Iain McGilchrist in conversation with the Swedish publishers of The Master & His Emissary

foreign [Music] podcast thank you very much Crystal we are very happy to to be published to to be publishing your book The Master and his Emissary and and I know that's not your latest book but the idea is to sort of introduce you to the Swedish audience with that book and then maybe follow up later on I mean it's a must it's a massive piece the master of things no I mean no the matter of things I mean it's a massive piece it's two books I is it like 1500 pages or something it's something like that but a couple of hundred of those are notes and references but um yes and I thought we should talk a bit about your personal sort of um way into these questions but I also would like to talk a bit about your your ontology your view of reality and and and things like that so yeah let's just start should you start Victoria well a good way to start is you telling us about how you choose that title The Master Miss Emissary and where does it come from well it's an interesting question where it comes from I say in the book that it's from nature but you may have noticed that there is a footnote and it's almost a postmodern footnote because well my all my all my notes are extremely precise and in this one I say very roughly based on nature and now I can't find where and I I don't think it's got anything to do with nature really but but um somewhere along the line I heard a story that was like this I thought it was possibly in nature um and what's interesting is that I find that in most cultures this story exists so there is a version of it you know a Chinese version a Japanese version a version in Iroquois people's legend about two uh powerful figures one of whom sees much more knows much more and needs to superintend the other but this other is rebellious arrogant um and want and competitive and thinks it knows much more than it does and it displaces the master with very bad results for for everybody for the most of the Emissary and the community over which they presided so really it's a story about how a society Falls to Peters because of this rivalry and it just seemed very appropriate when I thought about where we are now because as you know it refers to the two hemispheres of the brain and the first surprise people have to get over is that the master is not the left hemisphere the master is the right hemisphere yes and it's bureaucratic um helper is is uh is the left hemisphere that knows very much less and and in my view in our in our world at the moment the right hemisphere is being ignored and the left hemisphere is running amok as we say and when do you say that this have begun did it begin before the Renaissance or after the Renaissance well as you know in the second half of the book the first half of the book is mainly um neuroscience and philosophy but the second half is an attempt to review the history of the west from the Greeks onwards looking at the main turning points in the history of ideas and I identify that three times a civilization has flourished come into being almost at a point of enormous richness the Greeks the Romans and now ourselves and that over time each civilization has basically decayed and in each you can see this Triumph of the left hemisphere as the civilization decays so if I had to put a sort of date on it I would say probably somewhere around the late 17th century or the 18th century with the Scientific Revolution and the enlightenment now these are very important periods don't get me wrong um if I were alive at the time of the Enlightenment I undoubtedly would have found myself an Enlightenment philosopher but I've seen what has happened since and there is such a thing as hubris arrogance thinking you know everything and that is the besetting sin of the Enlightenment and it's that that I think has caused the problems that we now find hmm would you say that it sort of culminated with the Vienna circles uh logical positivism I think it's called in English is was that the worst case of this or or how do you see it yes there is a horrible period who during which Western philosophy anglo-american analytic philosophy um really um peaked on uh left hemisphere silliness and logical positivism was one of the parts of this um but what I love is that there are people in that movement who uh who saw that it was not enough and changed their whole ways so and who were they who who are you thinking about well I'm thinking about um Wittgenstein in a way but also in his pupil who became professor of logic at Oxford Friedrich weissmann yeah okay yes I mean I like Vice man very much and I quote him quite a lot in the matter with things both of us are huge fans of the girdle actually yeah he was in the positivist Circle as well to begin with but I mean he was not an atheist for example of course there are many physicists and mathematicians who are not um atheists at all one of the things I discovered that was extraordinary is that um if you look at the the beliefs of Nobel Prize winners and this has been studied in depth at book length um you find that of the the the the winners of Nobel prizes and the humanities perhaps um about a third uh uh were never Believers in any kind of religious uh uh ideas um but as you come into the sciences that there become fewer and fewer people who were non-believers it's extraordinary and the the least of all is physicists of whom only 4.7 percent um were at any time in their life um atheists or even agnostics so amongst physicists it was a very very very high um 95.3 uh percent of them of Nobel prize winning physicists had some kind of a religious belief that's interesting we actually met at the Nobel Prize ceremony in Stockholm in December we met with uh seilinger and klausa the two Nobles yeah and they're completely different in this case because clauser is a hardcore hardcore atheist and xylia is not I don't think seilinger is a feast but he's definitely religious in some sense but yeah so they're quite opposite views from from their lifelong research in quantum physics yes yes honored in this way no I was just thinking it was very satisfying that they were honored in this particular way it was definitely an Allah as bear as well I mean the three yes they really deserved it exactly um I want to get back to you on quantum physics but first your definition of I'm interested in your definition of religion actually because I heard somewhere that you define yourself as a Taoist is that correct yes I mean I don't Define myself as a direct but I am a darist um okay and and that's not incompatible with being many other things in in many ways I'm a Buddhist Buddhists um flock to my to my work and uh I I've been often asked to speak to um Buddhists uh so I share that but I also was brought up in a in a Christian culture though my parents were not religious at all I I never went to church until I was in my teens but um nonetheless [Music] um I think I would call myself a very bad Christian there were aspects of Christianity I don't really like I think it's it can be dogmatic and certainly um fundamentalists Christians are as bad as fundamentalists anything including fundamentalist atheists I think fundamentalism is a problem it's the Dogma then you can be dogmatic about religion or dogmatic against religion but that dogmatic cast of mind is very left hemisphere and is a product of not really being able to think flexibly imaginatively to understand the importance of ambiguity Mis metaphors narratives this sort of thing but when it comes to taoism or Buddhism do you define those Traditions as religions or rather as philosophies I think it's probably more accurate to call them philosophies yes um what I tend to call them which is a slightly hackneyed phrase but um wisdom traditions in other words they are bodies of wisdom the trouble with philosophy is that in the west it has rarely been associated with wisdom um I think I think in the pre-socratic era it was and and I will annoy a lot of people if I say I'm not sure that Plato was as wise as you thought he was but nonetheless he probably did have some wisdom but what has happened to Philosophy for nearly 2 000 years um was a distraction from the importance of things that only started to be perceived again in the period of the German idealist philosophers in the first part of the 19th century particularly in my view shelling and then later in the century with people like Nietzsche and in our own time by Wittgenstein by Heidegger and others yeah um it's all right if we come back to you uh for a while and um I don't think you're so famous yet in Sweden so if you would like to tell us a bit about your story uh what what is your education um and a bit on what's from that that's okay yes well I I count myself very lucky that I was able to go to a school with a scholarship because otherwise my parents wouldn't have sent me um where um the thinking was very Broad and advanced so we had a huge um it was wonderful I was uh um submerged or not exactly submerged but but sort of swimming in um an education that included the humanities and The Classical Languages history philosophy and Science and it was very broad-minded and that that I think made a great difference to me um that the education was not narrowly geared to passing exams but to what it should be in other words communicating an enthusiasm for thinking for yourself and um I I was going to [Music] um study Theology and philosophy because I liked everyone my life really been interested in philosophy the big question since childhood actually and in my teens I thought I saw there were things that just weren't right about philosophy like people said um that the whole was the same as the sum of the parts but I you know even from the age of 13 I thought this is not right actually and um the world is inert and um it's it's inanimate and we we just um receive data from it passively but I didn't think this is right that in fact there is a sort of um reverberative relationship between us and the world and so on the Opposites for example are not in fact as far apart from one another as they would be if they were on a straight line but come towards one another as if they were on a circle so all of these sort of thing has fascinated me and I wanted to study the kind of philosophy that had a place in it for religious ideas but also the kind of religion that was mainly philosophical I wasn't particularly interested in in the history of the Bible so I wanted to do this Theology and philosophy at Oxford and to get into Oxford you had to do an exam in some school subject and I just chose English at random and they said you mustn't do Theology and philosophy it's not an honors degree you must get an honors degree so I said well okay and they said you obviously like English why don't you do that so I said I studied literature but from a philosophical point of view and wrote a book called against criticism in my twenties which is um which was unceremoniously reminded after selling about 400 copies and it's now worth a couple of thousand pounds if you can find one on the on the market um which is satisfying but but um after after I graduated um I became a fellow of All Souls College Oxford which is a a college that has no students it's the only one in Oxford or Cambridge that has no students whatever not even graduate students it's only fellows and the way I was able to do this was by sitting a three-day exam and at the end of that exam they either choose one or two or none and I was chosen and this gave me seven years in which I was allowed to do exactly what I wanted nobody asked me any questions or said were you publishing I just was allowed to read learn and do whatever I I wanted and during that time I wrote this book against criticism because I thought there was something very badly wrong with the way literature was studied um not particularly by the teacher or tutor as we call them that I had but generally so that we took works of literature and we applied Grand theories to them we made them abstract and containers of ideas and in this process what had to remain implicit which was subtle and difficult and ambiguous was made crystal clear and became very banal you know you can take some wonderful poem that you can hardly even think of without tears coming to your eyes and you say what's it about well what it says is it's very sad when somebody that you love dies okay I know that in this way you you've you've turned I call it the unmidest touch you know the Greek King Midas who everything he touched turned to Gold well this way of approaching literature made the goal turn to and so this was a very very bad idea and I thought what the problem is is that we've disembodied literature we've abstracted it we've taken it out of context and we've made the implicit explicit and we've lost everything that was unique about it it could be replaced by another General thing that's like it sorry does the implicit always get destroyed when you turn it explicit is there any way to keep the implicit while still doing what the explicit does well I think it is let me make a digression to answer that question um I mean in essence it's rather like explaining a joke I mean it's no longer for any once you've explained it but but there is this process whereby this is something that's very Central to My Philosophy but we'd have to jump ahead here that things that are understood by the right hemisphere can be taken apart analyzed in this way by the left hemisphere but then must be reintegrated by the right Hemisphere and the easiest image for this is of learning a piece of music so say europeanist you love this piece of music you sit down at the keyboard you try to play it see the thing has appealed to you spoken to you at the right hemisphere level but then you discover that you have to go back over a certain bars and practice them because the fingering is difficult and and all of that and you you theorize and you see the low at this point that we return to the tonic and so on now that's all fine there's nothing wrong with it but when you go on stage and perform you must forget all of that completely it must no longer be a pruding in your mind and so what I would say is yes it's okay to make explicit the implicit as long as at the end of that process you take that knowledge back and render it implicit again in your mind when you read it so that you read it as a whole again not as a collection of bits and pieces so that was that was where I was at and I went I thought the problem was in the area of what philosophers used to call maybe they still call the Mind Body problem and I went to many seminars on the subject but I just found the philosophers were themselves too disembodied in their approach to this and I thought I needed to explore this in a more embodied way uh which was to see what happens when things go wrong in somebody's brain and it changes their whole experience world or when something happens in their experience of the world and actually changes their body and their brain this is very interesting this is a place where you can really see how the mind and the body uh um at one really and that meant studying medicine so 10 years older than the young people who's starting starting their medical training I started my medical training and after a while of doing neurology and neurosurgery I went to the maudsley hospital in London and it changed as a psychiatrist and so that was how I got to there and then I I met a person he was giving a lecture and I was fascinated by the title of the lecture it was um the um the the the um the role of the right hemisphere in Consciousness and this was a man called John cutting and I'd heard a lot about the left hemisphere you know responsible for language and when you have a stroke you can't speak you can't read you can't use your right hand terrible but I'd heard nothing about the right hemisphere almost it was like the right hemisphere didn't really do anything so I thought I'll go along and hear and what I learned at that lecture was absolutely fascinating it was that the right hemisphere understands implicit meaning metaphors jokes tone of voice facial expressions body language all the implicit massive meaning with the left hemisphere is very literal-minded the right hemisphere sees everything in its context whereas the left hemisphere takes it out of its context and puts it in a category so it's one blow it's been disembodied decontextualized and made General it's lost its uniqueness and I I was just thinking this is extraordinary because this is precisely the set of things that I was trying to express in my earlier book against criticism and of course the right hemisphere doesn't have a voice our voice comes from the left hemisphere they both Take A Part in language but for almost all right-handers anyway language speech is in the left hemisphere and so I I went up to him afterwards and said that was the most fascinating thing I've ever heard and I told him about my book and he said can I read it and then we started researching where I joined him he was already researching on hemisphere differences and then I went later to Johns Hopkins in which is a big Hospital in Baltimore in in the US to do brain Imaging on the symmetries and asymmetries in the brain and um that started me on a 30-year mission but all my colleagues said you mustn't do this because everybody knows that this stuff about hemispheres it's it's just pop psychology it's all rubbish it's been blown out of the water long long ago and I thought no no no there's something very important here I mean for one thing why is the brain divided at all since it's only purpose is to make connections why would you want it to be divided why and all the brains we've looked at in all animals are divided why um why would it be asymmetrical the brain is asymmetrical the two halves are not symmetrical and why would the band of fibers that connects the brain to halves of the brain called the corpus callosum why is that so much to do with inhibition that's remarkable so that set me off on a really interesting philosophical conundrum which I was able to answer using science um do you have um I mean what is your answer to that question why is the brain divided because it must have had some kind of evolutionary gain to to be divided exactly and as I say every single creature that has a neural network even the ancestor of a brain is asymmetrical and I I believe and and I I nobody has um ever come up with a more um more satisfactory uh hypothesis than the one I have which is that everything that lives has to accomplish two contradictory things it has to be able to Target something very precisely so if you can pick it up quickly something that it needs to eat whether that be a seed against a background of of gravel or whether that be a rabbit or whatever it is it needs to be able to focus on something targeted and get it very quickly but if it's paying that very narrow committed attention it won't see everything else and so it won't see Predators it won't see its mates it's con specific it's young that it also needs to be watching and so All Creatures have this capacity to divide attention and that means with two parts of the of the their brain one part dedicated to grabbing and getting and the other to seeing the whole picture and I give a sort of sound bite about this that um the left hemisphere helps us manipulate the world the right hemisphere helps us understand the world um uh I guess you have talked with Simon Baron Cohen on on brain research he wrote this book the pattern Seekers for example uh do you know him by the way do you know him I I've I I've met him but but I don't know I couldn't say I know him no no no but would you would you say that the people he talks about I mean on the autism spectrum do they have sort of an over capacity in the left uh hemisphere it's that how you would interpret it well especially depends very much what you mean by by patterns you see because some patterns are systems and people of this kind can see what I would call uh gestarken using the German word I don't know whether you use the same word in Swedish yeah yeah um and these are different from systematic distractions which are built up mechanistically from the starting point to the next point and you build up like you build an edifice and these systems are mechanical and can be predicted and machines are like this but organisms are not like machines they are complex not just complicated systems that contain recursive Loops that don't have efficient causes in the way that the machine does something pushes it and then the Chain Reaction goes and and these organisms are best seen as gestaltan they are holes which cannot be accounted for by summing the parts and so I think the typical person with autism is the pattern Seeker who makes systems build systems in a somewhat architectural or almost bureaucratic way whereas what is important is people who who see a problem solved by seeing it just from a different angle and some of these people may be on the autistic Spectrum too but it's very interesting if you read the accounts of pretty much any great scientist or mathematician and I've read many of them there is a moment they do a lot of work and they get nowhere and then there is an aha moment where the penny drops when they're thinking about something completely different there's a famous example of only Prime Cafe who was working away on on a particular Mass problem and he went into town and at the very moment that he he'd done his shopping he put his foot on the step of the bus the solution came to him and it took him a couple of weeks to work out exactly why Einstein was the same Einstein said you know I have a solution I don't yet know how to arrive at it what would you say happens there what happens in the Brain before such a moment happens well I think there are different phases to being creative um one is um the sort of laying down of necessary groundwork so you won't create out of nothing you have to be familiar with the territory and that is routine and can be done consciously acquiring the the background information the skills to work on it and then you play with things but you don't find the answer and the the moment of Illumination comes when you are thinking about something else and this is because when we think very definitely about a problem if you think very intensively about a problem you recruit more and more very um narrowly focused concentric neural networks mainly in the left hemisphere it's like looking more and more intensely into the center of a spotlight to see what's there but what you actually need to do is to be able to stand back and stop this process which is like a like a spasm or a cramp in the mental world and let go and when you relax your right hemisphere which is much better at pulling things together is able to bring together ideas from all over the place and suddenly they create a new picture and that is the moment that every artist every scientist every man mathematician lives for me as a fiction writer I can feel how work is being done inside of me when I'm not thinking but I can feel it and then I just need to put on some music and then it comes it's like I open some kind of a yeah it's like water pouring over me so I can feel in the silence something's working and then music is like um turning on the switch of a light and I see everything marvelous and you know that Einstein did the same thing he used to be working on something then he'd go to the piano and he'd play and then his daughter describes how he suddenly gets up and go I've got it and it was through music playing his violin or just playing on the keyboard and of course that's very interesting to me because music is a very good example of what I believe is the the way the world is built up not from things but from relationships in fact in the new book the matter of things I argue that there are really no things or there are only things secondarily to relationships what primarily exists are relationships and music is just relationships you I mean of course it's made out of notes but if I give you a note and ask you what it means the answer is precisely nothing there's absolutely nothing this note means and I give you another one it still means nothing I give you a hundred thousand and you can compose Beethoven's Mr salemness and it means everything so it's all in the relations it's all in the connections the gaps the bits between and that of course is actually how our world is constructed as well it is constructed out of relations between things are you familiar with Carlo Valley I mean I've heard him talk I [Music] yes why'd you ask because Christie has published his book called hilgoland yeah and this issue as well there are no things everything is built up with relationships it's right he would say the same thing is describing the quantum mechanics in that way very much it has to be understood as relationships rather than objects so to speak I mean that's his ontology his view of reality a lot of a lot of what you're saying now it sounds quite for me um it sounds a bit like Douglas hofstadt you probably read I am a strange loop with yeah and it's a lot of agreement between the two of you I think on those issues maybe not on all other things no no I don't know and you know I've never spoken with uh hofstractor but I must say I very very much enjoyed um yes partly because I love uh Bach anyway and the way in which he plays on The Goldberg Variations is enormously clever and and of course I think that Lewis Carroll was enormously creative and girdle is a very important part of my philosophical position and of course Asha who I used to illustrate various things in both my books so yes yeah that book was a game changer for me as well I read it when I was 20 years old and it completely changed my life so I started theoretical computer science because of that book actually and Douglas Hofstra has become a very good friend of the two of us now so I actually published a book in America and England called The Flame of Reason which is partly co-written with him so okay oh fantastic um and but but let me go back to this creative process of scientific Geniuses I know that God will also talked about that he more or less in meditation came up with ideas of his uh sort of mathematical ontology which was in a way breaking with the Vienna Circle because he showed that truth and provability is not the same thing for example exactly in what sense is girdle important to your philosophy as you just mentioned well because he shows that we can never we can never grasp something completely finally that we can't that there is always some aspect that lies beyond what it is that that we have achieved in in our system building and um that's part of it I think um but also at this point the truth is not the same as proofability and I write about that quite a bit in both books the truth is again a relationship actually it the word what is the word in in Swedish for truth uh something with it with an end what is what does it mean etymologically oh I don't know that I don't know either actually it's something I I'll find out and email you interesting interesting but anyway true truth um is related to I uh originally an old word truth um we still use this slightly old-fashioned thing when two people get married there's a rather archaic expression they played their truth their truth is their loyalty to one another and true means loyal in a relationship that they they work together they fit together and so on so it's not about provability and many truths can't be proved and many things that can be proved are not necessarily true as wise men three advice men himself said and this thing about speaking the truth said that the circle Beyond I think the Ninth Circle that's where the poets are because poets lie he wasn't the right hemisphere guy I suppose down there he probably was yes yes but let me uh still test an idea with you and see what you say when it comes together because as I said girdle has been very much misused in popular culture and you know to sort of defend a lot of ideas that maybe it's not so uh consistent after all for example I've heard people say that girdle shows that there are phenomena in the universe that we will never be able to understand and I think that's a wrong conclusion because first of all it could be the case that all phenomena in the universe are possible to describe with a provable subset of mathematical theorems first of all and secondly a phenomena in the universe I mean if if an equation like E equals m c squared for example if that is true or not it's not a mathematical issue it's it's a question of whether it corresponds to reality or not so do you agree but girdle is quite quite misunderstood as well by many people I I I do indeed and of course um it would be ludicrous to say that um the things that we I I mean there are reasons reasons like the limitations about human brains which means there will be things that we may not be able to understand we don't know what it is we miss I mean the definition by definition you don't know the things you don't know so um but but on the other hand that's not what he's saying and of course we understand many things but what is wonderful is that there are conclusions that are true within the system but it cannot be proved to be true yeah that's right therefore therefore there are things which we cannot be certain and one of the problems I almost wrote a book in fact I think that the against criticism book might have been at one stage going to be called against certainty and I think I've had a lifelong Crusade against certainty I'm a great believer in uncertainty and of course the left hemisphere needs certainty because it's a predator so it I mean let's get to the point where I I say if you if you hear me talk about the hemispheres and you don't know my work forget everything you've ever heard about them I say this to your listeners because it's wrong so it's not true that the left hemisphere is unemotional but reliable and the right hemisphere is a fantasist but emotional both hemispheres deal in Emotion both deal in realism and when it comes down to it the left hemisphere is the fantasist and the right hemisphere is the one that is much more the radical so you know I'm talking about something quite different but one factor I mean all the stuff I say is empirically based in studies of patients who have something wrong with one Hemisphere or the other and either a studied phenomenologically or a report phenomenologically or a scanned or are subjected to various kinds of tests so it's all based in empirical science and one of the things is that people who have a hypo functioning right Hemisphere and therefore more Reliant than usual on the left need black and white answers they need it must be this or it must be that what do you mean it could be both or it might be a bit of this and a bit of that so it is very much in need of a simple certainty because as it were it's looking at something it's got to catch immediately it's no good going hmm is that a rabbit well I think it's probably a rabbit but okay so it's got to go rabbit you know and twenty percent twenty percent of it but of course as you know Wittgenstein has this wonderful image which is borrowed from a children's magazine in the late 19th century of the Duck Rabbit is it a duck or is it a rabbit depending on how you look at it yeah so yeah and where were we what were you talking about I want to go out on this on this okay I I I'd like to ask you maybe a meta question in this uh in this respect would you say that sort of modern um neuroscience and neural philosophy is confirming your ideas during the last 10 or 20 years since you since since or longer since you sort of started to formulate your ideas is is the science confirming what you're saying or is it moving away to a more positivistic view of the brain yeah or logical new whatever there are two aspects to that one seems to be that you're asking me about whether science is moving away from a reductionist holy materialist the other is okay let me answer concerning the brain concerning the brain science yes well the great thing is that it's been clear hasn't it for at least a hundred years in physics that the reductionist mechanistic vision is not satisfactory um so physicists moved on from this mid-victorian hydraulic mechanistic idea um a hundred years ago and curiously um the science scientists of Life the biologists have structured well the scientists who deal with inanimate matter have shown that actually no piece of matter can be separated from Consciousness where there are there are Believe It or Not tenured professors holding jobs um no doubt lavishly paid in Western universities who say there is no such thing as Consciousness well this is hilarious I mean if it's a little if it's an illusion it's got to be an illusion in Consciousness you've got to have Consciousness to having illusion so anyway so I do think that now um biology is moving away from this there are a lot of signs that one of the things that was a catalyst for this was the decoding of the The genome and in the early 19th century along with the physicists there were a whole lot of very very interesting and intelligent biologists who were beginning to see how they like the physicists needed to move to an organic and a non-mechanistic idea of relationships between mind and matter and life and looking at life in general but then Along Came molecular biology and genetics and suddenly everything went very mechanistic again it was almost like back to Descartes um but since we did this heroic thing of um decoding The genome and found that there's almost nothing in it I mean far too little information in it and people are beginning to think okay so there's something else here that we're missing and quite what that is of course we don't know but it's something that is three-dimensional that is not just a set of linear instructions um epigenetics has begun to help with that and so I do think there are changes yes going on in the way in which biology funnily enough Neuroscience of all the branches of biology has remained the most stunk in uh yeah because you know a lot of people think well it's just like a wiring diagram for a computer you know it's just uh and that unfortunately the proximity of that metaphor of the computer um has derailed the thinking of many um neuroscientists not completely there are plenty who are not but I think there's that tendency and in chapter 12 of my newer books the matter we've seen is a chapter called the science of Life a study in left hemisphere capture I I I share at least eight um uh respects in which um a machine and an organism are not um comparable so I I find that people are much more open to this than they used to be at the moment I'm having conversations with Mike Levin who is a developmental biologist at Tufts and uh he's an open-minded guy he's been brought up in the tradition of you know mechanistic um whereas looking at the brain but he's also interested in lateralization and interested in things that go a little bit beyond the simply mechanistic but okay but what is your view of Consciousness then because if it's not an illusion what what is it uh is it an emergent phenomena uh from the brain's physical configuration or is it something else in your opinion I think it's something else I'm the one thing that we can be certain of which is why it's so hilarious that you have people who deny Consciousness the one and only thing we can be certain of and in this Descartes was right that we have consciousness I mean it's the one thing everything else we don't really know for sure but at least we know we've got consciousness um and we know that matter is something that we come to be aware of because of Consciousness but we don't know that Consciousness is something we're aware of because of matter it might be it might not be and my guess is that it is not because the idea that you can sort of incrementally approach consciousness and have just a tiny bit of it um it it is you know as William James pointed out once you've crossed the Divide to Consciousness you've taken a step and you could people say well this kind of nascent Consciousness you know there's almost Consciousness but that's wrong there is a complete divide between Consciousness and I mean there may be different degrees of Consciousness I'm not saying that all Consciousness is the same and the consciousness of a plant is like the consciousness of a dog or the consciousness of a human being but I believe they're all conscious in fact I believe Consciousness is what the cosmos is made of and in this I'm quite in a tradition of many in 20th century physicists and also in the same tradition as most of the Great um philosophical wisdom traditions of the East Consciousness is the primary element and I hope matter to be not somehow alien to Consciousness but to be an aspect of consciousness I say a phase of Consciousness and by phase I don't mean a phase in time I mean a phase in the sense that chemists say that water has phases in one of its phases it is translucent and flowing in another it is solid and white and very very cold and doesn't flow and in another it's in the air around you and you can't see it you can't tell it's there but it's keeping you alive so water has phases and I think Consciousness has phases and one of its phases is matter so Consciousness can as it were under certain circumstances hold an aspect of Consciousness steady for longer it does two things matter one is it provides a degree of permanence I say only a degree of permanence because nothing is ever permanent but it as it slows down the the way in which consciousness with its diaphanous nature things that you think they've suddenly gone but the table that was there yesterday is here today and that's it's matter and the other thing that it provides is resistance and resistance is extremely important in my belief resistance is what Every Act of Creation requires without it there could be none um and a simple way of thinking of this is friction what is friction friction is the very thing that stops motion it is also the very thing that starts motion without friction I couldn't move every movement I make is because of friction and um so [Laughter] resistance has a philosophical importance which I elaborate quite a lot in the last part the ontological part of um the matter with things ask you I mean correct me if I'm wrong that you're not the pan psychist because they would say that Consciousness is an element of matter but you say the opposite you say matter is an element of consciousness yes I don't think it matters too much unless you're a dogmatist when it comes to that point because um uh they only say that because they're used to feeling confident that they know what matter is but actually if you talk to physicists they say that it's rather embarrassing supposing that by reducing Consciousness to matter we can understand it better because quite frankly as physicists we have the slightest clue what matter is no that's so true said that at a Nobel Prize ceremony that after a lifetime spent in this I had no idea what it represents that's right it's very very good yes and so I don't think it matters which way around you look at it what matters more is whether you think there is some kind of huge divorce between them that there is a sort of a Descartes sort of race extensile and a a res cogitance I don't hold it like that okay but okay but let me ask you this then doesn't Consciousness require something or someone who is conscious on a cosmical level um it might seem like that but I don't think it's necessarily the case and we know we know that we are people it's true but is is a plant a person I don't know whether I would record that status to a plant but there is a lot of evidence um some of which I deal with in the book that plants have consciousness that is to say they have intelligence they can solve problems which they could not be prepared for by their either individual history or their phylogenetic history or anything in their DNA so they are they are able to be conscious I believe I thought sorry please a relationship to a person but I thought you meant the ego or the sense of an eye uh well it wasn't that well that's one aspect but I was I was just thinking of I mean it's you to me it sounds a little bit like the spinosa's Fantastic view of the world is that close to your no not at all no um there is a very very important distinction to be made between pantheism and panentheism and I am a panentheist and the distinction is a pantheist believes that God is the sum of all things and that the sum of all things is God but a pan atheist thinks that God is in all things and that all things are in God so let us not debate what God is you'll be amazed to know that I haven't got an answer to that question but I think that sorry to hear about it but I think it would be great yeah but the thing is that to assume that because we can't say what God is exactly that we should just ignore the issue is completely the wrong thing it seems to me that this question that cannot be answered is the most central question and that in the end all the other questions relate to it and and so at the end of the book um having written a chapter on the sense of the Sacred which cost me more trouble than anything that I've ever written um I I say that you know effectively what what this thing that we call God is we should not dismiss because actually coming to recognize that that something somewhere is the most important element in our life so I haven't expressed it as well as I do on on paper but but what I'm because this is a very difficult thing to say I think that the worry is that because we can't say what it is exactly we just miss it all together but there should be a god-shaped area as it were in our Consciousness right in the center of it not being able to say what it is in languages not the same as not being able to know something about it good but let go this way then as a non-religious person as I consider myself to be uh would you say that the question of the nature of God is it the same question as if I would say the question is uh the nature what is the nature of reality or is it two different questions in your view I think there are two different questions yes um but I see why you say that it's just that it depending on what you mean by reality and depending what you mean by God and these are two terms that are notoriously slippy and very difficult to pin down um and so in the end it boils down to an unsatisfactory um point about language really but I I believe that whatever it is that has been meant since Time immemorial by this grounding whatever and in Chinese it's lit in Sanskrit you know in in um in Greek it was logos uh whatever it is Yahweh God that God is the grounding of all being and or being is in that God and God is in or being so further than that philosophically one can't go but one can go further through experience and through um things like poetry drama myth ritual and and of course music so uh these these are things that to me make the nature of God manifest but when rather Saint Augustine said I know that there is time but when you ask me to describe what time is I cannot say and I would say that my experience tells me that there is something that the only way to describe it is with a word like the sacred the Divine that exists but if you ask me to explain in words what it is I can't language is a very poor medium for for many things in fact all the really important questions are failed by language language is a utilitarian tool that we developed for getting by and helping us to use things organize people and say we're going to go over there and beat up that lot over here it's not designed for the the the subtle intuitions that we have and like Louise Armstrong said if you have to ask what yes is you will never know I've heard some lectures with you is it called the William Blake Society yes yes yes yes and you'll break lecture oh yes I love them would you tell us something about your relationship to Blake well yes um he's a fascinating man um he's obviously one of the greatest poets in the English language I think probably my all-time greatest person the English language is words but but there's no doubt that Blake was a towering genius and he was able to inhabit more than one realm I mean quite literally he saw and heard things that we don't and you know wearing my psychiatrist hat I sort of wondered if he wasn't just a little bit psychotic at times yeah nowadays he would have been given an antipsychotic tablet until to you know come back next week and he would not have written any poems like no I don't know but just like Jung as well called Gustav young as well I suppose yeah he would have been hospitalized I think yes yes probably probably yeah but what I'm not saying however is that you have to be mad to be creative or that all the stuff that's produced by people who are mentally ill is is created very little of it is but sometimes it is and sometimes that is part of the illness but in any case he was a brilliant perceiver of the The Coincidence of opposites which which is a very very important part of my philosophy now I'd vote the whole of the first chapter in the in part three of that book The the matter with things uh the first chapter is on The Coincidence of opposites so um so he was able to see these things and express them in just very vibrant language there were there are many contradictions about Blake I mean he's one of the most contradictory people you can possibly speak about because for example he wrote some really rather awful sort of rambling baggy poems um but he also wrote These lapidary very small Miniatures like beautiful Ivory net skis or something like this he wrote These very very concentrated um gems um but and you know you can find things where he says one thing and certain opposites and so on so whatever you want to believe about Blake you can probably find it there he was like he had many personalities I think who all strive to get out and yeah yes okay just one last sort of theme before we we end I really must ask you what you think about the latest developments in artificial intelligence I mean a lot of people are worried now are you worried are you worried they can develop Consciousness or do you not think that Consciousness will go into the machines yeah I I I'm not sure about that but in some ways I think it's the least important worry there are many worries um but um whether a net of this kind could be uh conscious um I don't hold this impossible at all um what I do worry about is the the debasing of Truth um the capacity for um lies effectively to be committed to be propagated and for people to place far too much trust in AI that we also need to remember that AI reaches everywhere from the sort of things that we have to interact with if we go online in order to do a bank transaction and these very sexy things that are going on in California where they're developing chat Bots and so on and and for most of us most of the time what AI is is something that is enormously frustrating enormously diminishing of what is human and very very unintelligent I say AI is it's quite wrong to call it artificial intelligence it's artificial information processing and that is what it can do very very fast but it has no intelligence and it makes up stuff on the principle that this looks like it's a good fit here yeah exactly yeah have you tried have you tried it foreign I haven't myself but I've been I've been with friends when they were trying it and and they asked them um give a summary of Ian mcgoque's um the master and his hemisphere in 700 words and I it didn't do a bad job actually um but I also know that if you ask it to give the life of somebody it will make up facts it will make updates exactly it's so fascinating I tried it myself the other day and asked about myself and it made a very good presentation and then it presented some of the books I written which some of them were completely fake they don't exist yeah it's wonderful I mean this is terribly worrying and and people will believe it rather than reality I mean there's already a a hilarious problem which is of the sat nav or the GPS system in a car you know you get people who say you know you're driving he said well we haven't reached the right place but the GPS says this is where it is you know but yeah but when I look out the window that's not where we are you know so people are becoming more willing to trust the machine however stupid rather than just reality experience and I think that it's making us more machine like interacting in a way you have to lower yourself to the level of the machine otherwise you find yourself endlessly frustrated because you can't really answer its question and indeed I had the experience of giving a lecture for Oxford University um last year and I was very pleased that I didn't expect to be paid but they wanted to pay me quite nicely and in the old days when this happened the university chest which is where the money is would send me a check job done now I had to go online and fill in a questionnaire and in it he wanted to know what it was I had done and there were boxes for window cleaning um catering but there wasn't one for giving a lecture right what do I do and I rang them up and I said this is manly I mean this University that exists only for two she doesn't have a box to tick where what you've done is to teach what am I supposed to do because without it I can't go any further and the person said oh don't tell us about it it's an absolute nightmare it makes everything slow and complicated so what do I do I'll just lie so this is the kind of rubbish that we waste our time in and I find now that everyone is saying I don't have any time anymore everything takes so long and one of the reasons is because of AI it is destroying our lives and you know the promise that it will save us from things is is extraordinarily unlikely it's going to bring all kinds of menaces Total Control mass unemployment Mass degradation of um educational standards in schools and universities where it's almost impossible to tell whether this person really understands this or just got a bot to write it and what happens in the law you know did this person commit this act all kinds of fake things can be produced that seem to be yeah in the old days we had a phrase the camera never lies well now the camera lies all the time so yeah you know what happens in politics who do you really believe it has destroyed the ability to to be truthful and it is therefore destroyed trust then there's an old Chinese saying third Century Emperor who said for people to survive they need guns food and Trust if they have to give up one give up the guns if you have to give up another give up the food but never give up the trust without trust they can't survive and that's where we're at now so you are quite worried I can hear that about AI I'm extremely worried about it yes and and by the way in which very very rapidly it is beginning to spy on us and and um you know anyway sorry I I are you at the end of the time or something no I'm just going to say that on and on that happy note [Laughter] I do have happier I do have happier notes now but this was an extreme interesting conversation and you know Ian your book will be published in Sweden in in I think September or something like that in the Autumn it would be wonderful to invite you to Stockholm to come here and give a speech if that would be possible but we can of course talk about that later on but it would be great to have you here thank you thank you so much for being in our podcast thank you thank you for inviting me along and I wish we'd had more time there are so many things to talk about

Channel: Dr Iain McGilchrist

Views: 6,753

Keywords:

Id: irsGFt822r4

Length: 68min 14sec (4094 seconds)

Published: Thu May 04 2023