Beyond the Scientific Revolution: Ian McGilchrist’s “The Matter With Things”

While the scientific revolution produced many benefits, the scientific perspective omits purpose and value, without which life is meaningless. With The Matter With Things, Iain McGilchrist makes a valuable contribution to the body of poetry, literature, psychology, and philosophy that has rebelled against scientism and sought to give a more expansive, spiritual, and humane view of us and the cosmos. His deep understanding of the way the left and right hemispheres of our brains deal with the world provides a useful framework for thinking about what gets left out of the scientific worldview. Even were the hemispheric differences to be understood as a metaphor, and they are far more than that, McGilchrist has provided a vocabulary for referring to things which are by their nature hard to express or point at. The process began with The Master and His Emissary but is taken much further with The Matter With Things. Interestingly, some of what has taken place culturally and linguistically has rather exact parallels in the realm of madness and developmentally derived mental pathologies. His fellow psychiatrist, to whom McGilchrist appeals, Louis A. Sass, author of Madness and Modernity, concurs. The cynics and skeptics, those lacking imagination, those convinced that humans are robots and nothing more, have the easy task of heaping contempt on those of us who are none of those things. This teenage mode of asserting one’s superiority; the ones who consider themselves willing to face the truth that man is “nothing but” a mechanical doll; a collection of atoms and molecules following its programming, resembles, in significant ways, the schizophrenic, the autistic, and the psychopathic. The first two, at least, have trouble recognizing the reality of both themselves and other people. The right hemisphere is responsible for our intuitive sense of the reality of the world around us, and this sense can be compromised when things go wrong and these abilities are harmed.

Majoring in analytic philosophy, for the non-autistically inclined, can indeed feel like entering a madhouse. The apparent message? Life is far less interesting than you think it is. Professors strip any meaning, significance, or interest from any subject to which they turn their minds. “Writer” in Andrei Tarkovsky’s movie Stalker, avers that UFOs, telepathy, and the Bermuda Triangle do not exist. Everything is boring. And, if it turns out that alien civilizations exist, they will be boring, too. Writer might be right about UFOs, etc. But, anything that excites the imagination and produces wonder can be good if taken in the right way. King Arthur and Atlantis might or might not be fiction, but what material they give us to ponder! To what other thoughts may they lead?

Zamyatin’s We has much the same critique of the left hemisphere preferences of certain types of people. Having initially supported the Russian revolution, three years of living under Lenin’s dictatorship enlightened him as to the error of his ways, and We was his response. It was immediately banned – indicating that it hit rather too close to home. In Zamyatin’s dystopian novel, everything is to be rational and planned. Crooked roads are to be made straight. Anything natural or wild is to be walled off and happiness is to be achieved by making it compulsory. Those parts of the brain leading to questioning the order imposed on the population, or wishing to escape from rigid thinking and regimentation, were to be surgically removed. And which part was that? The imagination.

The truly great cultural changing scientists exhibit imagination in spades. They use their intuition, insight, inspiration, and creativity – all the things the lesser scientists and their philosophical followers despise – either overtly or in practice. McGilchrist has copious quotations from those geniuses decrying their narrow-minded and less able brethren, though their chidings seem to do no good.

There is a certain mindset that imagines that science is the only way to discover the truth, though science itself says no such thing. And that all important questions will be answered by recourse to science, which again is not a scientific claim. Arguing with such people is most probably a lost cause. So, is McGilchrist preaching to the converted? To a large degree; yes. If The Matter With Things is on Daniel Dennett’s reading list, it would be most surprising.

However, The Matter With Things can serve two purposes. One is to reassure and restore the confidence to those whose psyche is dominated by the right hemisphere, as all healthy brains are. No. You are not crazy. Quite the reverse. The other would be to convince the still young and immature that the really smart people embrace humor, dreams, insight, intuition, understanding, purpose, meaning, creativity, imagination, emotion, metaphor, and they do so without embarrassment. They do not disparage the contributions of the left hemisphere; logic, analysis, language, and clarity. But, they recognize them as tools in service of parts of the mind that frequently resist analysis; that, in fact, analysis destroys, such as humor. The problem-solving abilities of the right hemisphere frequently rely on sleep and specifically REM sleep (dreams). The resulting insights emerge from the subconscious to the conscious mind. Exactly what it has been doing before surfacing is unknown. But, since knowledge begins in the realm of mystery before it becomes the known and light of day, this seems entirely appropriate.

Success at manipulating the world is attained through the left hemisphere. But, to comprehend it and to see it as it is, writes McGilchrist, takes the right hemisphere. We ourselves are part of reality. Any errors in understanding the world become even worse when it comes to misunderstanding our own nature. The scientistic tendency is to imagine that we are machines merely because only mechanism is visible from the left hemisphere perspective. We denigrate ourselves and all humanity when we think in this manner. Once we get past the idea that nature consists of senseless particles, science can improve, but science is incapable of dealing with all the dimensions of the human being simply because it is so partial.

While The Matter With Things is a richly rewarding book, the reader might or might not find McGilchrist’s view of God appealing. He rejects what he calls an “engineering God” in favor of something like Alfred North Whitehead’s “creative advance into novelty.” This involves the idea that there is an engine of creation within nature itself. The divine is within nature, not imposed from without. The tendency of the universe over time has been to spontaneously produce ever greater order and complexity; an idea that seems related to the title of Robert Bly’s beautiful collation of poetry – The Soul Is Here For Its Own Joy. Nature too seems overflowing and exuberant, realizing potentialities hidden within it. That all seems appealing enough, but as to whether there is room for a transcendent and divine realm, whether an aspect of God could be a Person, whether our sojourn on Earth is only part of the soul’s journey to be continued in the afterlife, seems to be answered in the negative. This seems to be because for McGilchrist a disembodied soul is anathema. We are always embodied and the body has its own wisdom and contributions. One might counter that the idea of a spiritual body in the afterlife is a commonplace idea and no one thinks of the afterlife as consisting of free-floating invisible minds. The thoughtful Australian rock musician, Nick Cave, one of whose sons died in an accident, writes that his wife frequently dreams of her dead son. They meet and embrace and she is filled with a sense of his presence, but they do not talk because communication does not require words where her son resides. Those who experience near death experiences also frequently testify as to the continuance of existence after death. Deathbed visitations too are a commonplace. Ministers of religion often have people confiding to them that they have been visited by deceased loved ones in spiritually embodied form exactly resembling their bodies during life. These stories are frequently otherwise kept private for fear of being thought mad. Dostoevsky has a character in Crime and Punishment, Svidrigailov, who claims to have been visited by his dead wife, Marfa Petrovna, three times. In Part IV, Chapter I, he describes her as walking into the room and asking casually, “Good day, Arkady Ivanovitch! How do you like my dress?” Svidrigailov says; “She stood turning round before me. I looked at the dress, and then I looked carefully, very carefully, at her face. ‘I wonder you trouble to come to me about such trifles, Marfa Petrovna.’ ‘Good gracious, you won’t let one disturb you about anything!’” When Raskolnikov suggests he see a doctor, Svidrigailov comments that perhaps only the sick can see the existence of another world. Dostoevsky himself had mystical experiences filled with infinite meaning and significance shortly before his episodes of epilepsy, so there is a reason for thinking he might be sympathetic to such an idea.

However, even if one feels as though McGilchrist’s theology is incomplete and presents a partial picture only, this does not mar what he does say unduly.

McGilchrist describes a Heraclitan world of motion, order, the implicit, complexity, potential, and continuity. He argues that their opposites have no real existence and only constitute limit cases – approached, but never reached. There is no true stasis, or randomness, or the completely explicit, or the completely actual, though things can draw near those states.

Experience of the world is direct, but partial. The left hemisphere re-presents the world, but with the right hemisphere, the world is present to us. We play a role in bringing what we experience about. In our experience, potentialities of the world come to actuality. Dewey would say we foreground out of a background. McGilchrist refers approvingly to Dewey at several points in the book, but as a naturalist, Dewey’s experiential realism does not fit his metaphysics. What is more than matter? God, the transcendent, the divine, the spiritual and Dewey rejects all of that. (See Dewey’s A Common Faith.) Dewey helps himself to a concept, experiential realism, that his impoverished naturalistic metaphysics makes impossible.

Several times McGilchrist says “relationship exists before what is related.” Perhaps, this is supposed to be an example of a right hemisphere paradox that should be tolerated. It certainly seems like, logically, relationship and relata are mutually constituting; neither existing without the other. Giving relationship temporal priority over relata seems to imply a view of individuality emerging from monism. But, monism has no “relationships” within it, and makes love impossible; there being no lover and beloved. So, the maxim seems rather unlovely!

A key idea for McGilchrist is that the world we experience and know is affected by the kind of attention we pay it. The attention of the right hemisphere is a richer one than the left. Yet, individual animals whose hemispheres are not sufficiently differentiated have a competitive disadvantage. So, one must not disparage the left hemisphere as an undesirable thing, but just remember that the perspective taken in manipulating the world should not be used for trying to comprehend that world. Heidegger complained that the instrumental worldview looks at a forest only to estimate how many planks of wood could be gleaned from it. Too much is lost if we do not prioritize the point of view of the right hemisphere with the left playing a secondary role. For the schizophrenic or autistic, however, this manner of perception might not be possible.

Philosophy means the love of wisdom. Plato’s contemplation of the Form of the Good, or the insight into reality gained from mystical insight, whether that of a Zen Buddhist or Meister Eckhart, is not itself wisdom. Aristotle writes that phronesis is necessary for being a flourishing person. Translating phronesis as “practical wisdom,” as it is usually done, makes it sound like there is some other kind, but there is not. The concept of wisdom necessarily includes the ethical, practical, and embodied. No hypocrite is wise. A psychopath or a heroin addict is not wise. A three-year old is not wise. Aristotle writes that to “hit the target” in life one must do the right thing, at the right time, in the right way, towards the right person, and for the right reason. To do all that means paying attention to concrete situations involving specific people with their particular qualities. To get to be wise, one must be smart, observant, and experienced with good engrained habits. One cannot rely on algorithms and rules. Instead, context is everything. Doing the right thing in one context cannot be extrapolated to all other domains.

Much of what is required for wisdom involves the right hemisphere in particular; the attributes of which are much maligned in modern times. Much of what McGilchrist is trying to do can usefully be conceived of as righting this imbalance and showing what is required for wisdom and thus philosophy. Being wise requires, among other things, right hemisphere intuition, emotion, imagination, the concrete, problem-solving, and the unique. A professor could deliver an excellent lecture on the topic of wisdom, but if he does not embody the Greek virtues of justice, moderation, generosity, and courage, he is not wise. At most, he could be clever or knowledgeable. An immoral, intemperate, miserly, scared person is not wise. And a hyperscrupulous, boorish, profligate, rash person is not wise either. The Greek virtues must be exhibited to the right degree – neither too much nor too little – to be virtuous at all. All this is familiar to anyone who has taught Aristotle, but it is possible not to realize that this account of wisdom is not some weird “practical” subspecies of wisdom, but wisdom in its entirety. Phronesis is closer to the techne of the craftsman than the abstract universal knowledge of episteme. Homer referred to the “sophia” of the shipbuilder too, so sophia and phronesis can be usefully conflated.

The reason the analytic philosopher is not a philosopher is that he is content to be clever, cynical, and to win arguments; to entertain skepticism and outlandish thought experiments, but who, like Hume, leaves his speculations in the classroom, office, and study, and never even contemplates trying to live in accordance with his speculations. Such people are known to say things like, “I’m a determinist, but, of course, it’s impossible to live without pretending to have free will.” Any normal reasonable person should be free to conclude that this hypocrite is not a determinist in real life at all, but merely a poser.

For those of us who love philosophy, McGilchrist can help get us back on track and provides a language to do this. It is interesting that he possibly shares the same caveat one should bear in mind concerning Aristotle – that his conception of the divine might not be fully adequate for some. With Aristotle, his god is strangely unlovable; what F. M. Cornford called the philosopher’s god. An autistic, self-centered logical necessity and First Cause that leaves it unanswered why the Cosmos should hope to emulate his “perfection,” seeming as he does, to be most imperfect. The reader will have to decide if McGilchrist’s picture similarly lacks a conception of the divine worthy of inspiring emulation and providing solace in what can, at times, seem a nightmarish world.

Chapter 1 looks at the way opposing bodily processes can help each other. Biceps pull, triceps push. The sympathetic nervous system prepares for fight or flight, the parasympathetic system for repose. The brain too, with its lateral asymmetry, seen 700 million years ago in a sea anemone, provides more potentialities and mutual inhibition. As the brain gets larger, communication between the parts becomes unwieldly. The myelin coated fibers that connect different parts take a lot of space. If neuronal connection increased with the brain, there would not be enough room, so it works better if parts of the brain specialize and communicate the results once they are done, though crucial things to do with sight and vision are communicated very quickly. Interference between different brain parts is minimized through inhibition, with 25% to 35% of the brain dedicated to this suppression. When one part is activated the equivalent part in the other hemisphere is inhibited. The frontal lobes give us some distance, stopping things from happening, so we can plan for the future. They inhibit too – providing impulse control and thus give us more flexibility.

The hemispheres of children are less independent and this slows down their performance, which gets noticeably better around the age of 12. 

It is the corpus callosum that connects left and right hemispheres. Other creatures have another form of connection that is not as substantial.

The right hemisphere helps us deal with other people, to make sense of the world, while the left hemisphere makes us good predators, gives emotional distance, and focus on the future. The left hemisphere creates a virtual world parallel to the real world and language helps do this. This virtual world is largely abstracted from time, space, body and emotion. A lot of problems are created when we think this is the real world.

Chapter 2 – Attention

When the left hemisphere is damaged, the right hemisphere functions and is aware of the deficit, and continues to see the world in a normal manner. right hemisphere damage, on the other hand, leaves the person reliant on the left hemisphere. In that case, all things in the left half of the world disappear. (The right hemisphere is responsible for perceiving the left side of things). One man’s wife had to turn his plate so he would eat what had been on the left side. When other people try to draw attention to things on the left, patients with right hemisphere damage will get nervous and uncomfortable. They cannot imagine the world looking differently. One man just stopped communicating when the left side came up. right hemisphere attention is more flexible and both the right and left sides of the world remain.

This has parallels with trying to deal with analytic philosophers. They mostly see things congenial to the left hemisphere and ignore and reject the qualitative world of living beings. The philosopher whose brain has the healthy dominance of the right hemisphere can see what his analytic colleagues can see but the latter do not return the favor.

Left hemisphere attention is more predatory and tends to get fixated on things. Some right hemisphere damaged patients will stare at, for instance, a door handle until someone distracts them. It also takes a certain amount of time before the next target is located. The sense of the world persisting comes from the right hemisphere. The left hemisphere cannot perceive time as duration, as something lived through, but only abstract snapshots. right hemisphere is better at sustained attention, which makes sense if the left hemisphere sees motion only as a series of freeze frames. Neither time nor space is continuous for the left hemisphere. The left hemisphere can identify particular locations, but cannot deal with spatial navigation. The world is flattened. When the corpus callosum is cut, the right hand cannot draw depth, just stick figures, but the left hand controlled by the right hemisphere can.

The right hemisphere damaged person never considers himself to be wrong, does not care about the truth, and does not take responsibility. Analytic philosophers are effectively trained to function in this way with their left hemisphere emphasis, especially through the embrace of a crass utilitarian ethic (the trolley car problem is a famous expression of this mentality). Somehow, he imagined that his good intentions saved him from being responsible for homicide. He emphatically and explicitly insisted it was not murder despite fulfilling all the requirements. Presumably, as he was being handcuffed and arrested, he would still be protesting his innocence.

Symbolic logic classes do not care about truth either, just logical correctness and consistency. That fits with the left hemisphere predilections exactly. The left hemisphere is never prepared to say it does not know and confabulates (makes up stories) if necessary, with a poor idea about what will be plausible or not and it will often believe its own stories. McGilchrist notes at one point that the left hemisphere dominated are an odd combination of skepticism and extreme gullibility. 

We normally see a living room as a Gestalt and then divide it into parts. Schizophrenics see the parts first. Analytic philosophers share this tendency.

For the left hemisphere, the body is “out there.” The right hemisphere, however, feels the body as a whole from the inside. The right hemisphere damaged person may be alienated not just from his body, but his self as a whole and to refer to himself in the third person, as the autistic and schizophrenic tend to.

The world comes alive with left hemisphere suppression. Watches and the moon seem alive because they move. right hemisphere suppression, on the contrary, makes thing seem inanimate; to doubt your own existence and to feel like an object. The right hemisphere can take over speech if the left hemisphere is damaged in infancy, but the left hemisphere usually cannot replace the functions of the right hemisphere.

Chapter 4 – Judgment

Interacting with the blogger and troll Robert Philosopher during the summer of 2022 felt like an object lesson in the left hemisphere pathologies McGilchrist identifies. A proper response often seemed to be, “Read this book!” i.e., The Matter With Things.

The right hemisphere connects us with reality and deals with the ambiguous and uncertain nature of much of it, while the left hemisphere prefers certainty even when it is not available. It will over-generalize and jump to conclusions to achieve that desired state. Someone like the blogger prides himself on his logic, but cannot see the point of discussing whether his picture of what it is to be human is plausible or not. He does not want to compare his theory with his own experienced reality.

The mad suffer from an excess of rationality narrowly conceived, and miss the contextual, implicit, and intuitive as did the aforementioned blogger. Some of the worst schizophrenics are also the most logical. They may invent an imposter or duplicate to resolve conflicting information which has eerie similarities to the Many-Worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics.

Nearly all delusions, such as the idea that people are just like robots, are the result of right hemisphere damage. Paranoia, delusional jealousy (Othello Syndrome), Cotard’s Delusion, that you are already dead and need to be buried, schizophrenics who think they are machines and cut their wrists to see if engine oil will come out, Capgras Syndrome, that someone has been replaced with an imposter – leading to one man cutting off his stepfather’s head with a chainsaw to see if batteries and microchips would fall out, are all the result of the left hemisphere being left to its own devices. The left hemisphere jumps to conclusions, resists altering them, being uninterested in truth, and makes things up to maintain its point of view, even when it remembers well. As mentioned before, symbolic logic classes simply have to bracket the truth, the way things really are, in order to focus on the formal structure of arguments. Truth would require stepping outside the classroom and entering the realm of the empirical.

The left hemisphere is actually better than the right hemisphere if the problem to be solved is explicit, clear, conforms to one’s pre-existing beliefs about the world, and is expressed lexically. Otherwise, the right hemisphere is better. “Perhaps, to the extent that rationalizing is a function of the left hemisphere, Mercier and Sperber are right that rationality is not about seeking the truth – more about finding reasons that enable one to win an argument.” 

Chapter 7 – Cognitive Intelligence

McGilchrist’s discussion of intelligence is in line with that of Edward Dutton’s the evolutionary psychologist. The former, like Dutton, notes that IQ has declined by approximately a standard deviation (13%) between 1884 and 2004 though various factors have conspired to hide this fact. Proxies for intelligence, like the rate of innovation per head of population, color discrimination, and reflex speed have all got worse. Roger Penrose the physicist notes that there is no intelligence without understanding, so there is no “artificial intelligence” instantiated by computers, and McGilchrist also connects intelligence with understanding which is centered more in the right hemisphere. Autistic people with their right hemisphere deficits are better at identifying what someone is doing than why he did it, an important element in understanding people, which is connected to their lack of a theory of mind. Many social scientists rely on the University of Chicago’s “General Social Survey” which notes, for instance, that more highly educated people tend to disfavor capital punishment. For a philosopher, this is startingly uninformative. The only interesting question there is, “why?” In a philosophy class, philosophers studying only controversial topics with no definitively provable answer, giving reasons is the sine qua non.

Lower case “g” stands for general intelligence. Being good at one test means someone will usually be good at the others. General fluid intelligence is associated with the right hemisphere and it enables novel problem solving, while general crystallized intelligence is more culture bound. Removing a hemisphere of the brain will reduce intelligence, but lacking the right hemisphere means a more dramatic decline. The very smart are more right hemisphere dominated.

During the twentieth century, there was a tendency for IQ scores to go up. Since 100 represents the average, the test had to keep getting renormed so the average did not exceed 100. The trouble is that IQ tests are an imperfect measurement of g. Testing using Raven matrices (shapes) was thought to be the least culturally influenced element of IQ tests, rather than words, and so these have been given special emphasis. As a consequence, students have been schooled especially on these shapes, leading to the result that the supposedly least culturally determined factor becomes the element most culturally influenced. Ravens matrices are supposed to be solved using right hemisphere insight, but algorithms can be used to get the same result without insight and these algorithms have been explicitly taught – with diligence substituting for intelligence.

If people were really getting smarter and smarter we would be impressed with younger people’s thinking and speaking abilities and our grandparents would seem dull by comparison. What we see instead is grade inflation – with A-level math (an exam used in the UK) going up a whole grade between 1996 and 1999, meaning a general lowering of standards, not raising them. Math skills have measurably declined. In 1975-76, understanding how much water an object will displace, which is determined by volume, not weight, had an average success rate of 54% in boys and 27% in girls. In 2003-4, both sexes scored an unimpressive 17%. The decline in boys’ learning was much worse than that for girls which is in line with boys’ worsening academic scores and low college attendance (40% for boys compared with 60% for girls). We are seeing a reverse Flynn effect with the highest declines at the top end, with fewer children reaching a formal operational level (abstract reasoning and metacognition). Test taking skills have been emphasized, particularly since the 1980s, but the attempt to actually improve math skills has been unsuccessful. Those are getting worse, not better.

When the average intelligence declines there is a shift to the left on the Bell Curve with fewer outliers on the right, contributing to a dearth of modern-day geniuses. Since the 1970s, theoretical physics and astrophysics have effectively stalled; art, music, writing and architecture are bereft of giants, and live action cartoon-like Marvel movies dominate the cineplexes.

IQ tests have always favored abstract categories rather than the functional and classroom teaching has centered around the former at the expense of function. McGilchrist notes the following syllogism:

Q: All bears are white where there is always snow.

In Novaya Zemlya there is always snow.

What color are the bears there?

Students subjected to such questions all their lives know what they are supposed to answer. They know that their ability to follow logical reasoning is being tested. Russian peasants living in remote areas, however, do not confuse logic with facts. They reply:

A: I have seen only black bears and I do not talk of what I have not seen.

Q: But what do my words imply?

A: If a person has not been there he cannot say anything on the basis of words. If a man was 60 or 80 and had seen a white bear there and told me about it, he could be believed.

That Russian peasant is getting sent to the principal’s office, or at least is going to score poorly on the test. But, he is also less likely to be fooled by “fake news,” where facts are either made up out of whole cloth, or more typically, carefully presented to be thoroughly misleading; lying by omission.

Chapter 8 – Creativity

“In Dr. Faustus, Thomas Mann identifies the inadequacies of thinking of freedom in terms of free will. The narrator describes the paradox of freedom as being only the ability to deviate from God’s will,” i.e., to be evil. Similarly, Kant remarks that following the moral law makes us free from being the tools of nature and the feelings, desires, and drives it thrusts upon us. However, the moral law is the same for all; the antithesis of freedom. It is the link between freedom and creativity that Berdyaev emphasizes and creativity is necessarily mysterious. We create through hard work, acquiring skills and knowledge, and in line with our personality, interests, tastes, life experience and cultural milieu. Creativity cannot be forced and trying to make it too conscious can impede success. If creativity were merely the result of following an algorithm, it would not be creative. A machine can be made to imitate the music of Bach, but Bach’s music was not an imitation. Any well-qualified composer for film can copy any style at will, but that is neither original nor truly creative.

McGilchrist identifies creativity with divergent thinking, with the opposite being convergent thinking which involves discovering the one answer to a clearly defined question involving no originality, such as are found on IQ tests. Divergent thinking involves making otherwise undiscovered connections and analogies, and it requires a relaxed informal atmosphere if others are involved. Brains storming, however, is too random to qualify.

Most scientists are not creative and simply follow the procedures they have learnt, though it can be useful to be skeptical of originality in science. From The Creative Process: Reflections on the Invention in the Arts and Scientists, “Men have developed conservatism as a necessary guard against the dispersal of the order they live by.” Hence, geniuses have to be antisocial near psychopaths, immune to the negative reaction frequently garnered in reaction to their contradicting painfully acquired orthodoxies.

It is the right hemisphere that is most involved with creativity. The left hemisphere plays a secondary role. The left hemisphere follows algorithms, rules, and procedures and none of that is creative. We discover via intuition and prove via logic. “Reason is quality control” and “argumentative forms are a test of reasoning.”

Interestingly, damage to the left hemisphere can actually increase right hemisphere creativity, probably because left hemisphere plays a role in inhibiting the free ranging of the mind. Handel and Bach are thought to have had left hemisphere strokes and to have become more creative afterwards.

Chapter 9 – What Schizophrenia and Autism Can Tell Us

Schizophrenia and autism can be philosophically interesting because they are both deficits of the right hemisphere and the overactivity and lack of suppression of the left hemisphere. Modern tendencies of thought make the otherwise functional resemble these mentally compromised people.

While tending to be unaware of what they are missing, it is still common for schizophrenics to complain that they do not have common sense. The more the normal asymmetry is absent, either structurally or functionally, the more out of touch with reality someone will be. The right hemisphere frontal cortex relative to the left is the largest asymmetry in the brain for normal people. Anyone who refers to his brain instead of his mind tends to be on the schizophrenic spectrum. Paul Erdos would turn up at mathematicians’ homes and say, “My brain is open.” An excellent collaborator, he would sleep on the couch and need to be parented before moving on somewhere else.

The medication that schizophrenics take, like dopamine blockers, shift the balance from the left hemisphere to the right hemisphere.

The word “autism” comes from the Greek “auto” and refers to a self-absorption and lack of contact with reality. The autistic find it difficult to see things from another’s point of view or to understand their intentions. For instance, a father bought his dying daughter a coffin for Christmas because it would be “useful.” They like sameness and have trouble following narratives because they focus on parts and have trouble integrating them. The autistic prefer the inanimate to people. All these qualities reflect the tendencies of the left hemisphere with a diminished contribution from the right hemisphere. Healthy children normally have dominant right hemisphere which is important for bonding with their mothers.

Limping can have multiple causes, but the result will be roughly the same. Likewise, serious brain malfunctions will tend to result in problems with the proper brain lateralization. Psychotic patients are often strangely aware that there is something wrong with their right hemispheres. “You’ve got a hole,” a voice said, “in the right hand side of my brain.” The psychiatrist and philosopher Eugene Minkowski applied Henri Bergson’s distinction between intuition and intellect to his patients. With their right hemisphere intuition impaired, patients did not trust their impressions, while their left hemisphere intellect became too prominent and they inappropriately demanded proof when it was not forthcoming. A patient complained that he did not know how to feel and that everything had to go through his brain. Without a sense of time flowing, music was just a series of sounds to them. A patient compared it to tasting the ingredients of the soup, but not “the soup.” Schizophrenics lose their sense of self and thus a world shared with others. They become solipsistic and also objectify everything, including people. Unlike mystics, their fusion with the environment is distressing. Self-transcendence requires a self.

One of Berdyaev’s most popular books is The Meaning of the Creative Act. Analytic philosophers, on the other hand, have no interest in creativity and for the schizophrenic whom they resemble, the power to create is gone. Because they think in categories and not the actually unique people and things experienced, the future just resembles the past. They see “cat” when looking at multiple cats. Schizophrenics talk like (bad) philosophers and treat concrete things as abstractions. Like the dystopian world in the novel We, they hate the natural while loving the useful and man-made. “Schizophrenics use mathematical criteria to determine the value of objects and events like a bureaucrat.” The autistic love systems and tend to over systematize. Some philosophers have this desire to have an explanation for everything. Once their point of view is understood, it can be predicted what they will think. Summa Theologica by Aquinas was intended to provide priests with the answers to any theological question they might get asked.

A schizophrenic resembles the misanthropist liberal who likes mankind, but not actual people. “Those who espouse grand theories supposedly based on love of mankind, are by no means the kindest people one meet; and those that are innately suspicious of such schemes often surpass them in generosity and kindly warmth towards actual human individuals.” Evolutionary psychological studies confirm that conservatives are far more generous and caring in real life than those progressives who want to enact their grand schemes by voting and using other people’s money, and if particular people are harmed in the process, so be it.

Schizophrenics have trouble dealing with meaning, and narratives, and regard stories, myths and fables, as lies, rather than effective way to communicate truths. Narratives are the best way to communicate life’s meanings, so this is lost to them. They experience films and TV shows as just jumping from scene to scene. The analytic philosopher Peter Kivy wrote a book called The Meaning of Music, but prefaced it by saying he would exclude all reference to context from his purview. Since meaning is a matter of connections to context his conclusion that music is meaningless was foreordained.

The left hemisphere dominated and thus dysfunctional, love certainty and either/or thinking. McGilchrist notes that when schizophrenics start saying “maybe” it is a sign they are recovering.

Analytic philosophers will say things like, “How can we prove the external world exists at all?” Dewey and Heidegger responded that we are always already in the world. It sets the context for our philosophical musings. Given that we are here, now what? The schizophrenic takes the analytic philosophers’ point of view more seriously and are skeptical about things they need to believe in order to make their way through life, and yet are gullible about their delusional belief systems. An analytic philosopher will be skeptical about free will, though love and morality and a belief that they have any control over their lives require it, while taking the idea that “we might be brains in vats” super seriously or that we are living in a computer simulation or that there are an infinite number of worlds some with copies of you on them, though there is no evidence for any of these claims.

McGilchrist makes the interesting point that the left hemisphere is like the brain’s own computer. It is fed by the right hemisphere but is essentially a closed system with its own rules and procedures, with garbage in garbage out consequences. The downside is that if something goes wrong with the right hemisphere, or the left hemisphere becomes too dominant, contact with reality is lost and we live in a virtual world of representations, maps, categories, and schemas. Oliver Sacks complains that the history of neurology has largely been an examination of the left hemisphere while “the right hemisphere…controls the crucial powers of recognizing reality which every living creature must have in order to survive.” Both hemispheres of animals retain their connection with reality so animals never get schizophrenia.

Chapter 10 – What is Truth?

When it comes to truth, McGilchrist rejects the correspondence, coherence, and social constructivist theories. The first imagines that there is some reality completely outside the realm of mind that our ideas correspond to. Coherence is very much a left hemisphere fixation on internal consistency, that has little to do with truth. And social constructionism is that stupid idea that the truth is erected by elites in order to disenfranchise the many. That is not truth, but lies, manipulation, and propaganda. If truth is just whatever the powerful say it is, then the truth of that statement is the result of the powerful saying that “truth is whatever we say it is.” But, we can ask, “Is that true?” Epistemic nihilism leaves only brute force to determine “truth” and it fails the test of reflexivity.

The right hemisphere view of truth that McGilchrist promotes reflects that of a good philosopher. The good philosopher brings his whole being to philosophy: intuition, imagination, creativity, emotion, judgment, aesthetic sensibility, sense of humor, and direct intuited sense of reality, in other words, his right hemisphere and not merely his left hemisphere judgment. The latter devolves into what McGilchrist lampoons as the reason for philosophers like Parmenides denying the existence of change, in contradiction to every moment of lived experience, to which we could add a modern-day philosopher’s denial of free will, as, “But, it says on this piece of paper…” Logic devoid of correct premises is worthless and logic does not supply its own premises.

Truth is related to trust, fidelity, things we have faith in, an unconcealing. And belief is like love; a sweetheart, friend, or lord. “I believe in you.” Truth is a process and relationship, a reverberation, attunement, an accord between the subjective and objective realms. Truth is tested on experience and cannot be forced on someone unreceptive.

Truth evolves. It is an approximation, a seeking after. There may be no absolute objectivity, but the truth must be striven for. A non-philosopher friend stated that for him, philosophy would begin and end in a short amount of time. Once he felt that he had a rough enough grasp of a moderately well-functioning view, he would stop. Philosophers, on the other hand, are constantly trying to refine their views, to pursue further insight, to look at things from a new angle, and he uses every aspect of his being to do so, not just what it says on a piece of paper. He knows that his interpretation of reality will reflect his own life experiences and personality to a degree, which just means not all aspects of truth will be available to him. He encounters dead ends and there are options that are not live options, as William James termed it. James’ example is that the Greek pantheon is not something any modern person can believe any more. Berdyaev claims that philosophy begins with an intuition of the divine, as it did for Plato and Heraclitus, so there can be no atheist philosophers deserving of the name. They can engage in a kind of crippled pseudo-philosophy, and can only get anywhere if they are willing to contradict their own principles. Without God, nihilism is the inevitable conclusion to most questions. There are atheist “philosophers” who claim to believe in moral realism; never mind that they could not possibly justify this assertion.

Quantum mechanics is intrinsically less precise than Newtonian physics and a better fit for reality. Philosophers must have a high tolerance for ambiguity and uncertainty and an interest in constant refinement; attempting to purify the glowing metal of insight that the blacksmith hammers.

Although, we can never step outside a human perspective, we can use our imagination to see things from other than our usual point of view. The attempt to be “objective” is itself an imaginative act.

Chapter 11 – Science’s Claim on Truth

Richard Weaver pointed out that the mind invented science, and then scientists turned around and denied the reality of mind. If the mind is nothing but a delusion and fantasy, then so is science. We take the reliability of our perceptions for granted when gathering scientific measurements. When it is imagined that science is the right method for answering all our questions, then we have gone astray. How we look at the world determines what we see, and science is one good and useful method among others. It presents a partial truth which can then be mistaken for the whole truth. Though science excludes purpose from its purview, we cannot know that the cosmos has no purpose.

Erwin Shrödinger, like Wittgenstein, asserts that science says nothing about what really matters to us. “Sometimes it pretends to answer them, but often the answers are so silly we cannot take them seriously.” On the Lex Fridman podcast, and others, physicists and other scientists are asked big meaning of life type questions, the nature of consciousness, and so on, and their answers are often rather dismal and unimaginative. A Lee Smolin or a Peter Woit, both physicists, represent a welcome exception. Scientific innovators are necessarily open-minded creative types who use intuition, imagination, and often pictures. Niels Bohr’s notebook contained pictures or words, but no formulae. Kekulé discovered the shape of benzene rings, crucial for organic chemistry, when the image of a snake biting its tale emerged from the embers of his fire. Chance plays its role too in a lot of discoveries, like penicillin, mustard gas as chemotherapy, lithium as a mood stabilizer, and so on. Not surprisingly, intuition driven scientists are congenial to intuition driven philosophers. McGilchrist comments that it is easy to see that Heisenberg was driven by intuition and inspiration and he often found it hard to justify himself to mathematicians. But then, the truly great mathematicians resemble Heisenberg. Solomon Lefschetz would have correct insights, and then mess up the proofs. It is quite usual to have the mathematical insight, such as the case of Euler, and then to prove the theorem afterwards.

Chapter 12 – Science in Life – a Study in Left Hemisphere Capture

Otherwise interesting sounding podcast guests will announce that they admire Richard Dawkins’ contributions to biology, especially The Selfish Gene. McGilchrist shares my dislike for the ideas in that book that even at the time the book was written Dawkins must have known were wrong. Contra Dawkins, the Harvard geneticist Richard Lewontin asserts that genes make and do nothing, DNA is inert and inactive, genes are not self-replicating, they do not make proteins, and they are not turned on and off by DNA. The limited role of genes can be seen in the fact that we share 98 to 99% of our genes with chimpanzees and no one in his right mind would declare that there is a 99% resemblance to them, although that is what many seem to imply when they announce those numbers. Organisms are not machines following algorithms encoded in their genes. They are living, purposeful beings actively responding to and adapting to their environments. In fact, the machine metaphor is all wrong. Machines have an external designer, embodying someone else’s purpose. Their natural state is stasis and can remain like that indefinitely, whereas an organism must be in constant interaction with its environment in the form of respiration and energy consumption to name but two things. An organism has its own purpose that cannot be determined by analyzing its parts. And, unlike a machine, can adapt or respond intelligently to events which were entirely unforeseen. Barbara McClintock showed that maize cells will reorder their own DNA in order to try to reconnect chromosomes broken by exposure to radiation, in a process called transposition. Without the reconnection, reproduction was impossible. This is done intelligently and purposefully in an attempt to problem-solve. This is real-time top-down nonrandom gene mutation. Transposition is done to help the organism reproduce and is not determined or driven by DNA. Instead, DNA manipulation is undertaken by the organism itself.  Transposition, horizontal gene transfer, epigenetics, symbiosis, and hybridization are all covered.

Intelligence, as creative problem solving; a response to the unexpected and unpredictable, extends right down to the cellular level. In fact, horizontal gene transfer, where cells of all types, animal or plant, will reach into other cells, living or dead, to acquire their capacities, is frighteningly smart. A bacteria cell can acquire a new ability in real time to an immediate threat that allows it to survive and reproduce. Again, the cell is adding to and thus changing its own DNA. DNA is not mechanistically determining the cell’s actions or ensuring its own survival. Organisms are happy to change their DNA in response to environmental stressors. As McGilchrist puts it, it is a left hemisphere tendency to try to understand things by their parts, but the right hemisphere method is to understand the parts in the light of the whole. Genes are malleable processes subservient to the needs of the organism. “An organism as a process has no parts and is an indivisible unity.” Fruit flies having been deprived of the genes for eyes will nonetheless produce eyes in a few generations of breeding. Bacteria put into a lactose rich environment will quickly develop the capacity to digest lactose and this ability will be passed on to later generations.

It is impossible to understand transposition and horizontal gene transfer without teleology. Likewise, embryo development is goal-driven. The embryo will attempt to overcome interventions and challenges to its end that are too numerous to anticipate. Decapitated flatworms will regrow a head complete with memories, such as how to solve a maze. A tadpole whose development has been compromised by scientists can produce a healthy frog using methods that do not resemble normal development. Yet, biologists do their best to downplay teleology to bring it into line with other sciences that have also done their best to exclude purpose. However, the immune system, for instance, cannot possibly be made sense of without knowing its aim – to preserve the life and health of the organism in light of cancerous cells, and bacterial and viral threats to its wellbeing.

McGilchrist suggests the idea of “flow” as an appropriate metaphor for what is going on. Processes flow, giving the appearance of forms. “Mechanistic explanations are successful to the extent that the constituents identified are sufficiently stable on the timescale of the phenomenon under investigation.” But the success of this perspective does not mean an organism is just interlocking mechanisms. Biology should not become engineering; manipulating the world rather than understanding it.

Chapter 13 – Institutional Science and Truth

McGilchrist provides reasons for thinking that peer review of prospective academic articles is a sham. Peer review does not prevent fraud, of which there are thousands of examples, with some “researchers” racking up over a hundred papers based on bogus data. Mistakes made in submitted articles are generally not discovered, as proven by experiments to see if they would be detected. Data mining – trawling through masses of data to see if you can make it say what you want it to say – is something the majority of scientists admit to, so peer review is not preventing that. (Even without an intent to deceive, mathematically, the larger a data set, the more false correlations are going to be found.) Most glaringly, peer review can enforce conformity to current theory and suppress innovation. Established scientists do not like having their theories and experiments overturned, despite that being the only way science advances. According to Walter Isaacson’s biography of Einstein, in an example of how to make enemies and alienate people, when Einstein was a young man applying for jobs, he would write to heads of physics departments in Europe, explain why everything they had worked on for years was wrong, and then ask for a job. Not surprisingly, no jobs were forthcoming. McGilchrist notes the adage that science advances one funeral at a time. As evidence for this, it has been noted that the originality of submissions goes up when a figure who held sway in a field dies. So much for open minds! There is also an extensive amount of forgery and lying in scientific papers, estimated at 34% in neuroscience and 24% for medicine.

One problem with the concept of peer review is that when an Einstein presents his evidence for his groundbreaking discovery, he has no peers. His theory will be considered wrong by reference to “settled science.” Peer review reinforces conformity and orthodoxy, punishing dissenters. If a paper examines a politically unpopular topic, like IQ differences between races, the journals “Science” and “Nature” will simply not publish them if differences are found. This forces the scientist to publish in less prestigious journals where he can be safely ignored precisely for their relative lack of prestige. Rather than looking at the data and the study, the very fact that high status journals rejected the article is taken to mean it is worthless.

Journals, like the rest of us, are suckers for money and prestige. McGilchrist notes a study by Ceci and Peters where twelve articles from scientists from high prestige universities were re-submitted, without identifying labels, to the same journals who had accepted them in the first place. They were all rejected. Only three out of 38 editors and reviewers detected them as resubmissions. “16 of 18 reviewers recommended against publication and the editors concurred.” No hint was given that any would be accepted even “pending changes” by the twenty reviewers who rejected them. In many cases, the papers were described as being seriously methodologically flawed.

For their efforts, Ceci and Peters were attacked as traitors for showing the peer review system is a sham. The alternative is editor reviewed, and this was the practice at the height of scientific innovation in the 19^th century. This avoids most of the problems with peer review. If someone is in the same field, then he is your competitor. Competitors have a reason to suppress each other’s work, to promote their friends instead in the hope of quid pro quo, or even to steal their ideas. This happened with the deputy editor of The New England Journal of Medicine, Vijay Soman. When the person who was plagiarized by Soman found out, she was warned not to say anything. Soman, on the faculty at Yale, only got in trouble for inventing patients and data, not for the plagiarism, whereupon he left the country.

Other issues include the fact that editors can send work to someone they know will be sympathetic or unsympathetic, and reviews are unlikely to really be blind. The evolutionary psychologist Edward Dutton noted that, being familiar with the work of his colleagues in his field, he could easily guess who had written what.

At the moment, scientists are judged by the number of citations they have. This is clearly a simple case of the fallacy of popularity. Worse still, McGilchrist notes that citing an article does not mean that you have actually read it. In fact, the cited study is read in only 20% of cases. Sometimes the main finding of a cited paper is the opposite of what is repeatedly claimed. Of the 48 citations of a Peter Lawrence paper, 8 were appropriate, 37 irrelevant, and 3 were wrong.

In one study, a paper was sent to the BMJ (formerly British Medical Journal) with intentional mistakes that a high schooler should be able to detect. No reviewer spotted all the mistakes. Most detected a quarter of them.

Not mentioned in The Matter With Things, but heard on a podcast, Balaji Srinivasan argues that counting the number of citations as a method of assessing the quality of articles is a system that can be gamed. Just get your friends to mention you as often as possible. McGilchrist gives instances of journals artificially promoting their articles by publishing an article that mentions their own articles! A journal commissioned a literature review on topics already covered by the journal to boost their IF (Impact Factor).) Srinivasan claims that publishing the raw data for all studies, searchable by anyone, and counting the number of times a study has been replicated, not cited, would be a much more reliable indicator of quality.

The number of scientists willing to provide the raw data upon which their claims are based is low. Repeated requests for the data are often ignored despite clauses in some cases saying that funding is contingent on being willing to provide such data.

Regarding replication, there is, of course, the replication crisis. Only 40% of psychology studies and only 10% of cancer studies have been found to be replicable. The journal Nature had a study looking at 1,576 researchers. 70% had tried and failed to reproduce another scientist’s experiments. Over 50% could not reproduce their own.

Overly bold and strange claims get reported in the popular press, and even get published in respected journals. More measured responses are ignored and when less prestigious journals contradict the claims with larger samples, this is not considered newsworthy.

Money, promotion, and prestige contribute to false findings. Publish first and refute the competition and big financial packages by major universities will come your way.

There is a very appealing quotation from David Hull, an historian of science, that science does not require unbiased scientists, just scientists with different biases. However, having different biases from your peers and ignoring fads can be bad for your career prospects and jumping on the climate bandwagon can be most lucrative.

Chapter 14 – Reason’s Claim on Truth

McGilchrist distinguishes between two types of reasoning, a left hemisphere version; linear, explicit, analytic, critical and uncreative, trying to use definitions to arrive at truth and a right hemisphere influenced global, holistic, apprehension of the world. McGilchrist notes: “Defining words does not answer human questions.” A point of view can be of “a rich and ordered landscape,” or a meager and pathetic one. Focusing on chains of causation and on mechanism will provide only the latter, e.g., “humans are robots.”

Intuitions draw on nonconscious aspects of ourselves, as does creativity and imagination. They are a matter of judgment based on the whole of experience, not just the part of which we are conscious. This soil is relatively rich and fertile. The mechanists and determinists are motivated by their own intuitions too, though they typically pretend not to be. Imagining that they are being more rational, they remain especially blind to their own presuppositions and biases. They, like everyone, rely on axioms and axioms are value judgments that, being unprovable, explicitly appeal to intuition. If the axioms are bad, perfect logic will not save you. It is not possible to compel other people to accept our philosophical conclusions if their intuitions and thus axioms conflict with our own.

A philosophy is to be judged by its vision and insights, and not its arguments. Arguments exist to justify and recommend our intuitions to others; to support what we have seen. McGilchrist cites a study suggesting that reasons provided to change our minds can actually make our beliefs more entrenched. “People who hold strong opinions on complex social issues are likely to examine relevant empirical evidence in a biased manner. They are apt to accept “confirming” evidence at face value while subjecting “disconfirming” evidence to critical evaluation, and, as a result, draw undue support for their initial positions from mixed or random empirical findings. Thus, the result of exposing contending factions in a social dispute to an identical body of relevant empirical evidence may be not a narrowing of disagreement but rather an increase in polarization.” Lord, Ross and Lepper 1979.

Rationality is a tool, the value of which is understood by intuition. Advances in science and mathematics are mostly not achieved by reasoning, but by intuitive insight. The justification and proof often come after the fact.

The reliance on reason narrowly understood, with its top-down approach, is contributing to civilizational collapse. Culture is based on traditions, institutions, and customs that have not been rationally designed. The alternative to these non-rationally attained items, as pointed out by F.A. Hayek, is barbarism.

Chapter 15 – Reason’s Progeny

McGilchrist points out that meaning must be embodied. This will be why examples are so crucial, for things have meaning in context and examples provide a frame of reference and disambiguation. The invention of computers, however, required logic purged of meaning – i.e., symbol manipulation. David Hilbert asked if mathematics could be completely formalized in this manner, without worrying about truth or meaning. Gödel answered him in the negative. Gödel’s Theorem proving this itself relies upon truth at a certain point in the proof; a truth that can be seen but not proved, i.e., “this statement cannot be proven to be true.” If it is true, it is not proven. And if it is not proven, it is true that it cannot be proven. The autistic Bertrand Russell, however, celebrated the omission of details unnecessary for manipulating the world, focusing on causal laws, whereas William James, a philosopher McGilchrist likes very much, described intellectual life as “substituting the conceptual order for the perceptual order in which his experience originally comes.” Whitehead saw this process as contributing to the degeneracy of man; a devotion to chill abstractions.

The sheer crudity and over-simplification of a Thomas Hobbes says awful things about our civilization, or perhaps human nature, that he is taken seriously as a major philosopher. An admirer of physics, he hoped to extend billiard ball style mechanics to understanding human society, with the bare minimum of internal motivation driving our behavior; actually, just reduced to attraction and repulsion, like a magnet. It seems a surety that had he thought himself able to eliminate all internality he would have. McGilchrist does not mention Hobbes here, but Spinoza who wrote, “I will analyze the actions and appetites of men as if it were a question of lines, planes, and of solids.” One wonders if this was the origin of the phrase, “Jesus wept.” Spinoza’s declaration that he would write his Ethics in the manner of a geometric proof means that his work will remain forever unread by those of us who disfavor autistic philosophy. An over-emphasis on “precision, rigor, and clarity” results in “unrewarding pedantry” bringing a false clarity to a subject matter that does not permit it. The left hemisphere loves certainty, but knowledge and certainty do not go together. It is Descartes’ desire for certainty that produces his extreme skepticism. Concepts might be able to be certain, but not reality. When it comes to truth, McGilchrist avows that we must reach down into the realm of the unconscious, not just the small portion of which we are fully conscious.

It is in this chapter that the sugar, poison, and tea experiment is mentioned. When asked which is more immoral, accidentally poisoning someone with rat poison, or trying to poison someone and failing, experimental subjects who have their right hemisphere suppressed will become consequentialists and say accidentally poisoning is worse. Normal people and those with their left hemisphere suppressed through transcranial stimulation know that intending to kill someone is morally worse than accidentally doing so. This subject is discussed at length here.

Philosophical truths must be felt before they are seen in a process of unforgetting. No one can be forced to accept a controversial truth, and philosophy is the study of the controversial and nondefinitively provable. One’s basic intuitions about God and reality tend to be reasonably stable, so it is the fate of a philosopher to keep striving for “a fresh understanding of what seems to be the same imponderables” as T. S. Eliot put it.  Arriving from where we started but knowing the place for the first time. A new Gestalt is revealed with things falling into place, though the elements were there all along. Likewise, great paintings offer a vision of the world that is beautiful and sanctifies what is seen. They are a revelation and a drawing out of what was inherent in the scene depicted. What is portrayed is not entirely novel, but a new way of looking at what was there all along. Good philosophy should perform a similar function. It will be context-dependent. When under tyranny, the importance of freedom will be emphasized. When things grow too chaotic, the virtues of order need to be promoted. If emotion becomes too prominent, level-headed rationality might be in order. If the point of view becomes hyperrational, then creativity, imagination, emotion, and intuition need to be highlighted.

Mathematical truths can be demonstrated with proofs, but they are usually achieved by sudden insight after extended contemplation and fellow mathematicians want to be able to understand them in a similar manner. If one can only be convinced by following the step-by-step proof, and that remains your only reasoning for agreeing, then the mathematician has not really perceived it. There would remain an element of reluctance and incomprehension. With philosophy, the participants cannot even be brought to that unhappy position if the underlying intuitions are not present.

Interestingly, McGilchrist points out that sex differences mean that men tend to think more holistically, and women more sequentially. Mathematicians think in images and Einstein in musical shapes. The physicist Niels Bohr had notebooks of pictures only, with no words or equations. The right hemisphere is responsible for perceiving Gestalts and for insight and novel problem solving, so this would seem to give men an edge in creativity, since sequential thinking is a left hemisphere trait. It is also a feature of the autistic and more men are autistic than women, so there will be a lot of men with this sequential tendency too.

Nietzsche wrote that each philosophy is a confession of the philosopher as to what is important to him and how he sees the world, or wishes to see it; his hopes and dreams. F. H. Bradley observed that we find bad reasons for what we believe by instinct, but to search for these reasons is no less an instinct. We want to justify ourselves to ourselves and to others if their instincts differ from ours. “Yes. We see things differently. But, my view, at least, is not insane. Here. Gaze upon my reasons.”

Chapter 15 is particularly rich with quotations. McGilchrist notes F. M. Cornford’s claim that: “Almost all philosophical arguments are invented…to recommend or defend from attack conclusions which the philosopher was from the outset bent upon believing…To mistake [philosophical reasoning] for the causes which lead to a belief in the conclusion, is generally to fall into a naïve error.” In written conversation with an internet troll and blogger in the summer of 2022, he accused me of being biased. The topic was determinism. I reject determinism with every fiber of my being since it is a denial of consciousness and removes all meaning from the universe. Genocide, by contrast, only kills people. Determinism is much worse; it destroys any point in living at all, turning us into zombies. I stated that of course I was biased. The troll could scarcely contain his glee, seemingly rubbing his hands in anticipation as to just how rhetorically useful this admission would be, giving him the upper hand. It was a hollow victory, since the troll could not have been more biased and immune from counterargument if he tried, though he imagined that “facts” and “logic” had driven him to embrace determinism. Fichte notes that one’s philosophy depends on what kind of man one is, animated as it is by the soul of the person who holds it.

“The history of philosophy is to a great extent that of a clash of human temperaments” is profound. And when Iris Murdoch writes, “It is always significant to ask any philosopher; what is he afraid of” that is equally pertinent. Thomas Nagel stated that he did not want to live in a universe that had a God in it. When asked to expand on this by email he replied, “I have said all I wish to say on the topic.” Not being a fan of nihilism, and also being afraid of it, I embrace the opposite – if God did not exist it would be necessary to invent him. McGilchrist cites Jürgen Habermas: “Only if we can introduce the essential components of religious traditions, which point beyond the merely human realm, will we also be able to rescue the substance of the human.” Humans exist in the metaxy, the inbetween space, between God and animals. Without God we oscillate between imagining that we are God, about to produce artificial general intelligence, and describing ourselves as apes and machines; from the heights of hubris and pride, to outright self-hating, self-demeaning, self-denigrating conceptions of the human. One cannot help notice the glee such people take in spitting us in the eye (Sam Harris is a notorious example). 

Analytic philosophers lie on the schizo-autistic spectrum. They take things out of context, think in disembodied schema, adopt irrationally rationalistic approaches, favor utilitarianism in ethics and drain all meaning out of life, since meaning is a matter of connections to context. A purely cognitive world comes close to madness. R. G. Collingwood by contrast writes that “imagination and empathy, the appreciation of context, both personal and historical, as well as the ability to feel your way into another’s mind, play a crucial role in understanding.”

Nietzsche writes that Kant’s philosophy was less an involuntary biography of a soul, than a biography of a head. The fact that Kant saw marriage as an agreement for the reciprocal use of sex organs gives an indication of his limitations. Schizophrenics are noted for speaking in pseudo-philosophical manner as a result of their lack of a pre-reflective grasp of reality, and analytic philosophers demand proofs and definitions that cannot be produced in order to retain their nihilism, epistemic and otherwise. We start with the experience of beauty and then analyze it if we choose. We cannot first prove the existence of beauty and rigorously define it, no more than we can prove the existence of the world outside our minds. The world is simply where we find ourselves and it behooves us to try to make sense of it – preferably in a sensitive and productive manner. For all their rather dire limitations, at least the philosophy of Dewey and Heidegger start with our being in the world, rather than trying to theoretically prove the world’s reality, which cannot be done. What a great deal of wasted time is avoided by simply admitting our starting point. Our temperament and cultural influences will then determine what we foreground out of this infinitely dense and mysterious background, all viewpoints being partial in nature.

A very interesting distinction that McGilchrist makes is between “mythoi” and “logos.” He writes that the ancients preferred myth as the embodiment of things that happen all the time. Myth cannot and should not be fully explicated. It deals with the recurring, puzzling and tragic aspects of the human condition. McGilchrist blames Plato for making logos prominent in Western philosophy, though Plato used stories and myth all the time. The dialog structure is itself a fiction and a narrative. Far from emphasizing abstractions, at least in this regard, Plato can be thought of as the first novelist with a nuanced and detailed awareness of how concrete human beings thought, behaved and talked. The Symposium and Phaedrus, two of the more beautiful dialogs, make copious use of myth and story, particularly at key points. The Forms are unfortunately left hemisphere abstractions but they are to be pursued via right hemisphere divine inspiration and enthusiasm. Plato sees philosophy as an uncovering, an unforgetting. There is nothing schizo-autistic about Plato other than the reification of Justice and Beauty and Truth and Goodness as disembodied entities which admittedly is a major failing.

Bruce Lincoln is quoted as saying that logos used to be thought of as unreliable, feminine, and seductive, used by women, the young, the weak and the shrewd. Mercier and Sperker note that logic was invented to win arguments, not to bring us closer to truth. McGilchrist writes that mythos includes logos, but logos excludes mythos. Mythos includes logos, speaker, and context and depends on the authority of the speaker. King Lear as story and thus mythos has more truth than textbooks of neuroscience. Poetry captures right hemisphere insight into reality in a way that prosaic exposition cannot. Philosophy tries to do something similar and has to use lyricism at times to do its job. At a dinner party here in Oswego, the host suggested that high school students should learn philosophy. Another guest averred that reading classic medieval texts like Sir Gawain and the Green Knight and Beowulf was just as good. The debate as to which is to be preferred is, of course, philosophical! A philosophy informed by these books would be a great compromise between the two positions; even an ideal.

Philosophy is a reflection upon experience, involving concepts, language and representation. Myths and works of art are not left hemisphere representations but experience and presence. As such, they tap into aspects of reality that cannot be put into words. McGilchrist quotes Goethe complaining that Germans will ask him what idea he intended to express in Faust, as if he knew. The difference is that between knowing of, familiarity, and knowing that, propositional knowledge. Analytic philosophy rejects all but the most jejune aspects of “knowing of,” and even then acknowledges it only if absolutely necessary. Frank Jackson’s Mary, brought up in a black and white room, has studied all science related to the color red but has never experienced it. If she were to experience it, would she have learnt something new? Not for many analytic philosophers who are content with knowing that, having bought into the idea that human experience is fundamentally unreal while the measurable is not. Such people refer to “qualia;” a term to be utterly avoided and rejected by anyone averse to the schizo-autistic mode of being. We live in a qualitative world, not a mathematical abstraction. Wolfgang Smith introduced a distinction between what he calls the qualitative corporeal world and the physical world. The latter is described by quantum mechanics and consists merely of potentialities until observed.

Knowing of comes back to bodily experience. Abstractions are something dragged away from context, while “context” means to be something woven together. To understand the full meaning of that clock on the wall, it must be imaginatively placed in context; indicating creatures obsessed with tiny increments of measured time, organizing their meals, home and work life around its dictates. An agrarian culture, or hunter-gatherers, would not have much use for it. It is only the industrialized who need to synchronize their activities, originally for the purposes of the production line, who would need such a device.

Only if context were fixed could meanings be stable. Philosophizing about the world, time, space or God takes place devoid of the normal contexts and we imagine their meanings can be the same.

There is a beautiful quotation from Gregory Bateson the anthropologist; “Mere purposive rationality unaided by such phenomena as art, religion, dream and the like, is necessarily pathogenic and destructive of life.” The philosopher must bring all that with him to his musings. C. S. Lewis sees myth as connecting us to the world beyond thought. “What flows into you from myth is not truth but reality (truth is always about something, but reality is that about which truth is) and, therefore, every myth becomes the father of innumerable truths on the abstract level.” McGilchrist rounds out the chapter with a reference to Orpheus who was told that he could rescue Eurydice from the underworld only if he does not look at her before they exit. When he does, she vanishes. This is a metaphor for the dangers of explicitness. Trying to spell out the meaning of Faust and explaining myth, intuition, and emotion. These things, like reality itself, can be pointed at, but not explicated.

Chapter 16 – Logical Paradoxes: and Left Hemisphere Capture

Chapter 16, Logical Paradoxes: and Left Hemisphere Capture was a very exciting chapter to read. We know that the right hemisphere is responsible for our direct, perceived, and intuited experience of reality. The left hemisphere is merely a re-presentation and map of that experienced reality. Thoughts, feelings, and experiences can only be partially captured by the words and concepts of the left hemisphere. McGilchrist argues that many supposed paradoxes are the result of confusing reality with the tools at our disposal for analyzing that reality. A key insight is that neither time nor space come divided into chunks. When mathematicians and logicians attempt to use their left hemisphere methods to examine time and space, they make various errors that result in apparent paradoxes. Those paradoxes can frequently be removed by cutting the Gordian Knot; by rejecting the terms being applied to the reality in question. The paradoxes are also the result of the left hemisphere’s either/or thinking, desire for certainty, and discomfort with ambiguity – none of which apply to the right hemisphere.

Bertrand Russell’s Barber Paradox is that in an imagined town, if all those, and only those, who do not shave himself must be shaved by the barber, who shaves the barber? If he shaves himself, he breaks the rule because only those who do not shave themselves are to be shaved by the barber. If the barber does not shave himself, then he must be shaved by himself.

Paradoxes differ from contradictions in that contradictions are false, but paradoxes are undecidable; meaning their truth or falsity cannot be determined.

McGilchrist notes that the Barber paradox is generated by a rigid rule typical of the left hemisphere. The solution is that the existence of the barber and this rule are incompatible. If the rule exists, the barber cannot. If the barber exists, then the rule must be breakable. This is reminiscent of a PhD candidate writing on the topic of time travel who determined, regarding the grandfather paradox, that were time travel to exist, then it would be impossible to kill your own grandfather. Since logic would entail that, but the practical matter of what would actually prevent you from killing him is unclear, better to accept that time travel is impossible. The paradox is resolved by not getting yourself in that position in the first place.

Cantor proved that a short line has as many points as a long line, in fact, as many as the entire universe. The infinity of even numbers is as big as the infinity of whole numbers, and so on. Infinity cannot be reached via a sequence. One must get to it in one leap. A curve cannot be described by even an infinity of tiny segments that approximate a curve. A life-like mechanized doll must make a jump were it come to life.

McGilchrist does not mention that Cantor also proved that some infinities are bigger than others, which seems to conflict with his thesis. The power set, the set of all the subsets of a set, of a finite or infinite set X is always bigger than X itself.

One of Zeno’s paradoxes claims that it is impossible to leave a room, for, in order to exit, one must first pass halfway, then three-quarters, and then an infinity of such segments of the exit route. Someone would need an infinity of time to pass an infinity of points. The paradox can also be framed so that someone cannot even leave his chair, or so that he gets closer and closer to the exit but never reaches it.

But, McGilchrist points out, for a halfway to exist, the completed act must already be posited. The left hemisphere perspective involves a retrospective analysis. It turns wholes into parts, and these parts are a left hemisphere fiction. Both parts of space and parts of time have no real existence. With the left hemisphere, things are analyzed into static instants, re-presented after the act. In reality, both time and space are continuous. Movement does not come in chunks, and neither does space. One is not moving through a series of “points,” and halfway markers. A mathematical point has no “thickness.” It is dimensionless. A line cannot be made up from these points because the line would have no length. As soon as something has thickness and duration, it is no longer a mathematical point or instant. An abstract moment in time has no duration. It is also a fiction. The way we measure time divides it into parts, such as counting off seconds, but this differs from the reality of time. Time is experienced in the right hemisphere and it is continuous. Schizophrenics who do not have their right hemisphere playing its appropriately dominant role, tend to have all sorts of difficulties with their experience of time.

Movement through time and space proceeds prospectively. It is embodied and present, as opposed to re-presented. Zeno’s paradoxes are an artefact of the left hemisphere and reflect the left hemisphere’s inability to deal with reality directly. We know that this analysis differs from reality because arrows do hit their targets, rather than merely approaching it as they pass through ever smaller divisions of time and space, people do leave rooms, and Achilles does beat the tortoise. Freezing the arrow midway exists only in imagination, and requires retrospection for what was “midway” and produces stasis, not motion.

McGilchrist refers to Parmenides, who denied the existence of change and thus movement, as one of the first to say, “But, it says on this piece of paper…!” All those philosophers who adopt philosophical positions like a belief in determinism, get caught up in a theory while neglecting the implications for themselves and their own ability to reason without being constrained by mindless physical forces. And if they are mindful forces, mind controls matter, not the other way around.

The philosopher George Melhuish says, “Zeno shows that continuity cannot be composed of discrete elements even if there is an infinity of them,” and “Flow is an irreducible, not an emergent, element of the universe.” Instants in time have no actual reality. “The slicing of motion or time produces stasis.”

Schizophrenics with their dominant left hemispheres have trouble following narratives because they cannot see Gestalts and flow. Without the perception of continuity, change cannot be seen. For them, the wife in the morning is different from the wife in the afternoon and so she is sometimes thought of as two different wives. Words are produced by the left hemisphere which imagines they describe the whole of reality. The right hemisphere knows that “we can only approximate what we think or feel.” Descartes had this schizoid personality – credulously believing that dogs feel no pain and are unconscious – while skeptically being unsure other people were not automatons. The hyperrational schizoid type can be happy to believe we live in a simulation, that there are exact replicas of us elsewhere in reality, that there are an infinite number of universes, demonstrating credulity, while denying free will, God, and sometimes consciousness itself, the precondition for having theories about anything. We have no evidence at all that there is more than one universe, while we have the testimony of mystics, Zen masters, near death experiencers, and psychedelic ingesters, of divinity. (Evidence not being the same as proof.)

Living growing things keep changing. The left hemisphere might ask, “So what is the real organism?” The right hemisphere responds that it is the nature of the organism to change – change defines it. If it stopped changing it would die, and then keep changing as it decomposed. Heraclitus with his emphasis on change, comparing reality to fire and to flowing rivers – emphasized that continual alteration is inherent in the nature of things.

It will be the nature of a wooden ship to keep changing as its boards are replaced due to rot. The paradox of the Ship of Theseus assumes stasis and asks if a ship is the same ship once its parts are replaced. The Gestalt remains the same. The left hemisphere thinks of a ship as being put together by its parts. This could be compared with Aristotle’s notion of the four causes of substance; formal, material, proximate, and telos. For Aristotle, the end, the telos, for which the ship is built is the most important. The other causes – the blueprints, the materials, and the shipbuilders doing their job exist only because a vessel to travel on water by human beings was needed. A ship does not exist just because of its materials; and it has continuity through change.

If instead of gradual change, all the wooden planks were replaced at once, a new ship could be constructed with the old planks. The new ship made from the old planks would have the Gestalt and the parts, the old ship, the Gestalt but not the parts. Building something from scratch is a break in continuity, and the comparison with an organism becomes less plausible. Organisms simply die if their functioning is interrupted.

The right hemisphere is both more connected to reality, and it is also more comfortable with ambiguity. Einstein noted that, “As far as the laws of mathematics refer to reality, they are not certain; and as far as they are certain, they do not apply to reality.” And Nicholas of Cusa suggested that the intellect can only approximate truth.

Entities cannot be disengaged from the flux of reality. Similarly, music can only be understood by what went before and what comes after. The notes exist in relation to each other. By the time the unit of analysis is one note, the music is lost. To understand individual entities, they must be seen in context, where their meaning is revealed.

Chapter 17 – Intuition’s Claims on Truth

McGilchrist notes that there is an entire cottage industry of academics finding areas where intuitions are unreliable. He points out that visual illusions exist, but we do not decide to never trust our eyes again. Most of the time, both visual perception and intuitions do the job well. Our understanding of other people’s emotions take place on an intuitive level. A fraction of a second can be enough. Trying to make this ability explicit usually just makes this ability worse.

Our sagacious author gives an example of a French horse trainer who started working for a syndicate predicting which horse would win. He consistently bet the odds but he did not like the fact that he could not explain how he did it. As a result, he would often call up before a race and second guess himself. This hesitancy was counterproductive and the syndicate told him to stop calling. The fact is that experts can usually not explain how they do what they do. In the above article, I give the examples of knowing if someone is really smoking or not, really playing the violin or not, or is really a soccer player. It is possible to tell within two seconds if you have been a smoker, violinist or soccer player, but it is not possible to explain how you know or to communicate this ability to someone without those skills and experiences.

Some soldiers are excellent at identifying IEDs. The accuracy of their gut feelings and hunches were confirmed by cognitive scientists. These “gut” feelings really do have a connection with the contents of the gut which has hundreds of millions of neurons – communicating with the brain. The heart too is a component of personality and preferences. Heart transplant recipients are notorious for taking on many of the characteristics of the heart donor. One surgeon was so disturbed by these changes that he quit.

Instincts are also non-cognitive and are followed automatically, such as eating, drinking, seeking a mate, flying (if a bird), hunting or being wary depending on whether the creature is prey or predator, to make a home, and to copy facial expressions if a human baby.

For some activities, like racing a motorcycle on the Isle of Man, doing well depends on attaining a right hemisphere general awareness with no left hemisphere narrowing of attention and focus. Anxiety contributes to this narrowing, so the rider must remain relaxed. It could be compared with figure skaters who have practiced a difficult skill like triple or quadruple jumps. Becoming self-conscious or actively thinking is likely to result in a fall.

In certain experiments concerning cards, our bodies show evidence of figuring out the underlying patterns before consciousness does. Players would become tense and their palms sweaty when a red card came up, which tended to have much worse consequences than the blue cards, long before they consciously figured out what was going on. Verbal reasoning can simply get in the way of such intuitive apprehensions, though some people just have poor gut feelings, possibly because they are not good at noticing what their hearts are doing. Men care about the overall outcome more than women who are more sensitive to short term losses and women also take longer to figure the red/blue difference. In computer games, offering a reward hindered results by making the players too self-conscious; paying less attention to the body. Some tasks like identifying abstract images were done more successfully when subjects were distracted rather than being allowed to concentrate. In another experiment, subjects were better at identifying the odd one out when time was limited.

The border between the unconscious and conscious changes from moment to moment and being on the edge of awareness is better for creativity than being fully conscious. Creativity must make contact with mystery and the unknown. Left hemisphere algorithms are anathema to creativity. Sitting down with a guitar, ready to try to come up with something new, one must typically “play around” and try to break old habits and patterns to avoid a repetition of what one has done before. It cannot be done on command. Presumably, experienced performers who improvise will be able to ignore the audience members enough to not let self-consciousness take over. The right hemisphere is less conscious, but is not the unconscious. Awareness of the world is higher. The right hemisphere can seem like the unconscious to the left hemisphere only because it is less focused and explicit.

Contrary to the assertions in Daniel Kahneman’s Thinking Fast and Slow, expert intuition is fast, better and more reliable than our ability to consciously articulate anything, and superior to slow sequential reasoning. Again, think of the ability to identify the fake violin playing in movies and TV. McGilchrist refers to the “Getty Kouros” – an pseudo-ancient Greek statue of a young man that experts quickly identified as fake. One man described feeling ill at the sight of it. Then it becomes a matter of trying to provide evidence to convince the nonexpert. This seems comparable to the sudden insight into a mathematical truth and the slow process of building up a watertight proof.

Fast intuitions govern assessment of character, too. Evolution has made this a requirement. We assess “trustworthiness, competence, aggressiveness and likeability” in a tenth of a second and this judgment changes little. Less intelligent people have a harder time assessing trustworthiness and thus tend to be more suspicious than the smarter. Hence, low trust societies have lower IQs on average.

Some intuitions are improved by practice and they are informed by the body. Chess players, for instance, must rely on developed intuitions concerning patterns and meaning, being, unlike a computer, unable to evaluate millions of potential scenarios.

Benjamin Libet, an American neuroscientist, noted that 99% of what we perceive never needs to break through to conscious experience. This connects to Aristotle’s distinction between “active” and “passive” nous. Passive nous includes all feelings and perceptions impinging on the body, enabling us to drive a car under easy circumstances while thinking about something else, and to ignore background noise while having a conversation. Active nous is more tiring and is a selective attention paid to some of the inputs. Which thing we attend to, become conscious of, is decided by the unconscious.

On the topic of the role of consciousness in human functioning, blindsight is an interesting phenomenon. Blindsight occurs when the primary visual cortex is destroyed so that someone is incapable of conscious vision, and yet their unconscious can determine facial expressions, obstacles, color, and the person can catch something thrown to them. Those suffering from blindsight are not as surprised at their abilities as they should be and they also do not trust those abilities as much as they should. As a phenomenon, it is uncomfortably close to David Chalmers’ speculations about the possibility of zombie humans – people just like us but with no conscious awareness. It seems impossible that someone could do all those things without awareness of any kind. Perhaps a comparison could be made to intuiting emotions communicated by facial expressions without being aware that one is doing so or knowing how one is doing it. However, the conscious mind, with all its limitations and problems is probably not dispensable. Afterall, the unconscious mind recognizes the need for it and taps it on the shoulder when it wants its services.

Aristotle noted an abstract, analytic form of knowledge, episteme. But, is famous for promoting phronesis, practical wisdom, for ethics. He notes that knowledge as episteme is knowledge of the universal and unchanging, while ethical decisions take place within a particular situation. This involves the whole person – intuition, experience, emotion, which have bodily components, and the ability to identify the unique features of people and contexts in order to make the best ethical decisions. Aristotle knew that “calculating” using explicit and measurable items, was not going to work with ethics. Ethics involves “this person” as opposed to just “persons,” categories and concepts. Phronesis is related to the Greek conception of techne, which is the practical knowledge and skill of a craftsman, which is dependent on context, and learnt from practice, not from a textbook.

The word “philosophy” combines philia and Sophia; love of wisdom. McGilchrist claims that this “Sophia” from philosophy covers the low and the high, the embodied, and inspired divine wisdom. McGilchrist notes that Homer spoke of “the Sophia of the shipbuilder” and Theocritus “the Sophia of the tapestry weaver.” Phronesis and Sophia mean roughly the same thing when used in this way.

Analysis and focusing on the explicit and measurable interferes with expert skills, like the horse trainer and his assessments. Experts attend to Gestalts rather than analysis. Things become explicit only at decisive moments. Diagnosing difficult cases for a doctor is largely intuitive. Expert radiologists focus on the big picture, rather than scanning details. Expert chess players utilize the right hemisphere more than the left hemisphere. McGilchrist recounts an anecdote of a surgeon who made the rounds every day, chatting to patients. What he was actually doing was comparing the faces of the patients from the previous day to assess how they were doing. In this way, he could detect a problem two or three days before the best resident.

As noted, Aristotle observed that ethical decisions must take into account particular people and situations and medical diagnosis also involves the individual, not averages. Statistics are just averages. Algorithms only work when the symptoms are defined, singular and clear. The right hemisphere is better when information is partial, and most of life is like that. Intuition undergirds reason – when to bring in the active, analytical, and explicit. If only “reason” existed, human existence and behavior would be hopelessly degraded.

Chapter 18 – A Hymn to Intuition

Reality must be interpreted. An interpretation reflects purpose, and thus, bias and a point of view. What you find depends on what you are looking for and how you are looking. Bias is, ideally, a matter of emphasis, not fantasy. There is no view from nowhere, and if there were, it would not be productive. Whatever one studies, discusses, or writes about, is some subset of a larger whole reflecting interests, life experience, personality, intelligence, context, relevance, values, and, perhaps, plans for the future or reflections on the past. Any account of reality that was complete would simply reproduce it, which would be an entirely useless exercise. What we are interested in is, “What does it mean?” And meaning is ascertained through interpretation. We foreground elements out of an infinitely dense, rich, and mysterious background. Some accounts of reality are intentional lies made out of whole cloth. Much of the current progressive view of things qualifies. We can be sure of this if a view contains blatant contradictions, the people are hypocrites, and they project their failings onto others. They divide us into racial groups, identify all whites as evil oppressors with privilege, no matter how economically and socially deprived they might be, and no matter how privileged, rich and famous a black person is, and then call the rest of us racists. They then invent “anti-racism” which is just antiwhite racism and involves the necessity of white people acknowledging that they are racist just for existing. In a Catch 22, denying one is a racist just proves you are all the more.

So, some interpretations are just wrong. But, when not driven by a political agenda, competing interpretations will hopefully foreground real elements of background. The question then becomes, “Which interpretation at this moment is the most fruitful and rewarding?” It will depend on context which drives the goals and purposes of the interpretation. A doctor regarding someone as a patient is good and appropriate in one context, and bad in another. The context for a philosopher might be life in general which will still have a temporal element. A philosophy good for one century might not work in another.

Our right hemisphere provides our inchoate, broad focus, intuition of reality. Schizophrenics lose this intuition, and what horrors await them. Our left hemisphere, Iain McGilchrist has described as being effectively our own personal computer. It follows logic, is verbal, it engages in sequential reasoning, “if then” relationships, it analyzes, focuses on the inanimate, on “things,” it has a preference for certainty, it confabulates, it can follow algorithms (though not create them), but, like a class in logic, it has no ability to discern truth. Truth assessment is done by the right hemisphere. Problem solving is done by the right hemisphere, the results sent off to the left for analysis if need be, and then the results of that are sent back to the right hemisphere to be evaluated. That evaluation ideally involves the whole of one’s being, with both the conscious and the unconscious involved, one’s life experience and sensibility, and a feeling of satisfaction or dissatisfaction. One’s emotion-informed reaction to analysis, one’s vote of yay or nay, is intuition.

Computers are biased too. They embody the biases, prejudices and points of view of their programmers. Machine learning incorporates the biases of the data upon which it is trained. McGilchrist recounts an amusing anecdote of a dyslexic naturalist who asked Siri how to spell the name for a male hawk. Siri asked him why he was so concerned with gender!

Being smart does not diminish my-side bias. In fact, those of high IQ are particularly good at coming up with reasons for ignoring evidence and facts that count against their ideological commitments. Ed Dutton points out that the very smart are excellent at self-brainwashing – convincing themselves of ideas that it is particularly in their interests to express and believe. Socially and economically beneficial conformity is so much easier when you actually believe the nonsense you are saying. Ideas about the climate are mostly about exhibiting which “side” one is on. Those who imagine that they are immune from bias are actually less open to other views. The blogger Robot Philosopher had the most narrow, and biased of views concerning materialism and the nature of humans, claiming they are exactly like line-following robots and went on to write an article saying how he had decided never to believe anything about which he was not certain. A computer programmer, he certainly came across as autistic and a left hemisphere fetishist. At no point in pages of discursive interaction did he ever demonstrate awareness of anything associated with the right hemisphere, which is typical of those with right hemisphere deficits.

Philosophers search for reasons to justify their intuitions. Try convincing someone who has the opposite intuitions from you and see what happens. Hugo Mercier and Dan Sperber argue that reasoning is designed to help argue, but that it does not improve decision-making; in fact, it pushes you to make decisions that are easier to justify, not the best ones. Reasons are an attempt to convince people in large groups who have no reason to take what you claim on trust. To function well, intuition and reason must work together. Nikolai Berdyaev sometimes seems like the most intuitive philosopher who ever existed. He has something to say. He tells you what it is. But, it is more a vision he presents – a way of looking at things – more than reasons. He knows that if the reader does not find his viewpoint congenial, they will not accept his reasons anyway. It seems possible to write an entire article based on any two pages of Berdyaev’s writing, partly because it is so rich, condensed, and fecund, and partly because he leaves explanation and defending his views up to you.

It is true that there is no correlation between the strength of an intuition and its accuracy. However, this got misreported as meaning that intuition does not help decision-making. We can judge people’s characters from their faces to a great degree and women, as generally weaker and more vulnerable, are more reluctant to attribute trustworthiness than men. Trustworthiness will thus be somewhat relative.

One cannot eliminate prejudice. One can only replace old prejudices with new ones. Prejudice is the result of accumulated experience and provides some clue as to what to expect and how to behave. Without it, we would be like a new born baby exploring the world for the first time. All very exciting, but completely nonfunctional. The baby has to figure out how things in the world work – people, animals, plants, and things – storing up information of how things look, taste, feel, smell and sound. Marble is cold to touch, pillows warm and soft, and rusty nails have a metallic taste reminiscent of blood.

Cultural stereotypes concerning age, sex, and race, are 0.8 reliable, and work across cultures. A Pearson Coefficient of 1.0 represents a perfect correlation, so 0.8 is very high indeed. Male/female sex differences are accurate, as are left/right political differences. Thankfully, we are very good at not applying these correlations to particular individuals. One cannot go about living without having expectations, but we are also used to having these expectations disconfirmed. We expect a chair to support our weight, but we can make the adjustment if it is merely a prop chair, or just old and rickety. When we have clear and relevant individuating information, we make the adjustment at the rate of 0.71 – which is enormous – while the remaining effect of stereotyping is a measly 0.1 – one of the smallest effects in social psychology.

Intuition is also the name we give abilities that cannot be articulated. Scott Adams tells a story of working for a boss in the area of data analysis at a bank. She took a look at a bunch of figures Adams had provided and said, “No. This looks wrong.” Adams was a newbie at the time and was mystified as to how she knew this. After four or five years of data analysis, he had developed the same uncanny sense of when the numbers were off. Experts cannot explain how they do what they do. As mentioned before, how do I know when someone is just pretending to play the violin? All I can say is, “It’s obvious.” It is important to remember that there are many things about which one cannot be expert. There are, arguably, no expert economists. They can often neither tell us how we got into the situations that we are currently in as an economy, nor how to get ourselves out of them. Politicians will thus inevitably get conflicting economic advice and will be inclined to accept the advice most in line with their preferences and what they wanted to do anyway.

If one’s intuition says one should focus on objectively measurable data and ignore all other considerations, one has not thereby eliminated intuition. In fact, such a perspective is especially biased and partial, and potentially dangerous. When an expert doctor gives a diagnosis of an ambiguous and hard to discern illness, he is drawing on years of experience and skill in paying attention to particular patients. Patients are not statistics and averages. No tables or algorithms are available to apply. And, like all expertise, the doctor will not be able to articulate how he did what he just did, and as such, it falls into the category of “intuition.” It is currently popular to think that patients should make informed decisions about their own health. However, if a patient insists on what is objectively measurable and on what can be clearly articulated to a lay person such as themselves, then the patient may well die – depending on the severity of his condition.

An anesthesiologist must anesthetize this particular patient and then monitor the response of the patient to what he is doing. This skill and focused attention is not “book knowledge” and cannot be communicated. He could not explain to an unqualified person how to do what he does so they can step in for him should he be unavailable, hence why he is paid $300 an hour. These skills and abilities are closely related to phronesis – the practical wisdom that Aristotle made so much of – to be distinguished from abstract knowledge of universal truths. Imagine saying to the anesthesiologist, “I’m not going under until you explain to me in clear language exactly how you plan to proceed.”

Analytic philosophers, fixated as they are on the left hemisphere, love clarity and certainty. So, they ignore all that is mysterious and uncertain; and neither life nor science is certain. In fact, requiring that knowledge be certain is a sure-fire way of making sure that it is never acquired. The logical possibility that we are brains in vats remains of interest to them – though essentially puerile and adolescent in nature. A focus on the clear and certain, on logic and sequential reasoning, is as much of a bias as anything else. We know that major scientific and mathematical breakthroughs come from moments of insight that must be proved after the fact. We also know that not all truths can be proven to be true. They can only be seen to be true intuitively.

Daniel Kahneman is an exemplar of a trend that began in the 1960s of debunking intuition and thus expertise; the two things being intimately related. McGilchrist has done us all a favor of debunking Kahneman’s debunking of both in Thinking Fast and Slow. Expert intuition is fast. Laborious sequential reasoning and proofs are supposed to be the gold standard, but there is no evidence that doing such things improve decisions. Clarity and logic become merely obfuscatory when the subject matter does not permit it. It is irrational to try to be too rational. Just how “rational” one should be and when is determined by intuition. Consciousness, for instance, cannot be defined and it certainly cannot be explained. All that can happen is that it be pointed at and its nature and function examined. Aristotle explained that moral theory was simply not feasible because morality cannot be reduced to rules since all action takes place in particular circumstances involving particular people with particular qualities. All one can do is to try to cultivate the habits of generosity, moderation, justice, and courage and then learn how to enact them; how much and when. To act in the right way, at the right time, at the right place, in the right manner, towards the right people. This is practical wisdom – there being no other kind of wisdom – derived from intelligence, careful observation and accumulated experience. But, analytic philosophers turn around and call this “the theory of virtue ethics” alongside utilitarianism and Kantianism!

Kahneman’s attack on expertise and thus intuition in medicine is misguided and involves misrepresentation. He claimed that experienced radiologists, asked to evaluate chest X-rays, contradict themselves 20% of time when asked re-evaluate, sometimes within minutes of doing the re-evaluation. The same thing was said to be true of auditors, pathologists, psychologists, and organizational managers. This was based on one study in 1968 by Hoffman PJ, Slovic P and Rorer LG, ‘An analysis-of-variance model for the assessment of configural cue utilization in clinical judgment,’ Psychological Bulletin, 1968, 69 (5), 338-49. The study had nothing to do with chests, or X-rays, or pictures of any kind. It was actually about gastroenterology. The test was highly artificial and the “correct” answer was not cut and dried. The radiologists were asked to consider six factors on a radiological examination and to determine whether they constituted a malignancy or not. In fact, those six factors, though abnormal, may or may not mean cancer, depending on context, which the experts did not have.  Clinical judgments are made in the context of a patient, not pieces of “yes” or “no” data on a piece of paper. Of the nine radiologists, three were not fully qualified and it is unknown how experienced the other six were. Even with all those factors, they were “right” 80% of the time.

In an accounting study, auditors were asked to make 288 judgments involving rather loose criteria and language, such as the notion of something being “adequate.” Again, the auditors had a range of experience, half having between 3 and 7 years, and still they were 0.79 reliable. For a complex task using somewhat nebulous criteria, that is very consistent. In fact, the general conclusion of auditing studies is that auditors have good consistency of judgment. The accountants had the same yes/no questions where no firm boundaries existed, but managed to be impressively consistent. Kahneman, however, reframes it as a 20% error rate. This seems reminiscent of grading student papers. The precise letter grade will vary between instructors, but “poor,” “average,” and “excellent” can be expected to be reasonably consistent. Variation between instructors does not mean that grading papers is completely haphazard and a crap shoot.

The third study was by James Shanteau who had started out skeptical of experts, but changed his mind upon seeing the evidence, deciding they were in fact skilled and knowledgeable. So, it is strange that Kahneman would choose Shanteau’s study to challenge the legitimacy of expertise. Shanteau did not conduct 46 separate studies, as Kahneman claimed, but 41 studies were cited (citing not being conducting). Just nine citations were critical of experts, while 37 were neutral or supportive of experts. No reference was made to the idea that evaluations were redone “within minutes” as claimed by Kahneman, so that was an embellishment. Shanteau was critical of expert systems, which are attempt to standardize expertise, which is completely different.

Kahneman writes that “Unreliable judgments cannot be valid predictors,” but experts are not predictors. They are assessing or diagnosing. The same distinction comes up in Antifragile by Nassim Taleb. An expert can recognize that subprime mortgages are a ticking time bomb, particularly if they are assessed as being triple A+ by Standard and Poor’s, without predicting the moment of collapse. Recognizing that the banking system is fragile is an assessment or diagnosis. It is different from predicting the future or identifying the moment or proximate cause of its collapse. The situation can be compared with having all one’s savings in gold. It represents overexposure to a Black Swan (rare and consequential) event. Conversely, positive optionality means putting oneself in a position to profit from the unexpected and from variation, not predicting when those things will occur or even if they will happen. McGilchrist has a Whitehead quotation that Taleb would love, arguing that the track record of individual professed seers is so poor that it would perhaps be safer to stone them in some merciful way. (Merciful stoning being so much to be preferred over punitive vengeful stoning).

Most tests of expertise are artificial and deprive the expert of the ability to excel, such as how a patient looks and comes across. Contextual clues, as phronesis in general, is key. In one study, four patients’ case histories, with hundreds of pieces of information, were used to test experts. Being decontextualized, vital information was not available. And only half the cases were within any one expert’s field of expertise. Experts are better than systematic, operationalized, judgments of non-experts – which would have to be based on algorithms. But, you have to let doctors examine actual living patients for their expertise to reveal itself. Most human problems cannot be solved through computational methods. Algorithms assume the question can be well-defined and also that a method of solving the problem has already been designed. How can there be a method for diagnosing a particular patient with a nebulous problem? Lists of symptoms are not going to get you there in difficult cases, which is where expertise is needed.

On the topic of bogus algorithms and prescriptive methods, McGilchrist, like Taleb, brings up Harry Markowitz who got a Nobel Prize for a theory called “Portfolio Selection.” Markowitz does not even use his own method and it causes blow ups. A medieval heuristic of 1/3 property, 1/3 merchandise, and 1/3 cash works much better.

Thinking fast can be left hemisphere jumping to conclusions, but it can also be right hemisphere expert intuition.

Einstein wrote that common sense is the name for the collection of prejudices we have by age 18, and very useful these prejudices, which are mostly accurate, are too. Schizophrenics cannot acquire them and suffer as a result. They know something is missing. They see the spontaneous blending of logic with emotion and social and embodied intelligence in others and perceive that they are missing these things. Kant’s idea that marriage involves each person lending the other the use of his or her genitals conveys the idea. Without common sense, rules must be relied on and they are just no substitute. This can be compared to the fact that even the law can never be reduced to simple rules, and why we will forever be referring to the spirit of the law rather than its substance, and loopholes will continue to appear despite the best efforts of legislators – though too often – with their willing collusion.

Chapter 19 – Intuition, Imagination, and the Unveiling of the World

The tendency of the Enlightenment was to attack intuition. Analytic philosophy is happy to ignore or deride it. Since the sense of the very reality of the world around us is based on right hemisphere intuition, as opposed to theory, language, and representation, this rejection of intuition is a very bad idea. It accounts for the extreme anti-humanness and detachment of the school of analysis; and not detachment in some edifying sense. Bringing one’s right hemisphere to modern academic “philosophy” feels like being the one-eyed man in the kingdom of the blind.

Einstein was famously a fan of intuition and inspiration, associated with the right hemisphere, as all truly innovative and insightful scientists will be. McGilchrist notes that Einstein never thought in logical symbols or mathematical equations but in images, feelings, and musical architecture. The physicist noted, “I often think in music.”

Intellectual discovery necessarily involves a leap into the unknown and thus risk. The unknown is mystery; the known, order and light of day. Insight tends to come in a flash and precedes proof and analysis. The insight will generally follow a long period of wrestling with a problem, while the solution gestates in the unconscious. The spiral structure of galaxies came to William Wilson Morgen first, instantaneously. The data to prove it, second. Intuitive solutions are more often correct than the analytic.

The mathematicians interviewed by Anna Sfard all said they cannot think without pictures and the beauty of those pictures is important. Paul Dirac commented that Shrödinger’s wave equations were beautiful, but were considered wrong until the spin of electrons was discovered. Children really gifted in mathematics are also driven by elegance, whereas the average kid is not. This seems like an instance of the ancient postulated connection between beauty, truth, and goodness as being three aspects of one thing.

Visual imagery is hindered by visual perception, which is why we close our eyes when visualizing. And thinking out loud interferes with problems requiring insight rather than analysis. Language also compromises the perception of Gestalts, which may be why perception is lateralized into the mute (right) hemisphere.

There is the old advice to sleep on a problem. Experiments support this idea. Participants who needed insight to uncover a rule in a gambling experiment were twice as successful when allowed to sleep. REM sleep is particularly crucial. Left hemisphere focus is good for sequential and narrow problems but conflicts with big picture insight. It seems likely that Zen meditation could also be helpful, which, anecdotally, it is.

The Romantic poet Shelley, concerned with the same tendency that worried Wordsworth, namely, for perception to be influenced by concepts in such a way that the world we experience becomes boring, noted that imagination is required to reengage with the world and to revivify perception. It takes creativity together with perception to create novelty. Since experience is never literally the same twice, novelty and experienced reality are coextensive.

Colin Wilson called skills developed for dealing with the world “the robot.” By automating driving, for instance, our minds are freed for other activities. However, if perception becomes too automated, too robotic, too repetitive, then we live in a kind of abstract, deracinated world. Creative imagination is required to break through to direct perception with life’s blood running through it. This would indicate that the right hemisphere must wrest back from the left hemisphere these tasks at times, which is the case with all great poetry.

The work of art comes from the unconscious, feeling, perceiving self. Protagonists in good novels and plays take on a character of their own, immune to authorial intention. McGilchrist notes Thackeray being surprised at insights his own characters had. Forcing characters to propel the plot in contravention to their having a life of their own is a sign of weak artistry. As the work of art comes from the unconscious, so something similar in the perceiver must respond and be awakened. Just as there must be something beautiful in you to perceive beauty, so the creative, imaginative, emotional and intuitive are needed to properly appreciate art. Thomas Cole’s quartet of pictures The Voyage of Life have the power to evoke all of that.

McGilchrist notes that the left hemisphere sees the imagination as a species of lying, while the right hemisphere recognizes that imagination is necessary to access truth. Fantasy, on the other hand, does not have that purchase on reality. Henri Bergson notes, depressingly, that “criticism of an intuitive philosophy is so easy and also certain to be well-received that it will always tempt the beginner.” Such fun for the teenage cynic. But, as Schelling, and Berdyaev, noted, without intuition there would be no philosophy.

Chapter 20 – The Coincidentia Oppositorum

The coincidence of opposites might be an idea unsuited to my temperament. This could simply be my own shortcoming and not the fault of McGilchrist. Several times he refers to the north and south poles of a magnet as embodying some important metaphor or principle, but it means nothing to me. He quotes Pascal, who otherwise seems congenial, as saying that contradiction is not a sign of falsehood. If I beg to differ, does that mean we are both right? It is true that boundaries are also what connects things – the border of a country on a map, perhaps a river, functions like that. The ear drum separates the inner ear and outer ear but also joins them and makes sound possible by vibrating. And, a good principle taken too far can become its opposite. Compassion without conditions, for instance, free or subsidized housing for drug addicts with no behavioral requirements, is not compassionate at all since the addict will likely be dead in short order.

The idea that a river, in changing, stays the same, is both true and good. This applies to all living organisms – relative stasis coming only with death – though even then the organization of the cells will dissipate and alter as the component elements return to the earth.  A holon is both a part and a whole unto itself. And, most importantly perhaps for McGilchrist, the narrow focus and the broad focus of the brain hemispheres need to occur simultaneously. Since they are opposites, brain lateralization is necessary. McGilchrist has found an Iroquois myth of two brothers, He Who Grasps The Sky With Both Hands, and Flint, that captures the difference between the two hemispheres in a rather miraculous way. Some people suffering from brain pathologies, like schizophrenia, are weirdly aware of which part of their brain is not functioning properly, as though they can actually feel it. And the Iroquois managed to nail the contributions of each hemisphere too – right down to the fact that the dominance of the right hemisphere (He Who Grasps the Sky) is necessary for both individual and societal well-being. In modern Western context, the mechanistic view of a tree can be included in and accommodated by the right hemisphere, but the experience of the tree cannot emerge from a left hemisphere focus on mechanism and tool use. Einstein is quoted as saying that the intellect has no personality and should not be worshipped. It cannot lead, but only serve. It has no ends or values.

In an example of something generating its opposite, William James wrote that most institutions become an obstacle to the purpose for which they are founded. NGOs, for instance, that move into an area with the goal of helping the indigenous population end up parasitic upon it. If they ever solve the problems which are within their remit, they put themselves out of a job. A chief diversity officer at a university has to dig up and find new racial outrages to justify her existence; a process called race grifting. DEI requirements ruthlessly enforce ideological conformity. “Love means love” applies, in practice, only to homosexuals. White Christian heterosexual parents and familial love involves the cis-gendered, heteronormative, tradition-bound, oppressors promulgating unchosen bonds. While every sexual deviancy must be respected and even admired, if one were to refer to normal sex between normal people this would be regarded as exclusionary hate speech.

Other such examples include the fact that being incredibly selfish will harm the self. Caring about the happiness of others is likely to make you personally happy, while trying to be happy at others expense is likely to fail. If you aim at happiness, you will miss it, but if you find things you love to do, happiness will appear as a byproduct.

Chapter 21 – The One and the Many

The chapter entitled “The One and the Many” sounds like it will be a contribution to this traditional topic in metaphysics. Instead, “the One” refers to the unique and “the Many” to the generic or category to which the One belongs. With regard to this, McGilchrist identifies the paradoxes involved in the relationship between sameness and difference. An individual is different from others only because he is the same over a period of time. He resembles himself moment to moment, making him different from other people. “Internal sameness is the precondition of external difference.” Identity, etymologically means “sameness.”

In order to be a unique human being, you must first belong to the same category as everyone else – human being. In that regard, you are the same as everyone. Only then can you be regarded as different. What is unique and what is the same depends on the level of generality employed. “Human being” as a category is itself unique in the animal kingdom and the category “human being” exists because of commonalities (sameness) in terms of behavior and morphology between all human beings.

The relationship between the same and the different, the unique and the general, could be compared to Aristotle’s ideas about substance. Aristotle invented the word “hyle” which we translate as “matter,” to be contrasted with “eidos” (Form). For Aristotle, form is what makes something the substance it is and hyle is the matter from which it is composed. For Aristotle, no form exists without matter, contrary to Plato. That would seem to be clear. However, what is “form” and what is “matter” for Aristotle depends on the level of abstraction. If a brick wall is the form, matter is the bricks. But, if bricks are considered the form, then their matter is mud and straw. The matter of the substance “book” is the chapters. The matter of chapters are paragraphs. The matter of paragraphs are the sentences and so on. “Matter” does not just mean physical stuff. Though matter is crucial for a substance to exist, it is the form that makes the substance the substance it is, not the matter. And it is the form which is knowable and universal. What is relevant here is the way in which what counts as “form” and what counts as “matter” is relative to the level on is looking at.

Human beings are unique in the animal kingdom. An individual human being is unique within the category of human beings. But, he must be a human being first, a generality, before he can count as unique, which is individual. If he were a leaf, he could not be a unique human being. There can be a unique sycamore leaf because there exists the generic category of sycamore trees. And sycamore trees are unique, however, relative to the category “trees.” Trees are unique relative to plants, and plants are unique relative to living organisms.

The leaf and an individual human being is the same from moment to moment, making them different and unique. If all were chaos and flux then everything would be the same and uniqueness would not exist. There need to be general patterns for particularity to emerge.

McGilchrist notes that children get excited by categories that shape experience, “Birdie! Bunny! Doggie!” This can become the bane of adult existence where grown ups start experiencing the world in these left hemisphere abstractions instead of right hemisphere particularity, producing an enervating sham sameness. McGilchrist also recognizes this poem as a famous example of how useful left hemisphere categories can become part of the prison house descending on the growing person.

He notes that Don Giovanni is famous for seducing women indiscriminately, yet he does so by having representatives of every discriminable category. Nietzsche notes that we love only individualities. We can be attracted to or admire generalities like “womanhood” but not love it. Loving everyone means loving no one in particular. Being a citizen of the world means being a citizen of nowhere in particular. The left hemisphere focuses on categories and tries to fit things into them, like the bed of Procrustes, losing uniqueness in the process. McGilchrist quotes William Blake, “He who would do good to another must do it in minute particulars. General Good is the plea of the scoundrel, hypocrite, and flatterer.” The modern-day virtue signaler joins this list of miscreants, favoring the general good; always wanting someone else to do the good he thinks should be done on some giant scale.

McGilchrist writes: “The tendency of the world, of living things especially, is not towards oneness and sameness, but towards pluralism, difference and particularity…away from generalization and equality, towards every greater differentiation, relishing the uniqueness … of each being.” Many “liberals” seem to emphasize left hemisphere sameness, employing highly abstract categories to do so, and to positively demonize difference, as though bland uniformity were some kind of virtue. One such person was positively overjoyed when an Indian said, “I am not an Indian or a Hindu. I am a person.” The liberal thought it most enlightened. What a terrible shame for this Indian and Hindu to have lost something that makes him distinctive relative to the generic category of person. How wonderful to have different flavors and unique types of people with their own food, dancing, modes of dress, tastes, preferences, and religion. Only differences, combined with sameness, make the world diverse and interesting. “If rabbits bit, and eagles pecked at seed, then there would be no more rabbits and eagles.” Perhaps the liberal recognizes that we tend to affiliate with “the same” more than “the different.” Given the reciprocal relationship between the same and the different, each needing the other, perhaps we can find a way of appreciating commonality and difference at the same time. Perhaps the different can live in different communities and celebrate actual diversity rather than a commingling that produces uniformity; making every group the same admixture of every other group.

The left hemisphere thinks in terms of categories, the right hemisphere in terms of family resemblance. The right hemisphere can see Gestalts and then identify its parts relative to that whole. That is the right hemisphere version of the One and the Many. The left hemisphere, we know from right hemisphere suppression and damage, cannot see a painting as a whole and frequently cannot even identify its parts.

Oliver Sacks describes a Dr. P with right hemisphere damage. Dr. P came to see the world in terms of lifeless abstractions. He had been a painter and his paintings were “originally naturalistic and realistic, with vivid mood and atmosphere, but finely detailed and concrete.” After his brain was damaged they became “mere chaotic lines and blotches of paint.” “Far more abstract, even geometrical and cubist.” His wife considered this an advance into abstract and non-representational art and Sacks a philistine for not recognizing it as progress. Sacks responded that “this was not the artist but the pathology advancing – advancing towards a profound visual agnosia, in which all powers of representation and imagery, all sense of the concrete, and all sense of reality, were being destroyed.”

Current cognitive science, neurology and psychology resemble Dr. P. Experience is always personal, McGilchrist notes. Without the personal, things become abstract and computational. It is always worrying to hear people devoted to studying the minds of human beings who sound like they have yet to have had the pleasure of meeting an actual person.

Chapter 22 – Time

Time is crucial to McGilchrist’s process style philosophy, where all things move, and change, in Heraclitean fashion. Part of the essence of Heidegger’s Dasein is having a past and projecting our possibilities into future. That is why Dasein is not merely a thing, since the past and the future are not simply there and visible. On the other hand, a “moment” has no fixed border or boundary, and that moment can be our entire lifetime. We are thrown into the world and thus into time. All that exists exists in time. We and the universe evolve in time and all things flow. The mountain flows in geological time and galaxies grow and collapse in cosmic time. When the flow is slow enough vis-à-vis human perceptions and time scales, then we consider parts of that flow to be “things.”

The time of physics, and of clocks, is an artificial man-made conception of time. The left hemisphere intellect breaks time into fragmented clock time, seconds, minutes, hours. In essence, the left hemisphere cannot really deal with time adequately at all. In thinking about time, we spatialize it. Physics even refers to spacetime. But, as always, it is the right hemisphere intuition that deals with reality, and not mere representations of it. The reality of time is flow and duration. Time is necessary for growth, evolution, and creativity. Schizophrenics with their right hemisphere related problems, are often reliant on the left hemisphere and as a consequence, time often stops for them in an eternal present. Instead of seeing flow and change, a person in the morning can seem to be a different person in the afternoon; positing a break in reality where none exists.

We saw that Zeno’s paradoxes are, in many cases, the product of the retrospective division of continuous motion into infinitely divisible lines. We forget that lines are not made up of “points,” since the points on a line have no dimension of length at all. A point is a human imaginary construct only. If a point had length, then it would be a segment. One could cut a line into segments but that would not represent the reality of the line. An arrow can only be thought of as “halfway” to its destination in retrospect. Like Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle, in identifying an arrow’s location, we eliminate its motion. The arrow does not get “halfway” and then just stop. Thinking in this way makes it much easier to imagine it never hitting its target. In reality, the arrow will be tracing a parabolic curve in continuous motion. The paradox of having to pass through an infinite number of points on an infinitely divisible path to the target is an artefact of left hemisphere thinking and analysis.

Likewise, determinism is based on “chains” of cause and effect which inherently postulates a stop/start motion. It breaks time into chunks. If one thinks instead of an organism, or the flow of water, or any object following a gravity well, then this way of thinking is inappropriate. As per usual, the missing element for the concept of the organism is purpose; and purpose operates in time. A goal is sought and the organism, or the flowing water, encounters resistance and seeks to go around the obstacle. Resistance to desire generates conscious awareness. If all our desires were instantly fulfilled, we would never become conscious of the desire, nor would we have to overcome obstacles. Consciousness and obstacles are thus related. Consciousness and problem-solving, generated by those obstacles, are also inherently connected. The alternative would be like being a fetus in the womb, kept warm and fed in a way that eliminates the desire for warmth or food.

Determinism, pushing from behind, eliminates consciousness and the need for it. Problem solving, on the contrary, requires imagination and creativity and determinism forestalls the existence of either of those. A problem only exists if a goal is thwarted. Determinism has no goals and it cannot accommodate purpose. At most, purpose would be an epiphenomenon of no use or reality whatsoever. Just as Zeno’s paradoxes are a frustrating contradiction of everyday experience, so too is determinism, and they are both products of the damage left hemisphere thinking does to intuited reality. We know that we problem-solve and have purposes. We know that the arrow hits its target and people can leave a room. Life would be truly impossible and unfathomable if we were wrong about targets and room leaving and the same is true of determinism. Every element of what we think we are doing and experiencing would be false. If we are wrong about all of that, on what possible basis could we hope to be right about determinism? Science of all kinds is the product of a mind and it is tested perceptually. If human experience, all which has duration, is simply blanketly erroneous, then so too will be all science and thus determinism, the product of scientific materialism. Thankfully, determinism simply shows the limitations of an analytic, time-denying, “chunking” and fragmenting, abstraction and concept-loving left hemisphere. Physics describes a kind of constraint, noting regularities that things follow in the parts of the universe that we can observe, but not a master whipping us from behind, driving us to our inexorable destination. Determinism breaks reality into determinate parts, instead of an interrelated whole. Once the parts have been posited, then their combination and recombination can be hypothesized. Linear causation just means ignoring other parts for a particular purpose. It does not apply at the quantum level, the very small, nor the very large, organisms and the human mind.

The left hemisphere sees things as particles, the right hemisphere as a wave. All is in motion and motion can only be seen from the wave perspective, not that of the particle, and motion only exists if time is real. “Timelessness and mathematics are properties of representations of records of motion,” not of real motions. (Lee Smolin) Particles can be thought of as having position only if motion is ignored. 

Wolfgang Smith distinguishes between the physical world, described by physics, and the corporeal world of experiential qualities. Quantum mechanics posits a world of indeterminate possibilities and entanglement. “Particles” exist in superpositionality. They are also entangled in space and time, suggesting they are part of a continuous whole; a quantum field. Changing one part of the field affects the whole, like pulling on the edge of a blanket. Consciousness, observation, measurement (all the same thing in this context) collapse the wave function and the potential reality becomes actual. There are still no particles in quantum field theory. “The global evolution of the matter-field over time cannot be treated as an infinitely divisible series of states.” Since this seems to be the way things are, it is we who intervene and create the corporeal world. Smith calls the relationship between the physical and corporeal “upward” (top-down) causation.

For some reason, we moderns have jettisoned all but one of Aristotle’s four causes of substance: material, formal, efficient, and final; with modernity fixating on the efficient. What makes sense of causation, however, is the final cause – the purpose. We assemble the materials, envisage the final product, and undertake the actual activity, because of this goal. Probably for McGilchrist, like Whitehead, the final goal is “the creative advance into novelty.” The ancient idea of the principle of plenitude said that everything that can be should be.

A student enrolls in a college program with various goals in mind. He is not pushed, but pulled. The efficient cause would be someone getting him to sign the appropriate forms. But, that’s not much of an explanation. It is also to draw circle around something to contemplate in isolation. “Being enrolled in a program” is more a state of mind and legal status, than anything physical. It is not the ink on paper that creates this, or PDF signature, but a promise and commitment on the part of the student and the college. Focusing on the physical aspects involved, is like explaining the existence of a painting by brushstrokes, rather than the mind and body of the artist.

Determinism imagines one state causing another. But the essence of time is duration, and duration is flow. Henri Bergson points out that “states” are snapshots of a continuous process with no actual reality. Change, flux, and the continuity of transition are what is real. Think of the fox chasing the hen, and the water flowing down the river. States would be things undergoing change. Flow and duration negate the reality of static things. There is no herky jerky jumping going on. We need time lapse photography to show this continuity. It would be like insisting the reality of melody are individual notes, yet the notes have no melody. Change is their essence. The melody exists with the memory of the previous notes informing the present and future notes. The melody unfolds in time and must be understood as a whole. Preceding notes do not cause the later notes but they do influence their meaning and perception. The rhythm of the notes cannot be analyzed into discrete parts. The melody exists in consciousness and consciousness has a fundamental connection with time.

McGilchrist notes that determinism comes from a belief in a mechanical universe. Physics has no category called “free.” The closest it can come to “free” is “random.” This deficit of physics and the intellect in general is then the cause of a woeful shake of the head as it is then acknowledged that random actions are not the same as meaningful or free actions, as though looking through binoculars with blacked out lenses were the final proof that nothingness reigns supreme.

Focusing on what is useful means ignoring the rest. It narrows your attention and foregrounds a much more limited background. For practical purposes, we seek to intervene in the flow and alter its course. Choosing the right moment and method will require breaking things into chunks, points, locations. One might thrust one’s stick at a particular place to divert a stream. But, the fragmented and timeless is mechanical, lifeless and incoherent. Once the world is broken, it cannot be put back together. Change is not merely “things” moving through space and changing their locations. Organismic flow would include the immune system looking for pathogens and then responding intelligently. Or, horizontal gene transfer where one cell reaches into another to get the DNA instructions for how to create a certain useful ability. The cell is responding to stress, but not in some mindless mechanistic way with one thing banging into another.

Entanglement involves simultaneous change. Without one event preceding the other, normal ideas of causation do not apply. McGilchrist wonders if the physical and spiritual might be entangled in this way – acting in concert rather than one side determining the other.

Eliade refers to religious man as having a sense of time wearing out. As the sense of repetition increases, time speeds up. Mindfulness meditation slows it down again by forcing one to experience the world as new again. Meditation breaks mental habits. A friend once joked that meditation could become a habit. That is true only in the sense that one might make a habit of breaking habits! The monkey mind is the chaotic and habitual mind. Rather than the phenomenology of time being one special aspect of it, on the views being presented here, consciousness and time go together. “Objective” time would involve the measurement of time, not time itself. The unaccustomed slows down time, and meditation really does seem to prevent the days going past in a blur. Objective time only exists because the mind invented clocks. But, there is no objective time in relativity, quantum physics, or cosmology.

Lee Smolin writes that in physics, the area one is studying is regarded as dynamic against a relatively fixed background. We look at a meteor moving towards the earth and pretend the earth is static so we can determine the speed of the meteor. One could equally hold the meteor static and measure the speed of the earth. In reality, both what we are regarding as “background” and the dynamic part, are dynamic and evolving. This follows the principle of all thought, where, in order to question something, some kind of axiom must be accepted as true (be fixed) in order to say anything at all. It is not possible to prove something true, without taking for granted the truth of something else.

We have seen how rhythm exists in time, but so too does rhyme. The sameness and difference of rhyming words are both separated and bound together in time.

Stephen Hawking is famous for having postulated that the laws of quantum mechanics could flow backwards and the universe could go into reverse. This was subsequently proven wrong. In quantum mechanics time has an arrow, and it goes forwards only. “The probabilistic laws of quantum mechanics do not hold of time-reversed quantum processes.” Time sees entropy increasing in closed systems as well as structure and complexity increasing in others.

If time did not exist, and all were simply “there” in a block universe, then freedom and creativity could not exist. They emerge from the unknown into an unanticipated future. To know all is to forestall creativity. To simply reach into the future for some discovery and give it to another person, one has not been creative. To be omniscient means to know all the past and all the future which would thereby become fixed and not fluid. Growth, delight, joy, and play would all become predictable and boring. Time destroys but “time is as much the creator as the destroyer; indeed ultimately more so, since what has been is never undone.” God cannot undo what has been done and apparent destruction is part of the flow of creation.

McGilchrist closes the chapter with a beautiful poem from Japanese monk:

“The scroll looks beautiful in its silk wrapper, frayed and the mother of pearl fallen off.

If man never faded away like dew or vanished like smoke over Toribeyama, but lingered on forever in this world, how things would lose their power to move us.

The most precious thing in life is its uncertainty.”

He notes Odysseus’ decision to reject the offer of immortality of Calypso, but to continue on to Ithaca to grow old and die with his wife. Without time, there would be no unanticipated events and discoveries to look forward to and a significant diminution of mystery.

Chapter 23 – Flow and Movement

All things flow and move. The islands of apparent stability in this are compared to eddies and vortices in a stream where the flow meets resistance. Resistance thus has a creative function. No actual obstruction is needed. Any deviation in speed and viscosity is sufficient to create turbulence. Schelling is quoted as saying, “The world-soul flows through out the cosmos until it encounters a difference within itself, a point of resistance.” 

For practical purposes, it can be useful to interact with the world as though it came in chunks. So, the philosophical view may not be the best in a given circumstance. The left hemisphere is optimized for action, but only the right hemisphere is attuned to understanding. The left hemisphere, the intellect, is described as working in straight lines, even if infinitely small. Those straight lines generated the fiction of the stop/start motion of cause and effect, with cause always being proximate cause. Some electro-chemical impulse might be involved in reaching for a cup, but purpose, the final cause, provides understanding of why the cup is reached for in the first place. The final cause provides context and meaning. The proximate cause is an intellectual aberration and invention. It is exclusionary, simplifying the world for practical purposes. The entire history of the universe must be more or less exactly what it was for any one thing to happen. Real explanations would have to start with the First Cause, which for Aristotle is also the Final Cause. Why did that fly jump? In the beginning was the Big Bang…stars, planets, solar systems evolved…life emerged on this planet…insects came into existence…there will have been some evolutionary precursor to the fly to be discussed first…etc.

McGilchrist quotes Friedrich Schelling, Henri Bergson, Kepler, and Nicolas of Cusa, as saying that reality is curved, which intuition can deal with, while the intellect thinks in straight lines. This curved reality is also a seamless whole. Jill Bolte Taylor’s stroke affecting the left hemisphere, meant that she merged with her environment. There was a continuity between herself and the world and all elements of the world. In interacting with the world some aspects of the background are foregrounded. Parts come into the light, others recede. Looking for a chair, we divide the world into things we can sit on and things we cannot. Searching for a conversation partner at a party, we divide the world into congenial interlocutors and the uncongenial. There is no one right way, no one correct interpretation, though lots of wrong ways, e.g., the current mania for trying to divide the world into racists and nonracists, and even antiracists. If left hemisphere awareness is a kind of searchlight, it cannot illuminate the whole. It can only ever approximate. If we take this perspective as fundamental, we can never connect things back together again. Right hemisphere intuition contains the broad focus of awareness of context. The left hemisphere intellect can then analyze this intuited reality and break it into pieces. The left hemisphere cannot join these pieces except as some kind of cobbled together Frankenstein monster. The left hemisphere is digital. The right hemisphere analog. The left hemisphere can be compared to the digital sampling of a soundwave. No matter how many times the wave is sampled it can never reproduce the entire wave. It can never join up something once it has been broken. Reality is curved, and continuous.

Background is thus a sea of possibilities and potentialities. The left hemisphere foregrounds some of these possibilities, making them actual. McGilchrist writes: “The left hemisphere collapses the infinite web of possibilities into a point-like certainty for the purposes of our interaction with the world.” In actuality, the universe and consciousness are seamless wholes. The stream of thought flows, as does the rest of reality. But, conceptual thinking does not flow. Concepts divide themselves from each other and they break the world into pieces. To focus on something, we freeze it in place.

Jason Padgett was someone who suffered brain damage from a blow on the head and subsequently developed an interest in drawing in the area of mathematical geometry. Certain equations would inspire some such creation, and others not. Actual mathematicians and physicists noted that which equations inspired these artistic inventions was a matter of chance, and not anything to do with the true nature of the equations, and the geometric shapes had no real mathematical relationship to those equations either. When Padgett drew his shapes, his right hemisphere became nearly completely inactive. He would draw apparently curved figures, but those figures would be made up of very small lines. His left hemisphere perspective simply could not create actual continuous curves. There seems some at least a metaphorical connection between digital/numerical descriptions of “one-third,” as 3.3333333… extending on forever. You just cannot get there from here. It is related to the difference between the experience of beauty and attempts to describe, explain, and, especially, define beauty. The tools provided are not up to the task.

The lines of mathematics have no width, the points have no length, depth, or width. Lines in the real world are not made of points and they have width. Dots, at least, have some dimension in space, but lines are not made of dots either.

Padgett’s sense of the continuity of time and movement was also disrupted without a well-functioning right hemisphere. Water flowing out of a tap seemed to him to be segmented in nature, stopping and starting. The movement of his own hand resembled stop-motion animation. This is what happens to all whose right hemisphere is not playing the role it should be, such as those suffering from schizophrenia. Time does not flow and continuity in general is interrupted. It is the right hemisphere that is responsible for our continuous sense of self. This self changes as we go along, as does a river. It is the nature of selves and rivers to change and flow. If the river were to stop moving, it would no longer be a river but a long pond. As mentioned before, the schizophrenic patient tends to see the same person in the morning as a different person in the afternoon because they are slightly different – perhaps they have changed their shirt, combed their hair, they are more impatient and less rested, and so on. As another example of analytic philosophers resembling schizophrenics and the right hemisphere impaired, Derek Parfit claims that people have no continuous existence. Analytic philosophy “turns living processes into a dead structure.” It does so by taking things out of (embodied) context. Foreground is taken as existential reality and the background is ignored. Items of thought, like concepts, and logic, are given preeminence and intuition with its direct access to reality is despised. For Schelling, real philosophy “reanimates the dead structure of Nature as perceived by the left hemisphere.” Intuited reality comes from embodied experience, and experience is wordless. Poetry is an attempt to express this inexpressible aspect of perception, using language in a way that tries to transcend the limitations of language and appeal to emotion and intuition. Whitehead saw real philosophy as trying to do what poetry does in more prosaic language. “Philosophy is the endeavor to find a conventional phraseology for the vivid suggestiveness of a poem.” Language gives us the illusion that non-unique things exist. Philosophy must try to break that illusion. We must be receptive to reality in the manner of prayer or meditation, and not merely expressive. To know is not to pin down, but to reveal. The enemy of understanding is decontextualization, abstraction, and thus the disembodied. Motor, cognitive, and emotional skills are linked. Emotion and values imply action and dispositions toward the world. A deficit in the brain impairing movement affects our ability to think of verbs connected with motion, such as ALS and Parkinson’s disease. In schizophrenia and autism, the fluid movement of the organism is disrupted. Time, experience, and the body are mechanized, and machines work by one part acting on another. Organisms move as a whole. Schizophrenics perceive time and motion as jerky and they can lose their sense of self. In the normally functioning, different parts of the brain perceive general, biological, and human motion. CGI creators are often unable to recreate naturalistic movements of human beings. We have an unerring ability to know how, for instance, Spider-Man would move suspended from an imaginary spider web moving between buildings with his approximate size and weight. The animators seemingly just cannot get it right. Motion capture devices can make up for some of this, but since what Spider Man does is physically impossible, this remedy is unavailable to them.

There is a nice Henri Bergson quotation: “Having in fact left the curve of his thought, to follow straight along a tangent, he has become exterior to himself. He returns to himself when he gets back to intuition.” Logic is this broken, straight-line tool. The flexible Lesbian rule bends to conform to the curved shapes of Corinthian pillars, while the logic of hypotheticals, “if then,” statements make no sense. If the consequent (then) is true, the overall statement is regarded as true. “If Hiyao Myazaki makes wonderful movies, then Heisenberg discovered the Uncertainty Principle.” In logic, that proposition is regarded as true. This is literal nonsense. Logic is illogical in this regard, but propositional logic cannot function at all without this assumption. Not only are the straight lines of logic unsuited to flowing, curved reality, it exists as something broken in its own right.

For many of the philosophers McGilchrist cites, music is an excellent symbol for all reality. Music only makes sense as flow, which has its own special integrity. What is happening now is informed by what went before. Rhythm, a key feature of music, only exists in relation to the other notes. While potentially disjunctive, rhythm unifies. Analyzing the music down to the level of a phrase or a note destroys music as a phenomenon, from which it cannot be reconstituted, which has deep significance for philosophy and the rest of reality.

Chapter 24 – Space and Time

McGilchrist includes aspects of physics in his discussion of space and time, but he is explicit that he is not basing anything on physics, just pointing out moments of agreement between it and the neurological and philosophical standpoint. There are those who have tried to use modern physics to prove the existence of God or the spiritual realm. This ill-considered goal is an exercise in bad faith. Faith and hope undergird religious belief, so proof is anathema in the first place. (Remember Jesus rejecting the second temptation of Christ, to throw himself down from a pinnacle and have the angels of God rescue him? “Thou shalt not test the Lord thy God.”) Secondly, the person doing this will not abandon God and the divine should physical theories change, as they inevitably will – either in a direction congenial to religious belief, or not. 

Time, for McGilchrist, is fundamental to the living organism that flows and changes. It is unidimensional and unidirectional, unlike space with its, at minimum, three dimensions. Space is described as a property of quantum fields, rather than quantum fields existing in space. A vacuum is full of energy and space is a property of these fields. Forms are energy, space being filled with energy, even in vacuums, producing Gestalts with a continually changing vitality. Form names the eddy in the stream that has a continuous, changing, energetic, existence.

Thus, space is conceived as inherently productive, fecund, and filled with potential. A womb or expanding seed that inherently gives rise to form, rather than the Western conception of a sterile, static, phenomenon. Space is the Emptiness or Sunyata of Buddhism – the no-thing. Dark energy provides an expansive force within space preventing everything from collapsing in on itself, as does space in general.

Galileo wrote that mathematics is the language in which the book of the universe is written. McGilchrist counters that mathematics is an abstraction from the patterns that come from earth, air, wind, and fire. Perhaps mathematics, with regard to the book of the universe, could be compared to the motion-capture dots pasted onto the leotards of actors so their movements can be entered into a computer so that CGI can take on naturalistic looking motion. It is the underlying physical structures that gives such mathematics its validity, not math bestowing something sublime on physical structures.

Solid bodies have depth, as opposed to their two-dimensional representations. Thus, depth and reality are inherently connected. Depth is related to the profound, the non-superficial. There is the sea and the face of the deep, ranks of soldiers several rows deep, and fields deep in corn, forests deep in trees. There are the depths of intuition and experience, rather than the shallower consciousness. We know that schizophrenics lose their sense of depth and this has a deeply devitalizing tendency. They like the unmoving and are insistent in their desire for symmetry. Symmetry is unproductive. In mathematics and physics, any operation that leaves something unchanged is symmetrical. It was the uneven distribution of the plasma after the Big Bang that gave rise to matter coalescing into suns. The XY of the male chromosome is asymmetrical, as is the combination of XX and XY to produce children. The universe exhibits chirality – handedness, and thus asymmetry, in radioactivity, polarized light, and amino acids. The paintings of the Hudson River School, by contrast to schizophrenics, emphasized depth of vision, giving them an inherently spiritual quality. A fair amount of modern art, such as cubism, tends toward the two-dimensional; a product of computational and utilitarian left hemisphere emphasis. Paul Tillich describes Western man as having lost his sense of depth.

In an experiment involving hypnosis, subjects had their sense of depth either diminished or accentuated. The diminished group found themselves bored, alienated, withdrawn with a lessened intensity of shape, color and sound. The accentuated group experienced the world as more intense and exciting, the landscape as like a giant garden, and wilderness as joyous.

McGilchrist writes, “Relations are primary and form the bedrock of experience out of which emerge, secondarily, the elements that we retrospectively see as ‘things related.’” He also notes that Henri Poincaré declared that only relations are known, not the things themselves. This would seem to follow from Newton’s physics where things like “forces” are described operationally, by what they do, without force itself being defined. For physics to exist, this unsatisfactory exclusion of essences and the thing itself, is a prerequisite for knowledge. However, McGilchrist goes so far as to say that properties are all there are, there are no things. (This is a crucial point since “there are no things” was going to be the name of his book.) This goes further than a merely programmatic stance taken for pragmatic reasons related to the limitations of scientific knowledge.

The idea that there are no things runs counter to the idea of experiential realism, that contends that all items of experience, including lies, dreams, and hallucinations are “real” as far as they go. All things foregrounded out of the background are real, just not ultimate. When someone loves you, they do you the favor of focusing on your lovable aspects. Are these properties real? Yes. Are they properties of you? Not according to McGilchrist. For relationship to exist, there must be duality, not mere monism. Creator and creation create each other. Lover and beloved. Parent and child. Relationship and relata are co-creating. This, at least, is the position of Nikolai Berdyaev who recognizes that mystics tend to have experiences indicating that “all is one.” However, Berdyaev demurs, not agreeing that this is the final word on the matter. It might be true that all is ultimately made of stuff of the mind, and consciousness does not admit of division, but Berdyaev is adamant that creation is as real as the Creator. Theravada Buddhism negates all form by saying, “Form is Emptiness.” The arguably more advanced and chronologically later appearing Mahayana Buddhism adds to this, “Emptiness is Form.” Too much emphasis on unity demotes us to ideas like being cells in the cosmic body. But, this negates our own status as microcosms with goals and purposes of our own. The Father gives rise to the child, and then the child grows up and reveals to the Father his own life choices. It is the wish of the Father that we decide who we are. The Father/Mother may have given birth to us, but we have an important quasi-independent reality of our own. In his desire to get rid of the notion of the engineer God, McGilchrist also jettisons God the Person. He quotes Schelling, apparently approvingly, who writes, “In consciousness, Nature was coming to create and know itself as both subject and object which are transcended,” and “The Ground was Nature out of which consciousness arose and from which it is inseparable.” This is fine, one supposes, if one is happy to abandon conceptions of the Father, God the Person, prayer, and morality, and dialog with the divine.

The impersonal “Nature” posited by Schelling seems unlikely to be the worthy recipient of love and devotion, nor to inspire the Cathedrals of medieval Europe, nor the music of Bach, let alone hope for the life beyond.

In Chapter 23, McGilchrist quotes Schelling’s claim that all philosophical assertions take place in some particular context and can never stand alone. “Every assertion is inseparable from the set of circumstances that gave rise to it.” And, “No genuine proposition has universal validity such that it can be separated from movement – the active engagement with the world – out of which it arises.” Sometimes, the concept of a holon is useful – things are both wholes unto themselves and also part of a larger whole. Relatedly, there is the Gestalt, but then Gestalts within Gestalts. A face must be perceived as a Gestalt in order to be recognized properly. The banishment of things in general, as well as properties being properties of something, generating the idea of free-floating properties, does not seem attractive. 

Perhaps what is motivating this line of thought is the idea, oft expressed by McGilchrist, that once the integrity of the world is compromised, it cannot be joined back together. A line is not composed of dots or points. Once decomposed into its components, the line cannot be reassembled. The right hemisphere deals with our direct intuitions of reality and Gestalts. The left hemisphere then treats aspects of that Gestalt as objects for pragmatic purposes. The objects are then products of a manipulative stance and are abstract representations, not the world itself. Hence, it makes no sense to ask how many objects are there in the world, especially since the world can be divided up any number of ways. But, if we accept that experience is partial and represents an interpretation of reality, those interpretations can be perfectly valid. “The right hemisphere unites its fundamental Gestalt perception with the left hemisphere’s secondary representation in particular forms.” That seems like a less extreme formulation than “there are no things.”

Admittedly, there is something ugly about the word “thing.” It seems ripe for being exploited, perhaps dehumanized, and also for being discarded. So, there is a reason to reject it, but it might be nice to have a near synonym that could perform much of the same function. For instance, an “item” of experience has no strongly negative associations, one would think.

Elsewhere, it is stated that the universe is discretized enough to create individuals, while continuous enough to be ultimately unified. And the discrete emerges out of continuity. That all seems fine. David Tong notes that reality is continuous, so attempts to digitally model it will fail, which brings us back to circles not being composed of small tangents, and digital music only ever approximating analog sound. Quantum field theory matches this point of view the best, with particles emerging out of the field, rather than particles being fundamental, though these particles have no known location in time and space nor a definitive velocity. Wave forms collapse into particles when we interact with them. Wolfgang Smith sees this quantum realm as mere potential actualized in the corporeal, which he regards as the most fundamentally real, whereas McGilchrist seems to prefer thinking that the potential has more reality than the merely actual.

Chapter 25 – Matter and Consciousness

In a podcast interview, Noam Chomsky noted that consciousness is something with which we are all familiar. In that sense it is not mysterious. This fits Arthur Eddington’s claim that “Our bodies are more mysterious than our minds.” However, when thirty different scientists were asked what a particle was, they all gave different answers. “Materialism derives the only thing we undeniably know, the concreteness of experience, from an unknown abstraction: matter.” Thanks to the scientific worldview, intellectuals often act like matter is perfectly understood and commonsensical, while consciousness is inexplicable. Lucretius was the first to claim that the material universe gives rise to mind. McGilchrist notes just how unintelligible that assertion is. Mind is so different from matter, with no extension in space and being completely intangible, the claim does not really make sense. If, instead, the physical universe is the product of mind then there is no fine-tuning problem – with the tiniest deviations from the four main forces in the universe making life and the universe impossible – and no need to posit the abominable “multiverse” theory for which there is not the slightest piece of evidence. It has the characteristics of beauty, order, and complexity because those are components of the consciousness it is attuned to and we have those properties of the universe since it gave rise to us. The existence of DNA stops being so inexplicable too. On this view, mind is fundamental, and the physical is a special aspect of mind. Consciousness collapses the wave function creating the actual world out of mere potentialities. The physical offers resistance like the stone in a river that creates eddies and vortices. Movement and flow continues but with temporary forms appearing within the stream. Matter cycles in and out of us, but our form persists. As we zoom in on an atom, the atom appears clear but actually becomes less in focus as we get closer.

McGilchrist adopts something like the transmission theory of mind, but with the brain playing an active role in consciousness, permitting and excluding as it sees fit. He does not attempt to define consciousness other than having to do with awareness and he notes that only a small portion of what we are becomes the subject of active reflection. Much of our interaction with the world is pre-cognitive or non-cognitive, with embodied skills guiding our movements. Many of those skills will have been conscious at some point, but then become automatic. But, others, like understanding the emotional expression of other people, or recognizing faces, have never been conscious. We just do it. The results inform our experiences pre-consciously. “Consciousness fades into sub-consciousness and beyond that we must postulate something indefinite but yet continuous with our mental nature,” wrote Eddington. Philosophers like Hubert Dreyfuss and Martin Heidegger emphasize that our connection with the world is not theoretical nor the product of reflection. Active awareness intervenes when the hammer breaks, but a tool is simply grabbed and used when things are going as they should. Positing separation from the world in need of theoretical connection is a losing game. We are already in the world, moving through it, and occasionally stopping to try to make sense of things. In playing a church organ, no attention is paid directly to the hands and feet, but to the music on the page and the quality of the sounds produced. Memorizing music has the advantage of focusing attention on the emotional expressiveness of what one is playing. Your body goes along for the ride. One’s movements are clearly intentional, but the movements themselves are done relatively automatically.

Shrödinger notes that consciousness is the ground on which we stand in our search and exploration of the universe and so is excluded from our purview. Mind is omitted from our conceptual creation.

McGilchrist notes a conundrum where things become more mechanical in biology as one descends the order of complexity, from frog, to bacteria, to DNA, but the reverse is true in physics where atoms are relatively mechanical seeming, electrons less so, and at the quantum level events cannot be separated from the consciousness of the observer. In theistic terms, this would be consistent with God as Alpha and Omega, the ground of being and the destiny of creation. Electrons choose between quantum states. We call this “chance” or “randomness.” This is a fundamental flaw with the physics point of view. It has no category called “freedom.” No wonder physicists cannot find it.

Heraclitus, the philosopher of flow and change, is quoted again as saying all things are full of soul and mind is common to all things. Physics provides the mathematical structure of the world, but excludes its qualitative substance. Though, since the time of Galileo and Locke, objective reality has been deemed to be the merely quantitative, mind has the key role in measurement. Matter is a field that interacts with consciousness, not mechanically, but perhaps through the observer and the observed system becoming entangled in consciousness. Top-down causation seems proved beyond doubt in the form of placebos and nocebos, hypnosis, and cognitive therapy.

McGilchrist covers much of the same ground discussed in Consciousness, where he notes that single cells exhibit all sorts of intelligent and seemingly conscious phenomena. It is possible to be of above normal intelligence with 95% of your brain missing – throwing into question just how necessary brains really are – and plants exhibit intelligence. Plants and all cells can be “put to sleep” in the sense of anesthesia, they can decide that something is not a threat, and trees actively search for food and water – listening for the sound of running water and slowly moving their roots in that direction. And, pea plants can learn to associate wind from a fan with light such that they will turn to face the wind in expectation of light also appearing. Trees will send sap to each other when in need and warn other trees that a giraffe is feeding on them. Terminal lucidity and near death experiences all throw doubt on the idea of consciousness being dependent on the physical. Since organisms are not made of any special stuff, all of reality must be a combination of the physical and nonphysical.

Brains seem to have some connection to the emergence of higher consciousness. McGilchrist speculates that it might have something to do with entanglement. The brain also filters out memories. We could not think if we could not forget. Everything would be present at once. Those near to death in dying and drowning are flooded with memories, with the filter breaking down. It should be noted, however, that this phenomenon can occur when one merely thinks one is about to die, as a car starts to skid towards the edge of a bridge or cliff. Relatedly, brain injury can result in increased memory retrieval.

McGilchrist has the right hemisphere presenting aspects of Being by not saying no, and then the left hemisphere permitting or excluding the right hemisphere by deciding whether to represent what it is presented with or not. This seems comparable to Aristotle’s passive nous – a stream of perceptions – that is either ignored or attended to by “active” nous. The feel of the socks on your feet is there waiting to be noticed, but mostly it will be ignored.

Schelling’s metaphysics is appealed to again, and it is argued that purpose has to be intrinsic to Nature and cannot be imported from a watchmaker God who is omniscient and omnipotent. “The key point is that the ground of consciousness has given rise to something other than itself wholly out of itself, that is nonetheless not wholly determined by the ground of consciousness.” “There is an element that cannot in the nature of things be predicted: there is room for Freedom.” Dostoevsky seems to argue that if God did not exist it would be necessary to invent him and that freedom is central to human existence. Berdyaev appeals to Jacob Boehme’s notion of the Ungrund, the causeless cause, and the source of Freedom to account for God’s nature and our own. God the person is seen as emerging from the Ungrund, but that we too have the Ungrund within us. It is intrinsically inscrutable and mysterious and works in cooperation with our personality, character, life experience and choices to permit creativity which is necessary for all organisms to react spontaneously and non-mechanistically to unpredictable phenomena. Under this conception, God voluntarily limits his omniscience and omnipotence to make sure he does not violate free will, and to make all creation likewise creative; creativity and compulsion being mutually exclusive.

McGilchrist recommends that we start with the whole, then divide it into parts when necessary. He writes that the right hemisphere is like a field of potential in which things remain fluid, non-localized, implicit, and interconnected. If your picture of reality is fragmented, then that is the path your consciousness will tend to take. The right hemisphere presences and the left hemisphere breaks into things. Our intuitions come from the right hemisphere and they are more important and fundamental than our ability to argue, prove, or put into words.

Chapter 26 – Value

Value is discovered in the encounter of life with whatever exists. It is not some extraneous imposition on the world disclosed by science. Science cannot see value, so it does not to regard value as constitutive of reality. Yet, science depends on the value of truth – a value that it cannot explain or defend. Truth is an act of devotion and faithfulness to whatever is. Science without a love of truth is nothing. Because the other values; goodness and beauty, are excluded from its purview, science tends to degrade whatever it touches because it reduces things like beauty or morality to their utility.

Kant was arguably right that the best argument for God’s existence is the argument from morality. We know with our heads, chests and stomachs that good and evil exist, and they cannot exist in a purely materialistic universe. We all know that we have made moral mistakes and we have seen others doing evil things, and good things. The existence of evil, even more than good, proves the reality of God. A universe where value does not exist, also cannot have evil. We know that reciprocity is true – that one good turn deserves another – so value, and moral values, exist. Therefore, so does a spiritual realm of some kind.

The pursuit of truth is a most beautiful thing and gives life meaning. The German writer Lessing wrote that given the choice between possessing all truth and striving for it, he would choose the latter.

On the other hand, psychopaths lie on principle, gratuitously. Any values other than instrumentality are perceived through the right hemisphere and psychopaths have severely dysfunctional right hemispheres. Psychopaths lack love, and love and value are mutually dependent. We love what we value, and value what we love. The philosopher loves wisdom, and wisdom is bound up with knowledge, emotion, action. To perceive the truth, one needs love and sympathy for the subject matter. To try to see from the outside, a tendency in the Western perspective, gives contemplation an alien coldness.

Darwin, Freud, and Marx – a triumvirate of noxious influences, lacked love, and thus truth. Darwin commented that his mind seemed to him to have become a kind of machine for grinding out laws and that a scientific man ought to have no wishes or affections, but a heart of stone. Freud despised his clients; whom he regarded as a rabble fit only for their financial support and case-studies. Marx looked upon the working class as troglodytes; a view modern descendants of Marx have now openly averred.

Pascal, St Augustine, St Anselm and Nietzsche all emphasized that love is the path to knowledge; of divine things, of truth in general. We understand a piece of music through loving it. Not loving it means having a positive bias against it.

The right hemisphere perceives value as intrinsic to the universe. The value of a situation is present pre-cognitively as part of the Gestalt. Right hemisphere damage leads to a utilitarian attitude; reduced aversion to harming others, higher psychoticism, reduced empathy and emotional blunting, a greater sense of the meaningless of life, a greater Machiavellianism and the behavior typical of the psychopath and schizophrenic.

Right hemisphere moral intuitions evolved in the context of real life. Far-fetched scenarios like the Trolley Problem that involve elements of omniscience, like knowing the exact consequences of our actions in advance, simply confuse us, as is frequently the intention of those who teach it, leading to skepticism concerning the reliability of moral intuitions. 

It is in this chapter that McGilchrist notes the negative moral effects of believing in determinism, leading to “an increase in antisocial attitudes and behaviors, increases in deceitfulness, aggressive behavior, selfishness, lower achievement levels and increased susceptibility to addiction.” What else can one expect from a philosophy of despair? A similar cynical belief that people are exclusively motivated by self-interest also produces negative results, with worse health outcomes, worse psychological well-being, and poorer economic consequences. It was a view promoted by many philosophers in the 19^th century and economists in the 20^th century – sometimes known as “rational egoism.” Some of those philosophers were literally autistic such as Bentham. Any smartish sensitive adolescent should be able to see how inadequate that is. And, in fact, cynicism is a defensive mechanism of the stupid; trust almost no one. Being intellectually and emotionally stunted makes it hard to judge the reliability of other people and to read their intentions and character from their faces. This results in low social trust. High social trust, until recently prevalent in first world countries, is made possible by being good at knowing who to trust and who not to.

Altruism is found in the animal kingdom. If a monkey sees that another monkey gets an electric shock every time the first monkey eats, it will rather starve for days. If a rat sees another rat caught in a trap it will try to free it, even if this means it will have to share the nearby food. It will not first eat the food and then engage in altruism. Chimpanzees spend enormous amounts of time grooming each other to promote social harmony and connection, not antisocial fighting. Interestingly, they literally kiss and makeup when they do have disputes. (See Mama’s Last Hug by Frans De Waal). It stands to reason that human beings should also be capable of not just looking out for number one.

McGilchrist attacks Joshua Greene, who richly deserves it. Greene explicitly wanted to break down morality to brain processes in order to get rid of the notion of a soul. He thought that the fact that our moral reasoning can be influenced by electromagnetic impulses on the surface of the brain proved something significant. We have already seen with the poison tea scenario that transcranial stimulation, first inhibiting one hemisphere then the other, can have an effect on moral reasoning. Inhibiting the right hemisphere leads to making the wrong moral inferences. This in no way means that morality is merely a brain process. One could similarly interfere with someone’s vocal cords and alter their speech. This would not mean that speech originates in the throat instead of the mind.

As outlined in “Darwin vs Morality,” Greene notes that thinking about imaginary altruism (a hypothetical donation to charity) excites the pleasure center. Greene then contends that the pleasure center is making it fun to pretend to be altruistic – reversing the order of causation. We get pleasure from activities we enjoy for their own sake. In fact, the thinking element in his experiment is excluded entirely from his further analysis because it is not visible and cannot be measured. Thinking as the cause of the pleasure is simply missing from his further analysis.

McGilchrist notes Greene’s surprise to discover that the default mode for most people is honesty, not Machiavellian scheming. It takes an effort to lie for all but psychopaths. Those who are cynical about human motives are on average dumber, as seen above, earn less and have trouble cooperating.

Aristotle’s ethics are situational and concrete. What one should do depends on the exact circumstance and the people involved. Trying to reduce morality to rules does not work, partly because rules conflict with each other. Deciding which one should prevail will again depend on circumstance. Big abstract schemes to supposedly improve humanity are antihuman and sacrificial. Abstraction is a left hemisphere phenomenon and thus will inevitably take an instrumental approach that treats human beings as numbers in a calculation with some being expendable. These “noble” motives lie behind atheistic totalitarian regimes, religious extremism, and social justice activism. It turns out that these modes of thought are typical of schizoids, as outlined by Ernst Kretschmer in 1921. He found that they seek the theoretical amelioration of mankind, doctrinaire rules for life, the betterment of the world and the model education of their own children, and altruistic self-sacrifice for general impersonal ideals, like socialism or teetotalism, which all sounds eminently salient at this moment in time. However, the majority of the modern fanatics who think along these lines these days virtue signal their way to social prestige rather than doing anything self-sacrificial and are thus even worse!

After truth and goodness comes beauty. Much of modernity since the twentieth century has been explicitly anti-beauty. Modern architects want monuments to their ego and originality, rather than buildings that contribute to the overall beauty of the surrounding area, blending in in a prosocial manner. Students tend to imagine that people merely have differing conceptions of beauty, not knowing that beauty itself has often been maligned in the past one hundred years. This is because beauty is not consistent with egalitarian leveling impulses since it suggests a hierarchy with beauty above the ugly. In fact, pervasive ugliness has been a relatively recent invention coming into being around 1830. Before that there was Nature, which tends to be inherently beautiful, and man-made things which we used to try to make beautiful, as can be seen even in early flint tools. Evolution can make use of beauty, but to do that, beauty must exist. We find that birds and bees share our aesthetic sensibilities. Male birds that attract mates through their beauty, we find beautiful too. Many of the flowers that bees are attracted to, we also are drawn to. Darwin frequently refers to beauty in The Origin of the Species and even more in The Descent of Man. Ugliness is an externalization of the left hemisphere; parts, utility, and not Gestalts.

It should be noted that the pursuit of beauty can end up being destructive if truth and goodness are not taken into account. Also, that beauty cannot be made explicit. It cannot be defined and it is appreciated by the right hemisphere, with its mostly wordless, intuitive, implicit, and emotion-perceiving nature. The explicit and abstracting nature of criticism tends to destroy it. Beauty is an intrinsic value free from the goal-directed, manipulation-oriented left hemisphere. Beauty has links to the imagination. Without that, Emerson argued, something could only be pretty, elegant, or graceful.

The right hemisphere is attuned to reality and to this aspect of reality, a “constitutive element of the cosmos,” beauty. The Golden Ratio is an element in beauty, found in Greek, Roman, Japanese, Chinese and Indian civilizations. Symmetry is important too – though slight deviations from symmetry are preferred in the human face even when greater symmetry is recognized as advertising health. The Japanese will intentionally introduce imperfections and asymmetry as a sign of the organic versus the mechanical, and to excite a melancholy and spiritual longing. In fact, a preference for simple symmetry is associated with poor mental health – namely, among the schizophrenic, autistic and anorexic. The Enlightenment championed symmetry in particular, suggesting that there was something pathological about it.

Photographers know that early morning and later afternoon light is more beautiful than the glare of the midday sun. Beauty needs contrast and shadows, connecting it again with the mysterious right hemisphere versus the light of day of the left hemisphere.

Chapter 27 – Purpose, Life, and the Nature of the Cosmos

Much of modern science has been devoted to removing the notion of purpose and teleology from the world. However, organisms, in particular, cannot be understood without these concepts. Right at the core of Darwinism is the will to survive and reproduce. These are purposes subsuming many other behaviors and activities. Purpose in molecular biology can only be seen at scale. Focusing too closely only reveals mechanism. McGilchrist points out that an overarching teleology can contain elements of determinism when considered as short chains. But, there is also the undetermined and random which provide an opportunity for organismic agents to purposefully choose, bearing in mind that science has no category for freedom, which it can only deem chance or randomness. Karl Popper wrote that selection may be between random events without itself being random. The random exist because most things are orderly. With too much order, purpose cannot express itself. With too much chaos, there is no structure in which purpose can be expressed. When cells are under threat, they can seemingly randomly reorganize their DNA in order to introduce capabilities that might be able to deal with the stressful situation in a process of transposition. This happened with maize plants subjected to radiation. However, the location of the alterations in the gene is not random. So, here we have an intentional and purposeful use of randomness.

The purpose of the universe seems to be intrinsic and it is to engage in extravagant creativity, complexity, order, and beauty. The fine-tuning argument suggests some kind of mind guiding the choice of forces and thus purpose since those forces have to be exactly what they are for the universe as we know it to exist. In response, cosmologists have invented the unprovable notion of the multiverse where every kind of universe exists, including those in which structure and life are impossible, mostly to eliminate what would otherwise look like purpose, in a kind of intelligent design. The multiverse theory actually gets rid of the notion of probability since the chances of something happening become 100% in some universe or other. Probability could only exist from the point of view of an observer in one of these universes. A marvelous rejoinder is that if every possibility gets realized, and one possibility is that the universe has intrinsic purpose, then that universe too must exist.

Machines are given extrinsic purposes from a designer. Organisms have their own intrinsic purposes. The false starts and dead ends of nature are consistent with purpose. Writing a poem, for instance, consists of doing exactly that – revisions and emendations being par for the course. Evolution means a spinning out of properties latent within where potential becomes actual. For Newton, probabilities were related to uncertainty in knowledge. For quantum theory, uncertainty lies in the world itself and is connected to potential realized by observers.

McGilchrist notes a puzzle as to why organisms evolved that had shorter life spans with lower survival prospects. A tree can live thousands of years. Some bacteria (actinobacteria) live for over a million years using DNA repair. Humans, however, live for just a few decades. This apparent backwards step seems related to the abundant, creative, extravagant tendencies of nature where Occam’s Razor cannot be found, and to the principle of plenitude is that everything that can exist should exist.

The immune system and the suppression of cancer are things that can only be understood teleologically. Multicellular organisms require cells to self-destruct in the interests of the larger organism, including white blood cells. Dividing cells are at times selected for cancerous changes where cooperation ceases and the “host” is targeted for exploitation. Immune, nervous, and hormonal systems had to evolve to stop this. These systems themselves are subject to a loss of function from cumulative damage and neoplastic evolution, and yet the system does not “collapse into a chaos of smaller, faster replicating, mutually exploiting purposeless entities.” Teleology is either built into the cell’s structure or as a field acting on the form of the whole.

Near the end of the chapter are two choice quotations. One from Whitehead, “Scientists animated by the purpose of proving that they are purposeless constitute an interesting subject of study.” And another from Thomas Nagel, “Evolutionary naturalism implies not taking any of our convictions seriously, including the scientific worldview on which evolutionary naturalism depends.” Nagel is referring to the permanent reflexive problems plaguing materialist philosophers and scientists. Determinism is the denial of consciousness for a start, and yet the theory of determinism exists in consciousness. Secondly, if our beliefs and desires are the product of random or mindless physical forces, then so is the belief that our beliefs and desires are such a product. The more we insist that blind physical forces are all there is, the more we undermine any grounds for taking this claim seriously.

Chapter 28 – The Sense of the Sacred

The left hemisphere conception of the world dominates modern thinking. The left hemisphere deals with the explicit, what can be articulated, and the explained. Most of reality is implicit, mysterious, cannot be put into words, and is inexplicable. What cannot be expressed and pointed at can be forgotten. Context, also, cannot be seen. It is as though we have our faces smushed up against the glass and need to take several steps backward to see what is going on. Specialists are idiots, as noted by Mircea Eliade. Generalists take what the specialists have learned and attempt to give it meaning. And meaning is derived from looking at things in context and noting the connections. Religion involves worship, song, ritual, devotion and otherwise remembering what is forgotten in a narrowly pragmatic left hemisphere vision. The Tao, Li, God, Brahman, Logos, Allah, YHWH are “unwords” with no clear meaning that are placeholders for mystery. The attempt to explain or articulate them should be resisted. If one chooses to say something about them, Gnomic utterances are appropriate since they simply reiterate the opaqueness. This is connected to the fact that there is more to mind than conscious awareness. Mind is undergirded by intuition, the unconscious, emotion and embodied wisdom. Animism, seen among hunter gatherers, is our natural and instinctive tendency and it provides a proper existential stance. God is known more by heart and soul than intellect. Like most other things, right hemisphere intuition provides the materials for left hemisphere analysis, should analysis be desire.

Religion is not a discredited theory. It is a disposition, not a doctrine. God is a name for the mystery, not an explanation. Without mystery, we would not do science since all would be clear and understood. But, we have to remember that sciences discover what they logically presuppose. Being restricted to third person, repeatable, measurable observations reduces science to examining and revealing a tiny subset of reality.

The materialist view of things leaves us with useless “stuff.” The universe as a junk box. The spiritual conception sees the world as sacred, divine, informed by the Logos, expressed by Mythos which subsumes the Logos, filled with value, wonder, and mystery. Only such a conception of reality provides the basis for moral realism. Human life, at least, being sacred is the ultimate ground of “Though shalt not kill.” Left hemisphere consequentialism, on the other hand, is nihilistic and just ignores morality rather than fulfilling it. The laws of nature are observed regularities, but do not cause anything and the fine-tuned universe is a hand grenade for smug serial debunkers and cynics, not to mention something emerging from nothing with the Big Bang.

The universe has an order and harmony and man is both an aspect of this and has a reflection of it within him. Plato described love as a divine madness and love enables us to see. We can come to know and understand that which is not foreign to us, not alienated, and not rejected. Intuition, feeling, heart leads to insight – including the insights of the great physicists who tend to be mystics.

Greek and Roman myths had hubris as a common theme: men imagining themselves to be gods and wanting to challenge them. Conversely, wonder requires humility, the Socrates who knows he knows nothing. The more advanced civilization gets, the more we imagine we know, and the more that wonder declines. We forget the infinity of what we do not know, in focusing on the speck that we do. And without wonder, one cannot cherish. “Mankind will perish for lack of appreciation rather than knowledge.”

There are two choice quotations from Meister Eckhart; “The intellect peeps in and ransacks every corner of the Godhead,” and “The intellect forces its way in and is dissatisfied with the wisdom and goodness of truth or God Himself…it is as dissatisfied with God as with a stone or tree.” Curiosity is not wonder and without it, God is invisible. We explain the obscure with the familiar, but nothing is like God, and so he escapes and rejects exegesis. We cannot know God in words, but we can intuit his existence and open ourselves to Him.

Words are paradoxical. Polish philosopher Leszek Kolakowski notes that “the adjective ‘concrete’ is abstract,” “the adjective ‘unique’ is general,” “the adjective ‘incommunicable’ is communicable,” and “to say the word ‘intuition’ is not an act of intuition.” That is why the un-words are necessary and the path to their referents is through music, worship, and ritual, not thought.

McGilchrist emphasizes God as a Becoming, the world as flow and process, and the world, those aspects of God that get actualized. Whitehead writes, “What is done in the world is transformed into a reality in heaven, and the reality in heaven passes back into the world.” God is the companion who suffers along with us. The movement is analogous to right hemisphere to left hemisphere to right hemisphere. The Gestalt, the whole, is articulated, made concrete, realized, and then absorbed back into the whole, with the whole enriched. Music, once created, with its realized possibilities, then provides new material and inspiration for new possibilities of music. Possibilities require imagination for their realization, together with the Ungrund – the nothing that yearns for something. The musician, artist, philosopher, physicist, reaches into the unknown and pulls out something in line with their own temperaments, tastes, influences, and characters. Despite contributing to the rise of quantum mechanics, Einstein spent much of his life rejecting and questioning it. It did not suit his preferences. Other imaginative physicists were needed.

McGilchrist compares God to light. Light cannot itself be seen; only the objects that light reflects off. The created world reflects God, but God remains invisible. Just as an organ is needed to see the world, so one is needed to feel God. “God in the depths of us receives the God who comes to us.” God creates by withdrawing and providing space. He provides freedom by choosing not to know. Without the womb, a space for growing and developing; without forgetting, the universe has no room for growth and becoming. It would be a useless, static, block universe. This kind of power is permissive. The vocal cords restrict the air and creates our unique voice. The brain selects the capacities it will develop and that which it will ignore, and shapes our unique consciousness. An omniscient, omnipresent, omnipotent God does not have this permissive quality. Limitation is needed for Being. Not just yes, but no. God must say “yes,” to “no.” Negation can be creative. “If you are already everything, everywhere, always, then there is nowhere to go and nothing to be,” with the consequence that, “Everything that could be already is and everything that could happen already has.” Just as freedom and creativity require a standing back, so to do “music, art, humor, poems, sex, love, metaphors, myth, religion, meaning, [which] are all nullified by attempts to make them explicit.” 

Religious dogmatism takes tentative faith and hope with its accompanying doubt and turns it into the light of day of the left hemisphere, destroying the religious impulse. Literalism is anti-religious. McGilchrist notes that Sam Harris and Richard Dawkins prefer the fundamentalist to the apophatic theologians because atheism and fundamentalism share a dogmatic claim to know for sure. It can also be pointed out that fundamentalism and literalism are easier to attack, being the most puerile and simple-minded versions of theism. The principle of charity says to attack the strongest version of an argument, the best interpretation, not the weakest. Fundamentalism is a left hemisphere travesty of religion. The need for certainty is a mental imbalance and there is no point in debating such people. As Francis Bacon said, “A little philosophy inclineth men’s mind to atheism but depth in philosophy bringeth men’s minds about to religion.” Certainty and philosophy are inherently opposed to each other. Certainty cannot exist with wonder and philosophy is only the study of the controversial, with which certainty is inconsistent.

Dawkins sees apophatic theologians as “desperate.” But, they existed right from near the beginning of Christianity (Second century AD), and were not fighting atheists. Argue with Origen and Nicholas of Cusa if you want to avoid the strawman fallacy (but Dawkins always resorts to strawmen and is a rather uneducated intellectual on matters outside his own field).

George Steiner saw atheism as a substitute theology. “The political and philosophic history of the West during the past 150 years can be understood as a series of attempts – more or less conscious, systematic, violent – to fill the central emptiness left by the erosion of theology.” Children are naturally religious, regardless of upbringing. A religious sensibility is instinctive but can be suppressed by the intellect. These days, higher IQ people are less likely to be religious partly for that reason, with the autistic being the worst in that regard, being ten times less likely to believe in God; arguably because they cannot sense Him with their overly dominant left hemispheres. But, smart people also know on which side their bread is buttered, and they know that atheism and “being smart” are currently considered linked. Yet, man is not a machine because machines cannot love. David Bentley Hart offers a choice between human consciousness being “an anomalous tenant of an alien universe,” or, “The most concentrated and luminous expression of nature’s deepest essence.” 

From McGilchrist: “According to Goethe (and Plotinus before him), aspects of the world call forth in us, if we are open and attentive, the faculties that are needed to respond to them. The faculty to perceive the divine is no exception. Indeed, that faculty is what is meant by soul. Soul does not exclude feeling or intellect or imagination, but it is not exhausted by them. Though natural, it can be developed or stunted… We grow a soul – or we can snuff it out.” Culture should aid this process through archetypal symbols, rituals, music and holy words. Joseph Campbell’s Hero With a Thousand Faces, not Sam Harris’ Atheist Manifesto. Our current culture is running on the fumes of religion and it has created its own bastardized religion promoted by the elite, complete with dogma, magic words and utterances, and excommunication for the heretical. Lust, greed, pride, power-seeking, are now frequently shamelessly condoned or even admired. The force for good lives alongside the force for evil, which is dynamic and purposive, and the latter becomes more obvious as civilization breaks down. Ugliness and evil must exist for beauty and goodness to stand out, and because love can only exist if not-love and hate are possible. God renounces the power to stamp out the latter in the name of freedom.

McGilchrist argues that the tree of knowledge provided knowledge of the useful and not useful – the left hemisphere criterion of evaluation. Utility then becomes the good, alienating us from wonder, mystery, and thus God. But, this is not so bad because, “A world alienated and then reunited with God is superior to a world that had never been alienated and divided at all.” (1303) Again, this mirrors the right hemisphere – left hemisphere – right hemisphere dynamic.

McGilchrist ends with a reference to an Iroquois myth about “He Who Grasps the Sky With Two Hands,” who effectively represents the right hemisphere, and Flint, who is remarkably consistent with the left hemisphere. He Who Grasps remembers his divine origins, whereas Flint is actively content with forgetting them, saying that it is sufficient to him that he has arrived in this place. The right hemisphere is creative and the left hemisphere receptive. The latter only becomes evil when it thinks it is equal to the creative. Creative energy is always active and unfolding in the universe and the right hemisphere is aligned with it. Flint’s desire for control and usurpation makes him hate He Who Grasps. Flint can only create monsters. He Who Grasps creates creatures with minds of their own with his own consciousness, blood, and breath. He warns of Flint’s desire to control all minds. The left hemisphere types assert determinism and claim to be happy in their chains and to see no logical contradiction in thinking that they have made up their own minds on the topic. Since the left hemisphere is fundamentally unproductive and can only analyze, unable to see the big picture and unable to create, it seethes in anger and resentment at right hemisphere’s claims of freedom, of being the generator of insight and new ideas, and of connection to divinity. “You obscurantist, imagination-loving, God-bothering, deluded fool!” Yet, it is the schizophrenics and autistic, with limited access to the right hemisphere intuiting of reality, who hallucinate, break things into chunks, lose their sense of smoothly moving time, insist on certainty in an uncertain world, and who assert that multiple copies of themselves and others exist simultaneously.

Epilogue

The archetypal man; the one evolution has selected; the one best suited to the natural environment; the one harsh Darwinian conditions and high mortality salience creates, is healthy in mind and body. He is moderately conservative, religious and wants to have children. He is high in agreeableness and so cares about his neighbors and his community. He will be reasonably ethnocentric and prefer the language, traditions, and history of his own group and will be willing to defend it from outsiders. He will be conscientious, and thus interested in rule-following, doing things properly for their own sake, and in preserving order. As a conservative, he will value loyalty, deference to authority, and holiness, along with equality and harm avoidance – liberals chiefly embracing only the last two, as pointed out by Jonathan Haidt. Like Charles Murray, McGilchrist notes that those who both believe in God and who go to church, who thus have a community of faith, are the happiest, healthiest, best adjusted, and live the longest. Loneliness, self-centeredness, and nihilism do not a happy person make. Most people have around fifteen people, friends and relatives that they care a lot about, while the religious have forty-five; three times as many.

Some thoughtful, interesting atheists, like Scott Adams, Nassim Nicholas Taleb, or John Gray, admire and appreciate theism and theists. In Antifragile, Taleb refers to “skeptical fideists” as being mentally well-situated. They are skeptical, not of God, but of man’s ability to understand everything; to predict everything. Believing in God means accepting mystery, avoiding hubris, and recognizing the limits to rational thought. Antifragile is about trying to make sensible decisions in an environment you cannot control, and should not control, and an unpredictable future, using positive optionality. McGilchrist notes the economists who try to model and monitor financial markets to stop them from crashing, who just make things worse, a point Taleb hammers. The chairman of the Federal Reserve gets alarmed by variations in the market, takes steps to iron out natural variations, and thus kills the patient. Tying someone to a chair so he cannot move will prevent spikes in heartbeat and blood pressure, while also setting him up for a massive heart attack through his inactivity. Ruthlessly suppressing political dissent will produce the appearance of calm, while setting up the conditions for a violent uprising filled with resentment and anger. Stopping the lid on a pot of boiling water from bouncing around releasing steam will produce apparent calm and the conditions for a loud explosion. Alarmism and fear can prevent the natural variations, the unexpected, the challenging, and stress that are needed for health. Antifragile systems, such as organisms and the economy, benefit from stress and uncertainty. They actually need them in moderate levels. Those with unnaturally dyed hair tend to be neurotic and thus scared of the world and want to be protected. They want power to control this threatening world. They want safe-spaces to avoid any ideas they find unnerving. This, of course, simply makes them even more neurotic and fragile. The immune system needs challenges to maintain itself and so do people.

Harsh Darwinian conditions meant that fifty percent of children died. While sad and brutal, the healthy in mind and body were selected for, and thus, religiosity, agreeableness, conscientiousness, and generally the prosocial personality traits, and also physical health. At one point, you would have to survive smallpox to continue on to have children. McGilchrist laments the fading away of the religious sensibility. Some of this is cultural, but some of it will be spiteful mutants (those with accumulated mutations resulting in severe anti-social tendencies, and probably unattractive due to poor genetic health). Religious belief is at least 50% inheritable, and autistic people are ten times less religious than the non-autistic. Autism and schizophrenia, in fact, any deviation from a healthy, well-developed brain, will result in brain dysfunction. The proper brain has the right hemisphere as dominant, and the left hemisphere as subservient. Brain pathology will upset this balance no matter the cause, just as having a stroke or some other severe illness is likely to affect one’s gait. A limping gait reflects something having gone wrong, and a left hemisphere dominance represents a crippled brain and mind with flow on effects for a culture.

So, it is particularly galling when Western civilization actually celebrates and promotes left hemisphere dominance and pathology. Analytic philosophy is a particularly revolting instance of this. Its heroes include the autistic René Descartes, Jeremy Bentham, and Bertrand Russell. Studying analytic philosophy is an exercise in simulating brain damage. It sucks all the meaning and life out of whatever it examines and assumes, without argument, the most extreme materialism. If anyone studies “philosophy of mind” hoping to understand more about minds, he is out of luck. Instead, he is introduced to things like thought experiments about the occupants of China holding up semaphore flags in a way that is supposed to simulate brain function. It is the kind of thinking that simply makes you stupider and contributes to understanding less.

The great physicists tended to be religious and mystics. They, by definition, were creative and imaginative and they made their contributions through insight, not merely logical and sequential reasoning. Modern physicists seem more likely to be atheists and to believe that mechanism rules all and progress in physics has essentially stopped, though other factors are probably contributing to that too, such as a decline in IQ due to high IQ ceasing to have babies in any numbers, and an increasing hostility to the genius temperament in an academic world ruled by a feminine emphasis on congeniality and avoiding hurt feelings; geniuses tending to have near-psychopath levels of antisocial personality traits necessary to overturn the apple cart.

McGilchrist writes that the “essence of Taoism is to refine the conscious mind and reunite it with the original spirit.” The conscious mind is to be the servant of the original mind and the latter is the right hemisphere, the feeling, intuiting self where humor, metaphor, emotional understanding, poetry, creativity, imagination, problem solving, and insight, reside. Those are the things that make us the most human and distinguish us from mere computation and robots. Religion, with its worship, song, rituals, and poetry is an attempt to remember these factors; that keep us human and that ween us from a philistine pragmatism. The more we denigrate the right hemisphere and idolize the left hemisphere with its love of mere utility, the more inhuman we become. The left hemisphere is narrowly rationalistic; loves rules and certainty and is completely amoral – taking consequences as the summum bonum of “moral” reasoning.

We evolved to be at one with nature, which we instinctively treat animistically. We feel comforted by trees and landscapes and so hang pictures of them on our walls to reduce dysphoria. We create traditions which embody successful trial and error. Modernity has made scientific and technological progress, but has misunderstood man and the world, meaning we no longer know who we are or what we are doing. Recently, in an exchange on Facebook, someone had written that “religion stymies progress.” I replied that denying God results in nihilism. The atheistic regimes of the twentieth century, fascism and communism, far from ushering in a new period of enlightenment and human flourishing, generated the biggest mass murders humanity has ever seen, done with bureaucratic efficiency, using many of the techniques of the left hemisphere. There can be no naturalistic basis for morality, which cannot function without a notion of the holy and sacred (intrinsic inviolable value), so that without religion, whatever remnants of morality that remain are baseless. We are running on the fumes of past religions. We cannot live without myths and stories, so we just create new much worse ones. Someone responded, “That’s all very well, and represent a positive boon from religion, but we must reject magic in favor of logic.” The fact that that “logic” led to mass murder and undermines even the possibility of morality is apparently just the price we must pay for “progress.” Such thinking is dogmatic and puritanical. The “magic” we must eliminate from the world in this case is anything the rationalistic left hemisphere does not understand. The analytic philosopher says, “If I cannot understand it, it does not exist.” This incomprehension includes free will and whatever it is that makes living organisms different from inanimate objects. Only the right hemisphere deals with animate things. Left hemisphere logic treats all things, and all people, as though they were inanimate things to be manipulated to rationally determined ends.

McGilchrist quotes the messages at Delphi, “Know thyself,” and “Nothing in excess.” The latter is not just about moderation in one’s own living, implying good impulse control, but also applies to principles. Any principle taken too far flips into the very thing you are trying to avoid. Bureaucrats, like chief diversity officers, employed to combat racism, simply pit the races against each other, increasing racial animosity, and engage in antiwhite racism. In order to fight discrimination, one must engage in more discrimination against whites, they contend. This goes along with McGilchrist’s comment that the left hemisphere solution to the problems it creates, is to claim that it has not gone far enough. But, it is not logical to be too logical. Classic Star Trek consistently pointed out the limitations of Spock’s rationalism, with Bones the doctor trying to humanize him with an emotional input, and Captain Kirk’s action-oriented emphasis. People have pointed out that this turns the triumvirate into a psychodrama with three different parts of one person being personified. Classic science fiction is theological, raising right hemisphere issues and promoting a sense of wonder.

The managerial class approaches everything rationalistically and has no room for the unmeasurable and intuited. Its hubris creates disasters in education, healthcare and government. Believing you have all the answers morally, as opposed to epistemic humility, has led to the idea that it is OK to suppress dissent, certainty being a left hemisphere pathology.

Aristotle promoted eudaimonia as the human goal, meaning to flourish, which is a right hemisphere conception. Modernity has substituted left hemisphere hedonic happiness for this which is pretty much “anything that stimulates the pleasure center is good.” This is self-centered and narcissistic, neither of which is consistent with human happiness. As autonomy, fluid roles for men and women, a reduction in inequalities of power and structured codes of behavior, have all increased, so has human misery. The countries with the “best” metrics on these items have the highest rates of suicide and depression. “Satisfaction and happiness ratings in all modern societies that have been researched have declined as they became more prosperous and ‘Westernized.’” Women’s happiness declined between 1970 and 2005 both absolutely and relative to men, with female suicide going up abruptly for women between 10 and 24 years old.

Transcendental values, tradition, inherited beliefs are rejected as irrational. Every social structure is attacked as embodying oppression and a humorless puritanism stalks the earth. We have fantasies of achieving godlike power and creating artificial general intelligence, while seeing actual holiness as a trick by deceiving clerics. An actual love for God and the divine contributed to some of the most beautiful buildings ever created; frequently the most beautiful architecture in any given city. A love for the rational and logical generated Brutalism, and Corbusier’s “machines for living” that actual people hated. We need a connection to nature and to God, not a hellscape resembling the dystopian warnings of Zemyatin’s We.

The Matter With Things
By Ian McGilchrist
London: Perspectiva, 2021; 1500pp.

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