do is follow the strident shrieking voices,
whatever they may be saying. That is a wonderful moment to
take a pause. If the way to save the world is to gather in small
groups and talk openly in an atmosphere of trust without
judgement, that is what we're trying to do, all of us right
now. We'll take a 15 minute pause. The bar is open and
questions afterwards. I think the key, which
establishes your credentials, in my view, is your statement that
consciousness and matter are the same things and there's no
temporal aspect. Let him address that? Because
we've got to get lots of questions. Consciousness and
matter? Well, that's an easy one. As you
know, I hold consciousness to be an ontological primitive. That
is to say, it's not derived from anything else but it is, as it
were, a primary constituent of the cosmos. I don't think that
consciousness is somehow secreted by the brain, I believe
it is in everything. I am a pan-psychist, which is not at
all an unusual position for philosophers these days, even in
the West. And I'm also a pantheist, as it happens, but we
won't go there. And matter, I think, is a phase of
consciousness. And when I say phase, I don't mean a temporal
phase. I mean, a physical phase, as in water has phases. In one
it's ice, in another, it's flowing. In another, it's just
dispersed in the atmosphere. So people say well matter doesn't
look like consciousness. Well, no but what's dispersed in this
room doesn't look like a river or a lump of ice. They have
different qualities, but it's the same material if you'd like
to put it that way. Thank you. I just don't like the word
'esotericist', because it's conflated with all kinds of sort
of woowoo. And one thing I am not is woowoo but on the other
hand, I am very open to the insights of mystical traditions,
East and West. How do you listen to music? Well, there's no need to sort of
approach it consciously and analytically, because it's a
whole intuitive experience, hearing music to which we as a
whole respond, including our whole body, nevermind bits of
our brain. As you possibly know, in most people who are not
professional musicians, most of music is appreciable,
principally by the right hemisphere. That's to say melody
and harmony. The only bit that the left hemisphere seems to get
generally is rhythm, but even complex rhythms, syncopations
and so on a better process by the right hemisphere. It's an
interesting observation that music has progressed if we can
use that word in the context to something which is largely
rhythm without melody or harmony. So that's what I'd say.
One simply appreciates it with one's whole brain. I think one
can get caught up in the idea that somehow each brain is
isolatedly hearing one thing and no, because there's
communication between the two hemispheres. The sound is coming
all from both ears. It's like the conversation I just had with
a lady about sight. I mean it isis not a rigorous split that's
going on here. I'm talking about something at a higher level,
about the way in Which the world is put together by each
hemisphere. and that's demonstrated really different.
If you isolate one hemisphere of time, you find a different
personality with different preferences. There is no
question about that. Is the difference between the
male and female brain? Yes. Would you care to elaborate? Oh gosh, this one that always
comes up. And the trouble is that to answer it in a sensitive
way and not set up a lot of hairs, I'd have to spend quite a
lot of time answerinf it. If I tried to put it very simply, I
think it's certainly not true at all that the right hemisphere
somehow female on the left hemisphere, male. If anything
it's the opposite. For example, what's established beyond doubt
is that women's excellence in skills is often linguistic.
Whereas for men, they may be much less linguistic, but more
able to manipulate things in space, visual and spatial
manipulation. And that is the right hemisphere property
largely and linguistic fluency is largely a left hemisphere
property. And in utero, it is testosterone that causes the
right hemisphere to expand. I could go on and on and on. In
fact, the right hemisphere is bigger than the left, as I often
say, but that's almost entirely due to the influence of males
who have bigger right hemispheres than left. Women's
hemispheres are more similar to one another. And that takes me
to the I suppose the point I was going to make, which is that, I
think it's pretty indisputable that that male brains are more
specialised, the left and right. Whereas in female brains,
there's more overlap between the left and right. So there's more
of the right about the left and more of the Left about the right
than there is in a man. And this has the consequence that if you
have a stroke in a certain place in a woman, she's more likely to
be able to recover using another part of the other hemisphere
than is a man. And I think that because, from an evolutionary
point of view, women are absolutely essential. They're
the ones that carry on the species, and men are somewhat
dispensable. I mean, they can be experimented with by nature. And
so you get men who are very extreme left hemisphere, or very
extreme right hemisphere. And don't forget that all those
mathematicians and so on are great mathematicians, because of
their right hemisphere, not because of their left. The left
hemisphere is good at calculation can carry out
procedures, but actually, the business of doing maths and so
on is very right hemisphere. So it's a complicated picture but
that's probably the most I want to say about it right now.
Neither is better. it's just different ways of being. Great. Let's go to towards the
back of the room shall we? I'm thinking about how we're
moving towards the left, do you think that it has anything to do
also with language and speech we were taught? I remember in a
podcast with Sam Harris, you were saying speech comes from
the left side of the brain. And so speech inherently has to be
limiting and break things down in order to communicate. I mean,
Roger Scruton wrote us on 'Effing the Ineffable', which of
course, you can't do. So, is there anything to that, the fact
that we have language and that it starts progressing our brains
towards the left side? Yes, undoubtedly one of the big
developments of the human brain is is language in general, and
speech. And speech in most right handers, 97% is in the left
hemisphere. In the case of left handers, it's 60% in the left
hemisphere, 40% in the right hemisphere, but I didn't think
we should get over excited about that. The point that you're
making, I think, is that the business of being able to
articulate something in language requires a certain degree of
analysis and categorization, and that the really important things
in life don't lend themselves to this process and are famously
ineffable. I mean, the divine, love, music all these things I
keep coming back to, the experience of beauty. These
things are enormously limited if I'm trying to do them in
language, unless the language is poetry. And I see poetry as the
way of language undercutting itself, as it were, outwitting
language, to do something that an ordinary language can't do.
And the interesting thing about poetry is that it's very much
right hemisphere dependent, because it involves all this
explicit, sorry, implicit things like metaphors for a start and
tone and associations of ideas and so on. The right hemisphere
is much better at this, the left hemisphere can read a repair
manual for lawn mower. But you know what I mean, there's a
difference between certain kinds of language. But broadly
speaking, if your point was that something very important
happened to the brain with the advent of language, and
particularly speech, and that's right, and it has favoured the
left hemisphere over the right. And so the left hemisphere
dominated culture will see a decline in literature, in poetry
and imagery? Creativity in general, because
it's so dependent on the ability to hold many things together,
that may not even look like they, they gel- not collapsing
them too soon into a certainty. The left hemisphere wants to
know what this is. And we know from accounts of creativity that
the important thing is not to say, 'oh, I see what it is.'
Because as soon as you've done that, you've plonked it into a
left hemisphere box with a label on it. You have to actually
resist that and allow the thing to come into being and then it
will be a true poem, not just a piece of verse as it were. So you could argue that for over
50 years that we've rejected this age of reason. If you look
at Heidegger's existentialism, post-structuralism, all these
things reject systematising, boxing, and doesn't leave
anything in its place. But surely we're seeing the inverse
within intellectual history. It's not left hemisphere
dominated, but at the same time, it doesn't seem to see any hole
in it. Well, you may or may not be
right but as you know, you may be a professional philosopher,
that Western philosophy departments are almost
exclusively populated by people who follow so called Anglo
American analytic philosophy. They laugh at Heidegger and so
forth but Heidegger was I think, somebody who was trying to
articulate things that the right hemisphere sees. The postmodern
thing is a disaster, it's basically collapsing into,
'there is nothing really there, we make it all up.' And the two
things that I am rejecting are that we make these all up, or
that we have no part in making what it is. One is naive
idealism, the other is naive realism. And actually, what is
happening is- I keep saying this- a relationship. It's what
our brain, our consciousness- better- does when it meets
whatever it's experiencing that brings them out reality. So I
accept that in intellectual history, there has been a shift
away from that narrowly analytic way of thinking, but I'd say
that's only in in pockets within academia. And what is much more
common is this, poststructuralism, postmodernism
that anything goes because everything is equally true.
Well, if everything's equally true, why don't we all just cut
our throats now? I don't think so at all. I believe there is
such a thing as a truer view, a truer pronouncement. But it's
not that there's something out there that we have to get to by
a chain of reasoning. It's something that we have to feel
our way towards and have a sense of, and then it comes more and
more into being. It's a responsive relational thing and
you know when you're onto a path that is somehow succeeding and
approaching the truth. But you could never be certain about it
so it's always up for grabs. There aren't any rules for
defining what exactly is true. You see, because we say idolise
rules and procedures, we think if there aren't rules and
procedures for something, then it can't really be real. But all
of the really real things are not susceptible to this
proceduralisation I was just having a conversation with a
young man who's studying at Durham at the moment, and I just
hinted in what we were saying that one of the problems with
universities now, as with schools, as with the medical
profession, and with the whole of life is the sudden explosion
of bureaucratic procedures and thinking. There are manuals upon
manuals that you're supposed to read and observe and follow. And
then we're surprised that professionals who are skilled
people who have learned things through experience, want to
leave the profession because they're effed off with the
general tenor of the way in which they're cheated by
managers who'd never been teachers or doctors or whatever.
I had a very, very distinguished colleague who was a bit of a
mentor of mine, the professor of neuro-psychiatry at the Maudsley
and he was queried by a manager about why he'd sent a patient
for a scan. And he said, when I have to explain to a manager,
why I've sent a patient to a scan, it's time for me to leave
the profession. And he did. And the people who really taught me
knew what was what and they communicated a fire to me, which
was the gift, it wasn't information. But if they'd had
to fill out all these questionnaires and be subject to
guidance and rules and so on, they'd just have said no, forget
it. I'm going to retire and cultivate my garden. Could we say, rather worrying,
worrying me that we're living in a world where the very reasons
for doubting are doubted and there is this crusade for
certitude? Absolutely. And by the way, that
is entirely part of the hypothesis I'm putting forward
because one of the first things that differentiates the
hemispheres is the left hemisphere has to have
certainty. There's a famous picture used by Wittgenstein,
which is actually taken from a Victorian children's comic,
which shows either a duck or a rabbit, depending on how you
look at it. And that the right hemisphere is able to hold those
together without collapsing them but the left hemisphere is
unable to. It's either this is a duck or it's a rabbit. What do
you mean and that's its attitude. It's cut and dried to
everything. It's black and white thinking, dogma, cut and dried
thinking unnuanced thinking, the craving for certainty that lies
behind our problems now. And that is exactly an expression of
the left hemisphere's mode of being in this world, whereas the
right hemisphere, I think I may have mentioned this is the
devil's advocate. It was so called by Ramachandran, a very
great neuroscientist. It's the one that says, 'yeah, but maybe
not'. And if only we had more of that voice saying, 'yeah, but
maybe not, let's have another look.' We wouldn't be in the
mess we're in. I'm just going to abuse the
chair for one second to ask a follow up question. Not this
chair. The one area that we haven't spent much time on is
what a lot of volume two of 'The Matter with Things' which is
more the spiritual, I suppose or the the sense of the sacred. And
here we are, we're 40 metres from Westminster Abbey. We're
going to have a strange coronation ceremony there in two
weeks time. Do you think this must be part of the story
mustn't it that that need for certainty is also an insecurity
because there is an absence which religion used to fill in
some way? How do we understand that in a big picture? I think to some extent, although
I would say that any religion that peddled certainties was not
a religion, properly speaking. It was a dogma or doctrine,
which might or might not be right. But most of the great
theological thinkers and mystics have emphasised this. Not that
there's no reality about it, they're very clear that there is
but not that there is a single way of thinking about this or
realising it or seeing it. Everybody has to make their own
way there. And although you say there's this sense of the
sacred, it's actually one chapter, the last chapter. I put
that there at the end, because I thought if people have followed
me this far, they're going to see the point, because a lot of
people will just be put off by the mention of the sacred or the
divine. 'What? This guy is some sort of freaky basehead.' If I
may reassure you, I wouldn't like to say exactly what I
believe in religious terms but what I definitely believe is
that the great religions, all of them and the great mystical
traditions of Buddhism and Taoism, and so on, have central
truths that they hold in common, and that these are a kind of
wisdom that are not appreciated, unless one is brought up in a
tradition that helped one see them. And our tradition is dead
against seeing them. So it's much simpler just to say, 'oh,
it's all nonsense, because I can't see any of this. I can't
measure any of it.' But I don't think that that is reasonable,
I'd be much more cautious and say that on a matter of
experience, those who have experience of such a realm, and
I think I do... No voices or supernormal anything but just in
my appreciation of the world since I was a young person that
the beauty of it. It spoke to me and still speaks to me of
something beyond this realm. When I first heard the great
polyphony of Renaissance, I thought this is intellectual.
Yes, it can move the emotions yes but it's not primarily
either intellectual or emotional. In fact, it's
spiritual. Thank you for the talk. Very
interesting. There is no shortage today of apps teaching
you mindfulness. I was wondering if you could have any examples
of safe practices that would focus on this right brain
thinking. How should I call it? 'Mind-halfness', or something
like that? And I'm aware, it's a dumb question. Because you're
trying to do Gestalt switch, you're not trying to just give a
body of content, 'have this, do that'. But I'm curious what you
think about it? It's a very good question. You
really answered it, that one of the procedures, one of the
ritual practices that one could have would be mindfulness. And I
believe it is extremely valuable. And effectively what
it is doing is recruiting the right hemisphere's attention to
the world in a peaceful and deep way, while silencing the
chattering left hemisphere, which, as you know, in that
literature is referred to as 'monkey mind'. We're always
rushing to verbalise, to judge things, instead of actually
allowing them to declare themselves fully. And in 'The
Matter with Things', I do quote a long passage from a Buddhist
monk who is considered an authority on mindfulness. And I
quote this fairly short passage and indicate 23 things in it,
which indicate a right hemisphere preference over a
left one. So I think that is a valuable practice, thank you.
But also allowing one's mind to be free to and pay proper
attention to music, not just have it on in the background to
sort of make you feel calmer. I mean, good music can disturb as
well and can bring very deep and profound feelings, to open
oneself to poetry to make a habit of reading good poetry,
listening to good music, you know, appreciating a walk in
nature, just being aware of one's surroundings. And then one
finds there are good thing is that despite the overall picture
that I'm afraid I've given it just somewhat well, it says
realistic really. We can't go on as we are, I think everyone
knows that but we can do what we can. And those sorts of things
are personal things we can do. And there are other things we
can do for society in general. I share your beliefs that
basically science... If you say that science could answer all
your questions, or could possibly answer all our
questions in the future, it's anti-scientific. But also on the
other hand, I also study medicine so for me it's also
difficult because my intuition is that science cannot answer
all the questions in the future. But on the other hand, I think
it's also rational that you believe because science has
answered so many questions that in the future might also be able
to answer questions that we cannot yet believe that it's
going to be able to answer. So what I'm saying... What I'm
always wondering, because also by my fellow students, and by
scientists, I'm always regarded when I have these views that you
are sharing, I'm always regarded as this woowoo person. How am I
supposed to respond to that? And what would you in the practical
world, suggest to young people who are trying to be scientists?
How should you proceed? To be regarded as a scientist and not
as woowoo person? Kind of combine these two hemispheres
again? That you are seen, as you
believe, in that light is simply a proof of what I'm saying about
the culture. But I do also know from many, many young people-
and I'm very pleased that a lot of the people who listen to me
and talk to me and write to me are young people. And they see
there's something profoundly missing in version of the world
that's given to them. And there are a lot of these people in the
medical profession as well. I have a lot of extremely humane
colleagues who realise the value of the somewhat mechanistic
science that we have. And I'm not saying it has no value.
Absolutely not. I'm just saying it's by no means the full
picture. It is a small part of the picture. And as to whether
or not science can ever explain certain things, I would say not
unless one expanded the meaning of science to include things
that science at the moment doesn't allow itself to include.
So it would be a word game. Maybe there's going to be a
machine that if I give in all my information, tells me what I
should do. And that's like, kind of scientifically, correct. Yeah
but that might be possible, but I think it's just beyond
comprehension for humans. So what's the practical? How can I
explain to my friends and to like the society that we should
think about what's the benefit- Okay, yeah, I've got it. I think
the problem is the way in which we trained scientists to be
doctors. Doctoring is as much an art as a science, and unless we
understand that we produce bad doctors. And I don't think that
anyone actually should be allowed to read medicine until
they've got an earlier degree in something in the humanities,
something like philosophy, which would make them question the
automatic assumption that what they're looking at is a machine.
They just get rather hurt if you say, but it's not a machine.
'Oh, what do you mean? That can't be the case.' But look, if
they knew the first thing about philosophy, they'd realise that
they're making assumptions that they can't substantiate. And
against which there are many particularly good arguments. So,
yes, let's re-educate doctors or change the way in which they're
educated. I think that would be wonderful but at the moment,
stick to your guns and say what you believe in because you'll
find people respond to you. I have. I need to stop I think because I
need to get a train. Ian I promised we would end at
8:30 and indeed, it is three minutes past. Thank you so much
to you. Thank you for coming. and thank you all for your
questions.
At 35’ : once something cannot be said you live in tyranny ( Hannah Arendt)