ML192 Iain McGilchrist on The Matter with Things, Paths to Understanding & Answering Big Questions

who are we what is the world how can we understand consciousness matter space and time do we have a purpose what is the divine our answers to these questions are important because our view of humanity in the world around us shapes what we do and how we live now while our current perspective has allowed us to make amazing progress in increasing our material wealth and extending our lifespans the costs of this worldview are starting to catch up with us what we need is a new way of thinking one that takes the best of the progress we've made but restores the important values we seem to have lost today's guest ian mcgillcrist has taken on this challenge he's a psychiatrist former fellow of all salts college oxford and author of the highly acclaimed the master and his emissary in his new book the matter with things which forms the basis for our conversation today ian uses the disciplines of neurology philosophy and physics to tackle the big questions and paint a new picture of humanity and the world in the episode we speak about the key differences between the left and right brain hemispheres and how they shape your view of the world the four pathways to understanding science reason intuition and imagination and how the big problems we face including the assault on nature destruction of culture and dismissal of the divine are all related we also talk about the significance of morality the nature of truth and beauty and the intersection of science and religion this was a genuinely mind-shifting conversation that will change the way you look at yourself and the world around you ian is a true polymath and it was an honor to discuss the big questions with him so without further ado please enjoy my conversation with ian mcgilchrist ian thank you so much for joining me today oh it's a great pleasure nurses i recently listened to our first conversation that was almost about five years ago where we spoke about the master and his emissary and in that conversation towards the end of it you alluded to a book that you were writing about metaphysics which has now manifested in the form of the matter with things i know it's changed a lot over the course of that period in the conversation you said i am something along the lines of i'm boldly going where only fools will go so just how foolish were you in the end now that this book is finished and published well i i suppose that i believe that no great things or even very good things are achieved in life without a risk and i'm not reversed to making myself vulnerable if i was i wouldn't explore many of the things i explore but i think they're true and important and so i want to go there but the the more important the area the more you know you can't do justice to it the ultimate case of this is i dared at the end of this book um to address the question of what we mean when we talk of the sacred or the divine and i knew before starting that no words can deal with this properly so whatever i'm going to do is is going to fail but i failed the best i could and we'll definitely be getting into that over the course of this conversation can you just for listeners who perhaps might be familiar with your previous work the master and ms3 make the link between these two projects where does the matter with things pick up from the master of this emissary well in the master in his emissary for the first time i laid out what i then knew that was 12 years ago after 20 years of research about hemisphere differences they're nothing at all like what pop science says they are to rubbish that is correct but actually it doesn't get rid of the problem that it's very strange that we have these two hemispheres so i explored all that that was part one of the master in his atmosphere and in part two i was interested in exploring how the balance between these hemispheres had manifested in the philosophical outlook of societies because i believe that our own contemporary society over emphasized what it is that the left hemisphere is able to tell us without really taking into account what the right hemisphere which is more important more perceptive more intelligent uh is able to see and i thought it would be interesting to look back people ask me you know what about other periods and i began to look back and in the end i the second part of the martian his emissary is a historical survey of the history of ideas beginning with the ancient greeks and moving forward to the present day looking at the big turning points through the lens of the hemisphere hypothesis so that was that book in this book i wanted to address what is really the key question and as um somebody pointed out to me it's surprising that it's taking you to the second book to do so but that is if i am right that the two hemispheres deliver two [Music] distinct sometimes almost incompatible versions of the world then this has implications for philosophy when we say we find this in the world or we see that in the world we can't ignore the fact that sometimes we'll be swayed by one or other of these paradigms if you like or takes and so this book is is a is a shamelessly philosophical book and it's based on three strands neurology philosophy and physics i i'm not a physicist but i have an interest in and have read a certain amount around it and i have a group of friendly physicists past whom i run things before i say them to make sure that i'm not completely misunderstanding um but what is intriguing to me is that if you look from these three standpoints um if you imagine a sphere and they're about as far removed from one another as they could be around this sphere as you sort of go closer to the center you come to very similar picture of the world and it's that picture of the world that i wanted to convey a picture very different from the one that we are now commonly um offered by popular science and popular philosophical discourse i want to pull on the thread of the hemispheres just very briefly again for listeners because as you said there are an awful lot of misconceptions about it and the sort of pop psychology myths around that are you know things along the lines of the left hemisphere is logical and the right is creative the left thinks exclusively in language the writing images and so on and so forth and you know correct me if i'm wrong but your thesis essentially pulled down in a very simple way is that the left is more focused on specific detail or the mode of consciousness is more in specific detail and therefore manipulation whereas the right is more focused on the big picture and therefore that is more conducive to understanding and being in relationship to things and people that's roughly right yes um [Music] i hold and i i think it's a very robust thesis that the reason that there are two hemispheres is that every neural network that we've looked back in creatures however simple going back 700 million years is asymmetrical and i believe this is because of the need to solve a conundrum which is how to manipulate the world which requires finely focused targeted attention to a detail while remaining alive by looking out for everything else that's going on while you're busy getting and grabbing that requires a completely different kind of attention which is broad open sustained and vigilant and that effectively is why we have these two takes clearly the one that is targeted on a in a tiny fragment of reality however clearly is not going to be very good at seeing the whole context in the big picture and crucially i think as well as you point out they are constantly working together and they're involved in all activities the mechanism i think that you you've touched on in perhaps both of these books in both in the master and emissary and the matter with things was i think david mcneill talking about essentially the idea that thought originates in the right hemisphere it's processed in the left but then it has to be reintegrated into the right again would you say that's sort of accurate in terms of the general mechanism that's a very good general um outline um it's not dependent by any means on david mcneill's research although it nicely confirms it it's dependent on a whole raft of research but yes that is exactly right so in the first part of the book you speak about the seven portals to knowledge or you call them sort of means to truth yes um things like attention perception judgment social intelligence cognitive intelligence creativity um obviously you've dedicated a whole large section to those so it'll be impossible to go into each of those in significant detail but can you just speak about what those modes are essentially and perhaps how they are loosely related how would you how would you encourage your reader or listener to think about those well what i wanted to do was to look separately at the level at which we gain information about the world from and even to some extent knowledge of it from the powers we might pursue in the long term if we have a goal to find the truth which might be things like science and reason and intuition and imagination which form part two of my book but one is about the immediate things that the brain is able to do when it's observing the world and attention is is not the same as perception we can attend without perceiving we can perceive without attending but attention is very very important to me because it i realized that attention changes the world it found the nature of the only world we can experience and the different qualities of attention given by the two hemispheres give rise to two worlds experientially which are have quite different qualities you speak about attention as a moral act in what ways is it moral because it both makes the world what it is and makes us what we are so if we espouse as we are encouraged to do mainly in the modern world a kind of clinically detached attention to details to try and build up a picture we see a certain kind of world and we think of ourselves and our relationship to the world in a certain way which i think is intellectually impoverished it's it's almost simplistic it's well it is simplistic uh it's it's morally and spiritually bankrupt and it leads us to do things like well create the crises that i don't think any of the viewers will need um alerting to that beside us these days in any case to return perhaps to your earlier points about could i say something about the portals so attention is very important and what happens i think in right hemisphere damage is there's a loss of depth in space in time and in emotion they each of them become hollowed out space becomes literally two-dimensional time becomes split up into a series of instances it has no flow or duration and an emotion becomes superficial the timbre and the whole repertoire becomes one of irritability disgust and and jokiness but actually no deep empathy at all and one of the things that people care for people with right-handed strokes find most difficult is this change of personality and loss of empathy anyway i look at that i look at perception uh in all the modalities all the sensory modalities in in another chapter and i look at the judgments formed on perception and attention perception and judgment are all mixed up together in a certain way they're completely um discernible and and discriminable and and different but they nonetheless um never act alone so when we're making a perception we're already making a judgment unconsciously about what it is we're seeing a lot of the things we see we've made a judgment as to what it is and mostly we're correct occasionally of course we're completely wrong so it's about those things judgments including delusions i mean what i show is that of the right hemisphere damage but not to the same extent if at all after left hemisphere damage patients have all the great delusional syndromes the hallucinations these are massively common up to right hemisphere than left hemisphere damage and what i think this suggests is as i show you in many many respects time and again by reference again to the literature that the right hemisphere is if you like our a reality uh orientator it's our detector it actually weeds out the nonsense and keeps us on quite contrary to the you know pop idea the left hemisphere is reliable and rational it's actually impetuous jumps to conclusions it's much less reliable than the right hemisphere it's given to fits of peak and anger and it just is not this unemotional um boring accountant so um that's those first chapters i suppose and then i look at emotional and social intelligence which is by no means inferior to cognitive intelligence but interestingly as people probably imagine that emotional and social intelligence was more right hemisphere-dependent and very obviously is people who have damage there don't understand human situations can't interpret what people mean actually or anything that's not entirely explicit tone of voice sense of humor body language you know metaphors images narratives um and then but what they might be more surprised about is that actually the evidence seems to be that cognitive intelligence iq is much more dependent on the right hemisphere than it is on the left obviously it's dependent on both everything is dependent on both that's one of my points but it's just that it's more dependent importantly on the right very much more and in a different way so it's the how not the what of what is done and each hemisphere does everything it's true but the how of the right hemisphere is to see everything as part of a large context of a field that is interconnected that is changing and so on whereas the left hemisphere is left with a lot of still snapshots little fragments that it has to try and build up the world from and then finally they look at creativity because in fact when we're meeting the world and i see all our experience as being an encounter between whatever it is that is our consciousness and whatever it is that we encounter in the world in that encounter we do play a creative role so what the the the one can summarize part one in a way quite briefly by saying that in all those respects the right hemisphere is superior to the left there is one chapter which i call apprehension rather than comprehension comprehension is to take something in the round apprehension is to get your hands on it grasp it and in that the left hemisphere is hands down batter so that is its 40 that is its resin that is to be the one that helps us grasp and manipulate why is this important you might say well in the end i don't really care which hemisphere is involved because i just want to do philosophy well this is the the kicker for me is that at the end of this we can actually see the imprint the hallmark the typical pattern of left hemisphere thinking we can recognize it it has certain qualities it's simplistic it's fragmented it's linear it's two-dimensional it's decontextualized it's abstract it's disembodied it's inanimate it's um all these things and it thinks it knows everything it's very certain and well-dressed and it loves certainty is intolerant of ambiguity or the need to um suspend judgment so when in future we have a philosophical debate over thousands of years people say well some people have thought this but other people have thought that and at the end of it all we go well i think it's not too much to say that there is an advance here because we can say but this picture is very clearly that developed by the left hemisphere and we know that the left hemisphere is less reliable it sees less understands less it is prone to delusion and those are not just my words i quote other neuroscientists who say in so many ways the left hemisphere is deluded now there's an awful lot to unpack there just very briefly at the beginning of your answer you mentioned sort of the implications of uh the sort of the left hemisphere dominated view in terms of uh time space and so on and so forth and what just really struck me there were you said a flattening in terms of space and a jerkiness in terms of time without any sort of flow and then a superficiality in terms of emotions i mean that's the world we're living in i mean if i think about a flattening and i think about screens and everything being intermediate sort of intermediated through a screen if i think about the nature of time and i think about uh soundbite culture and fragmented clips on social media becoming ever and ever and ever shorter and these sort of jerky sort of scrolling through a feed and then i mean emotion i mean the superficiality with which everybody now seems to be talking about their emotions but quite frankly it's a lot of nonsense that there isn't any there isn't the word is depth there isn't any depth to it so i mean it's not hard to see that that is demonstrative of the type of world we're living in isn't it yes i think you're right and i'd say about the emotions that the the typical town of social media is precisely the ones that the left hemisphere is key to anger self-righteousness narcissism disgust but not empathy and not subtlety not shades of meaning not you know we need to talk about this because everybody has something in their point of view so this rigid way of thinking is absolutely typical but it goes very much further than that and i hint at some of this at the end of the book in the epilogue i don't try to summarize the book there of course but i do refer to many of the paradoxes as we call them of modern life where we strive from one thing and achieve its exact opposite and and i suggest that's because we don't understand the structure of reality we don't know who we are anymore we don't know what the world is anymore and we don't know how we relate so i begin this new book the matter with things explicitly by quoting after schrodinger who also in his 1951 lectures in cambridge mentioned this saying of placing us but we who are we now that question seems to be never more urgent than right now what is a human being what are we doing here and i don't think that most people nowadays have the faintest idea yeah and it reminds me of another quote you touched a number of times in the book uh alfred north whitehead as we think we live well obviously looking at the way that we're living that suggests that there's almost certainly something wrong with the way we're we're thinking as well um and speaking of sort of philosophers um i was interested you touched briefly on the book on well you actually mentioned a number of times heraclitus and you speak about sort of plato almost having two paths to go down either going after sort of parmenides or heraclitus can you just briefly sort of summarize what you're talking about there and sort of what was the parmenide in view and what was the heraclity in view well heraclitus is um is my most admired philosopher of all time and his writings exist mainly in fragments sometimes reported by other people but i suppose you could summarize a very complex vision of the world by saying that a number of things that are not common in modern western philosophy were very important in that philosophy one is this idea of flow and continuity i mean famously he said everything flows which is not the same as everything changes which is a common place of buddhism another philosophical point of view to which i i cleave and i'm very close and um but but it's it goes further than that not just that everything changes because after all you can change from this to that to the other but actually everything is cohesively joined and flows and actually understanding quite how important that was you know it was part of the journey of this book pimenty is is actually more complex than i let on because i couldn't go everywhere um but permanentes did actually uh say that time can't exist and everything is static because he couldn't understand how to resolve certain paradoxes which zeno explored um i'm not saying that he was looking at zeno but all i'm just saying is that they're famous to us from zeno's paradoxes but prime minister was a rather complicated character who also um at other times wrote a totally contradictory philosophy to to that one which which seems to stand in complete opposition to eric leiters plato was um very strongly influenced by power amenities and plato of course again is very complex because he i think i'm not original in saying this it's been said a thousand times is that he began with aristotle the the entrainment of western philosophy by an obsession with um things in their opposites can't be correct which of course heraclitus was constantly saying that you know opposites come together and that its countries fulfill one another and so on um you know that on the whole and one should be able to achieve a certain degree of certainty i mean even if plato was always saying well you know i don't know but on the other hand the drive was that there is a certainty we should know and an abstraction in which abstractions like the idea of the perfect idea of something in heaven is more real than what we actually find in this world which which i think is a huge error i understand why he said that but he was also a writer of myths i mean at the same time that he in a way um promoted logos at the expense of mythos two different ways of thinking of truth in the ancient world mythos being originally a much more powerful and important means of conveying truth than logos and it only laterally has come to mean something not true a myth but but he did actually himself create some of the most famous myths i mean one of them being of course the myth of the cave so would you would would you say that mythos and logos correspond respectively to the uh modes or loosely correspond perhaps to the modes of consciousness of the right hemisphere in the left hemisphere mythos being more right and logos perhaps being more left or is it more complex than that it's slightly more complex in the first of all it depends at which point in history you're taking the word logos because originally logos as i do go into this in the book um meant something that was probably deceptive it was the kind of thing that a not particularly scrupulous lawyer would use to sort of try and make a point but that mythos had the deep truth in it um and logos was disparaged as sort of superficial as time went on and plato was instrumental in this logos and in heraclitus logos has a completely different meaning which is like the ultimate inexpressible origin of everything it was rather like the dao it was like what the chinese called in this kind of founding principle of order and beauty and complexity in the cosmos so logos means unfortunately a whole bunch of different things um more recently it tends to mean logic and it would be a mistake to say that the right hemisphere is not able to do logic in fact as i point out in discussion of reason it's an important contributor to the faculty of reason so as often is the case the right hemisphere is able to encompass both of something whereas the left hemisphere can't so a short answer to your question would be yes the left hemisphere doesn't do mythos but the right hemisphere can do both and that leads very nicely on to i think a very sort of succinct way that you summarized it which was um the sort of distinction between either or and both and and the idea that obviously the either or being more discriminatory left hemisphere the both end being more about union right hemisphere it's not it's not a toss-up between either or both and it's both either or and both and depending on the specific context right so that shows in essence the hierarchy of the right hemisphere reintegrating the fact of holding these two opposites i think that's very true i mean that's actually right what i say repeatedly is that we need drives for union and for division it's not enough just to unify it's not enough to say all is one you need also to say all is many now what both of these are true and in the great philosophical mystical traditions both of these are accepted so i also say we don't just need non-duality we need the non-duality of duality and non-duality rather in the same spirit as what you said about both hand and either or and you have that beautiful illustration of uh of ashes angels and demons or heaven and hell whatever it's called which shows basically depending on how you look at it both of those two together it's it's beautiful that's exactly right yes it's a wonderful picture all the space is taken up either by angels and demons and they interlock and i sometimes say you know every angel has its demon something that we don't really has its devil actually something we don't really appreciate in modern life if you think it's so simple there are certain things that are obviously just good and more and more is going to be better and better but each one conceals its dark side and if you're not aware of that the dark side will emerge suddenly rather powerfully and surprise you by the shock with which it bites you i think that we're in for that now comparing knowledge and understanding that seems to me a sort of transition between part one and part two of the book essentially where you know as you were saying before knowledge is sort of something more immediate and there are these different portals to sort of um grasping that in essence or relating to that um understanding is something perhaps more deeper and long term and you speak about sort of four pathways to understanding being science reason intuition and imagination um i'd love to touch very briefly on on on some of those um specifically around science obviously we have glorified science in our society because it has done many wonderful wonderful things for our society but we have also failed to acknowledge its limitations how would you articulate the limits of science well i must first say that you know my argument has nothing to do with the diminishing of science in fact i believe it needs to be restored to its proper place which is um not that it can do everything i think that's when people make over claims and the whole thing becomes precarious but it needs to be very properly scientific which means not dogmatic so it falls to somebody who is highly dependent on science to years studying science who loves science and thinks it's a very important path to truth to point out that it has limitations and the limitations are a number of them really but i suppose one of them is that it is assumed that it makes it starts from no premises or assumptions but it does of course make sense you couldn't get off the ground without making assumptions and often and for most circumstances the assumptions are fair enough but they can't be taken as cast iron and its conclusions need to be reinterpreted as it were rather like what the right hemisphere first sees or thinks or takes in needs to be unpacked and processed if you like by the left hemisphere but then the products of that need to be taken back by the right hemisphere and understood in the in the round so scientists find up to a point because it's it what its conclusions are not naive of philosophy people think there is no philosophy in science but if you think that and you've simply bought hook line and thinker the idea of the current scientific myth which is one of a progress and b of a machine then everything can be modeled on a machine and we need models you can't understand anything without comparing it to something you already understand that's what we mean when we say i understand that and so we always need a model but scrutinizing the model is terribly important and the machine model has already been discredited in physics for 100 years and more it lives on curiously enough in the life sciences say we have a science of the inanimate physics in which consciousness plays a very crucial part and we have a science of life which denies the consciousness of anything except an excretion of matter fascinating and then illogical and i deal with all that in the part three but yes so there are um limitations and of course things that simply go beyond the remit of science um science doesn't pretend to be able to explain what love is it can do all it likes to document things that happen in your brain when you love things but that is not the same as the experience of love and it is not in any way a way of explaining to somebody who never experienced love what it is and it's not just love but it's pretty much everything that makes life valuable for us um arts and the power of nature all these things um the sense of the sacred all these aspects can be superficially i mean this is the trouble with that without much reflection people could superficially dismiss them by saying well you know science says but really what science says is more complex than that what good science says it's never that we've understood all these things but that we can have a partial light if we make these assumptions we can see that this follows and we can explore it and we can test it this is wonderful nothing against that is the idea that all these pathways are sort of related in the sense that a good scientist would also be um in various different situations and context drawing on intuition drawing on imagination as would sort of a logician in terms of reason they would be using imagination using intuition um yeah how do you think about the relationship between these different well importantly i have studied um the accounts of many scientists and mathematicians of how they made their discoveries and although of course at some point they did very routine pedestrian work following a procedure and so on and many hours of that when they made their insights they were using intuition and imagination and there's nothing wrong with that that that's in fact the crowning glory and these things are much better um underwritten or furnished for us by the right hemisphere than by the left so that one of the things i show in part two where i look at the the value and the limits of each of those paths of science of reason of intuition and imagination because each have value and they each have limitations what i show is that the better part of each of them is again contributed as you would expect from part one by the right hemisphere um and i don't think this is in any way um controversial to anyone who's ever bothered to inspect the history of science and mathematics it also applies to reason there's the second um pathway that i explore yeah could you could you define that briefly as well because to have a working sort of understanding of what exactly we're talking about yes well at the outset i i sort of say reason is the following of a single pathway of of um predictable steps in an algorithmic fashion to reach a single conclusion that is then verified then the second paragraph after that i see reason is the ability to see things in the round to see that they are complex and need to be understood not in a linear fashion at all so i mean i set out that there is a left hemisphere version of reason and there is a right hemisphere version of reason and i think i say something like in our world um the first of this the one has become the predator this kind of um machine logic that you know you could program a machine just to follow these steps at the expense of the the other which has become like a hunted animal and is in fact the whole was in the past believed to be the flower of civilization and the purpose of education to enable people to make reasonable judgments and a reasonable judgment is never simply the following of rules i mean that's where we get very rationally rationalistic and you can you can see this in certain philosophies where by being irrationally rationalistic you reach absurd conclusions and as i sort of say if you reach a conclusion that's obviously wrong then don't just keep going well the sat nav says this is where we should be question the sat nav and try a different way of finding your your goal yeah you mentioned that the sort of the linear and the round elements of reason it reminds me of the distinction you make as well between this is probably zooming out one level but uh between savjuan connect and french the sort of in terms of the two modes of knowing sort of the first mode of known they were speaking about before knowledge versus understanding really knowing something being in relationship to it and then on the level of it seems that that also applies on the level of reason as well would you say that's accurate yes i would yes and in most languages other than english we have two there are two words for knowing uh in german there the equivalent of sapphire is vissen an equivalent of connector is canon but i i gather this is very common in most languages so what what confuses a lot of anglo-american philosophy i think i gave that far is not making sufficient distinction between these two kinds of knowing and one of the reasons that the phenomenological tradition grew up and has become so important in europe but not so important in the anglo-american world is because of the realization of the shortcomings of this very narrow kind of procedural attempt to understand which is somewhat autistic and unfortunately you can't get away from this people with certain types of autism certainly because i didn't believe that autism is a simple single entity and with schizophrenia become over hyper rationalistic and don't find it odd when they reach completely absurd conclusions so there is this trend in philosophy i'm afraid towards neglect of context which changes everything abstraction what in fact william james called vicious abstractionism the taking of material out of the context the embodied context the lived context in which it has its meaning and then thinking that you've really grasped it when of course you've lost everything that made it what it was by taking it out of its lived embodied context so i look at the different kinds of reason and there are three chapters on reason there's three chapters on science uh looking at different aspects of them um and yes again the the right hemisphere is capable of embracing both the need for a narrower kind of of ability to to use logic and a broad understanding that comes from experience which is nearer to wisdom intuition has certainly gotten a bad rap over the last few decades at least if we look at some of the um ideas and uh papers and books that seem to gain prominence one that comes to mind for me is cannon and tavarsky's work popularized by thinking fast and slow which was sort of a global bestseller in that they speak about the sort of two systems of thinking system one and system two and the message essentially that's taken away from that is um don't trust your intuition yes can you speak to that a little bit why has that gained such prominence that idea gained such prominence what is intuition actually when we're speaking about that well intuition is the human capacity to take into account many things that are not consciously being focused on a prominent german jurist who's the director of the max planck institute says that intuition is our ability to finally tune and balance scores of different strands of thinking which when we're reduced to explicit sentences we can only deal with one of these at a time and often neglect many others so it's potentially richer and he says that all institutions involved in making wise judgment should encourage their their people to trust their intuition to at least an extent you can never trust anything all the way intuition can lead you to the wrong places but as i've been suggesting reason can lead you to the wrong places if not tempered with intuition and judgment so we always need to make judgments we always need the whole of our experience and i think you know academic subjects including psychology are populated by people whose careers are based on appearing clever by applying a certain procedure so it's actually quite amusing for us to see that you know oh gosh how stupid our everyday intuition on this clearly leads the wrong conclusion i mean what is missed out of these cleverly designed experiments is that 99 of the time your intuitions are extremely valuable you ignore them at your peril because you then lose a compass basically you make the point of if you are fooled by an optical illusion that doesn't mean you should walk around with your eyes closed all the time yes i've never known anybody who's seen a really good optical illusion say well that does it i'm going to live my life as my eyes closed from now on but that is the apparent message from the literature on the illusions coming back to kahneman um i mean i just want to comment a couple of things people have said so the systems one and two reflect the hemispheres they don't and neither does kahneman think so we have agreed that in fact what he's talking about he's slicing the brain not as i do um sort of laterally but sort of top to bottom um but if uh and this is very clear and i should show the evidence in the book that if you wanted to align one of the hemispheres with jumping to conclusions and doing quick and dirty thinking it is very much the left hemisphere not the right the so-called reliable rational left hemisphere is actually most of the time jumping to conclusions the right hemisphere is what ramachandran calls the devil's advocate the one that's going well the left hand is jumping to a collusion but it might not be so which seems to be a pretty important point um the other thing to say is that i mean i'm a great obviously admirer of kahneman and enjoy his work and find it both entertaining and illuminating um but i i think he puts his thumb in the scales i read a thing by him about uh medical expertise and intuition in which he made some very improbable claims that you know it turned out that he refers to three papers about expertise in which they're said to show that you know the majority of the time people do quite irrational things with their expertise make you know suddenly change their minds and and so on i thought this is you know i've actually spent decades alongside clinicians who are fabulously astute and i've watched them at work and i know how incredible their acumen is i just don't believe this they're constantly changing their mind and making wrong conclusions so i i mean i one thing i do do is i do my homework i mean i refer to 5 700 pages in there papers in there and i have consulted every damn one of them i have never copied a reference because i found it actually often the reference doesn't say what it's quoted often repeatedly quoted in one case 83 times in the literature wrongly but um anyway i looked up kahneman's papers they didn't say anything of the kind in fact they support the importance of expertise and in some cases they're laughably mistaken in their report now he was writing in a hurry probably he had a fact checker or a you know a student who uh this can happen to anyone but if you're going to make dismissive claims i do think you've got to be a little bit careful i mean he's obviously a brilliant scientist as you point out who's done you know great work what i take issue with is you kind of alluding to the um drawing of conclusions from that that to me are just fundamentally inhuman so so we get to a point where well we should dismiss all intuition and we're already just a bunch of automatons and we don't really have any free will and it's all predetermined anyway so you know whatever ends up happening in our lives is already more or less a foregone conclusion there's a certain element of fatalism to it um and and i'm aware that he is not saying this at all but conclusions that are being drawn from some of the things that he touches on are being fed into an overall sort of conversation to me is just fundamentally dehumanizing i mean in terms of our ability to make decisions to to exert free will in our lives to do things that we believe in and to uphold certain values i mean is that is that do you have the same sense of that i do it's dehumanizing de-skilling and makes us stupid and demoralized but i do need to emphasize that i don't think kahneman holds any of the views that you outline i think he's quite careful um but unfortunately what he's taken to be saying is another matter and there's somebody whose work is constantly misunderstood and um simplified and so on i i i have to have a great deal of sympathy with that yeah absolutely i can imagine um speaking of imagination that's the fourth mode to understanding again something that people will superficially relate to as an escape from reality rather than something that can bring you closer towards reality um let's define that term what is imagination well imagination is not fantasy fantasy is whatever it is that you use to escape from reality by creating um addressing for reality which is based on bits of experience gathered from other places wordsworth and courage wrote about this importantly and one may say well yes but that was a couple hundred years ago but they still remain for me the most important writers on imagination in the english language and they're very consonant with the writings of great and absolutely non-dismissable german philosophers such as hegel and shelly where the concept is that there is a stark difference between fantasy and imagination um they rebelled against the sort of fantasy of augustine poetry in which things were dressed up in pastoral costume and made pretty and and so on and the imagination for which wordsworth was sometimes mocked because he would stare as it were at a rock or a mountain or until for the first time he saw it as it really was the imagination is seeing into the depths of something that you think you know but seeing it for the first time you're finally making contact with it not just with an image of it whereas imagine sorry fantasy is the substitution of something for whatever is in front of you so these work in in exactly opposite directions and somewhere i quote from biography literary or passage in which coleridge distinguishes the two by about eight or ten uh pairs of epithets that contrast and they just map onto the two hemispheres as i show so they are very it is very important i believe that when we um when we encounter reality which is what we call experience that we have all the time we do have to bring imagination to bear on it if we are to understand it it can't simply be um as it were naive it can't there is no such thing as just data and just data wouldn't tell us anything because again they have to be interpreted and understood so imagination is a form of understanding and i tell this funny story about the should i tell it about that about tolkien yeah and you told keenan was a member fellow at merton college where he was a professor of english at oxford and the other fellows of merton got very tired of you know people being introduced to the great man and going oh professor talking and all the rest um and uh one day somebody was a guest and was introduced to professor tolkien they said ah professor talking your works they're so so full of imagination and from behind a newspaper a grumpy mathematician was heard snorting imagination imagination made it all up and i think that beautifully brings together the two contrasting ideas about imagination that it's something you just make up well actually it's how the world comes into being for us and feeding back into the two and some of the other ones we already spoke about you know as a scientist you have to have imagination to come up with a creative hypothesis to think about something that you haven't considered as to be a reasonable person and to use reason effectively you have to have imagination to consider how would a certain person that you're interacting with react in that situation and so on and so forth right that these these modes are constantly interacting and to apply any of them well they need to be supported by the others certainly in psychology all you said is very true but it's also true as has often been pointed out there is no such thing as starting with no disposition towards certain hypotheses otherwise you'd have to waste your entire testing all kinds of bonkers hypotheses because you had to remain entirely objective about no people use their imagination i think there's something interesting going on there's a couple of shapes here that fit i'm going to explore it so their imagination's already at work and it's very like this right to left to right thing that it begins in seeing something which then gets serialized and unpacked in a rather dull procedural way but then needs to be taken back into an image of the whole again yeah and and you know with specific sort of reference to intuition as well you use a couple of examples in the book um i think it's a motorcycle race in the isle of wight that's easy and then there's also the one i particularly enjoyed was the the horse racing and picking horses fascinating in the sense that sort of obviously anecdotal but very demonstrative of a trend that many people would experience if they looked at their own experience or looked to the world around them um when he tried to be more analytical his picks were significantly worse whereas when he was asked to sort of think about oh what elements are actually going into my intuitive sort of understanding of which horse is going to perform well all these sort of intangible factors that nobody would necessarily have considered was sort of coming up for him and it was just fascinating to think that yes there's a counter example that we were talking about earlier of your intuition's faulty no actually in so many instances your intuition is the correct mode to move forward with perhaps i should just lost what you're saying because it's about a man who wrote to me and saying i have this puzzle and he was a man who had always thought of himself as very systematic left hemisphere he had a doctoral thesis in horse physiology and he did in his early years created an algorithm predicting which horses would race well but he finally he acted as a tipster and made a six-figure income out of tipping because he did it so well and he hadn't the clue how he did it he said i don't know how i can look at a horse for 20 seconds like make the right decision and to begin with what he would do is doubt his intuition and change his mind and he always changed it from better to worse and eventually the the the bookmakers who from whom is working said just put down what you think send the text and don't question it and don't ring us up afterwards and say you've changed your mind as long as he did that he was fine let's move towards morality briefly we did touch on it earlier when we were speaking about attention attention being a moral act it strikes me that if you are more focused on manipulating than understanding on using something or someone as opposed to being in relationship with something or someone the potential for immoral behavior is significantly greater and you touch on this at various different points in the book speaking about sort of the nature of good and evil and thinking about them as forces but um yeah i would love to hear you just speak to the importance of morality in this context as well because it does seem to be something that um yeah i mean obviously in the environment that we're in at the moment and the rise of sort of more post-modernist thinking and relativism um good and bad seem to almost have become in many circles just arbitrary labels as opposed to things that actually have meaning and weight and importance what is the significance of those concepts of good and evil and morality within the context of the discussion where you know we're having here well we are intrinsically moral beings um we can't avoid making judgments and and carrying out actions on a basis that includes a moral value i mean for example scientists believe in truth why um if you believe that the cosmos is a pointless heap of random stuff that's just floating around and that we are the products of chance then why would you prefer truth to the principle of pleasure why would you why would you say no no no you can't believe that it may give you comfort but you mustn't because it's not true where in that universe does this supreme value of truth come from now i happen to believe that truth is incredibly important incredibly important but that's because i don't believe in that kind of a cosmos i don't believe it's random and pointless i believe it's ordered complex beautiful and has a drive and i write about all of that in part three of the book but yes i mean on the way um morality in the sense of goodness is is again one of these things that we think we make up as just a label and i always try to steer the course perhaps i can just digress for a moment here um because it goes back to ontology to you know what things can we say really do exist that i i i want to distance and i do in the very first pages of the book myself from two apparently competing positions that are very often espoused in modern discourse one is that the just is as it were a truth out there this is often held by scientific scientists that it is our job to find and we play no part in whatever it is when we find it that is rightly problematized by some modern philosophers of the post-modern school but what is wrong is those who reach the opposite conclusion that we just make it all up and each of these is really a mirror image of the other as vacuous as the other and it's all in fact about a relationship about an encounter now that is in other words it's not out there or in here it's the coming together of the two now that is utterly fundamental to this entire book and i argue as it happens that relationships are prior to the things that are related they are ontologically prior um which we could either return to or not but but in any case my point there is that i also believe that moral values are not just colors we paint onto the world they exist and cannot be reduced to other things like utility of course the left hemisphere having only one value that of utility wants to reduce all value to that of utilities well of course morality is much more to do with the intentions of the doer than simply the outcome of the act because you can a very good person can intend something good and not achieve that end but a really evil person can make a mistake and something not so bad happens and so but you know the these ideas are importantly separate from just utility and guess what people who have right hemisphere damage it impairs their morality they become selfish they become aggressive they become rather hard to live with they they make decisions entirely on the basis of utility whereas people who have left hemisphere damage don't lose their moral sense their empathics and their sense of morality as embedded in the structure of human lives and society you mentioned before relationships being ontologically prior that correct me if i'm wrong but that obviously the book sort of goes into so many levels of depth but that that applies right down to the level of particle physics right i mean the idea of relationships being ontologically prior in the sense of a more uh a physical view of the world that is based on quantum mechanics as opposed to newtonian physics absolutely right and you know i was delighted to find that uh david merman actually says in physics and he is a physicist uh relationships are prior to relata which you know i despaired of finding a scientist who would take this point of view which i believe is profoundly true philosophically speaking and pete hutt who said there are no things which was originally the title of this book but i changed it when i realized that people might think that i was on the side of post-modernist or not [Laughter] towards the sort of uh some of the ideas that you touched on in the third part in the view the world we sort of touched very briefly on you know the the physics right and we touched on the being the metaphysics which i do want to come to briefly at the end um but the view of the world that we're seeing you spoke about before the sort of perspective of this sort of naively optimistic and naively cynical i mean like it's crude to sort of put them into two camps but essentially sort of uh a sort of naive pessimism from a sort of postmodernist perspective that says everything's terrible we should tear it all down and there's nothing of value to be found in anything that we've done or built and then the sort of naive optimistic perspective of well everything's great really because you know poverty is declining and you know the myth of progress we were speaking about before like we've had we have all these wonderful achievements um i don't know what you could call that almost a sort of techno-optimism or a rational optimism to think of sort of you know pinker and some other people that are articulating that where does your orient me in terms of where you obviously you can dispute the sort of dichotomy or whatever but like worry me in terms of what what vision are you trying to paint what perspective are you trying to paint that transcends these simplistic and just fundamentally almost pure almost ridiculous views when you actually look at them and examine them well that's right and and one of the hard things in talking about any of my positions is that they are always nuanced and i want people to understand that because in being brief i often seem to be a bit crisp about these things but there are things to be said around almost anything one stage but but what i can say quite clearly is that in this book i aim to show that there is absolutely no reason to suppose that either science or reason compel on us a view of the world as a random heap of stuff mechanistic in nature understood by reductionist tendencies to reduce it to the smallest possible particles and say that's all that there is it's the what i call the school of nothing buttery um you know you are nothing but you know famously said by francis crick and others um this is terrifically naive i mean it just shows that philosophy is something that scientists you know desperately need and training in my view what i would say is that none of this is compelled on us and that we are not either um you know playthings of chance and all these squalid apes that must always compete with one another the the history of humanity shows that we are every of course we do compete and and there are atrocities and so forth but that we would not have got where we have unless we had a powerful capacity for cooperation and collaboration and collaboration involves a bit of competition and a bit of cooperation so i try to show a vision of a world which is rich intrinsically complex intrinsically incomprehensible to simple reason i mean reason can get us a long way scientists can get us a long way i'm not suggesting we abandon them but it's illogical and irrational and unscientific to suppose that they can answer everything and explain everything so a world that is rich complex and responsive so that i see everything as relational and then a relation each part of a relation changes the other so that and this is exemplified in particle physics that the the observation of something changes it and of course the experience by the observer changes the observer and what the observer knows and thinks so that things are always interacting with one another and that this suggests a world which is intrinsically beautiful and the only way i can or inspiring that to to help us to see that it's not naive to be struck by wonder and or at the nature of the cosmos it's naive to think that just because you know a few things you've got it all i mean that's there's something called the dunning-kruger effect in psychology which effectively states that the less you know the more you think you know and that when people really know a lot they realize how little they know a little of that humility would be rather good in the public discourse of philosophy and science you're looking at the big picture you know you do touch on this uh again multiple instances in the master and emissary and and at various stages of the matter with things um specifically around nature culture and the divine looking at the world that we've created for ourselves an assault on nature which is apparent destruction almost self-destruction of our culture absolutely and a complete denial of the divine and dismissal and um almost um rendering it as not even being part of the conversation um these are remarkable sort of developments in the con i mean can you just sort of can you situate these in the context of history in terms of i think you write in the book something along the lines of you know we think that we are beings who have understood more than any who have come before us but actually in so many ways we clearly haven't i think we understand much less um we know more data which is a quite different matter the information is not knowledge and knowledge is not understanding and understanding is not in itself wisdom we've certainly abandoned wisdom i can't imagine a more foolish world really um in which we believe the blatantly absurd uh we've now degenerated so the public discourse is full of things that are obviously quite absurd really but i seem to be accepted by everybody um what i what i'm what i would suggest is again not original but that since the enlightenment which was in itself a a wonderful movement i'm sure if i'd been alive at that time i would have welcomed and enthusiastically embraced um what it has a value to offer it's been grossly exaggerated and become a very crude and simplistic dismissal of everything that can't be fitted into some pretty pre-christian bad or constructed by chord science and chord reason that our intuitions and our imagination our art our experience of life should tell us that there's far far more that and can be encompassed by that and what i found in the case of social cohesion i expressed in the last chapter of the master in his emissary it was new information to me and i spent some time on it because i found it absolutely fascinating that for example immigrants into the united states come with low levels of mental illness but after they've been in the united states for 20 or 30 years and the next generation that their children show higher rates of mental illness as they approximate more and more to that of the native culture and i also noted these fascinating studies of relatively cohesive communities um there's one particular italian community rosetta which was closely studied where people had high rates of smoking and drinking and didn't take enough exercise and all the rest and had low rates of heart disease and lead happy lives and and so forth they were fulfilled psychologically socially and physically and and this seemed to be strongly related as um is expressed by robert putnam in his wonderful book bowling alone this was a feature of social cohesiveness so important and that's exactly what we're destroying now um but then in this book i i took on two other important sources of health and happiness which are closeness to nature and the literature on this has exploded in the last 10 or 15 years and is is absolutely vast and i probably don't even need to say much about it because it's incontrovertible and very well known that's just spending short periods of time in in nature is is good on a lot of physical health measures but also improves enormously one psychological state including one's cognitive capacity um reduces anger and aggression and increases creative thinking and makes one feel happier and of course until not very long ago we all lived surrounded by nature almost everybody in the world did but that's not the case now and the third which i wasn't prepared for at all and went to with no preconceptions was the literature i didn't even know the actual literature existed until i started to explore it on the effects of having spiritual beliefs on these very same factors physical health spiritual health moral health of an individual and of a society and what this displays is that social groups that have a spiritually cohesive philosophy last in one study four times longer than those that didn't have such her philosophy but more importantly more interestingly that individuals who have a spiritual framing of the world and the effect seems to be stronger if there is common or sharing of beliefs so religion obviously does play a part there sometimes for ill i know but obviously sometimes for good but the key thing is this spiritual understanding which seems to have these same extraordinarily powerful effects that are stronger on physical health than going to the gym and losing weight and stopping smoking are extraordinarily important on what hardly surprisingly on moral behavior particularly amongst young people who have these spiritual beliefs and on psychological well-being people are robust they're more able to cope with stress and with distress they are happier they're more fulfilled and and so on so these effects are very very strong and i sort of asked slightly rhetorically if you wanted to destroy the happiness of a people what would you do alienate them from nature alienate them from the idea that there's any kind of spiritual or divine or sacred realm and divide them one from another and destroy their traditions and history and and say it's whatever you want that doesn't achieve happiness it achieves high levels of unhappiness and we are measurably unhappy and if you ask pinker you say well of course they'll be much happier now because the world has utterly improved in so many ways but the proof of the pudding is in the eating right it doesn't matter what your theory says sure from from a spreadsheet perspective you know as you said more people are now earning two dollars a day as opposed to one dollar a day and therefore from an economic perspective they're better but if you take people from ancient ways of life yes and pull them they had no income at all and where they were thriving and bring them into a city slum they've got a suddenly got an income great but they're miserable yeah and they're truly poor for the first time truly poor and there's a story told by helen the norbert hodge who is i think a very interesting person who went to um ladakh in the 70s and she was went there to a community where they largely lived in a way that was uninterrupted for you know hundreds of years thousands of years and she saw all the beautiful buildings and the places she was shown where people lived and what they did and she said now i want to see where the poor people lived and they said but there are no poor people this is how we all live and she went back some 20 years later after advertising television and toxic western culture had been imported to ladakh with all its generation of unhappiness disquiet sense of falling behind need to compete greed and found that rates of self-harm inner self-harm is unknown now it was and when she said to the people you know how we're just so poor but these people had a true wealth which they had lost they had become truly poor it depends how you measure what you're talking about exactly and that comes down to you know the hierarchy of values you speak about max sheila and you know we've essentially inverted the pyramid we've inverted the hierarchy of values which as you point out is something that uh a sort of left hemisphere dominant culture would naturally do but can you speak to that hierarchy of values briefly how does he puts i think you mentioned pleasure and utility on the bottom and then there are various gradations above that yes and max shaler was a german phenomenological philosopher who died too young um and at his funeral heidegger gave his funeration and said he was the most important philosopher of that generation in europe and he's he combines a lot of the insights of heidegger with a much more i think interesting emphasis on also emotional moral and social being as well as just the sort of intellect but he he generated what he called a sort of pyramid of values um which in fact i've included in post books so i think it's so important and as you say in the bottomless level are those of um utility and pleasure which is really effective what the left hemisphere is out to seek then above that come um what it called the levensvata um the values of of life which means things like um uh fidelity generosity magnanimity courage um things that we admire in people because they are aspects of living a good life and then at the next plane above that comes digesting which means grace is interesting in german because it means both spirit and intellect and i think these are effectively you know goodness beauty and truth that that level and above it at the summit is das heiliger the holy and what i suggest is that the right hemisphere is able to see that each of these as it was taken up a level as you go towards the peak of the pyramid but the left hemisphere has been engaged in a kind of feat of explaining away whereby all the higher values are explained in terms of lower ones which boil down to utility so you know um a belief in the holy means that there can be a hierarchy of priests who control things and it causes degree of sexual cohesion and makes people fear the afterlife so it's good and um then you get goodness beauty and truth which are again just ways of sort of disciplining the the unruly people and you know courage and magnanimity and so on well these are things you know poor fools who prepare to sacrifice their own happiness and but can't see that really they'd be better to be machiavellian and just please themselves they do those things and they help against society go here so they have the utility but you know i i've touched on beauty and how it simply can't be reduced to utility but as diamond said even in the sense of you know favoring sexual selection that can't be the end of the story because you still got to account the existence of beauty and why the shape of an oak tree would be beautiful to a human being because it's of no utility to us that it has that shape and i think there's any other creature that can actually appreciate its form um insects that are very important to the tree are probably not looking at the overall shape of the tree but you know things like the beauty of an equation like e um to the i equals minus one uh wireless equation uh or the beauty of a desert or of a wild and rugged mountain or the beauty of a snow capped peak or the beauty of a minor third or the beauty of c major quintet i mean none of these things can be reduced to sexual competition or selection and they're not just modern as i point out in the book these are not modern prejudices that people um you know 300 years bc in china and and in the early years of the first millennium elsewhere we're talking about deserts and wild places and mountains and forests which are not fertile and not safe really compared with the cultivated fields would see them as particularly beautiful yeah i mean the points about beauty and not being able to reduce reminds me of the way you you know speak about music and describe it as you know being part of a coherent whole and so on and so forth and the note in isolation means nothing to in isolation but when sort of brought together that's the the gestalt the whole in essence yeah um just tying back briefly to the um to the point about sheila's hierarchy of values would you say that in inverting the pyramid what we've replaced our relationship to the sacred with is essentially a religion of money in the sense that that is the vessel through which we're able to fulfill all of our needs and our pleasures it's money fulfills pleasure and utility and if you look at the culture in the society we've built what do we celebrate i don't remember who said this but you know look at what people do on a daily basis and i'll tell you where you know what they worship what their church is our obsession with work and our obsession with consumerism i mean money is our god isn't it would you is that your perspective i think it's a fair point i i i would largely agree i i of course many years as you point out the means to utility and pleasure but he and power which is the other value of the left hemisphere control manipulation having power but also fascinatingly money is like everything in the left hemisphere a representation it's not the thing itself so that money one of the differences i haven't explained but it's a very important one is that the left hemisphere as it was the one that deals with the representation of the world whereas the right is the one to which it presences and a representation the very word tells us is something that's afterwards and it isn't actually present anymore this is like the map the schema the theory you have about life compared with what happens when you actually engage in life and find out what experience tells you that is a contrast and in i think the master and his chemistry i talk about the origins of money in the ancient world when it started to become a means of exchange that was already an abstraction which then took on the qualities of the thing that it represented as though the representation were the reality that it represented and that i think now is part of the world picture and so many people i know um have seen professionally as well have made a lot of money but have not made themselves happy yeah and and that comes back to the difference between manipulating reality and understanding reality right like if you are able to manipulate reality in such the way that you're able to acquire massive material wealth how many stories are there of people who are not satisfied or fulfilled that's because they've learned how to push a button and get a result in life but they haven't necessarily understood the fundamental nature of reality in order to live harmoniously to be with others to be in relationship to others and the world it's it's you know they're very very distinct things and it seems to me that at the moment we glorify those who have succeeded in terms of material terms then we think those are the right people to give us policy decisions so a successful entrepreneur jeff bezos and elon musk you know oh they're successful so obviously they should be telling us what hierarchy of values we should be living our lives by that's the world we're living in i know well i can't be very positive about that but what i am positive about is that there are so many people in the world who see the peculiarity of it i mean perhaps they themselves don't and perhaps those who fawn on them and flatter them and are their acolytes don't but everywhere i go i find that people are longing to hear about something richer and deeper which they know in a way is is there the most fascinating thing and i did a public conversation with philip pullman last week i think it was and in it he said one of the things about my encounter with your work is that there were things that i knew to be the case but had never found words for and you gave me the words and the reasons and that is one of the commonest things that people say when they write to me as they you know i'm flattered and honored to say i often do to say your book has changed my life or whatever one of the things they say is there was stuff that i kind of knew but there was no way in our culture of referring to it talking about it validating it but you have given me the way to do that so on the one hand what i want to do is present a very different picture of the world from really a markedly different picture of the world from the one that's sold to us all the time but it's also run that people will at some deep level recognize and recognize means to have conceived it again you conceived it innerly unconsciously before and now it comes into practice for you so that's what i want to do speaking of the sacred which we touched on you know at the very beginning of the conversation yeah um that's one of those areas where you're damned if you do and you're damned if you don't go back to sort of you know going where fools will only boldly go at the beginning of the conversation you speak about it and you reduce something irreducible and therefore you do an injustice or you ignore it and then you have the environment that we're currently experiencing where people don't have any relationship to anything sacred or higher or divine in whatever form that might be right um how did you navigate that challenge well that particular challenge was the hardest i've ever faced hands down and writing that chapter which is the final substantive chapter before the epilogue was the hardest thing i've ever done in my life and it took me longer per word than anything i've ever written i really sweated blood over it because i didn't want to betray the subject i didn't want to say things that were false but everything that i said because it was in language was going to be intrinsically limited and to some extent false famously the dao de ching opens with the words the dao that can be named is not the real doubt and it's not confined just to daoism saint augustine said if you understand god then it's not god you've understood what i like about that is that without knowing that at all richard feynman said if you understand quantum mechanics you don't understand quantum mechanics so all the really profound structures of reality are of this nature that they can't really be talked about without doing them damage or violating them so i felt this tension between you know should i say this or not and so i have to both say things and at the same time explain we mustn't fall into this trap here or that trap there so i try really to keep a balance on what is a tightrope did you feel obviously as a sort of very well-respected scientist um within your field um did you feel any sort of hesitation around how bringing that into the conversation bring that into the conversation might be received by peers people in your community so on and so forth and did that add to the struggle of actually writing about it you probably did although i mean i'm pretty good at not being dissuaded from saying things i think are true because i think people won't like hearing them i mean i have this gnarly little thing in about you know i really think whatever's true matters more than what isn't and there isn't a single truth but we need to get at it but yes of course i i knew that there are people who without i mean like there are people who know nothing about what i've written you just go oh about hemispheres it must be nonsense you know i mean i still hear that after writing so detailedly so i'd love somebody to rebut you know just look at my evidence you know take a couple of decades and look at my evidence and show me why it's not right i i defy you anyway on that i did feel you know yes of course and there was a philosopher who um who was wonderfully kind and helpful who sort of begged me you know don't please don't include this chapter what you've written is so wonderful it's so philosophically powerful you'll just undo everything by writing about the sacred what was the piece of research you mentioned where um a study was done in terms of looking at uh people within the sciences and their relationships to the divine something along the lines of the harder the science the greater the percentage of people who believed in something sacred or divine what was that it was a research on um nobel prize winners and all nobel prize winners since the beginning have been researched on a whole range of things to do with this particular question and others and what it shows is i will get the percentages probably slightly wrong but it won't matter too much around 30 percent of the um winners of nobel prizes in the humanities were at some point in their lives uh atheistic or agnostic because the criterion was were you at any time in your life atheistic or agnostic but as you got into the sciences it got fewer and biological sciences it was something like eight percent who fell into this category but by the time you got to physics it was only four point seven percent i think of nobel prize winners who said yes at some point in my life i was atheistic or agnostic that's remarkable i've watched already a few of the interviews you've actually done speaking about this book and what happens typically as people come towards the end of the conversation as they ask you what do we do with all of this what is this what are the practical implications and of course it's a perfectly reasonable point to make as i think you point out a number of occasions but you're not really arguing for a specific list of things to do here are you what you're trying to do is um paint a vision and show an image of gestalt as we were sort of talking about earlier and it's almost that it's a change of perspective it's a transformation of mind it's uh you know metania i don't know how it translates in in you know from the greek it's just you know going beyond the mind it's a shift of mind um you know how do you how you know and i'm sure you have this question again and again and again how do you speak to people when they ask you know what do i do with all of this well i do say that first of all i don't have six bullet points that if we do them we'll be okay because even if we could do them and we could actually change things we need to do a few bullet point things you know we need to stop poisoning the seas and stop chopping down the rainforest of course obvious but that if we only did that it really wouldn't matter because we carry on being the same selfish unhappy miserable people that we are because we don't understand who we are what we're doing here or what the world is about i took part in a film called tawai made by bruce parry about hunter-gatherer people and he spent a lot of time with them and their image of the world is one which is entirely coherent and they would be astonished at the idea that somehow it was all pointless purposes and meanness and you may say well they're just simple people but i think you ought to be very careful before you say that because they seem to have contact with intuition about awareness of things that civilization has kind of damped down in us because if you don't exercise faculties you don't you don't have them there to exercise after a while um but yes what i'm saying is as i said that we don't understand who we are we don't understand what this world is and when you look at those people they do understand who they are what they're doing there and the sacredness of the world around them and the need for their relationship with it there's a wonderful little clip made by french television in which they show images of the modern world to an amazonian tribe and they're appalled by the things we do to nature the things we do to one another the things we do to our elderly and all the rest and they say you know we don't have this way i think we think of these things when we kill we it costs us when we cut down a tree it costs us we only do it if we have to we then yeah et cetera but there's one moment when they share a clip of maria callas singing cast a diva from bernini's norma and the atmosphere completely changes and the the and the people you know the two a young man comes to the camera and says it's not our culture we don't understand it but we feel there is something powerful here and then an old man says it is it's beautiful i'm in orbit there is something sacred now that just shows that these are not things we make up and paint onto the world but that are shared and are intrinsic my god we need to recover them because without it there is no point in life what is life if there is no beauty no purpose no no goodness no truth we need you know it's not a matter of fantasy here i'm talking about it's a matter of reality using our imagination to get back to the core of what things are and who we are and these are conclusions or not perhaps conclusions of the wrong one but these are sort of threads that every ancient wisdom tradition has pulled on you know you speak about taoism hinduism christianity islam and the findings that you find through your scientific research and and and work on the hemispheres you say i think towards the end of the book that it all in essence checks out it does it does i mean there isn't a great conflict you see this is a myth of our age there's a conflict between science and reason and on the one hand an intuition and imagination under there isn't um philosophy neurology physics i think i show go to the same places and that happens to be where the ancient traditions go i can you know cite ancient literature from china from japan from india from the north american native people from circumpolar regions where people have the same perceptions of reality which correspond to the story of the master and his chemistry that there are two importantly conflicting elements to our take on the world which are not symmetrical one of them sees very much more than the other but the one that sees less because it sees less things it knows more becomes arrogant and when it does that's when things dissolve into ruin in fact it says that in itching yeah and the iroquois meth you speak about in the book and the sorcerer's apprentice and all these stories that throughout the ages have basically sort of been pointing towards the same thing which may not have been understood on the level that you're now able to understand it from a neurological perspective with the technology that we now have but there was an intuitive understanding of it that had been passed down through the ages yeah so absolutely well we can find things by introspection ian thank you so much this was an absolutely wonderful conversation thank you for coming down to join me today um it was a real pleasure thank you very much it's been great pleasure from you too where can we direct listeners to learn more about your work and the book uh channel mcgillcrest if you google that um if you want a copy of the book and you're in britain you can also get it probably cheapest from my website but you can get it from amazon um in america at the moment uh the book depository is the place to go and they will send and not just america they will send everywhere in the world postage free uh but for sure big book is quite something uh it is a heavy book as we were talking about before yes yes so that's where if you want to go to the book depository or if you're in britain uh there are a number of possibilities and my channel continues to um you know be a place where there's material about what i'm doing what i'm thinking interviews and so forth wonderful ian thank you very much thank you thanks for tuning in if you're still here at this point then i'm guessing you liked some of what you saw so go ahead and hit subscribe to get notified the next time i release one of these conversations they'll get bombarded by a whole bunch of annoying notifications which you wouldn't want from anyone else apart from me until next time keep learning and catch you then

Channel: MetaLearn

Views: 29,747

Keywords: iain mcgilchrist, ian mcgilchrist, iain mcgilchrist ted talk, the master and his emissary, the matter with things, split brain, split brain experiments, split brain theory, right brain, left brain, right brain vs left brain, the matter with things book review, iain mcgilchrist the matter with things, iain mcgilchrist book, iain mcgilchrist book review, the matter with things mcgilchrist, right brain left brain, left brain right brain, iain mcgilchrist controversy

Id: CQ0iA98OhFo

Length: 90min 30sec (5430 seconds)

Published: Thu Nov 25 2021