Part Three of School of Nothing Buttery: Matter and consciousness

effectively the mainstream culture prioritizes matter because it prioritizes things and hence my title the matter with things you see the world is wrong and when it has to decide what the heck consciousness is it imagines it must emerge from things from matter and of course a brain is material and a brain certainly seems to run in parallel with consciousness when things happen to the brain they affect consciousness there's no question about it that's been known for a couple of thousand years but the assumption that matter leads to consciousness is no better grounded in fact i would argue less well-rounded than the idea that consciousness gives rise to matter there are three possibilities indeed that matter emits consciousness um that it transmits consciousness or that it permits consciousness and in this it's like a tv set if an alien were to land in this world and to inspect the tv set it wouldn't be able to tell whether it transmitted something or generated something because the machinery would look the same now in brief i haven't got time to do the argument but i can argue that easily the least probable of these is the idea that matter in some form emits consciousness um first of all we haven't the slightest clue nobody has even the vestige of a clue how matter could give rise unconscious matter could give rise to consciousness and as walter i'm sorry not william james um pointed out it's rather like a story in midshipman easy a 19th century novel in which a woman who's had an illegitimate child excuses it by going but if you please sir it's a very little one the idea that might be a very little consciousness uh before consciousness as it were just the kind of ghost of consciousness about to be doesn't help us because either it's conscious or it isn't and if it's conscious in any degree the same problem uh exists it's not like things that emerge it's not like flow emerging from h2o molecules there's something about the chemistry of h2o molecules that we know predicts that they will flow when they're a mass often but there is nothing about the nature of matter that says that under any circumstances it can give rise to consciousness so um there's an awful lot to say but the first thing is um neurons are not necessary for consciousness and there are cases of people who have certainly almost no cortex whatever and yet are able to function as a simple level and there's a case of um chap who got a first class degree in mathematics from leeds and had an iq of um nearly 130 and and was found to have only a tiny rim of brain very very much smaller than them than the normal brain um and as i say there are people who are um have a very special unusual condition um in which they don't have cerebral cortex at all and yet they can recognize people they can behave socially they can enjoy music and so forth and people think that it i never got this argument but people say things like well it emerges out of all the connections well yes that's fine it's slightly like the idea that if you just put more and more notes together magically notes will do something but it's it's actually more than that it's is it something come out of the notes it's the form and the form is not actually in the notes at all so the form is not in the connections one thing that i find very striking you probably know is that the cerebellum the ancient part of the brain at the posterior part of the of the brain has four times as many neurons as the cerebrum the part which maintains consciousness for us and it's not that they're not very interconnected they have some of the most sophisticated and most interconnected cells in the human body purkinje neurons so it simply isn't a case of multiplying connections because nobody has been conscious just with a cerebellum and we now can see that plants can make decisions can respond to situations situations that they couldn't have been prepared for and if anybody wants to ask me about them i can describe experiments but i probably haven't got time at the moment but um two rather interesting insights into into what i'm saying are that so vital are some organs to creatures that the the sense of the loss of them causes them to generate them even when they don't have the gene for it so you can breed eyeless flies by deleting the gene for eyes and their offspring have no eyes and you carry on after 14 generations they have eyes but they don't have the gene and even more astonishingly is that a certain um silly a certain um ciliate organism you can uh remove the gene for the flagellum and i've been told that even in a matter of days it will generate a new flagellum even though it now doesn't have the gene for it now i'm not a geneticist but this is what i'm reporting and and perhaps i've got time just to tell you the fun experiment about plants because um let's start with the simple one and a sensitive plant mimosa pudica um is designed to close uh if it's touched and if you stroke the leaf it will close if you carry on doing that and it doesn't experience any harm it will stop doing it you might say well yes it's fatigued but if you drop a drop of water on it which is different from a touch of a finger it can tell the difference and it closes because it detects danger so it's not straightforward and here's something really remarkable you can grow pea shoots in a circumstance in which they are craving light and light can come to them down one arm or another over y-shaped tube and the plant will get more light if it grows towards the tube down which the light is going to come but the clever experiment randomly varies in but what the experimenter does is to send a puff of air down the tube sometime before the light is going to go on and there are two sets well three including a control but in one experimental set the advent of the puff of air means light will come down that same arm of the y out of which the air came in the other experimental setup it's the other way around when you experience the puff of air the light is not going to come down that particular arm and the plant is able to be trained in a quite short space of time to detect the air first and know that that's where the light is going to come from and grow towards the light there are many other things i mean there's a whole literature on this but the very idea that plants which of course have no neurons at all um can't be conscious of things seems to me wrong and we now know more and more about very simple brains i mean the the brain of a crow or a magpie is something of which humans may be frightened they can do things that some quite clever children can't do in terms of calculation working out what's going on and they have no neocortex at all and the whole size of the brain is minute um mind you it's very profusely um interconnected within itself but there you are it's a it's an interesting observation so well i just like to end then without with the final few words it seems to me that we've fallen under the spell of not just a way of thinking but a way of being in the world which is wrong um we have a a full set of values and in the hierarchy of values that the philosopher max shaler drew up at the base there was the values of utility and the values of pleasure and at the summit was the value of the holy and in between there was a level of what he called laden's vetera the sort of values of life which were things like courage magnanimity fidelity loyalty and those sort of things and then above that um was beauty goodness and truth and then there was the holy and it seems to me um and i say this in the master in his emissary that the left hemisphere reduces all those higher things to a utility the story is that the holy was invented so that priests could have a um a hierarchy which literally is the is the um the the the ascendancy of priest um and that beauty goodness and truth are things that society needs in order to um guide copulation and hold the um society together the labends there are things that um simple people do self-sacrifices for the value of the rest of the community and that all in the end boils down to utility and pleasure but i think the right hemisphere sees things in exactly the opposite direction that things are useful so much as they create something that actually gives to life and gives meaning to life and that leads us to a place where we can experience beauty and goodness and truth and ultimately the holy and i'd like to suggest that whatever those terms mean the meaning of a life comes from the journey towards them whatever they are and the effort to understand what they are and what they mean and i don't think that we as well give the meaning we find the meaning it's not an invention it's a discovery well i'll stop there thank you very much well and thank you very much indeed i i like i mean you know you you want us to go up to the hole in the holy rather than always going down to the the quanta or the grubs or the parts of the bottom and you end very very strongly in that direction

Channel: Dr Iain McGilchrist

Views: 2,374

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, matter and consciousness, matter and consciousness mcgilchrist, mcgilchrist on matter and consciousness, what is matter, what is consciousness

Id: 6axDitByfUg

Length: 11min 22sec (682 seconds)

Published: Wed May 12 2021