Tom Campbell and Iain McGilchrist on the Nature of Reality

The following is from a discussion between Tom Campbell and Iain McGilchrist on the nature of reality. Iain McGilchrist is asked to start with providing an “elevator pitch”:

Iain (6:05): Yes, I ought to be able to give an elevator pitch… I begin from exploring…the difference between the two brain hemispheres. … These two parts of the brain…see the world in different ways…
The right hemisphere sees a world which is flowing, interconnected, never entirely certain, never entirely static, in which context matters enormously, in which much of what is going on has to remain implicit… So it has a picture of something which is alive, embodied, contextual, flowing, changing, interconnected, and importantly, present… It’s not just passively present…
The left hemisphere, on the other hand, sees a world which is entirely represented, in other words, it’s presented again after the fact when it’s no longer present, and that world is like a map… And the picture that the left hemisphere brings about is one in which everything is isolated, static, fragmentary, decontextualized, abstracted, categorized, and no longer has any uniqueness or any vitality.
This representation of the world…has led to great mistakes in philosophy and in our understanding of who we are and what the world is. And following on from that, the errors we’ve committed in destroying the natural world, and fragmenting society…
I believe it [the nature of reality] is primarily relational…
I believe…that opposites tend to coincide rather than be at opposite ends of a pole…
I believe that the world is resonant and vibrant and takes part in consciousness.
…the world is never fully knowable, it is far richer, more complex, more beautiful, more resonant and more animate than the one that we are supposed to believe.

Tom says he agrees with everything Iain said and adds:

Tom (25:32): My general philosophy, I guess, would fall under a thing called idealism, which goes back to Plato’s cave… What we see is not really what’s important, or what’s there… That’s just the shadow on the wall of the cave. There’s something else behind it all…

Iain asks:

Iain (33:44): Okay, for my benefit and for the benefit of listeners, can you do a really really compressed answer… You said you’ve got the answers, you haven’t told us anything about what they are.

Tom (34:39): Well, I told you it’s basically idealism… That’s the root of it, but idealism with the idea that consciousness is fundamental…

Iain (43:44): I’m not a straightforward idealist … who I think runs the risk of modeling things as though they were a reality when, actually, they have only the structure of a model.

Iain (44:07): Bertrand Russell said that we know a certain amount about our conscious experience, but we know nothing about reality because…all we know about it is the mathematical structure of it.

Iain (44:40): Alfred Whitehead…said that it’s not good enough for science to reject the business of experience … because, as you say, it’s not measurable and…it can’t be…simply pinned down. It doesn’t mean it’s not important.

Iain (45:26): The left hemisphere, as I said, deals only with an internal model, and it imagines that everything that is real is in its mind. So what is real for it is what it has invented, and what it has invented is its model.
…the right hemisphere accepts that there is some reality to experience. It’s obviously not the whole picture… I think our experience of reality is partial, but not because we can only go part of the way towards reality and then we hit a wall, but…because it’s just my experience, and yours is just your experience, but they’re very real experiences.

Iain (47:15): Experience carries a kind of reality…for me. All the important things I know come through experience.

Iain (1:01:33): The left hemisphere is getting stuck in its map, in its formula, in its schema of how things should be.

Tom says throughout the discussion that he agrees with Iain, but Iain isn’t as convinced that he agrees with Tom:

Iain (1:22:39): …I think what we have to agree is that there’s much here that we do agree on. I think there’s quite a lot that you said, just in the last bit, that I probably want to qualify in a number of ways…

At the end, Iain is asked to say something about the solution he sees for a better world:

Iain (1:23:58): Well, we’ve got to be very, very, very quick and brief, and I don’t know how to do that, but I think it’s not so much things that we need to do, although there are many things that we do need to do…
Stopping doing things may be every bit as important as doing things…
Speaking as a psychiatrist, the way to help somebody is often to get them to identify what they’re doing wrong and stop it, because otherwise there is no space in which whatever good can come to come about. So we need to stop certain things as much as to do new things.
And above all we need…a different way of being in the world… Unless we do that, things we do will not make any difference. … It’s about a whole new way of thinking about who you are, who other people are, what the world is, how they all relate. So that’s all I’ve got room to say.

Iain (1:29:58): When one stops learning one stops living.