Perspectives on the Nature of Reality to Inform Systemic Change Dr Iain McGilchrist,CERN,Switzerland

what am I going to do this evening I'm going to try to do the impossible um in the old days students used to have nothing very much to do at University so they used to entertain themselves with pranks like how many people can you fit into a telephone box and it's going to be a little bit like that tonight I'm going to see how many uh ideas I can cram into whatever time has allowed me I want to begin by talking a bit about the uh I remember what I call the hemisphere hypothesis um the the question of the difference between the hemispheres but mainly as a portal to a further exploration of reality it seems to me that at the moment where we're puzzled about reality because um there are messages that come to us particularly from some areas of post-modernism that there is no such thing as truth everything is just whatever you make up I don't believe that for an instant I believe passionately that there are truths that they are really simple and they may sometimes conflict with one another so it is hard to set up a program of them but we can learn to look for them and be more successful in finding them and it's in that project that I've been writing for um 30 Years first semester in his Emissary and then the matter with things which came out a couple of years ago were less than that now November 21 and in it I try to take strands from what we know about the brain what we know about our thinking patterns in Consciousness and what we know from physics these seem like three pretty core ways of looking into the nature of reality I'm not suggesting there is one single easy reality I'm not suggesting there is one ever knowable truth I'm suggesting we mustn't ever give up on the idea that it is worthwhile for a human life in fact it is imperative for a human life to be searching for such a reality and such a truth otherwise we are frankly deluded and I believe that much of the world I now live in is suicidally deluded when I come on to that later now let me see oh that's good so this is a quote from Pascal the twofold nature of man is so evident that some have thought that we had two Souls well he's not the only person who said something like this said something like this schopenhower um the wonderful German philosopher Max Shayla who in my view is underrated and under red these days they all had this Instinct that there were two sort of almost people or points of view within us that were somewhat in conflict each could be helpful for some things but neither of them was complete in themselves and in fact incidentally in writing this book I found that there are stories like the story of the master and his Emissary which gave me the title of my earlier Book 2009 from all around the world the story I took there was supposed to re-situate the way in which we think about the left and right hemisphere when I was in medical school it was said that the left hemisphere sort of was terribly important because it controls the right hand with which you do the grasping and it controls certain elements of language mainly speech through which we say we grasp things but actually it turns out that the right hemisphere is far far more important for getting a hold on the world than the left hemisphere and indeed when people have had a stroke it is harder for them to recover from a stroke in the right hemisphere than I spoke in the left hemisphere even though the left hemisphere stroke often affects their speech and affects their abilities use their right hand so and I could say at this point that in the in the later book that I'm I've written the matter of things which came out as I say November 21. I begin by looking at what I call the various portals through which we can um get a grasp of the world at all get some kind of understanding of it receive information from it and I take it that those are attention perception which is not the same as attention judgment the ideas we form on the basis of what we attend to and what we perceive emotional and social intelligence cognitive intelligence in other words IQ and creativity because that enters into our ability to interpret what it is we're seeing and in all of these I demonstrate at length over 400 pages and I draw on 5 600 pieces of research I can demonstrate conclusively that all of these are better carried out by the right hemisphere it is more veridical it is more intelligent more perceptive and much better guide to reality and when people have right hemisphere damages has been commented on by neurologists over at least a century they lose any sense of reality they become deluded start hallucinating and indeed in schizophrenia which is the the topic that probably Rings bells for most people when one mentions delusions and hallucinations what is going on there is something like a defunct or deficient right hemisphere which has been compensated for by an overactive left hemisphere anyway that's all by way of an introduction but first of all let me just ask this question most of you here will have heard something like this what hemisphere differences that's all complete rubbish that was all blown out of the water 30 years ago it's all nonsense don't even listen to it and there's a sort of circular thing that happens here this is what people were taught so they never looked because they never looked and never found anything different from what they've been told so much later in their careers they don't want to spend 30 years like the action finding out what are the differences between the hemispheres because it would mean the end of their career they'd be despised by their colleagues they wouldn't get promotion so I'm afraid this is a question of a and what you might call it an urban myth it is an idea that itself needs powerfully to be debunked if you don't believe me read my work it is enormously well referenced you can look up everywhere what it is that I'm referring to and why it is scientifically based I'd just like to ask you three simple questions why is the brain divided this is a picture by the salius and we were in Basel the other day and passed by accident a house he said here lived this age it's in 1542 this slightly grumpy looking man had the top of his head lifted off and here you see the left hemisphere pushed slightly to the side to expose this Vander fibers at the base of the brain called the corpus callosum why is the brain divided in this way if the power of the brain is in making connection connections why have it so massively divided and it's not just our brains by the way it's all the brains we've ever looked at mammals reptiles amphibians Birds right down to Insects having separate different ganglions wherever you look and in fact in the oldest creature that we know has a neural network which is said to be the ancestor of the mammalian brain a sea creature called nematicello vectensis the brain is the neural network is somewhat divided and asymmetrical which is the next thing I'm coming onto why is the brain asymmetrical here you're looking up at the base of the brain as if you're looking up your own spinal column and you can see that the right hemisphere which is helpfully on the left is um larger than the uh the corresponding frontal labor the left hemisphere and similarly at the back the left hemisphere is larger than the right when I was in medical school that was always said to be because of language but we know it has nothing to do with language it has become used by language now that the brain has this expansion that the expansion was not caused by language because it's there in chimpanzees gorillas orangutans and other creatures that we've tried to teach language to and got nowhere and the third thing is the corpus callosum itself this band of fibers which only two percent of brain fibers actually cross from one hemisphere to the other it's rather wonderful this Suburban doorbell suddenly coming in from the cosmic reaches um what I've got here is a normal human brain uh over whoops there oh and over here I've got I was very privileged I got a slice through uh Donald Trump's brain and um oh no sorry it's a dog's brain but anyway what you see is that um the dog's brain is smaller than a human brain uh quite a lot but the corpus callosum which is if I can do this this whoa band of fibers here and the same thing in white over here in the whoops in them there the job I didn't have a drink and so you can see that it's it's not as big um comparatively with the brain so the the corpus callosum is getting smaller over Evolution and it only started in mammals prior to mammals it wasn't a court of escalation at all and get this the main purpose of the corpus callosum is to inhibit to tell one hemisphere to the other one keep out of it um many of the fibers across the corpus callosum for those of you are neuroscientists are excitatory they're due to liturgic but they are but on Gaba urgent neurons which are functionally inhibitory and that why this might have a a reference to a human culture is expanded in this book The Master and his Embassy why would this have anything to do with human culture but I'm going to explain to you that the two hemispheres have evolved to do completely different things and in this book I go into that and the philosophy of it but I also look at the history of human culture and suggests that there are times when we have got these two aspects of our brains out of balance I'll come on to that now as was mentioned by Amir a central concept for me is attention when I discovered that one of the most important distinctions between the two brain hemispheres was the way in which they pay attention to the world it didn't immediately dawn on me why this was so significant because I had been trained in a mechanistic way of thinking about the brain which was that attention is just another cognitive function that can be measured in the lab and it could be simulated by a machine a machine can be directed towards something but it can't pay attention to it and attention is something very special indeed because I believe it actually creates the world the only world that any of us can know is the world that comes into being for us and that world is a combination of something coming from us and something out there and I believe that this is a two-way relationship in fact that all things in the cosmos have two-way relationships are reverberated in their nature and I'm trying to get away from naive realism on the one hand a naive idealism on the other naive realism I call rot that the reality is out there r-a-t and that's just nonsense that there's just a world out there and we record it passively like a photographic plate or a sound recorder no something of us goes into what we find there which is why what we find there has some very general common ground but it's not identical in every experience even by the same person never mind by different persons but I also don't think that it is um what you might call Mumbo made up miraculously by ourselves m-u-m-bo which is the kind of post-modern idea that it's just a fantasy out of our brains it is something that happens between in what I call a betweenness betweenness is not just a gap between it is it's like an electric current where is the electric current is it in the positive terminal no is it in the negative terminal no it needs them it is in the space between no it's in the whole ensemble it and between this is what happens when two fingers come into a new unit and something uh comes about that is different from either of any of its uh component parts but subsumes them so they're necessary but not sufficient now this is the mountain behind my house its name derives from a Norse word which means a sloping Rock and you can see why because from the sea this mountain was a signal to the Vikings who came there um a thousand years ago that this was a very dangerous Bay in which they would be Shipwrecked so to them this mountain was a landmark that meant life and death but there were people here before the Vikings there were the pits and they've left their Brocks their Stone houses and we know that for them this mountain was the home of the Gods then in the 18th century people came to drawn paint in Scotland it's a very beautiful landscape and they would have seen this as a many colored many textured form of beauty and then in the 19th century people came and they were interested in geology and it just happens to be an extremely good example of Colombia battle formation um so to all these people it was something different and then to a physicist you ask a physicist What It Is Well 99.99 of it is we empty space and the other bit the point zero one percent we don't really know what it is after all so which of these is the real mountain I ask you now my answer to that is that no one of them is the full story but each of them is the real mountain each of them is a real way of looking at the mountain as you say to me yeah but come on it's just a big lump of rock that already is a very specialist way of looking at it which betrays your values and your particular narrowness of way of viewing because it's many many things now if you apply that across the world you realize that attention is a creative act attention is a moral act because what you make of the world is something that really comes out when I attend you in a certain way I can I can bring something that is warm good beneficent perhaps healing um as a good therapist or doctor might be able to do if I pay attention to you in a clinically detached way I can make you feel very small very alien and so on we create the world around us we actually make things through our attention so how you attend matters because it forms up like this once you start looking in one way you find only the bits of the world that respond to the way you look the world is a machine so you look at it this is mechanical that's mechanical the other's mechanical the whole thing's a machine but that's because looking at it as a machine all you see are the bits that respond to that mechanistic view and if you do you then start to look further in this same way thinking that was a good start and now you just harden up so after a few decades it's very difficult to break out of a habit of mind that we are instilling into people in the west which was never held at any other time in human history never held in other parts of the world and the West until very recently and is extremely odd this is the kind of attention paid by the left hemisphere targeted on something the reason that we have these two hemispheres imagine why do we have these two hemispheres is because the left is good at one thing only it's much better than the right at grabbing at grasping and it even the processes whereby we say we have grasped something we have a big question or indeed comprehend comprehendary is to graspolo or apprehend this to grasp onto comprehend is probably different is to sort of see the hole together which is what the right hemisphere alone can do but this is how the left hemisphere looks at the world a leads to be job done but the broad view of the right hemisphere see is that a and b are connected but not as directly as you've thought and that the system is living hence the birds and the tree and complex not this complicated uh you may say it's very facile to talk about one hemisphere as a whole and of course I am neurologically trained I'm psychiatrically trained I know that there are different areas in the brain I know they have different functions if you read my writing you will find that the different areas do but it is also now known that instead of thinking modular in a modular way about the brain we should be thinking more in terms of whole networks and indeed the the when you excite one part of us at the left or the right hemisphere there will be excitations that spread much more widely throughout that Hemisphere and this is to show you a couple of sort of um if you like the super highways of transmission the superior longitudinal fasciculous and the fascicular sharing connections between the posterior parts of the brain and the frontal lobes and between the frontal lobes and the temporal lobe so um this pains me I'm going to do something it's extremely simple-minded and much more black and white than I would like it to be but because I just don't have time you'll have to take it as a bit of a caricature but broadly speaking uh it is what you can accept and if you want to know the Finesse and all the details then read my books so um there are various differences and one is that the the left I put the left hemisphere version on the left and the right hemisphere version on the right and in these dichotomies that are somewhat false dichotomies because nothing can be cut and dried when it comes to anything as complicated as the brain but nonetheless there are strong Tendencies for the right hemisphere to be able to apprehend new experiences of whatever kind new music new person new shape whatever it might be whereas the left hemisphere latches on to what is already known unfamiliar because it's looking for food it's looking for things to pick up with its right hand um and The evolutionary Point here is that if you're only attending to food and a tweak to build a nest and all the utilization of the world the manipulation of the world which left hemisphere is good for you'll soon be eaten by another creature while you're getting your own lunch because you need to be looking out for Predators for your mate for your con specifics and so you have to have some part of your brain that is holding the whole picture together while you go about grabbing and picking what you know it prefers what is certain to what is possible in other words it likes things to be cut and dried black and white whereas the right hemisphere is more open to uh ambiguity the left hemisphere prefers fixity it can it likes to fix things and literally when people have a certain kind of damage to the right uh posterior hemisphere they begin to see normal flow of motion broken up into like a sort of um a a a an old-fashioned cine film that's got stuck or stop go animation because after all it's targeting something and wants to catch it so it fixes it and fixes up so it sees a lot of static bits whereas the right hemisphere sees that everything is flowing the left hemisphere sees Parts where the right hemisphere sees the hole the right hemisphere has the body image in it which is the whole image of the body and all modalities the left hemisphere has a nose an elbow a knee a foot explicit versus implicit so the left hemisphere understands what is explicit what if you have a dictionary and a grammar and perhaps a computer could put them together but all that is implicit which is nine tenths of what matters to us things like love and a sense of the Sacred and the meaning of music and the understanding of poetry the understanding of humor uh sarcasm irony all these things that change the way the world is to be interpreted are taken at face value by the left hemisphere though understood by the right the left hemisphere tends to abstract things from their context and if you take things out of their context they change their meaning completely and the best way to understand something is to see it in the context which makes it what it is nothing is something outside of its context the context is what actually creates it which is one of the reasons I say that relations are prior to things the title of my later book is the matter with things which is upon about our obsession with matter and our obsession with things but things I say arise secondarily out of a web of relationships they're the things that catch our attention they are the the little hubs where things cross but actually they are only what they are because of their relations in abstracting it turns uh whatever it has into a general case not a unique one and here because I'm in Switzerland this first time I've ever talked about this with two wonderfully described cases rather sad cases one is of a woman who spent her whole life um describing and writing about the birds of Switzerland and you have a wonderful bird life here in Switzerland and she had a a right uh posterior temporary parietal stroke and afterwards she said all the birds look the same this is pretty tragic and another is a case of a farmer a Swiss farmer who knew all his cattle by name but after a stroke he had it difficulty telling a cow from a horse so you see it deals in very broad categories but the right hemisphere sees the unique taste sees the units of you and the vastness of your friend the left hemis is mainly interested in how much of something the right hemisphere more in but how what is the quality of it naturally this world becomes inanimate and the right hemisphere sees the intimacy and you can actually isolate one hemisphere at a time painlessly experimentally using something called transcranial magnetic stimulation and if you if you suppress the right hemisphere people see what they would normally think of as living as inanimate if you suppress the left hemisphere they see things that we would normally think of as inanimate like the sun as a living being the left hemisphere is remarkably optimistic ridiculously optimistic you again you can isolate one hemisphere at a time and this is done sometimes prior to um brain surgery uh and it's called the water test and while one hemisphere is isolated the other one is not contributing it lasts for about 15 minutes during that time some psychologists administered a personality infantry to the subject and also to the subject's relatives and friends and discovered that the left hemisphere has a very high opinion of itself compared to what other people think but when it was the right hemispheres turn the right hemisphere was a little bit too negative about itself but more realistic and the most extraordinary demonstration of this is denial this is terribly important because I believe we now live in an age of denial all around us we are denying a whole host of things trying to not see them at all or saying the opposite is the case and this is very literal after the left hemisphere stroke somebody may have a paralyzed right arm or right leg and they'll be very unhappy about this they will weep about it complain to the doctor that if they've had a stroke in the right Hemisphere and the left side has the paralyzed they may completely deny there's anything wrong so you're going to see them in the morning after they come into the stroke in the night say how are you and they say fine I said oh that's very good and any difficulty moving anything no no can you move your left arm yep can you show me and they go there but nothing actually moves if you bring it round in front of them and say move that they say that's not my arm that belongs to that person over there or it belongs to you Doctor and the the most important but least exciting perhaps of this list is the difference between something that is truly present and something that is represented now represented literally means presented again after it is no longer present it is therefore already past finished dead and presenting is something that we don't allow the world to do nowadays because we're so quick with our representations and it's one of those it's a picturesque scene it's a lake it's a car it's a whatever we don't only if we practice mindfulness I'll be able to get back to that um States in which we are fully present and the world is fully present to us okay that's because I didn't know how to build that slide hello yes we've heard from you before now so um effectively what you've got here I I'd like to draw this together so you see the kind of world that the left hemisphere brings into being for us it's effectively I think we may have more problems with my poor skills at building slides but let's see that's all right so um first of all you've got a world in what we take for reality enough better check the pack on yeah yeah has it stopped working or well it's been very quiet all along I'd like to be louder but I'm not a technician yeah no I'm fine oh that's better that's a bit too much yeah thank you so first of all what we take to be reality is in fact just a representation a map a picture a diagram but not the complex Living Hope one that is in fact made up of isolated things things more over that are known familiar decontextualized fixed predetermined and made up of bits fragments disembodied having no meaning or coherence until we give it to them where all is abstract generic in nature infinitely reproducible and quantifiable and therefore inanimate and mechanical and the future is a fantasy which would be only better if we could get more of it under our control whereas in the right hemisphere one sees that nothing is ever entirely certain or predictable that all things are ultimately interconnected but there is nothing that is ever fixed but in fact that as Heracles said everything flows that what exists are holds the parts are an artifact of the left hemisphere's way of looking at it that meaning is implicit that the world of uniqueness is real not just categories that can be Quantified but having different qualities and an essentially animate will and here is a future that is a product of realism not denial we've got one hemisphere that sees just a theory of the world it's very simple and pleasing and it's only going to get better the right hemisphere is seeing the whole embodied impassioned business of Vitality and seeing that it is not necessarily leading somewhere we want to go there's a relationship between the brain and the structure of the cosmos um that's something I'm going to try and explain now and there is a sort of hierarchy of the right and left let me say this first of all I think I've explained that the right hemisphere is more veridical that it is a better transmitter of a producer of reality and the left hemisphere has certain limited uses what it sees is not wrong it's not that it's got no use it's just that its use is very limited and its knowledge is limited the problem only becomes when it thinks it knows more and we pay attention to that very narrow way of thinking as though it gives us the full picture which it doesn't so there's a hierarchy there and I think this is also demonstrable in physics I'll explain that and I I would say that when we're talking about you know how we would like to make a world it's a fantasy for us to imagine that we can just make up a world without understanding both our own brains and the cosmos and so this is where we need to start from in all our exercises of imagination and in whatever exists there is a replication of this thing about the brain which is that the left hemisphere tends to divide in order to understand but then cannot put it together again but the right hemisphere tends to see the whole and see the whole picture of which what the left hemisphere has been looking at is just a part now we need both these kinds of attention but one of them is more important than the other the capacity to see the whole and there are these forces for division and forces for Union throughout the physical Cosmos as well as the metaphysical one and what we need is the unity of the forces of division and Union not the division of the forces of division and Union do you understand I sometimes say we don't want either either or or both and we need both either or and base and I hope that's entirely clear um so this idea hello the unity of difference and unity is the first asymmetry the cosmos is founded on a symmetry um so this is all played out in this recent book of mine in two volumes 1300 pages of text 1500 altogether um now it's based on this idea that science and philosophy should never have been divorced with science in English only began being used to specialized meaning in 1830 until then science meant knowledge and indeed indeed what we call science is called natural philosophy because in fact what scientists don't see anymore is there is no such thing as just looking because the way you attend the preconceptions in which you attend Alters what you find if you don't know anything about philosophy you just think it's obvious that everything is mechanical because that is the philosophy of our age that is what people suck up from all around them as they grow that everything is mechanical but it is not actually mechanical organisms in particular are not like machines in at least eight ways which I explained in this book and here I'm approaching from my favorite English philosopher the last hundred years the antagonism being science and metaphysics is like all family quarrels being disastrous and from Collingwood science and metaphysics are inextricably United and standal four together any of you who hear a scientist please take that away and think about it it does matter and and one of the things that I wanted to talk about was the centrality of attention uh to what comes into existence I've talked a bit about that already then The Coincidence of opposites now to our way of thinking now how can opposites go inside it sounds impossible we're taught at school that if it's this then the opposite is as far away from it as possible but this is not the case actually because mental space metaphysical space and indeed physical space is curved it's not linear and the further you go in a certain direction the more you find yourself coming back to what you're running away from it's a truism that anarchy leads to tyranny that something extreme gives rise to its opposite because it has its opposition in it I've always thought that politicians is Extreme left and extreme right you can hardly get a razor blade between them they've got the same mentality which is to miss all the shades the complexities the subtleties of human existence um and uh I've already mentioned that I believe that relation has come before relata the things that are related and I just want to say something about limit cases being inverted this is my view of reality that you know in the old world in the old world of physics we taught that this was a Newtonian world that things are naturally static and they don't move unless they're given a push but now we know that there is nothing that is actually static in the entire Cosmos everything is in motion and stasis would be the limit case of motion not motion the limit case of stasis representation is the limit case of what is actually real total Independence is the limit case of interdependence because everything is interdependent there is no such thing as total Independence but if it existed at all it would be the limit case of the norm which is interdependence discontinuity is not the norm which then gets connected continuity is the norm you may say how why do you say that I can quote physicists who say this metaphysically I believe it should be the case from observation of the world I believe it to be the case but discontinuity discontinuity is the limit case of the continuous the explicit is not the norm and the implicit some very strange thing that happens in a poem implicit is what all our knowledge is explicit knowledge is a very special case that we learn how to say in words through the process of Education the literal is the limit case of the metaphorical everything is metaphorical everything even the words in fact particularly the words used by science and philosophy a point that has been made by philosophers themselves are based on metaphors because they're dealing in an abstract realm and they therefore have to draw things from a real world in fact the word abstract is itself something that means being dragged away I mean it's very physical um so meaning is effectively metaphorical the literal is only a special case of the metaphorical privilege one kind of meaning Randomness which actually doesn't exist anywhere in the cosmos would merely if it existed be the limit case of order which is everywhere Simplicity represents a special case of complexity because the more you go down even into the into the the the the quantum vacuum this is the simplest thing that we know and according to David Tong professor of physics Cambridge it's unbelievably complex so Simplicity is what we make when we clear away all the complexity I've got a mechanism how lovely that gives me a little treat power and the determinant is the limit of the indeterminate everything is actually ultimately indeterminate but in very special cases if you take the window narrow enough you can say it looks determinate and straight lines are the limit case of Curves not curves some special case or straight lines so all that exists is a kind of form and in the words of Whitehead beyond all questions of quantity that allow questions of pattern which are essential to the understanding of Nature and form is a matter of tension um can I go back yes this is from my favorite presocratic philosopher heraclitus or my favorite philosopher frankly they do not understand how a thing agrees with variance at variance with itself it is an Attunement turning back on itself like that of the bow and Lair what did he mean he meant that things are always in balance of their opposites that wherever something exists it's dark side that other end of it is there as well and that what you look for is not to collapse this creative tension into Justice or just that that holds attention for us is uncomfortable therefore we try to collapse you know it's just that or it's just that no you have to hold the two opposites and the bow and the liar is the string of about the string of the layer gives rise to the note that gives rise to the Flying Arrow and if you let that tension go slack and didn't pull into opposite directions pulling in opposite directions is logically a waste of time but actually it's essential to everything that exists because this tension is creative you want to make a good apple pie you don't get boring Bland apples you get nice tart apples and put lots of Honey with it okay and this is one of his deepest sayings graspings which means the coming together of things hoes and not hoes conversion diversion consonant dissonant from all things one and from one thing all I would love to have time to unpack that for you but take it away and read it and think about it and that relates to the idea of one and all I have a chapter on the coincidental opposite or on The Coincidence of opposite and a chapter on the one and the many and I say it is wise or he says it is wise listening not to me but to the logos which is like the founding ground of being to agree that all things are one and I put in Brackets and that the one is all things because the Greek grammar allows this ambiguity of dual interpretation as I say he will say and this is the second important point about physics is that everything flows that's not the same as everything changes there is a Buddhist saying that everything changes it's good as far as it goes but everything flows is better because not only does it suggest there's a difference between the meaning of flow and just the succession of things but also it contains within it the important idea that when things flow they both are different and the same the river that flows by my house is always the same river but the water is always different and heracleiter said famously you can't step into the same water twice um but that is beautiful because you also said by changing things remain the same see this very interesting idea that comes from observing the flow that in the flowing it remains what it is but it also becomes something other then here is Democritus another early Greek philosopher the cause of coming into being of all things is the vortex Vortex of course is a whirlpool and this is terribly important because uh well this is about flow really um this is David Tong again from Cambridge at a fundamental level nature is is nature discrete or continuous I see no evidence whatever for discreetness all the discreetness we see in the world is something which emerges from an underlying continuing quanta are emergent they're not built into the heart of nature so there we need discontinuity and we need continuity but continuity trumps if you like discontinuity it it is able to overarch the two and here is the vortex and there's various interesting things about the vortex first of all if you look at a whirlpool in a stream a world foolish photograph or measurable it can move stones is it in the water no it's not in the water like the stone is in the water it is water for that moment it is that water and I believe that beings including every one of you here if you think about your nature and your being you are like this whirlpool in that you are not distinct from whatever it is that constitutes us a sort of indigestible lump you are from something that is already there that takes the form you take at the moment and when you go it will be passed on and will still be part of the flow of the river so there are various things about vortex one is that it's as the nature of a spiral as you see and spiral staircases are very important because they are a good image of how we progress in life T.S Eliot said that the end of all our voyaging is to return to the point where we started from and know it for the first time but that's not actually true we don't ever return we can't ever return to the point we start it from because it's gone we come back somewhere higher on the spiral and look down at where we had been before but nonetheless the progress is in one sense circular but is also up foreign Jacob's Ladder as depicted by the poet and painter William Blake romantic Persian painter and it's the only Jacob's Ladder I know which shows it not as a straight line to heaven but as a spiral that climbs in this way forever and this is really just to say if you look at the spiral down its axis you see A Perfect Circle which is static and eternal but if you look along the side of the Spiral you see that it's actually not a particle but a waveform and that it is extending somewhere in space it has linearity and circularity recurrence and newness in one and this is just to show that inflow there is always movement which is reciprocal that's one of the things that flow gives rise to um and these are rather interesting these are photographs taken of the flow in water and what has been done is simply a straight line of rectangular rods that are rectangular in cross-section immersed in the Stream So absolute rigidity straight straight pieces bars in a line and what you get is this completely wonderful creative newness which flows and changes um this is something called the common Vortex Vortex Street which is created by an obstruction uh simply stuck into the flow of water and it results in this amazingly beautiful form and it's suggesting that flow and the obstruction of flow are creative in My Philosophy resistance to flow is as important as flow resistance is creative without resistance nothing can happen what is friction it's what stops movement but it's also what starts movement without friction I can't take a step so these things come together in this way and this is from Leonardo he's showing an old man leaning on the stick in the water and there he shows the patterns that follow which he describes as like braided hair coming from the stick and the most beautiful ratio on which many aesthetic um figures and pictures and so on our base is the so-called golden section which is asymmetric it has this interesting asymmetry built into it and this is just to say that each of those rectangles is in relation to the next rectangle in the ratio of 1 to 1.61 which is roughly speaking that of the um golden ratio and it relates to a spiral here you can see the generation of the Spiral out of it this spiral is Again part of the asymmetry of Nature and the both going uh forward from something but completing something at the same time these are snowflakes they're all the random we say expression or form they are all beautifully in one sense themselves but they are also fractal so as you go down the stem you see further Expressions which are of the overall nature of the whole um Snowflake and this is fractality which is another expression of difference in unity so there is a unity and as you go down into it and things differentiate they become more and more versions of the same thing in the way that um beautiful things often have this asymmetry built into them um I mentioned the the um the the the um the uh the golden ratio um but here is an example so many of them from Japanese art where there is both Symmetry and asymmetry and get this it's not just a symmetry that matters it's the asymmetry of symmetry with asymmetry look at that in a way it is symmetrical but in an important way it's also asymmetrical and it's the coming together of these two opposites that creates Beauty this is very profound in Beauty here here is um Gladius Villa The Villa Capra now known as The Villa Rotonda um in the region of Vegeta and you see that in this in some ways very formally perfect symmetrical facade there are little signs of of life there are these figures that this is a very strange thing hold on these figures that are living and asymmetrical and here there is a goat which was the family the coat of arms of the Katra family and so it has a sense of the beautiful symmetry but complemented by asymmetry now look at this which is a copy of it basically built at the University of Virginia by Thomas Jefferson who was a not inconsiderable architect it's just symmetrical I had to put that in because there's asymmetry and Symmetry and the asymmetry of symmetry and asymmetry so something about sameness and difference is very important we don't just want difference or sameness for the both together and this is from getter dividing the United uniting The Divided is the very life of nature this is the Eternal sistery and diastole the Eternal coalescence and separation the inhalation and exhalation of the world in which we live and where our existence is woven and Sicily and diastole are the two beats of the heart sisterly is the lap and diastole is the duck of relaxation no uh just to finish on physics I wanted to quote Pastor who of course was a biologist the universe as a whole is asymmetrical and I've come to believe that life as it is Manifest to us is a function of the asymmetry of the upload the asymmetry of the Universe I would even say that living species are primordially in their structure in their external forms functions of the cosmic asymmetry from his inaugural lecture in 1854 at Leo and here um some 40 years later is piakuri of course a great physicist certain elements of symmetry May coexist with certain phenomena but they're not necessary what is necessary is that certain elements of symmetry do not exist it is asymmetry which creates the phenomenon the effects produced may be more symmetrical than the causes and I just put this here in 1956 um this Chinese lady made this discovery of the um violation of parity which means the left and right hand are not symmetrical in the case of the weak interaction all the other forces that have been discovered were symmetrical but then she discovered this is asymmetrical and I'm sorry to report to you that about three or four years later two men got the Nobel Prize for this discovery there we go no what has this got to do with the world we live in I'm going to do this very quickly you'll be glad to know I believe that over the course of uh the history of the West we've gone through phases in the Greek civilization there was a sudden efflorescence of everything of the Arts of the Sciences together then in the Roman World there was something similar and in each of those cases it tailed off over three or four hundred years in that Civilization disappeared and then again in our age the sudden eruption of wonderful working together of the right and left hemisphere which are both necessary for science in fact the more important one is the right so don't ever quote me as saying the left hemisphere of Science and the right hemisphere is the Arts we need both for both and in both cases the right hemisphere asymmetrically is more important than the left even in science I believe that in our world like those worlds in which I've shown in the second part of the master this Embassy that things have drifted further and further to the left hemisphere point of view it's happening to us now now if I'm right let's do the let's do a kind of um little um fantasy let's imagine that actually the left hemisphere was the only one we were listening to what would the world look like well there'll be a loss of a broader picture knowledge will be replaced by information as tokens or representations of true understanding wisdom wouldn't get anywhere near it because wisdom is much too unmeasurable the product of a properly lived human life has nothing there that the left-handed so it can get hold of can't be operationalized to be the loss of the concepts therefore of skill and judgment which are essential to being a fully functioning human being they'd all be taken over by machines that had algorithms and things like that so we'd spend hours talking to machines and get in nowhere instead of talking to people who would exercise skill and judgment I'd hate to live in that world and there'll be simultaneous abstraction and reification so one of the same time things will become more and more abstract the stuff you read would have more and more abstract nouns in it wouldn't refer to reality at the same time matter would become just lump and matter I always say that materialists are not people who overvalue matter but under value matter because matter is very very special even if you believe there is only a matter then you've got to accept that much I gave rise to Boston John Passion so it's pretty amazing stuff bureaucracy would have a field day because according to Peter Berger a great sociologist these are the characteristics of bureaucracy um like you I'll let you read them and the beer loss of the sense of uniqueness just categories on those things you had to fill out which box there's never a box for me but wait a minute with whom on which day in what circumstances you know and in what mood um quantity will become the only criteria not quality there'll be a sort of either owners now you can't have well it might be this it might be that you've got to go yes it's this or yes it's that um reasonableness would be replaced by pure ratiocination which is not the same thing in German there's a distinction as you know the German speakers here between and we don't have the distinction in English I make the distinction between reason which is an embodied thing that comes with experience and being able to think clearly whereas rationalization is just the application of logical rules there'll be a failure of what we call Common Sense and there's now extremely uncommon there'll be systems designed simply to maximize utility loss of social cohesion depersonalization paranoia and lack of trust because the left hemisphere wants to control its only Power is control so if it thinks things are slipping out of control they start thinking how can I control them better we need more cameras we need perhaps a database yes let's have a database of the genomes of the population and there'll be a need in other words for total control and anger and aggression would be the it would be the term of our conversations people think the bad old days used to say oh the left hemispheres down to earth reliable we're not emotional whereas the right hemisphere is a bit given to moods you know that's terrible but actually the emotion that most strongly lateralizes of all emotions is anger and it lateralizes to the left hemisphere not to the right and we we would you remember how when something doesn't work oh it's nothing to do with me I can't be responsible you remember that well we would be the passive victims of other people's doings never a problem with us and in this world art would become purely conceptual it would have um that in a sense of depth and bizarre perspectives these are things that only the the right hemisphere can fully understand and therefore came into being three times in Greece in Rome it wasn't just invented in Florence in 1453. it was invented serially and then lost the civilization decayed because it's how the right hemisphere sees depth in the world not just the screen in front of it music would produce a little more than Rhythm because that's the only bit the left hemisphere gets the complexities of Melody and Harmony are interpreted by the right hemisphere there is a distinction in professional musicians who train their brains especially but that's the norm and language would become a hope not too much like mine diffuse excessive lacking in concrete reference there'll be a deliberate undercutting of the sense of awe or wonder because what does that mean it just means you don't you haven't done enough research yet of course we understand everything one more experiment and we really have got it that actually to be fully present in the world and to understand it and to be appreciated of it with gratitude which is the secret of a fulfilling and happy life we need to be able to ReDiscover the sense of awe or wonder and flow would just become an infinite series of pieces like a good strain they'll be discarding of all tacit forms of knowing everything having to be explicit network of small complicated rural strangling us this is what the top Phil saw in America in 1837 that was a very prescient man and we would be like um Descartes proudly calling ourselves Spectators rather than actors in the world sitting on the sofa with a six-pack watching it all go by on the telly um and all this would be accompanied by a dangerously unwarranted optimism well thank goodness we don't live in that world so just my last words values Shayla created this pyramid of values and I say these are the only ones that we now respect the values of utility and pleasure all the other ones what he meant by labensvarter was courage magnanimity um Fidelity generosity all of that seems to be the sort of thing that nowadays only suckers do that and other people profit from it so why would you do that why don't just be a dog that eats dog values of the intellect geistic oferta of course you know that Geist means both mind and soul these would be things like Beauty goodness and Truth the platonic virtues and at the top is does heiliga the holy and I believe we have inverted this so in our left hemisphere world the holy is just a fiction that enables certain priests to have power the values of the intellect are really just to do with sexual selection the values of Vitality as I say are those espoused by people who don't know any better and thank God they do because we can take advantage of them and really it's all in the service of use and pleasure we live in an upside down world my friends this is where we are now we've lost value we have a lust for the power to manipulate which is the left hematist uh resonant we seem to have lost any sense of purpose because we think of purpose in the utilitarian way that the purpose of a of a of a copy of a copying machine is to um and [Music] where if we have a purpose even it's not a utilitarian purpose um and lastly there's a blurring of boundaries between truth and falsehood now um there's a war on Truth basically all around us from politicians and from various sectors of society which is that of uh bureaucracy and AI turning everything that is living into a series of processes and I can talk as you can well imagine for a very great deal of time about those and have done on other occasions that are not going to do now thank you [Applause]

Channel: Dr Iain McGilchrist

Views: 104,877

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Id: c_AGejpKZyM

Length: 61min 19sec (3679 seconds)

Published: Tue Nov 28 2023