The role of consciousness in nature: An interview with Dr. Iain McGilchrist, Part 2

[Music] one way of answering this question is to repeat what i said in my um earlier talk for essentia because there i'm talking about what do we mean by reality is it something that is simply out there or is it something simply made up in our heads and i'm trying to suggest that it's something more complex than either of these that doesn't rule out our role in making it what it is but doesn't suggest that we just somehow make it all up so it's a complicated process but i think my best attempt to explain it is in that article i contributed to the website but i think the important thing is to come back to the perception which for me is so important that all reality is relations it's not things things are secondary to relations and i i do actually argue and i'm here i'm with a number of physicists that relata the things that are related are secondary to the relationships so there's not that there are first things and then because there are things or relationships between them but there are relationships and out of the web of interconnections congeal as it will come further and further into our site nodes where threads cross and it's these things that attract our attention we call them things we see them as things separate things but actually they're all part of a network and i sometimes create here um the image of indra's net which is um in the vedanta this idea of a net that covers the cosmos and in the net at every place where one thread crosses another there is suspended um a bead or a pearl in which all the rest of the net is is image so everything is interconnected um and so when we say what is real we appear to be asking the question what is really the case if i stopped having a relationship with it but that would immediately invalidate its being real because things are only real as much as they are relational what we can do though is inhabit many different viewpoints so what is objectivity it's not inhabiting a very odd viewpoint which is one in which you pretend that you have actually have no responses no feelings um about whatever it is you're looking at something that actually no human being has ever been able to achieve and wouldn't really be desirable as a way of securing truth in most cases if i i'm asked about something i need to enter into some sort of relationship to find out what it is otherwise i'm in the position of a martian looking at something that i completely don't understand is utterly alien to me and trying to make sense of it so instead of objectivity being an idea of an unrealizable and indeed undesirable detachment it's about varying one's point of view as fairly as one can to take in as many points of view as seem valuable in contributing something to this picture so the mind of the objective person is not one in which all other viewpoints other than one very peculiar cold clinical way of thinking is active but the exact opposite a kind of meditation in which all kinds of perspectives are being entertained and tried out to see which ones are most revealing so in that sense it's the way we take in anything that we we like in a in a zen garden we we don't just sit in one place but we walk around and look the garden looks different from different points of view interestingly in the case of one zen garden famous one called ryanji um although there are 15 stones or 15 rocks in the garden there is no place from which you can see all 15 which is something i like very much because it seems to me to anyway reflect on what i was saying is there is no one viewpoint from which you can see everything but by inhabiting different viewpoints you stand the best chance of seeing a reality it doesn't mean to say you have to accept each one of them to the same extent you may think one of them is enormously more important and revealing than another which is natural so that's fine but it's not a matter of the being a reality that we can discover and here again i come back to that saying of bore about physics that we are not trying to be able to demonstrate the inner nature of something which is always in a way beyond our capacity to do but instead to see the patterns of relationships between what we know and that is the progress of science to make sense of what it is that we know and it should be as broad in its embrace of things that we experience and as broad in the ways in which it approaches that as is possible and then to take a reasonable judgment on them and then testing out ideas against reality sorry well yes a third person study of something like consciousness um will only produce peripheral knowledge such as changes in certain brain activities under certain circumstances but those changes in whatever the brain is doing is not despite one or two perverse opinions voiced by philosophers i shall name is not the same thing as the experience so you can i can fall in love and undoubtedly there will be changes in my brain if i fall in love everything i do from filling the car with petrol and eating a sandwich and looking at the stars has a brain correlate but when you can demonstrate to me what that brain correlate is you haven't told me anything about what that experience was the true experience so this is a problem which seems to have escaped a lot of researchers into consciousness because for example they will say um we can show that consciousness actually has its origin in as i believe mark zone says in the brainstem that may be but it hasn't told us what consciousness is what it tells us is that given the existence of consciousness which we're doing nothing to explain it seems that the brain stem has a very important part to play in a human's experience of consciousness but too often in science we miss the fact that we are taking for granted the very thing that we should be questioning if we're prepared to take for granted consciousness it exists then we can ask these other questions like where are the correlates in the brain and so on but we've got no narrator saying what consciousness is and we can't get nearer to saying what love is by by looking at graphs or or doing anything that involves lab work but it doesn't make love unreal love's one of the most real things in life so the um that would be my my my take on that and and it's interesting because it's worth saying about value as well um darwin was enormously taken by and expressive of his love for and his reaction to the beauty of nature in his descent of man i think either the word beauty or beautiful occurs on a very high proportion of pages um i i do quote the figures in in the book i can't now remember that it's repeated over and over again and people think that they can tell me what beauty is and is for because they said well obviously it helps make selection and and so on it's that's fine and darwin of course wouldn't have disagreed at all with the fact that given the existence of beauty it can be used in this finite game sort of way but looking more towards the infinite game what is beauty at all where does it come from and darwin twice expresses complete puzzlement and says we get no closer to knowing where or how beauty ever came about once we we take for granted the existence of beauty we can say yes it can be used for this it can be used for that but the fact that it can be used for this and used for that doesn't say that's all that it is or that that is its purpose um there are you know um there are many things that we may do to express our being a life and then not necessarily the purpose for which we are alive and so in the case of beauty one finds oneself laughably reduced the suggestion that it has something to do with um mate selection only i mean it does have to do with that but good grief so is that really the reason that um a uh a desert place is beautiful that um the ice cap of a mountain is beautiful that um the equation e to the i pi equals minus one it's beautiful that a chess move is beautiful that the zen garden is beautiful that a minor third is beautiful that schubert c major quintet is beautiful no so it's extraordinary the capacity for science to blind itself to the very narrow hole in which it's digging and to answer all questions with relation to that not being able to see the vast canvas that it's ignoring yes there's nothing in science that says that reductionism is the way to do it or is somehow more scientific than other ways of doing science and that's why i devote three chapters to science in the matter with things um looking at its strengths which i profoundly believe in and rely on both in my career and in my personal life as we all do um what its strengths are what its limitations are because it can't be um thought to answer all our questions that's a that's a simple logical error um and what it comes from the different models which it uses so if it uses the machine model or if it uses the model of a of a process such as a the flow of a river and and the ways in which he gets distorted by um inevitable pressures in the institution of science so i look at all those yes what can we do about it well one of the things we could do would be to stop thinking that we get closer to something by simply taking it apart we get closer to understanding it by simply taking it apart and by taking it out of context i argue very strongly that once you change the context you change whatever it is you're looking at and once you take it out of context altogether you have utterly changed it also that when you take it apart you don't necessarily find the key to what it is you may have just thrown away everything that made it what it was again an example might be a sonata by haydn and you asked me what is it it's it's a lot of music what's his music it's it's a lot of different tones different notes that are sung or played or whatever what is a tone or a note let me have a look at these notes and i write them all down in a book and catalogue all the notes that are in the sonata it won't tell me anything at all about the sonata as soon as you start breaking it up you've lost the very thing you were looking at so i think the move towards a proper balance between the knowledge that does come to us from analysis but must be taken back into a syncretic or synthetic view that is able to compose something again that makes sense a balance between the processes for division and those for union with those processes for union always being if you like preferred superior or at a meta level more important than the ones for division it's a point that i make time and time again that we need the union of union and division we need both union and division but we need them to be unified and when people say we need um you know non-duality i say well yes but we also need duality but we need the duality or the non-duality of non-duality and duality so in this case what i'm really saying is there's nothing wrong with analysis it tells us very much it's quite true but if you are asking it to help you understand it rather than just to change something manipulate manipulated then you need to be able to bring this knowledge into a larger syncretic understanding in terms of what the hemispheres contribute to science and they both contribute massively to science it's clear from the descriptions of the processes that led great scientists and mathematicians to their key discoveries that processes that we know are associated more with the right hemisphere than the left were the crucial parts in the process there was also a lot of rather pedestrian serial analytic work going on for years it's true but the actual insight the knowledge the understanding of what was being dealt with comes from a kind of insight which is much better given by the right hemisphere which understands a bigger broader picture so in effect i think we need to make science more scientific um it's too unscientific at the moment for example science shouldn't have dogmas that it won't look at certain things consciousness is on the fringe of one of these dogmas it's not entirely excluded but there are certain scientists who wouldn't wish science to have anything to do with such a philosophical concept as though science and philosophy could be distinguished if you don't understand the relationship between science and philosophy then you've simply naively accepted a philosophy of mechanism and materialism without realizing that you've done it because that is the unspoken philosophy for what it's worth of much science has now practiced but science needs to be much more than that it needs to be open to the possibilities that it's missing things it needs to be skeptical but it needs to be not dogmatically skeptical it needs to be able to examine things and be just and fair in its appraisal of them and i don't think that is the case in much of the work that aims to help us understand processes that are not material or mechanical only it's the same thing that i was talking about that just because there's a brain and it's quite true you can watch it and measure it and see it changing that that's all there is there's nothing in the looking at the brain that tells you that everything that is is visible in your view of the brain i actually conceived some of the most interesting parts of psychiatry are the neurological parts i i i'm delighted by the beautiful things that we learn about the workings of the brain but i see those as telling us more about what a human being is in other words they need to be absorbed into a philosophy of human life which is really as schroedinger said you know the great physicist said that specialized knowledge about detailed areas in science is only useful in as much as it eventually contributes to the understanding of what we are and what we're doing in this world addressing that question took me 12 years and 1500 pages and that is the book no matter what things we mustn't think of purpose as necessarily something that was somebody else's purpose because we see purposes as being manifested in things that we make expressions of a desire we have that if we or any parts of the world where to be purposeful we'd ask well whose purpose is it must be a god there must be an engineering god who designs this but this is just an image dreamt up by the left hemisphere of a super left hemisphere god as an engineer who makes everything happen according to a mechanism and puts in the hand occasionally to correct things when they go slightly out of balance puts a few drops of oil into the machine from time to time but this is just getting us no further than the idea of there being no purpose but as i said there are purposes that are not parts of finite games instrumental purposes well there's no purpose in your studying music there's no purpose in your enjoying the garden there's no purpose in being in love and having a family but there may be no purpose in that narrow sense but these things would be wrongly described as without purpose because they have purpose in another meaning of that word which is not instrumental but is that they are going somewhere they are answering an attraction they are parts of the world call to us and we respond to it and indeed we call to parts of the world and they respond to us i don't hold with the idea that this is a one-way process involving an entirely insensitive cosmos the cosmos is conscious and responsive and so are we so the purpose is not something that could be attributed as a goal can be to a mechanical purpose it's a purpose that fulfills itself in the very process of coming into being and that's what the really deep purposes in life are what was the purpose of my writing that book it wasn't actually to change anybody's mind it was it was something that had no purpose at the time i was writing it i just felt the strong need to respond to what i saw in the world and that was the purpose that drove me to do it i mean in the end the purpose was more powerful than i was because i really didn't want to carry on but the purpose of saying no you have to carry on you must do this much as i suppose as a parent you may come to a time when you think oh god why did i ever become a parent you can't go no i'm not going to be afraid you have to carry on and in that carrying on the purposeness of life the purposeness of the fulfilling nature of being who one is which can only be found in unpacking potential that is the kind of purpose that we have three things that are very very clear um to me and very clearly substantiated by a mass of research evidence are that there are three things above all that make people well sane in other words in body and mind happy fulfilled resistant to crises more resistant to illnesses there are three things that are more important than stopping smoking losing weight or going to the gym or whatever it might be and those three things are belonging to a coherent tradition a social group that carry out processes where that group extends over time and space and is one of mutuality so the relational inter-human concept of a society the second is relationship with nature that just being in nature can change your capacity to think clearly can change your emotional range so that you don't feel so angry and aggressive um it can change your happiness very strongly but it can also change the levels of heart disease and and you know for those who are interested in the physical health more than anything it's very profound effect um that we get from being in contact with nature and the third thing is being in touch with a spiritual realm believing in a spiritual dimension preferably belonging to a group that has common practices together worships together has rituals in common but not necessarily just simply believing that there is more than this summed up in the very simplistic morally and imaginatively and intellectually naive vision of a cosmic mechanism and what have we done we have helped destroy the continuity of our communities we have rejected history tradition and everything that is not the product of some logical formula that we have decided now is more important we have alienated ourselves from nature until 100 years ago most people lived where they lived in a natural context and that also expresses for us an idea of the bigger whatever it is um that we belong to not just the tiny person that i am in a flat in a city and the third thing is you know we've done is to cut ourselves off from the spiritual and religious life by saying well only somebody who's simple-minded um would believe such things in my view any someone who is simple-minded would be convinced by an argument that there cannot be such a thing so we're in the process of committing suicide it's not a purpose of mine to stop us because we probably can't i can't stop people committing suicide i'd love to say i could because i have children i have grandchildren but it's up to all of us to reconceive the world to reconceive what life is so we conceive the cosmos which is beautiful and complex and responsive and tells us something about the nature of existence so if we if we lack all of that then we're losing the plot as we say and we can expect things to just disintegrate i i'm not a very strong you know adherent to one particular religion i see great value in in in most of the religions i know but the reason that things are going wrong in our world is because men have forgotten god and i think there's an awful lot in that because in that it's packed up a whole idea of the way in which we we live and who we are so although people are inclined to reject these ideas i think we ought to be careful before we reject them they may contain great wisdom a distinction of that kind of perfectly reasonable um the way in which i would mainly consider it is the distinction between the way the right hemisphere is able to understand the world including the way the left hemisphere understands it but seeing much more and the way the left hemisphere understands it which is just a very simple version and one of the differences between the two hemispheres is that the left hemisphere represents what was present or present to the right hemisphere so the right hemisphere is where we have this encounter with experience and it is then immediately replaced by a representation which literally means present again after the fact when the thing is actually no longer present this is a profoundly important distinction because we have got used to living in representations of the world without actually experiencing the presence of it one of the purposes of mindfulness is to re-engage our capacity to be present and to allow the world to presence to us and most people who practice that virtually everyone who practices it says it is a life-transforming experience that they see the world differently well this is because they're re-engaging the part of us which you might well call the heart and um over and above the simple model of the left hand it says representation which is always mechanical which is always linear which is always two-dimensional replacing it by the three-dimensional and i'm not speaking just figuratively about two-dimensional and three-dimensional i go into the neurology of all these things the differences between right and left hemisphere it's very very clear that when people have dysfunction of the right hemisphere they start to see the world two-dimensionally in space and two-dimensionally in time as made up of slices as a static not a flow any longer and seeing the world is flat like on a screen such as we are looking at now so yes all these things are ways of killing what you might call the soul killing yes i think what the the word soul is possibly even better than the word heart um and what's kind of interesting in german is that the word geist which is the word for intellect also is the word for spirit and it's a word already carries with it the idea that it is more than a purely intellectual process and we now know that just out of interest i wouldn't set an enormous amount of store by it but we know that the heart actually does have a an electro magnetic field around it which can be sensed by other people i think it's extensive to something like 12 feet around the person and and make it what you will i know that there was a surgeon who did heart transplants um at papa's hospital which is a big key center for such transplants in britain and he finally gave up doing them because he was so unnerved by the changes in personality that came when people received another person's heart and they started to prefer and like things that before the heart transplant they hadn't but which were completely typical of the donor of the heart now make what you like of that i just said there are many things that we don't understand what i like is that physicists tend to be very good at accepting there's just a lot we don't understand in fact they're much better at this than biologists biologists tend to convey the idea that we we've nearly cracked it just a few more experiments and we really understand the essence of things but there's something called the dunning-kruger effect in psychology which means that the more intelligent you are the more you understand how little you understand and the less intelligent and insightful you are the more you think you know everything and i'm afraid the left hemisphere tends literally to go to no i don't have a problem it lies somewhere else i'm not just speaking figuratively here i'm talking about what happens to somebody if they have a right hemisphere stroke the person simply overestimates their capacities has a higher opinion of themselves and is warranted thinks they're able to do things that they can't it doesn't happen after a left hemisphere stroke when the right hemisphere is now in charge so these are tangible truths about differences between the hemispheres and einstein was often created as um saying things like that he believed certainly certain things like that he could rule out the existence of god in fact he's known to have said not that he knew anything about a religion and he thought that a personal religion might be a rather childish idea but that he was very cross when people quoted him as a reason for disbelieving in god what he actually said was when it comes to questions of this kind it is completely beyond the capacity of the human brain so if he was humble enough and he was a humble man in many ways to recognize the extent of the things he didn't know why do so many biologists find it so difficult it's an interesting question often puzzles me i can quote a score of physicists who express this wonderful sense of not knowing which is a very fertile place to be in order actually to come to understand things um as erwin chargaff said in his wonderful intellectual autobiography heraclity and fire that biologists don't seem to understand the value of unknowing but physicists really do and in that tradition of all the great thinkers and mystics of the past that it's only in actually understanding the limits on our knowledge that we can come to have greater understanding [Music] [Music] you

Channel: Essentia Foundation

Views: 7,686

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

Id: sk0Hh-N40Kc

Length: 31min 39sec (1899 seconds)

Published: Tue May 03 2022