The role of consciousness in nature: An interview with Dr. Iain McGilchrist, Part 1

[Music] it's a little like asking a fish what water is like we live in it and we can't stand outside it and study it and a lot of our idea of what it means to know something in science is to stand outside experience but of course experience is consciousness so we can't stand outside it um in that sense it's different from most things studied by science um but it's not unique um the things we value also have to be seen from the inside for us to understand what we mean by value of them the things that we love we have to see them as it were from the inside you can't inspect love from the outside and hope to get a better picture of what it actually is because you'll miss all the important part of it so it's a very difficult thing to do and it might be a mistake to think that the human brain and the human mind can comprehend uh these things these very large subjects like consciousness and value and purpose and god which are essentially experienced elements in in themselves and what i like is something niels bohr said um in the 30s the aim of our task in science is not to be able to demonstrate the essence of reality but in as far as it's possible to show the relationships between different aspects of our experience i think that's a very very good phrase very good expression of what we have to do in other words all we have is our experience to go on and to make better and better models of how different aspects of that experience relate but not to take this sort of single essence of one thing in the course how do we know that that would be the essence the bit that we know with our little brains um and indeed it suggests that we'd be dealing with things rather than as i constantly stress relations and processes so the first thing i would say about consciousness is that it's a mistake to think of it as a thing it's a process even better it's an aspect of processes in the same way that a certain rabbi aegis made the very good remark about truth that though to god truth might be identity to humans it is more properly thought of as an adverb truly we do things truly we do them with and in truth and consciousness is like this it's an aspect of our experience we do things consciously or unconsciously what actually consciousness is as a noun may be a mistake as a question [Music] absolutely not a byproduct of anything the whole idea of a product is a static noun and i'm talking about a process okay so it's not a product certainly not a byproduct of anything it's foundational and i think in the earlier talk that i gave for essentia i made that point that i see consciousness as foundational to all it is that we can't get behind it we can't get a standpoint from which to see it outside of it we are in it and it is foundational for everything that we know the idea that somehow consciousness at one time didn't exist and then suddenly sprang forth from a human brain or an animal brain or whatever it is that one imagines is an extremely unlikely story i'd say if you were at all skeptical you'd think i wouldn't put much money on that a much more reasonable idea is that consciousness is present as an element in the cosmos and that's not a fringe point of view that's not a a an outsider's view on science um in their oxford companion to the mind ramachandran and colin blakemore two very mainstream neuroscientists concluded that consciousness may just be we have to accept that it may just be one of the essential building blocks of the universe in other words they're saying it can't emerge from something else and i absolutely agree with that [Music] it wouldn't be the way i would take it um because there's a position there that things are either separate or they're in a way fused whereas what i'm suggesting is that in in this case in talking about consciousness as in talking about any kind of reality we have to preserve the dipolarity between what is unique and what is part of the whole or is just whole in other words things can be distinguished within a hole without being thought of as separated from the hole um a simple image of this which i've often used is of a wave in the sea or a whirlpool in a river that they are distinguishable you can see them you can photograph them you can measure them and they have force they can move stones rocks so they're very important and very real but they're not somehow the wave is not separate from the sea the wave is an aspect of what the sea is the whirlpool is not separate from the water it's not just in the water it's the form the water takes at that particular time and place so for me consciousness is neither atomistic nor a simple home it is a differentiated hole and that's a theme that comes up a great deal in my uh recent book matter with things in other words union and division are brought together but they are unified they're not divided so at a higher level union trumps division if you like division is important in the genesis of anything but only in complexifying fulfilling and making beautiful the whole i think this is an idea that it was also i'm not saying i'm i'm quoting or even paraphrasing david bone but i think his idea of the implicat order is of this nature that it and i see the cosmos what is worth not speaking for david bowm here as an endless unfolding of something which by its unfolding doesn't become fragmented it's not that things come out of the cosmos and are now separate it's that the cosmos unfolds and what before seemed simple and single is shown to have multiple aspects so in essence my consciousness your consciousness are at least partly distinct there are certainly people who would argue in religious traditions and even in certain scientific frameworks that then even there your consciousness and mind are not completely distinct and i'd be quite content with that formulation if somebody wanted to put it forward but at the end there is not just a sum of all these consciousnesses but they're part of one single sea of consciousness or stream of consciousness when it comes back to the image of water [Music] well yes i mean we may or may not know bits of what's going on in somebody else's head and uh irrespective of whether um it's possible for minds to communicate with one another in some form of telepathic communication as i say irrespective of that the early 20th century german philosopher max schaeler who i very much admire suggested that thoughts and feelings are not inside each one of us when we have them but when we share thoughts and we share feelings we should think of them as in some intermediate space that is not just in my head and in your head but where the two minds actually meet so that's a possibility in any case i mean all that one says about these things has to be speculative if somebody had finally decided what they thought consciousness was and we all agreed with them we wouldn't have anything to talk about and i don't think we've reached that point and i don't think we ever will so what i would say is yes we are continuations of a process we're part of an ongoing process that began before we were and continues after we are and from which we are not in any way separate although we are distinguishable and that is the process of consciousness and the process of life we are the ways in which consciousness and life and probably many other things such as love and beauty and purpose manifest in each individual person even though what we're talking about are not atomistically distinct entities [Music] it's a quite different area that about the relationship between matter and consciousness yes and what i do say about that is that they are phases they are phenomenal expressions of what is at root an indivisible entity so although as we meet matter we think of it as something quite distinct i would say it is a phase of consciousness phase not as in time but phase as in an aspect so for example in physical chemistry people talk about water as having phases it has the liquid phase it has the solid face which we know as ice and it has this indivisible um aspect as water vapor diffused in the air and it's worth thinking about those because um it prepares us for the fact that the same entity may manifest in very different forms so as water what we call water pure and simple it's translucent it is constantly on the move when permitted to do so um it has it can be separated into tiny drops it can you can move in it without um without difficulty um and you see through it ice is opaque it's hard it doesn't move unless it's forced to and it's very solid indeed and as i sometimes say it's hard enough to split your head open so it's really very different from water and then water as it is diffused in the atmosphere is such that we can at times not see it at all much of the time we can't see it we occasionally see it in certain kinds of light and when it becomes very thick but it has quite different properties so if those are all russia you might say well which is the real water but that seems to me to be a mistaken question it's a question of language simply which one of these three phases do we want to call or do we normally call water and because what we mainly experience is flowing water that's what we call water but ice is a name for a kind of water and matter is a name for a kind of consciousness and what i mean by that is it is a way in which our consciousness manifests something to us so when i am doing what we call thinking i can move in my thinking wherever i like but when i'm dealing with mata this table in front of me this chair on which i'm sitting i can't go where i like it resists it's solid um and so it has a different um way of manifesting itself and why we should necessarily think of um consciousness as primary to matter is an arguable point it could be said that they are equally phases and we shouldn't make further distinctions but all i would say about that is that it's slightly different from the image i gave of water and ice in that it's not through water that we come to experience ice and it's not through ice that we come to experience water it is through consciousness and only through consciousness that i have any concept of matter at all matter is in fact an abstraction that nobody has ever seen what we are talking about when we refer to mata is all the things the events the processes in our experience that have certain qualities that show that they resist us they uh they they they manifest themselves by resisting our will and i can be certain that i only know matter because of having consciousness but i can't be certain that i only know consciousness because of having matter a brain that may be true or it may not be true in fact i don't believe it is true but that's a separate argument [Music] well i think there are clearly people who have had experiences such as near-death experiences um there are very very many accounts of them i of course never have had one nor have i ever experienced anything that falls into the realm of what would be called paranormal um it's arguable that there's nothing para about these phenomena because they happen so frequently that they should be called part of the normal experience having said that i'm not in a position to speak from my experience so i can only go on the experiences of others and the degree to which they've been investigated and i think they have been investigated scientifically such as famously by pim van lomel um but by others uh peter fennican and others i haven't really studied this literature so i don't i don't really have a firm position on it i wouldn't like to be dogmatic about it i'm very wary of dogma in science or in those who want to promote or dismiss science and i think we ought to go with what we can know fairly certainly um at least as certainly as we can know anything in this world which is not very certain at all um so i don't know i i i i think it's perfectly possible there are other phenomena like terminal lucidity in which patients who've lost brain function through long brain diseases such as dementia suddenly seem to gather acuity of thought and the ability to speak and so on and almost invariably die in the following 24 hours hence the name terminal lucidity this is a again a very widely experienced phenomenon phenomenon most people who've worked with the elderly or with the terminally ill as nurses for example can describe cases of it so it's not rare if these things are true it does suggest that there is some capacity for whatever it is that we call consciousness not to be wholly limited by the brain which is its vehicle in this world and in the matter with things um i have a chapter on consciousness and its relationship to mata and what i argue there but i haven't time to unfold the whole argument but um is that there are clearly enormous parallels between brain function and mental function i mean they're so close that nobody could conceivably deny them and lucretius already a couple of thousand years ago was noticing that drugs affect the brain and they affect consciousness epilepsy affects the brain and affects consciousness and and so on and that um a head injury can an injury to the brain will affect the consciousness of course this is absolutely indisputable but when two things are very closely allied we're not immediately informed unless we think quite hard about it what the nature of that relationship is does a cause b or does b cause a or does some further thing c cause both of them and i i suggest that probably that lassa option is the best one i say in the book that putting it simply we can think of the relationship between consciousness and the brain as an emission in other words the consciousness is something emitted by the brain or that we can think of it as transmission in other words that it acts as a receiver for consciousness that doesn't it's not confined to the brain but is manifested through the brain at that time in the way that the program on your radio set or whatever is manifested as found in the room but is not actually made by or start doesn't start from the radio set itself or there is a third option uh permission so either emission transmission or permission and i say the that emission is the least likely of all these options nobody has given the slightest uh reason for us to believe that consciousness can be emitted from a brain if that brain is treated as entirely unconscious if you say well the brain is in any case conscious then you're not you're not demonstrating that consciousness comes from the brain you're saying that what we have to argue if we're keen on this idea that consciousness is an emanation of matter is that it must come from unconscious matter someone has to imagine some matter which is entirely unconscious and suddenly there is consciousness in it this is completely illogical and completely incomprehensible and nobody has explained how it could happen people sometimes talk about complexity as though this explains something the complexity of interconnections in the brain and indeed these are colossal um there is uh almost an infinite number of connections in the human brain um and there's over 100 billion neurons the part of our brain that sustains consciousness the cerebrum however only accounts for a small part about 20 percent of all these neurons most of these neurons are actually in the cerebellum it has four times as many neurons as the cerebrum as what we think of as our brain the bit that does the thinking the cerebellum the small ancient part of the brain that it sits posteriorly in the skull contains four times as many neurons but it can't sustain consciousness somebody might say well they may have more neurons but they're not com complexly interrelated but i'm afraid they are and some of the most um elaborated and highly complex neurons the purkinje cells exist only in the cerebellum so it's not clear in any case i would say why complexity of its own can be gestured towards as an answer to the arising of consciousness it's it's like we put a lot of things together that are unconscious we make them very complex and complexly interconnected but still unconscious and then after this somehow consciousness comes you've really just black boxed the whole business of how that consciousness comes by using the word complexity but it doesn't really help explain the situation so i take the view that consciousness for most of us most of the time is tied to our brains and is certainly influenced by the brain in the way that the transmission of a radio program or a television program is influenced if there's something wrong with the set or something wrong with the radio so of course it has impacts but as in the case of the radio and the tv the program that you are actually engaging with is not generated by the tv set or the radio set it comes from somewhere else [Music] i don't begin from anywhere because um although um i don't say i have a certainty about this i espouse a panzerkiss position in other words the consciousness is everywhere in the cosmos the ways in which it is manifested however are very very different in different forms and different places at different times so i certainly wouldn't argue against a single cell being conscious mainstream microbiologists and cell biologists have themselves claiming that the single cell is is conscious one of the reasons for saying this is that well several things to say about it really but one simple thing is that it appears to be able to think for itself i know that sounds a remarkable claim to make but a cell can adapt um in an intelligent way to a crisis that it phases without that being anything for which that cell could either in itself or in its lineage have been prepared for so it can't have been prepared in its genome and it can't have been prepared by experience to know how to respond intelligently in order to minimize damage and yet a cell can do this this was something that was first pointed to by barbara mcclintock who was a nobel prize winner back in the 80s i think so certainly single cells would appear to show consciousness and very simple organisms such as slime molds can solve mazes which is something that requires we would have thought memory and the ability to as it were take a decision um so there's those those reasons i think for thinking that a cell is likely to be conscious is a virus conscious i would say yes it's not conscious in the way that you or i are conscious then you say well what about the consciousness in all the things around us and i think we have to conceive consciousness as present in their makeup but not as active in the form of intelligent understanding but if we don't take the pan psychist position we can never get over the problem that we have to get from a state of affairs in which there simply is no particle of consciousness the one in which there is and that is just an impossibility so i mean this this is a position that is now being espoused increasingly by a mainstream anglo-american analytic philosophers for what it's worth um but also has been held by phenomenological philosophers and is common to most ancient wisdom traditions around the world so it's not exactly a surprise that we might think there's a reasonable position to hold [Music] that is an answerable question an answerable question um i probably am not the person to give you the perfect definition but i think it's not disputed that we can say that when certain processes begin to take place involving rna particularly and probably dna as well that we are dealing with life so there is inanimacy and there is animacy i think that is absolutely right and it doesn't present the same problem as going from unconsciousness to consciousness it's perfectly legitimate to think that there is a way in which things are disposed and arranged which has some of the properties actually of everything that lives but can't itself replicate in the way that what we call living beings do what life brings is two things i think a huge change in the rate at which responses can be made so um inanimate complexes like iron ore in the rock can enlarge can shrink can change will respond to the environment all these things are true of inanimate deposits of minerals and and rocks and so on but they're changing is much slower than ours behind my house there is a mountain it is actually a wave that is ready to break on to the top of this house i won't be here when it breaks um but it is an interrupted um part of a flow a volcanic flow which is frozen at the moment and if one saw a time-lapse camera from the beginning of the formation of the earth and going forward one would see this this wave moving so everything moves everything changes everything is responsive as my most admired philosopher of all time heraclitus said everything flows this is true but what life does is speed this process up unimaginably so things that would take literally billions of years can take place within seconds in living organisms and the other thing that life brings is responsiveness so i'm not saying that there is no response in the inanimate world water moves a rock the rock responds it falls it crushes something else but the nature of the response and the depth of the response in life is completely different so as i say you get single cells that can solve problems within not billions of years but actually just within um minutes so that is that is what i consider to be the essence the transformation of the speed of responsiveness and the extent of responsiveness and what i like very much is um the idea that we don't have values because we are alive but life is necessary because there are values um and this is a a point that's made by um thomas nagle and i absolutely agree with it i hadn't read it at the time that i had formulated my own views on the nature of values as being ontological primitives in other words like consciousness things that we can't get behind and attribute to something else which is not again um an unusual position and doesn't involve um invoking some sort of engineering god at all in fact it was a position put forward by um derek perfect a colleague of mine at all souls uh who who was a very great philosopher um atheistic and very much in the anglo-american analytic tradition but he held that values are ontological primitives that they can't be seen as deriving from or emanating from anything else now if they are ontological primitives they they their nature is relational like consciousness it is relational this is the point that we need to be discussing consciousness is a relationship not a thing values are relations not things and in the nature of a relation as in the archetypal one of love there has to be a relationship between things that can't just be love without anything to love or to be loved or to respond to that love so in the unfolding of consciousness and the unfolding of the world not the creation of these things the business of the universe unfolding and enriching itself massively all the time this individuating drive within the overall hole that allows things to differentiate without fragmenting that hole in that process life came about as a way of making the creation the cosmos more responsive to whatever it is that is of primary significance in its primary entities in the cosmos things like consciousness life and values [Music] i suppose there are a lot of things i could say i mean the one is that it would be surprising if a single human mind knew what the purpose of the entire existence and unfolding of the cosmos was i have a couple of ideas they're not more than that i think one of them is an important distinction that is between purpose of an instrumental kind and purpose of if you like a self-fulfilling kind the distinction is between a mechanism such as a photocopier the purpose of which is to produce a sheet of paper it's made by human beings for a utilitarian purpose which is to make a copy on a paper but there are other things that we say have purpose but they don't have instrumental purpose for example there is a great deal of purpose in meditating but you mistake the nature of meditating if you think the purpose of it is to make you a more effective broker so you do 15 minutes of meditation in the morning that is not the purpose the purpose is fulfilled in itself and the philosopher james cars s c-o-r-s-e talks about finite games and infinite games and what he means by finite games are things that have a goal in sight and the purpose of the whole exercise is to achieve that goal infinite games are games that are fulfilled in the playing of them and so you can see that um the purpose of a of a game of football might be getting the goals but another way of looking at it is the purpose of a game of football is to play a game of football and it is fulfilled by doing that even if there is no score there are no goals so these are different ways of thinking about what purpose is i may learn of a piece of music and i may want to play it i may go to a choir and sing in the singing i don't do it for some utilitarian outcome in order to improve my breath control or lower my blood pressure or or do anything at all i just do it because the the music is itself a celebration of life it is it is itself an important aspect of what a human being is so this kind of purpose is not describable in the sense that i expect most people when they are so what is the purpose and they're thinking in this very narrow utilitarian way which i associate with the left hemispheres um understanding of the world which i believe i can demonstrate evolved for the purpose of having purposes of this utilitarian kind and enabling us to fulfill them grabbing things getting things um but there is other purpose uh the kind that the right hemisphere is better able to understand that lies within the process and i suppose the other thing that i'd say in relation to what is the purpose is to take up your reference to the kabbalah there um and i'm sure you know this and i may have said it before but it's such an important story that i want to tell it again which is the story in the lurian cabala i.e the form it was developed to in the 16th 17th century by isaac luria of the foundations of all it is and the idea is that originally there is a being about which we can say nothing more than it is being and it is ends off and aims of nature is love and therefore ends of need something that is complementary and it needs something that is independent because if it is just a projection of you and part of you and abate entirely your will it is not separate from you and you cannot love that so the first act of creation by aims of what was it to do was it to stretch out a hand and make mountains and make seas and make sky and make the moon and the stars no its first act was what is known as tsim tsum which means withdrawal so ends off withdrew in order to create a space where something else whatever it was could be at all and in that space there were i think 12 vessels and they were to contain this other whatever it was and a single spark came out of ainsoft and fell on the vessels and shattered them they couldn't accept the size of they were too flimsy for this the single spark of reality of what ainsof is and that part of the story is called shepherd herce which means the shattering of the vassals and then there is a third phase in which humanity plays a very important role according to this philosophy which is repair tikkun which simply means repair and it is the role of putting the vessels together again but more beautiful than they were before and here i think of the japanese ceramic art called kinsugi in which a broken piece of ceramic is repaired but repaired with gold and the finished item is more beautiful than the original bowl before it was shattered and i give some examples i have some illustrations in the book the matter with things why this is so important to me is that it seems like the way in which we create our own experience in the brain there is a part the right hemisphere that is more receptive it is more open without judgment to whatever experience may be so it is like that fertile space into which something may come after there is withdrawal so i say the right hemisphere has a kind of active passivity it is actively open without having to do something and that is the most creative field into which something can begin to happen when that happens it is then whatever it is is taken up by the left hemisphere and if you like reduce to one of those i see we put it in that category that's one of those that goes there and so it organizes these things in the like in the urns in the in the in the vases that were there to contain this experience but those categories are much too small for reality and so they don't contain it but after that piece of work has been done the right hemisphere takes this information back now that this is this experience has been unpacked if you like and makes it into something richer and fuller than it was before and this is like the way a piece of music is learned best to begin with we are attracted to it as a whole but if we want to know it to play it we have to practice parts of it over and over again we have to fragment it we have to see it theoretically we have to see what's happening here uh we're resuming that the first theme we're going to return to the dominant or whatever it may be so it's broken up like that but when you come to play you forget all of that otherwise you can't play it but that wasn't time wasted that was time that was necessary for you to be able to give your final response to this wonderful experience that came to you first as a piece of music so i see creation as like this as having this quality of openness the closing down which is premature it helps to create something which can then be taken up and made into something more beautiful still [Music] there's a third isn't there um which is the way in which whatever that creative force is comes both to be what it is and to know itself and in that sense it's more like the idea of a dance which emanates from the creative principle but shows that creative principle itself something about itself which before it may not have been aware of until it's able to dance that how does it know that that is within because one very important idea in this is the distinction between and this ideal within chapters on time for example um that what happens can be thought of is already there somehow in some static block of the universe and it's just unfolded like going through a catalogue and turning the pages and you find what is there only bergson early 20th century um french philosopher um enormously rich mind and greatly underappreciated these days um gives the image of a ladies fan which was um an accoutrement of uh well-dressed women at that period that he had a fan and when you open the fan there was a painting on it but it was there when it was closed and the opening of it really just there it is but the the image i want to give is that and what black song was getting at is the image of something that actually is not pre-existing it only comes into existence in the process of coming into existence it's not knowable beforehand and so one way of thinking of it is that whatever this creative drive is and it clearly is a creative drive however you care to think of it in different cultures it's called things like li in chinese it's called the dao also in in traditions of buddhism and uh and daoism it's called in in the vedic tradition it's it it's known as the logos it's known as allah whatever this creative force is that causes this complex and beautiful cosmos to unfold i would say that that force is not like something we would base on the idea of a human being just much much grander like a person with an almighty brain it is a force that is actually constantly celebrating discovering delighting in and further propagating whatever is within it to bring forth so it is like the massive consistent eternal realization of potential like streams that flow forth and never stop flowing forth and are not exhausted by being in that process of laying force actually on that topic there is an interesting image in the sufi poet rumi in which he talks about whatever is safer in living as having these three parts to it that it is the source from which the water flows it is the water flowing from the source and it is the water that is drunk by the person who is thirsty and that is a beautiful way of conceiving what otherwise looks like a completely baffling concept in christianity that of the trinity uh i remember a simple franciscan monk giving me the best version of what how one can understand the trinity that i've ever heard and it's very simple it's like a book and there's some wisdom in that because in the greek tradition both pre-christian and in the christian tradition in the greek new testament there is talk of the logos which means yes a word but it also means much more than that it means reason thought the capacity for creation and the whole founding business of the gospels so it's like a book which is the book is it the book in the mind of the person who conceived it as the time they were conceiving it is it this book on the table that i can pick up and hold in my hand and give to you or is it what happens when you open it and read it and it starts to come to life within you and change you which is the book they're all the book so i think i like that image [Music] you

Channel: Essentia Foundation

Views: 27,708

Keywords: consciousness, psychiatry, idealism, philosophy of mind, ontology, metaphysics, mcgilchrist, iain mcgilchrist, the matter with things, essentia foundation interviews, EF Interviews

Id: OFylqGX4n9M

Length: 46min 46sec (2806 seconds)

Published: Sun Apr 17 2022