The Divided Brain and the Sense of the Sacred with Iain McGilchrist

through our virtual doors and take a seat and then i'll introduce the events properly as you're coming in do let us know by the chat function at the bottom of zoom where you're from and we understand we have people from quite far flung places around the world including on led to please some friends from california um so if anyone's further from california we would love to hear from you would i say from everyone really orlando we have now florida switzerland australia we've got to win at tasmania and japan and canada assuming everyone telling the truth i'm sure they are something about the grim suburb of leeds now i'll give you another 30 seconds or so because we've only just hit 12 30. [Music] [Music] great well people are still filing in but because we only have one hour together um i'm going to kick off now um but obviously as you come in you are very very welcome welcome to theos and to this online seminar on the divided brain and the sense of the sacred with dr ian gilchrist um many of you will know theos i suspect there'll be no people in the audience who've been to other online seminars that we've held over the last couple of years or so but for those of you who don't we are a christian think tank that exists in effect to tell a better story better in the sense of more accurate research is at the heart of what we do but also better in sense of more attractive more appealing better story about christianity specifically faith in general about contemporary public social political and intellectual life and we do that in a number of ways we conduct research as i mentioned we engage with media interventions for which i'm very grateful to justin welby and boris johnson for keeping us so very busy this week and we have a particular interest in the the rich borderlands of science and religion where we're publishing a major new research study next week and we're particularly interested i'm particularly interested in engaging in the world of ideas which is why we're delighted to welcome dr ian mcgill chris to this lunchtime seminar ian has a formidable cv he's a former fellow of all souls college oxford an associate fellow of green templeton college oxford a fellow of the royal college of psychiatrist a fellow of the royal site of the arts a consultant emeritus of the bethlehem and wardly hospital in london and a former research fellow in neuro imaging at john hopkins university medical school in baltimore but i guess he will be best known to many of you as the author of this the master in his emissary the divided brain and the making of the modern world that is my well-thumbed copy and that's published i think it was 13 years ago now explore the divided brain and the way it can be traced through the history of western civilization his new book is entitled the matter with things and it is extraordinarily even more ambitious than its predecessor picking up on the central theme of the master and tracing the idea of the divided brain through a very rich epistemological and metaphysical landscape as you may well be aware the matter with things is a very substantial book so rather than cover the whole thing in our hour or so together we are going to focus solely on the final chapter which is entitled the sense of the sacred for those of you who may be worried that focusing on a single chapter might involve us biting off rather less than we can chew in an hour i should reassure you that the final chapter alone is 100 pages so we will not be short the material to discuss a little bit of housekeeping before we get to the meat of the business and ian and i are going to have a conversation for 25 or 30 minutes or so after which point i will put questions and comments to him from um from our virtual floor the chat box is going to be turned off as we begin speaking but you can ask the question by putting it in the q a box at the bottom of your screen and then i'll be able to see the questions and hopefully collate them and put them to ian could i respectfully offer a tip to anyone who does want to ask a question which is if you're able to please keep them short it's just much easier trying to marshal people's questions if they're only a couple of lines long rather than a couple of paragraphs um the seminar is not being recorded on soon but you will be able to watch it again on youtube and details of that and of ian's book will be put in the chat box when it's um put back on at the end of the session so i think that's all the housekeeping ian it's great to see you again thank you so much for joining us thanks very much nick it's a pleasure uh let me begin with a very broad question for anyone who's not familiar with um the master as well as matter with things talk us through your basic thesis concerning the divided brain well i'll try to keep it very brief um in a nutshell for evolutionary reasons the two hemispheres of the brain have evolved to be largely separate connected by just a band of fibers at the base called the corpus callosum um and asymmetrical and a lot of the traffic that goes between them is inhibitory so there's something here about these two hemispheres having different roles and being although in constant touch needing to be somewhat separated and my belief is that this is because all animals need to be able to combine two kinds of attention at the same time that sound to be and are probably mutually conflicting and can only be done if you're sustaining consciousness with two neural networks that is to look out for predators and to look out for prey not necessarily pray in the in the sense of food but just anything that you want to manipulate anything that you've already decided you need you want to focus on it target it and get it so in a sound bite the left hemisphere which is in humans the one that pays this kind of attention to the world uh the left hemisphere is there to help us manipulate the world but the right hemisphere to help us understand the world because when you set up the system as it were so that one hemisphere can just target things that you already know it has to pay very narrow beam attention probably only three degrees out of a 360 degree arc and to resolve that very sharply so that you can fix it and grab it but if you're doing that only then you will be very vulnerable because you won't be taking in the whole picture in which you exist this division between different parts of the neural network seem to be extremely ancient and there's already an asymmetry in the neural net of the most ancient living creature never to elevate tenses 700 million years old which is said to be the origin of the brains of what we think of as higher animals the result of this different kind of attention one paying a targeted piecemeal attention to a detail and the other opening up to the big picture sustained over time is that they produce different versions of the world so one the left hemisphere produces something rather like a map of the world rather than what the world is like it's a representation which means present later after the thing is no longer actually really present so it prefers what is known what is certain what is fixed abstract decontextualized general categorized quantifiable and represented as on a map it engages with the explicit and has little understanding of the implicit it sees parts not holes an inanimate world in fact a bureaucrat's dream and it's given to an unwarranted optimism which we may come onto the other hemisphere the right hemisphere sees the world that's being mapped rather than the map this is a place where things are often new essentially unique possible rather than certain flowing and interconnected always inseparable from context and because of all this ability to see the broader picture it understands what is implicit what is not necessarily in the focus of what is being referred to a world that must be viewed as a whole an animate world where things present to us rather than being represented in fact a bureaucrat's nightmare and its outlook is essentially realistic very slightly more pessimistic but generally more realistic than the the left hemispheres view and so perhaps that's a good way to to begin yeah it is it's very good very helpful and that the principle being that properly speaking by your analogy the right hemisphere understanding should be the master the left hemisphere should be the emissary which enables us to manipulate the world but particularly in the last 200 years or so those roles have been reversed is that a fair summary that's a fair summary and perhaps just two little things to say about that one is that it seems that the delegation of a certain kind of procedural work to a kind of high functioning bureaucrat is the image the left hemisphere takes data and processes it without really having an understanding of what it's processing in that sense a bit like the brain's own computer and the other thing to say about it that business of the the one that should have the oversight and the one that knows less but thinks it knows more this is present in myths all around the world i've discovered so people intuit that this is in fact what our mental world is like fascinating now we're going to be talking about the sacred and i want to ask you a little bit about your own religious background or or lack thereof which you talk about briefly in that final chapter of the matter with things um tell us a little bit about that and your own kind of um if i can put it this way inadvertently religious sensibilities yes will there probably be a surprise at least possibly to my parents they were surprised because my parents were not believing people nobody in my family was and i was never taken to church and when i went to school i had the good fortune to be living next to a beautiful medieval chapel and to listen to services there twice a day often with very beautiful music readings from holy books that i wasn't familiar with and rituals that seemed to me to be pregnant with great meaning and so i became aware that there was something incredibly important that wasn't it wasn't taken in by and wasn't included in the picture the intellectual picture um that the west had espoused and over my lifetime i i've remained somewhat uh and possibly wrongly but distant from any one particular religion the most of my experience of church going is of course anglican um but i have deepened i think the sense that there is something very important very deep in the world that is not summed up in a material account and that that includes very much having been to places uh around the world visiting holy sites holy in the hindu religion holy in islam holy in in buddhism and and so forth well that brings us nicely on to uh kind of the origins of our religious sensibility as as a species or within culture you quote victor's done an awful lot in the book um which is one of its many merits and one of the famous statements is the mystery is not how the world is but that it is it strikes me that is central to your argument doesn't it if you like if there's anywhere to begin here it's with a sense of war or and wonder and that the world is yes i think that without or wonder not only can one not hope to make any sense of or to further once thinking in theology but also in philosophy um plato and aristotle and other sins such as goethe have opined that philosophizing begins with a sense of or wonder and ends in fact in or or wonder because it's never banished the more one discovers the more one realizes how little one knows this is a sort of difference between the hemispheres the right hemisphere knows a considerable amount but thinks it doesn't know everything completely rightly but the left hemisphere knowing very little thinks it knows everything and unfortunately i believe that in our culture this way of being um the know it all we've got it's just a way of thinking about the world is the dominant rhetoric of our age not just in science so that sense of war and wonder which so many people feel uh even today now you know comparatively secular west and is certainly widely historically testified across the globe that fair to say that's a a right hemisphere reaction to the world well it might be a bit too simple to parcel anything up into never mind everything up into its right or left i mean what i've always been clear about is that both hemispheres take part in our understanding of everything however having said that um the left hemisphere is going to find understanding this uh phenomenon whatever it is very difficult because it wants to close down on uncertainty rather early it makes things that are fixed that are black and white that are well um well known to it that he knows where to categorize them it gives them a name and sorts them into a place in its mental map but of course this whole sense that we have of something that calls to us and to which we respond is something that is not specifiable in everyday language that can't be summed up in this way can't be rationalized in this way can't be categorized or compared because it is completely a one of a kind it is a suei generous experience well i definitely want to come and talk about language and you do quite a bit in that final chapter um but before i do i think it's important to get one point very clear here it's quite common particularly in our um culture uh to say there is the world there is a sense of wonder and therefore god and kind of almost tag god on as a kind of explanation for that wonder or for the existence of the world that's emphatically not what you're saying isn't it no it's absolutely not what i'm saying and and i think that in many ways those who have a rather left hemispheric vision of the world one that is um serial and follows a kind of program in reaching its understanding it's natural that it should think well something must have made this let's call it god but um unfortunately in all religions there is a sense that naming this is the first step to misunderstanding it and you find the great terrorist uh text the dao de ching can be named it's not the real tao and saint augustine said if you understand god then you don't understand it's not god you understand which actually has a rather nice parallel richard feynman said if you understand quantum mechanics you don't understand quantum mechanics and niels bohr great physicist made the point that physics has to use language in a poetical way and the fact that religions and mystical traditions and spiritual traditions have always used language in a political way doesn't mean that what they're talking about is not real it means it is ultimately real yes there is a terrible error we fall into isn't it sometimes the only literal language becomes true and somehow metaphorical language it might be nice and cuddly it doesn't mean anything and that's that's a perilous perilous mistake to make let me it's always indeed god it's a slight delay sorry um let me ask about um creation then because this is a again a popular misunderstanding that um god not least because of the way that genesis narrative right beginning is constructed god is seen as it's called the temporal creator almost one thing that causes another thing yeah that's a that's that's an erroneous view isn't it why well god is not on a level with anything at all he's not just a very remarkable being like a human being but with extra special powers whatever god is and ultimately we can't fully know uh the answer to that question the way to conceive god it seems to me that it whatever god is underlies uh not just it exists within the world but underlies the very existence of the world so you can't um it can't fall uh somewhere along a chain of causal reasoning because the whole business of course the reasoning is itself something that is as it were part of what has created i mean people say well of course the universe unfolds according to laws that we now understand but laws suggest something that already exists then they're not created by the universe so you always have this problem that there is something that underlies being and is greater than being but is the source of being and you use the phrase ground of being don't you quite a lot which is i mean that's a it's a quite a popular phrase particularly in in the literature but it's always slightly slippery can you unpack ground of being yes the the difficulty always is um the problem of verbalizing and in many traditions it's it's known that trying to put this into words is itself a vanity a a work that will surely end in error um the whole zen tradition is a way really of undermining all the assumptions that you can make in linguistically reasoning about the sacred or the divine and i i was faced with a problem really with this chapter um it seemed to me that this sense of the sacred that we appear to have lost in our world is of ultimate importance and some people said you know this book is so before it was published this book is so interesting on so many philosophical topics don't don't go there don't go to the sacred or the divine and just leave that and it was a part of me that felt well maybe that's the rational thing to do because when one tries to talk about it one gets it wrong but if one doesn't talk about it at all it disappears from the account and indeed it was at the center or the lead point of the account that i was giving you know it was implicit in the philosophy that i hold of the nature of the world which is what the rest of the book up to this point has been discussing so in the end i thought it's better i just have to i know i will fail um to put this properly into language but it's better to fail having you know tried at least to do it than just not to go there at all it's interesting isn't it there is a real nervousness around this you've just testified to some people saying don't don't go onto that particular territory and at one point in the chapter you talk about iris murdoch's famous but i think it's called the sovereignty of the good isn't it and and and how you know it there's an almost synonymous she's talking about god there but you won't use the language of god you you will use an ethical language and similarly we talk about being or that kind of thing there's a nervousness around appropriating a language which is doing what we want it to do but actually is badged religious yes i i think it doesn't especially matter um the exact meaning of the word because as soon as you have this word its meaning is by definition not exact and therefore there are different words around the world for whatever is taken to be the ground of everything um logos in various different cultures is such a concept in fact in every culture there seems to be such a concept my problem was that people would think in left hemisphere terms when thinking about it that's why i needed to try and expose the weakness of left hemisphere thinking uh throughout the book up to this final point and because if you're still stuck in a mindset which is a mechanistic one then you automatically conceive of god as a divine mechanic as an engineer who starts up this machine that is the universe and then sort of stands back occasionally um puts his finger in if something goes wrong with the mechanism but this is to completely misunderstand the nature of what can be meant by god it's immediately to reduce it to something that the left hemisphere only understands so the way in which one can approach it needs to be that of of poetry of myth of metaphor of narrative of humor in fact all these are possible powers but they're all of them they have this in common that they're not explicit they depend on the human mind and human experience being able to perceive something in the place that is left open for it to be perceived in there's a central claim within the christian thought that god is personal and i wanted to explore that a little bit with you because i'm guessing that you could understand use god as a placeholder word here god in an impersonal or a personal way according to what we've been talking about and it's at the same time you do quite a lot in the book in the last chapter talk about love and love is of course a fundamentally a personal virtue a personal quality and by christian thought god is love i want to know whether you think the understanding of god as a personal entity is is helpful and right here i think in some ways it is and in some ways it isn't so ways in which it is it can only be approached through experience and our experience is by definition personal i can't have your experience you can't have mine in as much as it can be approached only through experience then this idea of the personal nature is is a good one and i do find myself coming back to the idea that whatever this divine entity is that the concept of a love a creative love is central to that that way of understanding but what i don't um myself understand it isn't at all my experience um and it's not held by most religions that god will somehow be um as c.s lewis says a sort of divine butler who can be sort of summoned uh to turn up with whatever it is you need at the time um and and he makes the point that uh prayer can never be a way of achieving a certain end and he points to the fact that the the most holy petitioner of all by which he means jesus christ in the garden of gethsemane um prayed that a certain uh burden or couple would ever be taken from him but that was not to be the case and he says if if that didn't work then our little requests for god to answer some particular need in our life are not going to be um working either so i i do i just like to say that i do respect people who say they they have a sort of experience of god somehow acting in their life and i wouldn't rule anything out i think my my view on on most of this has to be um one of uncertainty we simply don't have that kind of certainty for or against we're getting some questions coming in now and i'm going to start start collating them so i would encourage people to pop questions into the q a box at the bottom but whilst people are beginning to do that i do want to ask a question about pantheism and panentheism i think many people will be familiar with that with the first term fewer with with the latter um look what you come out advocate quite a strong pan-enthist position in the chapter describe what that is and how it's different from pantheism well pantheism is a fairly simple concept it is that god is the sum of all things that exist so all that exists is god and god is all that exists it's an equation my own view is that god is not reachable by summing everything that we can know exists but is beyond all those things that we know exist but not absent from them so pantheism literally means all is god and pan enthusiasm means from the greek roots all is in god and god is in all so i see a universe in which god is manifested in the totality of things but it's not equated with the totality of things um because all those things exist within god so this is this is i think an important point and it it it enables us to understand more broadly how things that we experience you you were talking earlier about the personal uh aspect of this what i have felt very strongly is that my experience for example of the natural world has a sense of the divine being revealed in it throughout um and i i think i was about 18 or 19 when i i'd always disliked wordsworth i i thought well coley is an interesting philosopher um but wordsworth i really don't know about him um i i had a sort of epiphany at a certain point in reading wordsworth in which i realized that wordsworth was probably the greatest of all english poets and that indeed he gets closest to understanding this panentheistic idea the great thing about wordsworth is he never bangs at a tab or stands on the soapbox or preaches about god although he comes near to it at the end of his life but in the great period of his creativity um in his 20s and 30s instead he he talks about a spirit that is in things that rolls through all things and impregnates the whole of existence yes i know landlines from tintern abby i know amongst your favorites and mine too and there is a whole other seminar on whether wordsworth is the greatest of all english poets i think we should have another time that one might cut up a bit rough so we'll we'll park that one for the for the time being and i guess we should also mention music here as well that hasn't come up in our conversation yet but it is very central to so much of what you write about and how there's a a lovely phrase from a nick hornby of all people series of essays he wrote when he said something like um talking about one of his favorite records uh i try not to believe in god of course but every now and then i catch myself coming up short when i listen to this whoever you are it seems to me that music has this extraordinarily powerful way of conveying this sense of the sacred absolutely a hundred percent and indeed it probably was now i look back on it the most important influence in my early teens uh was getting to know a whole type of music i'd never come across which is the absolutely extraordinary rich powerful uh polyphonic tradition of the 16th century late 15th and 16th century and going on into the early 17th century all across europe and this um experience can only be described using terms such as sacred or divine if you if you're asked to describe it it's no good using the language of romanticism the language of emotion um i mean emotion obviously is part of it but the the feeling has something quite distinct about it and the only way in which i can express it is by using terms like the sacred so i'm going to start willing questions from our audience thank you all for uh putting questions in i'm going to start group a few together so people don't feel left out and there's a few questions here about um the origins or the evolution of our um sacred sensibilities shall we call so i'm gonna pick one here um david i'm curious to not pay much attention to the evolution of spirituality and religion in your books actually the specific question is are you considering that an arena for another book but i think before we go straight on to your your your next the next book i would like to explore that a bit as well um another question would you agree that the mode of consciousness that provided for animism is a likely source for religion so i guess that there's a few others as well just point to a general question around in evolutionary terms because you started off talking in evolutionary terms where is this coming yes i i'm um if you like um inclined towards an animist view as the origin of panantism and such animistic views are present all around the world in fact and are also held by highly educated modern japanese so one shouldn't make the error of thinking somehow in patronizing terms about animistic beliefs um in terms of hemispheres there is a very big difference here between the right hemisphere and the left hemisphere the left hemisphere tends to see things that are obviously animate in in mechanical terms and the right hemisphere uh sees things that we would not think of as animate like the sun or a rock or food as animate and you can actually achieve this by suppressing the left hemisphere in ordinary subjects that they respond differently to the world so that is a very interesting point perhaps i could speculate a bit about where all this comes from it would take us far far far too long we'd need at least a whole day seminar for me to express what i think about consciousness there is a we've been talking about chapter 28 but chapter 25 i think it is is on matter and consciousness and it's also a short book in length but it to cut to the chase on that i believe that consciousness is never derivable um from matter that has no consciousness in it it's not a gap that can be jumped so i take consciousness to be one of the building blocks of the cosmos um an ontological primitive past which you cannot go perhaps oddly um to some people i don't make a hard and fast distinction there is obviously a massive distinction to be made but not a completely hard and fast one between animacy and inanimacy so i think that consciousness has to be in the anonymous as well as the animate world but the difference is that when life came along two massively great steps forward if you like for the creative nature of the cosmos occurred one is that responsiveness greatly increases so obviously the animate world does change in response to forces but its way of changing is not such that there is this um encounter this vivid encounter that in i believe in in many animals and certainly in ourselves takes place i believe that all consciousness is not a thing somewhere or even just a kind of um uh highly abstract process but an encounter i mean the concept of an encounter is fundamental to my ontology so everything i think for us comes about in an encounter and like an encounter it has a bit of us and a bit of what you know in an encounter each party is changed by the other and each goes to help create what that encounter is so what i see life is doing is promoting two things firstly this business of enormously increasing the capacity to respond to that consciousness in the world and the other is to speeding up this process so things that would take literally millions of years can perhaps be achieved in a second or two in life um so there's an enormous acceleration of the evolutionary process with the beginnings of life and the capacity for the universe to respond ultimately to itself so i mean again perhaps that would take too long for us to unpack but i believe that the cosmos is coming into being and is understanding itself as we are understanding it so as a.n whitehead believed the divine and the human are evolving together um each illuminating more of what there is within the divine that's your choice the word encounter there is very interesting there's a question from jenny here what's your thinking on the idea that god is present in the spaces between things and people the spark that exists and it ignites people i mean you've kind of talked a bit about that that's a fair reflection of your view that in between us that relationality is critical to your eyes i think that's a i think that's a lovely uh question thank you very much um and i do think that it as it were is in but it's not really quite the spaces there is it it's what i call betweenness and between this is not just empathy or something like that and it's not just a space between things it's what comes about when there is relationship among things or between things so um to take an example an electric circuit um where is the electricity well it's not in the positive pole it's not in the negative pole is it in the space just between them no it's in everything that comes about through the coming together of those poles it's in the entire circuit and that's what i mean by the betweenness it's the coming together creates a new entity that has certain qualities of course the most obvious example of this is music in which um i do sometimes suggest that music is only the spaces because it's the spaces between the notes that make a melody the spaces between the notes that make harmony the spaces between the notes that make the rhythm and music is simply those elements so in one sense it's the it's the gaps but they're not nothings they are enormously pregnant spaces if you if you like to call them that and i wouldn't object to that let me ask a slightly crunchier uh question um it's about evil and a couple of mentions of that in the chat box one of them is if pan-enthusiasm is true does that not imply that evil is therefore in god which is surely a very troubling notion and and more broadly a few comments about how you know if you like the conversation we've had um is um the kind of conversation that if you like you can have if you're comfortable and educated and so on and so forth it's not the kind of conversation you have in marriage and i don't mean that facetiously i mean that evil is a very real presence in the world how does that fit in to your understanding of pantheism or your understanding of god or the ground of being gosh it's a very uh as you say crunchy or meaty question um which i do uh touch on in in the book um i take it as granted that if god is love love is a relationship and the relationship of love can only exist between parties that have a degree of freedom um i won't unless you particularly want me to tell you about the thunderbolt that struck me when i understood the the story of creation in the lurian kibala but it also suggests this business of god needing to create a something create a space for something else to come into being and that coming into being of things that reflect but are not the same as one another is the creative principle of the universe in my view and in many religions it is accepted that there is some degree of resistance i i one of my strongest um messages in this book is that nothing comes about without resistance so something that can be loved that comes into being to be an object worthy of or capable of being loved or giving love back has to be to a degree free of control which means free to reject love and the story which is so brilliant is held in milton's paradise lost is that of the brightest and best of god's angels and rather like the emissary in the story um falling away through pride and resentment um a feeling of insubordinacy and the need for power um and this in the terms that things are unfolding for us temporarily um should not be neglected or or kind of swept away on the basis that you know god will is good and therefore nothing evil will ever happen and that is blatantly not true but what i believe is that um love i mean to put in a nutshell um love can embrace its opposite but hate cannot embrace its opposite it's like the relationship between the hemispheres um the right hemisphere sees the need for both hemispheres it needs to seize always a both and whereas the left hemisphere's world is constructed on an either or it wants to narrow things down to a certainty what do you mean it's both it has to be this or or that it can't be both and i believe that in the end this capacity for inclusiveness of healing of forgiveness is the power whereby ultimately god god's love will be able to encompass this metaphysical concept of evil it's not an easy thing to talk about um quickly or or glibly so forgive me if i've not made a lot of sense all right don't worry i think everyone is going to forgive you for not for not solving the problem of evil in a in a two-minute answer i think we're reasonable people here um but i'm going to ask you another difficult one uh as well because we've had a number of people to ask me about consciousness in in in the chat um and of course you you mentioned it earlier just picking one prem after you believe in what's called david chalmers calls the hard problem of consciousness do you believe that's resolvable or is it more productive to shift from seeking to understand consciousness to learning to harness consciousness for our holistic evolution yes um i'm not sure about harnessing but um there is an obligation on us to use our consciousness wisely because it is creative our consciousness helps bring about what is this is to do with the quality of attention which i believe is a moral act because the kind of attention you pay for things changes what there is in certainly your experienced world and possibly in the long run in any world that can be experienced and it also changes you who are doing the attending so you're right that consciousness is a powerful element in existence if you can put it that way and it has serious consequences what we do with it and what i believe about consciousness is that it's a hard problem only if you set the problem up in a certain way if you set the problem up as consciousness must somehow emerge out of holy and utterly unconscious matter um then you've got a hard problem and i suggest one that can't be solved and this might suggest that you've set the problem up wrong and that actually consciousness can't emerge from something that has absolutely no consciousness i stress the absolutely because i think there's a fudge that is so easy for people to do unless you draw attention to it which is think of being thinking of it coming about a bit gradually you know a little bit of consciousness and like existence there can't be a little bit of existence and you can't get from non-existence to existence through a spectrum whereby a little tiny bit of existence gets to exist and the same thing is true of consciousness it's not a particularly unusual position to hold the consciousness is a primary building block of the cosmos it's certainly one of the um common truths of ancient wisdom traditions in east and west um but it's also uh held to be the case by many anglo-american analytic philosophers now it's an increasingly popular position um because in fact the um incoherence of a view that somehow a miracle happens and consciousness appears out of unconscious matter and in the um oxford handbook of the mind i think it is um vs ramachandran and uh colin blakemore two great and highly respected neuroscientists uh comment on this that we may simply have to accept that consciousness is um one of the building blocks of blocks of the cosmos are not derived from anything else that's really really interesting there's a famous probably a popular story of the bertrand russell lecture isn't there when he is approached afterwards by his little old lady who tells him authoritatively that the universe rests on the back of a turtle and he asks what the turtle rests on and she says another turtle and he asks again and she says no turtles all the way down um and even if it's apocryphal it's a lovely story it's consciousness all the way down as far as you're concerned as well the consciousness is is primal and ontologically basic to the universe yes yes um by the way it was with um william james uh you can't catch me out professor james it's turtles all the way down his consciousness all the way down yes i mean that's what i'm saying and it's not a very helpful way of thinking though um because um it suggests there's just another of the same going on forever whereas i believe that is a a process not a chain uh not a sequence of things in the way that the turtles would be but more like a river in which things are interpenetrated and can't be isolated out atomistically it's the difference between um a good strain however long with its various carriages and as i say the flow of the stream in which every part is ultimately in contact with every other part so i think that's important because it suggests that a lot of its quality is shared it doesn't have to be there actually in the particular thing in its full form but elements of it are shared and that indeed it can evolve i believe that consciousness in fact does evolve i believe in fact that everything flows in the unsurpassed aphorism of um heraclitus my favorite philosopher of all time um the question from andres here who said that you claim the left brain is more optimistic than the right hemisphere left hemisphere it's more optimistic in the right hemisphere nevertheless the right hemisphere can understand the purpose of existence does that mean the purpose of existence is not something to be optimistic about no no i don't think it is i don't think one should get i mean there's always a danger in trying to put across a very complex matter in a few sound bites that are comprehensible under a short space of time but i don't think one should get um too um hung up on on the idea that as it were only the left hemisphere can the right hamstring lift hemisphere have understandings of their own that have strengths and weaknesses i just hold it in this particular area where we're dealing with something that by definition is not clear categorizable um unambiguous and um linguistically encompassable that the right hemisphere is going to be the better bet in coming to understand it the left hemisphere attempts tend to result in something that is mistaken namely fundamentalism either religious fundamentalism or atheistic fundamentalism they have all the left hemisphere characteristic i'm right you're wrong it's all written in this book we know exactly what's going on and you know that's just not a way in my view to approach the sacred um i don't think that um we know what the purpose of existence is if you think of purpose in the sense of a goal that is to be achieved at the end of the process uh a distinct i have a whole chapter on purpose um which i think has been proved very interesting to scientists who've contacted me and we have to distinguish between two at least meanings of the idea of purpose that are radically different one is what the philosopher james cass calls uh the purpose of an inf of an infinite game and that of a finite game a finite game is one that is played for as it were 90 minutes and the outcome is to score more goals than the opponent an infinite game is a game that is fulfilled in the playing of it it's not its outcome that can be separately reckoned but it's the actual process so all the things that we think are incredibly valuable in our lives like experiencing beautiful music seeing certain paintings reading poetry being with our friends being married being having children the these can't be summed up as towards a certain goal which when we've done it we tick it and we go yes i've done that these are all processes in the playing out of which we and some of things generally are enriched so in that sense the purpose of existence is something that we have contact with through the business of existing but it can't be just simply put in words i think it's an extremely profound point in the interviews we did for this science emerging project of whom you were one of them i recall one of our atheist scientists quoting stephen weinberg the famous american cosmologist who made the point about the more we look at the universe the more we look it appears pointlessness in our interview he said but what exactly would convince you of the point of the universe if it wasn't everything you saw already that seems to me to be a reflection of your helpful distinction between finite and infinite games i wonder also whether that's the same distinction between zero-sum games and non-zero sum games the former being you know if i win you lose and vice versa whereas a non-zero sum game being one in which we can emerge from it both having been enriched neither of us haven't lost yes thanks for making that point nick actually because i think um much of biology has been misunderstood by neo-darwinists it wasn't misunderstood by darwin himself as being a matter of simply ruthless competition but at least as important if not more important in the history of evolution is cooperation and cooperation is necessary just as competition is necessary both are necessary for a full collaboration and i believe that these two elements are always present in the process so um yes that would be my feeling about the idea of you know um the there being no purpose the purpose is something that is fulfilled in the process i'm going to talk about evolution there because we've had a few questions um on evolution um i'm just going to hoover them up again i guess that the gist is that there has been a trend over the last 50 years or so to think we can explain pretty much everything by evolution and i think matt ridley even published a book called the evolution of everything in which this is a whole great list of things in society and bodies and virtues or whatever else and it's bitter by evolution now now i'm guessing you are an absolutely fully paid-up darwinian how far does darwinism take us well darwin himself um helpfully said that um particularly as he heard how people misunderstood his work uh that he didn't hold that evolution viewed simply in in in this way of you know knocking out the competition and advancing um was the only way in which um progress and change occurred um again these are huge huge topics uh you're quite rightly inviting me to comment on very briefly um i think that we are beginning to see more and more that as i say this sort of rather simple hard line neo-darwinist understanding isn't enough um the ways in which change happens seem more um if left literally to um completely random alterations would take vastly vastly longer time possibly more time than the universe has existed to come about and we know that things appear mysteriously to appear very much faster than we would think of in the ordinary understanding of darwinism so it's not to reject darwin but to sophisticate our ideas of darwin and i i think you know it's always dangerous to think you've nearly got it sussed at the end of the 19th century physicists sort of more or less put their feet up and said well i think actually we've solved all the problems and there's just a bit of fine-tuning and then we've got the entire picture suddenly in the early years of the 20th century this whole picture was blown out of the water and i think actually something like that is happening in biology biology is left behind in the sciences physics and even chemistry are very very much further ahead and they've you know bailed out from the simple mechanistic hydraulic idea of evolution of the mid-19th century very much a victorian concept um whereas i'm afraid biology good old biology is still plotting on with this mechanistic vision and in chapter 12 of my new book on the science of life i i try to put forward a completely different vision of biology based on um what biologists are now finding and telling us there is a whole left and right hemisphere dimension to this isn't it i'm familiar with the quote you mentioned about i think it was a lecture in the physicist's lecture about 1890 when he said something like the only physics to be done in the 20th century is finding working out our roundings the fifth or sixth decimal place which strikes me by your analogy as a very overconfident very left hemispheric approach to take to the entire discipline yes yes i mean perhaps i should just say if i've got a moment and i'm not just saying um optimistic in a sort of mild way i'm talking about ludicrous um optimism which is denial so when something is blatantly wrong and not functioning like a whole half of the body is paralyzed and the the left hemisphere the functioning hemisphere after a right hemisphere says no problem at all everything's fine no paralysis and we'll absolutely argue that black is white that is probably um one of the defining features of the world we now live in is the radical denial of the problems that we're causing ourselves exactly by this mechanical way of thinking i'm i'm getting you to dot around quite unfairly here so forgive me but i want to try and put the net as wide as possible to the questions we've got coming through we've had a number of questions through about about miracles and prayer this is one of them in the book you discuss how we can intuit the existence of god and also certain qualities of god with humility in the process of course what are your thoughts on prayer and the extent to which we can actually communicate with god and the extent to which god might be responsive to our communication with um what might be responsive to our communication and our requests of him well i think any discussion of that has to be prefaced by the fact that um as william james said uh knowledge is a drop our ignorance is a c and i don't know the answer to all these questions my own experience is not that of um intercessory prayer affecting things although i believe there is evidence i've never and these things have to be constantly replicated to to carry weight but that this may actually um exist uh in most religions it doesn't and even in the christian religion you have uh for example saint francis saying that when you pray you must pay pray not for anything nothing at all and so in other words one shouldn't be trying to achieve an outcome in one's prayer i always say the prayer is not a way of causing the universe to align with our will but causing our will to align with that of the universe so i think acceptance is an enormously important part of it but i don't want to dismiss experiences i don't understand and haven't had myself so i'm always interested to hear about experiences and they are in some cases fascinating and make one thing well we don't know everything there's more here than we we can though but personally i don't have this vision uh that you know there are there are miracles in that sense but the world is so strange and so unknowable that it would be ridiculous to rule out such a thing as it would be ridiculous naively to go well of course i mean there's such a thing as having to keep one's mind um able to embrace opposites and the left hemisphere's not very good at this it closes down on it's like this or it's like that we can't have it both ways let me try and squish in one more question in the last minute or so together um when i reviewed your book for prospect i began then with darwin and we're both very enthusiastic about and in darwin's autobiography he kind of offers advice to his younger self he used to love literature and poetry and landscape his mind became like a machine for grinding out theories from large conv large quantities of observation and by the end of his life surprise surprise he no longer loved poetry or art or or music what advice would you give to you know the several hundred people who were listening in about the practices or the virtues or the values that one should um embrace if you wanted to cultivate this sense of the sacred well i've got less than a minute or something to say this and what i would say is that in my experience and i think there's a lot of evidence that this is right mindfulness meditation is a way of engaging the mode of being of the right hemisphere in fact i take a quote from a famous description of what goes on by one of the great indian practitioners in the book and i point out 23 things about it which suggests that this is engaging the right hemisphere rather than the left but i do also think as you have hinted that the whole vast panoply of beauty complexity or inspiring grace is in poetry in music in arts in architecture in all these aspects things are being intensely revealed to us they're a kind of distillate of what's going on all around us that arrests us with its vividness and speaks to us and calls to us and therefore calls forth something from it so i believe that the process of education in short for children should enable them to be able to do certain things before they leave school um to know how to be silent and practice mindfulness to have a good understanding of the great artistic um elements of our culture and of other cultures and that doesn't mean sitting in judgment on them and working out whether they tick boxes invented 15 years ago it means actually trying to get beyond that and engaging with what a real person really saw in the world they need to be able to do that and they need to be able to learn to see both sides of a question which are which is a very right hemisphere um capacity i'm perhaps like if i'm allowed a few more seconds i just want to tell this thing that um i i heard from um rabbi um uh sorry i've forgotten his name um the last great rabbi anyway jax jonathan sex yeah um a holy man is reading the um talmud and he finds that he is told by a person who's greatly revealed revered a certain rabbi says you must not do this as he reads on he finds another equally revered rabbi saying you must do this so he's totally perplexed and he prays to god and asks for some help in the situation and god replies and says both of them are correct both is true and in exasperation he says but he can't both be right he says all three of you are right thank you um the book we've been talking about is the matter with things one of the questions that came up in the in the inbox is that do i have to read the masterminds industry before you read the math with things from my experience though i did i think don't think you have to i think you can get a huge amount out of this book this is just volume two of which um i should say it is expensive but given the fact it is very very long and extraordinarily kind of thorough it is very very good value for money so please people who are listening and now don't let the price tag put you off um it is a book that could well last a lifetime in reading and thinking so do do consider it um ian thank you very much indeed um more generally i have mentioned in was an an interview in a project that we've been doing for three years it's been us now on science and religion the the results of which are being first published next next monday so do keep an eye out for that um it's called science and religion moving away from the shallow end and we have indeed been thrashing around in the deep end for the last hour or so so um take keep an eye out for that do consider um investing in the book it is very rewarding and finally thank you very much indeed and for your wisdom for your time for your humor and your wit thank you all very much indeed thanks very much thank you you

Channel: Theos Think Tank

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Length: 63min 31sec (3811 seconds)

Published: Fri Apr 22 2022