Part Two: School of Nothing Buttery - Three examples of how damaging our current way of thinking is

now in the time that's left to me i haven't i can't go over very much but i thought i'd take three examples of what i mean about how damaging this way of thinking can be and the first one is really just to demonstrate how absurd it is in my life and maybe in yours one of the most meaningful things of all is music now if you take music apart you get phrases and then finally you get notes and then you go oh a glass i've put it into my cloud chamber and i can definitively affirm that music is made of notes um round of applause now what is a note once we know what a note is we can work out what music is um but of course the note is well nothing really it's just a meaningless sound and if you put um thousands and thousands and thousands of these together you get mozart's g minor quintet which probably means more than anything that you can encounter in the world how does that happen it can't be in the notes we've established that because one note means nothing two notes mean nothing three notes mean nothing and presumably therefore thirty five thousand notes mean nothing so it must be in something else well the only things that there are are gaps there's just silence which is the gaps between the notes and the melody the gaps between the notes in the harmony as they occur at the same time and the ictus of the way in which the thing moves but silence on its own doesn't mean anything either so this is a perfect example of a gestalt and to me a much better image of the universe is a symphony or a dance or a beautiful piece of choral music rather than the machine i don't just say that in some um flowery poetic way i mean not there's anything wrong with the insights of poetry um but i mean it in a very deep philosophical way that we misunderstand it and of course the other thing about music is that it simply cannot be understood except in an active encounter it's not there and you can look at it and go away and inspect it you have to encounter it now that is a very good image of everything in our lives everything in our experience and i would say of the nature of the cosmos the second thing that i would look at is something that will take me a little bit longer but which is really very important to me because after all i'm a doctor and i've worked in the area of neurology and psychiatry very prominent in the life sciences as they're called is the image of the machine now physics curiously moved on from the image of a machine about a hundred years ago it decided that simply the cosmos is nothing like anything mechanical at all however this message hasn't got through to certain prominent public intellectuals in the realm of the biological sciences who carry on in a perfect propagated mid 19th century way to see uh the whole business of the living world as mechanical and we must stop conceiving of not only living beings as things sorry not as just as machines but as things at all they're processes and in the last 18 months i've been very excited by discovering a book called everything flows quoting heraclitus the greatest philosopher that ever lived and it's by dupre and nicholson published by aup and i do recommend it to everyone i i think on a policy of oups you can in fact read it online for free um and it has uh enormous amount in it but it effectively takes apart the idea that living beings are anything at all like a machine and the information in it is staggering what is fascinating of course is that at one level of course neurology at least neuroscience which is perhaps a less humane thing than neurology where you were forced to confront suffering humanity every day in neuroscience in the lab your knowledge it's easier to think of what you're looking at as just some little circuit or some something mechanical and so the language of neuroscience is full of feedback loops and circuits gates that open and close and um parcels of information and so forth whereas um in fact when people start talking about cells including neurons but all cells they cannot help using a language which absolutely wouldn't be necessary or tolerated in physics or chemistry they talk about a cell designing something helping something um forming something and promoting something interpreting something messaging something all things that only living things actually do there's a lot to say about that disjunct but let me just allow that to to take away that and then of course we've inherited from richard dawkins this very silly idea that we are just um the tools of machine-like robots um that enable them to do whatever it is they do interestingly this is actually just a transposition of the idea of an engineering god it's saying that we don't do things something else does things to us and controls us except that his idea of the engineering god is contained in a gene and i i don't hold an engineering god a god depending on what it means may be but that's another matter well first of all genes don't determine very much at all they are according to luontine as very great biologists some of the most inactive molecules in biology they are more like a storehouse on which the cell can draw as it needs the cell acts on the genome and in fact in some creatures this is an extreme case but we all living creatures do it up to a point but there is a very small single-celled organism that regularly jumps about 90 percent of its genome and refashions the order of rest on orders from the cell that's a huge thing when we finish this heroic task of decoding the genome we found that there was just not enough information there the image that always comes to mind i'm sure all of us over a certain age at any rate have seen faulty towers possibly more than once and there is a wonderful episode probably the best of the whole lot where um the the chef has got drunk and basil faulty has to go and get a duck from his friend andre a chef in town and comes back smirking pushing his trolley with the silver dish and he pulls the lid off and there's a bla monge and she says nothing but just goes and then goes ducks off and that's the end but i'm afraid the discovery at the end of this trail of the genome is just like that it's not there how many genes does the human being have about 26 000 actually depending on what you define as a gene you might think a gene is a clear discrete concept but actually it's not but we normally say about 26 000 whereas a blind millimeter long um worm uh c elegans uh has nineteen thousand um a very small water flea called daphnia pulex has i think 39 000 and the biggest genome of all is one species of amoeba that has something like 200 times as much genomic content as the human genome now on top of that only two percent of the genome is thought actually to be um active i mean we'll probably discover um how foolish that idea is but at the moment 98 is called junk dna it doesn't leave you very much with which to conjure the extraordinary complexity so that in even one single cell ten thousand different reactions are going on every second with pathways that are not simple and discreet but interlock with one another so what is important is the system as a whole not just the genome but the gene gnome and the cell and the surrounding tissue and the whole being in which the whole thing is going on now one of the first things that alerts you to the fact that organisms are not like cell and not look like machines is that machines can be switched on and off people can't nor can hamsters and but every machine i know can be switched on and off you can switch it off for a few years you can come you can start it up and on the whole you'll hope that after a few hiccups it will carry on doing whatever it was doing and that's not actually a small point is what is happening is that there is a continuous process we are processes not things not even aggregates of things and what has to be explained in the human being is not motion as in a machine how does this come to move well because we burn a lot of things in a fire station we plug it in and it then starts moving then we switch it off no we change all the time to remain the same in fact this is the saying of heraclituses by changing it remains the same and this is absolutely true of a cell or any living thing in fact the interesting thing is that in greek the word for change there is metaballon which is basically the word in metabolism so what we are doing metabolizing is changing all the time and when you see a picture of a cell in a a microphotograph or in a drawing in a textbook it looks like it has clear boundaries but actually it's not those boundaries that look solid are actually fluid and things are coming into them and going out of them all the time they're more like rivers than they are like walls the process of evolution as well natural selection natural selection is not the the bringer of change change is there automatically in nature all the time fluidly changing in response to the environment it's a dance natural selection is a stabilizer it goes hang on we quite like that one are we going to fix it so it's actually not what it is often taken to be nor of these systems uh linear systems in any sense at all i've already mentioned that they often have recursive loops in which they act on themselves um and in fact sydney brenner who won a nobel prize for his work in genetics says that basically in the cell it's everything doing everything to everything else so um the idea that one can get to simplicity as one goes on the way down is absolutely not right nor can you fix anything as a single component because everything is interdependent so everything depends on its place in the whole and in a machine you know you've got a widget or a tappet or whatever it is you can take it out rub it clean put it back in again whatever but in a human or an animal or a single cell or the the simplest living thing you you don't have this business of independence there's a very nice little book by a quite young um microbiologist called kriti sharma called interdependence which i found very impressive in which she says it's not just as we know that the organism is always in dialogue with the environment because one tends to think that the organism has an effect on the environment and then the organ the environment has an effect on the organism and then etc but it's not and then the two come into being together because of one another rather like the piece of music nor is it in any sense a predictable matter what a gene will do it depends entirely on the context in a very gross way for example um probably any of you who've done school biology will know that the eye of a fly compound eye the eye of a frog and a human eye are really very different both to look at and how and in how they function but the principal gene that codes for them is the same in every case it's pac-6 i mean of course there are other genomic differences but the point i'm making is this that what a gene does can't be predicted until you know pretty much about everything about all the other genes so that a single gene can produce as many as 2 000 different proteins on different occasions so what does it code for is not a straightforward matter and indeed while the same outcome can be derived from a number of different genetic cellular streams equally the same elements can give rise to many many different outcomes so as it were in both directions you've got a fan not a straight line so the whole is very important in its influence and of course again living things as i've rather emphasized don't have precise boundaries and i i mean of course psychically one may well know that but i mean it's not foreign at all to mainstream biology that the brain and the heart give off waves that are detectable within feet around but also that you know i am partly what my environment uh gives to me and what i give to it there isn't a sharp boundary at the edge of me and of course the final thing is that um living things bootstrap they're often compared with you know mindlessly to computers but it's not for a computer a computer can build another computer but it already has to have the information um it doesn't generate the information in the process of becoming the machine you can't just put a lot of things together and hope that they will generate information at the same time it's the thing that the information refers to um and in this living things are again very different so i would suggest that a much better image for all living things and quite possibly for inanimate things which i don't think are wholly distinct from living things i think they are if you like a limit case of the living but that would take us away from i can't cover that now but the better image would be the flow of life or the stream of life um than that of the machine and there's nothing nebulous about that a stream has enormous force it can change things it can move boulders it creates whirlpools that you can photograph that will propel you so it's very very real um except that each eddy in the stream each part of the flow is not in any sense disconnected from any other part of the flare

Channel: Dr Iain McGilchrist

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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, nothing buttery, jordan peterson, iain mcgilchrist the master and his emissary, the divided brain, iain mcgilchrist new book, john cleese and iain mcgilchrist, philosophy, thinking

Id: yh6eYORByas

Length: 16min 22sec (982 seconds)

Published: Wed May 05 2021