Part One: School of Nothing Buttery - The dangers of a mechanistic philosophy

ian you are speaking about the school of nothing buttery is rather a jolly title and the floor is yours thank you very much thank you for inviting me and i'm really genuinely very sorry that it is not as we're me in the flesh i'm speaking to you from some ethereal realm on sky but uh but there we are i would love to to come to edinburgh one day and speak since writing the master's in chemistry i've gone on to write the book that um lance referred to which i'm hoping will be called the matter with things which is in effect um a sort of taking a part of the reductionist position which so much dominates our world not just in science but in public discourse about pretty much everything in the philosophy and the spirituality as well as the arts and uh just about all that we believe about ourselves and who we are so i address platinus's question who are we in the book and i do it of course as i do everything through the lens of the two hemispheres and i think this is uh relevant to what i'm going to be talking about tonight i take the the phrase the school of nothing buttery actually from a former oxford colleague of mine alas now deceased of philosopher j.r lucas who had a very nice sense of humor and uh like me he was i'm pretty unimpressed by the idea that the way you find out about something is simply to take it to parts and find that it consists of pretty much nothing at all and therefore was all along nothing to be concerned about um let alone to love and uh just one of the hemispheres would be likely to to adopt this this this position sometimes people think that maybe i'm being rather reductionist to talk about the mind through the an image of the brain but in fact i'm not because i'm not reducing mental activity something i'll come on to talk about to the brain in any sense at all i'm just saying that it constrains the ways in which we think about the world so um just in a few sentences what is relevant about the two ways in which our two hemispheres um deal with the world it's not that one of them does uh as it were logic and science and maths and the other one does sort of painting and it makes pretty pictures and and hums little tunes like pooh bear and it's actually nothing to do with what they do because they're both concerned with everything it's that the the way in which they do it and a lot of people would be very surprised to learn that the best contributions to science and maths in fact the the work of the great scientists and the great mathematicians relies very much on what i can demonstrate is effectively the right hemispheres the left or the right hemisphere in fact rote calculation uh simply analyzing things into bits yes that is what the left hand is very very skilled at but actually understanding what's going on seeing connections and seeing the shape of things is not its strong suit so effectively what i believe is that the left hemisphere has this take on the world which prioritizes one little part of it this has a an evolutionary basis in that we need in order to exist at all to be able to focus on something that we require whether it be food or a twig to build a nest or whatever it might be and we need to do so accurately sharply and be able to manipulate it at the same time we need to be able to keep a wide open sustained attention to the whole scene so that we know there's a predator coming or those are my kin that i need to be getting food to so that's the basis of the idea and because of this effectively the left hemisphere has a very very tiny very narrow probably about three percent of the well sorry three degrees of the whole 360 degrees arc which is very much in focus and that is all that it sees at any one time the right hemisphere sees the whole picture including the extremes on both left and right and what this leads to is a vision in the left hemisphere of a world that is made up of bits that is actually composed of things that are not connected they're discrete fragments they are static because that's how you grab them you fix them and you get them um they are taken out of context because all the context has been shared off um they are largely abstract one sense of what they are in one's life and in an embodied experience is not part of what the left hemisphere is interested in they're categorized they're no longer unique so you have this world made up of little bits that you put together in order to make ah i see i've got a bicycle whereas the right hemisphere is seeing that nothing is ever completely distinct from anything else at all that things are never static but are involved in a three or four or five dimensional universe with many other things that they constantly flow and change um and that they um are things to which we are connected we're not sitting in a kind of powerfully detached almost psychopathic position of um observation whereby we work out what we want to do to manipulate things so these give two completely different um pictures of the world one is a bureaucrat's dream that's the left hemispheres one and the other is a bureaucrat's nightmare because it's very hard to pin it down so when we come to the idea of [Applause] what we see we're given two versions basically what i hinted at quite strongly in the master in his emissary and make very plain in the first part of the new book is that we can go a little further than saying there are just two visions we can very strongly prefer one as more in touch with reality now it has been put to me that how can you say that because if it's all coming through the two hemispheres you need a third hemisphere that judges the first two but it's not actually like that um as i think one of the greatest philosophers of the last 120 years uh william james uh pointed out and as the whole pragmatist movement including brilliant cs pers john dewey and so on is that things are tested out on experience now i suppose you had two um flight controls in your cockpit and they gave you different information you needed them both for different things at different times but they seem to be giving you know different information that didn't exactly go here you were getting on fine and you were told you i'm afraid one of them's got to go down we haven't got enough power for both you're only going to have to live on one the test of which one is more in touch with reality is which one will keep you in the air longer which one will um crash you into a mountain side rather quickly and my contention is that if you follow the image of the left hemisphere you crash into the mountain side rather quickly i believe that is indeed what we are hasting to do in the 21st century and we haven't got very much time because we're approaching that mountain site extremely fast so one can judge these things and what i've looked at is the nature of the attention that the hemispheres play to the world the quality of their perceptions which you can test against reality um the reality and subtlety of judgments that are made on the reality that is attended to and perceived um how much it is actually understood both in terms of emotional and social intelligence which is an enormous part of our life and how much just in terms of good old-fashioned iq cognitive intelligence and which is better at enabling us to make the imaginative move to whatever it is that we're trying to understand and in every single case i can demonstrate that the right hemisphere is superior so we can get the signature of the right hemisphere because it sees a certain kind of shape when it looks at the world that is not pinnable down is never ultimately knowable is always in process is constantly connected with everything else and we know the imprint of the deceitful left hemisphere which there are just dead bits that have to be put together now that's condensed uh i think 437 pages and so uh i won't say much more about about that except to make a contrast between two ways of thinking about an understanding one is the analysis where you you say you take it apart you take it apart and you can carry on this process going down to cells down to genes down to atoms down to subatomic particles you can carry it on as far as you like until you can't find anything that you can actually specify at all um and you're left with nothing this vanishing trick seems particularly difficult for people who pride themselves on not deceiving themselves to see through but the other way is to see not by going down but by going up because if everything is connected it says as much about me that i'm composed of cells as it tells you about a cell that it can go to make me and this is true not just of living things but throughout the universe um it tells you about the simplest things as alfred north whitehead um made very clear what it is that they can ultimately come to be and express as much as doing it the other way around why i always look downwards why not look upwards because a very simple thing that tends to be a culture of has been for a hundred years or so somewhat like holistic one of seeing the human being as a a lonely alien in the universe struggling to find meaning struggling to make beauty struggling to love but what i'd like to point out is there's nowhere but out of the universe that love imagination creativity beauty can come where do they come if they don't come out of that same cosmos it's a fact that the cosmos has it in it to produce box b minor mass that is a fact it's not my opinion now if that's the case it says something very interesting about the stuff of the cosmos so the other way of looking at things is what overall hole that defies analysis into parts does it go to make and the term that is most helpful here we don't have a word in english is the german word gestalt the gestalt means the overall figuration the overall sense of the whole that is lost when you start taking it apart now science would do very well not to have as it has done over the last 200 years become divorced from philosophy and philosophy would have been well not to get divorced from science they've both lost by it and in my writing i try to bring them together and enrich both there's a rather unfortunate race to the bottom which is when they do pay attention to one another i mean actually science is not really interested in philosophy because it will they feel it's rather irrelevant and hold them up on their um getting the next prize um and it just seems to them obvious uh because they've never been i'm afraid many of them trained in in anything like philosophy that the universe just is a machine and that people just are machines and sometimes they're rather sort of hurt and surprised if you say but that's not obvious at all and seem to think oh really i mean how could you think differently so um scientists don't think much of philosophy and a lot of the time philosophies just think philosophers just think that sciences some beneath them really and can't tell them anything now i think both of these positions are mistaken um of course philosophy can enormously sophisticate what science um tells it um and um science can be enormously sophisticated by philosophy and and and informed by philosophy and enriched but what i'm afraid is happening is that scientists go well i'm afraid when we look at everything it's just a machine and the philosophers go yeah well probably the best philosophy for dealing with it is a mechanistic philosophy so we're really losing out and one of the things i hope to aim with this next book is that i i break that vicious loop in which we uh hurry one another to the bottom as fast as possible

Channel: Dr Iain McGilchrist

Views: 10,963

Keywords: the master and his emissary, dr iain mcgilchrist, left brain, right brain, neuroscience, psychology, left brain right brain, brain hemispheres, ian mcgilchrist, iain mcgilchrist, left hemisphere, right hemisphere, tuesday talks arthur conan doyle centre, arthur conan doyle centre, school of nothing buttery, nothing buttery, jordan peterson, iain mcgilchrist the master and his emissary, the divided brain, iain mcgilchrist new book, john cleese and iain mcgilchrist, philosophy

Id: pIrPU1VX5Uo

Length: 14min 7sec (847 seconds)

Published: Thu Apr 29 2021