Tuesday Talks: 'The School of Nothing Buttery' by Dr Iain McGilchrist

[Music] well i'm going to start talking because i my clock says 1930 i'm lance butler i'm um about to become the chairman of the arthur conan doyle center which will be a great privilege and i'm hosting this for the center it's wonderful to see so many people that some that's nearly 50 people already and you're all extremely welcome these zoom talks seem to me to have been going pretty well and they're every tuesday evening and i sincerely hope you'll keep on coming back of course no pressure ian but that depends on the quality of the speakers however you can you can have your laugh on me because i shall be giving a talk in a month or so is time but we have some very interesting people coming up we've got a professor from bristol next next um tuesday is talking about magic and and spirituality in the gothic and after that we have the the following tuesday on the 27th we have the the young keen young pan psychist from durham university called philip gough but um that will all be apparent in your in your emails that you get and on our website arthur conan doyle center tonight we have ian mcgill christ who is seems to be one of the if he'll shut his ears for a moment one of the great intellectuals of our time he he was in my discipline english literature um at oxford and he was a distinguished don a single student and don to the point that he sat for and became elected to the college all souls which is about as high as you can get in most academic spheres and having succeeded with all souls and been a very good english dot he published a book called against criticism packed the thing in and started to become a doctor and he was a doctor and a psychiatrist and very well respected and very serious but he's always had both sides which of course is what we really like both the intellectual side and the more exploratory and alternative side which involves the arts and involves the spirit and so on and in 2009 he published his magnum opus called as many of you know the master and his emissary which had an enormous success and has had him invited all over the world to speak about what it's about which is the two halves of the bro for over the millennia because he can approach both the scientific side and the artistic side and of course he's no slouch on the spiritual side either so i'm really really pleased that ian is here um he's just finished he's just told me that the book that i've watched him writing for the last several years he's just sent it to the publisher and it's a sign of the times and it's a sign of ian's extraordinary edition that when i said what's he going to be called he said to me well it's so big it may have to be two books so it may have to have two names um this is a man who has read practically everything in our sphere and many others um i'm not going to go on i'll just to say that if you have any questions for ian which i hope you do we don't do the old-fashioned q a um could you please just address the questions to everyone on in the chat column and i will then monitor and present them to ian at the end that way we avoid confusion anyway look enough of me ian you are speaking about the school of nothing buttery is rather a jolly title and the floor is yours well thank you very much lon thank you for inviting me and i'm really genuinely very sorry that it is not uh as with me in the flesh i'm speaking to you from some ethereal realm on sky but uh but there we are i would love to to come to edinburgh one day and speak um what i'm best known for as uh lancers intimated is the idea that my my brain is divided in two and and a number of people have uh something seems to have happened i don't know quite what but lynn is now on my screen anyway um i hope you can still hear me um yeah so the the business of the divided brain um what i wanted to say is that since writing the mastering cemetery i've gone on to write the book that lance referred to which i'm hoping will be called the matter with things which is in effect um a sort of taking a part of the reductionist position which so much dominates our world not just in science but in public discourse about pretty much everything in the philosophy and the spirituality as well as the arts and just about all that we believe about ourselves and who we are so i address platinus's question who are we in the book and i do it of course as i do everything through the lens of the two hemispheres and i think this is relevant to what i'm going to be talking about tonight i take the the phrase the school of nothing buttery actually from a former oxford colleague of mine alas now deceased of philosopher j.r lucas who had a very nice sense of humor and uh like me he was i'm pretty unimpressed by the idea that the way you find out about something is simply to take it to parts and find that it consists of pretty much nothing at all and therefore was all along nothing to be concerned about um let alone to love and uh just one of the hemispheres would be likely to to adopt this this this position sometimes people think that maybe i'm being rather reductionist to talk about the mind through the image of the brain but in fact i'm not because i'm not reducing mental activity something i'll come on to talk about to the brain in any sense at all i'm just saying that it constrains the ways in which we think about the world so um just in a few sentences what is relevant about the two ways in which our two hemispheres um deal with the world it's not that one of them does as it were logic and science and maths and the other one does sort of painting and um it makes pretty pictures and and hums little tunes like pooh bear and it's actually nothing to do with what they do because they're both concerned with everything it's that the the way in which they do it and a lot of people will be very surprised to learn that the best contributions to science and maths in fact the the work of the great scientists and the great mathematicians relies very much on what i can demonstrate it's effectively the right hemispheres or the left or the right hemisphere in fact rote calculation simply analyzing things into bits yes that is what the left hand is very skilled at but actually understanding what's going on seeing connections and seeing the shape of things is not its strong suit so effectively what i believe is that the left hemisphere has this take on the world which prioritizes one little part of it this has a an evolutionary basis in that we need in order to exist at all to be able to focus on something that we require whether it be food or a twig to build a nest or whatever it might be and we need to do so accurately sharply and be able to manipulate it at the same time we need to be able to keep a wide open sustained attention to the whole scene so that we know there's a predator coming or those are my kin that i need to be getting food to so that's the basis of the idea and because of this effectively the left hemisphere has a very very tiny very narrow probably about three percent of the well sorry three degrees of the whole 360 degrees arc which is very much in focus and that is all that it sees at any one time uh the right hemisphere sees the whole picture including the extremes on both left and right and what this leads to is a vision in the left hemisphere of a world that is made up of bits that is actually composed of things that are not connected they're discrete fragments they are static because that's how you grab them you fix them and you get them um they are taken out of context because all the context has been sheared off um they are largely abstract one sense of what they are in one's life and in an embodied experience is not part of what the left hemisphere is interested in they're categorized they're no longer unique so you have this world made up of little bits that you put together in order to make ah i see i've got a bicycle whereas the right hemisphere is seeing that nothing is ever completely distinct from anything else at all that things are never static but are involved in a three or four or five dimensional universe with many other things that they constantly flow and change um and that they um are things to which we are connected we're not sitting in a kind of powerfully detached almost psychopathic position of um observation whereby we work out what we want to do to manipulate things so these give two completely different pictures of the world one is a bureaucrat's dream that's the left hemispheres one and the other is a bureaucrat's nightmare because it's very hard to pin it down so when we come to the idea of what we see we're given two versions basically what i hinted at quite strongly in the master in his emissary and make very plain in the first part of the new book is that we can go a little further than saying there are just two visions we can very strongly prefer one as more in touch with reality now it has been put to me that how can you say that because if it's all coming through the two hemispheres you need a third hemisphere that judges the first two but it's not actually like that um as i think one of the greatest philosophers of the last 120 years uh william james uh pointed out and as the whole pragmatist movement including brilliant cs pers john dewey and so on is that things are tested out on experience now i suppose you had two um flight controls in your cockpit and they gave you different information you needed them both for different things at different times but they seemed to be giving you know different information that didn't exactly go here you were getting on fine and you were told you i'm afraid one of them's got to go down we haven't got enough power for both you're only going to have to live on one the test of which one is more in touch with reality is which one will keep you in the air longer which one will um crash you into a mountainside rather quickly and my contention is that if you follow the image of the left hemisphere you crash into the mountain side rather quickly i believe that is indeed what we are hasting to do in the um 21st century um and we haven't got very much time because we're approaching that mountain site extremely fast so one can judge these things and what i've looked at is the nature of the attention that the hemispheres pay to the world the quality of their perceptions which you can test against reality um the reality and subtlety of judgments that are made on the reality that is attended to and perceived um how much it is actually understood both in terms of emotional and social intelligence which is an enormous part of our life and how much just in terms of good old-fashioned iq cognitive intelligence and which is better at enabling us to make the imaginative move to whatever it is that we're trying to understand and in every single case i can demonstrate that the right hemisphere is superior so we can get the signature of the right hemisphere because it sees a certain kind of shape when it looks at the world that is not pinnable down is never ultimately knowable is always in process is constantly connected with everything else and we know the imprint of the deceitful left hemisphere which are just dead bits that have to be put together now that's condensed uh i think 437 pages and so i won't say much more about about that except to make a contrast between two ways of thinking about an understanding one is the analysis where you you say you take it apart you take it apart and you can carry on this process going down to cells down to genes down to atoms down to subatomic particles you can carry it on as far as you like until you can't find anything that you can actually specify at all um and you're left with nothing this vanishing trick seems particularly difficult for people who pride themselves on not deceiving themselves to see through but the other way is to see not by going down but by going up because if everything is connected it says as much about me that i'm composed of cells as it tells you about a cell that it can go to make me and this is true not just of living things but throughout the universe um it tells you about the simplest things as alfred north whitehead um made very clear what it is that they can ultimately come to be and express as much as doing it the other way around why i always look downwards why not look upwards because a very simple thing that tends to be a culture of has been for a hundred years or so a somewhat like holistic one of seeing the human being as a a lonely alien in the universe struggling to find meaning struggling to make beauty struggling to love but what i'd like to point out is there's nowhere but out of the universe that love imagination creativity beauty can come where do they come if they don't come out of that same cosmos it's a fact that the cosmos has it in it to produce box b minor mass that is a fact it's not my opinion now that's the case it says something very interesting about the stuff of the cosmos so the other way of looking at things is what overall hole that defies analysis into parts does it go to make and the term that is most helpful here we don't have a word in english is the german word gestalt the gestalt means the overall figuration the overall sense of the whole that is lost when you start taking it apart now science would do very well not to have as it has done over the last 200 years become divorced from philosophy and philosophy would have been well not to get divorced from science they've both lost by it and in my writing i try to bring them together and enrich both there's a rather unfortunate race to the bottom which is when they do pay attention to one another i mean actually science is not really interested in philosophy because it will they feel it's rather irrelevant and hold them up on there and getting the next prize um and it just seems to them obvious uh because they've never been i'm afraid many of them trained in in anything like philosophy that the universe just is a machine and that people just are machines and sometimes they're rather sort of hurt and surprised if you say but that's not obvious at all and seem to think oh really i mean how could you think differently so um scientists don't think much of philosophy and a lot of the time philosophies just think philosophers just think that sciences some beneath them really and can't tell them anything now i think both of these positions are mistaken um of course philosophy can enormously sophisticate what science um tells it um and um science can be enormously sophisticated by philosophy and and and informed by philosophy and enriched by it but what i'm afraid is happening is that scientists go well i'm afraid when we look at everything it's just a machine and the philosophers go yeah well probably the best philosophy for dealing with it is a mechanistic philosophy so we're really losing out and one of the things i hope to aim with this next book is that i i break that vicious loop in which we uh hurry one another to the bottom as fast as possible now in the time that's left to me i haven't i can't go over very much but i thought i'd take three examples of what i mean about how damaging this way of thinking can be and the first one is really just to demonstrate how absurd it is in my life and maybe in yours one of the most meaningful things of all is music now if you take music apart you get phrases and then finally you get notes and then you go oh a class i've put it into my cloud chamber and i can definitively affirm that music is made of notes um round of applause now what is a note once we know what a note is we can work out what music is um but of course the note is well nothing really it's just a meaningless sound and if you put um thousands and thousands and thousands of these together you get mozart's g minor quintet which probably means more than anything that you can encounter in the world how does that happen it can't be in the notes we've established that because one note means nothing two notes mean nothing three notes mean nothing and presumably therefore 35 000 notes mean nothing so it must be in something else well the only things that there are are gaps there's just silence which is the gaps between the notes and the melody the gaps between the notes in the harmony as they occur at the same time and the ictus of the way in which the thing moves but silence on its own doesn't mean anything either so this is a perfect example of a gestalt and to me a much better image of the universe is a symphony or a dance or a beautiful piece of choral music rather than the machine i don't just say that in some um flowery poetic way i mean not there's anything wrong with the insights of poetry um but i mean it in a very deep philosophical way that we misunderstand it and of course the other thing about music is that it simply cannot be understood except in an active encounter it's not there and you can look at it and go away and inspect it you have to encounter it now that is a very good image of everything in our lives everything in our experience and i would say of the nature of the cosmos the second thing that i would look at is something that will take me a little bit longer but which is really very important to me because after all i'm a doctor and i've worked in the area of neurology and psychiatry and very prominent in the life sciences as they're called is the image of the machine now physics curiously moved on from um the image of a machine about a hundred years ago it decided that simply the cosmos is nothing like anything mechanical at all however this message hasn't got through to certain prominent public intellectuals in the realm of the biological sciences who carry on in a perfect propagated mid 19th century way to see uh the whole business of the living world as mechanical and we must stop conceiving of not only living beings as things sorry not as just as machines but as things at all they're processes and in the last 18 months i've been very excited by discovering a book called everything flows quoting heraclitus the greatest philosopher that ever lived and it's by dupre and nicholson published by aup and i do recommend it to everyone i i think on a policy of oups you can in fact read it online for free um and it has uh enormous amount in it but it effectively takes apart the idea that living beings are anything at all like a machine and the information in it is staggering what is fascinating of course is that at one level of course neurology at least neuroscience uh which is perhaps a less humane thing than neurology where you were forced to confront suffering humanity every day uh in neuroscience in the lab you're not it's easier to think of what you're looking at as just some little circuit or some something mechanical and so the language of neuroscience is full of feedback loops and circuits gates that open and close and um parcels of information and so forth whereas um in fact when people start talking about cells including neurons but all cells they cannot help using a language which absolutely wouldn't be necessary or tolerated in physics or chemistry they talk about a cell designing something helping something and forming something and promoting something uh interpreting something messaging something all things that only living things actually do there's a lot to say about that disjunct but let me just allow that to to tick away that and then of course we've inherited from [Applause] richard dawkins this very silly idea that we are just um the tools of machine like robots um that enable them to do whatever it is they do interestingly this is actually just a transposition of the idea of an engineering god it's saying that we don't do things something else does things to us and controls us except that his idea of the engineering god is contained in a gene and i i don't hold with an engineering god a god depending on what it means may be but that's another matter well first of all genes don't determine very much at all they are according to luanton as very great biologists some of the most inactive molecules in biology they are more like a storehouse on which the cell can draw as it needs the cell acts on the genome and in fact in some creatures this is an extreme case but we all living creatures do it up to a point but there is a very small single-celled organism that regularly jumps about 90 percent of its genome and refashions the order of rest on orders from the cell that's a huge thing when we'd finished this heroic task of decoding the genome we found that there was just not enough information there the image that always comes to mind i'm sure all of us over a certain age at any rate have seen faulty towers possibly more than once and there is a wonderful episode probably the best of the whole lot where um uh the the chef has got drunk and basil faulty has to go and get a duck from his friend uh andre a chef in town and comes back smirking pushing his trolley with the silver dish and he pulls the lid off and there's a blamong and she says nothing but just goes and then goes ducks off and that's the end but i'm afraid the discovery at the end of this trail of the genome is just like that it's not there how many genes does the human being have about 26 000 actually depending on what you define as a gene you might think a gene is a clear discrete concept but actually it's not but we normally say about 26 000 whereas a blind millimeter long um worm uh c elegans uh has nineteen 000. um a very small water flea called daphnia pulex has i think 39 000 and the biggest genome of all is one species of amoeba that has something like 200 times as much genomic content as the human genome now on top of that only 2 percent of the genome is thought actually to be active i mean will probably discover how foolish that idea is but at the moment 98 is called junk dna it doesn't leave you very much with which to conjure the extraordinary complexity so that in even one single cell ten thousand different reactions are going on every second with pathways that are not simple and discrete but interlock with one another so what is important is the system as a whole not just the genome but the gene gnome and the cell and the surrounding tissue and the whole being in which the whole thing is going on now one of the first things that alerts you to the fact that organisms are not like cell and not look like machines is that machines can be switched on and off people can't nor can hamsters and but every machine i know can be switched on and off you can switch it off for a few years you can come you can start it up and on the whole you'll hope that after a few hiccups it will carry on doing whatever it was doing now that's not actually a small point is what is happening is that there is a continuous process we are processes not things not even aggregates of things and what has to be explained in the human being is not motion as in a machine how does this come to move well because we burn a lot of things in a fire station we plug it in and it then starts moving then we switch it up no we change all the time to remain the same in fact this is the saying of heraclituses by changing it remains the same and this is absolutely true of a cell or any living thing in fact the interesting thing is that in greek the word for change there is metabolon which is basically the word in metabolism so what we are doing metabolizing is changing all the time and when you see a picture of a cell in a a microphotograph or in a drawing in a textbook it looks like it has clear boundaries but actually it's not those boundaries that look solid are actually fluid and things are coming into them and going out of them all the time they're more like rivers than they are like walls the process of evolution as well natural selection natural selection is not the bringer of change change is there automatically in nature all the time fluidly changing in response to the environment it's a dance natural selection is a stabilizer it goes hang on we quite like that one are we going to fix it so it's actually not what it is often taken to be nor of these systems uh linear systems in any sense at all i've already mentioned that they often have recursive loops in which they act on themselves um and in fact sydney brenner who won a nobel prize for his work in genetics says that basically in the cell it's everything doing everything to everything else so um the idea that one can get to simplicity as one goes on the way down is absolutely not right nor can you fix anything as a single component because everything is interdependent so everything depends on its place in the hole and in a machine you know you've got a widget or a tap it or whatever it is and you can take it out rub it clean put it back in again whatever but in a human or an animal or a single cell or the the simplest living thing you you don't have this business of independence the very nice little book by a quite young microbiologist called kriti sharma called interdependence which i found very impressive in which she says it's not just as we know that the organism is always in dialogue with the environment because one tends to think that the organism has an effect on the environment and then the organ the environment has an effect on the organism and then etc but it's not and then the two come into being together because of one another rather like the piece of music nor is it in any sense a predictable matter what a gene will do it depends entirely on the context in a very gross way for example um probably any of you who've done school biology will know that the eye of a fly compound eye the eye of a frog and a human eye are really very different both to look at and how and in how they function but the principal gene that codes for them is the same in every case it's pac-6 i mean of course there are other genomic differences but the point i'm making is this that what a gene does can't be predicted until you know pretty much about everything about all the other genes so that a single gene can produce as many as 2 000 different proteins on different occasions so what does it code for is not a straightforward matter and indeed while the same outcome can be derived from a number of different genetic cellular streams equally the same elements can give rise to many many different outcomes so as it were in both directions you've got a fan not a straight line so the whole is very important in its influence and of course again living things as i've rather emphasized don't have precise boundaries um i mean of course psychically one may well know that but i mean it's not foreign at all to mainstream biology that the brain and the heart give off waves that are detectable within feet around but also that you know i am partly what my environment uh gives to me and what i give to it there isn't a sharp boundary at the edge of me and of course the final thing is that um living things bootstrap they're often compared with you know mindlessly to computers but it's not for a computer a computer can build another computer but it already has to have the information um it doesn't generate the information in the process of becoming the machine you can't just put a lot of things together and hope that they will generate information at the same time it's the thing that the information refers to um and in this living things are again very different so i would suggest that a much better image for all living things and quite possibly for inanimate things which i don't think are wholly distinct from living things i think they are if you like a limit case of the living but that would take us away from i can't cover that now but the better image would be the flow of life or the stream of life um than that of the machine and there's nothing nebulous about that a stream has enormous force it can change things it can move boulders it creates whirlpools that you can photograph that will propel you so it's very very real um except that each eddy in the stream each part of the flow is not in any sense disconnected from any other part of the flag now i said i would talk about three elements i spoke about music i spoke about the disconnect between an organism and a machine very very very sketchy and briefly and i now want even more sketchily and briefly just to touch on matter and consciousness of course it's a huge topic when i last spoke about it i did for two hours so i'm going to talk about it for 10 minutes effectively the mainstream culture prioritizes matter because it prioritizes things and hence my title the matter with things that we see the world is wrong and when it has to decide what the heck consciousness is it imagines it must emerge from things from matter and of course uh a brain is material and a brain certainly seems to run in parallel with consciousness uh when things happen to the brain they affect consciousness there's no question about it that's been known for a couple of thousand years but the assumption that matter leads to consciousness is no better grounded in fact i would argue less well grounded than the idea that consciousness gives rise to matter there are three possibilities indeed that matter emits consciousness that it transmits consciousness or that it permits consciousness and in this it's like a tv set if an alien were to land in this world and to inspect a tv set uh it wouldn't be able to tell whether it transmitted something or generated something because the machinery would look the same now in brief i haven't got time to do the argument but i can argue that easily the least probable of these is the idea that matter in some form emits consciousness um first of all we haven't the slightest clue nobody has even the vestige of a clue how matter could give rise unconscious matter could give rise to consciousness and as walter i'm sorry not william james um pointed out it's rather like a story in midship and easy a 19th century novel in which a woman who's had an illegitimate child excuses it by going but if you please sir it's a very little one the idea that might be a very little consciousness uh before consciousness as it were just the kind of ghost of consciousness about to be doesn't help us because either it's conscious or it isn't and if it's conscious in any degree the same problem uh exists it's not like things that emerge it's not like flow emerging from h2o molecules there's something about the chemistry of h2o molecules that we know predicts that they will flow when they're a mass of them but there is nothing about the nature of matter that says that under any circumstances it can give rise to consciousness also i would point out that i know that i only know consciousness because of matter i know that for certain what i don't know are we ever going to know what ian doesn't know scott is there a recording going on yes i notice that in the top left hand corner when ian freezes it always says recording we may have to put the recording onto a what is the back burner is it where i think um i think ian is no longer with us ah we've lost him i wouldn't put the recording onto the back burner i would wait maybe invite ian to join us again yes shall i ring him up yes why don't you invite why don't you try and do the inviting while i ring him up sorry about this ladies and gentlemen it hasn't happened before oh no he's got his phone off we're struggling a bit and she might want to explain where ian actually is yes i'm phoning him now ian lives at telescope house on the extreme west hand side of the isle of skye it's a very beautiful place but of course he's been like he likes living up there alone um anyway but in the last nine months he's been locked down up there and unable ready to leave which is what's enabled him to write this immense book um right yes he's not answering that phone either he's he's a remarkable chap and he's been up there for quite a number of years um and he has a large study and a large library but of course he writes in the kitchen next to the argo like the rest of us he's a tremendous chap and i've been up there a few times but of course i haven't been able to go up recently either um now yes what do we got in the chat yes it happens well it reminds me a bit of bilbo baggins who just disappears at the right moment at least everyone was having a party with a few drinks i don't know perhaps the audience is having a party um so scott do we think there's anything we can do about this um i'm going to send him the link again and so hopefully he's still got access to email but if his internet connection has dropped he probably won't get money he won't get that either well look what here we are here we are oh well done yes but by by an amazing resurrection here i am and i was going to be perfect and finish after exactly five minutes but i'm going to i'm probably going to do my best to do so even even even now but i think what i'd said was that it seems to me clear that um i know the consciousness that i know sorry i know the matter i know because of consciousness but it's not clear that i know that the consciousness because of matter that may be the case or it may not so um there's an awful lot to say but the first thing is this and neurons are not necessary for consciousness and there are cases of people who have certainly almost no cortex whatever and yet are able to function as a simple level and there's a case of um chap who got a first class degree in mathematics from leeds and that had an iq of nearly 130 and and was found to have only a tiny rim of brain very very much smaller than than the normal brain um and as i say there are people who are um have a very special unusual condition um in which they don't have cerebral cortex at all and yet they can recognize people they can behave socially they can enjoy music and so forth and people think that it i never got this argument but people say things like well it emerges out of all the connections well yes that's fine it's slightly like the idea that if you just put more and more notes together magically notes will do something but it's it's actually more than that it's it's something come out of the notes it's the form and the form is not actually in the notes at all so the form is not in the connections one thing that i find very striking you probably know is that the cerebellum the ancient part of the brain at the posterior part of the of the brain has four times as many neurons as the cerebrum the part which maintains consciousness for us and it's not that they're not very interconnected they have some of the most sophisticated and most interconnected cells in the human body purkinje neurons so it simply isn't a case of multiplying connections because nobody has been conscious just with a cerebellum and we now can see that plants can make decisions can respond to situations situations that they couldn't have been prepared for and if anybody wants to ask me about them i can describe experiments but i probably haven't got time at the moment but um two rather interesting insights into into what i'm saying are that so vital are some organs to creatures that the the sense of the loss of them causes them to generate them even when they don't have the gene for it so you can breed eyeless flies by deleting the gene for eyes and their offspring have no eyes and you carry on after 14 generations they have eyes but they don't have the gene and even more astonishingly is that a certain um silly a certain um ciliate organism you can remove the gene for the flagellum and i've been told that even in a matter of days it will generate a new flagellum even though it now doesn't have the gene for it now i'm not a geneticist but this is what i'm reporting and and perhaps i've got time just to tell you the fun experiment about plants because um let's start with the simple one a sensitive plant mimosa pudica is designed to close uh if it's touched and if you stroke the leaf it will close if you carry on doing that and it doesn't experience any harm it will stop doing it you might say well yes it's fatigued but if you drop a drop of water on it which is different from a touch of a finger it can tell the difference and it closes because it detects danger so it's not straightforward and here's something really remarkable you can grow pea shoots in a circumstance in which they are craving light and light can come to them down one arm or another over y-shaped tube and the plant will get more light if it grows towards the tube down which the light is going to come but the clever experimenter randomly varies it but what the experimenter does is to send a puff of air down the tube sometime before the light is going to go on and there are two sets well three including a control but in one experimental set the advent of the puff of air means light will come down that same arm of the y out of which the air came in the other experimental setup it's the other way around when you experience the path of air the light is not going to come down that particular arm and the plant is able to be trained in a quite short space of time to detect the air first and know that that's where the light is going to come from and grow towards the light there are many other things i mean there's a whole literature on this but the very idea that plants which of course have no neurons at all um can't be conscious of things seems to me wrong and we now know more and more about very simple brains i mean the the brain of a crow or a magpie is something of which humans may be frightened they can do things that some quite clever children can't do in terms of calculation working out what's going on and they have no neocortex at all and the whole size of the brain is minute um mind you it's very profusely um interconnected within itself but there you are it's a it's an interesting observation so well i'd just like to end then without with the final few words it seems to me that we've fallen under the spell of not just a way of thinking but a way of being in the world which is wrong um we have a full set of values and in the hierarchy of values that the philosopher max schaeler drew up at the base there was the values of utility and the values of pleasure and at the summit was the value of the holy and in between there was a level of what he called ladinsvata the sort of values of life which were things like courage magnanimity fidelity loyalty and those sort of things and then above that um was beauty goodness and truth and then there was the holy and it seems to me um and i say this in the master in his emissary that the left hemisphere reduces all those higher things to a utility the story is that the holy was invented so that priests could have a um a hierarchy which literally is the is the um the the the the ascendancy of priest um and the beauty goodness and truth are things that society needs in order to um guide copulation and hold the um society together the laban's there are things that um simple people do self-sacrifices for the value of the rest of the community and that all in the end boils down to utility and pleasure but i think the right hemisphere sees things in exactly the opposite direction that things are useful as so much as they create something that actually gives to life and gives meaning to life and that leads us to a place where we can experience beauty and goodness and truth and ultimately the holy and i'd like to suggest that whatever those terms mean the meaning of a life comes from the journey towards them whatever they are and the effort to understand what they are and what they mean and i don't think that we as well give the meaning we find the meaning it's not an invention it's a discovery well i'll stop there thank you very much well and thank you very much indeed i i like i mean you know you you want us to go up to the hole in the holy rather than always going down to the the quanta or the grubs or the parts at the bottom and you end very very strongly in that direction um talking about going up amongst our your hearers um peter bruin has pointed out that uh when you started talking about music it reminded him of the of the music of the spheres so that incentive going full circle back to a very early religious notion and this is followed up by by michael hall um asking about the german artistic romantic movement about which you know quite a lot and its link of the human being and its brain to nature the proper relationship nature and the natural beauty of the cosmos so that whether it's music or other kinds of beauty um i suppose these two um listeners are are associating you with german romanticism or even the ancient greeks with the music of the spheres do you like that kind of more than that broader picture philosophically and historically absolutely i like it very much and i accept it of course um again as i say in the master in this chemistry we live in a world in which romanticism has been associated with kind of intellectual slackness but actually out of that unfortunately all too brief movement principally in germany and in england uh came absolutely the most sophisticated thinkers that i think our culture in modern times has produced i mean people like goethe um but above all i mean the discovery of mine um which is not a person who's much studied today but shelling um i i used to and still am quite keen on hegel but shelling has ascended in my pantheon above hegel and and all the things that you just mentioned would have been comprehensible to him because he was very interested in chemistry and physics and he believed that when we lost the vision of the whole or the all as he called it then a society crumbled and we tried to put things together from little particles of dust and couldn't succeed he was absolutely visionary so i accept that and i do think that uh yes the music of the spheres was no silly thing and in the conversation which has been watched over a million times now that i had with them jordan peterson we got on to that very topic i can i can recommend that joe you just have to easy to find on youtube um in with with jordan peterson too two of our cleverer people if i may say so before i go on to further comments from both peter and michael um can i just uh thank donna soto moritini who has written in to say that your the book that you referred to everything flows is available on amazon everything flows on amazon you could get it but with a warning the kindle version costs nothing and the hardback cost 58 pounds so yeah i leave it to you but this sort of tag teaming i'm getting from michael and peter um there are the michael asks this question or makes this comment there are no straight lines in nature this is a fairly standard line there's no straight lines in nature but all machines have or rely on in places on on straight lines yeah would you recall that as significant would that back up your point or contradict it well yes i mean it's not infallible in that as we make machines more and more complicated they may become rather different from the machines we're familiar with i don't know um i need um an expert in up to the minute ai to gloss that one but i think basically right the left hemisphere um has as it were the platonic solids in its mind but anything that is more complex in shape than that has to be perceived by the right hemisphere which is the one we rely on for things like faces which are massively complex so and i do think that's right and in the book i do actually quote de la cua i think it is to the uh effect that there are no straight lines in nature and i quote blake saying nonsense uh but somebody wrote in and said what about a beam of light um in one way that's right but of course light has to travel through space and is subject to the curvature of space as well i believe so any case i think that's picking holes um the the uh the german uh painter and architect friedrich hundadvasa um once said that um the straight line is the death of humanity uh and he had a lot of other things interesting things to say about it and i know what he means it is the kind of death of the soul and it's not slightly odd of blake to have made that tetchy remark but he was very self-contradictory and he was very touchy as well as being a genius um but because of course he hated the sort of linearity of the mechanistic world and invade against it from the moment he was born i imagine to the moment he died sorry sorry can i just before we have the next question i i forgot really to point out that but i'm sure everybody is aware of this that the the tendency to try and reduce things matter and it's self-defeating because it's based on the idea that at least we understand what matter is but in fact um the more we know about matter the less we know what it is and it certainly is not absolutely it's not independent of consciousness to base consciousness on a something that is independent of consciousness it's not going to work if you invoke matter and as um i think it's um adam frank a physicist says when um philosophers and neuroscientists come along and say consciousness is uh they're in physics you know and uh it's all in physics they think they're being very clever and he said we physicists shuffle look uneasily at our feet and mutter sheepishly it's more complicated than that of course yes that's right well listen absolutely i propose that a couple of people have asked peter brown again and christine smith have both asked about the emergence of of consciousness do you think the brain is an amplifier of consciousness or a producer and to give the other version of the same question could could inanimate nature could an inanimate substance ever be capable of consciousness so there's the old question is it an amplifier or a producer and then what what would an inanimate thing ever be able to be conscious like or as yes well first of all um i don't think that consciousness is something secreted by the brain i think this is one of the silliest and most improbable ideas that was ever put forward i mean in years and years and years decades possibly a century of teasing this problem nobody has got a millimeter closer to explaining how that could possibly happen and as colin mcginn the philosopher you might as well say that somebody talking about you might you might as well um you might as well say that ethics emerged from rhubarb so um clearly that is not not a likely one i personally take the view that the brain permits consciousness it doesn't simply transmit it has a role in shaping it and in this it's like a flute that shapes the note or and this is an idea that william james gives actually a beautiful quote from rumi um i my soul is the breath of christ as it is played through the flute so but but william james gave this idea of rather the vocal cords shape his voice that his brain shapes the thing that is him so i think that for a while a part of the ultimately always connected consciousness becomes as it were individuated into whatever it is that's in me at the moment and carries on in some other form not as me although as where we've all contributed some meaning to the overall consciousness of the cosmos by our existence and that is the purpose of our existence on the second question what would an inanimate universe sorry an animate universe look like exactly like this one it is in fact an animated universe and that was very strongly shelling's point and shelling was i put money on him being one of the most intelligent people that ever lived the thing is that we say well yes i know but it doesn't look like it is but that's because we do a source of anthropomorphizing in reverse if it were conscious it would do all the things i do with my consciousness so it's a mountain behind my house with consciousness it ought to be um knowing the lawn and having a glass of wine and going to tesco or whatever but that's not what mountains do with their consciousness and i think there is consciousness in everything in the universe so i am a pan psychist and no doubt you'll be hearing more of that from philip goth and i think it's in fact the only rational position um something that's argued very strongly by galen strawson um and i think is absolutely right and it's as i say it is a tradition that goes back a very long way it goes back not just to shelling but of course it goes back to the ancient greeks there are gods in all things so okay one little one from michael hall just just a simple one and then i've got very nice question from gavin ritchie michael hall's comment is question is whether the concept of the holograph is useful when you're considering the brain is the brain holographic in nature yes it's often said so i think my answer to that is i'd have to pass because i'm not really familiar enough with the physics of holograms i did read jude caravan's uh book which i was rather impressed by if she's a physicist um and she very much bases the idea on the hologram and i and i also like the idea that um teaser and kefatos have taken building on arthur kerster's idea of the holarchy that things are sort of as it were sets of one another going on eternally um and that it depends on where you are what it is that you see so the gestalt shifts as you move in the cosmos and the bit it's there but they just seem different depending on where you're looking at it from much as you know if you start with the atomic particle and move up to the molecule to the gene to the cell to the organism to the person to the society to you know whatever you go on into the into the cosmic realm and it depends where you are on that track it could be it could be holographic in that sense i see that well gavin has a couple of questions do you find any compelling experimental evidence for the hemispheric strengths and weaknesses in split brain patients are we talking about leukotomy or something no no uh the split brain uh business is the lucotomy was a um fairly barbaric procedure which uh anti-dated um uh chlorpromazine for schizophrenia in 1952 until that time the only thing that actually seemed to help at all uh making people less distressed was to put a scalpel in and sort of fish about in a rather random way in the frontal cortex i mean like rain there judgment on history but people had to do what they could at the time so but anyway i mean obviously that is not something that goes on but there is um there is the possibility for a callosotomy in which the two halves of the brain are separated the cooper's collosum the band of fibers at the base of the brain which forms the main connection between the two hemispheres is surgically severed and uh my word yes i mean if you read my book you will see that a lot of the information does come from kalisotomy patients but in itself um that wouldn't be enough but it's so much in keeping with the literature from lesions so people who have say a stroke or a tumor just confined to one hemisphere and you get very similar phenomena confirming the nature of each hemisphere you can predict what is going to be going on in each hemisphere in the way that you can in the uh callosotomized or split brain patient so split brain operations are not done very much now and so we're running out of split brain patients they're beginning to die but so a resource for psychology is sadly not not not as available as it used to be well um the other question that gavin asks is is a bit of a classic in this area we know that artificial intelligence has already overtaken some narrow human specialisms such as with ibm deep blues victory over chess grand master and gary kasparov but what is your view of the possibility of general artificial intelligence well the first thing to say is it's a complete misnomer to call it intelligence it has nothing to do with intelligence the um it is a machine has no intelligence at all it's entirely stupid which is why it doesn't see in a way that a chess grandmaster does uh a chess grandmaster only surveys about six possibilities but the computer can work through all of them which is why it will eventually just because it can do it very quickly because of clever circuitry that we designed and we programmed quite often with the history so that the computer knows the past games of kasparov himself go to actually generate the intelligence of the machine so really it's a it's a misnomer or it's just a tool like a like a hammer or a screwdriver it's useful for doing things we don't normally do with our hands i can put data into it and it'll churn it away and come up with an answer eventually if it can do it very very very fast it will amaze me i'll go oh must be intelligent not intelligent at all okay thank you very much indeed can i have a question of my own um we at the arthur conan doyle center are going to put on zoom um a course on poetry and spirituality there's going to be a bit of a taster before christmas and then we're hoping to do 10 or 12 weeks after christmas where there will be these sorts of seminar discussions with poems which will be sent out well the the notion that poetry is somehow connected to spirituality i'm rather moving you away from your science and back to your literary origins or perhaps forward to your spiritual future aspirations but you i know spent all your literary career focused on poetry is there something special either from the point of view of the hemispheres of the brain or more broadly from a philosophical or even religious point of view which makes it appropriate that one could even imagine such a thing as putting poetry and spirituality together in other words i'm i'm running this course am i on the right track yes i profoundly believe so and as you i know know uh but some of the listeners may not i have since uh beginning it well not not quite the beginning of lockdown but i've been reading a poem on the internet every day and will continue until i've read 365 poems um but i believe they're terribly important um i left the study of literature because i thought that what we were doing to poetry was terrible and in brief it is an illumination which led straight into um by interest in the hemispheres because what the poem depends on is the ability to contact the implicit in context and the unique in an embodied way and the study of it made it disembodied general decontextualized it and made the implicit explicit and in doing so completely killed it rather like the kind of taking a part of the pieces of music we've got a note you know good um and i'm not saying that you can't learn something from analyzing a poem just as you can learn something from analyzing music up to a point you know and i'm not saying down to a note but down to i see what we're doing we're shifting harmonically here back to the tonic or whatever it may be so it has a role but always as an intermediary which must then be given back to the right hemisphere which understands the whole and in this sense the left hemisphere is more like a computer i repudiate the idea that the brain is in any sense like a computer because it just isn't but the um the the left hand is not like the right hemisphere's personal computer so we have experience through the right hemisphere that goes to the left hemisphere the right hemisphere doesn't really need to know about it get involved with the left hand side oh it's one of those it's one of those i can put them together in that way and then it gives it back to the right hemisphere which then says now i'm going to take the data that the computer spewed out and turned them back to the original life problem where they came from so if we don't do that then we're missing the whole point of the purpose we've lobbed it to the left hemisphere and it stayed there which is why we don't understand anything anymore to come back to the spirituality thing the right hemisphere is the one that understands the implicit the right hemisphere is the one that understands the nuanced the very many meanings the the thing and its opposite together that makes us feel connected language is a very distancing thing when it's used in certain ways it makes us it puts a screen between us and reality but poetry actually connects us immediately a good poem produces an electric charge in one so that one has found the meaning that one could never have got from an endless prose version of this so i think it's very important and i'd like to say that in a non-religious age that one of the very few places in which you can reach the spiritual sense now is in the arts through music through poetry and so forth thank you very much indeed for that um i have a deeply serious question from one of our listeners who which is about um it's about president trump um is trump capable of consciousness given enough time and enough puffs i think the puffs is a reference to the pea shoots which are intelligent and i detect satire here yes i think i've probably picked up that that one was a humorous remark um very nice i love it i can't give you an answer i'm afraid patrick patrick moore would have said but whether we can or not we just don't know i don't know that's right i'll say the whole thing is quite extraordinary isn't it and i think i mean one of the things that i will really have enjoyed here and i don't know perhaps we could open up some people but there are so many it's hard to encourage an actual discussion but one of the things which i'm sure everybody has felt is that ian ian is a syncretist he he he synthesizes he brings together um science and art and spirituality and and he's prepared to laugh at politics all those different things there are biological things and there are spiritual things and other things going on in iran's mind which he shares in his books and i think that's that's really really important because you know we all know that the problem with um the intellectual world for over the last 200 years is that we all know more and more about less and less that's the that's the famous comment about it but we could also know more and more about more and more if we open our minds and you know the slogan for these talks which we which we encouraged and get from people like ian is open minds open minds and i i really hope that's been what's been happening here um somebody has asked this is an easy question ian um would you like to say more about the holy i mean of course [Laughter] you're going to say there's a pun aren't you between holy and holy but um what about that i would but i this is disappointing for the questionnaire but i think at this stage it's it's far too big i would need i need a good hour uh otherwise i'll not be able to really convey what i mean because it is the most impossible thing to put into words yes you you you created my new book yeah i sweated blood over it and nothing took me longer than that and i tried to show how although when one starts thinking and at the beginning of my book you may well think that only somebody rather foolish would believe in the divine or the holy and i think that importantly related concepts you can't really have something that's holy unless you believe there's something divine um and if there's something divine there will be things that are holy um but uh it's a very difficult one and i wanted to lead people to the point where at the end of the book they would think probably only something really rather limited would think that there wasn't a very strong likelihood that there is something in this idea of the holy and the divine and i think it's the most important idea interestingly i discovered in i mean the most important idea that once life can engage with um but interestingly in writing the book i discovered because i had to research it i had no idea that actually one of the things that makes more difference to health both mental and physical more than exercise more than not smoking more than controlling diet more than anything at all is being engaged with a spiritual and preferably community spiritual life this adds enormously to longevity to fulfillment to happiness and to simple physical health cancer cardiovascular things all the rest that's that's a pretty interesting answer about holi whatever it is it's good for you at least you could [Laughter] yeah that's right i just want to say also i mean not to put you off from asking another question but um i just wanted to say i do think it's terribly important that it's not just that i was lucky enough to have this maverick career whereby i imbibe things from places i want people to see that in the end we have to hold these things together and there's a place in the world for the specialist but nowadays there is no room for the person who is not a specialist and that is a great great shame and we need people with synoptic vision and in this book what i have tried to show is and this i think increases the likelihood that i'm on to something that if you look deeply into the neurological literature deeply into the philosophical literature and as deeply as someone like me who's not a physicist can into the physics you approach the same reality just from three different angles and if they're all really leading to the same vision that increases the likelihood that one's on to something i i think that's terrific it's that's a pretty good exit line but i'm not quite going to let us everybody stop all that i think we must very soon i just got to read out um the some of the last little comments that we've had here um thanks cheers to absolutely lovely suggestion of quote machine is absolutely deprivative intelligence thank you for splendid talk next talk please let's bring ian back for another hour another talk on the holy perhaps yes please let's have another lecture about the holy and later date another talk please couldn't agree more yes i don't call could you explain the title of this talk oh a little bit of bathos there so um would you like to end by explaining the title of this talk well i don't remember what it was but i think it was something like the school of nothing battery that's right was that right yes well it's just that there is an academic school to which um an enormous number of materialist scientists and their um fellow traveling philosophers like dennett belong in which everything is reductionist and the the end of reductionism is that we are nothing but something else now rather than that you know and as i say there's no end to this process we're nothing but um cells we're nothing but genes we're nothing but molecules we're nothing but whatever and eventually you end up with something you don't even know what it is because it only has a small probability of being anywhere at all and physicists can't tell you anything about its nature except that it's dependent on consciousness so i mean that's what you want to hide into nothing going in that direction um and i also very much like something i read in my trenches which was a saying of joseph needham you know the great chinese scholar i mean scholar of chinese culture and civilization and science um that as it were life can't be reduced to matter because nothing can ever be reduced to anything and i thought good point and it's really something that i in one way and another say in the book that actually nothing is something else as soon as you said it's something else you have actually something else not what you originally had just like when you say this poem is or this piece of music is these whatevers now you don't have the music now you don't have the poem you have something else so rather than say that we are nothing but something else i would say that we don't know yet the whole of what we are we can't in fact know and actually being bright and on the case is usually marked by a strong awareness that that is the reality that we can't know certain things which doesn't mean we give up it's there's a lovely rabbinical saying you are not obliged to finish the task but you may not desist from it and i think that you know one has to keep trying to learn and um far from that we are this squalid apes you know it seems to me that um we are something rather more wonderful and the things that we really value are more wonderful than we can really know uh maybe i'll just finish that remark with them a saying of emerson pugh who is a nuclear physicist he said if the human brain was so simple that we could understand it we would be so simple that we couldn't that's very good isn't it yes indeed we like it very much well listen there are one or two more comments but i think that maybe that mean you may have delighted us long enough best put down in the history of literature sorry exactly um i know actually there are a couple of other little things that people have said um super talk thanks and um nothing could be reduced to anything is my mantra for today says um it says elena stoever nothing could be reduced to anything nothing can be reduced to anything else it seems a very good one listen this has been terrific i let me just remind everybody that we have these talks most tuesday evenings they will be desisting over christmas in the new year as most of you know and we've got lots of wonderful people coming and quite obviously by popular acclamation ian is going to be lured back i would hope physically from the isle of skye but if not at least like this so you're getting your emails i hope from from scott who is in the top left-hand corner of the gallery view with the name arthur conan doyle next to him i think um and on our website contains information about all this but we do have on saturday nights we always will nearly always have at this same time mediumship demonstrations with some very interesting mediums and we have all sorts of other classes and talks and things which are available to you for a small fee and it's wonderful how many people are joining in and this the silver lining of all this coronavirus business is that at least we find that you know if iran had come to the center there might have been 20 or 30 people unlikely i think there would have been 55 which we've had tonight that kind of thing is the is the golden lining of all this zooming and of course people from outside edinburgh at the very least so next week we have we have david punter on on on magic and the gothic which were quite interesting and then the week after we have philip gough on the pan psychism of which we've heard this evening but what i really want to say is ian that was a marvelous talk thank you very much indeed i think people will do the regulation you know silent clapping that goes on here and i'm going to say thank you to everybody for coming look forward to seeing you again and good night i'm trying to leave leave leave meeting can we have the the uh my website yeah thanks thank you very much thank you

Channel: Arthur Conan Doyle Centre

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Length: 79min 7sec (4747 seconds)

Published: Thu Dec 10 2020