Science vs philosophy | Iain McGilchrist Meets Philip Pullman

[Music] hello everyone um good evening it's wonderful to see so many of you here in real life uh after months and months of online events and zooms it's fantastic and to see you and i'm delighted to welcome you all on behalf of the how to academy um also fantastic to welcome all of you who are signing in um from home but it is a particular treat to see so many um sorry is there a little bit of an echo can you hear that um there we go it's gone a particular treat to see so many real faces rather than always sort of knowing and not quite knowing who's out there i think knowing and not quite knowing who's out there leads me very neatly to what might form the basis of much of our discussion this evening um or rather sort of how we come to know how our brains perceive and experience the world and these are questions that we'll be asking and that fill the pages of the books that have inspired our event this evening um here we go i'm sure many of you might have them with you now the matter with things our brains are delusions and the un making of the world and their books and as you will come to see as you read them they're more than books they're a whole new way of seeing the world and ask some of the most profound questions we really can ask as humans uh who are we what is the world and what of our consciousness matter space and time given that i think i should probably wrap up an introduction quite quickly because we have a lot to get through and as you can see we also have two extraordinary minds to engage in these subjects we have the author of the works himself psychiatrist philosopher and literary scholar in mcgill christ who's also of course the author of another book that many of you will know the master in his emissary the divided brain and the making of the western world which i think will also come into our discussion this evening and with us to explore this uh we also have one of our most celebrated minds the novelist award-winning novelist author of 33 probably more than that now is it books lost count a lot more lost countless lost count including of course um his dark materials of the trilogy so thank you both very much indeed for being here and thank you all um again for joining um ian i i've been watching various a few various interviews that you've done and i've been watching some of the videos that you've done about the book and i appreciate that it is i think you said as long as the bible is something like that it's very there's a it's a it's a lot of work 10 years but i've also heard that you can do an elevator pitch so i'm going to ask you just to begin by explaining or telling us what it what it is about yes it follows on in a way from the um mastering chemistry but it it takes things much further effectively what concerns me is the way we think the great philosopher aion whitehead said as we think we live and the very obvious problems that we face in the world in which we live today seem to me to be the products of a certain aspect of the way our brains function one half of the brain has evolved and specialized to enable us to manipulate the world rather than to understand it and this part of the brain leads us to believe that all that exists is matter and the way to understand it is to reduce it to the smallest possible part i think this is intellectually shoddy i think it's morally and spiritually bankrupt and i think it lies behind the folly that we've got ourselves into i believe that we need of course the best most open-minded science i'm a passionate defender of science i'm also a passionate defender of reason true reason that is no more than science opposed to intuition and imagination but in fact dependent on intuition and imagination to do its job and these things are not in conflict and when you take them together you find that in fact the right hemisphere of the brain contributes the most important part what what any of these things mean what science means what reason means what its findings actually mean to human beings as well as intuition and imagination and so what i hope to do in this book is to argue on a basis of neurology and philosophy supported by the findings of contemporary physics to suggest that we the world and indeed the cosmos are not at all the way that they are presented to us by the voices of popular science a heap of pointless random fragments uh populated by ourselves who are the playthings of chance engaged in a war of all against all but that instead there is unimaginably in fact literally for the human mind impossible to fully imagine but we must make the attempt an unimaginably rich complex beautiful and responsive cosmos and it's our birthright and i want to reintroduce us to it just before i uh bring you philip because i know there's so much in there that i'm sure you you react to and will explain your interest in the subject i just i just want to ask about this synthesis of science and philosophy because you say you offered a new synthesis of philosophy and science you say it's um important in exciting and liberating both parties so i just wonder if you could explain that what this um you know unifying of science of philosophy means to you and why it's taken so long why are they such sort of the opposites otherwise well i think it's a product of the way in which universities work partly and the way in which the western mind has been trained to think in the last 250 years it's been said by many great philosophers that the divorce between science and philosophy is a disaster but in the universities i think most scientists some are very interested indeed and knowledgeable about philosophy but probably it's a fair generalization to say that to most of them it's of a secondary level of interest if any and threatens to slow them down on the race to the next discovery what this actually means philosophically is a question that might not even be asked and indeed i find that talking to some scientists they're quite surprised and almost little aggrieved that i should question that the idea that everything is just a mechanism rather like a pop-up toaster or the bike in the garage so there's that and then i think there's also a sort of snobbism of philosophers that somehow they can't learn anything from science i think both of these are mistaken and unfortunate and what i've tried to do here is to take what i understand about the nature of the brain and if we're going to talk about meaning what we can know about ourselves and the world and the brains not a bad place to start and show what the philosophical consequences of the structure and functioning of our brain are in that sense bringing science and philosophy to bear and also i'm not a physicist but i'm interested in physics and have a group of friendly physicists past whom i run my ideas before publishing them to make sure that i'm not completely mad um and really all three of these strands if you imagine them as sort of points on the surface of a very large sphere as you sort of drill down as we say or go deeper and deeper you find that they reveal the same patterns they're not in conflict with one another they all of them tell the same story which is wonderfully confirming if three different starting points lead as they go to the center to finding something very similar that to me is not a proof that this is right but it is a sign that we might be on to something and indeed what we find is also in keeping with very ancient wisdom traditions of both east and west so all in all that's what i mean by synthesizing science with philosophy physics and neurology with philosophy and i think that you've first both sort of encountered each other at the blake lecture which you gave in 2016 but before we go into sort of specifics perhaps you could outline the influence that ian's thinking and work has had on you since or before then you and your work and your thinking yes um well i came to um ian's book the first book the master in his emissary in about 2010 i think it was published a year before that um it was a revelation um because i found i found this immensely learned man this literary scholar this neuroscientist telling me things that i recognized to be true in a brilliantly clear prose that was the big surprise because having read various works of um well popular science and philosophy and so on um fields of knowledge that aren't noted for their clear prose but here was someone explaining with great vividness and brilliance something that i've been sort of been conscious of or had felt as if i might be conscious of without really knowing that i was conscious of it i recognize things he was saying as things i recognize for myself now i by that time finished um my big trilogy his dark materials and i was engaged on the next series of books i was writing so i can't say that it had any influence on the first except that it sort of chimed it sort of made sense to me like ian um i had been very affected very moved very enlightened and illuminated by poetry uh wordsworth as um as ian was but also william blake william blake came to me when i was about 16 i vividly remember the book i first encountered him in and what i was enthusiastic about was his insistence on life and energy and so on um everything that lives is holy life delights in life how do you know but that bird that cuts the airy way is an immense world of delight closed to your senses five he was telling me that the world was alive the world was full of energy full of joy full of wonder and so on and i kind of felt this but i didn't see this reflected in very much modern literature it was there in music it was there in um not only the great works of classical music but also in jazz which i love still love it's also there in the work of chuck berry for example and rock and roll this zest this energy this this life this pulsating rhythmical joy in things that was what i loved and have always done um and that's what i found uh ian talking about as well it was it was astonishing really that there was so much um to say in a sort of neuroscientific way about something that i had felt purely as um as a response to art to poetry it's so interesting to hear philip say all about having heard you say that that i think is the exact reaction that you very much hope for when you're writing about uh ideas and thoughts that can't be articulated i know you've said people have said to you similarly that your work encapsulates ideas they've had that they can't put into words which brings us to this idea of language because if these ideas can't be articulated how does one how does one talk about them how does one bring them into the world with great care and difficulty um and that's partly why i've taken so long writing um at the end of the book i dare to tackle topics such as values purpose and the nature of the sacred and gosh that cost me so much because as soon as you start talking about the sacred every word you utter is false and yet it's so real and true and so important uh in fact the illusion that it means nothing is carried by the fact that everything stated about it is probably false so it took me a very long time to articulate it and one has to both say and unsay i mean it sounds like it might be very confusing and and and not really very clearly thought through i hope the reader will not feel that but we'll see that i'm trying to guide them through a minefield in which to either side of a very important path there are ways in which one can stray off and into danger but like following a certain path being aware of the dangers that beset one in following it enables one to carry on safely towards some sort of a conclusion of course there is no ultimate conclusion on any of these very big topics but i always feel that the right way to use language is sort of against itself and again that might be misunderstood as mere confusion and i'm certainly not an admirer of confusion in fact i aspire to a certain kind of clarity but i always say you can be as clear as you can but no clearer than that and that when you start trying to go for greater precision or clarity you lose it because what we're trying to deal with are things for which everyday language hasn't got the right terms everyday language has evolved to enable us to tackle practical problems of survival but we haven't really got an extensive vocabulary for things that language leaves behind this is why we have poetry this is the point of poetry is to take language beyond language and therefore make it more rich and more fulfilled as language but i mean the point is i suppose if if language and our limited words um bring us back you were saying music expresses these things better jazz i think you mentioned and art but you're a writer so how how does that fit well i think you rely on language it's it's it's always been a curious thing to come i get up against the fact that language is a left hemisphere thing and not a right hemisphere poetry is a sort of just interject it's both yeah yeah yeah of course um there there's a i find when i write um i have to sort of trick the uh the controlling per the the the left hand is i suppose that's what's going on i found a way of doing this quite some time ago i noticed from the way we read from the way i read from the way most people i suspect read most things papers newspapers magazines novels and so on i don't read every word uh you know strictly and consecutively my eye leaps from this word to that and so on and i noticed once that i was looking for things that weren't there because i had misread something that was there a good example of this a very good example of this happened when i was reading a a piece in the new york review books about philip roth now as i was reading this in the usual way skipping and going ahead and not really paying attention i found myself saying what's it hang on what did he say what did this what did this chap say about updike it was something about updi community what was that i looked back and i couldn't find up dyke anywhere what i did find was the word at the beginning of a paragraph the word unlike and that had put into my mind and i'd and i thought well hang on i can use this um this is something i can do and from then on no actually it was before that because i recognized that as an example of what i was already doing you plant words in the paragraph or the sentence that don't directly relate logically or grammatically to the thing you want to describe but they surround it with images that will be productively misread by the inattentive reader and suggest the thing that you want to them to imagine so i i think i'm probably tricking the left hemisphere at that point is that what he's doing yes i mean first of all just to clear out of the way the hemisphere thing and you one of the problems i always have is that people think that you know the left hemisphere is language and reason and the right hemisphere is pictures and emotions and it isn't at all like that and they both are involved in in everything and indeed the left hemisphere is not this cool customer that is totally reliable and a little boring like an accountant but it's actually trained for fits of rage is extremely capable of being deluded i mean the first part of the three parts of the book demonstrates just how deluded the left hemispheric name is but just to say to clear that out of the way language has many aspects of course doesn't it philip and there's what i found when i was trying to inspire people with a love of literature in oxford when i was very young was that the process that akadem sanctioned was to take this object that was full of complexity full of things that were not being said but were being conveyed um importantly they were implicit and they were embodied and they were actually unique and it took them and turned them into something general explicit and disembodied and abstract and it's just kind of unmagic trick in which as it were the beauty of the thing suddenly collapses you're left with a handful of dust you

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Length: 20min 23sec (1223 seconds)

Published: Mon Jan 10 2022