https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=0Zld-MX11lA
Hello. If you have found the ideas I discuss interesting and useful, perhaps you might consider purchasing my recently released book, Beyond Order, 12 More Rules for Life, available from Penguin Random House in print or audio format. You could use the links we provide below or buy through Amazon or at your local bookstore. This new book, Beyond Order, provides what I hope is a productive and interesting walk through ideas that are both philosophically and sometimes spiritually meaningful, as well as being immediately implementable and practical. Beyond Order can be read and understood on its own, but also builds on the concepts that I developed in my previous books, 12 Rules for Life and before that, Maps of Meaning. Thanks for listening and enjoy the podcast. I’m pleased today to be talking to Dr. Ian McGilchrist. I met him in 2018 in London and we had the good fortune to have a relatively brief conversation, which was taped and put on YouTube and it was very productive. And so now I get to talk to him again and hopefully for a longer period of time. Ian is a psychiatrist. Dr. McGilchrist is a psychologist, a psychiatrist, a former fellow of All Souls College, Oxford, an associate fellow of Green Templeton College, Oxford. He’s lectured all over the world. He’s published a number of scientific papers He’s most well known for his book, The Master and His Emissary. And I think you have a copy of that. I asked you to get that so that you can show people. The Master and His Emissary, The Divided Brain in the Making of the Western World, which is an analysis of hemispheric specialization and its philosophical and scientific significance. And he’s working on a new book, which I have and have started to read a long ways into it at the moment called The Matter of Things, which will be forthcoming at some point in the future and will shape some of our discussion today. He’s published broadly, scientifically and publicly, a study of paintings on of subjects with psychotic illnesses that’s coming out, I believe. I’m planning that. And also forthcoming a series of essays about culture and the brain. So welcome. Thank you very much for agreeing to talk to me. It’s a huge pleasure, Jordan. Thank you very much. So one of the things I was rereading the introduction to your new book this morning, and I was struck by many different topics, but I was particularly interested in your conception of attention. And so you talk about attention as something that in some sense brings things into being. I don’t think that’s a misreading of your writing. And maybe I could get you to expound on that a bit and to tell me what you think attention is, because I’ve had a hell of a time differentiating it from, well, from fluid intelligence, for example, or from consciousness. It’s a word that makes sense when you hear it in the context of a bunch of other words, but when you extract it out from that context and try to grip it, it falls apart in your grasp. So I think one could say that attention is the way in which the individual disposes his or her attention. It’s a disposition of one’s consciousness. So attention is how you dispose your consciousness towards the world. When I discovered when I was researching The Master and His Hematry, the book that’s now ten years old, I came across this fascinating thing that one of the most fundamental differences between the hemispheres is their way of attending. And it didn’t entirely hit me at the time how important it is. But we can talk about that later. But you were asking the rather sort of interesting philosophical question about how attention helps to bring things into being. And I think it does both generally and rather particularly in a very particular sense in the left hemisphere. Generally, what I mean is that how you attend to the world depends on that, depends what world you find. The qualities of the world that comes to your attention is determined by the quality of the attention you bring to it. And. So that’s a very significant, that’s a very significant statement. I was talking to someone the other day who’s somewhat theologically minded, and he was also very interested in the role that attention played on in constituting the world. I mean, you pay attention to things that you value one way or another. And what that means is that the world tends to manifest itself in relationship to your value structure. And that’s a very troublesome idea, in some sense, with regards to our conceptions of the objective world, because it’s not easy to parse out what’s objective when what manifests itself to you is dependent in large part on what you value. It’s very complicated to sort that all out. Well, possibly very much later, we can come to the question of what objective and subjective mean and how one can. I think it’s a mistaken dichotomy. I think one can interpret the words in important ways that give them meaning. But I think to think of just being an objective world out there and a subjective world in here is one of the problems with modern Western philosophy. But to come back to the creation of the world, I was going to say that not only does it sort of bring into the world, the world that you know, which is after all, by definition, the only world you will ever know, but it also changes who you are. So the quality of the attention you pay changes you, the attender. So it’s a very profound difference. And in the first book, The Master and His Embassy, one of the things I was expounding was how this business of attention creates a whole distinct world. So the hemispheres have evolved to two different sets of values. You mentioned values, and it’s very germane. They have different reasons for existing and therefore have different things they respond to. And what I have tried to explain in that book is that this gives rise to a whole way of seeing the world in a whole world, which is not just for the individual, but also, at times, it becomes the way of looking at the world for a whole culture. Because because we as individuals never entirely distinct from our culture, we are partly created by our culture and make it what it is. So it’s a very fundamental thing. Well, you take pains in The Master and His Emissary to promote the idea or to call attention to the idea that something extremely mysterious is going on in relationship to hemispheric specialization. So it’s a very ancient phenomenon. Yes, many creatures or most creatures with developed nervous systems have a bifurcated brain. And the hemispheres differ substantially in terms of their neuroanatomical structure. And the question arises, why is it necessary, assuming that that differentiation of structure reflects some profound differentiation of function, why is it necessary to look at the world, so to speak, in two ways? And why is it so necessary that that bifurcation is conserved across evolutionary history? You’d think that one way would be sufficient, but it doesn’t seem to be. And so the first question is, why do you have to look at the world in two ways? And the next question might be, well, what are those two ways? One of the things you outlined that’s particularly fascinating to me is that the right hemisphere seems to be specialized more for what you don’t know, whereas the left hemisphere is specialized more for what you do know. And I’ve sort of defined knowing pragmatically, you know something if you undertake an action and the outcome is what you specified, and you don’t know something if you undertake an action and the outcome is other than what you specified. And that sort of reflects that novelty organization division that was Goldberg, I believe, that originated that, the neuropsychologist. Well, Jordan, you’ve raised a whole bunch of points there, so I need a little bit of time to explain that. First of all, every neural network that we know of is asymmetrical, going down to the very most basic network that we know and the most ancient one that we know. Nematostella vectensis, a sea anemone that is 700 million years old, is already asymmetrical in its neural network, and that’s the earliest neural network we know of. And it’s true of insects, it’s true of worms, it’s true of, you know, all the way up to human beings. And the three questions that really got me going on this was, if the brain is there for making connections and its power is largely lies in the question, the connections it can make, why is it divided down the middle? Whoppingly divided, I mean, most people don’t realize quite how big this differentiation is, if they haven’t actually seen a brain. The second thing is, why is it asymmetrical? Because if you just need to grow this brain, you’d grow it symmetrically, the skull that contains it is symmetrical. And the third thing is, why is the connection, the principal connection between the two hemispheres at the base of the hemispheres, the corpus callosum, why is it at least as much, if not more, in the service of inhibition than facilitation? So it’s as though there’s something really important about keeping two things apart. Now, my hypothesis, and it’s just that, is that this results from something that all creatures need to do. All creatures without exception need to eat and not be eaten. They need to live and to manipulate their environment, to get food, to catch something, to pick something up quickly, deftly, to pick up a twig, to build a nest. In other words, for all the kind of day-to-day stuff, food, shelter, they need to be able to manipulate the world very precisely. But at the same time, they must pay a precisely opposite kind of attention, which is sustained, vigilant, open without presupposition as to what it may find. And so, on the whole, the way in which this has been addressed by evolution is that there are two neuronal masses that can direct attention at the world. And the left hemisphere tends to specialize in targeted, precise attention, and the right hemisphere in a much broader, vigilant kind of attention, which actually sustains the being of the world. Nothing about these tiny fragments that are isolated, disconnected, meaningless, gives you any idea of their meaning. It’s only when you see the broad picture and you understand that they’re not actually things that go to be put together to make that broad picture, but are things that are isolated out of an already connected picture. So, that’s the basis of that. I just wanted to pick up your thing about, because I don’t think it’s quite right to say that the left hemisphere is about what you know, and the right is about what you don’t know. Somebody, I can’t remember who, some philosopher said that knowledge is what we’re uncertain of. The things we’re certain of are things that we don’t really know properly. I think there’s a good deal of truth in that. The left hemisphere tends to jump to conclusions. It’s much more quick and dirty than the right hemisphere. The right hemisphere is the one that says, hang on, wait a moment, you may be getting this wrong, because it wants to get things quickly. Its job is to manipulate, its job is to get, it’s to catch, it’s to grab stuff. It’s the one that controls the right hand that does all the grabbing. So, the left hemisphere tends to prize certainty, and it’s very uncomfortable when there’s ambivalence. Whereas the right hemisphere… Well, there’s ambivalence, you can’t act. Exactly. Whereas the right hemisphere seems to appreciate the possibility that we have to hold multiple views, multiple possibilities together. So, it has a quite different take on reality. It’s more interested in discovery and exploration rather than capture. The left hemisphere is more interested in capturing a thing that it thinks it knows, often not in any deep way. It’s just identified an object it needs. But to understand things, the right hemisphere is better. The idea of the master and the emissary is… I won’t go through the myth of it, I’ve explained it so many times, but the basic idea is that the master, the right hemisphere, knows that it needs an emissary to do the sort of functional administration work. So, it’s aware that the stuff that it mustn’t get involved with and that it can’t know. Whereas the left hemisphere knows everything, as it were, in its eyes, because it only knows a tiny bit, which is explicit. And, you know, there it is in broad daylight, down in black and white, no shades of meaning, no nuances, nothing implicit about it. So, it thinks it knows it. And if you like, the downfall of the left hemisphere, and therefore, if I would go of the society, the civilization, as it once was, that we belong to, is that the left hemisphere doesn’t know what it is it doesn’t know. It’s, you know, you know the famous thing the Dunning-Kruger effect, that the more you know, the more you think you don’t know, and the people who know least think they know everything. It’s a little… that’s not quite fair, but there’s something of that about it, yeah. But can I pick up something that I touched on earlier? We were talking about creating the world through attention, and I think that is true. And there’s a very big question there about what I mean by that. Do I mean just, as you say, subjectively or objectively? And maybe we should part that for the moment, but I don’t mean either in a very simple way. But what is fascinating is that the right hemisphere, as I say, knows that there are things that it’s not aware of. But the left hemisphere seems to take the attitude that if it’s not attending to it, it doesn’t exist. This is very dramatic in clinical neurology. So, people who’ve had a right hemisphere stroke, they not only, as it were, don’t now pay attention to something, but they deny that that thing ever existed. There’s wonderful, you know, very rich accounts of patients. One of the ones that I really like is an experiment done by, who was it, Biziyak and Lutzati, I think, back in the late 1970s, where they got a couple of highly educated people with right hemisphere strokes. And they were in Milan at the time. And they said, you know, these people lived in Milan. And they said, imagine you’re standing in the Piazza del Duomo in front of the cathedral and looking at the square. Describe all the buildings in the square. And they would describe only the ones on the right side that the left hemisphere only pays attention to. Whereas, you know, but I need to say for the viewers, that the right hemisphere pays attention to both halves of the world. So, when you have a left hemisphere stroke, the world is relatively preserved globally. But after a right hemisphere stroke, you’re only relying on this left hemisphere. It’s interested in the bit of space which it can manipulate, the bit on the right. So, they named the buildings down the right-hand side of the view of the square they had then. And then the experimenters asked them to go to the other end of the square and look at the cathedral facade and name the buildings. And this time, they named all the ones down the other side of the square, but didn’t mention any of the ones they’d just mentioned. So, there’s something, it’s been commented by one philosopher that it’s almost like there’s an ontological landslide. Things come in and out of existence for the left hemisphere. And when it was pointed out to these people what they’d missed, they became angry, irritable, and frustrated, which is a typical left hemisphere emotional town. Impatient to dismiss this. So, I think that’s intriguing. I mean, it’s just one image. I mean, the very dramatic one is to do with denying that you have parts of the body. And as was pointed out by Pritz Langeler, I think, way back in the second decade of the 20th century, they don’t only deny after a right hemisphere stroke that they have the left half of the body, which is not functioning because of the right hemisphere stroke. They will become very irritable if questions are asked about it, or they will just go blank. I mean, they will be talking perfectly coherently, and then they’re asked about that, and they will go, or they will become very irritated. And if you force them to recognize that they have a body on that side, although they’re perfectly intelligent people, they know they must always have had a left half of their body, they will deny it. And he says it’s as though they never had a left half of the body. It’s not only that it’s not there now, it never was for them, and never will be. Now, that’s what I mean when I say that there are different levels of creativity of the world, or the creation of the world through attention, I should say, in the two hemispheres. Now, you’re in your new book, and to some degree in The Master and His Emissary, you’re also making, you’re mixing your neurological analysis with philosophical speculation, and you’re trying to solve a problem. So maybe you could tell us what the problem is, and then we can discuss the solution. Well, I suppose the problem is the one that I mentioned, that there was a puzzle about why brains are set up in this rather odd way. But you’re also pointing to a kind of philosophical malaise, right? So there’s a conceptual problem, but also an emotional or broad scale philosophical problem. There is indeed, and indeed, if I may say so, the book that I hope will come out fairly soon called The Matter with Things, which is a pun on several levels, because I think it’s a critique not only of the way we think now, but of our obsession with thinking of the world as composed of things, and that only matter exists. But anyway, in that book, what I’m really trying to do is marry science and philosophy again. They never should have been separated. Science cannot properly be done by philosophy without philosophy. Many scientists and philosophers have commented on this over the years, and the divorce has been disastrous for them both. You get a mindless kind of science that jumps to very naive conclusions that everything is mechanical, and you get a kind of philosophy that thinks it’s above dirtying its hands with science. Now, I think each of these parties can benefit from a rapprochement, which is long overdue. And it’s that that I try to do in this very big book, to show how strands of neurology philosophy and physics, and even of world mythologies come together to show the same very similar pictures, the same gestalten, the same differences between a world such as the world brought into being by the left hemisphere and a world such as is brought into being by the right hemisphere. And perhaps before going on any further, you did invite me earlier to say something about what those differences are. Well, I think that’s a very interesting question. Well, to try and sum it up very quickly, what I’d say is for the left hemisphere, things are known, familiar. Literally, things that are unfamiliar are better dealt with by the right hemisphere until the left hemisphere can go, oh, I see, it’s one of those and put it in a category box. They’re more distinct. In fact, they’re probably entirely fragmentary or isolated in the left hemisphere, whereas the right hemisphere sees that nothing is ever ultimately unconnected from everything else. Things in the left hemisphere are frozen, they don’t move, they don’t change things in the right hemisphere constantly flowing and changing. Although, flowing and changing and remaining the same are not necessarily an opposition. As we know, Heraclitus, my favorite philosopher said, by changing, it remains the same, which is the image of a river, which is never ever still for a moment, but the river outside my house that was there at breakfast time is probably there now. So, in that sense, it’s remained and we’re all, I believe, like these rivers, all living beings are. In fact, probably everything that exists is as Heraclitus pointed out. And so, the left hemisphere abstracts, it tends to abstract from the body, it tends to abstract from the context. And something I learned very early on in life was the importance of context, how it utterly changes anything that somebody says or any image. And this is particularly true, of course, of literature, which I studied and taught for a certain while when I was a young man. That once you start paraphrasing a poem and taking its sentiments out of the context, they’ve utterly changed themselves and no longer what they were. The left hemisphere is more interested in categories, the right hemisphere in the unique case. So, it sees that you’re not just a member of a certain group, you tick certain boxes, you fall into that category, but that you’re massively complicatedly different. And I mean, this has a very real basis when you look at neurological patients, people who have right hemisphere strokes are examples, two I know of that both come from the same research group in Switzerland, but involve a farmer who used to know all his cows by name. And after the right hemisphere, right hemisphere right parietal stroke, he couldn’t really, well, he not only couldn’t tell his cows one from another, but he could hardly tell a cow from a horse. And another woman who very plaintively commented after right hemisphere stroke, she’d spent her whole life studying the birds of Switzerland, she was an authority on them. And she said all the birds look the same. So that’s what happens in the left hemisphere world. Quality, quality, quality, quality, quality, quality, quality is replaced by quantity, uniqueness is replaced by the category. And then again, the the left hemisphere tends to see things as inanimate, where the right hemisphere will see them as animate. Well, a category implies in some sense that the members of that category are indistinguishable, right? Because otherwise you don’t have a category, you just have particularity. And so you can imagine that, that I mean, to understand this completely, you have to understand to some degree, what categories are for, but or what, yeah, what categories are for, at least in part, you put things that you can act towards the same way in the same category. And so yes, young children might think of cats and dogs as dogs, all of them as dogs, because they’re cuddly, peddable entities. Not because they have four legs, or because they have fur, but because you interact with it the same way, then you can differentiate cats and dogs as you get a little older. But the first category dog, which is peddable things is a perfectly reasonable category. And you can imagine that once a categorical structure has been imposed, that it’s easy just to see the category. I wrote an essay in my new book, which is called Beyond Order, about the function of artists. And I believe that part of what artists do, and I think this is maybe, you can tell me, but I think it might reflect the differences that you’re talking about. When I was a kid, I lived in a small town, and I can remember all the houses on my block. I can remember them in detail. They’re familiar to me as individual entities. But now that I’m an adult, I’ve lived on this street for like 20 years, but the houses are indistinguishable to me. I can’t see them as different entities. And I think it’s because I’m so familiar with the category house, which is a practical category that I can’t see beyond the category. And it’s very efficient because I know what houses do. They sit there. You don’t have to pay attention to them. And so it’s really a useful perceptual shorthand just to see the category. But what an artist will do is take you outside the category and make you see the particulars again that you’re missing. And I guess that’s partly the context to remind you of what’s beyond what your memory forces you now to see. And is that akin to this distinction that you’re making between the left and the right? Well, it is a distinction. It’s a related distinction, but not exactly the same distinction. I mean, interestingly, it relates to the difference, a very important difference. In fact, I think probably the single most important difference of all, which doesn’t first strike people partly because they’re so used to living in a world of representations. That is the distinction between the presencing of something as it comes into being for you and your mental representation of it, which is like a caricature or a category thing or a verbal sign so that the left hemisphere’s addiction, if you’d like, to understanding things via language is very important because after all, language makes everything the same. As Nietzsche said, it makes the uncommon common because when you say somebody’s got brown hair or something, then you’ve got everything just like in a category. But when you see that person, there’s something quite different about the way their hair is and so forth. So you’d find that out if you painted it. You know, because you wouldn’t paint it with brown paint. You’d paint it with a multitude of colors if you were really looking at it. And you’d see that it wasn’t brown. And I mean, artists play with it. Was it Manet who painted the haystacks or Monet, I don’t remember, at multiple different times of the year? And the haystack, I mean, the shape was the same, but the haystack was completely different. And that’s really, in some sense, what he was portraying was the category of haystack, but the reality is extraordinarily complex. But the category seems to have functional significance. So you dump things together that you can act towards the same way. And then a word is labeled on top of that to serve as an even further compressed shorthand for that category. So you have a complex world that’s multitudinous and too complex to even see. And then there’s a perceptual act that categorizes that into like a perceptual image, house, say. And then there’s a further compression and eradication of information that enables that to be represented by a word. And now- Well, the Greek philologist Max Muller said, it’s interesting that we read encyclopedias, we have dictionaries, we read books, and we are with all these words. But none of the things that these words represents actually exists, because in the act of being represented, they are no longer the thing that was present, the very fact of representing it suddenly stops the presence of the thing. For me, this is very vivid in Wordsworth. And this comes back to some of the things you were saying about the liveliness of the childhood mind. That when he was a young man and 50 years a boy rambling in the Lake District, the world was very much still alive to him and coming into being for him. But that as a man, he went back there and as it were, couldn’t avoid seeing the landscape as, oh, a picturesque mountain, a picturesque lake, one of those, if you like. And this is what he means by the phrase, the shades of the prison house, closing round the growing boy in his intimations of immortality on the childhood. So this is from this book. There was a time when meadow, grove and stream, the earth and every common site, to me did seem appareled in celestial light, the glory and the freshness of a dream. Yes, that’s it. This is what I’m referring to. And this really is one of the more important differences. I would say probably the core difference that as it were, one world is real, vibrant, unknown in part, only known ever to a degree and ever more coming into being and ever more coming into knowledge for the right hemisphere. And for the left hemisphere, already cold, finished, known, dead, put in a book, stuffed on the shelf, filed away. And we now live so much in this virtual represented world, partly because we’re very much cut off from nature, which constantly reminds you of its vivid, uncertain liveliness. It confronts you with its audacious beauty and vitality all the time, partly because we’ve learned to cut our minds off from our bodies. And so we think in this enormously abstract way, and partly because of city life, partly because of technology, which means we interact with two dimensional screens, rather than the three dimensional depth, which is in a room when you’re with someone, which is why, as you know, and I know, because we’ve both helped patients in our time, that it’s very important to be in the room with the patient. It’s a completely different thing that happens from anything you can do on the telephone, or even like this. So part of the philosophical case that you’re making is, I believe that, while we have a terrible conundrum as human beings, we need in some sense for the purposes of efficiency to move towards the most efficient representations possible. And this has real bearing on the nature of perception itself. So I know, for example, that even in the primary visual cortex, so in principle, you know this, but I’m going to explain it for people who are listening. As the signals, as the pattern signals from your retina move back towards your brain, they move upwards, so to speak, through a hierarchy of processing units. And even at the first stages of that processing, there’s still more top down input from other brain centers than there is input from the retinal structures themselves. And so what that implies is that even at the beginnings of perception, you know, if you think about it as being built up from perceptual elements up towards the whole gestalt, which isn’t exactly accurate, but it’ll do for now, even at the beginnings of the visual process, there’s more input from what’s inside than there is from the external world, so to speak, or at least as much. And then what seems to happen as we age is that, perhaps, is that increasingly that perception becomes solipsistic. And so we’re only seeing what we know, and that’s extraordinarily efficient because it’s very hard to build up a new perception. You have to really investigate something in detail to see it anew, whereas if it’s the same old thing that you’ve seen 10,000 times, you can already use what you know. And it’s not surprising you’d be annoyed if you were forced to jump out of that, because there’s a tremendous amount of work that has to be done if you want to see something for the first time again. Well, as we both know, people would rather deny obvious truths than let go of a cherished belief. So that’s certainly right. And we don’t perceive the world in a naive way. We come to the world with our history, with our vast range of experience. And so, as you say, there’s top-down effects on the lower end of things, or the lower end of perception from higher cognitive functions. But that’s an image of something very important to the philosophy I try to put across in the matter with things, which is that in order to understand any element in experience, it’s at least as important to see what holes it goes to make up, or potentially can go to make up, as it is to see what it turns into when you break it down. In fact, often it’s not very revealing to find out what happens when you break it down. And so in a way, every- And psychology suffers from that. It’s like, psychology is a discipline that consists, at least in its present form, mostly of disparate experiments, which demonstrate very particular things about people, about how people behave in very particular circumstances. But there’s nothing, there’s very little that unites that back up to something that isn’t merely fragmentary observation. And so it’s very difficult to get a grip on. And there’s billions of potential separate observations. And they’re not that helpful in some sense. Well, it’s all part of the world picture, which from the philosophical point of view is the purpose of the long book, which I sent to you in manuscript, the matter with things. Effectively, I can state quite simply that I want to give a considered response to the philosophy of our age, which is that there is only matter and that things are understood by reducing them to their parts, and this doesn’t change them. It’s a very naive philosophy. It’s simplistic, and it’s immoral, because it changes the way we treat the world and other people and nature. It changes our idea of who we are in a very damaging way, ruling out things that other traditions have traditionally held as very powerful. And, you know, coming back to your comment about how people cling onto things that they believe, and it’s much more difficult to try and see something in a different way, especially with age. This is why, of course, most traditions of spiritual growth enjoin on the person paradoxes to see things in a completely new way that violates all the ways that they thought they knew. So I use paradox in this new book, but not in some blind way. In fact, I showed that what we mean by a paradox is that the view of the left hemisphere of something and the view taken of the right hemisphere of the same thing can never actually completely marry up. They have different qualities, and if you push the comparison or the desire to make them logically come together too far, you end up with a paradox. And this started happening, you know, early on in the ancient Greek period of philosophy with Zeno. This is where the first paradoxes come from, and I have a whole chapter on paradox, which I see is generated by the desire of the left hemisphere to say it must be this or it must be that, clinging on, preferentially, to the very fragmentary view of the left hemisphere. See, the left hemisphere is not good at understanding. That sounds a very blanket statement, and it is. But the whole of the first part of that book, the new book, is massively more thorough neuropsychology than is in the Master and His Emissary, so it’s about as thorough as I could possibly make it. And what I do is I look at the ways in which we have any chance of getting an idea of what the world is. What are the portals of entry of, if you like, information about the world to us? And I take it that they, it depends very much on our attention, how we dispose our attention, perception, the judgments we form on the basis of perception, the ways in which we apprehend what we’re dealing with rather than comprehend it, in other words, grasp it, as we say, with the right hand of the left hemisphere, take it, use it, how we understand it in terms of emotional intelligence, which is not a small thing. It’s the whole way in which we understand everything human. By emotional, I don’t mean sort of in some, you know what I mean. I’m talking about social and emotional understanding, the sort of thing that is absent in people with autism. And cognitive intelligence, this may surprise people, but all these things and creativity. So creativity, intelligence of the cognitive kind, IQ kind, emotional and social intelligence, apprehension is a separate case, I’ll come to that in a second, perception, attention, and judgment. All these are better performed by the right hemisphere. Only apprehension is better performed by the left hemisphere. So the only thing the left hemisphere is better at is getting a hold on either an idea, very precise, clear one, or on a thing that it wants to use. But all the manifold complexity which our intelligence brings to bear in order to understand the world, all of that is better done by the right hemisphere. And I can say that on the basis not just of experiments in normal subjects, but on seeing what happens when you have either left hemisphere damage or right hemisphere damage. To summarize a vast chunk of information, which I hope will be there for people to read very, very soon, to summarize that very briefly, what one would say is that when you have damage to the right hemisphere, your grasp of reality is the main thing that’s impaired. You don’t understand it, you don’t connect with it. Your ability to understand what’s going on disappears. Whereas when you have a right hemisphere, sorry, that’s when you have a right hemisphere stroke. When you have a left hemisphere stroke, the main things are you have difficulty speaking and using your right hand. They’re practically very important. But essentially the understanding of the world, the grasp of the meaning of the world, so we have to use these words, grasp, the gain of it, the overall comprehension of the world is sustained by the right hemisphere. Okay, so let me ask you a question. Sure, go ahead. All right, okay. Let me just make this point. Because I want to, people might say, well, okay, but so what? We’ve both got right and left hemispheres, so we’re not missing anything. So does it matter? Well, yes, it matters very importantly for my philosophical project. Because as I show in the second part of the book, where I look at the proper contributions to understanding made by reason, science, intuition, and imagination, what I can show is that in those attempts to grasp, we can see the world, we can see the signature of the right hemisphere or the signature of the left hemisphere on a particular model. So if we have two possible models of a certain action or an aspect of reality or space or time, which I deal with in the third part of the book, and indeed in philosophical history and in the history of physics and so on, there have tended to be opposing views of the world. Once you know how the left hemisphere sees it and how the right hemisphere tends to see things, you can see the hallmark of the left hemisphere’s understanding on a certain philosophical standpoint, on a certain scientific take of the world. And you can see the hallmark and the imprint of the right hemisphere in certain other ways of reasoning and of science and philosophy. So this is very important, because up till now, we’ve never been able to judge between these two. We’ve got A, we’ve got B, we just have to go, can’t tell, we can’t reconcile them, we can’t do without either of them. That’s true. Ultimately, that’s true. But we can get a very sharp idea, I believe now, of which of these is fallacious, which one is going to lead us down a blind alley, which one is out of touch with reality, and which one is more in touch with reality. I just wanted to say that because it’s behind the whole philosophical drift of my book, which is how do we know who we are? I asked Plotinus’s question, who are we? That’s effectively the question. What is the cosmos? What is nature? And how do we all relate? Sorry, I’ll hand over to you. No, no, that’s good. Okay, so to do something, you have to zero in on it. So let me lay something out for you. And then I’m going to ask you a specific question about it. So imagine that I’m concentrating on the computer screen, I’m attending to it, I’m writing a book. Okay, so the question might be, well, what am I doing while I’m writing that book? What is it to write that book? Well, in at the at the most focused level of my consciousness, the most focal level, that involves voluntary control of my fingers, I’m going to be typing single letters. And there are muscle movements that are associated with that. But I don’t really know what the muscle movements are. I know how to move my fingers. That’s the highest level of resolution I can manage. I can press t with my left hand and h with my right hand or and and with each with these two fingers. And so that’s sort of where the pedal hits the metal in some sense. That’s where my intent meets the world. Okay, so but I’m not typing letters. Sorry, I am typing letters. But at the same time, I’m typing words. And at the same time, I’m typing words, I’m typing phrases. And then I’m typing sentences, and I’m typing paragraphs, and I’m typing chapters, and then I’m typing books. And then the book itself is an artifact that’s nested inside higher order structures. So while I’m writing the book, but the reason I can write the book is because I’m, I’m imagining a world within which the book is nested. And so I’m focusing on something very specific, like I can’t write the book without pushing the letter t with my left index finger. But I also can’t write the book without apprehending the book as a whole. And you know, when I edit, I edit not letters, because I can spell, but I edit words, I substitute one word for another, I edit phrases, I edit sentences, I edit at the paragraph level, like all of these levels actually exist. Now, is it reasonable to suppose? So, sorry, I’m going to add one more level outside that. So you might ask, well, why am I writing a book? And it might be well, because I’m a practicing scientist. And why is that important? It’s, well, I’m a, I’m a dutiful citizen, let’s say, trying to uphold my moral responsibility. And you might say, well, why is that important? I would say, well, that’s part of my, my proper moral engagement with the world. And then I can’t go farther outside than that. Now, is it reasonable to suppose if you think about that whole structure as a kind of lens that focuses us in the world, is it reasonable to suppose that it’s the left hemisphere, so to speak, that’s concentrating on the T’s and the H’s, and that as you move up that hierarchy to broader and broader levels of conceptualization, that that, that the manner in which those higher levels are conceptualized shifts more and more to the right, or is processed more and more by the right? Is that a reasonable way of looking at it? I think you could, but I’d need to sort of gloss it a bit. And what you’ve beautifully described is what the right hemisphere knows, and which John Muir summarized by saying, if you try to get hold of any one thing and pull it, you find that it bring with it the whole of the rest of the universe. Yet that sentence you’re writing is, is informed by your personal history and the history, therefore, of your culture, and therefore, and so on and so on and so forth. So everything that has gone to make you is present in that business of the book. And so you’re not, of course, at any one time aware of more than a tiny bit. But there’s a very fallacious and superficial argument that if you’re not conscious of it, in that sense of the word conscious, then somehow you’re not doing it. But of course you are. The whole thing emanates from what I call the field of view. Now, suppose rather than, you know, we can take the example of the typing, but you wouldn’t be able to type at all if you were thinking about what your fingers were doing. And, and, you know, but nonetheless, it would be stupid to say that you’re unconscious while you’re typing. Of course you’re not unconscious. Somebody playing a Bach fugue has got to use all their fingers and their hands, you know, and their feet at the same time. And if they concentrated, they could only concentrate and focus on one finger. Of course that would stop the whole music for a start, but they’re, they’re conscious. Of course they’re just as conscious when the whole thing is happening as they are if they think about the finger and stop it. So what this illustrates is what Alfred North Whitehead was keen to point out, that as soon as we master something, we relegate it to another part of the mind that we don’t any longer have to focus on. And the focusing of tension is costly. He said it’s like cavalry charges in battle. It should only be done rarely. You need fresh horses and it comes at a high cost. So that’s a good analogy because- No, you build a, you build a little machine. The things that, the things that we do unconsciously are in no way inferior stuff. So for example, the Bach fugue is not inferior. When a surgeon is learning, he or she has to be very conscious of what he or she’s doing, the actual business of the hand cutting. But when the surgeon is very skilled, he can hum, listen to the radio chat with colleagues, and it’s all happening. Similarly, a chess player, a bad chess player has to be conscious of every move, but a really good one is not unconscious. It’s very, very highly conscious, but it’s not focused. Now, my distinction to, sorry, finally answer your question, is that, is that focused attention, this focal attention on the detail is what the left hemisphere does. It can only take in about three degrees for the attentional arc. So it’s incredibly limited. And as Whitehead says, it has its uses in an emergency, but really it’s not a satisfactory way for living. And what I think is happening is that we are now more and more saying anything that I’m not actually focusing on right now doesn’t exist. All the implicit stuff, all the unconscious stuff, all the things that go to make up the richness of our both cognitive and emotional and embodied cells isn’t really important. We focus down on this tiny bit that the relatively unintelligent left hemisphere knows about and is aware of. So when I say conscious and unconscious, I like to say, don’t think of these as two separate realms, like, you know, two tanks with perhaps a trap and things can pop up from the lower tank into the higher tank or whatever. But instead think of it like a stage and there’s a spotlight and the spotlight may just illuminate one part of the stage, but the rest of the stage hasn’t gone anywhere. It’s still there and you just need to move the spotlight and suddenly it’s there again in the middle of what you’re thinking about. That’s how I would see that question. Okay, so let’s go back to this typing example again. Just so when you learn to type, you’re going to be paying conscious attention to pushing the t’s and the h’s. As you learn to type, you start perhaps being conscious more of maybe you’re attending at the level of the phrase. Like, you don’t have to be consciously attentive to those things you’ve built automated machinery for. Now they say when kids learn to read, it isn’t enjoyable to begin with because it’s effortful to learn to process the letters and it’s effortful to learn to process the words. And it’s not until they can automatize the letter and word processing and so they can read the word at a glance that they start to be able to be conscious of the phrase and the sentence. And that’s when they get the meaning from the text and that’s when it starts to become enjoyable, right? It’s not just effortful. And then so the consciousness of a reader isn’t consciousness of letters and it’s not consciousness of words. It’s consciousness of something like the interplay between sentences and paragraphs. And it’s like your consciousness floats above the highest level of automatization that you’ve been able to manage. Does that seem reasonable to you? Well, I mean, when you’re playing a musical piece, for example, you don’t pay attention to what you’ve practiced because you’ve got that. You pay attention to the sequencing of what you’ve practiced and the greater a musician you are, the higher up in the abstraction hierarchy you can focus because you’ve automated all the lower stuff. Well, yes, and that comes back to what? I’m sorry. No, I was trying to get the relationship between that and the hemispheric specialization. Well, I think I’ve done my best to point out that the right hemisphere is the one that is able to attend to the whole Gestalt. Ultimately, it’s dealing not in fragmentary entities that have to be put together, but in Gestalten that already exist and are nested so that you go down from one level and you find another. You know, famously, you can go from the body to the organ, to the tissue, to the cell, to the organelle, to the, you know. And each of these at each stage is a whole that has its own qualities and its own rules, really, and works in a semi-autonomous way. So there’s always freedom between the levels of understanding. There’s always space. It’s rather like the gaps in the structure are where the light gets in. You know, if you tighten everything up, then you’ve got total darkness. So what we’re trying to do all the time is to know enough to be able to act, but to leave it open so that we can know more and really understand where we are and what we’re doing when we’re acting. So I think these are significant differences between the left hemisphere, which is utterly goal-directed and very direct in the way in which it achieves or aims to achieve its goal, and the right hemisphere, which is sustaining this and also seeing the goal in a wider whole. You know, the reason of typing these letters is not just to make the keys go up and down and to have a bit of paper at the end of it, but because you want to influence minds that are now unaware of this, but will know about it soon. So I think it’s the difference between this very, again, Whitehead says, as a civilization advances by the number of actions that can be made below the level of, sorry? Without thinking. Without thinking. Because thinking is a very complex thing, isn’t it? I mean, what is it? And a number of people have commented rather along the lines that I’m saying that it’s not so much right to say, I think, as in Kogito, but in the words of Lichtenberg, the 18th century German philosopher and physicist, es denkt, es denkt in mir, something is thinking in me, and that is the me. It’s not separate and it’s not unconscious in the sense of it has no life, it has no meaning, it has no purpose, it has no direction. Absolutely not. It has all those things. And one of the things I’m trying to argue in the last part of the… May I say something just about the structure of this book? I started off on it, this new book, I’m just going to say a little bit more about it. Yeah. Yeah. So I’ve explained… Yeah, well, we’re trying to grasp something large going through its parts. It’s not such a simple thing to do. It’s not a simple thing to do. So the first part of the book I’ve explained, it gives one an insight into a simple fact that in terms of having access to the reality of the world, the right hemisphere is better than the left. And it has a special take, if you like, which we can recognise. So that when we’re having to choose between two opposites, we can choose one if we want to over the other. And then the second part of the book, I’m looking at the pathways to knowledge using attention, perception, judgment, intelligence, and so on. How do we put them to use? Well, I think the main ones are science, reason, I think most people would say they’re important. I would say intuition and imagination are also vastly important. Now, none of these is infallible. None of these can say that it can deal with everything. There are proper limits to science, otherwise you’re peddling untenable naive scientism. But it is a very important thing for us to respect and to do honourably. Reason is enormously important. I use science and reason as the basis of my book. But again, reason, as Pascal, a famous mathematician and philosopher said, reason is poor if it cannot see its own limitations. And so it has limitations, but it can achieve a very great deal. And the same actually is true of intuition. It’s had a very bad press in recent years, because I think, again, psychologists, I think you’ve alluded to this, they like things that can be taken down into bits and shown we can find the mechanisms. Intuition is a bit hard for that. And imagination has been, again, relegated to the sort of children’s play box that this is something to do with fantasy. Whereas in fact, I argue that quite the opposite, that whereas fantasy may be an interesting decoration on things that we already know, and the left hemisphere can do that, imagination is actually how we go to meet the world and understand it. And we have to imagine it into being there is no alternative. If we are not imaginatively engaged with the world, we just can’t see a lot of things that are there. So we need to use all of these faculties together, not just one or two as we now do. Sorry, Carol. Well, I wanted to comment on your discussion of imagination and the manner in which it brings the world into being. So we’ve already discussed the fact that the realm of your experience is dependent to some degree on your attention, and that that’s associated with intent. And intent seems to me to be its future oriented to have an intent. Intent means to attempt to move from one place to another. And hypothetically, it’s a better place because why move otherwise? And so to act in the world with intent means that you’re playing out something that’s imaginative, because to posit that one thing is better than another, and therefore want to move towards it, you have to have imagined up a better world. And so what that means in some sense is that we’re always meeting the world in a way that imposes our imaginative attempts to make it better upon us, upon the world, but that also brings the world into being. And so, and I guess I’m saying that because I’m trying to grapple with the why of your book again. You’re implying throughout and more than implying that we have a paucity of viewpoint that’s demotivating and dangerous. And you’re implying as well that that has something to do with our obsessive concentration or utilization of left hemisphere functions. That reminds me of Heidegger to some degree in his claim that moderners use the world as produce, you know, that we tend to reduce everything to its functional utility in so far as it can be exploited. And like, I have some sympathy for that because we have to exploit the world to live, but it, so let’s say we do lose something by being specific. We, and narrow, we gain something which is functional utility. What do we do about that? You’re trying to understand it and why it is. What do we do to fight against it? Well, that’s a whole separate question, but at the moment I’m trying to unpack what the problem is and- Okay, well I won’t push past that for now then. I mean, quite what we do about it is the million dollar question and we may not be in a position unless we radically alter the way in which we think about the world, understand it and feel it and experience it and interact with it. We may not have a world in which to live. So it’s a pretty important topic, but in, so having sort of more or less, as it were, gone over what are the portals to understanding, what are the paths to understanding, I then in the part three, which is really, if you like, the reason we’ve had parts one and two, you can’t get to part three without them, but when you get there, we want to know, so what is the world like? And so I look at the structure of the world, the theories about it and what we can tell from physics and from the hemisphere hypothesis, what parts of it we may be perceiving with the left hemisphere and what we may be seeing with the right. And I look at the structure in the sense of the coming together of opposites and the very interesting philosophical question of the relationship between the one and the many. And then in the rest of the book, I look at time, space, motion, meaning largely flow, but all kinds of motion, matter and consciousness, value, purpose, and the sense of the sacred. Now, I argue that these elements like consciousness are not secondary, they’re not derivative. It’s actually irrational to suppose they are. Reason is on the side of the fact that they are ontological primaries. And I argue that unpack that for people because there’s a lot, but it would take us very long time. Well, I can unpack the phrase. What I mean by ontological primary is that it can’t be reduced to other terms. It can’t be said that as long as you look at a brain in a certain way, you can work out what consciousness is. Consciousness is so generous. It is of its own kind. It is not something that is derived from anything. It has to be a primary constituent of the universe. This is not a particularly any longer controversial view. It’s held by many philosophers now in the form of panpsychism in which something like consciousness is in the cosmos and the cosmos perhaps exists inside consciousness, not my consciousness, but a consciousness field. And there are plenty of neuroscientists who say this too. Rama, Colin Blakemore, not known for being kind of away with the fairies, but they say this too. But I would also argue, and it’s a perhaps harder thing to make comprehensible in a very short space, but that actually values are things that are there. They’re not things we make up. They’re not things that are like, I rather like that. They are built into the drive of everything. And I think that the cosmos has drives. You can describe them in all sorts of ways. It has the fact that it changes and moves in certain ways according to, quote, laws, which may actually not be laws, but maybe temporary habits. We don’t know. They may be evolving too. But the very fact that this thing has this energy to evolve, to differentiate, to produce differentiation within union, this is a value of a kind. You can’t get behind these. And most of our values, other than those of utility, this is good for me and I want to have more of it, which is what the left hemisphere is devoted to. Most of those other values are not reducible to sheer material greed or feathering your own nest. They’re often actually the things that are vastly important. Probably the whole point of the being consciousness at all is to come to appreciate the meaning of truth, goodness, and beauty, to have a sense of something awe-inspiring, which is really what we mean when we talk about the sacred, that we’re humble enough to say we don’t know everything and we probably will never know. I mean, why should we? That’s also a totally irrational idea that our brains are so constructed that we should know everything. I mean, most might think that if it could think that much, you’d think it knows everything, but it doesn’t. And we’re evolving. There may be creatures in the future who think, what the hell did homo sapiens in 2021 know? So I just want to get back into the frame that not all the things that matter to us, they are enormously important aspects of a universe that is not dead and static unless given a push, not without purpose, not without meaning, not without value. These things are in the grain, in the warp and the weft of the cosmos. Of that I’m certain. And the job is for us to find this. And most philosophers, wise people, sages, whatever you like to call them, in the past have adopted a view of the cosmos, which is exactly the one that one would expect the right hemisphere to hold, which is one in which things are not always certain or known. They’re changing, they’re interconnected, but the whole thing has a meaning. It is not a heap of fragments that don’t mean anything, the modern malaise. So that’s really where I’m driving at, if you see. That’s the philosophical goal, is to help people see something that I think they already intuit. I mean, that was a response to the master in his entry. Apart from people enormously, movingly writing to me, saying things I never thought I would ever hear from writing a book, like your book changed my life, and I’m sure you’ve had this too. But people saying, what you’re saying, I kind of knew, I’ve known this, but I couldn’t find any way of articulating it. Well, there’s a reason why you couldn’t find a way of articulating it. And that is, articulation in language is controlled by the left hemisphere. It developed very good tools for mapping out the world in a way that is very useful to its purposes. But the important things are hard to articulate in words. They’re implicit meanings. All the deep things like love, religion, poetry, music, how do you say these in words? How do you say them in language? But they have extraordinary meaning and power. They’re the things we live for, not for the things that we can say, put down in the notebook, if you know what I mean. So what’s driven you in this direction? Do you think? I mean, you made a very large number of claims in that last section of thought. For example, you’ve come to the belief that value is somehow implicit in the structure of being. That’s what I understood what you said. And correct me if I’m wrong. And that it’s unfolding across time. And I’ve been thinking about this, that exact issue an awful lot. Do you? It’s very difficult to formulate this question. So imagine that we’re drawn towards an ideal. Human beings are drawn towards an ideal. Imagine that you can detect that draw by your own dissatisfaction in part, is that you don’t feel you’re living properly or your conscience is bothering you. You feel that there’s something more to be attained. You’re embarrassed at your insufficiencies, right? So there’s this ideal that’s pulling you onward and judging you at the same time. And that ideal might be well, the ideal human being. That’s one way of thinking about it. And that’s partly why I got so interested in hero mythology. I mean, do you, is it a reasonable conclusion of your line of thinking that the notion of the ideal human being is somehow built into the structure of the cosmos? Because the classic, I don’t know how to- No, it’s not. No, I don’t think that at all. I want to scotch that immediately. Okay. Well, how do you scotch that if you start with your presuppositions? Like- Well, because I don’t, my presuppositions have nothing to do with an already conceived plan that is just being acted out. This- No, I wasn’t implying it. It wasn’t necessarily- Oh, all right. Well, okay. But let, all right. Okay. Well, I’m glad you weren’t. But a lot of people think that if I say these things, I must be positing an engineering god who sort of tinkers with things and makes things happen according to his purpose. Yeah. Okay. That’s fair. I mean, I was implying, I was implying that in some sense. I mean, the question would be where does your, where does your insistence that values are part of the structure of being, like, where does that find its limit? Because the classic limit of that is something like, in fact, the definition of the utmost place of value in some sense is almost indistinguishable from the claim that there is a god. And so- A god is not the same as an engineering god. And I take enormous pains in the book. It costs me more than anything I’ve ever written to write the chapter called The Sense of the Sacred, in which I try to help people to a place where they can understand why people use this extraordinarily difficult word, god. You know, it’s not a satisfactory term, but it’s the term we have to have to name an aspect of our experience, that if we don’t name it, disappears from our lives. And that’s not to say that there isn’t something there that is, that merits whatever we mean when we say divine. I mean, we haven’t defined, we haven’t defined what we mean by divine. And we’re back in the nets of language. We’re trapped in the nets of language, as Schelling said. But what I’m suggesting is that, as Whitehead suggested, and come on, Whitehead was also the co-author with Russell of the Principia Mathematica, he wasn’t a fantasist. He had this, I think, incredibly deep idea that whatever one likes to call the divinity, god, whatever, is the thing that the cosmos has relation with. Relation is at the core of being. I even argue that relation is prior to the relata, prior to the things that are related. That sounds nonsense. How can you relate? How can you have a relation if there isn’t anything yet to relate? But there’s a wonderful image called, in Indian mythology, called Indra’s Net, which covers the universe. And in it, the idea is that the filaments of the net exist before the net, before the crossing points, which are the things we see. And on those crossing points, there are little gems which reflect every other gem in the net. And that’s a, that would take a very long time to unpack, but perhaps it can set things going in people’s minds. But the idea I have… A gesture to the right hemisphere. …is that relation is prior to anything at all, really. And that therefore, whatever we mean by god and whatever we mean by the cosmos are in some sort of dynamic relation, which is an evolving one, in which the outcome is excitingly not known. If it were known, it would all be some horrible, possibly sadistic play by an almighty, all-knowing god. I mean, look, I’m going to be talking to Rowan Williams shortly, but I don’t want to go into all that I mean by that. I don’t think god is omniscient and omnipotent, but I don’t think he’s not either. Just in the same way, I don’t think he’s green, and I don’t think he’s not green. I think the terms are wrong, but we can go there if we want, later or another day. But the thing, what I’m really saying is that god is discovering, becoming unfulfilling, whatever god is, through the relationship, which classically in most religions is described as love, which is after all just like a form of gravity in the world of life and emotion rather than just in the world of the so-called inanimate. Therefore, we are coming into being, god is coming into being, and we’re necessary to one another’s coming into being. It’s not that god does a bit to us and then we do a bit back to god. It’s like, I’ve read a very good book, I keep mentioning it, by a young microbiologist in America called Kritish Sharma called Interdependence, and she argues very importantly that it’s not just that, certainly it’s not just that an animal or an organism moulds its environment, nor is it just good enough to recognise that while an animal affects and shapes its environment, the environment shapes the animal or the organism. But this is not a turn-by-turn process, it’s not that the animal shapes the environment, which should then in its turn shapes the animal. It’s an entirely simultaneous process of coming into being, of co-creation if you like. Now this idea of simultaneous coming into being is an ancient one, but I think it’s a very deep one philosophically and a very important one. So that accounts for your objection to the idea of the omniscient determining god. Absolutely, absolutely, because the god has, god would have no creation, creation is not really just the unfolding of something that’s already there. What’s the name of the book by the microbiologist? It’s just called Interdependence, it’s by Kritish Sharma. Can you spell her last name? S-H-A-R-M-A, it’s quite a short read. I’m mentioning her quite a lot these days. Okay, so let me ask you a question. Now I’m going to try to pack up what you’re doing, and so again tell me if I’m wrong. So we have these opposed viewpoints of the world, paradoxical viewpoints. They’re expressed, they make the hemispheric differences necessary or they’re a consequence of the hemispheric differences. If there wasn’t a paradox, we wouldn’t need the two hemispheres. We need these two different ways of looking at things. We’ve tilted, we’re in danger of tilting too far to a left hemisphere view, and that’s keeping us from, from what? It’s keeping us from apprehension of the relationship between the two hemispheres. With the sacred that you’re describing, the co-creation relationship? Is that reasonable? Well it’s ruling out so much. I mean I can’t begin to tell you, but you can imagine all the things that this very reduced abstract schematic bureaucratic, essentially it’s a bureaucratic, you know, you push something, it has an action on something else, and you know we can predict the outcome, we can organize it. That’s the left hemisphere’s vision of the world, inanimate stuff that it can move about. Very much the industrial revolution was a kind of acting out in the outer world of the world picture of the left hemisphere in some ways. I talk about that more in the master and his emissary, but but it’s phenomenally successful. It’s ruling out, it’s ruling out everything really. It’s ruling out our ability to understand, to see, to see at all. I mean a number of very important people, one of them Goethe said, you know, thinking is good, but seeing is so much better, and I think we just don’t see things anymore because we don’t expect them, we don’t understand them, we’ve ruled them out from the word go, because our world picture just doesn’t contain them, and if you stop doing that and start attending in a more flexible way, you find there’s a massively complex and fascinating, rich, nourishing response to your attention. It’s the absence of that that causes the meaning crisis, which is constantly being banded about. The Egyptians, you know, the Egyptians knew that, the ancient Egyptians knew that, because they, they, they’re, the god Horus is the eye, and it’s attention, and it is Horus that revitalizes Osiris, and he’s the god of structure, and they saw the, the proper sovereignty was a combination of attention and structure, a dynamic combination of attention and structure. Well this is absolutely brilliant. I quite agree, but this is where we come to, I need to make a correct, a possible misapprehension. There is absolutely nothing wrong with the view of the right hemisphere. It’s in fact necessary, it’s part of a, of a dialectic, backwards and forwards between these two ways in which things can be built. You can’t have the one in a way without the other, you’re quite right, we need them both, but, but we live in an age which is completely obsessed with the idea of equality, as some eternal sort of truth about the cosmos. I have, I can see no evidence for this idea. It’s a lovely idea, a humanly invented idea, which is, which is a good one in society, although it can’t be realized, and it may actually not be necessary or even good for it to be ultimately realized. It might lead to a horrible kind of totalitarianism, as many 20th century philosophers pointed out, but, but these two things don’t happen. That’s the problem with elevating one virtue above all else. It’s a left hemisphere problem. Well, no, no, the point is this, we need the left and the right, but we need the right to be in control. Now this is very important, this is the image of the master and his emissary. The emissary and the master are not equal. The master needs the emissary and knows he needs the emissary. The emissary being inferior doesn’t know that he needs the master. So the emissary is good as long as he’s under the control of the master. Now that image is extraordinarily important for understanding this picture of the cosmos, and is actually present in ancient Chinese, Navajo, not Navajo, Iroquois, mythologies and so on, this idea of the being an unequal pair, that one has to be the guardian of the other. And as long as the one that is, as it were, a potential problem remains under the supervision of the wiser one that sees all, everything works well for everybody. And that’s why in the master and his emissary, I suggest there were three periods in the West, in early Greek civilization, in the peak of Roman civilization, and again at the Renaissance in the West, where these were working well together. But in every case, it slid further to the viewpoint of the left hemisphere. And in every case, the civilization has crumbled. And I see the evidence for that all around me now. So I’m not saying that we just need these two things. I’m saying we definitely need them both. Neither of them is bad. But what is bad is for the inferior one, the one that sees less, to take control. And it’s very easy for it to take control, because like the less intelligent person that thinks it knows everything, it thinks I’ve got it. I’ve understood it. There’s no more. We do three more experiments, and we’ve cracked the universe. It’s all just a matter of a few more years of science, and we’ll understand everything. I don’t believe that’s the case. Let me let you in on some of the things I’ve been grappling with here. So I talked to Matt Ridley and Bjorn Lauburg recently, and their enthusiastic enlightenment rationalists, I would say, they look at what’s happened as a consequence of the Industrial Revolution and the tremendous technological advances that that’s produced, and the immense increase in human well-being. And they say we can continue with that into the future. We can produce a world, and perhaps are already producing a world, where poverty is increasingly going to be a thing of the past. And we can bring the rest of the world up to the standards of living that characterize the West, and we can continue to expand the pie. And I’m not interested in discussing whether that’s possible or not, because it’s possibly possible and possibly not. But it’s a particular vision, right? It’s a vision of the extension of material comfort to everyone. And that comfort has been extended tremendously over the last two or three hundred years. It’s absolutely amazing. And I would say in large part, it’s a consequence of that left hemisphere reduction of the world to manageable bits and the manipulation of it. And this is not to say anything negative about your thesis whatsoever. But one of the things I’ve noticed is that that materialistic utopian vision, and I’m also not insulting Ridley or Lauburg, who I admire greatly, that materialistic vision of incremental material progress has very little motive power. Like it isn’t an exciting story for some reason. And, you know, what do we want? Incremental improvement. When do we want it? In due time. It’s not a gripping story. It’s lacking something. And you seem to be pushing towards something that might be the medication for that lack. There’s nothing in that vision that speaks of like a grand destiny for the individual, for society. And there are many religious traditions that insist that human beings exist in a relationship with the divine and that it’s only in living out that relationship that life is imbued with the proper kind of meaning and proper means sufficient to keep you from malevolence, I suppose, sufficient to be in love with life. Now you posited in some of your statements a while back that we’re in this co-creation relationship with the divine. And that isn’t too far off from my understanding of many classical religious propositions that human beings participate in the act of creation. Whether we participate in the act of creating God is a whole different question, but we can leave that aside. I mean, you’re… So then the question is, what’s the question that arises out of that? I’m still trying to drive down at exactly what the main point you’re making. You’ve worked on this book for a tremendous amount of time. Something’s driving you hard. And it’s the revelation of a solution to a very important problem. And the revelation seems to be something like an attempt to explicate a higher order vision for… to explicate a higher order vision, something that we can aspire to. And… The drive to this is that I don’t think that we live in an enlightened era. We live in what David Bohm called an endarkened era, in which what we think is enlightening us is in fact inducing misery. The strange thing is that unarguably when people are enormously poverty stricken, and of course one needs then to define what poverty is, are people who lead the lives that their ancestors have lived as hunter-gatherers, are they poor? Or do they only become poor when the whole world is ripped apart and they’re brought into the nearest large industrial slum and have no bearings on the life, no relationship with the world, no pride, and their health suffers and they kill themselves. So what is poverty? That is a very important question first. But also remedying poverty, extreme poverty, is of course enormously important. No feeling person could argue against that. But it’s not enough, you know, as one rather well-known historical figure said, a man cannot live by bread alone. And the thing is that there’s only bread in this story. But that leaves out everything. Peter Cook, he plays the part of a publisher who says the trouble with your book is that it lacks everything. And I feel that this kind of philosophy lacks absolutely everything. It’s got nothing whatever to offer. Now let me just put some facts to this because it may sound, you know, it’s just my opinion. What do we know? Well fortunately going back to the 30s, school children in America in a certain system have been asked the same questions about their happiness in life at the same age, going back now 70 years. And Jean Twenge, who has looked at this data, which avoids all sorts of problems of defining what you mean by happy and, you know, retrospective scopes and all the rest. You’ve got the data from the 1930s, the 40s, the 50s. And nowadays the numbers of children that would qualify by a very well authenticated and commonly used standard as being depressed is five to eight times what it was in the 1930s when poverty was a big issue. So five or eight times, not five or eight percent more. So there’s something horrendous we’re doing to ourselves. Suicide rates are going up, particularly among women who register much greater dissatisfaction with life now than they did 20 years ago, interestingly, because one might think that a number of things that would have made life hard for them have been removed. But it just shows how complicated it is knowing what works well for people. And three things overall, three things seem to be incredibly important for human fulfillment and happiness. And one of them I touched on at the end of the master and his emissary, which is feeling socially connected, being bound into a meaningful community of trust. That’s one. The second is being in the presence of nature. Just going off for half an hour into a forest and being quiet has an effect on your blood pressure, on your physical health and so on. And these effects, if practiced, are greater than those and going to the gym. And the thing that really struck me is there is the Oxford Handbook of Religion, I think it’s called, but it looks at enormous bodies of evidence about the well-being of people who are adherents to a religion and those who are not. And not only, as you very well might expect, are the people who are not adherents to religion much more prone to anxiety, depression, drug addiction, they cope less well with crisis, they’re more vulnerable generally, but they’re actually physically not so well. So, for example, rates of stroke, of heart disease, are comparably better amongst the believing group than the unbelieving group, with the difference between those who do cardio exercise, you know, for several hours a day. So, and even smoking, it’s a more powerful effect than smoking. Social connectedness is more powerful than smoking. Being in nature, I think, is more powerful than smoking. And being a part of a religious community that worships, and even holding spiritual or religious views to some extent, is a mitigator against unhappiness and illness. So, you know, is that any answer to your question of why, you know, why I don’t think that Matt Ridley’s idea of, it’s totally left-hander’s idea, we just sort of crank out some more government departments, do some marvelous technical things, and everybody gets to be living in a fantasy land of happiness. I don’t believe this. Well, I don’t think he believes that. I mean, he’s a complicated person, he’s more concerned with applying material resources where they could be most effectively applied. I think the question of what material comfort and plenitude needs to be embedded in is a different question. I think it’s reasonable to say, well, we should do what we can to alleviate destitution and catastrophic poverty. We should improve child nutrition, we should eradicate tuberculosis. Obviously, right. Right. The question is, what does that have to be nested inside for it to be worthwhile? And that’s, so that’s what you’re aiming at. And I believe, what does that need to be nested in to make it worthwhile? And you’ve come to this conclusion, this has shocked you over the years that you came to the conclusion that, okay, why not? I mean, the reason I’m asking is because it isn’t an everyday occurrence, in some sense, for a committed scientist to point out that the scientific viewpoint needs to be embedded inside a broader, what, value-oriented viewpoint is something I believe, but it isn’t an everyday occurrence for that to be stated forthrightly. And as a scientist, it isn’t necessarily the first thing that would come to mind. Like, have you always thought this way? Or have you come to this as a consequence of your thinking? Well, I have the advantage of having come to science from a fairly thorough grounding in the humanities. So I had a philosophy of life that was based on reading, thinking, talking, and I was a relatively aged customer when I started to study medicine compared with most people who do that, at least in this country. So I brought a background, which has always been my passion, an interest in philosophy, but not just a kind of forever analytic philosophy in which you, it’s more or less like sort of angels dancing on a pinhead and breaking everything down to the tiniest parts. This doesn’t really particularly interest me, but a kind of more human philosophy, which doesn’t become theology, but which is open to the idea that there is more in the world than we can know or understand. But it does sound like it is, that it has become theology. This isn’t a critique. It’s an attempt to observe what you’re telling me. It’s not a critique at all. I’m trying to understand this. Well, it depends what you mean by theology. You see, I don’t think the most important part of a relationship with God is necessarily theology. I’m not disrespectful of theology, but I’ve read a lot of, for example, the Kabbalah. I’ve acquainted myself with Buddhist philosophy, and I’ve always been very interested in Daoism, Hinduism, and the deep wisdom of these things, including, as I say, North American native people and even circumpolar people. I mean, the wisdom is embodied in their mythologies. We think of these as somehow childish myths, but in fact, these myths contain, and in fact are the only way of containing or not containing because they’re not ever contained, but of transmitting, bringing into being for other people, the things that are the deep truths. It’s that that motivates me. I’m not going to be alive much longer. I mean, I’m not in imminent danger of dying, but we’re all actually here for an extraordinarily short time. There was great wisdom in the past in having a memento mori on your desk, a skull, and we’re not here for very long. It behoves us to behave and to understand the world in the most fruitful way for human fulfillment and happiness and for the greater fulfillment of whatever it is that we sense in whatever is around us, in the being of the world. The word cosmos keeps coming to mind, which also in its root means beautiful because I think what one sees when one looks at the natural order is that it is, as scientists and mathematicians are constantly saying, it’s outstandingly beautiful, complex, and orderly. Why? Where does that come from? Well, I don’t pretend to have an answer, but I see the difference is between people who think they know the answer and people who don’t. I’m one of the people who don’t think they know the answer, so please don’t ask me what the answer is. I think I would disqualify myself from having anything worthwhile to say if I thought I had the answer. The difference in life is not between atheists on the one hand and believers on the other, but it’s between fundamentalist believers and fundamentalist atheists on the one hand and people who often call themselves honest agnostics on the other. That openness of mind, that willingness to acknowledge that one doesn’t know everything, that one’s reaching and searching for something is far more fruitful and spiritual to me than saying, I know it, it’s written down in this book and these are the rules. I want to go back to the, I listened to all that, and I want to go back to this co-creation idea because that’s not a trivial idea, that’s an overwhelmingly massive idea. And it, see, I’ve, the audience, I’ve talked, the audiences I’ve talked with, I’ve talked about the necessity of a vision of life that’s sufficiently demanding, meaningful, to justify the trouble of existence. And it seems to me that it’s necessary psychologically to be in pursuit of a noble goal. And there isn’t a goal that’s more noble than the one that you outlined, virtually by definition, right? I mean, if you’re co-creating the cosmos, the cosmos, but also if you’re in a co-creating relationship with God, that involves you at the highest level of being with the structure of being. Well, I, you know, again, because we’re talking inevitably in shorthand, because this is why this book is so colossally long. I mean, it’s apparently as long as the Bible. The reason I had to do that is that I’m, what I’m doing is, is nothing less than this. I’m saying the whole way in which you are taught by your education, by science, popular science, not by, you know, quantum physicists who have a very much more sophisticated grasp of philosophy, but by the sort of 19th century mechanists who still dominate biology unhappily, a version of sort of engineering, if you ever like. This is not a good way to think. This is not even likely to be true. It doesn’t answer to any aspect of experience of the world, except the most timely detail. So for example, what I think is that the whole structure of things is infinitely complex and has many recurring loops in it. And when you try and it just an organism is like that, or even a cell, or even, you know, part of a cell, an organelle is amazingly complex that the number of interactions, the number of chemical reactions that are going on there is colossal and they all have cascades that interact with one another. However, if you take from this very large picture right down to the tiniest, tiniest bit of light, you can see a little chain of arrows. This leads to that, leads to that. You can’t see the all kinds of other things going on and you can identify that. And that’s what we’re good at doing. And we say, if I interfere in that, I can cause something to happen, which might be beneficial, for example, to somebody who has a health condition. So I’m not saying there’s anything wrong with any of this. Again, I come back to there’s nothing wrong with the left hemisphere. There’s only something wrong with it when it adopts the hubristic cloak of knowing everything. And when you said scientists are not often heard to voice the sort of things that I’m saying and that you are saying, I’d like to say that physicists very often do, but that biologists relatively less often do now, although in the early part of the century, there were many great biologists such as J.B.S. Haldane, his father, John Scott Haldane, Konrad Hauber Wallington, Ludwig von Wertelanty in Austria, who saw a very sophisticated vision of the living world of biology. But what happened was because there were great successes in molecular engineering after the war, this vision, which, as I say, is technically correct that you can interfere as a detail and do something very valuable. But the mistake is to extrapolate from that to say this is the structure of the whole thing we’re looking at. It’s not. It’s not like that. There are at least eight or nine ways in which a living being is not like a machine. So I am sorry that scientists diminish themselves by adopting this very narrow vision of what life is, because after all, the whole point of science, as Schrodinger said, is to answer the question, who are we? And if it’s not answering that question, and it’s not assumable into an answer to that question, it’s not really getting us to what the meaning of our life demands from us, that we have not an answer to the question, who are we? Not an answer to the question, what is the meaning of life? Of course, by definition, there isn’t one. But the very knowledge that we have to strive for it and not lose sight of it is very, very important. There’s a saying in the Midrash, you are not obliged to finish the work, but you are not permitted to cease from it. And I think that is, I mean, I would say that is my vision of what I do. I think it’s what all seekers after truth have to do, whether they’re philosophers or scientists. And, you know, I would love science to be more scientific. The curious thing is I honor science deeply. And I think that it has nothing to lose by making, you know, being a little bit humbler than it is by accepting that there is a lot that is deeply puzzling and that the more we know about physics, for example, the more we understand what we don’t know. And it’s not scientific to rule out certain ways of thinking, to say that thinking in terms of organic holes, in terms of Gestalten and so forth is somehow not scientific. No, it’s just not the way that a certain very narrow form of science is practiced. And I want science before I die to become more open as science should be, to be more questing, more imaginative. You know, in writing this book, I’ve had a lot to do with the story of how scientists made their discoveries, how mathematicians made their discoveries. And they very rarely, if ever, as George Gaylord Simpson himself said, you know, one of the great mainstream molecular biologists of the last century, it’s very rare that they make them by following the scientific method. The scientific method is a retrospective thing that is fitted onto what actually happens, which is extraordinary insights of intuition, seeing shapes, testing them out, of course, which is a scientific method, of course. But it’s not this kind of boring, rule-bound thing that it’s often made out to be. Well, I think with that statement, that’s a good place to end for today. It was a nice conclusion. Gone for an hour and a half or so. And I appreciate very much you talking with me. Hopefully, we can do this again. I want to get further through your book. I’ll keep everybody posted as to the progress of the book and to where they can obtain it when that becomes possible. Is there anything else that you wanted to mention today that you want to bring up before we close? Well, no. I mean, I want to say, first of all, which I haven’t really had an opportunity to say, how enormously glad I am that you are back in debate with us all. And long may that be. And I think the conversations we have are good. I hope other people may think that too. Well, we’re going to put that to the test. And I’d like to just draw people’s attention to the fact that in the last six months, it is six months, I think six or seven months, we’ve developed something called Channel the Gilchrist, which is a place on the internet where you can find out more about my stuff. You can see talks, lectures, podcasts, things I’ve done, what I’m, you know, and generally keep up to date. There’s a forum there where you can enter into and discuss my work. There’s a place where you can ask questions of me. So once a month, I answer four questions out of a list of things that members of the, because you can either be a non-member or a member, but if you remember, you can ask me a question, which I will then spend quarter of an hour answering. So, you know, that’s, that’s my attempt to try and give back something that isn’t just, you know, the odd book every 10 years. So, well, we’ll make sure that we put the links and all of that in the description of this video. And with any luck, we’ll get a chance to talk again in the future after we’ve both digested this and this conversation. It was really good to see you again. Oh, and you. Thank you. Thank you.