The following is from Matthew Segall’s interview with Iain McGilchrist on October 16, 2022. Iain McGilchrist talks about our obsession with matter, the divided brain, four main approaches to truth, why it’s wrong to think of organisms as machines, life’s responsiveness, values as ontological primitives, and more. My emphasis in italics.
2:43 >>Matthew Segall: It’s immediately apparent that you don’t think things are going very well at the moment… In your latest book you…explore the ways that the brain contributes to connecting us up with reality, through science and reason, emotion, imagination, intuition and so on. And you also dive into the deep end to do some scientifically, but also spiritually, informed speculation about the biggest metaphysical questions. The nature of space, and time matter, and energy, and consciousness, including the purpose of life and the sense of the Sacred… You view it [the brain] as a medium, and not as an emitter or a producer, of consciousness… You do show in in great detail how damage to certain parts of the brain can degrade or transform our consciousness, or particular features of our consciousness…
5:40 >>Iain McGilchrist: It’s part of what I think is wrong with the matter with things, …that we are obsessed with matter at the expense of anything beyond the fundamental material. And we’re obsessed also with things, because I argue that in fact…things are secondary to relationships… I argue that in fact relations primary…
8:01 It [the brain] sculpts greater consciousness into my individual consciousness… My voice comes from the air in my lungs coming out of my mouth, but if it weren’t for the larynx obstructing the flow of the air, I wouldn’t actually have a voice at all. So, …I see it in that sort of way.
9:22 If people want 10 minutes to find out [about the divided brain]… search RSA Animate… Effectively in evolutionary history all organisms that we know have asymmetrical neural networks even before there were brains… Our brains are…profoundly divided… My hypothesis…is that all animals have to solve a fundamental conundrum at the basis of continued existence… You need a particular kind of attention which is very very narrow … and at the same time keep a lookout for everything else that’s going on in the world…
12:03 These two types of attention…give raise to two different phenomenological worlds… If it’s true that each hemisphere pays different attention, it’s going to see different things, and it’s going to see them in a different way, and…effectively what you get is two versions of the world. One, which is useful merely from the point of view of manipulation, shows a number of details, little fragments that are isolated, static, familiar, unconnected from from their context, disembodied, effectively cut off from considerations of morality and other values. And abstract in nature, categorical in nature and inanimate effectively. So you have an inanimate world which is like a machine. … The right hemisphere, meanwhile, it gives rise to a world in which nothing is ever completely cut off from anything else, in which things are never completely certain or fully known; interconnected with one another, and flowing, and changing rather than static and isolated; are always to be seen in context of that to be understood, involved with embodied cells not, just with an abstract form of cognitive function; and are unique in nature, not just instances of a category. This is an animate world…effectively resistant to bureaucratic reduction. In fact, it’s a bureaucrats nightmare. So, these are completely different kinds of world. And we experience and know both, but very often in public discourse these days, we favor…the left hemisphere one, because it’s very easy to articulate in language, whereas the other one, that sees a much more complex and beautiful picture in which sometimes opposites coincide, is much harder to articulate. It also involves articulating the implicit the right hemisphere alone understands. Implicit meaning, such as in metaphor, in poetry, in jokes, whereas the left hemisphere understands the explicit, and doesn’t get what is not made explicit…
14:41 …I just want to dissociate myself from the idea that I am going to come up with the nature of reality… I guess we all believe some things are truer than others, and they want to get as close to that truth as possible…
15:29 …the way our modern educational approach is to rush children into the cultivation of the left hemisphere…
17:49 …I share an enormous amount of…clinical research…which I think speak volumes of what happens when the right hemisphere is damaged and the individual has to rely only on the left hemisphere. And the overall outcome of this is that the right hemisphere is less in touch with reality… its attention is poorer, its perception is poorer; its judgments are much more fallible and likely to be jumping to conclusions or…delusions…
20:02 One of the things I want to do in the book is to compare values. I use Max Scheler’s pyramid of values… It’s only the lowest level of Max Scheler’s pyramid that the left hemisphere accesses, which is utility… It’s a very bad thing when…a civilization starts only to attend to what the left hemisphere says…
23:27 …since the enlightenment, which is a movement, of course, which I have enormous respect for, there has been, unfortunately, a hubristic tendency to imagine we know everything, and we can control everything; which is really the left hemisphere’s way of thinking about things; and it’s leading us I think into a dead end. In fact, I think it is likely to destroy our civilization…
24:49 >>Matthew Segall: What you’ve done in your work is show very clearly that both hemispheres are involved in everything, but in different ways, and so exactly…keeping that in mind my next question for you has to do with science. You have a lot of important things to say about the nature of scientific truth. Your love of science, the importance of science and scientific research, and also the role that science plays in society and the formation of public policy. Can you speak to your sense of what’s gone wrong with institutionalized science? Because it seems that with culture more generally, there’s been a bit of a left hemisphere takeover, at least among some scientists…
26:07 >>Iain McGilchrist: In physics over the last century, there’s been almost a complete demolition of a sort of reductionist materialist approach, while, at least in the middle of the last century, biology became increasingly reductionistic… First, I should just say briefly that what you’re doing here is moving to the epistemology part two of this book [The Matter with Things] in which I look at what I consider the four main parts that we can use to approach truth. And I take those to be science, reason, intuition, and imagination. imagination having slightly different status that it’s more important than any of the other three… None of them can function properly without the imagination…
27:57 So I look at what the proper limits of science [are]. I believe there are things that you cannot ask science to address, and questions that you should not expect science to give you an answer to… I look at, as you say, biology and what’s happened there and why it is wrong to think of organisms as machines. I look at, I think substantively, about eight ways in which they’re nothing like machines, and look at the paradoxes that occur when you try to talk about them as machines.
29:16 …and I think that, like everything else, science has its left hemisphere aspects and its right hemisphere aspects. Its right hemisphere aspects are those in which it thinks flexibly, thinks often in imagery rather than in sequences of either words or symbols. She…has the capacity to see things alter with a Gestalt shift rather than simply by one piece of data…
32:41 …reason…has its left hemisphere and its right hemisphere aspect. Its left hemisphere aspects of trying to make it equal a series of coded instructions that could be carried out by a machine, wehereas true human reason is the product of a life well lived in which one brings together wisdom from experience with the ability to use logic…
34:50 …the thing about the scientific method is it’s almost never been used by scientists to reach a conclusion.
40:48 >>Matthew Segall: Where would you like to see biology go in a more balanced approach to science?
41:33 >>Iain McGilchrist: I adopt [Robert] Rosen’s view that animacy is the primary condition from which inanimacy is an interesting departure… I see whatever exists as existing in an encounter, and that everything is a two-way encounter, at least. It’s never just one thing affects another. And so I say, what we see as real is an encounter between my consciousness and whatever else is, and that my consciousness affects what that is, and that encounter affects me in what I become. So I see everything like this, but I see that what life did was two things above all. One is it speeded up the processes, as I say billion times, so that in a single cell things can happen in the twinkling of an eye that in an inanimate situation would take billions of years to occur. And that it also enormously expands this important element of responsiveness. And — I think, actually, the reason, if you like to put it this way, and I do think the cosmos is reasonable — I think it is if you insist on draining all meaning out of it, and not seeing its complexity, and its richness, and its intelligence, and its consciousness, in my view, then, of course, you’ve got a hard problem…
45:02 …this sense of a drive in the cosmos towards certain things, towards complexity, towards individuation, towards an unfolding of something that is present already in the cosmos. And I see Life as just being this on speed, if you like. This is what Life is… This in a much more wonderful and…much more extraordinary degree… If evolution is really all about survival, then why do we not remain at a very much more primitive level of evolution? In fact, we’ve evolved to being rather transitory beings who do very poorly in the stakes of persistence in being. And I think you said amusingly, “the secret of persisting in being is not not to live at all”, which is true. … So it’s not been about persistence, it’s about achieving something that can only be achieved by much more complex beings. And I think it’s absurd when one looks at the processes of life…to say that there is no purpose. Here I’m not saying it’s the purpose of a simple kind that we do so. What’s the purpose of a photocopier? It’s to produce a copy of whatever paper you put in it. That is the left hemisphere’s idea of purpose, utility. But I’m not saying that purpose is utility at all. The purpose may be to bring about the extraordinarily beautiful complex rich individuation. That is the cosmos, that is the universe, as has been seen in all the wisdom traditions. I can see no evidence against this, and lots of evidence for it, when one looks at the processes of life. So I certainly don’t claim that there’s an engineering God sorting things out and driving things towards them, not a bit. I’m opposed to that. That is the left hemisphere’s idea of a God, a technician, an engineer, who accepts a machine going. But it’s not a machine, and there isn’t a technician for it. It’s a something that is genuinely free and its purpose is to unfold itself. I have a lot more to say about it as but that’s really just to answer that…
47:56 …when you see single celled organisms acting purposively in response to a stimulus that they could not be prepared for, either by their personal history or by the history of the species, so lab engineered by human beings, and watch them intelligently respond to it, the idea that they have no purposes in what they’re doing becomes ridiculous.
48:42 …values are ontological primitives, as I believe consciousness is. They can’t be derived. I don’t think we invent them. I think we discover them, or failed to discover them. And the point of existing is to respond to them and to have that experience of celebration.
49:50 …he [Max Scheler] said value is like color. We don’t sort of derive blue from anything else. It’s a primary fact. And he said values were like that…
50:10 >>Matthew Segall: Whitehead says we have no right to deface the value experience which is the very essence of the universe, and so, yes, deep agreement there. But it seems to me that perhaps this left hemisphere way of of compartmentalizing the universe into say matter, and life, and mind or consciousness, creates all sorts of difficulties for scientists or philosophers who are trying to do cosmology… So it seems to me we need a general theory of evolution. It’s one of the ways I’ve been trying to describe it that would bridge the gaps between matter and life and mind… I see your work as a very helpful and important reminder that we need to include ourselves in the universe that we are trying to understand. Yes, if it’s all random and determined, then the view that it’s random and determined is random and determined, and it undercuts itself…
55:25 >>Iain McGilchrist: I believe there is something that we can call real, which is… comes, as I say, out of an encounter it. Comes out of the encounter of the only reality…that you can know is the reality that we know. And that opens us to the suggestion that it might be entirely subjective, but I don’t accept that. I think, I mean, starting from the simplest things that there are obvious very great commonalities. And experience, or at least we feel that there must be. And, I believe, unlike that, we do contact whatever that is the part that the two ways of thinking about the partial nature of our knowledge, or the nature of our knowledge all together. One might be, we can only go so far to the limits of what is projected by our minds, and then we cannot cross that to whatever is real behind it. We cannot know that another is to say we can cross to that, but each of us can only perceive what it is we can perceive. So this is different in that the partial nature of the knowledge is not that we get some of the way, but no further the partial nature is we go all the way. But because we’re limited by who we are, we only see the bit that we can see…
1:01:21 …things that are not easily put in language maybe better contacted through, as they have always for me been, through music, through poetry, through myth, through community, through place, through architecture — indeed, and above all, through nature. So these things have spoken to me of something beyond the reductionist and materialists all my life. And it’s what I call the sense of the sacred. And it’s the title of the very last substantive chapter before the epilogue, which wraps up where we are now in this new book, The Matter with Things. And it’s a short book in itself. It’s over 100 pages long and it’s the most difficult thing I ever wrote because I wanted to be honorable and true to to the various points of view, and not flippant or dismissive, but to try to show where things were going wrong…
1:02:34 >>Matthew Segall: All theology is a kind of left hemisphere way of trying to articulate right hemisphere intuitions…
1:03:13 >>Iain McGilchrist: I believe both in a process philosophy of the world, and therefore of the divine. And I believed in this idea of the world and God being in it and the world being in God…since my teens…
1:03:41 I love Whitehead, but my only complaint with Whitehead is that his use of language is sometimes a bit of a bit barrier…
1:04:56 So all my life I have believed that it’s a mistake to see things as sort of static objects that have to be assembled to make any meaning, but instead I have seen a constantly flowing web in which everything ultimately is connected to everything else…
1:26:16 >>Richard Tarnas: …very nice to see you and and to hear your literate voice… I have a a short question. It’s a kind of meta question, and that is you have made a discovery, and worked very hard to articulate it, and ground it in research, and you’re bringing forth into the world a kind of Gestalt shift. … It’s a new way of framing our approach to things, and that’s kind of what we’re in the business of doing in this program in general. We are very focused on worldviews, …on original ideas that can transform a worldview, that can…make a difference, basically. But the big challenge is how do we translate new ideas, new paradigms, new Gestalt shifts, such as what you’re bringing forth into practices that are enacted in a society, in our society, perhaps in our civilization, more generally. How do we do that? How do we bring our new moral orders, our new paradigms and visions of what is practices? And I wondered in your own life, how you have been conceived, because you care for the state of the world. It’s obviously in a fraught, even catastrophic state. How are you making the bridge between? … Do you have ideas about how to bring your particular conception into practical transformational efficacy in the world?
1:29:07 >>Iain McGilchrist: I like very much, and I hope it’s true, the idea that I might be trying to affect, or in succeeding in affecting, something of a paradigm shift. I think, what can I say? There are two things really. Those things that we can do individually, which involve questioning and pushing back against practices that seem to lead into, agree to, grasp or capture by the left hemisphere, where we see them in our own field in which we work, by embodying a different way of thinking, in the way we pass on to others what we can that’s all each of us does. We talk we model something for for others, I hope, I suppose. And then, there are bigger projects to do with, I mean, largely they’ve got to be to do with education. If we’re talking about changing the minds of the future, and education is in a perilous state at the moment, so it really needs rethinking. What we’re trying to do when we’re educating somebody, we’re not trying to stuff information in… I do think we’re poisoning, or corrupting and de-skilling, the minds of children by turning them into something more robotic. And, actually, the way people talk nowadays and go about in the world seems to be more zombie-like, often I mean literally… It seems now, it’s a horribly punitive world, in which you step out of line, you become a miserable non-person. New life becomes unbearable and we’ve got to stop doing this, and start being more liberal about what people can say, and giving them a hearing, and sort of trying to get together to solve the world’s problems. Not fighting and infighting with one another… Sorry, it’s not very helpful to say these things, but it I just think it’s clearly true. I just don’t have a formula for it Rick, and you’re probably not surprised that I don’t. But those are the things I think we need to do, thank you, and education is a very good place to consider putting into practice that will have transformational effects…
1:48:39 …these things: motion, emotion, and cognition are massively interconnected in the body, and in the brain, and in experience. So I think, if they are that way for us, they surely are for other living creatures…
1:49:43 >>Matthew Segall: Thank you for your your contribution for us here today, and for your your book and the work that you continue to do…
1:50:02 >>Iain McGilchrist: Oh, that’s great thank you very much for arranging this and making it all happen so, and for your enthusiasm. And thank you all for coming in for your questions I’m sorry I didn’t have time to speak with everybody.
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