Iain McGilchrist on Determinism

The bottom line on determinism is that were it to be true, we could never know it was true because we would not be conscious – or, if we had some aspect of consciousness like bare awareness, all we could do would be to observe what was happening with no ability to alter it. Determinism and agency do not mix. The fact that so many otherwise academically proficient people (one hesitates to call them smart) at least pretend not to understand the ramifications of determinism is bewildering and depressing. We cannot read each other’s minds, so unless someone confesses, we will never know exactly what is going on; assuming people even know why they are adopting the view. Is it a “I believe because it’s absurd” test of one’s scientistic credentials? A shibboleth and dividing line differentiating true believers from the rest?

Owen Barfield suggests that the Alpha Thinking of Onlooker Consciousness prevalent in modernity lacks a reflexive dimension. Any notion of rationality goes out the window under the mechanistic vision of determinism which forces someone to think a certain way and come to particular conclusions without regard to truth or persuasion. A brute mechanical force cannot know the truth. If such forces are instead guided by minds that know and can pursue the good, the true, and the beautiful, then physical determinism is false. We are living in an idealist version of reality, not materialist.

If a determinist is pressed sufficiently forcefully and for long enough, often he openly concedes that the concept of persuasion is meaningless on his view. In some cases, the person goes on to argue his point, clearly still trying to convince his interlocutor, in an example of a performative contradiction. That kind of contradiction analytic philosophers and other scientistic types, do not seem to mind because the contradiction is not on the page, but in the nexus between word and deed. The phrase was never even used in my twelve years of formal philosophical education.

Instead of attacking the logical incoherence of determinism, Iain McGilchrist goes about dismantling the basis for it. The standard argument for determinism is very simple and can be stated in minutes, possibly seconds. Determinists typically claim that anything that happens is the result of chains of cause and effect that, ultimately, go back to the Big Bang, or whenever the universe is supposed to have come into being. McGilchrist sees this concept of “chains of cause and effect” to be a product of a left hemisphere approach to topics.

Some people who have not kept up with the topic of hemispheric differentiation might be put off at this point. With his highly regarded books The Master and His Emissary and now the 1500 page two-volume work The Matter With Things, McGilchrist, carefully basing his assertions on scientific studies and first-hand experience as a psychiatrist and medical researcher, has single-handedly given the topic of brain lateralization a credibility in the academic community that has nothing to do with the ridiculous popularizations that appear on Facebook pages or some YouTube videos. He has been interviewed on all sorts of serious highly regarded podcasts. John Cleese has taken a particular interest in his writings and there have been a series of videos available on YouTube where they converse on the topic. Cleese is very much aware of performative contradictions and reflexivity and made a delightful video parodying scientists who attribute particular beliefs to specific parts of the brain and/or brain mechanisms, such as a belief in God, building up to the moment where the scientist points to the region of the brain responsible for pointing to regions of the brain and attributing to them the power to form particular beliefs. If a belief in God is merely the mindless, unthinking product of a brain mechanism, then so is the habit of attributing beliefs to brain mechanisms. The video is called, simply, The Scientist. Anecdotally, a professor of engineering who had not been particularly taken with McGilchrist’s views, changed his mind upon viewing the McGilchrist/Cleese exchanges. They had a bigger effect on him than reading The Master and His Emissary.

McGilchrist was made a Fellow of All Souls College, Oxford in his twenties. Only two fellows are selected each year and have no teaching obligations. While a fellow, McGilchrist decided he wanted to investigate brain science and went on to get a medical degree and to become a psychiatrist. This gave him first-hand experience of patients with brain deficits that reveal what those parts of the brain were contributing to consciousness, among other things. He was a consulting psychiatrist at Bethlem Royal and Maudsley NHS Trust in London, which is the most senior medical doctor responsible for leading the diagnosis, treatment, and management of complex psychiatric conditions. He worked in the Epilepsy Unit, the National Psychosis Referral Unit and the National Eating Disorder Unit and he became the clinical director of Acute Mental Health Services for the Bethlem Royal and Maudsley NHS Trust in London. He brings this background to his philosophical writings.

Rather than only working as a psychiatrist, applying the results of other’s investigations, he has also worked as a medical researcher himself in the areas of neuroimaging and schizophrenia. He has published on these topics, and on philosophical phenomenology, in the British Journal of Psychiatry, the American Journal of Psychiatry, Dialogues in Clinical Neuroscience and the British Medical Journal.

His qualifications and background are relevant given brain lateralization’s poor reputation among many, with phrases like someone being “left brained” being bandied about. And, there is a certain amount of appeal to authority of the non-fallacious kind involved in reading him. He does have critics, but he shows in one or two chapters in The Matter With Things that they do things like cite studies that actually show the opposite of what they are being used to support. Evidence of brain lateralization includes disease, such as brain tumors, brain damage, MRIs and so on. The different personalities and behaviors of the hemispheres were revealed when surgeons started cutting the corpus collosum that connects the two sides as a last ditch attempt to save the lives of epilepsy patients. Starting around 1940 and revived in the early 1960s, it provided the basis for split-brain research.

Key to McGilchrist’s arguments against determinism are two competing visions about the nature of the physical world in which we live. Metaphorically, one can be called digital while the other is analog. Digital music approximates sound waves by sampling the sound waves at various points. But, no matter how many times it is sampled, the resulting sound wave will still be made up of individual pieces. Increasing the sampling rate and interpolating extra signal between the samples will increase the fidelity to the analogue soundwave, but the result never reaches the level of the unbroken flow of the original. Similarly, it is possible to produce something looking superficially like circles or curves that are actually made up of tiny straight lines. Jason Padgett started producing such drawings after a brain trauma, inspired by mathematical equations. His right hemisphere would become nearly completely inactive when he did so.

McGilchrist is emphatic that reality; time and space, is analog. Standard determinism relies on a false picture of the way things are that are artefacts of the way scientists measure time and space rather than the underlying phenomena being measured. Right hemisphere experience of the actual world around us must not be confused with left hemisphere analysis. The latter fractures what should be whole and leads to this notion of “chains of causation” upon which determinism as a philosophical position often depends. The concept of chains of causation breaks the world into pieces; individual causes leading to individual effects, which become the cause of some new effect. This is to imagine a herky jerky, stopping and starting in the manner of stop action film making. No matter how many tiny causes and effects are postulated the view remains digital.

To explain this further, right and left hemispheric differences need to be explored. Human beings, and many other animals, need two contradictory and disparate forms of consciousness simultaneously. One is broad situational awareness that is open-minded about possibly threats. The other is narrow focus often associated with the grasping right hand and utility. A bird on the ground needs to concentrate on finding seeds or worms, while also being generally aware of any threats that might appear. Humans demonstrate these same abilities. The right hemisphere provides situational awareness and also our general intuitive connection to reality, while the left hemisphere provides a narrow focus related to the practical purposes of the organism, such as getting food. Since these modes of consciousness are incompatible, the brain has distributed them to different hemispheres. These two things are then, normally, blended together into a seamless whole. When this breaks down in psychiatric disorders, certain diseases, brain damage, congenital and otherwise, and also in transcranial stimulation for experimental purposes, the different contributions of the hemispheres are revealed.

For optimal functioning, the right hemisphere with its intuitive awareness of the world around us, its ability to process the emotions being expressed by others, and its problem-solving capacities needs to be dominant. The left hemisphere works like a kind of computer and vehicle of analysis to be used by the dominant right. Brain disorders, by definition, harm normal and optimal functioning of the brain and are thus likely to interfere with right hemisphere dominance, just as any pathology of the legs might produce a limp, regardless of the precise cause. This means that people with, for instance, autism and those with schizophrenia share a suboptimal left-hemisphere emphasis despite the two conditions otherwise having their own distinct pathologies.

The right hemisphere is strongly associated with the experiencing self. It is more in tune with context – the background relative to things brought to the fore. Purpose determines what will be foregrounded out of the broader range of possible things. Background is inherently mysterious and vague; a sea of possibilities. If someone were asked to itemize each object in a room, he would need to know for what purpose. There is no abstractly “correct” way to do it. Is it furniture you are concerned with? Each screw and nail in the furniture? Or, is one’s interest in single-celled organisms, or sub-atomic particles?

McGilchrist uses music as a way to demonstrate the ways in which left hemisphere analysis can be useless or destructive. A melody consists of notes and rhythm. If one zeroes in (narrow focus) on the individual notes, then melody and rhythm are lost. Melody consists in the relationship between the notes – the musical context. The previous notes are held in memory as one listens to the unfolding of the melody. Continuity is key. Meaning is a matter of connections to context and the context involves the other notes, among other things, like familiarity with that style or genre of music. Analytic philosophy, metaphorically at least, has this tendency to want to zoom in on the individual note, either ignoring the melody or denying it exists. For instance, it takes a Socratic argument out of context to examine its logical structure without considering the larger rhetorical setting. Socrates will sometimes employ the rhetorical tricks of a sophist, someone trained in rhetoric, when confronted by someone arguing in bad faith. Or, analytic philosophers might claim that consciousness is “really” an amalgam of different brain processes, as though the parts have some priority over the whole. Peter Kivy, an analytic philosopher, wrote a book called Music Alone that was supposed to be about the meaning of music but he specifically exempted from examination any mention of extramusical items, including, the person hearing the music and what he might be bringing to the experience. Needless to say, he concluded that music was meaningless.

McGilchrist points to Zeno’s paradoxes as a way of examining left hemisphere thinking gone wrong that directly relates to the errors of determinism. His analysis aims to show that there are no “instants” of time; nor is a line composed of an infinite number of points. “The slicing of motion or time produces stasis” (George Melhuish). Thinking otherwise is what leads to the absurdities that Zeno identifies. It should be noted that Zeno wanted his readers to reject his paradoxes in favor of the claim of his master Parmenides, that change is impossible. Zeno was trying to create a reductio ad absurdum. If someone thinks change is real, then he must also accept that these other things are true; an arrow never reaches its target, the tortoise always beats Achilles in a race if the tortoise gets a head start, no matter how small, and, a person sitting in a chair can never leave the room (commonly mentioned in relation to the canonical paradoxes). According to Zeno, to reject the paradoxes is to reject the claim that change is real, because believing the latter entails the former.

What Zeno actually shows, however, is that continuity cannot be composed of discrete elements of time and space, even if there is an infinity of them. The most famous paradox is that for an arrow to hit its target, it must first reach the half-way point, and then half-way between that point and the target, and half-way between that, and so on. It will need to pass through an infinite number of such points which would take an infinite amount of time and the arrow will never reach its goal.

However, McGilchrist points out, what counts as half-way is retrospective, not prospective. The completed act must already be posited to identify a half-way point. Secondly, the structure of the paradox imagines the arrow frozen in time at this half-way point. But, the arrow is actually traveling in a continuous movement in time. And the distance between the arrow and its target does not consist of mathematical points. That distance, in fact, time and space in general, is also continuous. Mathematical points have no thickness. A line is not made of them because it would have no length. An abstract moment in time has no duration. As soon as thickness or duration are postulated then it is no longer a mathematical point or abstract moment in time, and there would be no “infinity” of them to traverse. Freezing the arrow midway exists only in imagination, and produces stasis, not motion.

Time is duration, and this reality is experienced by the right hemisphere. The left hemisphere measurement of time; in seconds, minutes, and hours, is “digital” and does not reflect the nature of time. Time does not come in pieces like this. These units of measurement are left hemisphere creations used for practical purposes, but they misrepresent reality if they are thought to be the way things actually are. Likewise, lines in mathematics are not made up of mathematical points. The latter have no length or volume. They take up no space. They are dimensionless. If a point had length, then it would be a segment, not a point.

Schizophrenic patients, with their right hemisphere deficits, often do not and cannot experience time as duration. They experience it in chunks. Continuity is lost. If someone is wearing a hat in the morning and not in the afternoon, that person might be regarded as a new person at this later part of the day. Their inability to see gestalts can mean that instead of recognizing someone instantly by looking at their face as a whole, they try to identify someone by focusing just on his nose, or some other body part. What should be intuitive instantaneous recognition turns into a puzzle to be solved by looking at the pieces.

We know in advance that Zeno’s paradoxes must involve error. We know that arrows do hit their target. This calls for diagnosis as to what has gone wrong and the answer is that the categories of the left hemisphere have instrumental purposes but that confusing the map with the terrain will lead to absurdities.

McGilchrist, like a lot of philosophers, is a fan of Heraclitus. Heraclitus emphasizes change, comparing reality to rivers and fire. It is not possible to step into the same river twice because the stepper is different and the water is, too. It is the nature of all reality to admit of alterations. Mountains grow and erode, galaxies form and then disintegrate, the cosmos itself emerges and then subsides. Stasis is an illusion involving short time scales. McGilchrist sees vortices in moving water as a good analogy with objects; temporary structures in a constantly moving whole. In quantum field theory, space is a property of quantum fields and vacuums are filled with energy. “Form names the eddy in the stream that has a continuous, changing, energetic, existence.”

McGilchrist illustrates this idea with The Ship of Theseus, often given as an example of an imponderable. If all the planks of wood out of which the ship is made were slowly replaced, is it still the same ship once this has occurred? McGilchrist answers, yes. Change is the nature of things. There is continuity among the changes, so it remains the same ship. However, if all the planks were replaced at once, you could build another ship with those planks. Which ship would then be the real or original one? Replacing all the planks in one go would disrupt the continuity of the ship, destroying it. Likewise, all living things are killed if their integrity is violated like that. Flow is key. The arrow flows through time and through space hitting its target. The idea of “chains of cause and effect” segments time and space in the same manner, making the same mistakes that Zeno exploits for his paradoxes.

Causation as a topic is thus absolutely central to arguments for determinism. Arguably, the Aristotelian concept of causation is much more sophisticated, comprehensive in nature, and conceptually adequate than the modern stripped-down version, which represents just one of his kinds of causation. Aristotle noted four kinds of causation. With regard to a house, we have the formal cause (blueprints), the material cause (wood, bricks), the efficient cause (builders) and the final cause (shelter for humans). He argued that the final cause was the most important because without it no one would bother collecting the materials, drawing up the blueprint, or hiring the builders. For some reason, moderns have decided to focus only on the proximate efficient cause. This might be because since the scientific revolution, scientists have tended to want to remove purpose from their description of reality. The Greek word for purpose is “telos:” “end,” “goal,” as in a means to an end, which is the root of the word, “teleology.”

Whitehead suggested that a focus on the organism rather than the mechanical would help philosophizing and, McGilchrist suggests, the topic of determinism. An organism has purposes. Conscious awareness requires obstacles and purposes are a response to these, designed to bypass impediments. If all desires were instantly satisfied, nothing would reach awareness. Consciousness requires friction. Rupert Sheldrake describes purposes and goals as backwards causation – the future pulling something or someone towards it, like a gravity well. The destination exists ahead of you in time. Some elements of behavior are fixed, like needing to eat, shelter, warmth, and sex. Others are described as “orienting,” which are flexible means to achieve these ends. A goose rolls its egg back into the nest, but, being oval, each push must be a little different, as required by the final goal. Mud wasps will improvise ways to fix scientist-created damage to the mud funnel leading to their underground nests that would never naturally occur. There can be no evolutionarily-derived automatism slowly developed for this specific eventuality. The damage and the wasp’s response are novel in both cases. Since the mud is incredibly slippery, even for the mud wasp, it has a particular difficulty. Its solution is to build another funnel over the hole resulting in a funnel on a funnel.

Rolling an egg and intelligently responding to damage to funnels are not examples of “pattern recognition.” There is no pattern yet. The response is not derived from accumulated similar experiences. Any creative response to a novel circumstance can retrospectively be described as an algorithm – a set of step-by-step instructions. But, there is no algorithm prior to the encountered problem and its solution. Daniel Dennett, who has much to say about determinism, makes patterns and pattern recognition central to his accounts of consciousness and brain function, but they do not apply to these orienting situations. In the rolling the egg example, there cannot be an algorithm even retrospectively. Differences in the terrain and the exact shape of the egg will require goal-directed behavior in each instance.

Embryo development is also goal-driven, not merely mechanical. Tadpoles whose development have been compromised, again by those pesky scientists, can find ways to produce the goal of a healthy frog but in ways that are unlike normal development.

With regard to human beings, the language of “organism” is still a bit reductive and demeaning, but it is a huge improvement over the human as a machine metaphor. People as existing in the metaxy – the middle space between beasts and the divine – is a better description still.

Physical determinists think of all causation as being mechanical. Spiritual or divine determinism is different – Calvinists believe that God determines all, with children being born saved or damned in advance and negate free will in that manner. That is a separate issue. Physical determinism is related to the scientific revolution and the conception of all things being material. In physical determinism, historically, all events have been thought of as the result of prior events in a chain of causation. McGilchrist has two lines of attack on this conception. One is that “chains of causation” as a concept involves breaking reality into pieces, into chunks, in the manner of a schizophrenic patient, as has been described. The other is to reintroduce purpose to describe much of our behavior.

Human behavior is not the result of “chains of causation” with each event necessarily leading to the next event given the laws of physics. Even single-celled organisms respond intelligently to events in their environments in a goal-driven manner. For instance, when under extreme stress, cells will use a process called transposition to chop up their DNA and reconstruct it in an attempt to reproduce. This involves a kind of educated guess at problem solving. This was first recorded by Barbara McClintock who bombarded maize cells with radiation, breaking up the DNA strands, that would have prevented the cells from reproducing if they had not responded with transposition. Cells will also extract genetic material from another cell, living or dead, animal or plant, in order to gain a new ability, such as bacteria trying to survive the onslaught of an antibiotic in a process called horizontal gene transfer. Both transposition and horizontal gene transfer result in significant alterations to the cells in minutes or hours, not the huge periods of time normally thought necessary for evolution.

Like these cells, human consciousness is purpose-driven. It needs to exist in order to be able to improvise in complex situations and that includes social interactions. Even if we lived in a deterministic universe, the universe is too complicated for us to know how events will unfold, so we would still need to improvise. Not being omniscient requires us to be free and creative. Our responses must be purposive, not random. Predators have to figure out how to capture something that is trying to evade its grasp. Their actions are not a series of jerks; from A to B to C to D. Jerk A is not causing jerk B. It is one continuous movement as the prospective food tries to get out of the way and the animal chases it. The movement of organisms to their goals is fluid. The need for food is a fixed requirement. How food is obtained involves orienting behaviors. With humans, even what we eat and how we prepare it is subject to a huge variety.

McGilchrist likes a book called Madness and Modernity by Louis A. Sass that compares the left hemisphere domination of much of culture, particularly after the Enlightenment, more appropriately called the Endarkenment, with many psychiatric conditions. The left hemisphere is relatively robotic. Once a novel skill is mastered, it can be passed off to the left hemisphere to be undertaken without much thinking.

Continuous time and continuous space do not generate Zeno’s paradoxes. And organismic behavior is not a series of jerks, of the stops and starts of “chains of causation” referred to by determinists. This behavior is purposive; the future drawing it forward, not a mechanical pushing from behind. The latter concept simply cannot be used to make sense of goal-driven behavior. Scientists found it convenient to focus on the mechanical rather than teleology in physics, but teleology remains inextricably tied to the study of biology. Why flowers are heliotropic, why larger organisms need lungs and hearts, cannot be omitted. We think it is quaint that Aristotle claimed that heavy objects aim to rest on their proper place at the center of the earth, something we now attribute to gravity – albeit having little idea what gravity really is – something that should stop us from being too smug. But, Aristotle’s concept of four kinds of causation is a richer one than our focus on efficient causes. Final causes – the reason we do the things we do – the goal we hope to achieve, is a crucial concept for understanding organisms and certainly much of human behavior, and frequently how to achieve this goal must be improvised.

Apparently, some relatively modern determinists or compatibilists embrace the notion of flow and continuous fields, both electromagnetic and quantum, and think that causation is a law-governed flow of the whole state through time as described by equations. However, this does not work if a future goal is governing behavior. A law governed flow would be inexorable. Goal attainment has to be flexible.

For the flow determinist, there is a mathematically determined unfolding of the entire system’s configuration. The future state depends on the whole current state. There is then a deterministic flow. But, the notion of “the whole current state” determining the future state still involves a snapshot in time and thus stasis; the view criticized in explaining the Zeno’s arrow paradox. There is no “time at t¹” in actuality. Once the organism and its actions is divided up into “whole current states” frozen in time, then we have something like a chain of causation again and unfolding would mean that the destination is already contained in the enfolded. There is also no room for purposes, reasons or agency on this continuous field view. Continuous holistic dynamics governed by equations still involves a fixed trajectory.

McGilchrist’s discussion of determinism removes chains of cause and effect as the basis for believing in it and explains the errors involved in Zeno’s paradoxes, which is very welcome indeed for those of us who were unable to refute them while being fully aware that they must be wrong.

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