The following is from Iain McGilchrist’s lecture for The Weekend University on September 23, 2022. McGilchrist argues that value and purpose are constitutive of reality, and that reason and evidence strongly support such a conclusion. My emphasis is in italics.
2:15 >>Iain McGilchrist: I believe consciousness is first irreducible, and second, best thought of as a flow or process, rather than a thing; that flow, that process, always being directed towards something; and our experience being always an encounter. Well, what are values? In the third part of The Matter with Things, the book is divided into three parts, there are chapters on space, time, matter, consciousness, but also on values and on purpose.
3:08 Well, what are they [values]? Are they just paint or wallpaper on the walls of our cell, which we put there in order to brighten our prospects in this hermetically sealed box in which we leave lead our lives? Or are they merely just less accurate ways of describing what we like and what we don’t like? We have terms for them: good, beautiful, true. But really is it just a matter of our opinion about what works well for us? Well, I’m going to suggest that that’s very far from being the case, and that’s in valuing and coming to appreciate the value of things, we are encountering intrinsic aspects of reality. So I take values to be primary. They’re not derivable from anything else, and they’re not things within consciousness; abstract things, of course, but still not things. They’re rather aspects of reality. In other words, they’re not nouns, but adjectives or verbs, adverbs that are revealed through the process through that encounter.
5:53 So, in thinking of values as non-reducible entities, I’m not on my own. The great early 20th century German phenomenological philosopher Max Scheler said just that. But if you are more inclined to the anglo-american analytic tradition, one of the greatest philosophers of recent decades in that tradition, Derek Parfit, …also took the view that values are ontologically primitives and they’re also not sort of piggybacking on human consciousness…
6:36 Value, writes Thomas Nagel, is not just an accidental side effect of life. Rather there is life because life is a necessary condition of value. Now valuing depends on a relationship. Only in its being appreciated is value fulfilled as value. Neither we, nor other living creatures, originate values. They are evocations and we fulfill those evocations in responding to them. We are attracted to what is true, beautiful, morally good, at a deeper level than mere cognition can provide. … We see it immediately. We don’t see it as the outcome of a computation, or a rationalization. It is a primary aspect of our experience.
7:48 What is life for? Well, I do attempt to answer this question at enormous lengths in The Matter with Things… I believe that consciousness permeates the universe. Well, one answer could be that life brings the capacity to recognize and respond to value… It vastly enhances both the degree and the speed of responsiveness to and within the world. So, inanimate elements do respond to the world in certain very simple and primitive way ways, but they do so rather slowly. Processes may take billions of years, in a living organism they may take less than a second… I don’t have time to unpack what I’m saying here, I’m just giving you something to ponder on or reject. Life could be seen as the very process of the cosmic consciousness, or the conscious cosmos, continually both discovering and furthering in its unfolding, its beauty, its truth, and its goodness. Both contemplating and not separately, but in the same indivisible act bringing them further into being. A process in other words. So values evoke a response in us and call us to some end there what gives meaning to life, such things as beauty, goodness, truth, and purpose, which I will talk about briefly later…
9:53 Science… cannot help us understand their nature. It can, though, help us misunderstand them. This is for three main reasons: It may disregard disregard them on principle, as is the case with purpose. No assumption of purpose is made in the life sciences, and that’s a perfectly valid assumption to make if you wish to, but it won’t be surprised then if you find nothing purposeful after carrying out your investigations on that basis and on those terms. Secondly, you can attempt to account for them in terms of something else. So it can say, for example, that beauty is simply a tool of mate selection…or something of the kind. You’ve heard it all I’m sure. And thirdly, and above all most importantly, but probably less obviously, it gets them wrong by treating them as things rather than encounters, relationships in process. I will just look look at the three main values that I’ve mentioned before, saying a little bit about purpose, but don’t forget that science’s disposition not to value is already value laden. The belief that an inhumanly detached way of looking at our experience of the world is more valuable than one in which we encounter it and register its value, expresses values of its own. And one of those, of course, is truth. Truth deserves and gets a chapter of its own in my new book. But truth is again not a thing, whether conceived of us out there, or in here, but an encounter between whatever is our inner take on our consciousness and the rest of the consciousness that it encounters in what we call experience.
12:12 Science will not admit anything that is not empirically verifiable, but the value of truth, like all value, is incapable of empirical proof. So, where does this intuition, because that’s what it is, come from? It can’t be for its utility. Useful assumptions are not always truthful, such as, it’s quite useful sometimes to consider, for certain practical purposes, an organism is like a machine, but for roughly eight important reasons, an organism is never like a machine.
13:32 I don’t believe that the world is chaotic orderless and meaningless, but if you do, what is the virtue of truth? Truth is an act, again it’s not a thing, it’s an act of trust in or faithfulness towards whatever is. It characterizes the proper relationship between consciousness and the world. It is therefore not a function of some other value. Nonetheless it does imply that being faithful, so not blindly. so has value in and of itself. And that the something else to which we’re faithful has an intrinsic value of its own. Perhaps goodness, or beauty, or the faith, would be blind as you see rather than closing down on a single foundational element in a causal chain. We find this process of inquiry leading in the opposite direction, to a web of interconnectedness that we cannot by any means get behind or beneath, in which values cohere and sustain one another. On that point I just like to reflect on something that will sound very strange for those of us brought up on science in the 21st or even the 20th century, which is a relationship of love with value. … We don’t love things because we have learned to value them, but rather we can value them only, or can value them correctly only, if we love them. So that there isn’t a path to this. Once again, there isn’t a single step you take, and then another, but you must enter into an open relationship in which the capacity for love is present. If you drive that out and say I’m going to have a cold clinical detachment from everything I look at, you will see certain things, but you’ll see a rather skewed picture. Now, what about goodness? … Goodness, interestingly, in the modern west, at least in the world of philosophy faculties, goodness has been reduced to a utilitarian calculus. To call something good is to say that it brings happiness to the larger number of people. And utilitarian philosophers are fond of thought experiments…
17:45 One really interesting fact for me, or range of facts for me, as someone interested in neuropsychiatry, is that people with frontal brain damage, people with right hemisphere damage, and people of low emotional and social intelligence, and psychopaths, all tend to make moral decisions on the basis of utilitarian calculus. And this leads to the rather odd situation, as one research group pointed out, it leads to the counterintuitive conclusion that those individuals who are least prone to moral errors in the eyes of academic philosophers also possessed a set of psychological characteristics that many would consider prototypically immoral. I don’t have time to go into my beliefs about this, and alternatives such as deontology…
19:24 Goodness is irreducible, and interestingly it’s deeply bound up with the right hemisphere…
21:42 Pro-social behavior appears to stem from processes that are intuitive, reflexive, and even automatic. These observations suggest that our understanding of pro-sociality should be revised to include the possibility that in many cases pro-social behavior, instead of requiring active control over our impulses, represents an impulse of its own.
28:40 These all point towards the gestalt appreciation [without concepts] of the right hemisphere. …the left hemisphere fails to make sense of value, whether that be truth, goodness, or beauty, just as it fails to make sense of consciousness. Its answer in every case is…that they must be emanations of a purely material cosmos. that exists purely to further utility. Now, it seems to me that if you believe that, you’ll believe anything. You might even end up believing that consciousness is an illusion. Neither this point of view, nor any alternative to it, can be proved so our best recourses to apply science, reason, intuition, and imagination to experience. It seems to me that the reductionist account is contrary to scientific findings, unreasonable, counterintuitive, and shows a complete refusal to exercise intelligent imagination. All the hallmarks of its birth in the left hemisphere. The real result is that values themselves become devalued, beauty, morality, and truth have been downgraded, dismissed, or denied. If you want to see the consequences, you need do no more than look around you.
30:15 Now, finally on the huge topic of purpose… It’s a very interesting topic…
34:05 So, the first difference one needs to make is between a kind of purpose, which is thought of as being extrinsic and instrumental, like the engineering God. And this is like the purpose of any machine. The purpose of a photocopier lies in the copied sheet that emerges from it. Or, on the contrary, we can think of purpose as something that’s intrinsic and entirely fulfilled in the process itself. For example, a dance or a poem. These things are by naming pointless, but the point lies precisely within, not like the copied sheet without the process that brought it into being. And the second difference is that between a narrowly determined and mechanistic account of purpose on the one hand, and a largely undetermined and free account, on the other. This shows an illustration from Conrad Hal Waddington, who was a great british natural scientist of the last century. It shows an image of something he called creodes, which were preferential powers.
36:27 I think nobody would hold that there are narrowly determined purposes in beings, but there may be overall purposes towards which they generally tend…
37:08 It’s a non-instrumental way of thinking, and it changes with scale. So you can at very small scale, in a complex picture, you can see little determinative chains, but if you pan back and see the overall picture, it’s no longer narrowly deterministic, but there’s also something more active in the way in which animals, even tiny organisms evolve.
42:05 Non-teleological explanations…not only assume, but even depend upon, the imminent teleological character of all living organisms. The desire or tendency of living things to stay alive, and their endeavor to reproduce, both of which are among the minimal conditions of such a theory, are taken for granted and unexplained. Why, after all, make so much effort, embrace so many sacrifices, by far the best strategy for persisting in being is to avoid being alive at all. Being a rock gives you a much better chance. How is it that life ever took off?
43:05 I think…it can only rationally be explained if there are what Waddington called creodes, preferential pathways…
44:06 So, all I can really say is in conclusion that beauty, complexity, and responsiveness seem to be drives in the universe…
Related posts:
Iain McGilchrist on perception of value
Iain McGilchrist on Life & Value
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