The Matter With Things: The Case for Shifting Our Attention Dr Iain McGilchrist, Geneva, Switzerland

foreign thanks very much I'm here and thank you all for taking the trouble to turn up today and I want to draw your attention to a piece of intermediate technology the vegetable crate I have um a um a lot of reservations about some of the advances in modern technology and clearly the feeling is mutual um wherever I turn up things start to go wrong and you probably have heard of Wolfgang powley the physicist effect on the lab whenever he came in the machine's malfunctioned over a number of years I have realized that I exercise the probably effective some 10 minutes before we reduce the start I left the room and apparently there is problem to solve the one we couldn't get Beyond was a pointer that would work the same I'm beginning to do it like this but I prefer to stand up if you don't mind that's a piece of old-fashioned technology which is gradually failing on me but I I like the approach so um here we are and I'm going to be talking to you today about no matter which thing is now in English that is an expression which means there's something going wrong what is the matter versus enroute um and it's a pun because I have written a book called the matter of things which is about her obsession with mirabatter and our obsession with themes whereas I believe that actually not just Human Society but the cosmos is made up of relations and things are secondary to the relations I'll talk about that it sounds important I know but I'll talk about that a bit more as we go on we'll be able to pick up what I'm saying is it sounds okay good um what I think we have to understand why I'm talking to you and why I think this matters is that I don't think that we have just run into a lot of accidental problems glitches uh that have come out of nowhere and sorted our progress but I think the problems we Face are of one piece and they depend on a particular ultimately malignant view of who we are what the world is and how we relate and that's way of thinking is associated particularly as it happens with one of the brain hemispheres so I'm going to be talking to you about the brain hemispheres now most of you probably will not be an expert on this subject because it's a subject that is very much discouraged I will someone you have a promising career don't go into researching hemisphere difference nobody will take you seriously it was all said years ago to be complete nonsense and if you talk to somebody who's completely outside of science or even somebody who's in it but has never really looked at it they will just repeat what they were told when they were changing there is nothing in this subtle difference between amnesty so don't waste time on it because if you don't waste time looking at it you won't find out if there are any differences or not that's what science is it's empirical you know but actually nowadays it's dogmatic when uh Galileo saw that there were moons or the sorry there were mountains on the moon as he did using his telescope he encouraged a philosopher to look through it he said I don't need to look for it because Aristotle has already demonstrated that the Moon is a perfect circle and it therefore can't have moons this is science as it now is as Amir was saying I am profoundly interested have been all my life in science my father was a scientist of a Kind my grandfather was a a very committed scientist and they both expanded me from my earliest days and love of science they also have a love of many other things have a love of humanity and I think that problem with science nowadays is not scientific enough it's got too many dogmas about where you can go what you can say and this results in reductive materialism which is a very very simple-minded philosophy it's the simplest philosophy you can have it's one that you could accept the children are much smarter than this but you could take a four-year-old and say look we built it like this Lego this is what it is it's all made up out of beds and accept the children intuitively understand that that's not enough Richard Dawkins talk about the world as a spiritual place they have all kinds of ideas that Dawkins says they'd never have unless they were indoctrinated into them but actually in 70 years and Atheism in Russia people and certainly children carried on having these ideas and children from atheistic families still have them what happens is the reverse of the Dawkins idea they begin by seeing the world as a complex beautiful spiritual being and they talk in those terms and they're slightly discouraged no no you're making that type no that's a fact and they see it's not very smart to talk like is it smart to talk about mechanisms and so that is how the process begins now so what I'm going to talk to you about I also want you to suspend all the things you've heard all the urban myths you've heard and all that some myth that's been debunked that itself is a myth that I have been successfully debunking for the last 15 years and those who don't know that simply haven't caught up yet thank you here's a quote from Pascal the twofold nature of man is so evident that some have thought we had two Souls and it's not just Pascal it's curtain can't schopenhower nature that much underrated German phenomenological philosopher who all basically said something to this effect but even more importantly this is a wisdom embodied enshrined in World mythologies so you can find this in the E Ching you can find it in a wonderful legend of the Onondaga people who are part of the Iroquois nation in America and which I quote at length actually in part of my relatively new book the matter with sins so it's something we intuitively know that we feel a sense that we can see things in two different ways the Navajo have two concepts of eyes they have hard eyes which look for things Target things to get them and they have soft eyes with which they see the beauty of the landscape they see their family they see the natural world now if you don't know much about the hemispheres you will probably believe the sort of thing that I've put here but with the Titan what's the titled right and left but I've titled it right wrong um because this is one of the better offerings from the internet if you Google hemisphere differences and there are many words but in this list there is only one that is correct that's why I put right and wrong um basically it's what we call in English olives it's a technical term it means this is complete rubbish so when people say it's rubbish what they're referring to is this old appropriate what they don't know is they haven't read my work is 30 years of research on this topic resulting in a couple of thousand Pages very highly referenced my latest book has about 5 600 references to the scientific literature I am a Scientist as much as anyone else I'm also a rationalist I believe very much in the power of reason and I believe nowadays we're in danger of disparaging science and disparaging reason because they lead to conclusions that don't happen to be the governors of we happen to hold now so I would like us to be more rich and more scientific but at the same time we need to know that these are limited there is so much in the world that cannot be expressed in scientific terms which requires that it must be measurable it must be manipulable in the laboratory and so on anyone in this room never experience love well love is something rather important it's something very real nobody can tell me it's not real but can you measure it can you manipulate it in the laboratory absolutely not well this very much helps the power of music is probably greater than the Power of Words Words engaged are intellect music engages and other part of us which is intellect as well as the emotional and physical and the spiritual it engages all four levels if you like and the music of both is probably the Supreme monument at least in western music of that idea so here I'm just going to quote from a couple of rather reputable scientists the first is Tim Crow who may not be very well known to but he's a I think he's now either very elderly or maybe not even with us anymore but he was a very distinguished researcher in neuroscience and a psychiatrist and has contributed enormously to the understanding of schizophrenia then he writes accepts in the light of lateralization nothing in human psychology or Psychiatry makes any sense who is one of the authors of the second quote when The godfreed Wilhelm leibniz prize which is Germany's foremost prize for science and he got it for his work on lateralization largely in animals but he says about humans hemispherical synergies prevent practically all major neural systems of the human brain there is hardly any perceptual cognitive or motor system that is not affected by left-right differences of at least some of its components so if you don't want to look through the telescope don't don't care to find out anything about reality but if you do want to have a look accompany me I can only give you a taste in a short lecture but I as I say I've written about this and what I need to say is is much subtler than I can put across in a lecture but don't worry all the nuances the caveats the explanations are there in what I wrote the first thing I suppose I would say is why on Earth is the brain divided when I was in medical school it was just accepted that it was divided nobody discussed why this thing should be divided it consists of neuronal Connections in a way its power is through making neuronal connections so why would you have a whopping Great Divide in the brain if that was the only thing that mattered here you see this rather grumpy looking man not surprising he's had this lifted the top of his head off and moved his left hemisphere over to show the corpus callosum this band of fibers which you've been seeing running up and down here only two percent of all fibers in the brain actually cross the corpus callosum but the corpus callosum does send messages back and forth between the two halves and I'm going to talk a bit more about the corpus callosum in a moment but it's not the only connection but it is the by far the biggest connection between the two hemisphids like a hundred foot greater than anything else I know that that doesn't work does it that's it the second thing I want to ask is why is the brain asymmetric so here you're looking at the brain exist from its base as if you're looking at your spinal column the underside of the brain so the right hemisphere is on the left by a helpful neurological convention and the left hemisphere is on the right but never mind and you can see that the the frontal lobe on the right is greater than just forward more than the one on the left that is a single biggest asymmetry in the brain it was never mentioned in medical school what was mentioned in medical school is this that the left hemisphere posteriorly is enlarged compared to the right Tennessee and jumped slightly backwards so it's as though somebody got hold of the brain and twisted it from Below for which reason it's called Jack reflection talk after Yakov left who first described but why the skull is not notably asymmetrical the world is not notably asymmetric if it's just a matter of more space why not make it equally symmetrical there may be something different about the two hemispheres and there we look at um over here the the normal human brain in central section over here it's very fortunate to be able to get hold of a slice of Donald Trump's brain um as you can see it's considerably smaller I'm sorry it belongs to a dog anyway but the thing I want to pay for you to pay attention to is this this is the corpus callosum in perception here it is in the human brain which is very very much bigger but it's not really much bigger in fact it's getting smaller again I say again because it started from nothing with mammals Marvels for the inventors if you like of the corpus callosum other creatures just have two hemispheres that aren't specifically related in this way there are very fine Converses but nothing like this so mammal started with it and since then we have been leaving it behind through the growth of the brain there's a complex story and I'm not going to get into it now but it's the subject of chapter one of the matter with themes what happened to take away from this is that there are important differences between the hemispheres first of all they need to be divided secondly they need to be asymmetrical and thirdly the connection between them is a complicated matter because get this what's left for the corpus callosum is very largely at least 60 percent of it is inhibiting it's saying you keep out of this I'm dealing with now when I heard that in medical school which I did hear that I my ears picked up I thought this is fascinating why would this be happening and the answer is that the two need to work together but they need to do completely different jobs in the operating theater there is a surgeon and there is a scrub nurse for a good safe operation you need both a surgeon and the scrap nurse but it's not better if the scrubbler starts making the incision that's the job of the Sun and then ultimately you might get by with Justice urgent but they are not doing the same work and the two hemispheres are not doing the same work either and they need to be separate in order to cooperate now all of this was laid out and much more in um the 2009 book of mine the master and his hemisphere published by Yale and in the first half I expanded on the neuroscience and the philosophical implications of this division and in the second half I looked at the history of the west through the various ages since the Greeks through the Romans the Renaissance the Reformation Enlightenment Industrial Revolution Romanticism modernism post-modernism and all that but today I want to just confine myself for talking about where we are now in relation to this hemisphere hypothesis now we've all seen these sort of things their brain scans but this isn't this may look like one but it's a scan of the most ancient creature that is still extant that has a neural network nematostella vac tenses it's a sea creature and it's described by Thomas Holstein of Heidelberg who first described it as the origin of the mammalian brain and what I want you to see is that this is the axis running front to back and you can see that the the neuronautites are asymmetrical already now why is this why does nature do this my belief and I've never heard anyone either disputed or offer a better explanation that covers more of the facts is that every creature has to solve the Dilemma of how to eat and stay alive I know that doesn't sound difficult in Geneva in 2023 but actually for most of History ancient history creatures have had to do two impossible to combine things at the same time one is to look at a tiny morsel that they need accurately to pick up to eat or a treat to build an S that's something they need to use to utilize but at the same time they need to keep an eye out for Predators or they'll become someone else's lunch while they're getting their own and they also need to keep an eye out for their their their con specifics for their family that they need to be looking out for feeding and this is impossible with just the disposition of one neural network and so the answer is to have an asymmetry or ultimately a dual system and what is the difference the main difference there are many differences I will describe a few of them but the main difference the one that is most important is in the way they pay attention to the world now what I want to suggest is that I want to avoid either what I might call naive realism or naive idealism I'm using those terms in the philosophical sense and not against people having ideals that's not what I mean what I mean is the difference between a sort of view in which everything that is real is made up by our minds and the opposing view that everything is real is just out there and has nothing to do with our minds our minds are just there to sort of register the data now I want to suggest that it's something quite different it's a relationship it's not the one or the other it's the relationship between the observing mind and what is at the that brings whatever it is into being and what that is depends on the nature of the attention that is paid so the attention we pay changes what we see and what we find and it also changes us because if we get used to paying kind of exclusively utilizing predatory detached attention we become morally different beings and so does the world with which we interact become different now this is the mountain behind the house where I live on sky and its name in Norse is talisca from which some of you who know your whiskey will know there is the whiskey named telesca and it's called tell the squirrel that's four miles away from where I live because I live in Texas but they didn't maybe something in mind it was somebody else's at the time and even the point here is that its name being sloping Rock in notes so what that tells us is that the Vikings who came down a thousand years ago this was a landmark that meant life or death because it's a structuralist bay in which they would be Shipwrecked and the important thing was to keep clear the pigs were there however a thousand years before them we know that because we can see that Brock's Stone dwellings and to them it was the home of the Gods then in the 18th century people came with their sketchbooks and Drew these this beautiful landscape with its many colors and forms that was what the mountain was for them in the 19th century people became very interested in geology and it just happens to be an extraordinary example of bass the columnar basalt formation it's in fact part of the same stretch that reaches the Northern Ireland with the Giants Causeway which is also a battle of kilometer formation and comes to this mountain so to them this was something very different and special but if you ask a physicist what is Dismount they will say well 99.99 of it is space and the other point zero one percent we're really not sure what it is we're working on that but we don't really know which of these is a real amount what I would say is they are all the real amount they are just the mountain that gives itself to a certain kind of attention if you look at it one way you won't see what the others see using a different attention but it's still the same amount and I don't mean that we can just make it up and say it's an empty plane like the Savannah because it just obviously isn't I'm not saying it's made up I'm just saying that every time it's encountered it depends slightly on the attention that it's given to it what it comes for and if you say well really it's just a lump of rock you've simply expose your own kind of prejudices and attention and values that you bring to it which is dismissive and you don't see any of the things I've just described no anybody seen Mozart's do you mind or quintet lying around lately where is it I mean it could be anything else I take this as an example because it's a piece of music I particularly fondle but where is it it's not in the score on my bookshelves because that's just the potential it's not in the mind of Mozart either because he's dead now um what it is is whatever happens whenever a group of players preferably skill flares come together and perform this music and it is then received by other ears this is what it is and this interaction between the players and the peace whatever it is is not an attempt to approach an ideal there isn't in heaven an ideal performance of Mozart's G minor Quintet um it can be played differently on different occasions but that doesn't mean that anything goes anyone who knows anything about music can distinguish a very good performance for a really important I'm not saying anything else I'm saying we need discretion judgment and faithfulness truth truth doesn't just mean some abstract theme it is a process it is a relationship I am true to what I believe in I am true to my friends or whatever it is in fact in English there is an old word truth which is the same as truth and it only exists now in another Antiquated form that when two people pledge allegiance to marry they plate their truth that is the old expression but this is Carpenters still say about two pieces of wood that join that they are true meaning they fit together um when somebody paints a portrait you can ask is this a true lightness this doesn't mean does it a chord with some likeness that's in heaven where the truth is it means is it a faithful vision of what is there now that Vision can vary but only within certain quite clear bounds for anyone who has any common sense now the problem with paying attention is if you get very used to paying a certain kind of attention only things that respond to that kind of attention come forward to meet it from the world so if you decide that something's a machine when you look at it all you see is the mechanical aspects everything else recedes do you think will that work very well I'll use that again in the future I'm saying more and more and more you become that person who can't break out for the idea that everything is just a machine now I'm not saying there's no value in comparing things with machines you can get some truth out of it but it's not the only Truth by a million miles then it's completely wrong when it comes to organisms but that's a whole other story hello what kind of attention does the left hemisphere pay it's out remember to catch that your arm is on the microphone oh I see um the uh not the very effector so it's it's this thing I need that I focus very narrowly a needs to B is what I conclude but if I take the broader much broader Vision that the right hemisphere has of the whole 360 Degrees including the three that the left hand this is looking at they see this in which A and B are certainly connected but in a complex way and then a living way that's what the tree and the birds here represent you're going to go on and talk now about the differences but first I just want to say this people might say it's rather simple to talk about a whole hemisphere believe me I know all about the different parts of the brain and their different functions and I have sat in neuroimaging labs and traced small areas of the brain myself so I do understand but we used to think that the brain was modular there was a bit here that does this Bitcoin or does that and so on what we now know is that when you excite part of the hemisphere the there are chances that other remote parts of the hemisphere will also respond and they're more likely to respond to the contralateral hemisphere something like 10 times as well connected within the hemisphere as a CrossFit and this just shows you there are two main super highways but there are many others the superior longitudinal fasciculus and the answer for circulus that connect respectively the occipital lobe with the frontal lobe and the temple lobe at the frontal lobe and and I could say a lot more but I'm just going to pass on now so what are these differences well the first is that very obviously the left hemisphere knows what it wants it wants that worm it wants that tree it runs that rabbit whatever it is and it knows what it is and it goes for it that doesn't leave much room for anything unexpected then the right hemisphere takes in the unexpected it is according to vs ramachandran The Devil's Advocate the one that says well yes it might not be but that's not much good to the left hemisphere because it needs to be quick and dirty it is the one that jumps to conclusions it is the one that makes the black and white judgments whereas the right hemisphere says yes but it might be different something that seems to be disappearing from public Converse these days I'm putting on the left in every case the left hemispheres preferred move and on the right the right hemisphere is preferred mode of course these are not absolute distinctions come on but they are significant differences across a continuum the left hemisphere needs certainty because it doesn't want to be told release it might be a rabbit but then look at it it's not quite like the usual rabbit it just wants to go and get it whereas the right hemisphere is opening up to possibility well the left hand is closing down to certainty is it a duck is it a rabbit a picture from a children's Victorian comic made famous by Wittgenstein the right hemisphere is happy to understand it might be either the left hemisphere what what do you mean there's got to be one or the other doesn't make any sense tell me either fixity and flow the left hemisphere fixes things because after all it's trying to seize something very quickly so its attention slows to an image so it has like a succession of still shops it freezes the emotion whereas the right hemisphere sees then unendingly continuous flow so one has a discontinuum and the other has a continuum and when you have damage to certain parts of the posterior right hemisphere you develop a condition called palenopsia or a kind of Topsail they're not totally the same but most purposes they are and effectively what you see is this like a juddering cine film The Hand doesn't any longer move smoothly but moves in jerks then there is the distinction between parts and the whole the right hemisphere obviously taking a broader View can see the gestad you can see the whole new form whereas the left hemisphere sees the bits because it's going here's a bit there's a bit there's another bit its attention is piecemeal whereas the right hemisphere's attention is more glow now when you look at this picture you cannot build it up from the parts and in case that anyone can't see what there is yet but it is here the mouth the smell of a dog here's this ear and its head here's its back and its tail here the hind legs the other four legs and it's sniffing the ground in the shade of a tree where two paths cross it's completely obvious when you look at it like that but you can't build this up from going well that spot looks like a bit of a dog but that spot looks like a bit of Shame is impossible and in fact this is just an extreme example that is Illuminating of how we see the world we do not go into a room and see a chair leg Yeah we go oh is this a seminar reverse okay so we take in the whole picture only later do we see the bits that attract our attention as of Interest um okay uh this is uh just to demonstrate that most people here see the H and the four before they see the 50 E's and the eights and that's because we're something called the hierarchy of attention which is we see the hole first and then um a direct our attention to a detail with the left hemisphere and you know there's an enormous literature on attention you know that um one of the things that changes with handedness may be the location of language but the thing that is most robust in terms of difference of handedness is attention Global attention is almost always paid by the right hemisphere even in left-handed I think it's 81 to 19 which is more than any other um so-called brain function there is an exception to this which is in schizophrenia where people go to the details first and that is one of many thousands of interesting observations one can make in schizophrenia where I can see that what is happening is that deficiency of right hemisphere attention and an overdrive of left hemisphere attention so if anybody saw the E's and the eights first uh have a quiet word with me off they'll have a duty of care to tell you that there are many other reasons don't worry this is from a film on the internet which is an animation based on a talk I gave Royal Society of Arts shortly after the publication of the Mars from his chemistry and it's really showing this distinction between the types of attention and it's taking note of the fact that so extreme is this difference of attention the left hemisphere is mainly interested in capture and so it is largely targeting the right field of space in which the right hand moves and when people have a stroke affecting the right hemisphere they're often seeing only half a world they're seeing just the half that the left hemisphere can see and this can be very dramatically demonstrated any neurologist will know this very very well um patients will eat only the food on the right side of the plate and you have to turn the plate around so that they eat the other half they know this they're not stupid that it happened yesterday but they just don't take note of the other part of the plate or the world in which case it actually doesn't exist because it's a tension that brings it into being formed so for them this half of the world over here doesn't exist as a result they may fail to dress or shave this half of the body is according to the left hemis so it doesn't exist now there isn't the mirror phenomenon when you have a left hemisphere stroke because the right hemisphere sees the whole indeed interestingly if it sees the extremes of both visual Fields left and right by the way I should say about visual fields and in some animals that have eyes on the sides of the head in many ends in other words and birds it is true that the left eye feeds the right Hemisphere and the right to the left but we have eyes on the front of our head and therefore this is not true it's the right visual field of each eye that feeds to the left hemisphere and the left visual field of each eye that feeds to the right the next is the difference between the explicit and the implicit the right hemisphere is able to understand all that is meant that is not entirely explicit which is a great deal it includes poetry humor um sarcasm irony jokes visual Expressions on the face body language all these things are understood by the right hand it's been qualify the astronauts whereas the left hemisphere in a rather computer lightweight where he takes the expression entirely literally it doesn't see the joke doesn't really understand the point of the poem relent hemisphere tends to abstract things from Context and I can't emphasize enough how important context is and how little it is now observed in the sense that we are constantly taking things out of their context and sometimes and this is perhaps part of the scientific method in some cases we think we see it better when we're taking it out of its context and finally got it on the lab table but actually if you want to understand the human heart you should see it beating in the body in connection with the whole of the vascular and pulmonary system and all the rest uh just seeing this lump of wheat on the table doesn't tell you very much in fact it misses almost everything about it and this is true of context in general and um context and reverse the meaning of things for example if I say something and I'm meaning it sarcastically it could get reported on Twitter that my girlfriend says X but actually what I meant was the precise opposite of it and I'm sorry a lot of you heard me say this but I thought it was just telling you this little dramatic um illustration taken from serial packets in America in America there are four sizes of cereal packages jumbo which is very large and then there's economy which is large and there was family which means medium then finally this large which means small the left tends to generalize where the right T is the unique case so it sees a bird a worm a tree it doesn't see anything with a specialness about this one and here there are two instances from the Swiss literature which since I'm here in Geneva a camel resist relating to you they're quite poignant there was a woman who spent her entire life studying the bird life in Switzerland which I know is magnificent in various and she had a right posterior well a temporary parietal stroke and after the stroke she said plaintively all the birds look the same and another case was of a Swiss farmer who had a similar stroke and before the stroke he knew all his cows by name but after the stroke he could barely tell a horse from a cow so the right hemisphere as well as seeing the whole picture is also able to see individuality to see the uniqueness you know whereas the left hemisphere is like a bureaucrat it's got it in a category and it's now satisfied the left hemisphere is more interested in quantification and the rating qualification which rather follows from what I've just said so if it's not measurable it's probably not real there are certain aspects of science that mimic this I think we should honor science for its beauty and in its wonderful exposition of so many important truths but we shouldn't be dragooned into believing that it's the only way of understanding things it just isn't it should be hubristic it takes its place at the table there's lots of other things that's all I'm saying and quite um expectedly the left hemisphere sees the world as inanimate but the right hemisphere is element and this happens sometimes after Strokes that you can actually experimentally isolate one hemisphere at a time with an entirely painless and reversible procedure called um transparentum with nothing stimulation and with that you can either stimulate or suppress the activity of the area under the magnet and if you do this and suppress the left hemisphere people see the world as more animate than before so they may describe the Sun as a living being that moves across the cosmos whereas with the left hemisphere alone working in the right hemisphere suppressed they see even people and animals are somehow like zombies or machines and the all of this is accompanied by a great deal of optimism on behalf of the left hemisphere and a much greater degree of realism on behalf of the right hand skin um this is a procedure called the water test which is sometimes carried out before surgical operations on the brain um particularly involving the speech area which is Brokers area the posterior part of the frontal lobe on the left and those people but it can sometimes be on the right and so the two hemispheres are isolated one at a time and some psychologists had the brainy idea of interviewing people with just one Hemisphere and asking them to fill in a personality questionnaire and they gave the same questionnaire to the person's relatives and um uh friends and it turned out that the left hemisphere had a very high opinion of its own qualities whereas the right hemisphere was a little bit too negative about itself with much closer to the tree so this is it may sound like an amusing detail but it's actually terribly important because the ultimate in optimism is to know you deny that there is a catastrophe right here now and you see this after stroke so after a left hemisphere stroke you may have a paralyzed right arm away the person is concerned worried plankton the other way around they have the right time is the stroke and the left side of the body may be paralyzed they will deny there's anything wrong so you visit this patient it may have come in in the night with the stroke you say how I say I'm fine I said that's very good um no trouble moving anything then I suppose I don't know um can you wait yes um and you say um can you move your left arm and they go yeah let's see move it then they go there but nothing actually did move if you bring it around in front say move that they say oh that's not my arm that's his arm your armed up so there's a complete denial that there can be anything wrong with the left hemisphere the left hemisphere is always Mr Right yeah and then finally there is this which sounds perhaps not very interesting it is actually the most important of all the distinctions the right hemisphere sees the world as it is present to us but not only that as it presences to us that is not a normal verb in English it's been introduced into philosophy since Heidegger as a translation of unreason and which was in itself a neologism formed from the from the noun number it's two presence and what this means is not passively just being present like there it is no connection it implies a process in which this thing comes into being for us that is how the right hemisphere sees the world as this world that it is indeed bringing into being and the left hemisphere sees only a representation of this after it has been somehow denatured it's been categorized abstracted decontextualized fragmented analyzed and so on and now it has something which is very useful which is a map now a map doesn't contain anything really of the world except the mirror skeleton if it had more information it would be less useful so it's not a Critters but a map is a mistake if we want to live in it the map is great for guidance while you're living in the real world but you need to know which is the real world and I believe that when the left hemisphere takes over its Theory it's map its diagram its version of the world very simple-minded one that it has constructed is suppressing the living reality of the complex interconnected vibrant world that we experience now that's what we've been rather abstract so here are just a few examples um which are taken from Nikolai Nikolai Eng for his research in which one hemisphere was suppressed at a time and this is the same patient drawing a tree on the left in the normal situation in the middle after the right came into a suppress you see the left hemisphere only draws the right side of the tree on this occasion because that's the bit it is concerned about but you can see it's become stylized it's become like a map or a diagram or a symbol it isn't actually what a tree looks like but on the right you see the right hemispheres tree which is if anything more vibrant than light than the original and indeed that is what happens if you suppress the left hemisphere you can have an increase in the sense of apprehensional comprehension I should say or Berlin you see the same thing with flowers where the left canvases flowers are basically symmetrical symbols and in the right hemispheres have the living flow of a plant and here I just want you to look at the fourth column these are all by patients with right hemisphere damage trying to Draw Something In Real Life Look at the fourth column and see what the human being has become in the top case a pair of rhomboids now this is significant I believe because of the way it relates to the modern world maybe some of the things about the left hemisphere have grown Bells that there is a vision that of the left and this beautiful world which is known and in principle knowable completely as much as possible certain and fixed dependent on isolated fragments that have no meaning or place until we give it to them that are decontextualized abstracted disembodied and de-animated and unlike some kind of representation and on the other hand you have the right hemispheres World in which nothing is ever serves them or fixed it is no but only within bounds and those bounds can increase but this is an unending process and ultimately there is no such thing as a total Detachment because everything there's the right hemisphere perceived is ultimately connected to everything else it is part of a whole and that home means the context and everything changes when the context changes as I've pointed out one of those contexts important is the body and it is the anima the soul the animated and this world is one which is complex and difficult to pin down would be extremely important so you have these two visions of the world going back to pascalis as though we have two Souls all these Traditions around the world have these two eyes these two figures sometimes an emperor and a general or his hemisphere which is why I took the title The Master and his industry for the my earlier book because I wanted to say the master understands the need for the anniversary the atmosphere does not understand the need for the master the master of points because he knows does mustn't get involved in certain things in order to keep the overall picture so it has a high functioning um bureaucrat basically do all that grind so that he can see the whole picture and look after the community and what happens in that Fable which is represented in cultures around the world is that this upstart thinks it knows everything entirely because it knows so little only people who know very little think they know ever and the more you know the less you think you know this is called the dunning-kruger effect and it's well established so the left hemisphere is this upstart and I believe that it is pushing out of the way what is known to not just the right hemisphere of the brain but because it is much more in touch with the body and the emotion as well as the inhibition of inappropriate immersion it is able to see the full picture I put that qualification in there because there are differences between ways in which the hemispheres understand emotion it's not true that the left hemisphere as it was often presented was this at least Dependable logical realistic but perhaps a little bit boring accountant but there's no question actually the case the left hemisphere is perempting jumps to conclusions it gets very angry as challenged it is self-righteous and self-righteousness and anger and Scorn um distaste these are all um the sort of expressions of a mind that is filled with a certainty that it knows it is right there's an awful lot of people like this on the internet and I think it's taking over our world I meant to mention that the right hemisphere is the inhibitor of inappropriate expression of emotion as well as the foundation of true expression now in the world I believe we now live in what I call the Hall of Mirror's way because they we no longer have the outlets the Windows onto the world which would have told us that something going wrong well today I think they were roughly speaking first they were being close to the Natural World which to anyone who's lived there and observed it is nothing like a machine at all it's like an extraordinary Spiritual Living unified being and until quite recently most people would have had ready access to the natural world or live deep in it but by now probably less than half or maybe a half of the world lives in close proximity to Nature then there is culture we have trashed culture because we want everything to be made new which is an admirable perspiration up to a point uh Traditions always change the tradition is never fossilized look at the last three or four hundred years how every Century every 50 years has been different but it has been a threat a common culture which has held Society together we have now decided we know better and that cultures are to be hacked down and destroyed as um some kind of malign entrance but I think they are what tell us many were wise truths that our ancestors got to learn at the cost of life and limb and hard work and we'd be stupid to neglect them the third is the body which has become like an accoutrement some rather snazzy sports car that we ride in and we can polish it and hone it and tune it up and so on but effectively we are somehow distance from the body whereas we are in fact in inextricably interpenetrated with our bodies our bodies are actually not the whole of us it depends where you draw the line because the body is also intermingled with the soul in my view which doesn't necessarily mean the soul can reduce the body either but this idea of a Continuum of being has been replaced by a cognitive machine ah that in my lifetime has been reduced from something that required subtle Insight enormous skill and produced visceral works that when you stand in front of them you're just completely awestruck pieces of music that move you so deeply they can change your life but there's been a kind of Vendetta against this it's beginning to be reversed I'm glad to say but during the second half of well started in the first half from the 20th century um there was a kind of War on this that art should be superficial in fact literally this has been a gold car that it should be anything to do with the body or with meaning or anything should be discarded and you have a text on the wall which tells you what the painter was doing what they wanted you to understand Leonardo didn't have to put a text tell you what it was painting after a piece of music now on radio 3 if ever they have in Britain any pieces of modern commission music there's a piece by the composer telling you what he was doing Bach never needed to do that for me and then there is religion which has been reduced in my lifetime to two things um it's been rubbished by many people as they're only an insophisticate the country bunching a child could believe in it or it's been turned into something fundamentalist um fundamentalist Christians fundamentalists Islam fundamentalists of various kinds and as far as I'm concerned the difference is not between those who believe in those who don't but between those who are fundamentalists about their fears and all the atheism and the rest who understand the provisional nature of all understanding and the journey the process that is faith not a single thing that you read in a book so we come to a world where we are told there is no reality there's just black beyond the windows on which the sky is painted and so it has been said in many of the Great universities in the Arts mainly they are the culprit here that in fact there is no reality it's all language and where would that come from the left chemistry or certainly and that only there are symbols not in realness where would that come from hemisphere and there you come into a world where signs simply refer pointlessly to themselves right I I would also like to mention to you um this man you're rich who in 1927 published a book called president Lieutenant which was blatantly a sassara on the Soviet state though it was cast for political reasons in terms of the previous Zara state and in this story in the soldiers uh in a certain regiment the soldiers names were transcribed it was a mistake made um in which by the way the lines went a new new lieutenant called Keisha was invented he didn't really exist but that didn't stop him from having a very successful career in the Army he was well known as a Dependable comrade he was decorated for bravery and battle he married and had children and when Bazaar heard that about this person he wanted to see him personally and congratulate him but nobody could find him so they said he's died and the son was set away become an emotion that he commissioned a state funeral meanwhile there was a lieutenants in UKF who'd been left off the register who was wandering around the roads of of Russia where the begging battle trying to persuade people that he still really did exist in fact I have a newspaper cutting from Turkey in which a man appeared before a court to um uh plead that he actually existed and unbelievably the court denied his request anyway um let's have some more fun let's think about what the world is like let's do a thought experiment what would the world look like if I am right that the world is now somehow dominated by a business and I'm sure he had just mentioned that in my review of a 300 page review so very brief of Western history in the second part of the master of his atmosphere I indicate three times in Western history where there has been a wonderful working together of a right and left hemispheres um in roughly speaking the 6th Century BC around the dot and again in our Renaissance the Greek Empire waxed and then Wayne and as it did so it became more left hand misfaring the right the Roman Empire works and then waned and finally collapsed in 410 A.D after becoming fossilized with bureaucracy and left hemisphere ways of thinking you could see it in the sculpture you can see it in their thinking and I believe the same thing is happening to ourselves selves in recent history certainly since the Enlightenment and that there has been a hardening up of the left hemisphere view which has excluded all the richness the right hemisphere might have been able to tell us um so what would the world look like if I'm right well first of all there'd be a loss of a broader picture knowledge would be replaced by information tokens or representations um certainly nothing to do with understanding or let alone wisdom which is a personal thing that comes from experience can't be measured Quantified ticked as part of a form in a bureaucratic file and therefore is simply discarded we've become the least wise people since the beginning of time it might be there will be losses the concepts of skill and judgment which are again personal and acquired in a way that can't be regulated and there would be simultaneous abstraction and gratification the split between matter and and the sort of the the conceptual World um in which abstraction became vicious and ratification became vicious that there was just mere lump and Mata rather than as I believe matter is something very reward if you're a total materialist and you think it was only matter then I say this too matter is a very remarkable thing because it gave rise to box and John's passion that's an extraordinary thing for your matter to have done I believe there's more to match other than meets the eye in fact when you ask physicists whether Consciousness can be reduced to matter they say well you're just replacing one mystery with another we don't understand Consciousness but we don't understand matter right um bureaucracy would have a field day because according to Peter Berger a famous sociologist it has these sort of equalities procedures of the known anonymity organizatability predictability and Justice reduced to Mere equality explicit abstraction loss of a sense of uniqueness I mean that's very obvious of the world that I know sit around quantity will become the only criteria there will be no or little attempt to um vary because of the difference from one's opinion it would be a massive Ida or is this or it's that what about uh there might be another intervening stage that may be various possibilities here reasonable plus will be replaced by mere rationalization I'm I'm making a quality difference which I believe exists in German between and in English I it doesn't quite exist in the same way but I think English people understand the difference between reason and the sense of reasonable nurse which is a a product of experience fused with the ability to think clearly replaced by rationalization which is something the computer could spew out and the distinct failure of common sense that very uncommon thing and that very important attribute I can create schizophrenic patients you say there is something that everyone else had that I miss and it is devastating I cannot live a life and what is that thing it's Common Sense which is how we make judgments all the time that help us live in the world um in a meaningful way um interestingly Einstein said the common sense was the bunch of prejudices one had gathered by the age of 18. perfectly correct because it's about the age of 18 that schizophrenia really kicks in and they have no common sense and it's utterly devastating um where we are going wrong way actually systems designed to maximize utility only there'll be a loss of social cohesion depersonalization paranoia and lack of trust because the left hemisphere is residential is to control if there are things that are out of its control it becomes anxious and What needs to impose restrictions and find ways of of controlling things so using you know perhaps CCTV cameras everywhere or having a database of DNA that sort of thing there'd be a need in fact for total control and of course in schizophrenia thing is that the left hemisphere exact is exaggerated and it senses that there are things that are out of its control that are happening in other words it's thoughts and it says it must be because the police are in the Next Room and they're broadcasting through the wall or it's coming from that air event up there so they use the reason perfectly well these are rational possibilities if they have no comprehensive at all anger and aggression will become the main um term of social intercourse because these are the Specialties of the left hemisphere the um the emotion that most strongly lateralizes is in fact anger and it lateralizes to the left hemisphereological right that we would also see ourselves all the time as the passive victims of things other people have done to us the complete inability to accept responsibility of yourself and your own life and grow up because it's just like the left hemisphere it's a yeah the sound doesn't work nothing to do with makeup it's something to do with him over there you doctor there would be a conceptualization of Art in which there'd be a lack of the sense of depth and distorted perspectives because these are highly dependent on the right hemisphere they've been evolved three times in the civilization along with Harmony in Greece in Rome and in ours so perspective wasn't invented in 1453 in Florence that had been around the world a couple of times before and in each case it dies out as civilization corrupts and and the same thing happens to Harmony in music because music is basically best appreciated by the right hemisphere for most people Melody and Harmony are only appreciable by the right hemisphere the one bit the less hemisphere gets is boom boom boom boom a sophisticated rhythm with syncoptations which is wonderful you need to go to the right answer again for that language is diffuse excessive lacking in concrete reference they used to keep a file of procedures that the hospital Administration gave to me by my bedside in case I suffered from insomnia and it contained all of this and there'd be a deliberate undercutting of the sense of war or wonder because the left-hander says infuriated by the idea the little thing is it might not be able to know what do you mean of course it's just one experiment more we'll have the whole story um and flu would be just the sum of an infinite series of pieces flow is very important I have times talk about it they did talk about yesterday a bit about the idea scrap but it's a fundamental conception in the cosmos and the reduction to Pieces is very much the left feminism has take of it it would be discarding of all tacit forms of knowing instead we would have to have everything governed by explicit rules and in 1837 the top field in America already saw that this civilization was going to be strangled by what we call a network of small complicated rules and we pride ourselves like Descartes on being Spectators rather than actors in the world sitting on the sofa with a six-pack watching news and all this would be accompanied by a dangerously unwarranted optimism so if I'm right this might be a kind of world that could come into being but thank God I haven't experienced that I have experiences this um this is where we are I believe and this is why I wrote this book which and was a product of a further 10 years work and came out in November 20 21 the first part of it is really to expand enormously on the difference between the hemispheres in this way I'm saying subsidious at the lowest level of understanding because I think if we're going to solve the problems we Face we need to understand what's wrong I'm a doctor you don't cheat a patient until you know what the diagnosis is and as I said before if you start just putting a plaster on things piecemeal because this is a different problem and another problem you haven't got to the root of it's like treating a cancer by sticking um a Band-Aid on it um and so in the first part of the book I look at the portals of whereby we can get any information about the world at all and these involve attention perception judgment based on what we attend to and what we perceive um our intelligence both emotional and social and cognitive and our creative faculty and in every one of these cases I can demonstrate that the right hemisphere is superior to the left they may say that doesn't leave much for the left-handed sphere you must have got this wrong we can't have that well there's one thing that left hemisphere it was enormously good at it's no good at comprehension but it's very good at apprehension apprehension comes from ad prehenry to grasp onto something get it take it have it whereas comprehend it means to embrace to take together what is there and that is what the right hemisphere is doing that is the first part of the book and I think it's important because it doesn't just show that there are two ways of looking at the work but there are two unequal ways of looking at the world they're each important don't get me wrong we can't do without the left hemisphere you know it's my second favorite Hemisphere and I wouldn't be brighter if I'd had it removed we need these things but we mustn't let them run the show that is the important point they need to take a second role a supporting role to the right let me see which actually understands then in part two of the book which is also in volume one just to make complicated and I look at epistemology how do we follow the path towards some kind of a truth because I hold the idea that there is something we can call children or something else if you doubt that then there's no point in coming here to listen to me being at the University or even getting up in the morning if you don't prefer anything to anything else on the grounds that it's true you might as well count your throat no so there is some truth we just need to find a way and I think ways would be and most people would agree with me science reason intuition and Imagination which some people would think might lead you astray but in fact I showed an intuition and Imagination are fundamentally important to our ability to understand what we're looking at science and reason alone lead to a a very very partial diagrammatic picture of the world which is familiar to us from human beings who have autism of certain kinds or have schizophrenia recession clones and they suggest that we need all four of these wherever possible not just one or two and that in each case including in science and in reason the best part is contributed by the right hemisphere I give the stories of many scientific discoveries many discoveries in mathematics and you can see that these are made by a kind of pattern recognition a new Gestalt shiv which the right hemisphere is expert atom is only able to do the left hemisphere can't do this it has to approach things stepwise linearly so this ability to see a whole shift is right and it's independent and it gives rise to that wonderful sense of a heart and insight and this is robustly associated with the right Superior temporal sulcus and Gyros and limited and then in the last part of the book I say okay so armed with this let's apply all of this to looking at the constants and this is the metaphysics and here I have a chapter on the shape of the cosmos two chapters in fact they're called The Coincidence of opposites and the one and the many and the reason here is that in fact we completely neglect these two very important and ancient insights that opposites tend to coincide that if you pursue something to an extreme you find the same thing that you were running away from that every good thing has its dark side every dark thing has a good side there is a wonderful picture which I'm not allowed by copyright to put up on the screen I have the copyright for putting it in my book by MC Asher which is called it's called something quite irrelevant basically it shows angels and devils in black and white completely insulating to form a circle anyway what I think is important is that we've lost that corrective capacity in the right hemisphere that looks for inconsistencies in our world and the organism as ramachandran says the organism in this situation becomes progressively more and more delusional and become hopelessly trapped in them leading to states such as anos hypnosis like denying you have a paralysis so I'm just going to wind up now with some sites on what I perceive in the world around us in general and I think we're a twin progeny of the left hemisphere bureaucracy and the AI they are both ways of attempting to systematize something that is not systemic in this way but needs to be intuited by a bodily being that has experience in life and that is pursued in this way dehumanizes us both of them lead to the Triumph of somebody's Theory over experience both of them lead to loss of freedom through Insidious control the more things are administered managed the less Freedom we have the more we are monitored and followed and tracked down and this is a holy bureaucracy between bureaucratic power and AI there is also a loss of trust because in a bureaucratic organization nobody can truthfully say that they are responsible well this is my instructions you know this is what I'm told to do you can never find the person with whom you can have a reasonable conversation that actually my my car doesn't have square wheels so it's no good it's not going to work for me no I'm sorry according to go out about your cards were weird and and therefore a loss of truth because trust and Truth are not just etymologically connected they are experientially connected you can only trust somebody if you believe they're being truthful with you you are only true to somebody if you feel you can trust them these two qualities are very important and an ancient Chinese emperor in the third Century said for any civilization there are three things that are important guns food and Trust and if you want to lose one of them lose the guns if you have to lose another one lose the food but never lose the trust because without it it cannot survive there is a Dutch proverb if there's anybody from Holland here they will be able to correct me but it translated it says trust a lot arrives on foot and departs on a horseback there's a sort of loss of shared Humanity involved in both bureaucracy and in a i and a complete loss of Common Sense more and more of one's life is spent facing a faceless machine of people or a machine of mechanisms and as a result one's life is less and less to do with interacting with other human beings and more and more to so-called interfacing with some blasted piece of equipment this is no substitute for having a life and in the past it was easy to be able to correct a mistake by going on a telephone that modern invention and and speaking to somebody for five minutes but now you can easily spend a whole morning happily going around MCS to write loops on the internet which don't understand what you're asking about and eventually in frustration you give up you Google is there a telephone number for this you find there is one you're on hold for about an hour then you speak to somebody who is usually in the subcontinent doesn't know the place where you live and is working from an algorithm so they're not allowed to depart from Eldon in other words you're completely trapped in a mechanical world and there's no room anymore for common sense there is a confusion between organisms and mechanisms this is pervasive and extremely damaging we are not our brains alone and our brains are not cognitive machines alone they're not even machines and they're not only property there are about eight reasons why organisms are different from mechanisms and I deal with them in chapter 12 of the matter of things in which I look at the way in which biology has not kept pace with physicals physics a very long time ago discovered the world was not for mechanism at least about 110 years ago people gave up on the Newtonian idea that it was a static machine that was set in motion and blah blah and entirely predictable it is not it is not in time it's predictable it is not mechanical and it has bottom-up and top-down effects it is a complex system not just a complicated one and so on and so forth there is an erosion of boundaries both public and private we've now become used to exposing all kinds of things and should probably not be exposed in public and when they are lead to reprehensible consequences for for the person that is exposed whether that's the body or parts of their life and and so forth and this was always understood in every other Society but not of course by us because we're clever everything that is valued for its independence like the wild the Wilderness is now administered as a department of the Wilderness you know what I mean and there are special abundance who arranged around it and make sure that it's properly wiped and this means that you can never go anywhere now where you're not actually being that ministered by the machine you can't appreciate that essential wildness of life which is inside every one of us I'm ancient but I've still got it in there there's a sort of concept emptying out of meaning you know because meaning comes from the sense that things have a kind of connection with you and a purpose which is not the function of some functionary who drew up a chart of how it works it's something that comes out of out of your embodied being there is a colossal colossal expense of time and resource if all bureaucracies were cut down by about 80 percent think of all the money we would have to spend on other things that might be very important because they're not only expensive they're an impediment what very wealthy people want they extremely rich and in my lifetime the gap which we thought was getting narrower between rich and poor has got greater not less and this is because of the handful of extremely rich people who send messages down that we must cut costs how do you cut costs you replace people with the machine that's the whole point and what they are doing is outsourcing they are taking from us not just on money that's trivial they've taken from us our life and time because we now have to spend all day filling out forms in the last five years it's got double as bad as it was before that and it was already growing it at a a an incredible rate where is this heading we'll also end up sitting at a desk all day trying to fill out forms that don't cater to our needs at all or even describe the kind of life and it is therefore to a feeling of frustration and Powerless which in turn is as Hannah and pointed out an invitation to violence because violence is different from power power can be very necessary can be very important can be very beneficent but violence is another matter and when people feel completely dispossessed and completely sidelined they tend to become violent I think we will see this I think we're already asleep you'll be glad to know this is my last but one slide I'm sorry I've been rather long but I wanted to give you full value you've turned up um this is the Pyramid of values schematized from Max Shalom whom Heidegger called The Mist um the most uh promising and insightful philosopher of his generation when he spoke at shayla's funeral and Shayna unlike fighting I talked much more he did talk about the sort of more cognitive things when you talked also about values which I don't find Heidi was so good on and he thought there was this hierarchy of values in which at the bottom there will answer you know day-to-day things like use and pleasure and then there were leave from Sparta which are things that are now out of fashion like bravery and magnanimity and generosity and fidelity and uh obviously they're they're opposites and above that chain the geisting about her and of course in German ghosts means about spirit and intellect and these are probably best represented by Plato's um Plato's uh Triad of values Beauty goodness and truth I think they're all in Peril these days and these um were there to support Dash Heidegger which was the highest value and at the end of my book I have a chapter on the sacred which cost me more than anything I've ever written it took me longer than anything I've ever been per word in which I tried to be true to this idea which I believe to be entirely real but it's very difficult to express without travestying it or saying something that is false and I didn't want to do that is this kind of range of values but remember the left hemisphere is about control it exists to grab it exists to get power and so is it the story that's now constructed is the holy was invented by priests in order to exert a hierarchy of parliament the beauty goodness and Truth a sort of um so the superficially kind of luxurious things that we might come across and really there have no value except in procuring the furtherance of the species there's so much that can be said against that but then if somebody wants me to get into it I will do believe me and then um the values of Vitality which are those things that suckers do they they're they they choose their work they're generous they're faithful and thank God we dogs can eat those dogs and that's all in the service of power use and pleasure so who controls who those here a Triumph of power alone I'm not sure that anyone actually is benefiting from us but it's a I've come to believe as young believed that there were drives as Freud believed the word drives as most religions believe through our drives I believe there is a drive that is embodied in the left hemisphere which has a motivation of its own it has a life of its own is prepared to Simply replicate and it's a Triumph of pure power and therefore the undermining of all the other values that we get in its way in the execution of power but there is a futility of utility because if there is only Power what is the use of use just more power but that second is there nothing outside that there can be used for this is a point that's been made by many philosophers purpose then well I believe it's not necessarily anybody's purpose I don't think the people who make AI are aware of what they're doing they're excited by the feeling that they're making progress in a technique which is obviously rather exciting like an understanding but they don't really realize what the purpose of this is going to be and I don't think its purpose is going to be necessarily benign I had an interesting let me lighten the toes like I I gave a talk to Oxford University and I thought that's good and then somebody wrote to me afterwards and offered me a rather handsome honorary and I thought well that's nice I didn't expect that anyway in the past whenever something like that has happened I would get a check um a few days later from the University chest which is the financial armor of Oxford University and the job would be done but no not now I had to fill out various kind of forms so these were not enough they led to firm and questions and queries and forms eventually I was guided to somewhere on the internet where I had to tick a box as to what it was I had to live in and I discovered there were 77 option and one of these was for window cleaning and another was for catering but there was none for delivering a lecture which I've had was one of the purposes of having a university and so I was a bit mystified and in the end I rang the university chess which still actually has a telephone that's a man by a real person and I said what do you want me to do this is supposed to say oh it's a nightmare I mean this thing is just hopeless he takes up so much of our time and I said well of course A Valentine too and what do you want me to do she said oh just tick any box make it up okay so that is actually how I managed to get paid in the end six months later and many hours of fiddling around on the internet to who is this beneficial it's certainly not beneficial to the administrators it's not beneficial to anyone but a kind of mindset that's got in there that we must have more schemes more systems more pieces of paperwork I would say for everything that is introduced acts 10 others so you have to think before you go and introduce it 10 of your other regulations have got to go because otherwise this world is going to drown in paper in the left hemisphere knows only what it has made its own representation it is in that sense Windows it sees its version of the world and plays this little internal game we can't see out the what's actually happening in people's lives and I believe that this is there is therefore an active war on what it has not created itself things like the body the natural world all these things are being content and put in their place and for this to succeed it needs to abandon truth Beauty and goodness Hannah Arendt one of the greatest philosophers in the last hundred years who of course was herself the victim of Nazi tyranny the ideal subject to Italian totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the convinced communist but people for whom the distinction between the fact and fiction are either reality of experience and the distinction between true and false are either standards of thought no longer exists that is where we are now my friends what we do about it I have things to say about that but not now you can ask [Applause]

Channel: Dr Iain McGilchrist

Views: 20,484

Keywords:

Id: HMiC5ma_laY

Length: 87min 8sec (5228 seconds)

Published: Tue Nov 28 2023