The Matter with Things | Iain McGilchrist | EP 278

mephistopheles credo is that being is so permeated by suffering and catastrophe and tragedy and betrayal that it would be better if it was just brought to a halt and you know in some sense we're pulled in the world between those two polls right because part of us would like to build something better and to bring what's greater and more magnificent into being and another part of us is bitter and resentful about the tragedy and catastrophe of existence and so what mephistopheles doesn't understand is that you cannot have a thing without its opposite and so there's this left hemisphere fantasy that we can create a world in which all is simply peace and joy i don't believe that this is a possibility blake actually also said that in heaven there must be some degree of suffering otherwise it couldn't be joy [Music] hello everyone i'm extremely pleased today to be speaking once again with dr ian mcgillcrist i've spoken with dr mcgill chris a number of times uh the first time very intense half an hour conversation which was about 150th as long as i wanted it to be which was very well received ian and i have a lot of interests that overlap i would say particularly in what you might describe the neuropsychology of philosophy because we're both we both operate to some degree at the nexus between biological psychiatry and neurology and and philosophy especially philosophy that's associated um with narrative and so it's very interesting to talk to ian he's come to similar and different conclusions than i from a from a similar and different pathway and so it's a lovely interplay between things we're both familiar with and things were not i'll tell you a bit about ian and then we'll jump into his new book uh which is a masterpiece a very long ubra concentrating on this vital interplay between the scientific and the philosophical dr miguel christ is a former fellow of all souls college oxford an associate fellow of green templeton college oxford a fellow of the royal college of psychiatrists and of the royal society of arts a consultant emeritus of the bethlehem and mausley hospital in london a former research fellow in neuroimaging at johns hopkins university medical school baltimore one of the great world's great research institutions and a former fellow of the institute of advanced studies in stellenbosch he now lives on the isle of skye off the coast of northwest scotland where he continues to write and lectures worldwide ian is committed to the idea that the mind and the brain can be understood only by seeing them in the broadest possible context that of the whole of our physical and spiritual existence and of the wider human culture in which they arise the culture which helps to mold and is in turn molded by our minds and brain he is perhaps most well known publicly for his best-selling book the master and his emissary 2009 published by yale university press which is sold approaching 200 000 copies worldwide which is a uh what would you call all bases loaded home run for an academic book and it brought him to very wide public attention so ian it's a great see you again i'm so glad we have a chance to talk shall we dive right into your to the structure and the origin of your new book let's do that it's great to be talking with you again jordan thanks yes i i would like to be able to talk to you a bit about my new book uh the matter with things which i think you have had a chance to look at but it's quite long and i know you're a very busy man so it will be good for both of us to be able to just take a tour around it a bit um it follows on from the book that you mentioned the master and his emissary but it takes the philosophical implications of the fact that our brains are divided and that each half of the brain produces a different version of the experiential world it takes that much further and it takes it in particular in relation to something that i know concerns both of us and i imagine concerns many viewers and listeners which is the devastatingly reduced vision of the world that we now have this reductive materialist ideology which is absolutely not uh compelled on us as people seem to think by science or by reason uh it's a it's a version of the world which is very much constant with the view that one of the hemispheres of our brain takes the left hemisphere and we shouldn't be paying too much attention to what it has to say except for the business of getting our daily bread but actually in terms of understanding the world it's the right hemisphere that helps us here and in what you said in your introduction you suggested that i think context is very very important in fact context is everything context can completely change the meaning of any situation of any words or or anything that we're trying to put across and the right hemisphere is able to take in this broader context perhaps i'll just say something very brief about that from an evolutionary point of view we know that all the brains we've looked at going way back in into prehistory all seem to have this divided structure and indeed the oldest neural network that of a c anomaly called nematostelovic tenses 700 million years old is already asymmetrical which is a fascinating fact why would it be asymmetrical the world isn't asymmetrical in that way and it seems that this is because all brains have to do two things at once each of which could take up the whole attention of the brain that is basically to focus on a detail so that you can grab it and at the same time not yourself become prey to someone else who wants to grab you so there's two kinds of attention that we all need to be able to pay how we get food i i give the enemy sometimes of a bird picking up a seed on the background of grits or gravel and being able to get it swiftly accurately and before anybody else but if it's only paying that kind of attention it will soon become somebody else's lunch while it's getting its own because it needs to be looking out for everything else that's going on for predators for con specifics for its kin for those that it's looking after and so on and it effectively this is something that is cons constant throughout the history of evolution but has been taken a step further in the human brain because we are very good at standing back from the world our frontal lobes are highly developed and they enable us as you know to stand back from the world and to be able to see things in a more dispassionate way and to see them with more like a bird's eye view but that has meant that we need to be able to devote a lot of time to theorizing to mapping the world to exploring the possible what would happen if we did this what would happen if we did that and one crude and simple way of putting it is that the right hemispheres are anchor and reality it's actually looking at what we're experiencing right now and enabling us to understand it in all its complexity whereas the left hemisphere is giving us just a theoretical uh take on a certain kind of a situation so is it reasonable to is it reasonable to assume so a bunch of thoughts have been going through my mind and yeah part of this is the you need a brain if you start to move and if you start to move and interact with the world then you have the problem of the part versus the whole that's it and you talked about the bird that has to distinguish something very specific a seed against a background let's say of pebbles but the same bird having to be concerned about the broader context for the presence of predators for example and so the problem is is while you're focused on something specific the rest of the world is still there yeah and also that the separation between the part and the rest of the world is in some in some manner uh what would you say it's artificial and arbitrary yeah because if you're trying to eat and then you get eaten that pretty much does in the utility of eating effectively there aren't parts parts are an artifact of a certain way of attending to the world there are only holes and things that we think of as parts are holes at another level and things that we think of the holes can be seen as parts of an even bigger hole but this business of carving things up into parts is a an artifact of the left hemisphere's piecemeal attention so because it's trying to focus on this small detail it's it's it's homing in on on a certain little tiny bit perhaps three out of the 360 degrees arc of attention right and and that leads to a different take on the world from that of the right hemisphere and if i can just put this in a couple of simple sentences the left hemisphere sees a word which is made up of fragments of tiny pieces that are familiar because they're what it wants it knows it's targeting them they are at a missing and separate from the other parts they're static because it freezes it uh freezes its target even if it's actually following a moving target like an eagle trying to catch a rabbit it's as it were trying to fix that rabbit in the frame and so it's this world is one that this left hemisphere's version of the world is one made up of bits that are separate distinct fixed certain decontextualized abstract because they've been categorized oh it's one of those no i know yeah yeah yeah yeah right it's yeah yeah yeah and and this act effectively is an inanimate mechanistic vision of the world meanwhile the right so let me ask you let me ask you okay i'll let you return to that sec let me ask you about that so i'm thinking as a way to help people understand this do you think that that's akin to the difference between listening to music let's say a piece of music and only hearing it note by note and listening to a piece of music and hearing it at the level of all of the phrases let's say and the sequences and the totality at the same time because those are obviously very different things you could say that and indeed i i sometimes say that the two kinds of understanding given by the hemispheres need to be combined um it's not that something's wrong with the left hemisphere's understanding it's just that it's so very powerful so very simple compared with what it's actually um what is going on that if we start believing the the map instead of the world that's mapped then we misunderstand and i think that's one of the things that we're doing in in in our society now but i think i need anyway before we go on to be able to say something about the contrasting vision of the right hemisphere so instead of this vision of stasis particulate atomistic elements that have to be put together in order to find any meaning or direction in them the right hemisphere is seeing something which is coherent in which nothing is ever completely separate from everything else in which is constantly moving flaming and changing in which it's embodied and that embodiment like the rest of its context makes it what it is when you take it out of that context it's something else completely the right hemisphere understands the implicit all the things that are not being said the bits between the perceptions like make the thing rich and make it live and in fact this world that it um that it creates for us is a rich embodied implicit living world and in fact you can experimentally suppress one hemisphere at a time and what we find is that when the left hemisphere is working alone it it does see things that we would normally see as living as mechanisms as zombies as inanimate whereas the whereas the right hemisphere working alone we'll see things that normally we would think of as inanimate as animal so we'll see the sun for example as as living because it's it's it's a life force that's moving across the heavens so this is a i mean this is all very simple and uh for the sake of the argument and for the sake of our discussion i've compressed an enormous amount but i expand this as you know into a section of about 450 pages in the new book looking at these hemisphere differences so one of the things i noticed and maybe this will help people get a flavor for this too is i worked with uh with anorexic clients for a good while and one of the things i noticed about the anorexics because they already have a problem of perception not just conception absolutely it's a body image problem but if you work with someone who's anorexic what you soon learn is that they cannot see their body as a whole no what they're doing is obsessively they're very orderly people and they fixate on parts and so they'll take a look at their calf say and maybe there's some residual calf muscle and they'll look at the muscle really independently of the rest of the leg and they'll try to figure out if there's any fat there on the muscle and the problem with that is that when you parse your perception of your body up too focally you can't actually distinguish between what's acceptable in terms of let's say obesity and fat layer and what isn't you have to solve that problem by glancing at yourself comprehensively say as a gestalt in a mirror so you see your whole body and then you also have to be able to do that while you're simultaneously remembering how other people look and contextualizing yourself that way and it's so the the anorexic is so focused on the part that they can no longer see the hole and then and then they can't even see their body properly and um why this is so important to me is that the right hemisphere sees the body as a whole but the left hemisphere only recognizes parts uh it doesn't contain the full body image that is in the right hemisphere and there's several lines of of evidence that suggests that anorexia nervosa is in fact a right hemisphere deficit condition it has many of the elements of autism about it which also simulates a right hemisphere deficit condition in some cases i mean i would say that there are autisms rather than one single autism uh and but that would take us perhaps too far away from where we are at the moment so so that means the body dysmorphias are at least in part a substitution of the map for the territory and i wanted to talk a bit about that left hemisphere issue idea too you know so imagine when you when you detect something as a part and you've defined it as a part you've also in some sense like i'm looking at a little black box in front of me right now and i can see it as a single pixel entity in some sense so it's a black box so black is a very low resolution idea and box is a very low resolution idea and if i really look at the box i can see all the subtle variations of color because it's not just pure black and there's all sorts of shades of gray and i can see all the things that distinguish it from other boxes but when i say box and i see black box what i've done is i've i i've compressed the world into a concept which would be a map let's say and then you can see that we do that so much now because we communicate so much and our part detection has become so uh powerful our ability to focus in on details technologically amplified by our ability to exchange linguistic ideas and the power of our science and so you think maybe that as we've progressed over the last several thousand years that intense social communication that's allowed us to parse up the world into finer and finer and more detailed bits has also suppressed our relationship with the right yes i think it has but it's um it would perhaps make a lot of sense if i were able to unpack the structure of my new book a bit because it will answer some of the points that you're making so in that first the books divided into three parts and in that first part i am focusing almost exclusively on neuropsychology and the philosophical implications of it and what i'm showing is that in all the what i call portals whereby we can gain information about the world the left hemisphere is inferior to the right so it's not just attention i've been focusing on attention because i think it's extraordinarily important um attention helps us construct the world that we we live in how we attend changes what we find in the world and also changes us so it's pretty important stuff um but i i'm looking at the attention uh perception which is not the same of course as attention um judgment which is the kind of conclusions we draw from the basis of what we attend to and perceive our emotional and social intelligence our cognitive intelligence good old-fashioned iq and creativity and in all these respects the left hemisphere is inferior to the right and it's interesting that i look at a lot of what must be to somebody not familiar with them really extraordinary syndromes that are familiar to people like you and me uh in the world of neuropsychology neuropsychiatry and the ones that are characterized by the grossest delusions and hallucinations are almost exclusively due to damage to the right hemisphere not to damage to the left so it is it is that is a kind of important place to start because if we're going to talk about what is the world really like what do we really like and you've got two versions in the past philosophers have said well some people see it like this some people see it like that and then they shut their shoulders and go you know but these are just two different ways of looking we can now i think for the first time and this is exciting go further forward and say this has all the hallmarks the characteristics of the misperceptions the misconceptions of the left hemisphere and this on the other hand has the hallmarks the stamp of coming from the right hemisphere which is more vertical and so that's one reason that that i need to spend some time on that particular aspect um in the beginning of the book because as we go on and as it were if you like pan back a bit from those portals whereby we get information about the world to the powers that we might uh go down when we're trying to understand the world like science reason intuition and imagination we need first of all to have established something about the degree to which each of the hemispheres can be taken to be vertical we'll have more with dr mcgill chris in just a moment but first i want to tell you about birch gold the consumer price index has reached yet another 40-year high and the latest gdp numbers confirm that the united states is in a recession now is not the time to have all your money in the stock market or tied to the u.s dollar protect your savings from a highly turbulent economy by diversifying at least some of your investment portfolio into gold and silver from birch gold group text jordan to 989898 and birch gold will send you a free information kit on how to transition an ira or eligible 401k into an ira in precious metals birch gold will even help you hold gold in a tax sheltered account for decades investors have relied on gold and silver as a hedge against inflation now you can too with an a plus rating from the better business bureau countless five-star reviews and thousands of satisfied customers secure your future with gold from birch gold now text jordan to 989898 and get real help from birch gold today again text jordan to 989898 to claim your free no obligation information kit on how to protect your hard earned savings with gold [Music] when i wrote maps of meaning my first book i structured it in some ways similarly because the first large chapter is this chapter on neuropsychology and hemispheric function and i felt as you feel that it was necessary to make the case that there are these two fundamental differences in perceiving the world before investigating that both phil like philosophically and i would say at the narrative level and also conceptually now you let's talk about the last two parts of the book the second two sections and then maybe you could also describe a bit if you would why you think the right hemisphere and its concentration on narrative per se and narrative understanding is relevant to this venture so we have the right and the left and they look at things differently the right is contextual you spend the first third of the book talking about hemispheric differences and making case that first of all those are deep and old and profoundly important and philosophically significant the next part of the book deals with yes deals with the ways in which we use the information that has come to us through those various portals those faculties that i've described and they are effectively science reason intuition and imagination um science and reason i don't think many people would quarrel with um because there has been a motivated attack on intuition and imagination in recent years i think that people do there are some people who might question the value of those and i think that's kind of those are those left hemisphere types that you're talking about well of course yeah i mean you and i know that people are not so simple that they can simply be summed up in that way but it is quite true that a certain way of looking at the world that of the left has a kind of um cohesion of its own and the way of looking at the world the right hemisphere has two and yet they're not quite compatible so in a world like ours in which there's a lot of public debate and public discussion as the way in which we come to our understanding of the world this explicit difference between these two becomes more important if you i mean let me just explain what i mean there if if you look back most people until the last couple of hundred years have developed an understanding of the world through a consistent coherent culture often partly a religious tradition through living close to nature through narratives myths uh as you mentioned um through drama through poetry and so on and only part of the way in which they think about the world will be due to public debate and until the the advent of modern media probably very little of anybody's world was made up by public debate but in the world where we are in one of the worst things that can happen is people say you're inconsistent they feel like if you're inconsistent that shows you must be wrong but it might show that actually what you're trying to do is to balance two things that in slightly different ways in different circumstances are equally important but appear to our rather simple-minded way of looking at the world like contradictions you know in the in the last part of the book i have a whole chapter on the coincidence of opposites okay so one of the things i found very interesting about the psychoanalytic tradition and also some of the neurological work on dreams in relationship to this issue of hemispheric specialization was the idea that dreams which would be in the domain of imagination intuition are willing to sacrifice consistency for inclusion and so you can see these contradictory um perceptual and conceptual elements being brought together in a dream because the what the dream this is a union idea from the idea derived from carl jung that the dream extends the narrow range of what we might describe as left hemisphere consistency into a broader domain where that consistent theory is not comprehensive enough to account for everything and because it's consistent but not comprehensive it's going to produce paradoxes and then in order to increase the degree to which it's comprehensive you have to introduce what looked like paradoxes within the system and from within the system that looks like a categorical or a logical error but from the broader context it's actually a movement to a more uh inclusive and comprehensive way of perceiving the world and dreams do that and it's one of the things i loved about the union notion was that we have this delimited domain of explicit propositional knowledge but partly because of the requirements for consistency and and our finite nature it can't be comprehensive and so we need something to fill the gap between the consistent and narrow and the ultimately unknown and that is in fact the realm of dream and imagination yeah yeah no that's right and there are virtues to the dream world if necessary but certainly to intuition that are not open to pure reason which is not in any sense to devalue or disparage reason it's in fact i worry that in our age reason is being sacrificed that we're becoming completely unreasonable there are two kinds of ways of thinking about reason one is a a kind of logical formulaic carrying out of procedures and following of pathways that in a sense could be programmed into the computer and the other is a very powerful idea that has been important in western history for for hundreds of years which is the idea of being able to bring together what we know from logic with what we understand from experience from uh intuition from context from our embodied lives the kind of wisdom that a good judge would be able to bring to a case not not just saying well look i've looked at the rule book and it says in clause 186 or whatever no i mean that judge should be a fully functioning human being and this kind of reason which is nuanced which is sober which is um much more uh inclusive and less combative than the kind of reason the very sort of skeletal kind of reasoning that now seems to have um tossed the other kind of reasoning out of the nest um that's the kind that holds sway at the moment so what did i what well you saw this go ahead go ahead what what i want to do in perhaps i could just explain a little bit about this part of the book i want to take each of these things i'm not going to go through what i say of course it would take far too long but just to give people some idea of the structure so i i look at science as having peculiar strengths which are incredibly important and on which everything that i do and say depends but it also can't be taken in the way that scientism does as being able to answer all our questions that's simplistic and misguided so it's seeing where it has strengths and where it really needs to say this is not an area on which science can really pronounce and and so i look at the strengths and the weaknesses and i do the same with reason you know it has enormous strengths but it can also lead us to certain kinds of abstract ways of thinking which lead us to false conclusions it is interesting that abandoning reason um is dangerous and can lead to the wrong conclusions but actually merely following it in a blind kind of way can lead to falsehoods as well there's a there's a patient of um damasio's called elliot who has lost his ability to use intuition and emotion so he has to reason every single thing out from scratch in this he's rather like certain kinds of schizophrenic and autistic subjects which have no conception of the intuitive and have to base everything on reasoning from first principles and of course what it means is that they're often deluded and their lives are intolerable well i had a client who had obsessive-compulsive disorder a number of he was very very intelligent and obsessive-compulsive disorder shares some features with anorexia and part of it is this focus on the part to the exclusion of the whole and he would ask me very complicated questions which were deceptively simple so he said for example lots of people with ocd they won't touch something that's contaminated because then they feel that they're contaminated and that they contaminate others and so that's a big part of the moral quandary that besets people with ocd because there is some possibility that if you go out into the world you'll contact a disease let's say if you touch something you shouldn't and then there is some possibility that you'll bring that back say and transmit that to your children and the question of exactly how much precaution you should take therefore becomes a very important question especially if you try to solve it with the use of let's say a propositional expert system instead of being able to analyze context and he said look i don't know when i'm sitting on a subway at night and there's a newspaper that someone left behind i don't know when it's acceptable for me to pick it up and read it or not how do you decide that and i thought i actually have no idea how i'd decide that because i was trying to figure out how to guide him with a set of principles so it's like well do i touch it if it's a little damp do i touch it if it has a footprint on it do i touch it if it's folded too many times do i touch it if it's on the floor do i touch it if it's more than two days old and the answer is i have no idea how i know whether or not that newspaper magazine that's been sitting there and abandoned by someone is an object that i would be willing to pick up but i can more or less tell at a glance no no it's a misconception that um when we make things explicit um we're closer to the truth because often what we do when we make things explicit is that we conflate uh half a dozen or more different considerations that our intuitive and unconscious minds are able to weigh remarkably effectively we substitute for that um holistic vision a single thing that it collapses into the explicit statement that we make and so all the time that you're having to make explicit what you would do under what circumstances why you're limiting the world you're you're driving it down and down to less and less meaning and one of the things that amused me because i had of course patients with ocd as well was that i had one particular one who was a philosopher and he said that when he was studying anglo-american analytic philosophy his ocd got terrifically bad but when he was studying phenomenological philosophy uh his ocd relaxed and he was able to see things in a much broader wider and and more sustainable and coherent way so i thought that was a nice uh side light on this question of um the ocean but also one also one relevant for for for treatment considerations because if there are focal disorders of narrowed perception and that's a consequence of loss of context i mean i can't i can't also help seeing the recent arguments let's say that are raging about gender identity in exactly the same light is that we've lost the context and so we're producing these focal dysphorias because in a real sense we're using the wrong part of our brain to solve the problem and all the public clamor about that as actually making it worse not better okay so you talked about the second part of your book about rationality and imagination and intuition and science and what about the third part well yes just before going there if i may i just want to comment on intuition and imagination because i think they are extraordinarily important for understanding the world and partly due to dan kahneman's very entertaining and successful books a lot of people have come away with the idea that intuition would be a very bad thing to be guided by at any stage to any degree but i i say the these clever scenarios that are set up by psychologists in which you can show that what you would probably intuitively think is wrong are simply the equivalence of optical illusions there are optical illusions that are so striking that you know i say look those two lines are the same length if you say they can't be but they are so but i've never heard anybody after being shown one of those optical illusions going oh well that does it you know from now on i'm never going to use my eyes again but our intuition you know you can set up these artificial situations in which we we seem to be getting things wrong by following our intuitions that's often because 99 percent of the time we followed this intuition it would intelligently and quickly take us to the right solution and so i i really want to rehabilitate intuition i have some fascinating i think studies that came to me people who wrote to me after reading the master in his emissary one's a man who tips horses at races another is the physician who looks after the motorbike riders in something called the tt races in the isle of man the most dangerous sporting event in the world and the reflections they have to make about how these people are able to do what they're doing through um very much things that are identified with the right hemisphere an intuitive grasp that if they stop and think explicitly they're completely ruined they'll probably kill themselves so it's like it's like thinking implicitly or explicitly when you're trying to play a piece on the piano absolutely it interferes right away and i would say that's really relevant we should we should make this case quite clearly i mean one of the things that really disturbed me about the covid response was we we reduced the entire entire realm of political intuition to expert knowledge yes and we made the assumption that we could focus on one thing at the expense of everything else yeah and and that that was actually the right way to do it to follow the science let's say but the problem with that is that complex political dis decisions are often equivalent to diagnostic moves on the part of a physician and we haven't been able to develop expert systems that can do diagnosis worth a damn and it's because for however we do diagnosis it's obviously dependent on our ability to simultaneously apprehend a very wide range of potentially relevant contextual issues rather than reducing it to this algorithmic process for example that the person with ocd might demand yeah yeah well i do discuss um medical diagnostics in the book because interestingly in uh thinking fast thinking slow there's a passage where dan kahneman says some things that struck me as very odd um about physicians inability to be consistent in their diagnoses and um i have done a lot of um spade work in research there are 5 600 papers referred to in the bibliography of this book all of which were consulted in the making of it and when kahneman quotes these rather odd things i looked them up and found that they didn't show it didn't show what conneman says they show at all in fact they showed the opposite so it's it's always worth it oh that's how you look well well there we go this work by kahneman you know this this sort of thing has really annoyed me too because i i read through these things and i think just and i think your optical illusion um a metaphor is really a good one just because we can come up with contrived situations where intuition fails doesn't mean that intuition doesn't function properly in a huge range of appropriate contexts absolutely and can be much more subtle and much more revealing and and we disattend to it i mean it should always be something that we could be skeptical about we should be skeptical about our reasoning we should be skeptical about science science is a skeptical undertaking but so there's nothing wrong with being skeptical about it as well but we should at least attend to it um and i think i mean there's a lot more to say about koben and maybe we'll come come there later because there's there's a lot of interest uh i think that connects the hemisphere hypothesis how would you define intuition and imagination well i of course they are almost impossible to define and and it's a mistake to think that we can't discuss them until we've clearly defined them often the only way in which we can understand them is by approaching them from different points of view and and working out what they are um i use about eight different categories of things uh as possible constituents of intuition things like instinct ready to go knee-jerk reactions heuristics prejudices which is an interesting area because it's not as in anything like as dire a situation as people now think um that they yeah that's for sure yeah anyway but i i deal with those and with of course the aha moments with um scientific and philosophical insights and then in imagination of course i'm making the distinction which is a very very important one between fantasy and imagination i mean this is this originates with uh wordsworth and coleridge and no doubt probably with shelling but um the distinction is fantasy is something that covers up reality and takes one away from it but imagination is one's only chance for feeding one's way into reality so the the distinction that they were keen to make was between the sort of a prettifying augustine pastoral in which lords and ladies dressed up as shepherds and shepherd asses um that's fantasy and imagination which was this divine gift as both wordsworth and coleridge very clearly saw it which enabled one by paying a certain kind of attention to have insight into the deep life of the world of obviously the living world of other creatures but also of mountains of rivers streams lakes and so forth to see them in a new way and actually experience them as real rather than just categorical examples in the way the left hemisphere isn't so in any case all i'm really saying is that i rehabilitate intuition and imagination somewhat but show their limitations and i um i hope wave a flag for better science and better reason there's nothing at all wrong with science and reason in themselves the problem nowadays is that science is not scientific enough and our reasoning is not reasonable enough that the science i think the point there is that um it has dogma science has at the moment a number of dogmas we're due a paradigm shift and to be ruled by dogmas not by following the evidence is not scientific i'm i'm curious about a couple of things on the imagination and the and the hypothesis front so i i want to offer you another uh what foray into defining where imagination might begin on the fringes of rationality so if you do give people creativity tests one of the things you can do is you can ask them for example how many uses can you think of for a brick sure write them down in three minutes and then you can categorize those by number of responses so that's a fluency response and then you can categorize them by originality and originality is something like uh pragmatic utility so you have to identify a real use for the brick but also statistical unlikelihood so the more original responses are pragmatically practical but also rare so then imagine that there's a nexus of associations around any given concept and the tighter the associations are the more they look rational in the algorithmic sense and the looser the associations the more they look imaginative and that as you move out into the looser associations your probability of making a false positive increases right because you're associating two things that shouldn't be associated but your possibility of making a dramatic discovery also increases because now you're associating two things that have heretofore being distinct of course but yeah okay so so you can imagine that rationality shades into imagination and then you made this distinction that fantasy is the misuse of imagination to replace reality which is a nice distinction and so and then so one twist on that too one of the weird things about the way science is scientific science are educated scientists are educated especially to write scientific papers and to think about sciences we think a lot about the method and we think a lot about writing the introduction to a scientific paper as this algorithmic description of the algorithmic process that we walk through to get to the hypothesis but that's rarely true you know like i had one student who was very creative and she'd come up with an idea that was a leap an intuitive leap and then i could see where she was going but why and why but she didn't know how she got from point a to point b and then when she had to write out the introductions to her paper she had to come up with a story about how she derived that logically even though that had nothing to do with how she came up with it and that's the typical thing that happens when we have to consciously say how we did something the left hemisphere which knows diddly squat about how we actually did get there comes up with its own version of how it would have got there if it had been in control which it wasn't so um you're absolutely right that most of the great discoveries in science and maths were made intuitively through pattern recognition through seeing gestalt they weren't made by following a linear sequence and even i mean this this is a point that's made by george g lord simpson who's after one of the founders of the modern synthesis of what it's worth but i mean he he says you know the scientific method as such is more or less a fiction in that it's right more honored in the in the breach than the observance although it is a useful paradigm to have at the back of your mind for a lot of the rather plotting early work in science and reason so what i what i want to be able to say here is that there's no conflict between science reason imagination and intuition in good science they all work together in good reason they all work together in good intuition they all contribute and so forth so there is no need for these things to be set up as they so often are is in conflict with one another and another important element is that it's actually the right hemisphere contribution to them more obviously in the case of intuition and imagination but nonetheless importantly in reason and science it is the right hemisphere's contribution that is a really important one well i was just thinking about einstein in light of our conversation i mean when einstein published those three remarkable papers back i believe it was in the 1920s he had spent a tremendous amount of time in the world of the imagination imagining for example what it would be like to travel at the speed of light and we could also point out i think as well that the imagination differs from the uh propositional in that it actually does rely on images more and images are closer to the world in some sense than linguistic concepts and so the imagination tends to be less linguistic and reductive and abstracted than the then the purely linguistic and so it's richer but but not as precise no no absolutely and in the book i look at so many examples of of um how this is true that what we need is this broader um combination of intuitive work and more routine humdrum work um and einstein himself famously used to say that it took him a long time afterwards to explain in words how he reached conclusions that he found came to him sometimes while playing music and of course music is a perfect example of what i call betweenness it is only connection it is only gestalt the notes in themselves have no significances only as they come together in the patterns that we call music that they have come to have their meaning and incidentally um you said that if we start breaking things up uh and get explicit about the playing of the music we won't play it well exactly but that doesn't make um a sort of left hemisphere procedural um analysis of the piece worthless so i i sometimes say that everything has this structure that it's the right hemispheres open active receptivity that allows something to come into being for us to presence to us um and that then um it goes to the left hemisphere where it's um seen as oh yes it's one of those we put it in one of those categories and it's abstracted taken out of context and so on and then that work having been done it should be taken back into the right hemisphere where a new richer hole can be created now that's perfectly imaged in a piece of music you're attracted to it as a whole the right hemisphere phase you then start to play it and discover that you have to practice over and over again a certain piece of fingering because it's difficult you look at the harmonic structure of the piece and that helps you understand it but then finally when you go out on stage and play it you must forget all of that otherwise you won't be able to play a note but that doesn't mean that time was wasted the left hemisphere's contribution is very important but the point is it's always the intermediary stage it shouldn't be the final stage but in our culture we take things apart analyze them fragment them and that we have like a heap of bits on the garage floor where there used to be a motorbike and we go oh i have no idea what all this stuff means that's where we end the story um and of course a motorbike is a bad example of what we're talking about because i'm talking about organisms which are nothing it's all like machines but anyway you wanted me to move on to talk about the third part and so that we can cover a little bit of that and yeah well and then we'll go back to the first and start walking through it again so yeah go on to the third part yeah well the third part is so the second part is epistemology that's what i've just described and the third part is metaphysics so what when we've decided that we know how to weigh the different paths and the different portals to an understanding of the world what do we actually find there and in the first few chapters of part three the final part of the book i look at two elements one is as i say the conjunction of opposites which is so important uh and it's something we've completely lost sight of and by the way of course jung was um cognizant of um but we often think nowadays that we think in a very linear left hemisphere way that opposites are the two ends of a pole and as long as you keep moving further and further in a certain direction you get further and further away from the thing that you feared but often we come back and find ourselves actually approaching the very thing we feared because you know famously too much desire for freedom causes tyranny and you know so these just for one example but so i look at that and there's a lot to say about that but i i shan't say it now and then there's a chapter on the one and the many which is an ancient thing in philosophy at least in eastern philosophy but it's also something we can't ignore in any kind of philosophy the difference between the individual and the unique and the value of it and its place in a whole which it doesn't by its uniqueness and individuality do anything to to impair it doesn't it doesn't help disintegrate that hole in fact it enriches it i sometimes give the idea of a bud or a flower that unfolds and you see all the different parts of it but those parts have done nothing to make the the bud less whole in fact it's now made it a richer hole the flower so there's those are the the two on structure and then there are what you might call the constituents of reality so i look at guess what time i look at space i look at flow i look at matter and consciousness which i take to be aspects of the same foundational element in the cosmos and then perhaps through many people's surprise but to a lot of readers already highly expressed delight i look at values and purpose and the sense of the sacred as irreducible elements that we don't make up um as we're painting them on the walls of our room in order to cheer ourselves up but we we don't invent them but we discover them if we can in other words the business of living is about discovering exploring unveiling these values that purpose and that sense of the sacred so so this is the one of the arguments that i've been having with people like richard dawkins for example and sometimes when the religious types take richard dawkins on they accept some of his a priory presuppositions and that scuttles them from the beginning and one of the presuppositions and this allows the scientist scientism types to win in religious arguments all the time is that they basically make the presumption that a religious system is a set of science-like propositions about the world and its description when in fact the religious enterprise much more broadly construed involves no shortage of experiences like awe which are i mean awe involves pilot erection and pilot erection is a response that's 60 million years old and these and i that religious experience domain of religious experience also involves phenomena like our our our sense of being intensely gripped and moved by the meaning that is produced by artistic beauty and music and and ritual and dance and all these things that are embodied and emotional and motivational far far deeper than any cognitive overlay and to reduce the religious enterprise to a series of descriptions about the world is to do it great disservice but also to make it entirely demolishable on the scientific reductionist materialist atheist front yes you're so right about the importance of awe and wonder and recently there was a day uh in oxford of seminars devoted to my work on which that was the theme and i gave a lecture at the end on that which i hope is available somewhere i didn't think it was filmed actually interestingly but i think i may have put the text up on my channel channel mcgillcrist but it is a very very important element and of course it's quite different from sheer curiosity we don't say i'm curious to know what god is like we don't say i'm curious to know what the meaning of life is things that strike us as marvelous or inspiring or wonderful have a great depth and once we lose that sense we collapse them into this the little bit of the world that is illuminated in the dark when we flash uh our torch around a lumber room and we see little bits and pieces but actually if you didn't do that but allowed your eyes to adapt you'd see that there was a rich sky a universe a cosmos beyond so all of that is is extremely important you're quite right about it seems that scientists don't seem to understand different kinds of knowledge or meaning and they they they don't imagine that somehow king lear would be less important as a play if one could demonstrate as indeed one can that if there was indeed a historic um historic lear king lear um the story of that king was completely different from one toe by shakespeare in evaluating shakespeare's play has more truth in it than many a book of genetics but it's just of a different kind of truth is it well the best lecture on evolutionary biology the differences in men and women in evolutionary biology the best lecture i ever saw was wagner's uh dye meister singer which nailed it the the libretto nails the difference between men and women in the psychological sociological and theological sense almost perfectly and wagner went places that the evolutionary biologists haven't yet gone as far as i can tell i'm writing about that in my new book it sounds very interesting there is this well i want to ask you something you said something very deep very in a very uh truncated manner that i wanted to return to and i i i saw some of this emerging in the parts of your book that i was reading most recently you talked about you talked about the collapse of the waveform and the collapse of possibility into actuality and the role of the right hemisphere in doing that and you just walked through a sequence of thoughts where you said that the right hemisphere in some sense presents the global meaningful contextual reality to us and then we break it down into parts and master it um jonathan pajot told me by the way that when god tells people at the beginning of time that the purpose of mankind is to subdue reality what it means is sub do to give everything its proper place in the hierarchy of being and so that would extend all the way from the conceptual to the transcendent let's say but to it's sort of like making jacob's ladder that's another image that i would say and your vision of the left hemisphere operating at the level of detail in the right hemisphere operating at the level of totality and the need for all of that to be fleshed out simultaneously with no loss on either end seems to me to be in keeping with like the jacob's ladder vision and the idea of subduing reality with with the logos which is how it's laid out in genesis i'll just make an aside on jacob's ladder to me what is completely wonderful is blake's image of this which is unlike any other image mostly the image of the ladder is a straight ladder like that but blake's image is of a spiral and i think there's an enormous amount of depth in that the idea that as you go up you and and approach nearer to heaven you your process is not just simply linear but also in a way circular but not in such a way that you come back to as elliot said the place where you first started and i know it for the first time but you actually come back to a position which is similar to where you were but now on a higher plane and you can look down and see where you were before and you can relate these two things so you can see both the progress and the return in one but anyway um what i wanted to distinguish was i do um talk about the collapse of the wave function and um and and quantum field theory but what i don't think i do say at least explicitly because i don't know enough to be able to state that is that that um collapse is caused by the right hemisphere i don't i don't know that at all i mean what what we know is that somehow it's connected with the tension and there's plenty in the physicists um suggesting that and particularly in paulie's work that the quality of the attention paid may change uh how that process is carried out and what results from it but i mean that is speculative well you know that's worth wandering down for a second or two you know it's definitely the case if you think about imagination and intuition that imagine that in some sense you lay out or you ask for a revelation of a vision of the world that could be to guide you and let's say that you would like to bring a better world into being and so and you make that part of your meditative practice and part of your ethical goal and it's true in a fundamental sense and then what that means is that as a consequence of that practice your attention is going to be paid to those pathways and phenomena that make the bringing of a better world into being a more real possibility and we certainly do believe that we can dream and then achieve and we do believe that we can't even achieve without dreaming and so obviously there's some relationship between our ability to intuit and imagine and the manifestation of the reality that we experience itself because otherwise we why would thought be useful or vision be useful or planning be useful so it's speculative in some sense but in another sense it's it's what do we do we're going to operate randomly or we're going to operate with vision we come back to the importance of attention and i sometimes say attention is a moral act because it changes right what actually is there in the world for us to find and it also changes us so it has very important consequences it's not it's not just a passive process like the exposure of a photographic plate it's an active open receptivity which is going to meet whatever it is that comes out of that world to which we attend so it is it is a very important point there well so so let's delve into that because it's a yeah like i think it's a key insight to make the case that attention is a moral act and i believe that our ideas of heavenly hierarchy in some sense are an intuitive representation representation of the ethical hierarchy fragmented or united as it may be that actually directs our attention and that a couple i'll just decorate that a little bit if it's not united then it's fragmentary and that causes anxiety if it is united it has to be united towards some transcendent goal and that would be something like well let's say well in in the mythological sense that's something like the paradisal vision right that's the best all things could be you know the the idea of the logos that god uses in genesis 1 to create the order that is good out of nothing that logos is basically conceptualized as something like truth in language and imagination serving love and so the idea in some sense is the direction of attention towards possibility oriented towards love in infused by truth produces the order that is habitable and good and that ideas and that's the image of god in man and woman and god stresses that repeatedly in genesis right that he has this intent that's logos guided and every day of creation which is the interaction of potential to bring in new order is then deemed as good and i think the reason it's good is because it's brought into being under the auspices of love and truth and so this idea that attention is an ethical act man this is a killer revolutionary idea yes but it goes hand in hand with something else that's highly relevant to what you've just been saying which is that i argue that all that exists is in relation um one of the ways of constru there are many ways of constraining the meaning of the title the matter with things partly it's a pun on our obsession with material and uh obsession with the idea that the world is made up of things um never mind the reference to the fact that there seems to be something that is the matter with things at the moment but another way of thinking about it is that these things that we call things and i don't have any quarrel with us using the word in daily life are ultimately relations so that all that exists is is relation and that the relationship is prior to what we call the thing the relative so [Music] the relationship you can't after all if you think of anything as existing in a context it is what it is because of its relationships to try and suggest that it is something separate from those relationships is all ready to have made a an essential error in misunderstanding so i argued that that all that exists is relational and that of course is what attention is it's a way of disposing your attention to the world but what is lovely is that you raise this issue of love as a core part of creation which is a common theme to every religious tradition all over the world um and that idea of course whatever it is that we mean by god is a relation love love love cannot be anything other than relational and that the the creation which you referred to i see the story of this creation as the constant unfolding of some god and the universe that are in process together and each coming to know themselves more and more deeply in this process this would be um a and whiteheads vision and i have more respect for whitehead than for any philosopher of the last 100 years well so so here's another twist on that that might be interesting to you so i've been thinking i thought a long time about the relationship between truth and love and their union in this notion of logos which encompass encompasses both logic and also the embodiment of something like the divine word simultaneously and maybe that's the bringing together of the greek and the judeo-christian tradition in some fundamental sense but we could also think about the opposite of that so in uh guerta's mephistopheles uh in in faust his character mephistopheles is the great adversary and mephistopheles credo is that being is so permeated by suffering and catastrophe and tragedy and betrayal that it would be better if it was just brought to a halt and so his motivation is to destroy and eliminate the ultimate in nihilism and you know in some sense we're pulled in the world between those two poles right because part of us would like to build something better and to bring what's greater and more magnificent into being and another part of us is bitter and resentful about the tragedy and catastrophe of of of existence and so and i do believe that those fundamental polls that's cain and abel in some sense they wore for a war for domination of our intentional resources you know and part of what religious practice is is to what fortify your capacity to operate on the side of life more abundant and truth in its service and to move away from that nihilism that's terror based and a consequence of what would you say um bitterly apprehending existential catastrophe and that this notion of that religious war that's part and parcel of that battle it is a battle for the domination of intentional resources because that is key to what brings reality into being out of the realm of possibility yes one way of thinking about the problem you eliminated by referring to mephistopheles in faust is that what mephistopheles doesn't understand is that you cannot have a thing without its opposite and so there's this left hemisphere fantasy that we can create a world in which all is simply peace and joy and there is no suffering involved i don't believe that this is a possibility blake actually also said that in heaven there must be some degree of suffering otherwise it couldn't be joy but i think our way of thinking is to distinguish these things too sharply and i i i'm surprised in a way i know why you've concentrated on the word logos because it is that greek word in the new testament um but going back in history the greeks thought that there were two ways in which one could approach truth one was logos and one was mythos and myth has now changed its meaning to mean something untrue but there's nothing in the word myth that means it's untrue indeed they believed that myths were the ways in which the only ways in which you could embody and communicate the really deep truths and that logos was an essentially trivial thing that could be used in a bad way as it were by a lawyer in order to win a case but really when you when you're concerned with finding out the depths of reality then mythos is important that links to what you were saying i think earlier about the the necessity for myths and narratives in order to be able to understand what it is we're dealing with science has its own myths and narratives that's the interesting thing a lot of scientists think that there are known myths and narratives in science but if you think that there isn't one you have espoused the myth and the narrative of a science that always makes progress and in which there is a mechanism unfold that all can be reduced ultimately to the the idea of the machine that is the model that is espoused by those people who think there is no model in science right well you know one of the things that really struck me about dawkins when i went to talk to him is that despite his atheism so here's two things that are crucial as far as i'm concerned dawkins and scientists like him believe in the transcendent object so they believe that there's an ontology outside of the domain of epistemology unlike the post-modernists and it isn't obvious to me at all that we can maintain our belief in the transcendent object without maintaining our belief in the transcendent and he didn't see that or doesn't see that as an axiomatic faith-based presupposition of the scientific endeavor per se and then dawkins who i believe is an admirable man and a genuine seeker after truth because he is a credible scientist and you can't be that without that dawkins always accepts axiomatically before setting foot in the scientific ring let's say that the truth will set you free yes so and that's not a within science presumption right that's that's what you have to bring to the table before you can engage in the scientific endeavor i mean that that's a very nice introduction to the chapter i have on values in which i suggest that as i say um truth goodness and beauty are things that we we find we dis dis cover not that we invent i mean although the particular ways in which we see them at any one moment in history may be slightly different although those differences are greatly exaggerated there's enormous consonants throughout the world and across time on what we find to constitute beautiful good and true um but in any case the the question i ask is if you believe that the universe is purposeless meaningless and a heap of material stuff that has no importance colliding with other parts of itself in an endless process of um collision and destruction why would truth matter to you why does truth seem so important to scientists i know why truth matters to me yeah exactly because that's part of that because i i believe that the universe is a much richer one in which values like truth have meaning but in that universe why would truth be important because after all if you really believe nothing then the the most you could do would be to say but let's give people pleasure and comfort but why would a scientist set out to destroy the pleasure and comfort that somebody might find in their religious belief because they believed it wasn't true the very fact that they elevate truth like that seems to me to suggest that they have ipso facto a belief in a kind of transcendent set of values well i think that's beyond question i mean this is why i was so convinced when i read jung's work on alchemy in particular that science was necessarily embedded inside a narrative tradition that was least implicit and so we could say the scientists ignore the mythos when they don't concentrate on the process of hypothesis generation and they don't look at the role of imagination and intuition especially in the revolutionary scientific process and that's just a matter of epistemological and philosophical blindness as far as i'm concerned and then the next thing is that it's clearly the case that science is embedded in a redemptive enterprise because part of the enlightenment uh ethos that motivated science and scientists was the notion that if we came in contact with the ontology of the object outside of her epistemology and we were humble in face of the revelation of these new truths that what we would do would alleviate suffering and bring the world to a better state of being and so to operate as a scientist to be so because here's an example ian this is something so i read this this book a while back uh a kbgb agent wrote about um some of the experiments the soviets were doing on the biological warfare front and they were trying to hybridize smallpox and ebola and then aerosolize it to produce a super bug that could be distributed in cities that would be extraordinarily contagious and extraordinarily fatal and so here's the question if you're a scientist why isn't that as good a pursuit as any other because it's just a factual matter right it's just a clockwork mystery in some sense why not see how smallpox and ebola go together and you might say well it's preposterous to even question that but it's not no no i i would i would um i can imagine an atheistic scientist saying but there's nothing about being an atheistic scientist that means that i shouldn't be kind and i shouldn't care about other human beings and therefore it would be quite wrong for me to do this dastardly thing yeah but that's the issue is well there's a wrong there okay where does that come from exactly and i don't see that it can be derived except from this superordinate mythos that we've been describing well i think it's better um based in a much bigger broader vision i i agree but i i still think that it's a perfectly sensible remark and i think that dawkins would probably say something like this i must put words in his mouth but that you know just because i don't believe in a divine realm doesn't mean that i don't have moral values i think it'd be wrong to suggest that i mean it would be a basic error to suggest that atheists are somehow therefore immoral oh well i don't want to i definitely don't want to uh no make the case that atheists are by you know as a class any necessarily more immoral than any other classical people i'm just i'm just pointing out and maybe i will push you here a little bit the the thing is even if it is kindness and i'm perfectly willing to assume that it might be kindness and that that will get you somewhere that kindness itself is outside the scientific domain because we could talk about kindness in terms of kinship and we could talk about in terms of relation and biological um what would you say reciprocity but it's in the ethical domain specifically speaking and not in this reductive scientific domain well that's right but i mean the very fact that you talk in terms of biology and kinship and thriving and so on it would be meat and drink to the kind of atheistic scientists that i'm talking about i don't think it would be logical for them to say but you know that's perfectly encompassable in my way of thinking and i i don't think though that they can understand um i don't think that with that world picture you can understand why there is goodness at all and i don't know why i don't think you can understand why there is beauty interestingly scientists think that beauty is a tougher one for sure really really interesting one because scientists think they've answered the question of beauty it's to do with a mate selection and and so forth and but darwin himself twice points out that given the existence of beauty it can be used by evolution in certain ways but it doesn't explain what beauty is or how it ever came into being in the first place he said why why do so why do certain colors certain forms so on actually attract and have this beauty for for animals birds and of course for ourselves as humans and there are many things right well and it's that cross species similarity that's so interesting you know butterflies apparently can detect a one part in a million deviation from symmetry on the part of potential mating partners and fair enough but that doesn't explain why we think butterflies are beautiful i clearly do i'm glad i'm not meeting with a butterfly i know one one part in a million man that's pretty but i mean it's obvious that butterflies have high standards i mean they have very high standards but of course what's interesting is that humans don't necessarily find symmetry more attractive and there are studies that show that in fact human beings find faces that are symmetrical spooky um mechanistic and and you know they actually find um an asymmetry in the face or in the form more attractive so anyway so an optimal asymmetry there is an optimal asymmetry right i often say that we we don't we don't want just symmetry or asymmetry but we want the asymmetry of symmetry with asymmetry rather as i say the left hemisphere wants either or he wants things black and white the right hemisphere is able to see that they can be both hand and i don't think we should dismiss the what the left hemisphere has just has to offer so we need not either either or both hand but both either or and both and well you see that with music you know i mean you want a certain degree of algorithmic predictability in any musical piece but if it devolves into algorithmic predictability it just sounds like a drum machine absolutely and the whole business of roberto which is responsible for so much of the meaning in music which is often so fine that it can hardly be specifically detected consciously but it gives the life to the piece and when you hear it played by by a machine it certainly seems completely dead right and you see that difference too in the difference between analog and digital musical instruments because with an analog instrument you can capitalize on its imperfection in an unbelievably interesting way you can really make it an analog instrument like a piano sing yeah and it's really hard to do that with a digital instrument and that is i mean digital instruments have their advantages but they don't sing like analog instruments do no i've never tried playing a digital instrument but i um what you say suggests um yes suggests the likelihood that you're that's exactly right well you lose the context with the digital instrument to some degree because if you're playing a piano and you hit the hammers the whole thing the whole piano and the whole room starts to vibrate yes and you can play with all that if you listen to it and you really can't get to do that with a digital instrument which like i said has their utility so tell me more about your fascination with beauty because i'll just do a little intro to that one of the things that really propelled me down the root of the investigation that ran on similar tracks as yours was my realization when i was in my mid-20s that music had an intrinsic meaning and depth that was neither reducible to propositions nor uh just nor could be destroyed by propositional objection absolutely you know so you might say well the world is not meaningful it's like okay what about music oh yeah music is meaningful well why well i don't know can you criticize it well i can but it doesn't have any effect on the meaning of the music and so the meaning of the music which is part of its beauty clearly and that spiraling you talked about bach did that perfectly with the brandenburg concerto say that continual jacob's ladder spiraling that goes upward and upward but in some sense returns to the same place it's a brilliant example of that but so tell me what gripped you about beauty philosophically and why you decided to focus on that in relation to values well i i'm afraid i'm rather comprehensive in this book which is why it's so long so i do i do look at the various at least the three most important values to me which are goodness truth and beauty and whatever um keats who is a very fine poet um may have said about this truth and beauty can't simply be equated we wouldn't have two different words and i'm afraid that sometimes beauty can be other than good and other than true however and that's not to say that it always is often it is a pathway to something both truthful and and very good what you say about music is is important because it suggests you know a note has no meaning whatever put several hundred thousand together and you've got some matthew passion how does that happen it's entirely to do with the relationships between the notes which make the harmony make the melody and make the ictus of the whole thing so that's a very important part and as you say it can't be reduced to reason uh so it's not for that reason irrational i i i think we need to make a distinction between things that cannot be encompassed by reason but are not for that reason irrational they may be trans-rational or epiphenomenal you know people like pinker one of the things i take issue with pinker and those cognitive scientist types often is that they attempt to reduce the realm of the cultural including the realm of beautiful to like a cognitive spandrel right there are side effects of our cognitive ability and that seems to me to be put in the cart before the horoscope oh absolutely i think somewhere pinker says that music is a useless acceptation of speech um about right exactly exactly and he compares it kind of the other way around actually compares it to pornography and cheesecake and but anyway we don't need to waste time on that why do i find beauty so very compelling partly because of the part it's played in my life since my teens the extraordinary power for me of uh poetry and and art and music to which i've more or less devoted a large part of my life um i mean in a very i'm not making a big claim i'm not a creator but i mean they have guided my life and they've also guided me towards the sense of the sacred i think that if you listen to certain kinds of music it's rather inane to say to reduce it to well it's uh attractive in certain ways it is but there's a certain kind of music and i think particularly of the 100 years of the great polyphony of of the um of people like palestinian victoria bird telus lasses simply cries out for another category to be brought to bear on it namely that of the soul or the spirit but it it's greatly exaggerated that it's somehow a cultural artifact so for example so so for example we know that we know that norwegians who uh have know nothing about um the structure of indian music nonetheless can say what the meaning of certain passages in in raga what that meaning is and it will cohere with what an indian intended by playing that piece and you know it's very obvious that we find oriental art staggeringly beautiful our museums are full of it and our museums are also full of people from the far east coming to visit them they don't think that somehow it's ugly because it's not part of their tradition one of the most moving things that i've i've seen i just want to say this because i hope that some viewers will look it up and there's a piece on the internet um of uh amazon an amazonian tribesmen being shown a film by a french film crew of snapshots as it were or little um short clips illustrating our way of life and they express horror at what we do to trees what we do to animals what we do to our elderly how we have no respect for the sacred in the cosmos all these things and then there is this absolutely electrifying moment when they play maria callis singing casta diva from [Music] bellini's norma and suddenly they all fall silent and something that has never happened before happens one of the young men stands up and moves towards the camera and says this is not our culture but we feel there is something very special and beautiful in it and then an old man says to me it is overwhelming i feel that it is um divine or sacred so i i think that is quite extraordinary and it gives the light of the idea that these things are simply made up any old how by a culture well the other thing too in like we can afford to be dead serious about such things as scientists if you look at the way the brain processes language it's obviously the case that the musical element is not simply a secondary spandrel absolutely no because we know perfectly well that when you and i are talking and when everyone is listening a huge part of the emotional information that we're conveying and the motivational excitement for example we know perfectly well that that's carried by the melody of our speech yes and we know that music might be an elaboration of the melodic element of speech but that doesn't mean that music is reducible to speech like i would say if you were looking at this from the perspective of a hard-headed biologist you would say what nietzsche said which was that language emerged from music not the other way around that makes a lot more sense from an evolutionary perspective because animals use sound not language to communicate and the linguistic came out of the musical and so it's clearly not a secondary phenomenon it's way deeper and that that intuition of meaning you know that one of the things that i i want to tell you about my theory of music just for a second i think you might like it and and so what i realized about music was that it it consists of patterns and when that's not a brilliant observation but then it consists of these interleaved patterns that are stacked on top of one each other that work in a harmonious struc in a harmonious manner all simultaneously and you know you can walk through a complex piece of music listening to one musical instrument or another participating in that guest all pattern and i thought well why is that meaningful why is that and then people think well music isn't representational and then i thought wait a second that's wrong music is the most representational art form because the world isn't made out of objects it's made out of patterns and what music calls us to do is to attend to the harmonious interplay of the patterns of being and to bring ourselves into alignment with that and there is no higher call than that and the reason that music is meaningful is because that meaning really exists is that is what we need to do is to align ourselves harmoniously with the plethora of the patterns of being that exist at multiple levels and so it is a call to proper action in the world and that is meaningful yes i i wouldn't disagree i mean except perhaps to say i i prefer the concept of it allowing something to presence rather than a representation say music is representational i know what you mean in that it it acts on our bodies in a metaphorical way that rising and falling phrases affect our blood pressure our muscular um the tension in our skeletal muscles our blood pressure our pelvis they make as you say our hair stand on then being tears our eyes it's a very physical thing um and so in that sense it is very active on us through what i would call bringing into present something rather than actually just representing it so ian in in some sense i hate to do this but since we are trying to build jacob's ladder all the way down to the level of detail maybe we could delve a little bit more into the the practical necessity of such knowledge so why do you think this this matters in the concrete sense to and why do you think that we're dominated now by what you might describe as this left hemisphere reduced ideological view of the world yes i i i may well have compiled one of the most comprehensive analyses of hemisphere differences in the 450 pages of the first part of this book but it's not just of technical interest it seems to me to be part of a very important overall philosophical project as i explained we don't know how to evaluate different thing i have a whole chapter on paradoxes by the way in which one can see that one arm of a paradox comes from the left hemisphere and one from the right hemisphere and guess what the one that comes to the right hemisphere actually describes what we know to be real anyway to come to pan back a bit i feel that there is something i think we all know that there's something amiss with the vision we have of the world at the moment and that's the other meaning of the title the matter with things and another subtitle is our brains our delusions and the unmaking of the world and i think we're unmaking the world in several respects one is very familiar which is the disfoliation destruction desecration of the natural world of forests of seas and so forth and the consequences that that will have for us but another is a complete misunderstanding of the human being who is now seen as a kind of a machine perhaps even not a very efficient machine perhaps it would be better if we were hybridized with a machine all of this speaks to me of something that is profoundly missing um the meaning of a human being and a human life and we seem to have we seem to have lost our compass we seem to have lost all bearings and part of this is i think because we are dominated by the way in which the left hemisphere sees the world the left hemisphere after all helps you grab stuff but it doesn't do anything else in terms of helping you understand it the understanding of the world comes from the right hemisphere but it's the left hemisphere that makes you rich powerful for a while and it always seems to take over just as a civilization goes into tail spin and declines so you see this with the acquisition of two great territory in both the greek and the roman civilizations and you see it again with the expansionism of the west in the last 150 200 years since the enlightenment and what seems to happen is that partly because of the necessity of administering a huge realm whether that be a military realm or or a civil realm or a commercial realm that requires the generation of rather rigid inhuman rules that can be applied in all situations and therefore the takeover of essentially the bureaucratic mind it's not to oversimplify to say that what many of the troubles that we have now are because of the extraordinary expansion of the the bureaucratic vision of the world in which the human is left out and it's not caused i think by a sinister um cabal i i you know the paranoid idea there's a group of people who are really wanting to control the rest of us i mean i can't rule it out but i think much more likely from my experience in life i i believe that there are more cock-ups and there are conspiracies yes yes and that in this particular case um it's something that is bigger than all of us including those members of government's uh administrative bodies bureaucracies themselves they're the victims of this same thing well you're you're talking about it as a neurological proclivity in some sense which is way more very deeper and more profound than any mere manifestation let me ask you a mythological question so i've been spending a lot of time trying to unpack the story of the tower of babel and so what happens after the catastrophe of cain and abel in genesis is you get two negative outcomes let's say to let's say sinful existence and one would be the chaotic flood that envelops noah and the other then and so that's like the catastrophe of the natural world gone completely uncontrollable the next is the catastrophe of the bureaucratic state and so the tower of babel is an attempt to replace the heavenly hierarchy by a human creation and the consequence of that is the destruction of the ability to communicate and so what happens is that fundamental perceptual categories perceptual and linguistic categories become what would you say they become unstable as this top heavy administrative process develops and and it is a it is an element of luciferian presumption it's the attempt to replace the context by the part i think i think it is and it's interesting that even adorno back in the forties was describing what he saw then as the administered world the fifa volta velti said which is and and i don't want anyone to think that i'm just talking about bureaucracy but bureaucracy right as an image of a whole way of thinking which is the mechanistic one yeah the reductionist one the wonderful one that there are rules and so on and what this does is it privileges the theory over the reality yes absolutely that's what the post modernists do as has been pointed out experience has fallen in value and instead theories about how life should be have become the reality and this is something you notice in bureaucracies that actually having ticked the box is more important than the event in the real world which that was supposed to um you know to to evaluate so for example in medicine um it it's quite possible to do extremely good medicine but if it's not catalogued in a certain way and certain boxes weren't ticked it doesn't count and it didn't happen so well and i do think it is important as you point out it's extremely important to note that this is a deeper problem than merely that which is manifested by any of its manifestations exactly we don't want to blame the bureaucrats and the notion that there's an evil cabell well there is the world economic forum and they might count but fundamentally we're looking at something that's much more profound and it is something like i do think it's something that's represented in christianity for example of the as the luciferian presumptions of the untrammeled intellect and it is associated with this idea of left hemisphere domination it's it's hyper systematization at the context of at the cost of the whole yes i i think that's right and one thing that struck me very much in the last few years is that the the myth of the master and his chemistry on which the you know that the title of the first book or the earlier book is based is something that actually crops up all around the world that there is a wise ruler and there is an intemperate hot-headed general or underling who wishes to who actually is put out by the feeling that there is this more powerful being and actually once he wants to use up that being a very common theme common theme and one and but there are actually this precise myth of the being two beings one of them that is willing to take under its aegis the other and to allow it to work well but that other doesn't want that like satan yeah in in milton's in paradise absolutely absolutely absolutely it has a very expression of resentment envy and the desire to destroy if it cannot own something and this seems the really important element in the picture that we're looking at yeah well i think it's the crucial element i think you're putting your finger on uh milton's lucifer is absolutely perfect you know i i thought about milton in relationship to the rise of totalitarian states and so milton was writing about luciferian presumption before totalitarian states in the modern sense really came into being and one of the things that his poetic genius intuited was that our luciferian intellectual presumptions would entice us into producing representational systems that would then attempt to replace the territory with the map and to privilege epistemology and to privilege this narrow rationality that you're describing above all and then also to insist upon that representation and that replacement you know you really saw this with the soviets right where the soviets and the maoists they were so insistent that their representation replaced reality that it became criminal to admit that you were suffering it's like you can't be hungry the state is perfect yes oh yes and you know in venezuela they've made it illegal in venezuela they made it illegal to list starvation as a cause of death by physicians wow but yeah what fascinates me there is that denial is one of the key features of the left hemisphere's take on the world and it's so striking in medical cases that people who've had a right hemisphere stroke will claim that black is white they will just deny that a completely obviously uselessly paralyzed limb is fully under their control and they can move there isn't anything wrong at all well so in keeping with your notion and goldberg's notion of the right hemisphere let's say as an anomaly detection system so imagine this you know how you know what happens when you have a tooth pulled eh it takes your tongue and it'll do this all by itself like three months of exploratory work to map out that new crevice and so you imagine that your left hemisphere built up or there's a representation of that section of your mouth that's unbelievably highly detailed and then you upset it and now there's an anomaly detected by the right it says oh oh there's something here that where the map no longer matches the territory and then there's all this exploratory work that has to be done in order to map out the contours of the mouth and the mouth is really relevant because you know the mouth and the tongue are unbelievably uh thoroughly represented at a neurological level and so like it takes six months or three months of constant busy work to refamiliarize yourself just with the inside of your mouth so now let's say you have right hemisphere damage in the parietal lobe and you lose half your body but you don't notice and i think the reason you don't notice is because the the left has no choice but to impose its axiomatic presumptions when there's nothing indicating the lack and there's no pathway forward to a new representation i've seen people who i had a cousin who got really ill and she she was diabetic and she had a lot of immunological problems and she had to radically modify her whole life to deal with what she could and couldn't eat and she didn't do a very good job of it and my parents and other people her relatives were often upset with her not so much my parents specifically but many people who knew her were hurt and upset with her because they felt that she was denying her illness but i thought man if something happens to you that's cataclysmic and it changes your entire identity in an extraordinarily complex manner it takes you it can take you months to years to re-adapt three months just to remap your tooth and then the left will insist that the pre theory is the only one that abides yeah well first of all it doesn't happen the other way around so you can have justice yeah cataclysmic event like your right arm is paralyzed and you don't deny it at all in fact you're appropriately upset about it so it is something to do with the left hemisphere's way of understanding things and what is really fascinating is that when something is not there and there are these descriptions of patients who simply won't recognize the existence of half of their body and and fail to dress it or shave it but they also is pointed out by singer cannot imagine that there ever was a left half of that reward that there ever will be again in the future in other words once it's gone from the left hemisphere's attention it ceases to exist so it's not even not there i know it's so it's not it's not as though this it's not as though this left hemisphere tendency is simply to deny something it simply doesn't believe that it exists so right and when you put that on the cultural situation at the moment you can it begins to cast some light on how people who can't be that stupid and who can't be that perverse nonetheless argue that black is white you know yeah yeah well i've been trying to think i've tried to think about the phenomenology of neglect a lot you know because it's such it is such a weird thing that people even lose the notion that what's absent what is absent so it's not even not there it it's it's a category we don't even can't even comprehend but imagine so you look straight ahead and you move your hands to the side like this and what happens is in when your hands are in front of your eyes they're pretty high resolution and then when you move them this way they get lower and lower resolution and then they get black and white out here although you can't tell that but scientific investigations have shown that and then about here they just cease to exist and so i'm kind of wondering if that sense of neglect phenomenologically is akin to having that which is in our visual field behind us now moved three quarters of the way around instead of halfway around i'm not sure i'd say that um okay okay i think there's a distinction between not being able to see something but knowing that it's there and the right hemisphere doesn't engage in this kind of denial at all it's perfectly aware that you can't see something or it you know but the left hemisphere for the left hemisphere if it isn't in the map as it were then it doesn't exist it's not on the map so it can't be real and yeah this is that's deconstructionism in a in a nutshell right it's this privileging of epistemology it's image throughout various movements in the history of ideas in our lifetime that and is getting more and more extreme so that people's theory about what the world should be like is now the only reality and if things don't conform to it it's because some terrible people have been deliberately trying to frustrate it right well so okay so do you do do you have some sense sociologically why this has intensified as of late like is it a necessary consequence of our scientific and technological prowess and the philosophy that's come along with that and do you think technology is accelerating this in some sense well i think our success in technology has led us to believe that we understand all sorts of things that we probably understand less well than at any other time in human history and we may know more technically about them but we don't really understand what's going on or what the meaning or value or purpose of these elements in the world is or are and that's i think that's part of it the fact is that when you begin to see the world as meaningless and purely mechanistic then you lose the sense of value and it's extremely distressing so it causes an epidemic of anxiety and depression and that's something that something we can we can see the evidence of all around us and when people are anxious and depressed like that they must have certainties they cling to false certainties and they'd rather cling to a certainty that's clearly wrong then face the fact that they really don't they're disorientated so anything that comes along that you know becomes the the the element and particularly important is something that offers control yes because anxiety is i'm it's out of control it's terrifying i've i feel quote unsafe i mean how often do we hear that these days yeah i mean ridiculously enough but we do but the great thing there is we have to get control back and that leads towards um in intolerance and effectively things that can't be talked about and the foundations as hannah aaron said as simon vay said of totalitarianism okay so imagine imagine i'll take a bit of a detour here to talking to sam harris and so harris is a reductive rationalist and he believes in algorithmic processing he doesn't believe in free will and one of the things that's happened that's really interesting to harris and i'm saying this with all due respect i really like sam and he's really smart and i think his his orientation is fundamentally good but what's so interesting to see what what's happened to him practically is that he's really abandoned his rational atheism in in a phenomenological sense to pursue meditation and he's developed this meditation app which is his central focus now and he's teaching people all over the world to meditate and what i see happening is that he's taking a respite from the narrow confines of his reductive materialism in the world of the transcendent right hemisphere and it's he wants to keep that non-linguistic and that's sort of the buddhist twist on that because if it was propositionalized and transferred into something like a comprehensible religion then his intellect would just criticize it out of existence but he finds respite and sakura in these practices that i think produce a right hemisphere revelation of harmony and totality and love and all of that and then you might imagine that absent that so absent that proper relationship between the left and the right so the left so you can't find respite from your narrow preoccupations and your doubt in a relationship with the right you have to start to depend on ideological certainty as a buffer against the anxiety because you're not properly having you're not properly integrated in the part of the contextual understanding that would lead you to genuine meaning and that's where that immersement meaning is like an antidote to anxiety absent that you have to occupy a narrower and narrower certainty to keep your to keep yourself from well from panicking in some sense well uh attention is so fragmented nowadays because it's valuable and is therefore being grabbed out by so many um uh different sources all day long that we no longer able to pay the sort of sustained vigilant non-verbal non-judgmental openness of attention which is the very business of mindfulness to try and nourish right and i think that people are gravitating to this because in it for the first time they can begin to see a world that makes sense because as i say everything depends on the attention if your attention is is fragmented and it's making presumptions about what you're seeing that it's purely meaningless purposeless and mechanistic then you are trapped into something and i suppose that what he is trying to do there is to say this is a way in which we can open that up and i i think that's that's welcome i suppose i always worry about people adopting spiritual practices as it were for utilitarian purposes um but sometimes it's better that they they adopt them and then see what comes of that and that they don't adopt them at all i think it's a mistake to you you know for example um to think that the point of um meditating is um to lower your blood pressure and make your mind work faster so that you can be a better stockbroker and that that is really not that is to misunderstand this process that you're entering into and it's typically to it's typically to um to do what the left hemisphere always does which is to um turn it into a commodity right right to instrumentalize it yes you instrumentalize it exactly yes yes yes yes well a lot of these uh bureaucratic enterprises and ideological enterprises are also characterized by the instrumentalization of everything and the problem with that in some sense is that that instrumentalization which would be a left hemisphere function is extremely useful if you have a narrow goal directed necessity in mind and you need to undertake it efficiently and in a short period of time but if the question of well what's all this for in the broader sense comes up then that kind of interfering that kind of attention interferes with the apprehension that would allow you to conceive of the broader context and i think there's a couple of things that are really key and importance in what we've been discussing that that people should perhaps contemplate in a deep sense and one is your insistence which dovetails i would say with my insistence that there isn't in some sense anything more important than trying to understand the processes by which attention is directed there's something absolute you know the egyptian god horus that i that everyone knows the falcon that was horus that is that attentional capacity that you described and they worshipped that as the redemptive god himself like the eye of horus horus was the god who redeemed the dead state and who fought off seth and seth eventually turns into satan by the way via the coptics but seth is exactly that force that always threatens the bureaucratic state it's the usurping force and so the egyptians knew in their mythos that the attentive eye the eye of the falcon right and that's the bird's eye view was the antidote to totalitarian to the totalitarian proclivity and the mesopotamians knew this too because their god marduk who was the top god and also the model for the proper emperor had eyes all the way around his head and say they knew that it wasn't intellect that was the antidote to the totalitarian state not this narrow left hemisphere intellect let's say it was the capacity for attention that we seem to be focusing on when discussing right hemisphere function there's there's a couple of ways in which one can see the eye of horus and one is in the benign way that you do and the other is as the sort of um uh somewhat predatory all-seeing eye the disembodied eye and one day right one day i want to write about this because it's something an enormous number of egyptian symbols including the disembodied eye come up in the artwork of patients with schizophrenia who don't know anything about egyptology oh and i would love to talk about what one day write a book about that well the egyptian well good that's something else we can talk about you know the egyptians knew this too because they for them the optimal pharaoh so the principle of sovereignty wasn't the eye of horus it was the eye of horus having revitalized osiris who was the spirit of the state and so horus gives one of his eyes to osiris osiris is his dead father so their union and and yeah so so so that's a very complex thing it is yeah but how did we get onto the eye of horrors i've forgotten oh while we were talking we were talking about the potential redemptive value of of attack attention oh yes my goodness exactly yes and the fight the fight of attention against uh against intellectual arrogant intellectual totalitarian presumption yes and i just want to sort of say something very briefly about purpose that i uh people may think oh dear um he thinks that as it were there's a an engineering god who sort of um got it all the deistic vision you know that god wound up the universe and let it go or can occasionally move into the clockwork that's not what i mean at all i i mean that there is some um purpose that is transcendent that is sacred and is not deterministic which is a really important point to make um anyway i think the science points in that well i think the science points in that direction too ian so yes that's another place where we can be really hard-headed about this you know i talked to roger penrose about this because penrose does not believe that consciousness itself is reducible to an algorithm or computational and he believes that i believe on grounds that from the physics perspective are similar to the what would you say they come from the same conceptual universe as the ideas that you're propounding in relationship to the idea of consciousness at the forefront of let's say the revelation of possibility something like that so we can nobody can come up at let's say and criticize the these the ideas that we're discussing you and i by saying well the biology doesn't point in that direction and neither does the physics it's like no the biology points very strongly in this direction and so does the physics i mean this is it does i mean the argument that um there is no direction or no drive no purpose in biology but it's all simply accidental lives i think there must be a few people left in the world who still believe that but i think it's largely been discredited completely um it's very obvious in fact that biology is highly expressive of purpose but i think even the inanimate universe is as well and i adopt a rather unusual position but perhaps we mustn't go there because it will take us for a long time to discuss but that the inanimate and animate worlds are not totally distinct from one another obviously they are distinct in the sense that they are completely different and and have different kinds of qualities but they're not ultimately divided they're not ultimately separate there is a continuum is the best way of putting it um i'm going to talk to ian a bit more um for the daily wire plus folks for another half an hour or so about i would say his intellectual biography and his personal pathway through the intellectual and philosophical world to the point where he's developed the ideas that we've been talking about

Channel: Jordan B Peterson

Views: 466,278

Keywords: Jordan Peterson, Jordan B Peterson, psychology, psychoanalysis, existentialism, maps of meaning, free speech, freedom of speech, personality lectures, personality and transformations, Jordan perterson, Dr Peterson

Id: f6Vkhov_qx8

Length: 114min 57sec (6897 seconds)

Published: Thu Aug 11 2022