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Iain McGilchrist on the Existence, Being, the Limits of Reason and Language, and Schizophrenia
March 29, 2021
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Culture, they analyze finance, economics, business, international affairs across every region. I'm particularly liking their new insider feature. It was just launched this month. It gives you, it gives me, a front row access to The Economist's internal editorial debates.
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All right, hello toe listeners, Kurt here. That silence is missed sales. Now, why? It's because you haven't met Shopify, at least until now.
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Let me say quite genuinely that your questions are some of the best. They target very important areas and no, I think from that point of view you're one of the best interviewers that I've come across, so thank you. I could talk to you all day, I wish we had time.
Ian McGilchrist is a psychiatrist, a writer, and a former Oxford scholar who came into prominence after the publication of his book, Master and Its Emissary, which is a fantastic book by the way. Links are in the description.
This book is about the fundamental realities we experience that are different, complementary, yet incompatible, and rooted in the bi-hemispheric structures of the brain. Each time I think I can't top a podcast, somehow the guest surprises me and Ian is no different. We touch on the problem of the modern world with its overemphasis on rational mechanistic explanations while it simultaneously eschews meaning. We also talk about consciousness,
and how can one be a moral person if there are no objective truths are there objective truths we also talk about schizophrenia and i get fairly personal in this interview and the reason is that i
and driven by the screenwriting adage which says, the more general the pain, the less personal it is, and the more personal the pain, the more general it is. This means that ultimately people will relate more to someone speaking their experience earnestly and candidly rather than generic platitudes. Unfortunately, there were connectivity issues with Zoom, as usual, and some of his points were crushed, omitted, or overly compressed. There's very little that can be done about this because, for whatever reason, the backup recording on Ian's end
Stopped. If you would like to contribute to watching or listening to more conversations like this, then please consider visiting patreon.com slash KurtGymungle. Every dollar helps not only financially, but motivationally. Thank you so much. Enjoy. I've heard about your book. I don't remember exactly where I heard about your book, Master and Its Emissary, and I believe I even came to watch the film version of it. Maybe one of the first screenings of it where you had some laptop trouble.
and you're skyping live to us. The movie was was okay, but the book, the movie doesn't sell the book. The book is a fascinating fascinating. It's a it's a it's a frightening book, at least I find it to be so I find it to be unnerving and subversive. We can talk about why I find it to be that later. This channel is about theories of everything. And usually that involves talking to physicists string theory is included and so on and so but
The way that I conceptualize a theory of everything is, there's no English word for it. There's a German word, it's called Weltanschaung. That means a framework through which to interpret the world. It's like, it's more than a worldview. A worldview would be not selling it properly. And I believe you have a Weltanschaung. And it's... Yes. It's... Well, I don't know how you did it. I also have a Gesamttheorie. What's that?
a theory of everything. Okay, well, this is a great time to give the audience a quick recapitulation of your main thesis of the Master and its Emissary. Yes. Effectively, people think that they noticed there was a difference between the two halves of the brain in the late 19th century.
And then this took a step forward in the 1960s and 70s with the first split brain operations in California, in which people's brains were surgically severed in the middle, the connection between the two halves of the brain, the corpus callosum was severed. And so it was possible to interrogate and to investigate one hemisphere at a time. And a number of theories arose out of that.
And most of them are now considered wrong, and correctly they're considered wrong. But the problem that we have to rather different hemispheres doesn't go away. Why, if the brain gets its power from making connections, should there be an enormous divide right down the middle of it?
And this is not just for humans, this is for all animals that we've studied. They all have an asymmetrical neuronal network with some kind of division between the parts. So I set about investigating that and it occurred to me that what was the difference was the need to pay attention to the world in two different ways at once.
And that's a very important point, because how we attend to things changes what we find. Not just whether we're aware of them, but the quality of the awareness changes what it is that we find there. And it also changes us who are doing the finding. So attention is a moral act, it creates or destroys.
different ways. They will bring into being two different versions, if you like, of reality. And I then started investigating 20, 30 years, what these differences were. And effectively, they aren't what people used to say. They used to think it was, you know, as you think of a machine, well, what does it do? Well, the left hemisphere does language and reason and the right hemisphere does pictures and emotion. But this is not right since all these things
looked after by both hemispheres but we should have asked a different question if we've been thinking in terms of a living being instead of a machine instead of asking what does it do as though it's just a functional utility we'd ask in what manner how does it do it and to what sort of end because things evolve in living beings in ways that answer to existential needs to be able to carry on being so
and I think there is an answer to that that we do need in order to be able to pay attention to little details of things which is mainly things that we're going to use like food or you know if you're a bird picking up a twig to build a nest or catching your prey you need a certain kind of attention that doesn't really need to know the whole picture it just needs to know the little tiny bit in the middle of the picture which is very highly focused on.
but if it's only paying that kind of attention it will not survive because it will become prey to another creature very quickly so it needs to have a different attention which is a broad open attention and a sustained attention now that that's a very you know a very brief remark but it on it hangs just about everything because
Because these two ways of attending bring about two different Weltanschauungen. They bring about two different ways of looking at the world. In one, there are things that we can use and they're essentially fragmented one from another. We can pick them up, they're isolated, we put them together to make things that we want.
and it has no meaning and it's not really connected to us but we can manipulate it and that's the left hemisphere's picture the left hemisphere enables us to manipulate the world and in survival terms that's obviously very important but it doesn't help us understand the world at all the right hemisphere meantime which doesn't usually have access to speech it contributes to language but it for most of us doesn't actually speak
is seeing a completely different world, one in which things are never entirely isolated or atomistic. They're interconnected. In fact, everything is connected to everything else, ultimately. And it's a field that is changing all the time. It's not just made up of things that sit in the field.
It's the whole field of things that we see and perceive and we relate to it. We don't sort of see it as a thing and then relate to it. It comes into being through our relationship with it. So that built into it is the idea of relation. And so this is a very, very different world. And it sees things as special, unique. That's that's a thing we might come back to because people might say, but surely if they're unique, then
What's this about them being all interconnected? But it seems to me the whole business is to be able to maintain together uniqueness and individuation with togetherness without collapsing into fragmentation and atomism. So it sees a world made up of unique individuals that are constantly changing. It sees all the stuff that's implicit. Left hemisphere only understands the most explicit stuff. This is the world that we live in every day nowadays.
Nobody picks up the messages. And if you do, they become something quite different. Try explaining a joke, try explaining a poem, try explaining a piece of music. You can't because it is an experience in which all the important stuff is implicit. And so, of course, is the whole realm of what we seem to have completely abandoned, the idea of there being a sacred world, a divine element in the cosmos.
These things don't make sense to the left hemisphere. It seems obviously a mistake, but that's because it hasn't seen so much of the picture. Anyway, I'll leave it there and you can ask me some questions. You mentioned that the right hemisphere is involved in understanding and understanding the meaning. Okay. What does meaning mean? Well, yes, a very good question.
There are any word you like. The left hemisphere has one idea, and the right hemisphere a different one. So to the left hemisphere, meaning is something that is, as you might expect, put together from bits. And it could be something we create by, you know, words are tokens that are put together by systematic syntax, and they turn into a meaning the computer might be able to find out of the combination of a dictionary and a book of grammar rules.
But meaning is not that. When I say that there is meaning in certain experiences, like my wife means everything to me, or this piece of music means so much, or just being able to walk in wilderness is so important and brings meaning to things. Now, what I want to stress is that nowadays when people
allowed that there could be meaning coming from certain experiences. They see that as an invention of ours. So we do this and we think, okay, now we've added some meaning, but that's not the image. That's the left hemisphere image of something that is added to something else mechanically. What I'm saying is we are in certain experiences made to be more receptive, more aware
of something that is there to be brought into being through the commerce between ourselves, our own consciousness, and whatever it is that we're conscious of. So it's a relational thing, absolutely at its core is relation, and at its core is consciousness. So in this way I found that, you're a physicist, that surprisingly a lot of physicists have written to me since The Master and His Embassy was published, saying this is very important and interesting from our point of view.
In the book that I've just finished and want to publish in the next few months called The Matter with Things, I take three ways of looking at the world. One is neuroscience, one is philosophy, and the third is physics. I show that quite coherently by pursuing each of these paths we can come to a vision, a Weltanschauung, a picture of the world,
which is very, very different from the one that we're taught and that which the popular media and the Vox Pop of sort of scientists who do too much talking and not enough thinking, as it would suggest. Something that impresses me to an extreme amount about your book, at least though I've only read the Master and its Emissary in that one. It's quite at home and you see someone
You don't just see them compile chapters together, you see them work through their life in these pages. And I'm wondering, okay, how did you go about doing this? Because it seems like to me, there's a plethora of data. At first, you have to just accumulate and dispassionately view so that you don't bias it beforehand with your own worldview. And then you have to cohere somehow what you saw into a unified message. How long
Hi, I'm here to pick up my son Milo. There's no Milo here. Who picked up my son from school? Streaming only on Peacock. I'm gonna need the name of everyone that could have a connection. You don't understand. It was just the five of us.
Yes, well, it's easy to say about the gathering of the data that took about 20 years. But really the core of the idea
was that I felt already that there were two kinds of ways we could think about the world two kinds of awareness of it that we we both we needed both and we use both and as always it's not either that you just collect data and then look at it and something happened nor is it that you have an idea and you collect the data just to support it it's like everything it's a kind of
an encounter, a rapprochement, coming together of two things that sense each other's existence as two loving people understand, come to understand one another. And as indeed we understand the sacred and the divine, it's a coming together of something that speaks to us and we speak to it. And if you don't speak to it, you won't hear anything back from it. So most people think that science is made out of just doing hundreds and thousands of tests.
and then following an entirely logical path but in fact a lot of great scientists have pointed out that what happens is you have intuitions of a shape of something that is you know you can't put your finger on it but you know there's something here and you start to look at the data and you find that some of the data fit with it but some of the data don't and that's really important and interesting because then
You say, OK, I was thinking of it like this. Now I see I need to accommodate this other thing. So for 20 years or 25 years, this is what I did. I saw things and I changed what I thought. It evolved as all things evolve. The whole cosmos evolves. Evolution isn't just something that Darwin spotted in animals. Evolution is being. Being is becoming.
and this is a cosmos that is becoming not one that is just static and being so that process of creation was like all processes of creation the sensing of something that at the moment you can't put your finger on like a painter doesn't know exactly where all the bits in the painting are going to go when he or she starts it the poet doesn't know exactly but here's certain the shape of a few lines and images and then it starts to grow from that so science is not
different or opposite to the creative arts. It is in fact very similar to the creative arts. Is there a reason why God is associated with becoming rather than being or rather than a combination of both becoming and being? Well there are as many ideas of God as there are you know traditions in the world and probably as many as there are people
So ideas about God can be very different, but I have noted a very interesting strain in the mythologies and anthropologies of peoples around the world, from China and India, from the circumpolar regions, from the Native American peoples and so on, that speak of
a world that is becoming not just made but is constantly coming into being and I think that ultimately you can bring together the idea of a god that is eternally and a god that is coming into being but if I had to put my money on one or the other it would be the coming into being it seems to me that that is utterly primary and interestingly people like Pauli and Heisenberg and
and Schrodinger and so forth in the 20th century thought similarly that becoming was more important than being. David Bohm said that as well and I think Niels Bohr. Okay, this reminds me of another line from your book and it could be you said the mind or the brain. I don't remember which one.
Which we can talk about what's the difference between the mind and the brain, but regardless you said either the mind or the brain It's not correct to think of it as that the brain slash mind is grappling with the world, but instead it's bringing the world about Okay now to some that conflates the objective world with the phenomenological one So I'm wondering can you explain what you mean when you say it brings the world about?
Well, I may not be able to explain it very well in language because I think our language is not very well suited to describing reality. It's very well suited to describing everyday things like getting lunch and building a wall. But when it comes to actually understanding what we're dealing with, we don't necessarily have the words for it. And, you know, Bohr himself said there is no way we can talk about
physics, eventually, except in the language of poetry. And he said the same thing is true of philosophy and of the talking about the divine or whatever it is. So, yes, what I've struggled with very much is
not collapsing into one or other of two major areas of our age. One is to say, quite simply, it's all made up by us. So it's like we're sitting in a little cinema inside our heads, sitting on a sofa, a little homunculus watching the scene, but we have no contact with the world or anything else out there.
and the other is that you know just the world is out there and it's just a matter of going out measuring it photographing it and you've got it so you know in one case you've got very simplistic materialism and in the other you've got very simplistic idealism and i don't think that either of these positions gets us very far i think the important thing is to see these bridges because as i say everything is actually connected and it's through the connection that they come into being so let me
say that again because it's something that again as a physicist you will understand you probably know David Mermin the physicist he says relations are prior to relata now i was delighted when i heard that because i have been working on that basis for most of my adult life and that sounds nonsense to most people how can relations exist before there are things that relate
But actually the things only become what they are in the process of the relationship. Indeed, we only are what we are as human beings in the process of the many relationships we have with other people and with the world at large. And there's an image in the Vedic tradition, which I like very much of Indra's net. And Indra's net is a cosmic net that covers the whole world. And
in it at every place where the threads cross there is a little jewel and in this jewel are reflected all the other jewels and the whole of the net so it's like a hologram in a way but what is fabulous about it is that they point out that the threads the connections exist before any of the points that make a net the things that make it a net are the crossings that's what we see but they just stand forward after
The relations have done what they are. I think this is a good image because we tend to focus on certain things that stand forward to us.
in the world immediately and neglect the background out of which they emerge and from which they're never separate and this is a very basic neuropsychological distinction between the left and right hemisphere which you can demonstrate in the lab any day the left hemisphere sees a single thing of interest that is foregrounded and it ignores the rest whereas the right hemisphere sees the whole scene with whatever it is embedded in it
This reminds me of in one of your talks you were talking about, it was an offhand comment, you said that existence is predicated on resistance. And so what I'm wondering is, is this resistance akin to a relation? Yes. But it's not the same thing. But without some degree of resistance, without some degree of opposition, nothing comes into being.
Nothing can do anything. I mean, in a very simple way, motion is only made possible because of friction, which is the thing that itself brings motion to a standstill. So, I mean, I know that's a folk sort of idea, but I think it's helpful that actually what comes into being is shaped. It's not just formless.
There are forms that shape what comes into being and we our minds partake of those and of course any form any shape is already a denial of something else because if it didn't deny or negate anything it would be just a formless chaos a bag of nothing because it would be everything and everything would be nothing because there'd be no differentiation of anything from anything else nothing would exist right or everything you have to exclude
You have to exclude, you have to limit, and that is the process of resistance. There are lots of ways in which you can think of this, but there's one that I like particularly if we're going to talk about consciousness, because I believe that our consciousness, your consciousness, my consciousness, is not entirely separate from other consciousnesses,
But for the while it is shaped by whatever form it is that our consciousness is instantiated in. And William James, who I think is one of the towering intellects of the last couple of hundred years, said about this, that it is like the breath passing over his vocal cords.
that if there were no vocal cords the breath would say nothing it would mean nothing but because there are vocal cords that restrict it it becomes the voice that is him so i think you know we can you can allow that to to germinate in your imagination but i think the point is that things are not isolated by resistance but actually strengthened by and come into being by resistance let me just mention another very interesting small insight
You know there are these ecodomes in which plants, some of them are very large, plants are grown in a protected environment under glass. Biosphere? Biospheres, that's it, thank you. And people were puzzled to begin with that trees in these biospheres kept falling over before they had any maturity.
And it turned out that trees, in order to grow properly, need wind. They need wind to blow them and challenge them. And they produce a core of strength in the wood and in their roots, which enables them to thrive. There we are. It's just another image of the same thing. Let's talk about the title of your book, The Master and Its Emissary, which I believe is derived from the Nietzschean story. In the Nietzschean story, the emissary is contemptuous of the master.
Now that has me wondering, does the left hemisphere have some emotional reason that it thinks that it is primal or that it has an emotional reason to usurp the right brain? Because people normally associate emotion with the right and the left is just calculating.
Well, it's interesting because all those things that people used to say that they're just, you know, emotions in one hemisphere, that is entirely wrong. As I say, what is different is the way. So they each have emotions, they just have different ways of relating to the world. And interestingly, the emotion that most lateralizes is anger, and it lateralizes to the left hemisphere, not to the right. It's tempting.
And not perhaps entirely wrong, since after all, the brain is part of a person to think of these two hemispheres as having personalities of a kind. I mean, of course, one immediately invites the post that everyone's anthropomorphizing a computer or something. But of course, one's easily sort of skewing the picture by thinking of the brain as a computer, because it's obviously part of a living person as well. Anyway,
To cut a long story short, yes, when you isolate one hemisphere at a time, the left hemisphere is more confident, even when it's entirely wrong, and tends to increase its sense of conviction when it's presented with data that suggests that it might be wrong. Whereas the right hemisphere tends to be more open to, well, it might be something different.
Ramachandran, you know, very well-known neuroscientist says that he calls it the devil's advocate, the right hemisphere, because well, the left hemisphere is jumping to conclusions, which it does very quickly. The right hemisphere is going, yes, but on the one hand and on the other. And you know, another element that we miss very much in today's
culture is that ability to nuance position opinions and see this good and bad in many things that more and more of something you think is good is not necessarily good and so forth but to come back to the hemispheres it's also true that the left hemisphere sees less i mean literally sees less uh in the sense of it attends to less and therefore takes in less of the world and when you see or or understand less you think you know it all
There's a phenomenon in psychology called the Dunning-Kruger effect, which basically is that when people are very bright, they think they don't know very much, but when they're stupid, they think they know everything. And so it's the people who are least intelligent, who are most dogmatic about their views. And I think that you could say that the left hemisphere suffers from not really understanding
jumping to conclusions and tending to be rather impatient and angry. So yes, I think you could you could say that about them. And what what I've been amazed by is in how many cultures, there is a story, like the master in his emissary of two brothers or an emperor and his general, or whatever it is, these two powers, and one of them is clearly
sort of superintendent of the other, but the other thinks that it should be the master, even though it doesn't really understand what it's doing, and it tries to resist and even to try to destroy that force. Now that story exists in Iroquois legends, it exists in Chinese eighth century literature, you know, it's there all around the world, it's there in Inuit mythology,
What is this that we're seeing? I think it is an understanding that there is a part of us that is somehow unwilling to accept that it knows very little. Einstein actually said in a letter to the Queen of Belgium, he said, if more people understood how very little we know, the world would be a much nicer place to live in.
Speaking of stories, I'm reminded of one by Hildegard de Bingen. It's one of my favorite quotes. I'm not sure if you're aware of it, but it goes something like this. And pride germinated in the first angel as he can no longer comprehend the source of his own light. And so he spoke to himself. I want to be master and want none above me. And that one is powerful. I think about that often in one. So the first angel Satan and then two through his own radiance, he couldn't comprehend the source of his own light. And then three. And so he spoke to himself.
and so he spoke to himself and that to me is there's something about being overly self-conscious and and just simply speaking to yourself and not talking to others that breeds well it it reinforces arrogance but it also wants you there's something there's something evil about it yes i'm interested that you use that word most people these days are frightened of using it having spent a long time as a psychiatrist i've certainly seen sickness
and I've seen unhappiness but I have also at times seen evil something that is not fueled by any need or anything except the desire to destroy and to hurt and I think that does exist in all cultures people have thought that it did and that it's probably not just confined to us so I mean the absolute locust classicus in the west is
Milton's Paradise Lost, whose theme is entirely this, because of course it was Lucifer, the Lightbringer as the name means, who became the chief of the of the devils, and in that sense he was exactly like the emissary to the master, because in the story of that the reason the master points the emissary is that he's such a good emissary. The trouble is he's not a very good master, and
This unequal dynamic is very important and I think it's very difficult for people to understand these days because we'd like to think in a rather left hemisphere way that things should be just symmetrical, that if there's A and B they should be just symmetrical, but they may not be. One of them may be much more important and creative than the other. So I think these drives, if you like, that are in things are different, not necessarily easily reconciled.
And this has nothing to do with a particularly religious point of view. I'm sorry to say that I don't really... I mean, I certainly honor religions and spiritual traditions, but I don't myself feel that I have any particular connection to the divine. But I would hate to lose the sense that there is something beyond the material that is very important and powerful and beautiful in this world.
part of why your book is so fascinating is there are sentences embedded within paragraphs which are already far-reaching implications so there's a set of three sentences i don't recall where somewhere chapter seven chapter eight i wish i'd written them down but i just wrote down a note what you've done in these three sentences is connect nihilism boredism sorry boredom the platonic realm of timelessness and then to me that also connects eastern mysticism and then the idea of the present moment
As for the exact connection, the relations between those, I'm still cogitating, I'm still trying to understand, but you said that with an offhand remark and I was wondering, I don't know if you realize the profundity of those statements. I don't remember actually the words, but I could have said something like that, definitely.
I know I say, which I believe is correct, that the concept of boredom and the word for boredom arose in the 18th century when we first began to feel that we really had control of everything and that the whole of life and the world around us was under human control. We could have it the way we wanted it. And it was then that people started to feel the sense of emptiness of, as you say, the beginnings of nihilism
and so on. So I do think it's very interesting and in the book that I've said an awful lot more about all this in the book I've just written called The Matter with Things and the last part of the book I look at the building blocks of the cosmos. I mean a daring thing or perhaps a stupid thing for somebody to do unless they think they
They somehow have an insight into physics, which I rely very much on colleagues and on guidance from physicists, but to talk about time and space. And I think these things are very, very important. And one of the things that people believe in the real world, a lot of people who have a spiritual take think really time is an illusion. Really time is just a mistake.
It doesn't really exist, but I with Lee Smolin, who I very much admire. I'm going to be interviewing Lee. Oh, well, for what it's worth, I'm an acolyte. I think he's he's very, very interesting. And I quote him a lot in my new book. But with him, I think I'm right in saying I consider that, you know, time is absolutely
primary, ontologically speaking, and there is a saying of Dogen, Chinese sage, that even God cannot exist without time. Now you can, I mean that would be a fascinating conversation all on its own, but there is such a thing as time moving and developing and at the same time not running away
An image I quite like is the idea of being in a stream and if you move with the stream you don't stop the stream moving but as far as you are concerned the world is permanently there with you because you are moving with that stream. It's only if you're standing on the bank impatiently with a clipboard and a stopwatch watching things pass from outside that time appears to have this erosive quality
Instead, it's part of the experience of becoming, which is what it is to be a human becoming. Speaking of streams and time, Heraclitus' River, this is mentioned quite a bit in your book. And I have a speculative question here. Okay, I'm just going to read it because I don't have it in my working memory. So the right brain is the type that when I say right brain, I mean, hemisphere. So the right hemisphere is the type that would come up with the statement that there's unceasing change.
it's constantly constantly changing and then the left is the one that needs to stand back and abstract and see some constancy and then it made me think about time and then the arrow of physics and I'm wondering if you had any thoughts on the nature of time or the nature of arrow of time in physics well I do Kurt but I don't know how how good they are but I've thought about it an enormous amount and
Physicists themselves are divided on the arrow of time but I tend to be with those who say that without the arrow of time nothing could mean or be anything at all. That all that we know of physics even down to the you know the most rarefied kind of contemporary physics none of it could be without the existence of time. There can be no processes in fact without time and I believe that these processes are prior to things which is partly why I entitled this book The Matter with Things
It's a pun on various levels because I think there's a problem with our material obsession and there's a problem with our thinking the world is made up of things. So I think, you know, I don't take the block theory of time, you know, that it's really a static thing but we just sort of move about in it, nor do I take the view that it's something that most of the philosophers who try to approach time
with the single exception of Bergson seem to me to have confused what they're talking about and unfortunately most people nowadays don't read Bergson and the reason they don't read Bergson is they've inherited a prejudice that somehow Bergson was wrong because he had a debate with Einstein in which it said he didn't understand Einstein but which it's equally true that Einstein didn't understand Bergson
They were looking at two different things and they weren't necessarily at odds with one another. Einstein was looking at a kind of time like a clock's time, whereas Bergson was looking at time as not something that can be measured in that way. And the distinction between a flow
and a series is absolutely fundamental and Bergson spent most of his life trying to help people see why this was so fundamental. And when I saw it, it was absolutely one of the three or four great Eureka moments of my life. I saw that a lot of the problems that we have philosophically speaking and with our attitudes to the world come from us having seen a seamless motion. Hear that sound?
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There's a concatenation of an infinite number of slices. That sounds like an almost technical difference, but in fact, it goes right to the core of the two versions of the world that come into being.
is always trying to stop time. It's always trying to freeze time. Because imagine its idea is to pick something up or to catch something. So it wants to freeze it and catch it and get it and have it and hold it. But you know, as Goethe said, as Blake said, when you try to freeze the fleeing moment, then you're lost. Because all is in this process of change and flow. And it's respecting that
What is the other model then? So I know you can't go through Berkson's entire model, and I'm assuming you're talking about Berkson as in Henry Berkson?
All I know about Henry Berkson is that he's associated with Bohmian mechanics and I need to investigate more about Berkson's theories I've been told to so that's on my list for those who are listening and are eager I'm working on it. What's the alternative to viewing time as in infinite slices, infinitesimal slices? What he noticed and it's very important
is that it only can be turned into slices retrospectively and it's like a point on a line when you draw a line you don't draw a point infinitely small and then another one and so on you the line is there in retrospect you can find a point at which your pencil was at point a in the line you can you can designate it but actually there wasn't a business of going from point a to point b or whatever
Similarly, if you move your arm, it is a single seamless motion. And you can't say I move it to A to B to C to D, you don't. But in retrospect, the representation of motion can be dissected, but motion itself can't be dissected. Similarly, the representation of time can be dissected, but time itself can't be dissected. Now, why that is so important to me,
is that one of the most fundamental differences between the right hemisphere and the left is that the left hemisphere deals with representations so the right hemisphere deals with things as they are present more so it it deals with them as they presence as heidegger would have said has they at the very moment that they are not just present because that sounds rather passive and mechanical but as they presence they come into being for you they come into your
your field of of being an awareness and the right hemisphere is therefore with that living moment but the left hemisphere is categorizing things you can only categorize them a small time after you experience them so if you like its world is a world of a schema a representation a map which can only be made to
make any sense when there's something that can be schematized when there's something that can be mapped so the difference between what is in the present moment and what is reflected on later and dissected is profound and what he noticed was that in our thinking process because we stop and talk and reflect on things we think that we find the world as our left hemisphere intellect
presents it as a thing that's divided up into areas and so on whereas actually the experience of it is not like that and because we're so used to to seeing it the left hemisphere way most people wouldn't see what i'm talking about they just say well i don't know what he means by that i mean
You point out beautifully at one point that language is like money.
And I believe it's because it only takes its value at the terminus, but you have to cash it in. So for example, with cash, it's meaningless until you buy something with it. And then this place in which it bottoms out is the body in some sense. Okay. Can you explain what you mean by that? Well, again, what I mean is that we can be led into thinking that the world is the world that we describe. The world is the world
as we reflect on it and verbalize it. But because that's the bit that we're used to attending to. In fact, the right hemisphere can't speak for the vision that it sees. So it has to somehow convey to the left hemisphere how to use language to convey things that are not structured serially and analytically in the way that the left hemisphere prefers.
This is why, as I mentioned earlier, Bohr said you can only talk about physics, you can only talk about the sacred by using poetry. And the whole point about poetry is that it allows one to see beyond the everyday meanings of words to a web of interconnected meanings that are hinted at. So in a good poem, a phrase has resonances that may set seven or eight different things going in your mind rather than the clinical
an illusory antiseptic nature of the words taken out of context and put into a kind of manual of instruction. So words arise out of our bodies. They arise historically out of emotional responses. Animals in their own way have a kind of very primitive language. They make sounds that mean things and they express themselves in gesture and in words.
And there's a very long-standing tradition coming forth into the 20th century that language evolved out of the generation of embodied meaning in sound. In other words, out of music. And this is where, although I very much admire Stephen Pinker in many ways, I do rather take issue with his notion that music is sort of about as useful as pornography or cheesecake. Music is
terrifically profound and is actually more profound than language, which is why we often say, well, it's beyond me to express and so forth. But it's not just the very rarefied things that are beyond language. The philosopher Brian Magee makes a very good point that from the most exalted things to the most humble things. So he says, for example,
the towel that I've dropped on the bathroom floor. There is no language to describe the shades of color in it, the configuration of the folds, the way in which it relates to everything else in the room. And yet my consciousness immediately takes all that in. I'm aware of it. I know it. But there's no way I can do it in language. And how can I say Leonardo's Supper? You know, how do you? So language, we fool ourselves when we think that language
is where we live language is something we use to try and communicate a certain level of meaning about the world but not all of its meaning so what if someone says we can using language or some language give a representation a fairly accurate one of the last supper by taking a picture of it and then the zeros and ones that
Well, they've just definitely sidestepped the problem by saying that we take all these
ones and zeros, which if you look at them and I look at them, there's no Last Supper there. We can put them into a machine which creates a simulacrum. We've developed a machine with instructions on make this come to be something like the Last Supper. So that's really, that's just a way of circumventing the point, which has not been expressed in words. I mean, there are certain things you can try to express in words, but you immediately come down to a handful of cliched terms.
As Nietzsche says, language makes the uncommon common, you know, because there's only so many words you can use to describe someone's appearance. You know, they're tall or short or thin or fat or black or white or whatever they are. And they have this colored hair and that colored eyes and so on. But that doesn't get you any nearer to what your loved one looks like, you know? So language is a very useful tool, but that's all it is.
and it comes about we learn language and I know you're going to be talking to Chomsky and you may have noticed that I gently disagree with the I dare to gently disagree but I'm encouraged by the fact lots of other people do too with the idea that it is something like an abstract system in in the brain like it could be in a computer waiting for stuff to be filled in because in fact we develop language
through the process of interrelationship with other people in an embodied way, which involves emotion and feeling and gesture and so on. This is how children learn words. And so language has its roots in emotion in the body. It's not some abstract clinical thing that then gets closed in emotion in the body. It starts from those places. That's my point.
metaphor is language is cure for the ills entailed to it by language explain that that's another one that is a beautiful that's a quote okay well it's a beautiful quote well it tries to compress the idea that what are the ills i'm referring to well the ills are
As I say that something that is only a symbol or representation of something has to the thing that it represents. And in this way, it's like money that money can mean ultimately that I can have lunch tomorrow with a friend or I can, you know, buy a car or whatever it is. But the money itself only has that quality when it's cashed back into life, which is very complex thing.
And language is rather like this. We can refer to things, but the experience that we refer to is no longer in the representation or the reference. It's implied by it that it isn't actually there, but that doesn't matter because
We think metaphorically all the time, and all language is metaphorical. Interestingly, the language of science and philosophy is particularly heavily dependent on metaphor, a point made by Lakoff and Johnson in their wonderful books, Metaphors We Live By and Philosophy in the Flesh. So metaphor literally means a carrying a cross. And so if you imagine there is this sort of
divide or gulf between what the word love means and the experience of love. Metaphors
can carry us across that linguistic divide, they can take us back to the experience of love and so something as metaphorical as a Shakespeare play or as a piece of music or whatever and music is metaphorical, it uses metaphors based on bodily movements so risings and fallings and
resonances and all those things that are experienced in a bodily sense. So those things are evoked in great art, in ritual, in religion, in narratives, in mythology and so forth. And they take us back across the divide from those sterile words to the thing that those words were trying but not able to evoke. Think Verizon, the best 5G network is expensive? Think again. Bring in your AT&T or T-Mobile bill to a Verizon store today
Speaking of Lakov and Johnson, you mentioned, well, it's in your book, a couple quotes from them.
Reason doesn't separate us from the animals, but instead puts us on a continuum with it because we're, well, reason is predicated in embodiment. Now, I'm wondering if you can explain that because reason to me has to do with logical inference and so on, like if-then statements. How is an if-then statement related to my body per se? Well, I think the problem might be in thinking too literalistically about what your body is.
I mean, it might not be, as it were, in your thumb. I agree. But your body is everything that is you, apart from, well, not apart from anything, really. I mean, we are, for the time that we are alive on this earth, what our bodies make us. And animals that don't have language and don't apparently have
Any kind of schema of logic can solve logical puzzles. They can reason things. You know, crows and magpies can give correct answers to logical problems that an eight or nine year old human being won't. I mean, that's just one example, but I mean, the more one reads about animals and even insects, the more one realizes that the concept that only we can act reasonably or rationally
is wrong. You've probably seen on YouTube there is in fact a filmed episode of a crow solving an eight-step logical puzzle and although it has solved each step of the puzzle
in isolation before it has never solved this particular sequence and in a matter of about three minutes or five minutes it's not a very long clip it has actually taken the eight steps that will allow it to secure the food that it's after now i mean that's in itself what do you say about that you know is it the crow's language is it its mathematics or what somehow from experience and our bodies are the repositories of all our experience that is
that is solving this problem. And we don't solve half as many things as we think by thinking about them. In fact, nine tenths of all the great decisions we make are done unconsciously. We arrive at them unconsciously after thinking about other things, sleeping and then saying, I think I'll do that.
And when we are not aware of things, as Julian Jaynes first did out to me anyway in his 1976 book, The Origins of Consciousness and the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind, we don't really need consciousness for very much. We can weigh options, form judgments, solve puzzles, evaluate beauty, fall in love, and do many, many things without thinking about them. At some level, we are working on them.
but that what the left hemisphere privileges as thinking is just the left hemisphere's kind of thinking which is explicit in language and foregrounding whatever is in the mind but there's a whole what we're conscious of is only one percent maximum of all that there is that's going on in our minds
So the idea that, you know, we have to be conscious and reason in order to think cleverly is wrong. I mean, one of my favorite philosophers is A. N. Whitehead. And in the book, in fact, on the structure of mathematics, he said, I can't remember the exact phrase, which is wonderful, but he says that conscious thought is like cavalry charges in battle.
It's expensive, it's wasteful, it requires fresh horses and can only be done at unusual moments. So most of the time we're living perfectly rationally, perfectly intelligently, but without actually thinking about things explicitly. If we had different bodies or if we grew up on a different planet, a different evolutionary chain or tree, would we have reason differently? Would we reason differently? Would our inferences be different?
Or is logic universal? Well, how would I know? I mean, there are too many counterfactuals in that. You can't extrapolate from us to a being that we can only imagine and we don't know everything. In fact, we can only know what it is. Let me rephrase it. Is logic or the way that we formulated logic and rationality and reason, which I'm conflating and I know there's a difference between them, but for the sake of this,
Are they substrate dependent? So the fact that we are human, we came up with reason in this particular manner, and that aliens might not share our reason, they would come up with different inferences and it would be valid. Well, I would, I mean, again, I don't think anyone can be certain about such things. But my intuition would be that reason and logic are, if you like,
substrate independent, that they're not just a human invention. But then I think that about a lot of things, that they're not so much inventions as discoveries. I mean, confusingly, the word invention originally meant to find something, but it now means to make it up. And so what I think we do in experience is come to an awareness and an understanding of things that are not entirely dependent on us. Let me put it that way.
And I think these things include essential values like good, goodness and evil and beauty.
and things like that. So, and this is not unusual. Derek Parfit, who is a colleague at All Souls, and I say a colleague, I mean, in that we were both fellows of the same college, but I mean, he was a very great philosopher and an atheist, but he believes that goodness and beauty were ontological primaries, that they weren't things that were just valuations we put on things because we happen to like them or not like them. And I would be
I would be rather inclined to that position too. You also talked about, okay, so inventiveness is the etymology of it is related to finding and then also being originative. So being original has to do with the origin going back. Can you explain that? Because that was one part of your book and your book is quite lengthy and I wanted to finish this in time. It's spent the past week or so just absorbing pretty much pure Ian.
Pure Ian for this and I made notes where I wasn't able to comprehend fully and I just had to move on. That was one of them. So do you mind expounding on original thinking or coming up with some original object and its relationship? We think of it as a new, but you also made an analogy that it's original. That is it's going back. Yes.
Okay, again I can't remember exactly what it was I said that you're referring to, but I think I can see what's being hinted at. It's partly a distinction, if I may say, that is in similar structure to that between fantasy and imagination. So
fantasy is the putting together in a novel way of things that elements that really we have experienced and are aware of but we put them together rather as I say like those children's books where the pages are divided uh into three parts and you can turn the pages and create animals with the head of a seal and the body of a goat and all that sort of thing and so that is fantasy but imagination is looking at something
that you think you know and it seems entirely ordinary and suddenly seeing it for the first time, this is something Wordsworth wrote about a great deal, that it wasn't about striving for something outside of the ordinary, it was finding the extraordinary within the ordinary. Now when you talk about the origin or original thinking
many great revolutionaries, and I don't mean to say political revolutionaries especially, I mean people who brought about paradigm shifts in our thinking, did so by going back to the perception that had been lost sight of, sometimes a thousand years ago or more, and they renovated something that had been lost from the culture, and that was what was revolutionary about it, so that I don't think that
An original thinker is somebody who just makes it all up because none of us do that. We are all the repositories of centuries, millennia of other people's experience that has gone into the making of us and into the ideas that we believe. And so to strive to be original,
is to cut yourself off from that and to cut yourself off from the rest of humanity saying look i did this on my own whereas i think that is a you know a typical problem of our age that it's great that we're individuals don't get me wrong and i think that you know conformism is a problem but we are only also individuals because we also belong together in a society that both brings together and nourishes individual flourishing
Curiously, the coming together helps the being different. I sometimes talk about a couple in a relationship, that a good couple is one who become more themselves through the relationship, not less though. Sacrifice their individuality, but he does actually realize
and enriched and fought in greater being by the relationship going back to where we started that relationships create the things that are related as much as the other way around. Okay, here's what occurs to me when you say that. So let's say you have a great couple. Let's say you are you married? I was but I'm not. Okay, so I'm married. So let's just take me as an example.
let's say me and my wife I find that the longer I spend with her the more I do feel authentic but at the same time and the more she feels authentic but at the same time I can imagine we're becoming closer and more and more akin to one another's personality so then I wonder is the most authentic self for each individual as we come closer and closer to our core is it the same or extremely similar because otherwise I can't make sense of this paradox of you becoming authentic as an individual but at the same time becoming closer to other people
Well, I think that the deep structure of reality is entirely paradoxical to the left hemisphere's take on it, that things that are opposite are absolutely bound up with one another. And it's the left hemisphere that wants things to be either the one thing or the other, either to be separate or to be together. But the right hemisphere sees it doesn't have to be either or, it has to be both and. And what's more,
It has to be both, either or, and both and. I don't know if you've heard of paraconsistent logic with Grand Priest? I have, yes. And I'm not sure I entirely understand it, but what I know of it, I rather like. Okay, so explain to me, to the audience, how can something be and not be? Well, that's a big question, but
When we say something is something, we may well mean when viewed in this way, or in this context, change the context, change the point of view, and they're equally something different.
So the trouble with the left hemisphere is that it decontextualizes. This is a very, very important difference. The right hemisphere alone understands that what a thing is, is what it is only because of the context in which it is. And that context doesn't take away from its being what it is, but contributes to its being what it is. If you take the context away, you diminish it.
Now that's just a very obvious down-to-earth example of what I'm really saying, that we form social contexts, we form loving contexts, and in those contexts we are changed, we are altered. Everything we do, everything we think alters us, which is why we need to be careful about how we think. As I say, attention is a moral act. It changes us and it changes the world. Well, that's one of the most frightening aspects of your book.
Okay, you know, we can get to that part later. A distinction that's important for the audience was important and enlightening for me was between this and and Canon, I believe they're German words about knowledge. Yes. Do you mind expounding? Yes. Or if you prefer several and connect in French, and the simple way of saying it is that several this and is knowing that something is the case.
whereas Kennan is knowing something direct. So I know that Paris is the capital of France. I know Paris because of the times I spent there and what they've meant to me. And I know that
you know, the tree in my garden is of a certain species and a certain height and so forth, but I only know it because I walk past it, stop under it and experience it. So really, there's a distinction between a kind of abstracted form of knowing data, knowing things, about things, and the knowing of them rather than about them.
I'll tell you one of the aspects of your book that I found unsettling. Let's say I I've had this experience. I think I've talked about it before on another podcast, perhaps at the Bernardo Castrop, if you've heard of him. I have where it was in the middle of the night. I've woken up from a dream. And then as I was falling back to sleep in this hypnagogic state, I heard my wife say a word
I don't know what she said. I don't know. I still don't know if she said it or didn't say but it could have been it doesn't actually matter was like yes or okay. And then I wasn't sure if she had actually said it. And I started to go into a spiral of extreme anxiety. And I'm not a person who's ever had a panic attack in my life. But then I started to feel like am I going crazy?
am i am i hearing voices i don't want to hear voices oh my gosh and then i started to think okay don't hear a voice don't hear voice but then i was thinking about freudian repression am i now repressing a voice that will come back even harder later oh no so should i move toward a voice and what would what if the voice tells me to kill myself i'm not suicidal i don't hate my life not in the least what if it tells me to harm someone else and and then i i had to wake my wife up and tell her please help me because i'm i'm
I'm I need help breathing and then so she the next day I had a similar panic attack and then two days later had half of one Then it just went away. I didn't even talk to my doctor about this. She said you should go to psychotherapy to talk talk this out But admit it ameliorated on its own
Then a couple days ago, this is fresh, but this came from your book. This is why I love you. But then I curse you at the same time. There's plenty of talk in your book about schizophrenia. And each time that would come up, my heart would race. And I'm hearing myself in it, where I'm not the type of person that as you know, if I'm talking to you, I'm not a
a fundamentalist materialist who dispenses with the divine and so on. In fact, I'm extremely open to it. And the eulogisms I get for this channel is that I'm extremely open and actually trying to understand like I'm trying to understand your point of view. I'm trying to morph it with mine. I'm trying to understand other people's but that's extremely difficult because it puts me on such unstable ground that I don't know what's real.
And then I'm constantly questioning what's real. Is this real? Am I the only one that's real? Am I fake? Are people lying to me? And sometimes just when I say it out loud, it helps me through it. Part of it is like I'm keeping it in. I don't want to scare my spouse. I don't want to scare someone else. But I also thought another part is that there's no one else that I hear talk about this much, no one in the public sphere. And so I thought,
One time I heard Peterson was schizophrenic. It was, it turns out to be false, but that actually gave me, gave me hope because I was like, Oh my gosh, someone else is experiencing this. And then I thought, okay, Kurt, why don't you talk about it? First of all, it's curative to myself. Second of all, someone else might hear it and be like, okay, this is, I'm not someone who's asinine. And so maybe someone else who's somewhat normal is going through this. Castrop said, Kurt, don't worry. This is part of the spiritual journey. When you question consciousness and you involve yourself in these subjects, this will happen.
But either way, what you said, which is that you view the world more and more mechanistically, that's the left brain. Now, that's my entire life up until maybe a few years ago, because I'm trained as a physicist, a scientist, and that and that you're extremely speaking to yourself over and over and over. And I feel like that's what I do. And I've eschewed music, too, for the past 12 years. I haven't listened to music because I just find it to be a time waster. And I'm wondering how much have I hurt myself by doing so?
I wanted to say this to you because, well, first, I just want to hear your thoughts. And then you can also relate it to the world at large. Well, I think it's not unusual for people to have these experiences. And people who think a lot, ponder a lot, philosophize a lot, conceptualize a lot, do come to this crisis of doubt, if you like, and it's
I mean the first great exponent of this was Descartes. But for his age he lived a remarkably ungrounded kind of existence. What I mean is that most people then still lived a more rooted embodied existence and he probably by his personality as much as anything was inclined
to, I think he had a schizoid temperament, actually. And why this is important is that there's a wonderful book, which I often mention and will mention again by Louis Sasse, a psychologist at Rutgers called Madness and Modernism. And it is a fascinating work. And it was completely another of these sort of eureka moments for me when I read it.
because he drew so many parallels between schizophrenia and modern culture, including high culture. And he drew 25 or 30 parallels that are clear to anyone like him or me who has treated many patients with schizophrenia, between the way they encounter things, experience them, and aspects of modernity.
And this comes together for me in the fact that the left hemisphere is in a way ungrounded. It has taken things, taken them out of context, taken them out of the lived experience of the body, detached them from what they mean to us, and then said, I don't know what this means. Because as it were, having taken it out, ripped it out of the context that would give it meaning, it no longer has any meaning. This induces a sort of what's real, what isn't real.
The only people who live the sort of very strange lives that we do are likely to be tormented by this because they don't see consciousness as something in here and a reality that's just out there. We come back to something we talked about a little earlier and could talk about a lot more, which is how are these two things related? It's neither that there's just an in here and an out there.
nor that it's all made up or it's, you know, so it's a connection. We are beings that can attend to the world. That is our essence. And as Louis Lovell, a 20th century philosopher said, attention is love. Love is a pure attention to the existence of whatever is other, another person, another thing. And I think that that is
how we relate to the world, that it is not, it's not alien to us at all, nor are we alien to it. It's not that we have to figure it out as if it were an odd thing that had dropped in our path. You know, Paley in his days and thought that it gave the image that the universe was like a watch that some, sorry, Paley, an 18th century bishop. Yes, yes, Thomas Paley, I think he was.
Imagine the world is like a watch, you walk on a heath, you find this watch, you immediately know there must be a watchmaker. I mean, this thing didn't just happen. So he says the world is like this.
says, and I think very fairly, that he is himself a palaeist without God, because he, just like Paley, thinks there is a mechanism here that is working itself out, he just doesn't think it's God, he thinks it's genetics, that there is something, as it were, in a gene, the robot that controls, etc. These images of control
Are there in him as they would be in the idea of a daistic god i what i mean by daistic god is a an engineering god an engineer who is separate from creation winds it up and occasionally teachers with it.
whereas I believe whatever is divine is in the fabric of the world and is not known, not certain, even to whatever that divinity is. It's a process of true creation, a sort of exhilaration of that, that carries the whole process of creation of a creative cosmos. Anyway, I'm probably not making sense, it's so hard to convey these things briefly, but Schelling in the 18th century, who's one of my favorite philosophers,
was able to express this not not very easy German I have to agree but this is at the core of his perception that the inner and the outer as is often said in many non-western cultures they are distinct but they're not separate and that's a very important point that it comes back again to the business of not being lost in a context you're distinct from another person but you're not separate from them or sort of
And I sort of think of the world as being seamless, but with you can go seamlessly from red to green without even knowing that this has happened.
You know, in a three or four minute film, the color can change. Nobody knows is the color changing, but it's changed completely. So it's possible to move along a continuum and the spectrum of colors is an example of something that is not a concatenation. It's not lots of little separate colors. It is simply a spectrum that can be moved along in such a way that you can go from something very distinct
to something else distinct, but they're never been separate, they've never been cut off from one another, they're part of the same whole. And I think that a number of physicists that I've read in my attempts to understand modern, well, quantum field theory, actually, is the theory that I find most congenial to my philosophy, and seems to be being espoused by a lot of physicists,
But in that case, again, things can be distinct, but not ultimately separate. They belong to fields which can be more concentrated or collapse in certain ways at certain times in certain places. Actually, speaking of quantum field theory, on these pages that I have notes for you at the back, because I thought that we were scheduled for two hours earlier by accident. So I was just doing some quantum theory problems.
Just to get myself more familiar with it because I've been out of the game for a little while. Why is it that you mentioned... One day you'll be able to explain it to me. Why is it that non-rhythmic music is salutary compared to rhythmic music? See, let me explain my reasoning for this. Well, first of all, you mentioned it in the book, but second, I told you I don't listen to music. I don't get pleasure for music and I
I haven't done so for maybe 12 or even 14 years. I play music, like I can play this and sing. I like to do that. I like to listen to Eminem occasionally. But I don't like to listen to music. And for me, it's because I'm so in my head. I'm such a child of the enlightenment, let's say that I see that as a waste of time. And I just need to be thinking. And it came from when I was around 18. And I was
on a train and the train ride passed in like two minutes when it was a 20 minute train ride and it was because I was listening to music and I stopped and thought that's not good because I could have been thinking could have been solving problems so then I'm like from this day forward on the train you just think think think think think it's reminds me of the first angel then he spoke to himself and I feel like I have inadvertently been harming myself and now what I'm doing is a slow process of undoing
and your book is helping but it's also unnerving thank you either way you said that okay listen music these days is is rhythmic and that's not the best kind of embodiment non-rhythmic music is so can you explain well i i don't i don't think i said that i i really don't um i haven't got anything against rhythmic music i just said that the most powerful expressive elements in music include
melody and harmony and that rhythm is only a part of music and it's the only part that the left hemisphere really understands especially very basic pounding beats that are repetitive and mechanical because even complex beats with cross rhythms and syncopations are better understood by the right hemisphere but melody and harmony are really very much dependent for most people non-professional musicians dependent on the right hemisphere
And all I was really saying is that in our culture, I was just pointing to the 101 ways in which we can see the
what I consider to be the dire impact of not using or paying attention to what our right hemispheres will still tell us if we just listen to what they're enabling us to understand, experience and live in. One of those 101 things is the way in which music has changed, interestingly, to be largely a matter of rhythm and that
melodies and harmonies are not as subtle as they used to be, and are in many kinds of music. But there's nothing wrong with rhythm in itself, although there is something very important about variation in rhythm. So certainly in playing, if you're a great pianist, you wouldn't play something in the way that a computer would play the notes with exact same lengths and exact same intervals.
There's something called rubato, which you may know of, which is the business of very slight variations from bar to bar in the movement of the music. And this is a parallel to the fact that living rhythms are always variable. They're not mechanical. And I was absolutely amazed when I was on the obstetrics wards when I was a doctor in training.
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Now, I mean, that's an image to me of many other things that, you know, that
There is a beauty in the slight hesitances in dance, in music. It's very hard to put your finger on what they are, and they're within an overall frame of irregularity. So there's irregularities within the overarching frame of regularity. And this comes to something very, very deep for me, which is that we need
togetherness but we also need distinctness we need individuality but we need the whole but the important thing is we should be under the embrace of the force for togetherness not the force for separation so in brief we need the force for division and we need the force for union we need both both need to be present we need to be unified not divided
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This reminds me of longing versus want. In your book, you mentioned longing is a unification, a stretching out to, but want is a desire which puts you at
separate from? Yes. Is there a connection or is that just in my head? No, I'm delighted that you made that connection. I think it's exactly right from my point of view. And in fact, there is if people are interested, if you if you Google McGillchrist longing and wanting, I think it's called
I gave an hour-long talk in London about four years ago on the distinction between longing and wanting, and nowadays it seems to me that we have lost the sense of a longing for something to which we already feel an attraction and which is calling to us and which we are sort of rather
The word long literally comes from an Anglo-Saxon root which means to stretch out.
Gone from you, but which you are still connected. You want to reconnect with. In fact, it is this
Sisterly and diastole, if you like, which are from the heartbeat, you know, the sisterly followed by the diastole, the lup followed by the tup, there's this kind of contraction and release, is the way in which movement happens in nature by alternations of that kind. To produce something that is just a kind of addition of the two in some neutral way, or perhaps a compromise, a 50-50, it produces something completely new. This is the point. It is the creation.
The creativity of your life, of this world, of the cosmos, depends on our ability to see that opposites need to be held together. The world is not as simple as we think it is. Things that we think are good also conceal something that is bad, and things that we think are bad also conceal something that is good, and we need to finesse these things in order to find our way in the world. What I mean by
the opposition bringing something new into being is the tension of a string of a guitar or a violin. It's important for that, that it's pulled in two directions at once. In fact, if it weren't pulled in two directions at once, it wouldn't work. You might say, well, that's a waste of energy. Why pull things in two directions at once? Why not come to an agreement that a compromise and just stop pulling? Well, then you don't have a string anymore. You don't have a violin anymore. You don't have any music anymore.
Well, something comes out of that conflict, which is very important. Sorry. To be fair, in string theory, you can have closed loop strings and you just give them attention. It's just like a variable you vary. Oh, I really wasn't pretending to talk about string theory. I really don't understand. I know. OK.
When you say, you're like, hmm, we need to, we're separate, but we're also together. And this impulse to be separated should be there. And the impulse to be together should be there. We should be guided by the together one more so than the separate one. That's the individuality. Okay, well, that to me, it reminds me is I'm not meaning this, by the way, can I just say I'm not meaning this principally or only to do with social relations, I'm thinking of it as
a metaphysical structural feature of reality, that it has this structure of the need for difference and togetherness, not just we as human beings have it. Okay, well now you gave me another idea. So let's say I'm walking along the beach, and I'm looking at the waves and the sand and the salt. Am I supposed to feel, or is it good for me to feel, connected to it and feel as if the waves are alive in some manner and I'm speaking to the rocks? Because in the dead-end left hemispheric view,
I see them or one would see them as impressions, picturesque impressions upon my slate of sense, so sense data pressed upon me. But then I can, then I know that that's associated with schizophrenia, schizophrenic ideation in its extreme. Okay, but then in the other extreme, I can see someone going and talking to the rocks and and holding them up and kissing them as that its own form of
psychosis, but I'm not sure. I don't know if that's actually associated with schizophrenic thought. Either way, I want to hear so which one should I do? Should I stand back passively of you? Or should I treat it somehow emulated in my brain as this is living be Kurt be in this world as if you're living engaging with it. But these are not just plastic objects that have wood. They're, they're also not beings, let's say, but they're
There's something to them, there's some life that they have. So how does one dance that web? Because I can see inane craziness on both ends of the spectrum. But does it have to be one or the other, in keeping with what I've been saying? Isn't it an error to go to one extreme of either of these? Not because the reality exists in a compromise, but because there is a wholly different position that is only found when you reconcile the two opposites. That is my point.
and it's imaged in that taut string. But I think it's a very unusual view we have of the world that we are separate from it and it is dead and that any life in it is something we attribute to it. I argue, and it's too long an argument to do now, I even argue that inanimacy is
If you like the ultimate limit case of animacy, not that animacy is some weird thing that popped into the cosmos. I think animacy is of the essence of a conscious universe in different ways in different degrees.
Animacy as in animosity or the Jungian animus? No, no, as in things being animate. So obviously, yes, but we don't have to go to that, not an extreme, but to that length, if you like. I wouldn't have time to justify that position, but I think I do in my book. But in any case, most people at most times in the world have not
failed to make a proper scientific assessment and come up with a theory that things around them are alive they know that alive because they actually experience that and we have told ourselves that we can't be experiencing that because it's just not wrong isn't it I mean in the age of science but what do we know about that actually science is not dealing with that question science is not able to talk about whether there is
something that has consciousness or animosity in the world outside of our own heads. So I don't think that one needs to either tell oneself one's wrong when one feels a sense of connectedness or think that being properly connected means
You're being swallowed up and you don't love those waves so much that you go into a rough sea and get drowned. So you need to keep walking this balance and it's all about the balance or harmony. Harmony was the Greek word and it's a word that we've lost because our world has so little harmony in it. Things that we call harmony are actually
dictated fiats that things must be like this but no true harmony is is a kind of thing that has to evolve between things being fully themselves and not pretending to be something they're not so yeah i think it i think it is a very very important element i wrote also an article for the journal of consciousness studies on the question of the self because i think there's a confusion you know that
the holy person or the wise person has no self. And I think I know what is meant. I can see very clearly what is meant, not a narrow, egotistic, selfish, fragmentary, atomistic self, of course. But at the same time, by growing in richness and thinking and meditating and creating and just being,
you are growing a soul, you are growing a person, you are growing fulfilling an individual element of the cosmos that will never be there again. And surely to say that that's all valueless and that the whole business of existence is to try and deny that and get as far away from it as possible seems to me a little bit negative, because even the Buddha, you know, had to sleep, had to eat, had to go to the lavatory. If somebody shot the Buddha,
he didn't go well he didn't shoot me because he did you know every everybody has their individual self but there's a very big difference between what Jung called the self which is a sort of mature thing that you grow into and the ego which is this sort of more left hemispheric sense of the self as the acquirer the manipulator the one that wields power and that's very important again in
the spiritual philosophies of most cultures, the renouncing of power, because power is very much the left hemisphere's major tool. It exists in order to make us powerful, to get things, to grab things, to get prey, to build things, to make things, and thinks that we will become happier or better in doing so, although all the evidence is very clear. We don't become happier or morally better people by doing it. What you say just makes me think of
There's quite a few thoughts. I'll splay out two of them. One is, Freud said, or at least Freud surmised that his ego and so on would have some morphological equivalent in the brain if neuroscience would just progress. Now, it sounds like what you're saying is to some degree that's true because the left hemisphere is associated with the ego. Is that correct? I don't really want to say yes to that or no to it because in some senses, yes, in some senses, no.
It depends too much what you mean by ego, and some aspects of the superego might be better identified with the frontal lobes rather than with either right or left hemisphere, and certainly it wouldn't be right to say the right hemisphere is the id. The right hemisphere is the morally self-abnegating part of us, the part that enables us to be good friends, parents and citizens. It is the bit that
David Hecht at UCL in London says quite straightforwardly, and I think I'd sign up to it largely, that the right hemisphere is moral in its attitudes and the left is basically immoral. It is there for what it can get. Is the left hemisphere immoral or amoral? Immoral. In other words, it has a morality.
And it has it has really no sense of well, let me just go back on that. In the book, this new book, I argue that the left hands can't really understand morality. It hasn't any really a sense of morality. So it substitutes for morality calculation. It says if I weigh up the consequences of this act and the consequences of that act, I can find out which is the morally right act. That sounds very good.
But there are many circumstances in life in which it would be profoundly immoral even to carry out a calculus of that kind. And it's in normal circumstances, apart from one or two philosophers, it's mainly people who have right hemisphere damage or frontal lobe damage, or are very severely autistic who think in that way.
Most of us have a sense that morality is something more complex than that, and that we don't do it would be quite wrong to make decisions based on an entirely dispassionate mathematical. In fact, how would you attach the values? I mean, would the value gained by many sadistic pedophiles around the world
outweigh in the pleasure given to thousands of people the suffering of one innocent child that is tortured for fun well if you have to do a sum on that then you there's something wrong with your moral sense and i know that's an extreme case but i'm afraid it's a rather important indicator of something that is wrong with utilitarianism on its own
Utilitarianism has a place sometimes. But again, it's this problem that left hemisphere thinks that whatever it is, it does is the only thing and the best thing. Whereas it's actually not even core to morality, utilitarianism. I believe in a kind of objective moral. I'm so sorry. Do you believe in objective morals? Well, it depends what you mean by objective.
I don't believe that they're just subjective in the sense that they're made up by us, but I don't believe they're objective in the sense that a machine would be able to calculate it. I mean, when I say objective, I mean that there's something at the structure of reality at the fundament, at the abutment that has morals and that it's not just our own. No, no, thank you for clarifying. No, definitely. No, I think the cosmos is moral, which isn't to say that it's all good.
Of course, because morality includes the whole spectrum. But I don't think morality is an element that we've somehow, we've come to is simply an expression of things we like and things we don't like. I think it is a very profound aspect of the business of being alive, as is the appeal of beauty and of complexity of mathematics, of music, of landscape, all these things embody something that unless we're
you know crippled, cribbed and confined by the left hemisphere's take on things obviously speak to us about something more important than what the left hemisphere alone can tell us. There's nothing wrong you know it's not that we all would be better if we had a left hemisphere stroke of course not as I often say it's my second favorite hemisphere it's terribly important but it's you know it got to be under the
In Christianity, there's a heavy, heavy emphasis on both love and truth. And it's not just
speak the truth no matter what it's speak speak the truth guided by love so the truth has to serve love i'm wondering is that mirrored by the bi-hemispheric structure is that one right brain is the love in this sense and then the left is the one that's associated with truth at least objectively can be associated with some form of objective truth or am i just going off on a limb i think you're going you're going
An awful lot further than I would go. I don't think I would say any of that. But I think it's perfectly legitimate to speculate when you're thinking about the richness of an idea or an image or a metaphor about what it can illuminate. So I don't think there's anything wrong with having an idea and thinking, well, maybe not. But I think honestly, I'd say maybe not to that one. What do you make of Daniel Dennett's explaining consciousness or consciousness explained?
Well, I think it's a perfect expression, a very intelligent expression of a certain kind of take on the world, which is to use the term that you invoked at the beginning of our talk, that is, I think, rather sadly impoverished.
And it's not a thing that can easily be solved by argument. These are things that you come to through experience. In other words, they involve canon as well as vision. And they come out of the fruit of many kinds of attention to the world, not just the claim that comes from arguing in a seminar room.
And so not that there's anything wrong with doing that, but again, it's a supplementary aspect of what philosophy is. Philosophy has got a little bit lost, I think, as a sort of technical department in the university, somewhat like engineering. And interestingly, Dan Dennett says that if he hadn't been a philosopher, he'd probably been an engineer, which seems to be intuitively right. But it also points to perhaps a certain
I don't know, unwillingness to accept that things might be beyond what he knows and more complex. It's interesting that engineers, for example, have a very high... I did a study on this at the Maudsley Hospital, which I've never actually got around to publishing, but it's very clear that I didn't expect the results, that people who became mentally ill at university with a major mental illness,
Those who became manic-depressive, i.e. had an emotional disturbance as a primary element in their psychosis, were not principally philosophers or engineers, but those with schizophrenia were massively more likely to have been studying engineering or philosophy than any other subject. And it's also come to light that terrorists who are fundamentalists
have engineers are more represented amongst them than amongst other people. I, you know, of course, I'm not trying to say that, that all engineers are like this, but I'm just pointing to a sort of certain kind of, I don't know. The predilection for engineer like thinking is what is also a predilection for for categorical thinking and for a lack of willingness to accept that things
are not certain and maybe much more complex than when there's given them credit for being. Let's see. I wanted I'm trying to find this one question about. Well, okay, before I find that question.
I'm curious, how is it that you were able to pin down the insights about the right brain by using your left brain? Because this is a book written in language and so on. So did you engage in meditative exercises? Did you speak to spiritual gurus? How did you do it? Or did you just read dispassionately the literature and then you said, okay, this is what the right brain does. Let me write that down. Well, I think it was very like my idea of the right brain guiding in the left hemisphere doing much of the sort of procedural work.
So it's often been pointed out to me that without a highly active left hemisphere I couldn't possibly have written that book with its attention to expressing extremely difficult things that are not intuitively the things that most people nowadays in the West think in language and arguing for them and producing an enormous amount of scientific evidence. So I think the left hemisphere
as I say, was a valuable servant to me. But what I hope is that I was guided by a sense of something that I was aware of, but not fully aware of and wanted to explore more and to bring into more into the light really, never fully into the light, but a bit further into the light so that it could be better seen. I think this is the process.
It's more like seeing a gestalt, seeing a form, than it is culminating an argument in which step A leads to B through to Z, and then you fritch off and say, right, proved. That's never going to be a success in philosophy in my view, I say rather controversially, because the world is not like that. And Plato right at the start thought that we shouldn't even write philosophy down, that it could only be done by people
living people talking to one another for a long period and getting to know one another and that then an intuition would come about like a spark would be kindled. Now that's right at the founding of modern western philosophy but we've got a very long way from it. Yes, I think the image that I like, and it's occurred to me when I was writing my very first book in my 20s, was that what I was trying to say
was that we have understandings of things, specifically works of literature or of music or art or whatever they are, not by a linear chain of discovery, but by circling them and seeing them from different aspects. And that it's more like a picture that gradually comes into focus or even quite suddenly at some point comes into focus. So at the time you're looking at it, it doesn't seem coherent.
but then gradually you see bit comes and you see I see you have an aha moment and things begin to fall into place and then other things refuse to fall into the picture that you've got and they help guide the next stage so there's a new Gestalt, a better one replaces and indeed in philosophy what we're doing is always just replacing one Gestalt with another. What I mean by a Gestalt is a form
which is a whole, which is more than any of the parts. I know you know this, but I'm just saying it in case any listener doesn't define the term familiar. But it's the whole idea that there is a whole of something that can't be accessed fully by simply dividing it up into its parts. Something essential to it is loss. I have a quote here. It's you quoting Sass from Schizophrenic Mind. And I'm not going to I'm just going to paraphrase it because it's a quite a long paragraph. It says that
When you engage in the world in a passive, disengaged, self-conscious, stare at the world in an objective manner, it becomes bizarre, alien, frightening, and that's akin to the schizophrenic mind. However, the process of mindfulness meditation seems shockingly similar, where you're supposed to stand back and you simply observe, no judgment, don't engage, it's all just being fed to you.
Yes. Well, in terms of the hemisphere,
paradigm. One is what happens when you allow the left hemisphere only to be working. This is the standing back so that your body is not involved, so that your feeling self is not involved, so that you have deliberately cut off all the contacts from something and then see it as something utterly alien. Whereas the mindfulness is and then interestingly and perhaps not essentially but interestingly
The science of mindfulness shows that it does rely more heavily on right hemisphere.
activations than left and indeed on changes practitioners in the structure of the right hemisphere. But I don't think that's the important point. I think what is going on in mindfulness is that you are adopting the position of the right hemisphere towards the world, which is in fact, although you might think it is similar, it is the exact opposite. Because whereas the one is, as you are isolated and detached, the other is standing back
enough to allow the self not to crowd everything out. Where the one is actually thinking about things all the time, the other is saying, no, I'm not going to think at all. I'm just going to be there with it. Now, in the first case, in the sort of frightening alienating way, which interestingly,
Shreve describes the 19th century judge who became schizophrenic in his middle years and wrote a wonderful journal of his mental illness. Shreve describes exactly this, that the world becomes alien as soon as you start reflecting on it so much that you drop all the connection with it. Now in mindfulness you are not
absent from the world. It's about being fully present in the world. The idea is that in normal life, you're not fully present, you're not actually there with the world at all, because your thoughts, your ideas, your judgments, yourself is crowding it all out. So in fact, they're quite opposite in their tendency. I sometimes talk about something called necessary distance,
And what I mean by that is exactly that kind of distance that enables you to see something properly as a whole, not to swamp it. But it doesn't mean being so far detached from it that you can't see it or understand it or relate to it. That would be the opposite of necessary distance. That would be toxic distance. And there is such a thing as toxic fusion, in which you can be so close to something you can't see it, make it out or accept its being at all.
Why is it that you associated in a metaphor the rising up and floating with the left hemisphere and then being on the ground with the right hemisphere? Because to me, I would think that the left one is the one that's on the ground manipulating and the right hemisphere is the one that can see the whole picture. Yes. Well, you very, I think, entirely rightly put your finger on the way in which any one metaphor
breaks down in these circumstances and you have to use a whole variety of them. What I was really thinking of was that it was like the difference between someone who is actually living a life on the ground and somebody who is doing a sort of aerial photograph of it in order to map it. That as it were, all that is there on the ground is present to the person who's experiencing it headlong in the business of life.
who actually sees the garden, sees their children, hears the wind and sees the stars, and the mind that is already dissecting, analyzing and remote. So you're quite right that the left hemisphere, this is another way of putting the finger on what I was trying to say, is there is a kind of distancing which can be remote.
but there's a kind of distancing which enables you to see the whole picture just as the kind of being fixed on the here and now which is generous and wise and allows you to understand it and the being fixed on the here and now which is just about acquisition and accumulation of power and influence so they each contribute to both as you would expect
each has a version of closeness, each has a version of distance. As I keep saying, every concept you care to name has a left hemisphere take and a right hemisphere take. So it's not, as I say, that they do different things, they do the same things, but they do them always from a coherently different perspective. I see coherently different. Because I can imagine they don't call differently different.
Yes, what I'm trying to suggest is within themselves coherent. I see, like a self-consistency. Yes, self-consistency. So that, for example, you might say, so how does the left hemisphere view language, how does the right hemisphere view language, how does the left hemisphere view distance, how does the right hemisphere distance? They don't sound like they've got very much in common, but when you come to look at how each of them
looks at everything there are very common threads that are consistent through how the right hemisphere deals with every aspect of existence and very common threads that characterize the way the left hemisphere does so they're not coherent together so much as coherent within themselves but the art of life is bringing these two things to bear in such a way that the richness that they can only really come from them both is not swamped by the left hemisphere trying to take over the whole show
It doesn't happen the other way around because the right hemispheres often say well you've put your finger on you know what a left hemisphere world looks like because at the end of the book in the last chapter I sort of describe a world in which the left hemisphere based on what the reader knows about it would make of a world and in reading it you I think most people see a very clear portrait of what is happening to us now.
So people say, but what would a right hemisphere world look like? The answer is, well, it would be a very balanced one. And there's never been a civilization that didn't have its left hemisphere aspects, because the right hemisphere sees more, it therefore knows that it needs the left hemisphere.
it after all if it's the if it's the master it appointed the emissary because it realized it needed the emissary the emissary coming into existence and being crowned as this you know very wise minister thinks it knows everything when it doesn't and that's the problem it's people who think they've got it all in the bag now is our consciousness i think sorry sorry i was wondering is our consciousness
Residing in the left brain or residing in the right hemisphere or is it in the interplay between both or is it being fed from both? Because as I hear you say the left thinks it's in charge it reminds me of our consciousness that thinks we're the ones that are in control and then it has and then we have to be confronted with a myriad of psychological studies to show no you're a monkey on a Elephant's back and you think that you're controlling it, but this elephant's gonna go wherever it wants. So are we
When I'm speaking with you right now, or when one is speaking with you, are we either engaging in one of those modes? Are we primarily on the left? Are we both somehow being fed from each? When you start talking about the relationship between consciousness and the brain, then you know you really are in very, very rarefied areas. And I don't shy from talking about it in the book, a chapter, which is the length of a short book on its own on it. But I think that
You see, let's start with the monkey on the elephant. In my experience, the elephant is all that we are not currently aware of. And the monkey is just that foolish little bit that is doing the thinking and talking consciously now. So earlier I said, most of everything we are doing is not stuff we're doing consciously. In fact, if we try to do it consciously, we do it very badly.
It's one of the interesting things is that the better you get as a chess player, the less you think consciously about it. Right. So the same is true of a surgeon or a pilot. They have to think a lot to begin with, but as they get better, they think less and less. So the role of that monkey is rightly considered not important compared with the elephant, which is wise and has memory.
So that's the way I'd look at that. I don't see those images as therefore telling us that we're just the puppets or playthings of something else. I mean, that's a very, very skewed left hemisphere way of thinking about it, because of course it's only interested in power and control. But actually what it is, it's saying no. What you are is rooted very deeply in the whole of your experience.
including the bits that you're now conscious of, but including many that you were conscious of in another moment and aren't now, and things that you're perhaps never conscious of. So anyway, and complicatedly, consciousness has two meanings. One is as against the things you're not aware of, like, oh, at that moment I wasn't conscious of the fact that it's, you know,
my friend's birthday or something like that. But it also is used in the sense of what you lose when you go into a coma or die. So what I'm really saying is there is a kind of consciousness that we find all too obvious and overvalue, which is the one that does the chatting and talking and thinking right now. But what I mean by our conscious awareness of the world is a deep thing that is going on in both hemispheres all the time.
When we narrow down to the conscious mind, we're talking about that focus of the left hemisphere. An image I sometimes use, I don't know if it's helpful, is that we sometimes think of the unconscious as underneath the conscious, as like a sort of a deep tank that you would come to if you went through the floor of your conscious, the conscious tank. But instead I would hear that sound.
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There's a stage that is basically in darkness except where the floodlight happens to go and when that moves to a certain place, something suddenly shows up.
But when it moves away, that something doesn't go away. It's just that at the moment you're not looking at it, you're looking at something else. So we are a field of consciousness. In fact, Lichtenberg says and Schelling says, it thinks in me. So as it were, there is a field of me, which is the minus of me and all that goes into that. And it's not something alien from me. It is who I am.
And it's out of that that my thinking comes. The Cartesian idea that there must be a little chatty ego for there to be an I helps us forget or miss the two depths of our being. So anyway, when you when you do brain experiments, you can interrogate each hemisphere at a time and each one is conscious. It's just that the right hemisphere can't speak those things.
Sorry, sorry, sorry to interrupt, because I'm super curious about this. Okay, so you have a colisotomy, and then you asked a question, and then you confabulate an answer because you don't know it, or at least the part of it. Okay. But that's the part of you that is conscious. And it seems like the consciousness is still in the left and the right is in control, but it's unconsciously in control doing a process. So is that another way of thinking about it? Or can you attribute consciousness to the right hemisphere?
Well, I think consciousness is not a thing. It is, of course, a process. And indeed, the brain itself is not a thing but a process.
Every cell of your body is a process. It's much more like a process than a thing. It looks like a thing because you can photograph it or do a diagram of it, but actually that thing that looks like a cell membrane is actually very fluid and it's changing its position and its composition all the time. So even a single cell is actually a sea of things that are changing and moving and interconnected.
Now the brain is like that on an infinitely larger scale. I have a feeling that your new book, this is pretty much what it's talking about, is that there are no things, there are only processes. Is that correct?
It's not that I think there's anything wrong with conceiving of things as things. I mean, for example, this laptop on my lap is perfectly properly described as a thing in a certain way. It's just a way in which we encounter the world for certain purposes, a very good one. It's just that on the whole, it's a mistake to think that the world is structured out of things. Anyway,
When it comes to the consciousness and the brain, I mean, I think of consciousness as being sequestered for a while in a kind of area. And I sometimes think of this as like the outpouching of a membrane. I mean, if people remember looking down slides or down microscopes or seeing slides of
organic membranes of living tissue, they will often see that they have sort of outpouchings called drilli or that an amoeba has something called a pseudopod that it can extend and if you're in the middle of one of those those long things you can think you're completely surrounded on all sides but at the foot of it you're connected to the main and I think that our consciousness is quite rightly seems to us
and it would be no good it being flooded with everything else going on in the universe or nothing original would ever happen nothing would be creative and i keep saying the only way i can explain the cosmos it's through a deep creative urge that's the most i can say of it and one that probably is connected to to love which is relationship anyway um what i'm saying is that
Consciousness is my consciousness whatever it is my brain is experiencing as consciousness
is for the moment absolutely connected with my brain you know if I get an injury in the brain to affect the consciousness and to go back to James's thing about the vocal cords if he has an injury to the vocal cords his voice will disappear and so on so but he and his thoughts and his everything that we've expressed through that will carry on I know it's not an exact analogy another image I use sometimes is of the the consciousness in the brain
being able to divide and go around an island. So at a certain point in the flow of a stream, there may be two seemingly quite distinct streams that don't know much about one another at that moment. But if you moved 100 yards down the river, you'd see that they came together as they'd been together before. And they weren't, therefore, entirely separate streams, although it would be perfectly reasonable to talk of them as separate streams at the time.
but ultimately they are connected, and of course the image of the stream, which is the image that my all-time favourite philosopher Heraclitus said was at the heart of, you know, everything flows, is a brilliant perception because the stream both remain, so the stream that passes my house and it
I recall you talking about Heraclitus and saying that it is both that the stream is the same and that you don't step in the same river twice. It's more like
those are two different modes of being with the river or the stream. Okay now see that's different than the standard analytical answer would be the Wittgenstein which is while you're playing different language games and so it depends on what you mean by so-and-so but you're safe you've changed it from the analytical to saying no no it depends on how you be okay yes might outlining that briefly or as lengthily as you like for the audience I think that was incredibly insightful
Well, in a way, it's another way of saying something I said before, which is that it's not either or, or both and. It's both either or and both and. So it is both true that the stream is the same stream and that it is a different stream.
Each of these has a sort of truth, and in either or cast of mind, you can go, well, come on, which is it? But in another way, you can say it's perfectly coherent that it is both. Not actually because in some part, as I've just suggested with an image of an island, but all the time it is one and the other.
And there are many things in life and in the wider structure of things, it seems to me, that have this dual, not dual quality exactly, but this unwillingness to finally split it into it's got to be this way or that. In fact, the further you go towards deep things, the more you find that opposites come together. And I know I'm hardly the first person to have said that, but it still needs to be said.
Is that why you said at one point that the logical mind, while it reinforces itself, reinforcing at its extreme, you would get to the right mind? Well, I think into the extreme, it ought to be able to encounter its own bounds. So, for example, in a way, Gödel demonstrated that a certain kind of entirely logical thinking eventually demonstrates its own limitations.
And Pascal said that reason is feeble indeed if it cannot see its own limitations. And don't forget that Pascal was a great mathematician and logician. So, I mean, as well as being a great spiritual thinker. So if you take the left hemisphere thing far enough, it will encounter its own
self coming the other way. And we sometimes see this happening in the world. If you take a certain point of view, far enough, if you take an intolerant attitude that's dogmatic and cruel on the right, and a similar one on the left, you can hardly tell the difference. It's in the mentality. It's in an approach to the world.
and you know by going further and further away to the right or the left you don't avoid the fate that you're trying to avoid the nemesis will come to you if you insist on having a black and white either or way of thinking so we must for our own sakes get back to seeing that it's a both and world
in which you may have truth on your side and I may have truth on my side and we ought to respect one another and talk about it in a grown-up way, not vilifying, hating and silencing people, but listening to people who say things different from ourselves. That's so fundamental. It's how our civilization got to have a culture and now we're throwing it away.
Anyway, sorry, it does distress me very much. This, this sudden rise in, in the not being shades of meaning, I think it's to do with the way we're educated. I don't think we're taught any longer to think. There's a phrase in Greek, in classical Greek, men, there, and then many of the great philosophers of Greek, they would say, men, on the one hand, this, there, on the other hand, that, and
In a way that was part of the way I was taught to think that you should see yes is good in that but there's also something else to be said that you need to be aware of.
In the last year or two, you come across a couple of Zen sayings that I like very much, and I think I might write a book with one or other title. One is, yes, but, and the other is, not always so. And that really brings one back into the world of the right hemisphere, because the right hemisphere thinks yes, but. It's the one that always says, yes, but hang on. It inhibits headlong action. It's actually more intelligent.
It literally is a more intelligent hemisphere in the sense that if you have damage to the left hemisphere, damage to the right hemisphere, overall damage to the right hemisphere will drop your IQ more than damage to the left hemisphere. That's extremely interesting. I know that you can function in the world more adaptively if you have a left lesion, not the right lesion. You can certainly function more because your emotional intelligence is not impaired and your understanding of human beings is not impaired, but your good old-fashioned
cognitive intelligence, whatever it is IQ measures is also more highly dependent on the right hemisphere than the left.
There's a study by Barbie et al 2013 where they looked at 150 people who'd had strokes and had a pre-morbid IQ measurement and looked at their post-morbid IQ measurement and then they put the maps over the top of one another and where were the really key areas for dropping your intelligence? Hardly any was in the left hemisphere. Interesting. Almost all of them are in the right hemisphere which is not of course again part of that bad old
caricature difference between the left and right. You know, the right hemisphere is all very well, dear, but it's a bit, you know, kind of not very reliable and silent. Right. But yes, but actually, it's both more reliable in the sense of more likely to make the good decision and more intelligent. But anyway, there we go. But let's say about inhibition, because you said to me earlier on, and then I actually I really must stop. I'm enjoying this conversation.
so much no no bless you no i could i could talk to you all day i wish we had time um but i said early on something about inhibition well here's a fascinating thing first of all the corpus callosum which started up that's the band of fibers that connects the two hemispheres at the base of the brain started out largely facilitatory in other words it was largely conveying information from one to the other hemispheres but it has now
And when the
It involved more and more inhibitory neurons. Mammals have more inhibitory neurons, primates have more inhibitory neurons than other non-primates, and humans have more inhibitory neurons than any other primate. And the really important neurons for
the effectiveness of carving experience, coming back to the idea that as it were like carving a statue in the stone, something only comes into being by the turning away of something else, so that the inhibition of the discarding of something that might have been brings the thing into being.
I was always wondering if there's a more precise marker of intelligence or sophistication than the encephalization quotient or the brain to body mass ratio. And I was wondering if you can use the inhibitory neurons and the proportion of them.
I think any of the known markers has a little to be said for it and quite a lot to be said against it. And one of the things again, you know, think about the crow, able to solve all kinds of problems, a brain the size of a pea. Though birds do have a higher encephalization quotient than us. Well, there's a higher encephalization quotient, that is correct. But nonetheless, the actual
Number of possible connections is very much smaller, which is probably why they're not building things that are destroying the world. This one comes from Sam Ford. Nice one. I'm a big fan of
Ian McGillicrest. I think he's perhaps one of the most important thinkers of recent times. He cites Jung a few times in the Master and his Emissary and mentioned Jung in his first talk with Peterson. I've always wondered how well he thinks Jung's ideas about the different aspects of the psyche map on to his own. He gives a little postamble. It seems to me that maybe the persona slash ego in the left hemisphere may match up to some degree.
and that the unknown greater personality of self matches up to the union of the left and the right hemispheres maybe. Either way I would like to know his ideas on how Jung matches up with his.
Well, that's a very nice question and a good one. I have to say right away that I've not really made any systematic study of Jung. I read Modern Man in Search of a Soul,
When I was a teenager and it struck me as a very important and powerful book and since then I have I've read bits and pieces here and there so I don't really I wouldn't say I'm a paid-up Jungian or anything like that although I do find that Jungians like Buddhists and I'm also not a Buddhist
I have great sympathy with both Jungians and Buddhists. They seem to come to my talks and write to me. So obviously in their probably better informed minds, whatever it is I'm saying has resonances and I'm always interested in those.
I think the key thing about Jung for me, I can't really talk definitively about things like the ego and the animus and the anima and all these things but I can say that his general world picture is very sympathetic from my point of view and one of the most important points which is something that he shared with Goethe
was this sense that opposites come together and that's something that I do strongly believe as I've said earlier when we were talking about that and so yeah but I'm afraid I'm not really in a position to it's slightly like the Freudian question you asked about you know can we line up the id and the ego and the superego with I think to an extent you can but
And I'm sure that, you know, it's possible to make good analogies between Jung's work which I don't, you know, as I say, I don't know the detail of. I've always thought of him as a very sympathetic soul basically. So I'm afraid I'm going to have to disappoint some there. But the thing that interests me though is, you know, that although
You see, looking back over history, there are so many people who, long before even Freud and Jung, and who knew even less about the structure of the brain than they did, have posited something very like what I think I've discovered and am promulgating from
You mentioned once in your book about the Greeks that they had
some intimation about the left and the right hemisphere either one is for i think perception and the other one was for understanding
That's right. Yes, and it's fascinating that so long ago people were speculating on the uses of the two parts of the brain. I mean, what one has to remember is that in Galen, who is, you know, one of the first great physicians, he thought that the brain was actually a kind of air conditioning system. He thought that it helped the person lose
Excessive heat so clearly they were very long way off modern science, but I do cite and footnote the sources for I think their third century AD Suggestions that the right hemisphere was perception and the left for understanding now Unfortunately, it's actually true that the right hemisphere is better at both perceiving and understanding but one sort of knows what was being got at the right hemisphere is definitely better at perception and
and the sort of taking of things as reality rather than having an idea about them in the way that the left hemisphere has. So, you know, that is also remarkable. Thank you for reminding me. Well, thank you for pointing it out. I make extensive notes. Okay, that's another reason when I was telling you before that this podcast is killing me in many ways, in one way, in a salutary manner, hopefully.
In one way it's destabilizing, in another it takes so much preparation and hopefully the preparation shows in the questions. Sometimes I read the comments and often they indicate that they do, but I always wonder how much am I overextending myself.
No, no. Well, look, I mean, let me say quite genuinely that you do, your questions are some of the best. They target very important areas. And no, I think you're, you know, from that point of view, you're one of the best interviewers that I've come across. So thank you. Well, thank you. Thank you, man. It makes me blush. I'm brown. You can't tell, but I am blushing.
Okay, Joanne Dong says, can you ask McGillicrest about the substitution effect from psychology and its impact on the imbalance between the right and the left hemispheres over the course of Western civilization? Daniel Kinneman states, in thinking fast and slow, when faced with a difficult question, we often answer an easier one instead without noticing the substitution. Thank you. Well, yes.
Well first of all let me say about Daniel Kahneman and the hemisphere hypothesis. It would be wrong to suppose that when he talks about thinking fast and slow he's talking about the two hemispheres.
In a conversation that we had, he confirmed my impression that he's talking about more top brain versus bottom brain than right versus left. The frontal cortex of both hemispheres taking more time, being more thorough, and the posterior cortex of both hemispheres being more likely to be jumping to conclusions or going for the familiar. However, having said that,
Your questioner does touch on something very interesting because research shows that the left hemisphere jumps to conclusions and tends to see what it wants to see in what is being presented or what is being asked. It will actually ignore or just not hear or just not see things that invoke something that it's not interested in or not aware of.
So in that sense, our tendency to give a fast answer to something we can answer rather than a slower, more thoughtful answer to something that would require deeper reflection, that is a left-right distinction. So the left hemisphere being the more superficial and quick and dirty
Okay, C. Wren Dudley, hopefully I'm pronouncing that correctly, says, by positing an absolute division between the brain hemispheres, aren't we already thereby engaged in holy left brain thinking?
In other words, isn't the notion of different sides, quote unquote, confined to only one side of the brain, namely the left?
Yes, I mean, sorry, the answer to that question is no. I have talked about this quite a bit. I certainly addressed it in the new introduction to The Master and His Emissary, the new edition that came out a year or so ago. But I do also address it in the matter with things.
There's a sort of sense that you know you're dichotomizing aren't you people sort of say that but um I remember your exact line about this because sorry to interrupt for the people listening the preface alone of the master and its emissary is already one of my favorite books of the past few years the preface alone I remember listening to the preface I had to listen to it because I I was driving and so on so the preface alone
had me pausing so often and thinking and I'm just wondering how the heck is Ian coming up with this? Anyway, if you can only read the preface, do so. I would point out that the preface I'm talking about is for the new version 2019 onwards. It has a green cover, so if your version doesn't have the green cover then that doesn't have the preface.
but it's very nice that you say that because actually somebody sent me a very nice email saying man I've just read your preface and you know it's worth buying the book just for that so it's almost exactly what you said yeah so but I try I try to I try to encapsulate you know some of the the questions and answers there but you know in life there are things that are false dichotomies and there are some that are genuine dichotomies even if there is a degree of overlap
So for example, you know, bad drivers versus good drivers, that's a false dichotomy. I mean, it's a matter of degree and it's all on the spectrum. And then you could take some other things like being a tree or being an animal, you know, there is a kind of pond life, it's very hard to say whether it's actually a plant or an animal.
but nonetheless on the whole we can tell the difference between an elephant and a tree and and this is the this is a perfectly good dichotomy if you like
So what I would say about the divide between the brain is that I always start off very early in any book, I'm talking about it, I say, yeah, there is a certain degree of overlap that's necessary and important. But nonetheless, don't reject the fact that there are very startling differences
just because you happen to think that dichotomies are impossible. You know, dichotomies can be simple, but it can also be simplistic to reject a dichotomy if there is one.
and in this case there is one and let me just repeat because people don't find this easy to take in there is overlap there is overlap and an example I gave is between the culture and climate of Iceland
and indonesia so iceland is a very cold country and its landscape its vegetation even the temperament of the people is bound to have been molded by its climate indonesia has a different climate a much warmer more humid climate and again the vegetation and the history and the culture and even probably the temperament is different
But it is still true that the hottest year ever recorded, the annual average temperature in Iceland was higher than the lowest average temperature for the year ever recorded in Indonesia. So itís perfectly possible for there to be overlap in things that are radically different.
Actually, that line is burned into my memory. The line is people don't like dichotomies because they say dichotomies are simplistic, but it's also simplistic to dismiss something just because it's a dichotomy. Now that one I'm going to take. I will credit you. Don't worry. But I'm doing interviews. I'm being interviewed because I'm putting out a film soon on the extreme left. What makes the extreme left extreme on the political spectrum?
Right. Not because I'm a right-winger. In fact, I'm apolitical, but because it's difficult to analyze what's extremism on the left. Extremism on the right is blatant. Anyway, I may use that line. Well, I think extremism on the left is also blatant. As I said earlier on when we were talking, they have an enormous amount in common.
Right. Exactly. Exactly. So that's why I was like, okay, that's the horse shoe theory, I believe, in a nutshell. And that's interesting, because the further you run away from a point, the closer you get to it after a certain location. So it's like a circle. Right. In some cases, that is absolutely true. Maybe you want to quickly comment. This is something I was thinking about as I was reading your book is, is there a way of mapping the hemisphere differences, the left right onto our left right spectrum, maybe it's inverted, like the right brain is the left and the
The reason I was thinking about this is because while the French Revolution is posed as a left phenomenon and they espoused rationality and so on, but that's a left brain. But then on the other hand, they loved Rousseauian thinking, which seems to me to be more romantic, which is right-brained.
So there's many contradictions I see and I couldn't map them on directly and I was wondering if you had any experience or thought about this? Well, to come back to the previous question, this is a case where it would be simplistic. So any culture is a mixture of many things. And what I say about this is easily to identify right hemisphere style thinkers on the right and on the left and left hemisphere style thinkers on the right and on the left.
so that you get thinkers that are dogmatic, uncharitable, angry, Mr. Right, knows what's good for people, you know, that is your left hemisphere type and there's plenty of them on the left just as there are on the right.
and there are thoughtful, flexible, compassionate people who don't treat people as belonging to boxes or categories or ticking something but are actually complicated human individuals with many many facets to their experience, to their personality and that exists on both sides so it's quite coherent I think to say that no it doesn't map on to right and left in politics at all
in fact in some ways you know the interesting thing is if anything the left hemisphere is much more theoretical and the right hemisphere is much more interested in experience and one way of thinking about the divide between the political spectrum is that the left end of it tends to prioritize theories over the experience of history of culture whereas the right wing or the righter wing of thinking
tends to be very interested in history and culture and context and embodiment, not in a theory that on paper looks like it's going to make everybody happy. So I think there is an argument that if you had to put it either way I would associate the right spectrum with the right hemisphere and the left spectrum, particularly the extreme left, with the left hemisphere. Interesting.
But as I say, I don't think that you can make a clean mapping, no. Right. Nietzsche to me was paradoxical because he repudiated rationalities and then that to me puts him on the right hemisphere, as well as loved the passions. But then at the same time,
I do want to get away from the idea that somehow reason is associated with the left hemisphere and emotion with the right. Reason is associated with both hemispheres and so is emotion. They are both capable of being emotional. The left is actually more intemperate, less inhibited when it gets emotional.
and the right hemisphere plays a very important part in reason which is the coming together of thoughtful reflection on experience and even in some kinds of logic it is actually superior to the left so it's a very complex picture
This is a good point for you
a sort of isolated abstracted form formulation of rational processes in the sense that a computer could be programmed to carry them out and reason which is often in conflict with that
being reasonable means taking into account rationality but also taking into account what one knows wisely from experience and from living and in German there's a distinction between Verstand which is more like this rather abstract theoretical reason
and vernunft which is a kind of quality that you get from being wise and living which means you're able to reason but do so as a wise judge in a court would do I mean a judge in a court shouldn't really be just applying rules in a computer-like way but should be thinking contextually and that is what we used to mean
by reason and that's what we used to think was the flower of education that the reason for educating people was they could think in this very balanced flexible way taking many sides of things into account but in our world today where everything is very much skewed towards the left hemisphere we tend to think of reason as like a kind of rote rationality and I think that's a huge loss so yeah
You mentioned the judge and that reminds me I had a speculative question or speculative thought about Jesus who had an emphasis on the spirit of the text versus the text and one isn't keeping with God and the other is pharisaical, it's a literal interpretation and Jesus said you keep with God, you take the spirit and that to me was more right-brained and then I wondered does that mean there's a theological argument for the primacy of the right hemisphere?
Well there is actually and I make it in the matter of things, but it's a long argument and it needs to reflect on many many many things. I can't wait to read that book man.
But what I would just say is there's an interesting, you know how my vision is that the left hemisphere is either or, but the right hemisphere is sort of both and. Well, the left hemisphere tends to be very given to the letter of the law as you hinted, but the right hemisphere is able to see that sometimes the letter of the law
needs to be respected as well as the kind of spirit of the law, because the spirit of the law is generally what one wants to find, not the letter of it. But if a person has relied on the letter of the law, because that's what it says,
then they ought to be given some protection under law because they did abide by what the letter of the law said they might find themselves still open to the criticism that they didn't understand the spirit of it but i think that a wise judge would take both into account and it's not necessarily one way or the other that they would
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I know I want to get to Daigo's question, but you just said, please, I have to interject with one thought. Pascal, in your book, you mentioned that he had a quotation about the whole point of reason. I believe it was reason, not rationality. But let's imagine it's reason that the whole point of reason is to realize that there's an infinitude of more important aspects to life than reason. And then I was wondering, Well, what does one say to the retort that
When giving a reason to not use reason, you're still appealing to reason. So it's somewhat self-defeating. How do you get out of that? I didn't quite catch the meaning of your last remark. Let's say you're explaining to someone, here's why you shouldn't use reason alone, or if it's rationality alone. But either way, you're giving a rational argument. There are different levels of reason.
There's a kind of meta level of reason and I think the meta level, the overarching view that takes in both, is usually the one I would say is best associated, more likely to be associated, with the working of the right hemisphere.
and so as i say the right hemisphere is no stranger to reason absolutely not and it would be a big mistake to say that it in any way rejected it but it's more likely to see the limits of it because it's it's able to stand outside of its own viewpoint and see there are things that it doesn't know which the left hemisphere is very
bad at doing so it thinks I've got this schema which will solve all my problems I run them through this mental computer and a solution comes out which is the right answer
The right hemisphere is the one that would be using elements of reason, and there's nothing wrong with reason in itself.
to show the limits of reason. This is really what Pascal was saying, and you've just demonstrated that that is okay. He made a distinction between what he called géomètre, diameters, and esprit fin, fine spirits, and he says the fine spirits, by the word fine he means subtle. So the subtle spirit is different from the slightly bull in the china shop, black and white, hard and fast, inflexible
Geometric spirit in which he's saying you know you you you turn away you do a diagram and you've you've got the answer whereas the the espy fan he says can see things understand things that can hardly be put into words but a very very important now coming from a mathematician that is a very and a very great mathematician that's a very important thing to hear
Is this related to at one point in the book you reference that we need to transcend utility and I always wondered well tongue-in-cheek what's the use of that but also how does one transcend you till is this related to it is not related to it or is it all related because at some point everything's related but no no it is it is related Kurt but in the
I don't know whether you've got to a chapter where I talk about Schuyler's pyramid of values. Schuyler was a contemporary of Heidegger's, but died much younger, whom Heidegger called the greatest philosopher in Europe of his age. And he focused on values more than Heidegger. And he had a hierarchy of values, which at the bottom is things that are merely useful or pleasurable.
the sort of things that actually any animal would would go for and then there are the higher values that transcend those of pure utility and I think those are the very important values that render us moral beings and give our lives meaning and that just to be following utility and pleasure is self-defeating in fact by doing it very much more than any previous
civilization has ever done. We are endangering our very existence as a civilization.
We're just grabbing things as they're useful, taking courses of action because they're easy and pleasurable, whereas when a civilization is at its height, it inculcates a spirit of self-denial to a point, of a certain degree of bravery, of courage, of humility, of moral consideration of the value of others, and that this is not the way that we now think.
I'm assuming then when you use the term utility you mean in a short term or short-sighted or self-centered manner because we could always say that we could always reposition utility to be utility for God so that if you hear that sound,
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If we're acting in accordance with our morals then that's useful for the group as the whole.
But that would be a terribly debased way of thinking about one's attitude to God. It's rather like the old argument that if you believe that you will go to heaven if you're good then you're just really basically pursuing a good for yourself. But that is really to
I'm
Yes, a kind of selfishness and it's what we mean by hypocrisy, you know, where people say things and do things in order to look good and, you know, sound like they're something that they're not. Okay, Daigo Pinto says, his book, The Master and His Emissary is one of my favorite books about the brain. If you could sneak in one of these questions, I'd be appreciated. He has five. Sorry, he has four. I'm going to
Briefly align them and then you can answer one or two if you like, okay? Okay, so he says a section on the book that deals with evolution of the solid self though He's uses in brackets that I'm using these words on my own here I'm not he didn't use these words there would be a non unified voice or several in an individual which could be interpreted as an outside other being and then you make reference to Moses and the ancient Greeks or and so on as hearing God's voice as an example and
He said, could he elaborate on this and point out other sources on the topic? That's number one. OK, so save that. Maybe you want to respond to that. Number two, he mentions that language and the music have a common ancestry and then give some evidence for the claim. And I'd like to hear if he's learned anything new since the publication of this book. There's that. OK, so that's the other voices, language and music. Then what are his thoughts, if any, on Chomsky versus Lakoff ideas about language? That's number three.
And then number four, what does he think about objective truth? Can we apprehend it? Pretty much just that. Well, okay. Okay. So again, to briefly briefly outline the God and the other voices that are internal but perceived as such. Number two is language and music and then Chomsky and then objective truth.
Well I think the first two I have covered either in what I've said or in the book actually to some extent but the last two are both very big questions and to me more interesting ones. I very much think like Lakoff and Johnson about language and I find Chomsky's views, I may simply not have
given them the credit that's due to them, of course, but I find them less attractive because they seem more schematic, more programmatic, more like there is a sort of software in the hardware that does certain things, whereas I'm a great believer in what one might call the power of imitation in humans and I spend quite a lot of time on the fact that humans are particularly good
at imitating, not just copying but actually imitating and getting into the skin of another creature or another person and feeling something about how they are and why they are doing and saying what they're doing.
So I think language grows in this way, as I've said, from a sort of a basic sense that is embodied, profoundly embodied, in movement, in the voice, in music in the voice, and the business of breath, and that it is not really an abstract code
It can become that, but it actually, I don't know that Chomsky gives enough credit to the way in which language is constantly metaphorizing embodied experience, and Lakoff and Johnson very much do show how everything we say has a reference that is understandable in terms of the body, and we can't get deeper than that in a way, than our embodied experience.
It's where, as Wittgenstein said, I hit bedrock and my spade is turned. You know, one can't dig down any further, but it's from there that that language comes. And I've got time just to say a little bit about the objective thing. Do I believe there's objective truth? Annoyingly, I'm going to say yes and no. And I think we do, yes, we do to a degree have access to it.
I think very importantly that like many other things, it's a journey as it were, not an arrival. I mean it's not something we get and then we have it. It's a cast of mind or disposition for exploring
life in the world, which enables one to have more solid grounds for believing what one believes. So I absolutely repudiate the idea, which is a devastatingly destructive idea, a very silly one, that anything that anybody says is equally true, because there's no criterion by which to judge it.
It's almost beneath rebuttal, but it's so obviously wrong. You know, if I believe that, as Sokal says, that I can walk out of the 22nd window of my apartment, 22nd floor window of my apartment and survive on the landing, I'm wrong. Or very likely to be. So, on the other hand, it's not at all true that there's a single truth that is the truth, because
All truths are contextual. And that doesn't mean that every context renders it completely different. There are trends, and for me the important thing is to see that the path to truth is not a line, but a matter of circling or spiralling. So the important thing is not to say, I've taken this step, now the next logical step is this, and at the end of the road there will be truth.
you might even say well I know I'll never get there that's true but you know at least I can see exactly where I'm going but I'm not sure that truth is of this kind I think truth is of the kind where you look at something from as many different viewpoints as you can and when you hear somebody say something else about it you don't just rule it out and you know dismiss it you think now let me search for what's the truth in that because there are aspects of truth in it
And I sometimes quote Dunn on this, the poet John Dunn, 17th century English poet, one of our great poets, who says words to the effect that truth is like a castle that stands on a steep and craggy hill, and who wants to arrive at it doesn't go straight up, but has to circle around the hill to get there. And that image is a very useful one to bear in mind. In fact, I returned to the image of the spiral path
in which it's not exactly a circle which means that you just end up where you were when you get round the circle, but actually a spiral whereby you come to somewhere like where you were before but the view is now different, a little bit like T.S. Eliot's famous thing about arriving where we started from but knowing it for the first time.
And so I think life is a series of these things, and the path to objective truth is to commit yourself to this process of spiralling around and learning as much as you can about it, and knowing you'll never get the absolute truth, but you can get much, much closer to truth, and that matters very much. So truth matters.
and it is not the case that you know well i just see it differently so my truth is good as yours your truth may be as good as mine it may be better than mine but it may equally by the same token be worse so you know there is meaning to this idea a very important meaning to it and
I do find earphones very funny. I didn't know something about my ears but they always keep flopping out. Anyway, there we are.
Okay, is that in the mind's eye or what is that? No, no, it's its own book. It's a huge book just about how analogy is the core of cognition. Even the fact that when we imitate, I don't believe he uses the word memes. But Susan Blackwell even points this out that Blackmore points it out that to imitate is extremely complex to copy is wrong. But to imitate is complex. You have to take the essence of it.
Yes, that's exactly right. And what's also nice about it is that, again, the right hemisphere is better at this, because you're getting into the skin of somebody else and understanding the complexity of it, but it is also the one that thinks that understanding is analogy. So that these, when I've talked about mathematicians and scientists having a sense of a form and
and then finding that through a revelation or intuitional insight, they saw the solution to a problem. That was by analogy, not by going, well, I'm nine tenths of the way there down this path, and if I just do a few more pages of work, I've reached it.
Nothing is an understanding in that way. We don't just gradually work our way along a line. We have to see and feel analogies. And this is how Einstein describes his own discoveries, that he would play a piece of music and he would ponder about it, then he'd get up from the piano and go, I've got it. Or at least his daughter, I think, describes him in this way.
Have a great day, man. Have a drink.
Get some rest while for you. I don't know what time it is. I got the Chomsky interview. It's just a little early for a drink for me but I'll get onto it in due course and drink your very great health and I look forward to talking again perhaps in a year when you've had a chance to take a look at the matter with things. Thank you so much. I keep wanting to call you professor. I was surprised that you weren't a professor because the corpus of Master in its emissary is
It's a huge intellectual achievement. Well, I'm a maverick and Jung and Freud were doctors. I'm a doctor. I like that. True, true, true, true, true. My wife liked the advice that you said about me taking some time off and having a break. So we're likely going to do that after the Chomsky interview. OK, have a great one. Very, very good. I want the audience to look up. OK, first of all, where can they find out more about you?
The best places to go is channelmcgillchrist.com which you can just put in as an URL or you can google my name it will automatically come up. The main book of my thinking is the one that you referred to but in the next few months I'm publishing a very large book which is my attempt to explain why the whole way we think about ourselves, nature,
the cosmos and reality is mistaken and it's based heavily on the hemisphere hypothesis and I think it shows a way in which we could go forward in the world and flourish and survive rather than come to a disastrous end. So there we are.
I'd love to talk to you again one day, but right now I'm going to go and have a drink. Okay, go ahead. Go have a drink. At some point. I didn't want to ask you about cognitive behavioral therapy for what I was going through, but what I am going through, like I want to know, should I just be out of nature more? Should I listen to more music? I definitely going to stop or try my best to stop being so self-conscious and and let's say left brain. I think I think being able to be mindful, being out in nature, listening to music,
slowing down and doing precisely what your left hemisphere is telling you you mustn't do which is waste time would be a terribly good idea. I mean I think that's such a destructive idea that time is a resource. It's a typical left hemisphere idea that time is money as Jeremy Bentham, a man with no right hemisphere
detectable to the human eye said and it's this idea that we husband time as material and the more we do that the less time we have the more hurried we are the less we inhabit the world at all and then we die so i think it's a very good idea to slow down and to learn to listen and not to be too active i mean i don't always take my own advice i have to say yeah well you're i don't know how you were able to do that
I have no idea how you were able to come up with that book. You know, 14 years sounds like quite a long time, but as I have done my own research, I feel like in 14 years, I would have come up with 20% of what you came up with. So that's a tour de force, man. Well, I sometimes think the mice came in the night and wrote it for me.
Thank you so much. Please get some rest, have a drink. I feel like in many ways this podcast is killing me because I have so many pages here. I go through such lengths for each guest. Hey, we can do this again. If you don't mind, I would love to. You're too kind. I'll tell you what. What about we do it again in say a year's time? My book will have come out, you can have a look at it.
We'll have another go. That would be great. Yeah. Great. Great. Okay. Where are you, by the way? Are you in LA or what? I'm in Toronto. Toronto. Ah, yes, that's right. Because yes, because you said I attended the first sharing of the film, which and that was the one in Toronto. Somebody had
some sound engineer got a very red face afterwards yeah yeah that's right we could barely hear you and i think peterson had to talk to you over a phone i know all right then lovely to have been your guest thank you very much we'll meet again it was a pleasure it was a pleasure thank you i honestly mean it like your book is life-changing at least for me and i think slowly it's going to dawn on me your the realizations that you've just incepted or implanted thank you
Thank you very much. Hopefully it's not too destabilizing for me. All the very best. Have a great one. Thank you. Okay, I'll try and be more embodied. I'll try my best because I don't I definitely don't want to hear voices. Okay, have a great one, man. All right. Thank you. Bye bye.
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"text": " The Economist covers math, physics, philosophy, and AI in a manner that shows how different countries perceive developments and how they impact markets. They recently published a piece on China's new neutrino detector. They cover extending life via mitochondrial transplants, creating an entirely new field of medicine. But it's also not just science they analyze."
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"text": " All right, hello toe listeners, Kurt here. That silence is missed sales. Now, why? It's because you haven't met Shopify, at least until now."
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"text": " Now that's success. As sweet as a solved equation. Join me in trading that silence for success with Shopify. It's like some unified field theory of business. Whether you're a bedroom inventor or a global game changer, Shopify smooths your path. From a garage-based hobby to a bustling e-store, Shopify navigates all sales channels for you."
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"text": " Let me say quite genuinely that your questions are some of the best. They target very important areas and no, I think from that point of view you're one of the best interviewers that I've come across, so thank you. I could talk to you all day, I wish we had time."
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"text": " Ian McGilchrist is a psychiatrist, a writer, and a former Oxford scholar who came into prominence after the publication of his book, Master and Its Emissary, which is a fantastic book by the way. Links are in the description."
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"text": " This book is about the fundamental realities we experience that are different, complementary, yet incompatible, and rooted in the bi-hemispheric structures of the brain. Each time I think I can't top a podcast, somehow the guest surprises me and Ian is no different. We touch on the problem of the modern world with its overemphasis on rational mechanistic explanations while it simultaneously eschews meaning. We also talk about consciousness,"
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"text": " and how can one be a moral person if there are no objective truths are there objective truths we also talk about schizophrenia and i get fairly personal in this interview and the reason is that i"
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"text": " and driven by the screenwriting adage which says, the more general the pain, the less personal it is, and the more personal the pain, the more general it is. This means that ultimately people will relate more to someone speaking their experience earnestly and candidly rather than generic platitudes. Unfortunately, there were connectivity issues with Zoom, as usual, and some of his points were crushed, omitted, or overly compressed. There's very little that can be done about this because, for whatever reason, the backup recording on Ian's end"
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"text": " Stopped. If you would like to contribute to watching or listening to more conversations like this, then please consider visiting patreon.com slash KurtGymungle. Every dollar helps not only financially, but motivationally. Thank you so much. Enjoy. I've heard about your book. I don't remember exactly where I heard about your book, Master and Its Emissary, and I believe I even came to watch the film version of it. Maybe one of the first screenings of it where you had some laptop trouble."
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"text": " and you're skyping live to us. The movie was was okay, but the book, the movie doesn't sell the book. The book is a fascinating fascinating. It's a it's a it's a frightening book, at least I find it to be so I find it to be unnerving and subversive. We can talk about why I find it to be that later. This channel is about theories of everything. And usually that involves talking to physicists string theory is included and so on and so but"
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"text": " The way that I conceptualize a theory of everything is, there's no English word for it. There's a German word, it's called Weltanschaung. That means a framework through which to interpret the world. It's like, it's more than a worldview. A worldview would be not selling it properly. And I believe you have a Weltanschaung. And it's... Yes. It's... Well, I don't know how you did it. I also have a Gesamttheorie. What's that?"
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"text": " a theory of everything. Okay, well, this is a great time to give the audience a quick recapitulation of your main thesis of the Master and its Emissary. Yes. Effectively, people think that they noticed there was a difference between the two halves of the brain in the late 19th century."
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"text": " And then this took a step forward in the 1960s and 70s with the first split brain operations in California, in which people's brains were surgically severed in the middle, the connection between the two halves of the brain, the corpus callosum was severed. And so it was possible to interrogate and to investigate one hemisphere at a time. And a number of theories arose out of that."
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"text": " And most of them are now considered wrong, and correctly they're considered wrong. But the problem that we have to rather different hemispheres doesn't go away. Why, if the brain gets its power from making connections, should there be an enormous divide right down the middle of it?"
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"text": " And this is not just for humans, this is for all animals that we've studied. They all have an asymmetrical neuronal network with some kind of division between the parts. So I set about investigating that and it occurred to me that what was the difference was the need to pay attention to the world in two different ways at once."
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"text": " And that's a very important point, because how we attend to things changes what we find. Not just whether we're aware of them, but the quality of the awareness changes what it is that we find there. And it also changes us who are doing the finding. So attention is a moral act, it creates or destroys."
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"text": " different ways. They will bring into being two different versions, if you like, of reality. And I then started investigating 20, 30 years, what these differences were. And effectively, they aren't what people used to say. They used to think it was, you know, as you think of a machine, well, what does it do? Well, the left hemisphere does language and reason and the right hemisphere does pictures and emotion. But this is not right since all these things"
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"text": " looked after by both hemispheres but we should have asked a different question if we've been thinking in terms of a living being instead of a machine instead of asking what does it do as though it's just a functional utility we'd ask in what manner how does it do it and to what sort of end because things evolve in living beings in ways that answer to existential needs to be able to carry on being so"
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"text": " and I think there is an answer to that that we do need in order to be able to pay attention to little details of things which is mainly things that we're going to use like food or you know if you're a bird picking up a twig to build a nest or catching your prey you need a certain kind of attention that doesn't really need to know the whole picture it just needs to know the little tiny bit in the middle of the picture which is very highly focused on."
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"text": " but if it's only paying that kind of attention it will not survive because it will become prey to another creature very quickly so it needs to have a different attention which is a broad open attention and a sustained attention now that that's a very you know a very brief remark but it on it hangs just about everything because"
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"text": " Because these two ways of attending bring about two different Weltanschauungen. They bring about two different ways of looking at the world. In one, there are things that we can use and they're essentially fragmented one from another. We can pick them up, they're isolated, we put them together to make things that we want."
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"text": " and it has no meaning and it's not really connected to us but we can manipulate it and that's the left hemisphere's picture the left hemisphere enables us to manipulate the world and in survival terms that's obviously very important but it doesn't help us understand the world at all the right hemisphere meantime which doesn't usually have access to speech it contributes to language but it for most of us doesn't actually speak"
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"text": " is seeing a completely different world, one in which things are never entirely isolated or atomistic. They're interconnected. In fact, everything is connected to everything else, ultimately. And it's a field that is changing all the time. It's not just made up of things that sit in the field."
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"text": " It's the whole field of things that we see and perceive and we relate to it. We don't sort of see it as a thing and then relate to it. It comes into being through our relationship with it. So that built into it is the idea of relation. And so this is a very, very different world. And it sees things as special, unique. That's that's a thing we might come back to because people might say, but surely if they're unique, then"
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"text": " What's this about them being all interconnected? But it seems to me the whole business is to be able to maintain together uniqueness and individuation with togetherness without collapsing into fragmentation and atomism. So it sees a world made up of unique individuals that are constantly changing. It sees all the stuff that's implicit. Left hemisphere only understands the most explicit stuff. This is the world that we live in every day nowadays."
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"text": " Nobody picks up the messages. And if you do, they become something quite different. Try explaining a joke, try explaining a poem, try explaining a piece of music. You can't because it is an experience in which all the important stuff is implicit. And so, of course, is the whole realm of what we seem to have completely abandoned, the idea of there being a sacred world, a divine element in the cosmos."
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"text": " These things don't make sense to the left hemisphere. It seems obviously a mistake, but that's because it hasn't seen so much of the picture. Anyway, I'll leave it there and you can ask me some questions. You mentioned that the right hemisphere is involved in understanding and understanding the meaning. Okay. What does meaning mean? Well, yes, a very good question."
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"text": " There are any word you like. The left hemisphere has one idea, and the right hemisphere a different one. So to the left hemisphere, meaning is something that is, as you might expect, put together from bits. And it could be something we create by, you know, words are tokens that are put together by systematic syntax, and they turn into a meaning the computer might be able to find out of the combination of a dictionary and a book of grammar rules."
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"text": " But meaning is not that. When I say that there is meaning in certain experiences, like my wife means everything to me, or this piece of music means so much, or just being able to walk in wilderness is so important and brings meaning to things. Now, what I want to stress is that nowadays when people"
},
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"text": " allowed that there could be meaning coming from certain experiences. They see that as an invention of ours. So we do this and we think, okay, now we've added some meaning, but that's not the image. That's the left hemisphere image of something that is added to something else mechanically. What I'm saying is we are in certain experiences made to be more receptive, more aware"
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"text": " of something that is there to be brought into being through the commerce between ourselves, our own consciousness, and whatever it is that we're conscious of. So it's a relational thing, absolutely at its core is relation, and at its core is consciousness. So in this way I found that, you're a physicist, that surprisingly a lot of physicists have written to me since The Master and His Embassy was published, saying this is very important and interesting from our point of view."
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"text": " In the book that I've just finished and want to publish in the next few months called The Matter with Things, I take three ways of looking at the world. One is neuroscience, one is philosophy, and the third is physics. I show that quite coherently by pursuing each of these paths we can come to a vision, a Weltanschauung, a picture of the world,"
},
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"text": " which is very, very different from the one that we're taught and that which the popular media and the Vox Pop of sort of scientists who do too much talking and not enough thinking, as it would suggest. Something that impresses me to an extreme amount about your book, at least though I've only read the Master and its Emissary in that one. It's quite at home and you see someone"
},
{
"end_time": 932.005,
"index": 36,
"start_time": 905.947,
"text": " You don't just see them compile chapters together, you see them work through their life in these pages. And I'm wondering, okay, how did you go about doing this? Because it seems like to me, there's a plethora of data. At first, you have to just accumulate and dispassionately view so that you don't bias it beforehand with your own worldview. And then you have to cohere somehow what you saw into a unified message. How long"
},
{
"end_time": 957.671,
"index": 37,
"start_time": 932.517,
"text": " Hi, I'm here to pick up my son Milo. There's no Milo here. Who picked up my son from school? Streaming only on Peacock. I'm gonna need the name of everyone that could have a connection. You don't understand. It was just the five of us."
},
{
"end_time": 986.408,
"index": 38,
"start_time": 958.183,
"text": " Yes, well, it's easy to say about the gathering of the data that took about 20 years. But really the core of the idea"
},
{
"end_time": 1014.753,
"index": 39,
"start_time": 987.227,
"text": " was that I felt already that there were two kinds of ways we could think about the world two kinds of awareness of it that we we both we needed both and we use both and as always it's not either that you just collect data and then look at it and something happened nor is it that you have an idea and you collect the data just to support it it's like everything it's a kind of"
},
{
"end_time": 1045.145,
"index": 40,
"start_time": 1015.572,
"text": " an encounter, a rapprochement, coming together of two things that sense each other's existence as two loving people understand, come to understand one another. And as indeed we understand the sacred and the divine, it's a coming together of something that speaks to us and we speak to it. And if you don't speak to it, you won't hear anything back from it. So most people think that science is made out of just doing hundreds and thousands of tests."
},
{
"end_time": 1070.555,
"index": 41,
"start_time": 1045.691,
"text": " and then following an entirely logical path but in fact a lot of great scientists have pointed out that what happens is you have intuitions of a shape of something that is you know you can't put your finger on it but you know there's something here and you start to look at the data and you find that some of the data fit with it but some of the data don't and that's really important and interesting because then"
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"index": 42,
"start_time": 1070.896,
"text": " You say, OK, I was thinking of it like this. Now I see I need to accommodate this other thing. So for 20 years or 25 years, this is what I did. I saw things and I changed what I thought. It evolved as all things evolve. The whole cosmos evolves. Evolution isn't just something that Darwin spotted in animals. Evolution is being. Being is becoming."
},
{
"end_time": 1126.954,
"index": 43,
"start_time": 1097.039,
"text": " and this is a cosmos that is becoming not one that is just static and being so that process of creation was like all processes of creation the sensing of something that at the moment you can't put your finger on like a painter doesn't know exactly where all the bits in the painting are going to go when he or she starts it the poet doesn't know exactly but here's certain the shape of a few lines and images and then it starts to grow from that so science is not"
},
{
"end_time": 1156.271,
"index": 44,
"start_time": 1127.858,
"text": " different or opposite to the creative arts. It is in fact very similar to the creative arts. Is there a reason why God is associated with becoming rather than being or rather than a combination of both becoming and being? Well there are as many ideas of God as there are you know traditions in the world and probably as many as there are people"
},
{
"end_time": 1186.374,
"index": 45,
"start_time": 1156.766,
"text": " So ideas about God can be very different, but I have noted a very interesting strain in the mythologies and anthropologies of peoples around the world, from China and India, from the circumpolar regions, from the Native American peoples and so on, that speak of"
},
{
"end_time": 1212.193,
"index": 46,
"start_time": 1187.005,
"text": " a world that is becoming not just made but is constantly coming into being and I think that ultimately you can bring together the idea of a god that is eternally and a god that is coming into being but if I had to put my money on one or the other it would be the coming into being it seems to me that that is utterly primary and interestingly people like Pauli and Heisenberg and"
},
{
"end_time": 1231.203,
"index": 47,
"start_time": 1212.5,
"text": " and Schrodinger and so forth in the 20th century thought similarly that becoming was more important than being. David Bohm said that as well and I think Niels Bohr. Okay, this reminds me of another line from your book and it could be you said the mind or the brain. I don't remember which one."
},
{
"end_time": 1253.609,
"index": 48,
"start_time": 1231.732,
"text": " Which we can talk about what's the difference between the mind and the brain, but regardless you said either the mind or the brain It's not correct to think of it as that the brain slash mind is grappling with the world, but instead it's bringing the world about Okay now to some that conflates the objective world with the phenomenological one So I'm wondering can you explain what you mean when you say it brings the world about?"
},
{
"end_time": 1280.179,
"index": 49,
"start_time": 1254.974,
"text": " Well, I may not be able to explain it very well in language because I think our language is not very well suited to describing reality. It's very well suited to describing everyday things like getting lunch and building a wall. But when it comes to actually understanding what we're dealing with, we don't necessarily have the words for it. And, you know, Bohr himself said there is no way we can talk about"
},
{
"end_time": 1298.78,
"index": 50,
"start_time": 1280.469,
"text": " physics, eventually, except in the language of poetry. And he said the same thing is true of philosophy and of the talking about the divine or whatever it is. So, yes, what I've struggled with very much is"
},
{
"end_time": 1318.865,
"index": 51,
"start_time": 1299.172,
"text": " not collapsing into one or other of two major areas of our age. One is to say, quite simply, it's all made up by us. So it's like we're sitting in a little cinema inside our heads, sitting on a sofa, a little homunculus watching the scene, but we have no contact with the world or anything else out there."
},
{
"end_time": 1348.387,
"index": 52,
"start_time": 1319.002,
"text": " and the other is that you know just the world is out there and it's just a matter of going out measuring it photographing it and you've got it so you know in one case you've got very simplistic materialism and in the other you've got very simplistic idealism and i don't think that either of these positions gets us very far i think the important thing is to see these bridges because as i say everything is actually connected and it's through the connection that they come into being so let me"
},
{
"end_time": 1373.302,
"index": 53,
"start_time": 1349.07,
"text": " say that again because it's something that again as a physicist you will understand you probably know David Mermin the physicist he says relations are prior to relata now i was delighted when i heard that because i have been working on that basis for most of my adult life and that sounds nonsense to most people how can relations exist before there are things that relate"
},
{
"end_time": 1402.346,
"index": 54,
"start_time": 1374.224,
"text": " But actually the things only become what they are in the process of the relationship. Indeed, we only are what we are as human beings in the process of the many relationships we have with other people and with the world at large. And there's an image in the Vedic tradition, which I like very much of Indra's net. And Indra's net is a cosmic net that covers the whole world. And"
},
{
"end_time": 1429.497,
"index": 55,
"start_time": 1403.797,
"text": " in it at every place where the threads cross there is a little jewel and in this jewel are reflected all the other jewels and the whole of the net so it's like a hologram in a way but what is fabulous about it is that they point out that the threads the connections exist before any of the points that make a net the things that make it a net are the crossings that's what we see but they just stand forward after"
},
{
"end_time": 1437.91,
"index": 56,
"start_time": 1429.77,
"text": " The relations have done what they are. I think this is a good image because we tend to focus on certain things that stand forward to us."
},
{
"end_time": 1462.722,
"index": 57,
"start_time": 1438.251,
"text": " in the world immediately and neglect the background out of which they emerge and from which they're never separate and this is a very basic neuropsychological distinction between the left and right hemisphere which you can demonstrate in the lab any day the left hemisphere sees a single thing of interest that is foregrounded and it ignores the rest whereas the right hemisphere sees the whole scene with whatever it is embedded in it"
},
{
"end_time": 1488.131,
"index": 58,
"start_time": 1463.66,
"text": " This reminds me of in one of your talks you were talking about, it was an offhand comment, you said that existence is predicated on resistance. And so what I'm wondering is, is this resistance akin to a relation? Yes. But it's not the same thing. But without some degree of resistance, without some degree of opposition, nothing comes into being."
},
{
"end_time": 1510.725,
"index": 59,
"start_time": 1488.746,
"text": " Nothing can do anything. I mean, in a very simple way, motion is only made possible because of friction, which is the thing that itself brings motion to a standstill. So, I mean, I know that's a folk sort of idea, but I think it's helpful that actually what comes into being is shaped. It's not just formless."
},
{
"end_time": 1538.916,
"index": 60,
"start_time": 1510.93,
"text": " There are forms that shape what comes into being and we our minds partake of those and of course any form any shape is already a denial of something else because if it didn't deny or negate anything it would be just a formless chaos a bag of nothing because it would be everything and everything would be nothing because there'd be no differentiation of anything from anything else nothing would exist right or everything you have to exclude"
},
{
"end_time": 1567.5,
"index": 61,
"start_time": 1539.94,
"text": " You have to exclude, you have to limit, and that is the process of resistance. There are lots of ways in which you can think of this, but there's one that I like particularly if we're going to talk about consciousness, because I believe that our consciousness, your consciousness, my consciousness, is not entirely separate from other consciousnesses,"
},
{
"end_time": 1593.114,
"index": 62,
"start_time": 1568.49,
"text": " But for the while it is shaped by whatever form it is that our consciousness is instantiated in. And William James, who I think is one of the towering intellects of the last couple of hundred years, said about this, that it is like the breath passing over his vocal cords."
},
{
"end_time": 1622.142,
"index": 63,
"start_time": 1593.831,
"text": " that if there were no vocal cords the breath would say nothing it would mean nothing but because there are vocal cords that restrict it it becomes the voice that is him so i think you know we can you can allow that to to germinate in your imagination but i think the point is that things are not isolated by resistance but actually strengthened by and come into being by resistance let me just mention another very interesting small insight"
},
{
"end_time": 1646.323,
"index": 64,
"start_time": 1623.183,
"text": " You know there are these ecodomes in which plants, some of them are very large, plants are grown in a protected environment under glass. Biosphere? Biospheres, that's it, thank you. And people were puzzled to begin with that trees in these biospheres kept falling over before they had any maturity."
},
{
"end_time": 1675.128,
"index": 65,
"start_time": 1646.749,
"text": " And it turned out that trees, in order to grow properly, need wind. They need wind to blow them and challenge them. And they produce a core of strength in the wood and in their roots, which enables them to thrive. There we are. It's just another image of the same thing. Let's talk about the title of your book, The Master and Its Emissary, which I believe is derived from the Nietzschean story. In the Nietzschean story, the emissary is contemptuous of the master."
},
{
"end_time": 1692.346,
"index": 66,
"start_time": 1676.732,
"text": " Now that has me wondering, does the left hemisphere have some emotional reason that it thinks that it is primal or that it has an emotional reason to usurp the right brain? Because people normally associate emotion with the right and the left is just calculating."
},
{
"end_time": 1721.049,
"index": 67,
"start_time": 1694.445,
"text": " Well, it's interesting because all those things that people used to say that they're just, you know, emotions in one hemisphere, that is entirely wrong. As I say, what is different is the way. So they each have emotions, they just have different ways of relating to the world. And interestingly, the emotion that most lateralizes is anger, and it lateralizes to the left hemisphere, not to the right. It's tempting."
},
{
"end_time": 1751.988,
"index": 68,
"start_time": 1722.005,
"text": " And not perhaps entirely wrong, since after all, the brain is part of a person to think of these two hemispheres as having personalities of a kind. I mean, of course, one immediately invites the post that everyone's anthropomorphizing a computer or something. But of course, one's easily sort of skewing the picture by thinking of the brain as a computer, because it's obviously part of a living person as well. Anyway,"
},
{
"end_time": 1779.906,
"index": 69,
"start_time": 1752.346,
"text": " To cut a long story short, yes, when you isolate one hemisphere at a time, the left hemisphere is more confident, even when it's entirely wrong, and tends to increase its sense of conviction when it's presented with data that suggests that it might be wrong. Whereas the right hemisphere tends to be more open to, well, it might be something different."
},
{
"end_time": 1803.695,
"index": 70,
"start_time": 1780.452,
"text": " Ramachandran, you know, very well-known neuroscientist says that he calls it the devil's advocate, the right hemisphere, because well, the left hemisphere is jumping to conclusions, which it does very quickly. The right hemisphere is going, yes, but on the one hand and on the other. And you know, another element that we miss very much in today's"
},
{
"end_time": 1833.234,
"index": 71,
"start_time": 1804.258,
"text": " culture is that ability to nuance position opinions and see this good and bad in many things that more and more of something you think is good is not necessarily good and so forth but to come back to the hemispheres it's also true that the left hemisphere sees less i mean literally sees less uh in the sense of it attends to less and therefore takes in less of the world and when you see or or understand less you think you know it all"
},
{
"end_time": 1858.848,
"index": 72,
"start_time": 1833.66,
"text": " There's a phenomenon in psychology called the Dunning-Kruger effect, which basically is that when people are very bright, they think they don't know very much, but when they're stupid, they think they know everything. And so it's the people who are least intelligent, who are most dogmatic about their views. And I think that you could say that the left hemisphere suffers from not really understanding"
},
{
"end_time": 1888.08,
"index": 73,
"start_time": 1859.241,
"text": " jumping to conclusions and tending to be rather impatient and angry. So yes, I think you could you could say that about them. And what what I've been amazed by is in how many cultures, there is a story, like the master in his emissary of two brothers or an emperor and his general, or whatever it is, these two powers, and one of them is clearly"
},
{
"end_time": 1916.578,
"index": 74,
"start_time": 1888.541,
"text": " sort of superintendent of the other, but the other thinks that it should be the master, even though it doesn't really understand what it's doing, and it tries to resist and even to try to destroy that force. Now that story exists in Iroquois legends, it exists in Chinese eighth century literature, you know, it's there all around the world, it's there in Inuit mythology,"
},
{
"end_time": 1944.48,
"index": 75,
"start_time": 1916.971,
"text": " What is this that we're seeing? I think it is an understanding that there is a part of us that is somehow unwilling to accept that it knows very little. Einstein actually said in a letter to the Queen of Belgium, he said, if more people understood how very little we know, the world would be a much nicer place to live in."
},
{
"end_time": 1975.486,
"index": 76,
"start_time": 1946.715,
"text": " Speaking of stories, I'm reminded of one by Hildegard de Bingen. It's one of my favorite quotes. I'm not sure if you're aware of it, but it goes something like this. And pride germinated in the first angel as he can no longer comprehend the source of his own light. And so he spoke to himself. I want to be master and want none above me. And that one is powerful. I think about that often in one. So the first angel Satan and then two through his own radiance, he couldn't comprehend the source of his own light. And then three. And so he spoke to himself."
},
{
"end_time": 2006.288,
"index": 77,
"start_time": 1976.527,
"text": " and so he spoke to himself and that to me is there's something about being overly self-conscious and and just simply speaking to yourself and not talking to others that breeds well it it reinforces arrogance but it also wants you there's something there's something evil about it yes i'm interested that you use that word most people these days are frightened of using it having spent a long time as a psychiatrist i've certainly seen sickness"
},
{
"end_time": 2034.991,
"index": 78,
"start_time": 2006.869,
"text": " and I've seen unhappiness but I have also at times seen evil something that is not fueled by any need or anything except the desire to destroy and to hurt and I think that does exist in all cultures people have thought that it did and that it's probably not just confined to us so I mean the absolute locust classicus in the west is"
},
{
"end_time": 2062.961,
"index": 79,
"start_time": 2035.282,
"text": " Milton's Paradise Lost, whose theme is entirely this, because of course it was Lucifer, the Lightbringer as the name means, who became the chief of the of the devils, and in that sense he was exactly like the emissary to the master, because in the story of that the reason the master points the emissary is that he's such a good emissary. The trouble is he's not a very good master, and"
},
{
"end_time": 2091.681,
"index": 80,
"start_time": 2063.558,
"text": " This unequal dynamic is very important and I think it's very difficult for people to understand these days because we'd like to think in a rather left hemisphere way that things should be just symmetrical, that if there's A and B they should be just symmetrical, but they may not be. One of them may be much more important and creative than the other. So I think these drives, if you like, that are in things are different, not necessarily easily reconciled."
},
{
"end_time": 2119.735,
"index": 81,
"start_time": 2092.619,
"text": " And this has nothing to do with a particularly religious point of view. I'm sorry to say that I don't really... I mean, I certainly honor religions and spiritual traditions, but I don't myself feel that I have any particular connection to the divine. But I would hate to lose the sense that there is something beyond the material that is very important and powerful and beautiful in this world."
},
{
"end_time": 2147.841,
"index": 82,
"start_time": 2121.084,
"text": " part of why your book is so fascinating is there are sentences embedded within paragraphs which are already far-reaching implications so there's a set of three sentences i don't recall where somewhere chapter seven chapter eight i wish i'd written them down but i just wrote down a note what you've done in these three sentences is connect nihilism boredism sorry boredom the platonic realm of timelessness and then to me that also connects eastern mysticism and then the idea of the present moment"
},
{
"end_time": 2169.548,
"index": 83,
"start_time": 2148.37,
"text": " As for the exact connection, the relations between those, I'm still cogitating, I'm still trying to understand, but you said that with an offhand remark and I was wondering, I don't know if you realize the profundity of those statements. I don't remember actually the words, but I could have said something like that, definitely."
},
{
"end_time": 2199.753,
"index": 84,
"start_time": 2170.452,
"text": " I know I say, which I believe is correct, that the concept of boredom and the word for boredom arose in the 18th century when we first began to feel that we really had control of everything and that the whole of life and the world around us was under human control. We could have it the way we wanted it. And it was then that people started to feel the sense of emptiness of, as you say, the beginnings of nihilism"
},
{
"end_time": 2224.462,
"index": 85,
"start_time": 2200.23,
"text": " and so on. So I do think it's very interesting and in the book that I've said an awful lot more about all this in the book I've just written called The Matter with Things and the last part of the book I look at the building blocks of the cosmos. I mean a daring thing or perhaps a stupid thing for somebody to do unless they think they"
},
{
"end_time": 2253.302,
"index": 86,
"start_time": 2225.128,
"text": " They somehow have an insight into physics, which I rely very much on colleagues and on guidance from physicists, but to talk about time and space. And I think these things are very, very important. And one of the things that people believe in the real world, a lot of people who have a spiritual take think really time is an illusion. Really time is just a mistake."
},
{
"end_time": 2282.722,
"index": 87,
"start_time": 2253.797,
"text": " It doesn't really exist, but I with Lee Smolin, who I very much admire. I'm going to be interviewing Lee. Oh, well, for what it's worth, I'm an acolyte. I think he's he's very, very interesting. And I quote him a lot in my new book. But with him, I think I'm right in saying I consider that, you know, time is absolutely"
},
{
"end_time": 2307.944,
"index": 88,
"start_time": 2283.677,
"text": " primary, ontologically speaking, and there is a saying of Dogen, Chinese sage, that even God cannot exist without time. Now you can, I mean that would be a fascinating conversation all on its own, but there is such a thing as time moving and developing and at the same time not running away"
},
{
"end_time": 2333.2,
"index": 89,
"start_time": 2309.07,
"text": " An image I quite like is the idea of being in a stream and if you move with the stream you don't stop the stream moving but as far as you are concerned the world is permanently there with you because you are moving with that stream. It's only if you're standing on the bank impatiently with a clipboard and a stopwatch watching things pass from outside that time appears to have this erosive quality"
},
{
"end_time": 2363.046,
"index": 90,
"start_time": 2333.695,
"text": " Instead, it's part of the experience of becoming, which is what it is to be a human becoming. Speaking of streams and time, Heraclitus' River, this is mentioned quite a bit in your book. And I have a speculative question here. Okay, I'm just going to read it because I don't have it in my working memory. So the right brain is the type that when I say right brain, I mean, hemisphere. So the right hemisphere is the type that would come up with the statement that there's unceasing change."
},
{
"end_time": 2390.794,
"index": 91,
"start_time": 2363.78,
"text": " it's constantly constantly changing and then the left is the one that needs to stand back and abstract and see some constancy and then it made me think about time and then the arrow of physics and I'm wondering if you had any thoughts on the nature of time or the nature of arrow of time in physics well I do Kurt but I don't know how how good they are but I've thought about it an enormous amount and"
},
{
"end_time": 2420.862,
"index": 92,
"start_time": 2391.34,
"text": " Physicists themselves are divided on the arrow of time but I tend to be with those who say that without the arrow of time nothing could mean or be anything at all. That all that we know of physics even down to the you know the most rarefied kind of contemporary physics none of it could be without the existence of time. There can be no processes in fact without time and I believe that these processes are prior to things which is partly why I entitled this book The Matter with Things"
},
{
"end_time": 2448.558,
"index": 93,
"start_time": 2421.271,
"text": " It's a pun on various levels because I think there's a problem with our material obsession and there's a problem with our thinking the world is made up of things. So I think, you know, I don't take the block theory of time, you know, that it's really a static thing but we just sort of move about in it, nor do I take the view that it's something that most of the philosophers who try to approach time"
},
{
"end_time": 2474.667,
"index": 94,
"start_time": 2449.548,
"text": " with the single exception of Bergson seem to me to have confused what they're talking about and unfortunately most people nowadays don't read Bergson and the reason they don't read Bergson is they've inherited a prejudice that somehow Bergson was wrong because he had a debate with Einstein in which it said he didn't understand Einstein but which it's equally true that Einstein didn't understand Bergson"
},
{
"end_time": 2495.367,
"index": 95,
"start_time": 2475.145,
"text": " They were looking at two different things and they weren't necessarily at odds with one another. Einstein was looking at a kind of time like a clock's time, whereas Bergson was looking at time as not something that can be measured in that way. And the distinction between a flow"
},
{
"end_time": 2522.551,
"index": 96,
"start_time": 2495.828,
"text": " and a series is absolutely fundamental and Bergson spent most of his life trying to help people see why this was so fundamental. And when I saw it, it was absolutely one of the three or four great Eureka moments of my life. I saw that a lot of the problems that we have philosophically speaking and with our attitudes to the world come from us having seen a seamless motion. Hear that sound?"
},
{
"end_time": 2549.599,
"index": 97,
"start_time": 2523.507,
"text": " That's the sweet sound of success with Shopify. Shopify is the all-encompassing commerce platform that's with you from the first flicker of an idea to the moment you realize you're running a global enterprise. Whether it's handcrafted jewelry or high-tech gadgets, Shopify supports you at every point of sale, both online and in person. They streamline the process with the internet's best converting checkout, making it 36% more effective than other leading platforms."
},
{
"end_time": 2578.097,
"index": 98,
"start_time": 2549.599,
"text": " There's also something called Shopify Magic, your AI powered assistant that's like an all-star team member working tirelessly behind the scenes. What I find fascinating about Shopify is how it scales with your ambition. No matter how big you want to grow, Shopify gives you everything you need to take control and take your business to the next level. Join the ranks of businesses in 175 countries that have made Shopify the backbone of their commerce. Shopify, by the way,"
},
{
"end_time": 2607.022,
"index": 99,
"start_time": 2578.097,
"text": " powers 10% of all e-commerce in the United States, including huge names like Allbirds, Rothy's, and Brooklyn. If you ever need help, their award-winning support is like having a mentor that's just a click away. Now, are you ready to start your own success story? Sign up for a $1 per month trial period at shopify.com slash theories, all lowercase. Go to shopify.com slash theories now to grow your business no matter what stage you're in."
},
{
"end_time": 2627.346,
"index": 100,
"start_time": 2607.227,
"text": " There's a concatenation of an infinite number of slices. That sounds like an almost technical difference, but in fact, it goes right to the core of the two versions of the world that come into being."
},
{
"end_time": 2656.51,
"index": 101,
"start_time": 2628.507,
"text": " is always trying to stop time. It's always trying to freeze time. Because imagine its idea is to pick something up or to catch something. So it wants to freeze it and catch it and get it and have it and hold it. But you know, as Goethe said, as Blake said, when you try to freeze the fleeing moment, then you're lost. Because all is in this process of change and flow. And it's respecting that"
},
{
"end_time": 2675.009,
"index": 102,
"start_time": 2657.278,
"text": " What is the other model then? So I know you can't go through Berkson's entire model, and I'm assuming you're talking about Berkson as in Henry Berkson?"
},
{
"end_time": 2700.196,
"index": 103,
"start_time": 2676.237,
"text": " All I know about Henry Berkson is that he's associated with Bohmian mechanics and I need to investigate more about Berkson's theories I've been told to so that's on my list for those who are listening and are eager I'm working on it. What's the alternative to viewing time as in infinite slices, infinitesimal slices? What he noticed and it's very important"
},
{
"end_time": 2727.278,
"index": 104,
"start_time": 2700.486,
"text": " is that it only can be turned into slices retrospectively and it's like a point on a line when you draw a line you don't draw a point infinitely small and then another one and so on you the line is there in retrospect you can find a point at which your pencil was at point a in the line you can you can designate it but actually there wasn't a business of going from point a to point b or whatever"
},
{
"end_time": 2753.968,
"index": 105,
"start_time": 2727.79,
"text": " Similarly, if you move your arm, it is a single seamless motion. And you can't say I move it to A to B to C to D, you don't. But in retrospect, the representation of motion can be dissected, but motion itself can't be dissected. Similarly, the representation of time can be dissected, but time itself can't be dissected. Now, why that is so important to me,"
},
{
"end_time": 2783.473,
"index": 106,
"start_time": 2754.531,
"text": " is that one of the most fundamental differences between the right hemisphere and the left is that the left hemisphere deals with representations so the right hemisphere deals with things as they are present more so it it deals with them as they presence as heidegger would have said has they at the very moment that they are not just present because that sounds rather passive and mechanical but as they presence they come into being for you they come into your"
},
{
"end_time": 2809.514,
"index": 107,
"start_time": 2783.797,
"text": " your field of of being an awareness and the right hemisphere is therefore with that living moment but the left hemisphere is categorizing things you can only categorize them a small time after you experience them so if you like its world is a world of a schema a representation a map which can only be made to"
},
{
"end_time": 2836.8,
"index": 108,
"start_time": 2809.77,
"text": " make any sense when there's something that can be schematized when there's something that can be mapped so the difference between what is in the present moment and what is reflected on later and dissected is profound and what he noticed was that in our thinking process because we stop and talk and reflect on things we think that we find the world as our left hemisphere intellect"
},
{
"end_time": 2856.681,
"index": 109,
"start_time": 2837.09,
"text": " presents it as a thing that's divided up into areas and so on whereas actually the experience of it is not like that and because we're so used to to seeing it the left hemisphere way most people wouldn't see what i'm talking about they just say well i don't know what he means by that i mean"
},
{
"end_time": 2885.981,
"index": 110,
"start_time": 2857.193,
"text": " You point out beautifully at one point that language is like money."
},
{
"end_time": 2916.067,
"index": 111,
"start_time": 2886.715,
"text": " And I believe it's because it only takes its value at the terminus, but you have to cash it in. So for example, with cash, it's meaningless until you buy something with it. And then this place in which it bottoms out is the body in some sense. Okay. Can you explain what you mean by that? Well, again, what I mean is that we can be led into thinking that the world is the world that we describe. The world is the world"
},
{
"end_time": 2943.695,
"index": 112,
"start_time": 2916.323,
"text": " as we reflect on it and verbalize it. But because that's the bit that we're used to attending to. In fact, the right hemisphere can't speak for the vision that it sees. So it has to somehow convey to the left hemisphere how to use language to convey things that are not structured serially and analytically in the way that the left hemisphere prefers."
},
{
"end_time": 2971.203,
"index": 113,
"start_time": 2944.309,
"text": " This is why, as I mentioned earlier, Bohr said you can only talk about physics, you can only talk about the sacred by using poetry. And the whole point about poetry is that it allows one to see beyond the everyday meanings of words to a web of interconnected meanings that are hinted at. So in a good poem, a phrase has resonances that may set seven or eight different things going in your mind rather than the clinical"
},
{
"end_time": 3002.073,
"index": 114,
"start_time": 2972.346,
"text": " an illusory antiseptic nature of the words taken out of context and put into a kind of manual of instruction. So words arise out of our bodies. They arise historically out of emotional responses. Animals in their own way have a kind of very primitive language. They make sounds that mean things and they express themselves in gesture and in words."
},
{
"end_time": 3032.466,
"index": 115,
"start_time": 3002.978,
"text": " And there's a very long-standing tradition coming forth into the 20th century that language evolved out of the generation of embodied meaning in sound. In other words, out of music. And this is where, although I very much admire Stephen Pinker in many ways, I do rather take issue with his notion that music is sort of about as useful as pornography or cheesecake. Music is"
},
{
"end_time": 3057.142,
"index": 116,
"start_time": 3033.473,
"text": " terrifically profound and is actually more profound than language, which is why we often say, well, it's beyond me to express and so forth. But it's not just the very rarefied things that are beyond language. The philosopher Brian Magee makes a very good point that from the most exalted things to the most humble things. So he says, for example,"
},
{
"end_time": 3086.476,
"index": 117,
"start_time": 3057.705,
"text": " the towel that I've dropped on the bathroom floor. There is no language to describe the shades of color in it, the configuration of the folds, the way in which it relates to everything else in the room. And yet my consciousness immediately takes all that in. I'm aware of it. I know it. But there's no way I can do it in language. And how can I say Leonardo's Supper? You know, how do you? So language, we fool ourselves when we think that language"
},
{
"end_time": 3108.746,
"index": 118,
"start_time": 3086.834,
"text": " is where we live language is something we use to try and communicate a certain level of meaning about the world but not all of its meaning so what if someone says we can using language or some language give a representation a fairly accurate one of the last supper by taking a picture of it and then the zeros and ones that"
},
{
"end_time": 3124.428,
"index": 119,
"start_time": 3109.002,
"text": " Well, they've just definitely sidestepped the problem by saying that we take all these"
},
{
"end_time": 3154.394,
"index": 120,
"start_time": 3124.94,
"text": " ones and zeros, which if you look at them and I look at them, there's no Last Supper there. We can put them into a machine which creates a simulacrum. We've developed a machine with instructions on make this come to be something like the Last Supper. So that's really, that's just a way of circumventing the point, which has not been expressed in words. I mean, there are certain things you can try to express in words, but you immediately come down to a handful of cliched terms."
},
{
"end_time": 3183.114,
"index": 121,
"start_time": 3154.872,
"text": " As Nietzsche says, language makes the uncommon common, you know, because there's only so many words you can use to describe someone's appearance. You know, they're tall or short or thin or fat or black or white or whatever they are. And they have this colored hair and that colored eyes and so on. But that doesn't get you any nearer to what your loved one looks like, you know? So language is a very useful tool, but that's all it is."
},
{
"end_time": 3210.998,
"index": 122,
"start_time": 3184.053,
"text": " and it comes about we learn language and I know you're going to be talking to Chomsky and you may have noticed that I gently disagree with the I dare to gently disagree but I'm encouraged by the fact lots of other people do too with the idea that it is something like an abstract system in in the brain like it could be in a computer waiting for stuff to be filled in because in fact we develop language"
},
{
"end_time": 3238.916,
"index": 123,
"start_time": 3211.476,
"text": " through the process of interrelationship with other people in an embodied way, which involves emotion and feeling and gesture and so on. This is how children learn words. And so language has its roots in emotion in the body. It's not some abstract clinical thing that then gets closed in emotion in the body. It starts from those places. That's my point."
},
{
"end_time": 3261.408,
"index": 124,
"start_time": 3239.531,
"text": " metaphor is language is cure for the ills entailed to it by language explain that that's another one that is a beautiful that's a quote okay well it's a beautiful quote well it tries to compress the idea that what are the ills i'm referring to well the ills are"
},
{
"end_time": 3290.964,
"index": 125,
"start_time": 3262.517,
"text": " As I say that something that is only a symbol or representation of something has to the thing that it represents. And in this way, it's like money that money can mean ultimately that I can have lunch tomorrow with a friend or I can, you know, buy a car or whatever it is. But the money itself only has that quality when it's cashed back into life, which is very complex thing."
},
{
"end_time": 3308.541,
"index": 126,
"start_time": 3291.408,
"text": " And language is rather like this. We can refer to things, but the experience that we refer to is no longer in the representation or the reference. It's implied by it that it isn't actually there, but that doesn't matter because"
},
{
"end_time": 3338.609,
"index": 127,
"start_time": 3309.053,
"text": " We think metaphorically all the time, and all language is metaphorical. Interestingly, the language of science and philosophy is particularly heavily dependent on metaphor, a point made by Lakoff and Johnson in their wonderful books, Metaphors We Live By and Philosophy in the Flesh. So metaphor literally means a carrying a cross. And so if you imagine there is this sort of"
},
{
"end_time": 3350.179,
"index": 128,
"start_time": 3338.951,
"text": " divide or gulf between what the word love means and the experience of love. Metaphors"
},
{
"end_time": 3370.213,
"index": 129,
"start_time": 3350.862,
"text": " can carry us across that linguistic divide, they can take us back to the experience of love and so something as metaphorical as a Shakespeare play or as a piece of music or whatever and music is metaphorical, it uses metaphors based on bodily movements so risings and fallings and"
},
{
"end_time": 3399.343,
"index": 130,
"start_time": 3370.538,
"text": " resonances and all those things that are experienced in a bodily sense. So those things are evoked in great art, in ritual, in religion, in narratives, in mythology and so forth. And they take us back across the divide from those sterile words to the thing that those words were trying but not able to evoke. Think Verizon, the best 5G network is expensive? Think again. Bring in your AT&T or T-Mobile bill to a Verizon store today"
},
{
"end_time": 3431.852,
"index": 131,
"start_time": 3402.09,
"text": " Speaking of Lakov and Johnson, you mentioned, well, it's in your book, a couple quotes from them."
},
{
"end_time": 3460.759,
"index": 132,
"start_time": 3432.295,
"text": " Reason doesn't separate us from the animals, but instead puts us on a continuum with it because we're, well, reason is predicated in embodiment. Now, I'm wondering if you can explain that because reason to me has to do with logical inference and so on, like if-then statements. How is an if-then statement related to my body per se? Well, I think the problem might be in thinking too literalistically about what your body is."
},
{
"end_time": 3490.981,
"index": 133,
"start_time": 3461.869,
"text": " I mean, it might not be, as it were, in your thumb. I agree. But your body is everything that is you, apart from, well, not apart from anything, really. I mean, we are, for the time that we are alive on this earth, what our bodies make us. And animals that don't have language and don't apparently have"
},
{
"end_time": 3521.049,
"index": 134,
"start_time": 3491.869,
"text": " Any kind of schema of logic can solve logical puzzles. They can reason things. You know, crows and magpies can give correct answers to logical problems that an eight or nine year old human being won't. I mean, that's just one example, but I mean, the more one reads about animals and even insects, the more one realizes that the concept that only we can act reasonably or rationally"
},
{
"end_time": 3536.903,
"index": 135,
"start_time": 3521.442,
"text": " is wrong. You've probably seen on YouTube there is in fact a filmed episode of a crow solving an eight-step logical puzzle and although it has solved each step of the puzzle"
},
{
"end_time": 3565.23,
"index": 136,
"start_time": 3537.278,
"text": " in isolation before it has never solved this particular sequence and in a matter of about three minutes or five minutes it's not a very long clip it has actually taken the eight steps that will allow it to secure the food that it's after now i mean that's in itself what do you say about that you know is it the crow's language is it its mathematics or what somehow from experience and our bodies are the repositories of all our experience that is"
},
{
"end_time": 3584.462,
"index": 137,
"start_time": 3565.572,
"text": " that is solving this problem. And we don't solve half as many things as we think by thinking about them. In fact, nine tenths of all the great decisions we make are done unconsciously. We arrive at them unconsciously after thinking about other things, sleeping and then saying, I think I'll do that."
},
{
"end_time": 3615.128,
"index": 138,
"start_time": 3585.384,
"text": " And when we are not aware of things, as Julian Jaynes first did out to me anyway in his 1976 book, The Origins of Consciousness and the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind, we don't really need consciousness for very much. We can weigh options, form judgments, solve puzzles, evaluate beauty, fall in love, and do many, many things without thinking about them. At some level, we are working on them."
},
{
"end_time": 3638.029,
"index": 139,
"start_time": 3615.435,
"text": " but that what the left hemisphere privileges as thinking is just the left hemisphere's kind of thinking which is explicit in language and foregrounding whatever is in the mind but there's a whole what we're conscious of is only one percent maximum of all that there is that's going on in our minds"
},
{
"end_time": 3667.108,
"index": 140,
"start_time": 3639.821,
"text": " So the idea that, you know, we have to be conscious and reason in order to think cleverly is wrong. I mean, one of my favorite philosophers is A. N. Whitehead. And in the book, in fact, on the structure of mathematics, he said, I can't remember the exact phrase, which is wonderful, but he says that conscious thought is like cavalry charges in battle."
},
{
"end_time": 3695.162,
"index": 141,
"start_time": 3667.637,
"text": " It's expensive, it's wasteful, it requires fresh horses and can only be done at unusual moments. So most of the time we're living perfectly rationally, perfectly intelligently, but without actually thinking about things explicitly. If we had different bodies or if we grew up on a different planet, a different evolutionary chain or tree, would we have reason differently? Would we reason differently? Would our inferences be different?"
},
{
"end_time": 3725.145,
"index": 142,
"start_time": 3697.432,
"text": " Or is logic universal? Well, how would I know? I mean, there are too many counterfactuals in that. You can't extrapolate from us to a being that we can only imagine and we don't know everything. In fact, we can only know what it is. Let me rephrase it. Is logic or the way that we formulated logic and rationality and reason, which I'm conflating and I know there's a difference between them, but for the sake of this,"
},
{
"end_time": 3753.831,
"index": 143,
"start_time": 3725.52,
"text": " Are they substrate dependent? So the fact that we are human, we came up with reason in this particular manner, and that aliens might not share our reason, they would come up with different inferences and it would be valid. Well, I would, I mean, again, I don't think anyone can be certain about such things. But my intuition would be that reason and logic are, if you like,"
},
{
"end_time": 3783.951,
"index": 144,
"start_time": 3754.172,
"text": " substrate independent, that they're not just a human invention. But then I think that about a lot of things, that they're not so much inventions as discoveries. I mean, confusingly, the word invention originally meant to find something, but it now means to make it up. And so what I think we do in experience is come to an awareness and an understanding of things that are not entirely dependent on us. Let me put it that way."
},
{
"end_time": 3794.206,
"index": 145,
"start_time": 3784.548,
"text": " And I think these things include essential values like good, goodness and evil and beauty."
},
{
"end_time": 3822.705,
"index": 146,
"start_time": 3795.009,
"text": " and things like that. So, and this is not unusual. Derek Parfit, who is a colleague at All Souls, and I say a colleague, I mean, in that we were both fellows of the same college, but I mean, he was a very great philosopher and an atheist, but he believes that goodness and beauty were ontological primaries, that they weren't things that were just valuations we put on things because we happen to like them or not like them. And I would be"
},
{
"end_time": 3850.111,
"index": 147,
"start_time": 3823.217,
"text": " I would be rather inclined to that position too. You also talked about, okay, so inventiveness is the etymology of it is related to finding and then also being originative. So being original has to do with the origin going back. Can you explain that? Because that was one part of your book and your book is quite lengthy and I wanted to finish this in time. It's spent the past week or so just absorbing pretty much pure Ian."
},
{
"end_time": 3871.903,
"index": 148,
"start_time": 3850.384,
"text": " Pure Ian for this and I made notes where I wasn't able to comprehend fully and I just had to move on. That was one of them. So do you mind expounding on original thinking or coming up with some original object and its relationship? We think of it as a new, but you also made an analogy that it's original. That is it's going back. Yes."
},
{
"end_time": 3895.094,
"index": 149,
"start_time": 3872.602,
"text": " Okay, again I can't remember exactly what it was I said that you're referring to, but I think I can see what's being hinted at. It's partly a distinction, if I may say, that is in similar structure to that between fantasy and imagination. So"
},
{
"end_time": 3923.985,
"index": 150,
"start_time": 3895.828,
"text": " fantasy is the putting together in a novel way of things that elements that really we have experienced and are aware of but we put them together rather as I say like those children's books where the pages are divided uh into three parts and you can turn the pages and create animals with the head of a seal and the body of a goat and all that sort of thing and so that is fantasy but imagination is looking at something"
},
{
"end_time": 3947.483,
"index": 151,
"start_time": 3924.275,
"text": " that you think you know and it seems entirely ordinary and suddenly seeing it for the first time, this is something Wordsworth wrote about a great deal, that it wasn't about striving for something outside of the ordinary, it was finding the extraordinary within the ordinary. Now when you talk about the origin or original thinking"
},
{
"end_time": 3975.094,
"index": 152,
"start_time": 3948.046,
"text": " many great revolutionaries, and I don't mean to say political revolutionaries especially, I mean people who brought about paradigm shifts in our thinking, did so by going back to the perception that had been lost sight of, sometimes a thousand years ago or more, and they renovated something that had been lost from the culture, and that was what was revolutionary about it, so that I don't think that"
},
{
"end_time": 3995.742,
"index": 153,
"start_time": 3975.776,
"text": " An original thinker is somebody who just makes it all up because none of us do that. We are all the repositories of centuries, millennia of other people's experience that has gone into the making of us and into the ideas that we believe. And so to strive to be original,"
},
{
"end_time": 4022.329,
"index": 154,
"start_time": 3995.913,
"text": " is to cut yourself off from that and to cut yourself off from the rest of humanity saying look i did this on my own whereas i think that is a you know a typical problem of our age that it's great that we're individuals don't get me wrong and i think that you know conformism is a problem but we are only also individuals because we also belong together in a society that both brings together and nourishes individual flourishing"
},
{
"end_time": 4041.186,
"index": 155,
"start_time": 4023.148,
"text": " Curiously, the coming together helps the being different. I sometimes talk about a couple in a relationship, that a good couple is one who become more themselves through the relationship, not less though. Sacrifice their individuality, but he does actually realize"
},
{
"end_time": 4065.794,
"index": 156,
"start_time": 4041.561,
"text": " and enriched and fought in greater being by the relationship going back to where we started that relationships create the things that are related as much as the other way around. Okay, here's what occurs to me when you say that. So let's say you have a great couple. Let's say you are you married? I was but I'm not. Okay, so I'm married. So let's just take me as an example."
},
{
"end_time": 4095.35,
"index": 157,
"start_time": 4066.323,
"text": " let's say me and my wife I find that the longer I spend with her the more I do feel authentic but at the same time and the more she feels authentic but at the same time I can imagine we're becoming closer and more and more akin to one another's personality so then I wonder is the most authentic self for each individual as we come closer and closer to our core is it the same or extremely similar because otherwise I can't make sense of this paradox of you becoming authentic as an individual but at the same time becoming closer to other people"
},
{
"end_time": 4124.821,
"index": 158,
"start_time": 4096.766,
"text": " Well, I think that the deep structure of reality is entirely paradoxical to the left hemisphere's take on it, that things that are opposite are absolutely bound up with one another. And it's the left hemisphere that wants things to be either the one thing or the other, either to be separate or to be together. But the right hemisphere sees it doesn't have to be either or, it has to be both and. And what's more,"
},
{
"end_time": 4153.575,
"index": 159,
"start_time": 4125.316,
"text": " It has to be both, either or, and both and. I don't know if you've heard of paraconsistent logic with Grand Priest? I have, yes. And I'm not sure I entirely understand it, but what I know of it, I rather like. Okay, so explain to me, to the audience, how can something be and not be? Well, that's a big question, but"
},
{
"end_time": 4165.845,
"index": 160,
"start_time": 4153.882,
"text": " When we say something is something, we may well mean when viewed in this way, or in this context, change the context, change the point of view, and they're equally something different."
},
{
"end_time": 4188.865,
"index": 161,
"start_time": 4166.323,
"text": " So the trouble with the left hemisphere is that it decontextualizes. This is a very, very important difference. The right hemisphere alone understands that what a thing is, is what it is only because of the context in which it is. And that context doesn't take away from its being what it is, but contributes to its being what it is. If you take the context away, you diminish it."
},
{
"end_time": 4217.398,
"index": 162,
"start_time": 4188.865,
"text": " Now that's just a very obvious down-to-earth example of what I'm really saying, that we form social contexts, we form loving contexts, and in those contexts we are changed, we are altered. Everything we do, everything we think alters us, which is why we need to be careful about how we think. As I say, attention is a moral act. It changes us and it changes the world. Well, that's one of the most frightening aspects of your book."
},
{
"end_time": 4244.224,
"index": 163,
"start_time": 4218.933,
"text": " Okay, you know, we can get to that part later. A distinction that's important for the audience was important and enlightening for me was between this and and Canon, I believe they're German words about knowledge. Yes. Do you mind expounding? Yes. Or if you prefer several and connect in French, and the simple way of saying it is that several this and is knowing that something is the case."
},
{
"end_time": 4261.323,
"index": 164,
"start_time": 4244.718,
"text": " whereas Kennan is knowing something direct. So I know that Paris is the capital of France. I know Paris because of the times I spent there and what they've meant to me. And I know that"
},
{
"end_time": 4288.131,
"index": 165,
"start_time": 4262.073,
"text": " you know, the tree in my garden is of a certain species and a certain height and so forth, but I only know it because I walk past it, stop under it and experience it. So really, there's a distinction between a kind of abstracted form of knowing data, knowing things, about things, and the knowing of them rather than about them."
},
{
"end_time": 4316.681,
"index": 166,
"start_time": 4290.196,
"text": " I'll tell you one of the aspects of your book that I found unsettling. Let's say I I've had this experience. I think I've talked about it before on another podcast, perhaps at the Bernardo Castrop, if you've heard of him. I have where it was in the middle of the night. I've woken up from a dream. And then as I was falling back to sleep in this hypnagogic state, I heard my wife say a word"
},
{
"end_time": 4339.701,
"index": 167,
"start_time": 4317.739,
"text": " I don't know what she said. I don't know. I still don't know if she said it or didn't say but it could have been it doesn't actually matter was like yes or okay. And then I wasn't sure if she had actually said it. And I started to go into a spiral of extreme anxiety. And I'm not a person who's ever had a panic attack in my life. But then I started to feel like am I going crazy?"
},
{
"end_time": 4365.162,
"index": 168,
"start_time": 4340.486,
"text": " am i am i hearing voices i don't want to hear voices oh my gosh and then i started to think okay don't hear a voice don't hear voice but then i was thinking about freudian repression am i now repressing a voice that will come back even harder later oh no so should i move toward a voice and what would what if the voice tells me to kill myself i'm not suicidal i don't hate my life not in the least what if it tells me to harm someone else and and then i i had to wake my wife up and tell her please help me because i'm i'm"
},
{
"end_time": 4382.739,
"index": 169,
"start_time": 4365.674,
"text": " I'm I need help breathing and then so she the next day I had a similar panic attack and then two days later had half of one Then it just went away. I didn't even talk to my doctor about this. She said you should go to psychotherapy to talk talk this out But admit it ameliorated on its own"
},
{
"end_time": 4402.466,
"index": 170,
"start_time": 4383.166,
"text": " Then a couple days ago, this is fresh, but this came from your book. This is why I love you. But then I curse you at the same time. There's plenty of talk in your book about schizophrenia. And each time that would come up, my heart would race. And I'm hearing myself in it, where I'm not the type of person that as you know, if I'm talking to you, I'm not a"
},
{
"end_time": 4425.862,
"index": 171,
"start_time": 4403.166,
"text": " a fundamentalist materialist who dispenses with the divine and so on. In fact, I'm extremely open to it. And the eulogisms I get for this channel is that I'm extremely open and actually trying to understand like I'm trying to understand your point of view. I'm trying to morph it with mine. I'm trying to understand other people's but that's extremely difficult because it puts me on such unstable ground that I don't know what's real."
},
{
"end_time": 4451.852,
"index": 172,
"start_time": 4425.862,
"text": " And then I'm constantly questioning what's real. Is this real? Am I the only one that's real? Am I fake? Are people lying to me? And sometimes just when I say it out loud, it helps me through it. Part of it is like I'm keeping it in. I don't want to scare my spouse. I don't want to scare someone else. But I also thought another part is that there's no one else that I hear talk about this much, no one in the public sphere. And so I thought,"
},
{
"end_time": 4482.312,
"index": 173,
"start_time": 4452.773,
"text": " One time I heard Peterson was schizophrenic. It was, it turns out to be false, but that actually gave me, gave me hope because I was like, Oh my gosh, someone else is experiencing this. And then I thought, okay, Kurt, why don't you talk about it? First of all, it's curative to myself. Second of all, someone else might hear it and be like, okay, this is, I'm not someone who's asinine. And so maybe someone else who's somewhat normal is going through this. Castrop said, Kurt, don't worry. This is part of the spiritual journey. When you question consciousness and you involve yourself in these subjects, this will happen."
},
{
"end_time": 4512.329,
"index": 174,
"start_time": 4483.131,
"text": " But either way, what you said, which is that you view the world more and more mechanistically, that's the left brain. Now, that's my entire life up until maybe a few years ago, because I'm trained as a physicist, a scientist, and that and that you're extremely speaking to yourself over and over and over. And I feel like that's what I do. And I've eschewed music, too, for the past 12 years. I haven't listened to music because I just find it to be a time waster. And I'm wondering how much have I hurt myself by doing so?"
},
{
"end_time": 4542.654,
"index": 175,
"start_time": 4512.722,
"text": " I wanted to say this to you because, well, first, I just want to hear your thoughts. And then you can also relate it to the world at large. Well, I think it's not unusual for people to have these experiences. And people who think a lot, ponder a lot, philosophize a lot, conceptualize a lot, do come to this crisis of doubt, if you like, and it's"
},
{
"end_time": 4570.23,
"index": 176,
"start_time": 4542.91,
"text": " I mean the first great exponent of this was Descartes. But for his age he lived a remarkably ungrounded kind of existence. What I mean is that most people then still lived a more rooted embodied existence and he probably by his personality as much as anything was inclined"
},
{
"end_time": 4599.053,
"index": 177,
"start_time": 4570.555,
"text": " to, I think he had a schizoid temperament, actually. And why this is important is that there's a wonderful book, which I often mention and will mention again by Louis Sasse, a psychologist at Rutgers called Madness and Modernism. And it is a fascinating work. And it was completely another of these sort of eureka moments for me when I read it."
},
{
"end_time": 4625.742,
"index": 178,
"start_time": 4599.821,
"text": " because he drew so many parallels between schizophrenia and modern culture, including high culture. And he drew 25 or 30 parallels that are clear to anyone like him or me who has treated many patients with schizophrenia, between the way they encounter things, experience them, and aspects of modernity."
},
{
"end_time": 4654.667,
"index": 179,
"start_time": 4627.005,
"text": " And this comes together for me in the fact that the left hemisphere is in a way ungrounded. It has taken things, taken them out of context, taken them out of the lived experience of the body, detached them from what they mean to us, and then said, I don't know what this means. Because as it were, having taken it out, ripped it out of the context that would give it meaning, it no longer has any meaning. This induces a sort of what's real, what isn't real."
},
{
"end_time": 4683.268,
"index": 180,
"start_time": 4655.367,
"text": " The only people who live the sort of very strange lives that we do are likely to be tormented by this because they don't see consciousness as something in here and a reality that's just out there. We come back to something we talked about a little earlier and could talk about a lot more, which is how are these two things related? It's neither that there's just an in here and an out there."
},
{
"end_time": 4712.278,
"index": 181,
"start_time": 4683.78,
"text": " nor that it's all made up or it's, you know, so it's a connection. We are beings that can attend to the world. That is our essence. And as Louis Lovell, a 20th century philosopher said, attention is love. Love is a pure attention to the existence of whatever is other, another person, another thing. And I think that that is"
},
{
"end_time": 4740.845,
"index": 182,
"start_time": 4712.705,
"text": " how we relate to the world, that it is not, it's not alien to us at all, nor are we alien to it. It's not that we have to figure it out as if it were an odd thing that had dropped in our path. You know, Paley in his days and thought that it gave the image that the universe was like a watch that some, sorry, Paley, an 18th century bishop. Yes, yes, Thomas Paley, I think he was."
},
{
"end_time": 4756.51,
"index": 183,
"start_time": 4741.237,
"text": " Imagine the world is like a watch, you walk on a heath, you find this watch, you immediately know there must be a watchmaker. I mean, this thing didn't just happen. So he says the world is like this."
},
{
"end_time": 4778.933,
"index": 184,
"start_time": 4757.176,
"text": " says, and I think very fairly, that he is himself a palaeist without God, because he, just like Paley, thinks there is a mechanism here that is working itself out, he just doesn't think it's God, he thinks it's genetics, that there is something, as it were, in a gene, the robot that controls, etc. These images of control"
},
{
"end_time": 4791.698,
"index": 185,
"start_time": 4778.933,
"text": " Are there in him as they would be in the idea of a daistic god i what i mean by daistic god is a an engineering god an engineer who is separate from creation winds it up and occasionally teachers with it."
},
{
"end_time": 4820.776,
"index": 186,
"start_time": 4792.039,
"text": " whereas I believe whatever is divine is in the fabric of the world and is not known, not certain, even to whatever that divinity is. It's a process of true creation, a sort of exhilaration of that, that carries the whole process of creation of a creative cosmos. Anyway, I'm probably not making sense, it's so hard to convey these things briefly, but Schelling in the 18th century, who's one of my favorite philosophers,"
},
{
"end_time": 4851.323,
"index": 187,
"start_time": 4821.51,
"text": " was able to express this not not very easy German I have to agree but this is at the core of his perception that the inner and the outer as is often said in many non-western cultures they are distinct but they're not separate and that's a very important point that it comes back again to the business of not being lost in a context you're distinct from another person but you're not separate from them or sort of"
},
{
"end_time": 4869.292,
"index": 188,
"start_time": 4851.886,
"text": " And I sort of think of the world as being seamless, but with you can go seamlessly from red to green without even knowing that this has happened."
},
{
"end_time": 4896.544,
"index": 189,
"start_time": 4870.247,
"text": " You know, in a three or four minute film, the color can change. Nobody knows is the color changing, but it's changed completely. So it's possible to move along a continuum and the spectrum of colors is an example of something that is not a concatenation. It's not lots of little separate colors. It is simply a spectrum that can be moved along in such a way that you can go from something very distinct"
},
{
"end_time": 4924.548,
"index": 190,
"start_time": 4897.21,
"text": " to something else distinct, but they're never been separate, they've never been cut off from one another, they're part of the same whole. And I think that a number of physicists that I've read in my attempts to understand modern, well, quantum field theory, actually, is the theory that I find most congenial to my philosophy, and seems to be being espoused by a lot of physicists,"
},
{
"end_time": 4951.681,
"index": 191,
"start_time": 4925.094,
"text": " But in that case, again, things can be distinct, but not ultimately separate. They belong to fields which can be more concentrated or collapse in certain ways at certain times in certain places. Actually, speaking of quantum field theory, on these pages that I have notes for you at the back, because I thought that we were scheduled for two hours earlier by accident. So I was just doing some quantum theory problems."
},
{
"end_time": 4980.196,
"index": 192,
"start_time": 4952.056,
"text": " Just to get myself more familiar with it because I've been out of the game for a little while. Why is it that you mentioned... One day you'll be able to explain it to me. Why is it that non-rhythmic music is salutary compared to rhythmic music? See, let me explain my reasoning for this. Well, first of all, you mentioned it in the book, but second, I told you I don't listen to music. I don't get pleasure for music and I"
},
{
"end_time": 5005.913,
"index": 193,
"start_time": 4981.886,
"text": " I haven't done so for maybe 12 or even 14 years. I play music, like I can play this and sing. I like to do that. I like to listen to Eminem occasionally. But I don't like to listen to music. And for me, it's because I'm so in my head. I'm such a child of the enlightenment, let's say that I see that as a waste of time. And I just need to be thinking. And it came from when I was around 18. And I was"
},
{
"end_time": 5031.698,
"index": 194,
"start_time": 5006.664,
"text": " on a train and the train ride passed in like two minutes when it was a 20 minute train ride and it was because I was listening to music and I stopped and thought that's not good because I could have been thinking could have been solving problems so then I'm like from this day forward on the train you just think think think think think it's reminds me of the first angel then he spoke to himself and I feel like I have inadvertently been harming myself and now what I'm doing is a slow process of undoing"
},
{
"end_time": 5057.551,
"index": 195,
"start_time": 5032.585,
"text": " and your book is helping but it's also unnerving thank you either way you said that okay listen music these days is is rhythmic and that's not the best kind of embodiment non-rhythmic music is so can you explain well i i don't i don't think i said that i i really don't um i haven't got anything against rhythmic music i just said that the most powerful expressive elements in music include"
},
{
"end_time": 5087.398,
"index": 196,
"start_time": 5058.49,
"text": " melody and harmony and that rhythm is only a part of music and it's the only part that the left hemisphere really understands especially very basic pounding beats that are repetitive and mechanical because even complex beats with cross rhythms and syncopations are better understood by the right hemisphere but melody and harmony are really very much dependent for most people non-professional musicians dependent on the right hemisphere"
},
{
"end_time": 5097.312,
"index": 197,
"start_time": 5088.848,
"text": " And all I was really saying is that in our culture, I was just pointing to the 101 ways in which we can see the"
},
{
"end_time": 5122.568,
"index": 198,
"start_time": 5097.756,
"text": " what I consider to be the dire impact of not using or paying attention to what our right hemispheres will still tell us if we just listen to what they're enabling us to understand, experience and live in. One of those 101 things is the way in which music has changed, interestingly, to be largely a matter of rhythm and that"
},
{
"end_time": 5150.811,
"index": 199,
"start_time": 5123.626,
"text": " melodies and harmonies are not as subtle as they used to be, and are in many kinds of music. But there's nothing wrong with rhythm in itself, although there is something very important about variation in rhythm. So certainly in playing, if you're a great pianist, you wouldn't play something in the way that a computer would play the notes with exact same lengths and exact same intervals."
},
{
"end_time": 5179.855,
"index": 200,
"start_time": 5151.408,
"text": " There's something called rubato, which you may know of, which is the business of very slight variations from bar to bar in the movement of the music. And this is a parallel to the fact that living rhythms are always variable. They're not mechanical. And I was absolutely amazed when I was on the obstetrics wards when I was a doctor in training."
},
{
"end_time": 5203.029,
"index": 201,
"start_time": 5180.998,
"text": " hear that sound?"
},
{
"end_time": 5230.111,
"index": 202,
"start_time": 5204.002,
"text": " That's the sweet sound of success with Shopify. Shopify is the all-encompassing commerce platform that's with you from the first flicker of an idea to the moment you realize you're running a global enterprise. Whether it's handcrafted jewelry or high-tech gadgets, Shopify supports you at every point of sale, both online and in person. They streamline the process with the internet's best converting checkout, making it 36% more effective than other leading platforms."
},
{
"end_time": 5256.203,
"index": 203,
"start_time": 5230.111,
"text": " There's also something called Shopify Magic, your AI-powered assistant that's like an all-star team member working tirelessly behind the scenes. What I find fascinating about Shopify is how it scales with your ambition. No matter how big you want to grow, Shopify gives you everything you need to take control and take your business to the next level. Join the ranks of businesses in 175 countries that have made Shopify the backbone"
},
{
"end_time": 5281.971,
"index": 204,
"start_time": 5256.203,
"text": " of their commerce. Shopify, by the way, powers 10% of all e-commerce in the United States, including huge names like Allbirds, Rothy's, and Brooklynin. If you ever need help, their award-winning support is like having a mentor that's just a click away. Now, are you ready to start your own success story? Sign up for a $1 per month trial period at Shopify.com slash theories, all lowercase."
},
{
"end_time": 5297.073,
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"start_time": 5281.971,
"text": " Now, I mean, that's an image to me of many other things that, you know, that"
},
{
"end_time": 5325.35,
"index": 206,
"start_time": 5297.961,
"text": " There is a beauty in the slight hesitances in dance, in music. It's very hard to put your finger on what they are, and they're within an overall frame of irregularity. So there's irregularities within the overarching frame of regularity. And this comes to something very, very deep for me, which is that we need"
},
{
"end_time": 5355.469,
"index": 207,
"start_time": 5326.323,
"text": " togetherness but we also need distinctness we need individuality but we need the whole but the important thing is we should be under the embrace of the force for togetherness not the force for separation so in brief we need the force for division and we need the force for union we need both both need to be present we need to be unified not divided"
},
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"end_time": 5374.258,
"index": 208,
"start_time": 5356.425,
"text": " Razor blades are like diving boards. The longer the board, the more the wobble, the more the wobble, the more nicks, cuts, scrapes. A bad shave isn't a blade problem, it's an extension problem. Henson is a family-owned aerospace parts manufacturer that's made parts for the International Space Station and the Mars Rover."
},
{
"end_time": 5396.084,
"index": 209,
"start_time": 5374.258,
"text": " Now they're bringing that precision engineering to your shaving experience. By using aerospace-grade CNC machines, Henson makes razors that extend less than the thickness of a human hair. The razor also has built-in channels that evacuates hair and cream, which make clogging virtually impossible. Henson Shaving wants to produce the best razors, not the best razor business,"
},
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"text": " So that means no plastics, no subscriptions, no proprietary blades and no planned obsolescence. It's also extremely affordable. The Henson razor works with the standard dual edge blades that give you that old school shave with the benefits of this new school tech. It's time to say no to subscriptions and yes to a razor that'll last you a lifetime."
},
{
"end_time": 5445.981,
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"start_time": 5416.084,
"text": " This reminds me of longing versus want. In your book, you mentioned longing is a unification, a stretching out to, but want is a desire which puts you at"
},
{
"end_time": 5465.742,
"index": 212,
"start_time": 5446.305,
"text": " separate from? Yes. Is there a connection or is that just in my head? No, I'm delighted that you made that connection. I think it's exactly right from my point of view. And in fact, there is if people are interested, if you if you Google McGillchrist longing and wanting, I think it's called"
},
{
"end_time": 5488.166,
"index": 213,
"start_time": 5466.203,
"text": " I gave an hour-long talk in London about four years ago on the distinction between longing and wanting, and nowadays it seems to me that we have lost the sense of a longing for something to which we already feel an attraction and which is calling to us and which we are sort of rather"
},
{
"end_time": 5518.114,
"index": 214,
"start_time": 5488.558,
"text": " The word long literally comes from an Anglo-Saxon root which means to stretch out."
},
{
"end_time": 5524.002,
"index": 215,
"start_time": 5518.626,
"text": " Gone from you, but which you are still connected. You want to reconnect with. In fact, it is this"
},
{
"end_time": 5553.951,
"index": 216,
"start_time": 5526.101,
"text": " Sisterly and diastole, if you like, which are from the heartbeat, you know, the sisterly followed by the diastole, the lup followed by the tup, there's this kind of contraction and release, is the way in which movement happens in nature by alternations of that kind. To produce something that is just a kind of addition of the two in some neutral way, or perhaps a compromise, a 50-50, it produces something completely new. This is the point. It is the creation."
},
{
"end_time": 5578.746,
"index": 217,
"start_time": 5553.951,
"text": " The creativity of your life, of this world, of the cosmos, depends on our ability to see that opposites need to be held together. The world is not as simple as we think it is. Things that we think are good also conceal something that is bad, and things that we think are bad also conceal something that is good, and we need to finesse these things in order to find our way in the world. What I mean by"
},
{
"end_time": 5608.336,
"index": 218,
"start_time": 5579.309,
"text": " the opposition bringing something new into being is the tension of a string of a guitar or a violin. It's important for that, that it's pulled in two directions at once. In fact, if it weren't pulled in two directions at once, it wouldn't work. You might say, well, that's a waste of energy. Why pull things in two directions at once? Why not come to an agreement that a compromise and just stop pulling? Well, then you don't have a string anymore. You don't have a violin anymore. You don't have any music anymore."
},
{
"end_time": 5626.903,
"index": 219,
"start_time": 5609.377,
"text": " Well, something comes out of that conflict, which is very important. Sorry. To be fair, in string theory, you can have closed loop strings and you just give them attention. It's just like a variable you vary. Oh, I really wasn't pretending to talk about string theory. I really don't understand. I know. OK."
},
{
"end_time": 5655.674,
"index": 220,
"start_time": 5627.312,
"text": " When you say, you're like, hmm, we need to, we're separate, but we're also together. And this impulse to be separated should be there. And the impulse to be together should be there. We should be guided by the together one more so than the separate one. That's the individuality. Okay, well, that to me, it reminds me is I'm not meaning this, by the way, can I just say I'm not meaning this principally or only to do with social relations, I'm thinking of it as"
},
{
"end_time": 5685.674,
"index": 221,
"start_time": 5656.561,
"text": " a metaphysical structural feature of reality, that it has this structure of the need for difference and togetherness, not just we as human beings have it. Okay, well now you gave me another idea. So let's say I'm walking along the beach, and I'm looking at the waves and the sand and the salt. Am I supposed to feel, or is it good for me to feel, connected to it and feel as if the waves are alive in some manner and I'm speaking to the rocks? Because in the dead-end left hemispheric view,"
},
{
"end_time": 5708.933,
"index": 222,
"start_time": 5686.357,
"text": " I see them or one would see them as impressions, picturesque impressions upon my slate of sense, so sense data pressed upon me. But then I can, then I know that that's associated with schizophrenia, schizophrenic ideation in its extreme. Okay, but then in the other extreme, I can see someone going and talking to the rocks and and holding them up and kissing them as that its own form of"
},
{
"end_time": 5736.152,
"index": 223,
"start_time": 5709.292,
"text": " psychosis, but I'm not sure. I don't know if that's actually associated with schizophrenic thought. Either way, I want to hear so which one should I do? Should I stand back passively of you? Or should I treat it somehow emulated in my brain as this is living be Kurt be in this world as if you're living engaging with it. But these are not just plastic objects that have wood. They're, they're also not beings, let's say, but they're"
},
{
"end_time": 5766.459,
"index": 224,
"start_time": 5736.681,
"text": " There's something to them, there's some life that they have. So how does one dance that web? Because I can see inane craziness on both ends of the spectrum. But does it have to be one or the other, in keeping with what I've been saying? Isn't it an error to go to one extreme of either of these? Not because the reality exists in a compromise, but because there is a wholly different position that is only found when you reconcile the two opposites. That is my point."
},
{
"end_time": 5794.087,
"index": 225,
"start_time": 5767.346,
"text": " and it's imaged in that taut string. But I think it's a very unusual view we have of the world that we are separate from it and it is dead and that any life in it is something we attribute to it. I argue, and it's too long an argument to do now, I even argue that inanimacy is"
},
{
"end_time": 5810.828,
"index": 226,
"start_time": 5794.991,
"text": " If you like the ultimate limit case of animacy, not that animacy is some weird thing that popped into the cosmos. I think animacy is of the essence of a conscious universe in different ways in different degrees."
},
{
"end_time": 5839.224,
"index": 227,
"start_time": 5811.084,
"text": " Animacy as in animosity or the Jungian animus? No, no, as in things being animate. So obviously, yes, but we don't have to go to that, not an extreme, but to that length, if you like. I wouldn't have time to justify that position, but I think I do in my book. But in any case, most people at most times in the world have not"
},
{
"end_time": 5869.531,
"index": 228,
"start_time": 5840.316,
"text": " failed to make a proper scientific assessment and come up with a theory that things around them are alive they know that alive because they actually experience that and we have told ourselves that we can't be experiencing that because it's just not wrong isn't it I mean in the age of science but what do we know about that actually science is not dealing with that question science is not able to talk about whether there is"
},
{
"end_time": 5894.326,
"index": 229,
"start_time": 5870.367,
"text": " something that has consciousness or animosity in the world outside of our own heads. So I don't think that one needs to either tell oneself one's wrong when one feels a sense of connectedness or think that being properly connected means"
},
{
"end_time": 5917.056,
"index": 230,
"start_time": 5894.872,
"text": " You're being swallowed up and you don't love those waves so much that you go into a rough sea and get drowned. So you need to keep walking this balance and it's all about the balance or harmony. Harmony was the Greek word and it's a word that we've lost because our world has so little harmony in it. Things that we call harmony are actually"
},
{
"end_time": 5943.814,
"index": 231,
"start_time": 5917.654,
"text": " dictated fiats that things must be like this but no true harmony is is a kind of thing that has to evolve between things being fully themselves and not pretending to be something they're not so yeah i think it i think it is a very very important element i wrote also an article for the journal of consciousness studies on the question of the self because i think there's a confusion you know that"
},
{
"end_time": 5974.872,
"index": 232,
"start_time": 5945.879,
"text": " the holy person or the wise person has no self. And I think I know what is meant. I can see very clearly what is meant, not a narrow, egotistic, selfish, fragmentary, atomistic self, of course. But at the same time, by growing in richness and thinking and meditating and creating and just being,"
},
{
"end_time": 6005.196,
"index": 233,
"start_time": 5975.282,
"text": " you are growing a soul, you are growing a person, you are growing fulfilling an individual element of the cosmos that will never be there again. And surely to say that that's all valueless and that the whole business of existence is to try and deny that and get as far away from it as possible seems to me a little bit negative, because even the Buddha, you know, had to sleep, had to eat, had to go to the lavatory. If somebody shot the Buddha,"
},
{
"end_time": 6031.493,
"index": 234,
"start_time": 6005.486,
"text": " he didn't go well he didn't shoot me because he did you know every everybody has their individual self but there's a very big difference between what Jung called the self which is a sort of mature thing that you grow into and the ego which is this sort of more left hemispheric sense of the self as the acquirer the manipulator the one that wields power and that's very important again in"
},
{
"end_time": 6061.493,
"index": 235,
"start_time": 6032.039,
"text": " the spiritual philosophies of most cultures, the renouncing of power, because power is very much the left hemisphere's major tool. It exists in order to make us powerful, to get things, to grab things, to get prey, to build things, to make things, and thinks that we will become happier or better in doing so, although all the evidence is very clear. We don't become happier or morally better people by doing it. What you say just makes me think of"
},
{
"end_time": 6092.056,
"index": 236,
"start_time": 6062.278,
"text": " There's quite a few thoughts. I'll splay out two of them. One is, Freud said, or at least Freud surmised that his ego and so on would have some morphological equivalent in the brain if neuroscience would just progress. Now, it sounds like what you're saying is to some degree that's true because the left hemisphere is associated with the ego. Is that correct? I don't really want to say yes to that or no to it because in some senses, yes, in some senses, no."
},
{
"end_time": 6118.626,
"index": 237,
"start_time": 6092.483,
"text": " It depends too much what you mean by ego, and some aspects of the superego might be better identified with the frontal lobes rather than with either right or left hemisphere, and certainly it wouldn't be right to say the right hemisphere is the id. The right hemisphere is the morally self-abnegating part of us, the part that enables us to be good friends, parents and citizens. It is the bit that"
},
{
"end_time": 6143.882,
"index": 238,
"start_time": 6119.326,
"text": " David Hecht at UCL in London says quite straightforwardly, and I think I'd sign up to it largely, that the right hemisphere is moral in its attitudes and the left is basically immoral. It is there for what it can get. Is the left hemisphere immoral or amoral? Immoral. In other words, it has a morality."
},
{
"end_time": 6173.865,
"index": 239,
"start_time": 6145.043,
"text": " And it has it has really no sense of well, let me just go back on that. In the book, this new book, I argue that the left hands can't really understand morality. It hasn't any really a sense of morality. So it substitutes for morality calculation. It says if I weigh up the consequences of this act and the consequences of that act, I can find out which is the morally right act. That sounds very good."
},
{
"end_time": 6195.947,
"index": 240,
"start_time": 6174.735,
"text": " But there are many circumstances in life in which it would be profoundly immoral even to carry out a calculus of that kind. And it's in normal circumstances, apart from one or two philosophers, it's mainly people who have right hemisphere damage or frontal lobe damage, or are very severely autistic who think in that way."
},
{
"end_time": 6221.049,
"index": 241,
"start_time": 6196.92,
"text": " Most of us have a sense that morality is something more complex than that, and that we don't do it would be quite wrong to make decisions based on an entirely dispassionate mathematical. In fact, how would you attach the values? I mean, would the value gained by many sadistic pedophiles around the world"
},
{
"end_time": 6243.814,
"index": 242,
"start_time": 6221.561,
"text": " outweigh in the pleasure given to thousands of people the suffering of one innocent child that is tortured for fun well if you have to do a sum on that then you there's something wrong with your moral sense and i know that's an extreme case but i'm afraid it's a rather important indicator of something that is wrong with utilitarianism on its own"
},
{
"end_time": 6271.527,
"index": 243,
"start_time": 6244.411,
"text": " Utilitarianism has a place sometimes. But again, it's this problem that left hemisphere thinks that whatever it is, it does is the only thing and the best thing. Whereas it's actually not even core to morality, utilitarianism. I believe in a kind of objective moral. I'm so sorry. Do you believe in objective morals? Well, it depends what you mean by objective."
},
{
"end_time": 6300.657,
"index": 244,
"start_time": 6271.903,
"text": " I don't believe that they're just subjective in the sense that they're made up by us, but I don't believe they're objective in the sense that a machine would be able to calculate it. I mean, when I say objective, I mean that there's something at the structure of reality at the fundament, at the abutment that has morals and that it's not just our own. No, no, thank you for clarifying. No, definitely. No, I think the cosmos is moral, which isn't to say that it's all good."
},
{
"end_time": 6330.725,
"index": 245,
"start_time": 6301.254,
"text": " Of course, because morality includes the whole spectrum. But I don't think morality is an element that we've somehow, we've come to is simply an expression of things we like and things we don't like. I think it is a very profound aspect of the business of being alive, as is the appeal of beauty and of complexity of mathematics, of music, of landscape, all these things embody something that unless we're"
},
{
"end_time": 6356.988,
"index": 246,
"start_time": 6332.585,
"text": " you know crippled, cribbed and confined by the left hemisphere's take on things obviously speak to us about something more important than what the left hemisphere alone can tell us. There's nothing wrong you know it's not that we all would be better if we had a left hemisphere stroke of course not as I often say it's my second favorite hemisphere it's terribly important but it's you know it got to be under the"
},
{
"end_time": 6384.087,
"index": 247,
"start_time": 6357.363,
"text": " In Christianity, there's a heavy, heavy emphasis on both love and truth. And it's not just"
},
{
"end_time": 6410.384,
"index": 248,
"start_time": 6384.377,
"text": " speak the truth no matter what it's speak speak the truth guided by love so the truth has to serve love i'm wondering is that mirrored by the bi-hemispheric structure is that one right brain is the love in this sense and then the left is the one that's associated with truth at least objectively can be associated with some form of objective truth or am i just going off on a limb i think you're going you're going"
},
{
"end_time": 6440.452,
"index": 249,
"start_time": 6410.879,
"text": " An awful lot further than I would go. I don't think I would say any of that. But I think it's perfectly legitimate to speculate when you're thinking about the richness of an idea or an image or a metaphor about what it can illuminate. So I don't think there's anything wrong with having an idea and thinking, well, maybe not. But I think honestly, I'd say maybe not to that one. What do you make of Daniel Dennett's explaining consciousness or consciousness explained?"
},
{
"end_time": 6464.889,
"index": 250,
"start_time": 6443.097,
"text": " Well, I think it's a perfect expression, a very intelligent expression of a certain kind of take on the world, which is to use the term that you invoked at the beginning of our talk, that is, I think, rather sadly impoverished."
},
{
"end_time": 6488.148,
"index": 251,
"start_time": 6465.606,
"text": " And it's not a thing that can easily be solved by argument. These are things that you come to through experience. In other words, they involve canon as well as vision. And they come out of the fruit of many kinds of attention to the world, not just the claim that comes from arguing in a seminar room."
},
{
"end_time": 6518.2,
"index": 252,
"start_time": 6488.951,
"text": " And so not that there's anything wrong with doing that, but again, it's a supplementary aspect of what philosophy is. Philosophy has got a little bit lost, I think, as a sort of technical department in the university, somewhat like engineering. And interestingly, Dan Dennett says that if he hadn't been a philosopher, he'd probably been an engineer, which seems to be intuitively right. But it also points to perhaps a certain"
},
{
"end_time": 6548.097,
"index": 253,
"start_time": 6519.138,
"text": " I don't know, unwillingness to accept that things might be beyond what he knows and more complex. It's interesting that engineers, for example, have a very high... I did a study on this at the Maudsley Hospital, which I've never actually got around to publishing, but it's very clear that I didn't expect the results, that people who became mentally ill at university with a major mental illness,"
},
{
"end_time": 6577.073,
"index": 254,
"start_time": 6548.507,
"text": " Those who became manic-depressive, i.e. had an emotional disturbance as a primary element in their psychosis, were not principally philosophers or engineers, but those with schizophrenia were massively more likely to have been studying engineering or philosophy than any other subject. And it's also come to light that terrorists who are fundamentalists"
},
{
"end_time": 6605.794,
"index": 255,
"start_time": 6577.705,
"text": " have engineers are more represented amongst them than amongst other people. I, you know, of course, I'm not trying to say that, that all engineers are like this, but I'm just pointing to a sort of certain kind of, I don't know. The predilection for engineer like thinking is what is also a predilection for for categorical thinking and for a lack of willingness to accept that things"
},
{
"end_time": 6620.026,
"index": 256,
"start_time": 6606.391,
"text": " are not certain and maybe much more complex than when there's given them credit for being. Let's see. I wanted I'm trying to find this one question about. Well, okay, before I find that question."
},
{
"end_time": 6648.285,
"index": 257,
"start_time": 6620.486,
"text": " I'm curious, how is it that you were able to pin down the insights about the right brain by using your left brain? Because this is a book written in language and so on. So did you engage in meditative exercises? Did you speak to spiritual gurus? How did you do it? Or did you just read dispassionately the literature and then you said, okay, this is what the right brain does. Let me write that down. Well, I think it was very like my idea of the right brain guiding in the left hemisphere doing much of the sort of procedural work."
},
{
"end_time": 6677.756,
"index": 258,
"start_time": 6648.968,
"text": " So it's often been pointed out to me that without a highly active left hemisphere I couldn't possibly have written that book with its attention to expressing extremely difficult things that are not intuitively the things that most people nowadays in the West think in language and arguing for them and producing an enormous amount of scientific evidence. So I think the left hemisphere"
},
{
"end_time": 6702.159,
"index": 259,
"start_time": 6678.012,
"text": " as I say, was a valuable servant to me. But what I hope is that I was guided by a sense of something that I was aware of, but not fully aware of and wanted to explore more and to bring into more into the light really, never fully into the light, but a bit further into the light so that it could be better seen. I think this is the process."
},
{
"end_time": 6732.483,
"index": 260,
"start_time": 6702.875,
"text": " It's more like seeing a gestalt, seeing a form, than it is culminating an argument in which step A leads to B through to Z, and then you fritch off and say, right, proved. That's never going to be a success in philosophy in my view, I say rather controversially, because the world is not like that. And Plato right at the start thought that we shouldn't even write philosophy down, that it could only be done by people"
},
{
"end_time": 6762.159,
"index": 261,
"start_time": 6733.012,
"text": " living people talking to one another for a long period and getting to know one another and that then an intuition would come about like a spark would be kindled. Now that's right at the founding of modern western philosophy but we've got a very long way from it. Yes, I think the image that I like, and it's occurred to me when I was writing my very first book in my 20s, was that what I was trying to say"
},
{
"end_time": 6790.964,
"index": 262,
"start_time": 6762.619,
"text": " was that we have understandings of things, specifically works of literature or of music or art or whatever they are, not by a linear chain of discovery, but by circling them and seeing them from different aspects. And that it's more like a picture that gradually comes into focus or even quite suddenly at some point comes into focus. So at the time you're looking at it, it doesn't seem coherent."
},
{
"end_time": 6817.005,
"index": 263,
"start_time": 6791.476,
"text": " but then gradually you see bit comes and you see I see you have an aha moment and things begin to fall into place and then other things refuse to fall into the picture that you've got and they help guide the next stage so there's a new Gestalt, a better one replaces and indeed in philosophy what we're doing is always just replacing one Gestalt with another. What I mean by a Gestalt is a form"
},
{
"end_time": 6847.193,
"index": 264,
"start_time": 6817.415,
"text": " which is a whole, which is more than any of the parts. I know you know this, but I'm just saying it in case any listener doesn't define the term familiar. But it's the whole idea that there is a whole of something that can't be accessed fully by simply dividing it up into its parts. Something essential to it is loss. I have a quote here. It's you quoting Sass from Schizophrenic Mind. And I'm not going to I'm just going to paraphrase it because it's a quite a long paragraph. It says that"
},
{
"end_time": 6870.93,
"index": 265,
"start_time": 6847.5,
"text": " When you engage in the world in a passive, disengaged, self-conscious, stare at the world in an objective manner, it becomes bizarre, alien, frightening, and that's akin to the schizophrenic mind. However, the process of mindfulness meditation seems shockingly similar, where you're supposed to stand back and you simply observe, no judgment, don't engage, it's all just being fed to you."
},
{
"end_time": 6889.855,
"index": 266,
"start_time": 6872.039,
"text": " Yes. Well, in terms of the hemisphere,"
},
{
"end_time": 6920.623,
"index": 267,
"start_time": 6890.794,
"text": " paradigm. One is what happens when you allow the left hemisphere only to be working. This is the standing back so that your body is not involved, so that your feeling self is not involved, so that you have deliberately cut off all the contacts from something and then see it as something utterly alien. Whereas the mindfulness is and then interestingly and perhaps not essentially but interestingly"
},
{
"end_time": 6927.944,
"index": 268,
"start_time": 6921.288,
"text": " The science of mindfulness shows that it does rely more heavily on right hemisphere."
},
{
"end_time": 6957.21,
"index": 269,
"start_time": 6928.558,
"text": " activations than left and indeed on changes practitioners in the structure of the right hemisphere. But I don't think that's the important point. I think what is going on in mindfulness is that you are adopting the position of the right hemisphere towards the world, which is in fact, although you might think it is similar, it is the exact opposite. Because whereas the one is, as you are isolated and detached, the other is standing back"
},
{
"end_time": 6980.828,
"index": 270,
"start_time": 6957.551,
"text": " enough to allow the self not to crowd everything out. Where the one is actually thinking about things all the time, the other is saying, no, I'm not going to think at all. I'm just going to be there with it. Now, in the first case, in the sort of frightening alienating way, which interestingly,"
},
{
"end_time": 7003.319,
"index": 271,
"start_time": 6981.203,
"text": " Shreve describes the 19th century judge who became schizophrenic in his middle years and wrote a wonderful journal of his mental illness. Shreve describes exactly this, that the world becomes alien as soon as you start reflecting on it so much that you drop all the connection with it. Now in mindfulness you are not"
},
{
"end_time": 7027.363,
"index": 272,
"start_time": 7003.746,
"text": " absent from the world. It's about being fully present in the world. The idea is that in normal life, you're not fully present, you're not actually there with the world at all, because your thoughts, your ideas, your judgments, yourself is crowding it all out. So in fact, they're quite opposite in their tendency. I sometimes talk about something called necessary distance,"
},
{
"end_time": 7056.203,
"index": 273,
"start_time": 7028.114,
"text": " And what I mean by that is exactly that kind of distance that enables you to see something properly as a whole, not to swamp it. But it doesn't mean being so far detached from it that you can't see it or understand it or relate to it. That would be the opposite of necessary distance. That would be toxic distance. And there is such a thing as toxic fusion, in which you can be so close to something you can't see it, make it out or accept its being at all."
},
{
"end_time": 7082.619,
"index": 274,
"start_time": 7056.681,
"text": " Why is it that you associated in a metaphor the rising up and floating with the left hemisphere and then being on the ground with the right hemisphere? Because to me, I would think that the left one is the one that's on the ground manipulating and the right hemisphere is the one that can see the whole picture. Yes. Well, you very, I think, entirely rightly put your finger on the way in which any one metaphor"
},
{
"end_time": 7108.439,
"index": 275,
"start_time": 7083.353,
"text": " breaks down in these circumstances and you have to use a whole variety of them. What I was really thinking of was that it was like the difference between someone who is actually living a life on the ground and somebody who is doing a sort of aerial photograph of it in order to map it. That as it were, all that is there on the ground is present to the person who's experiencing it headlong in the business of life."
},
{
"end_time": 7131.8,
"index": 276,
"start_time": 7108.797,
"text": " who actually sees the garden, sees their children, hears the wind and sees the stars, and the mind that is already dissecting, analyzing and remote. So you're quite right that the left hemisphere, this is another way of putting the finger on what I was trying to say, is there is a kind of distancing which can be remote."
},
{
"end_time": 7156.118,
"index": 277,
"start_time": 7131.8,
"text": " but there's a kind of distancing which enables you to see the whole picture just as the kind of being fixed on the here and now which is generous and wise and allows you to understand it and the being fixed on the here and now which is just about acquisition and accumulation of power and influence so they each contribute to both as you would expect"
},
{
"end_time": 7182.363,
"index": 278,
"start_time": 7156.749,
"text": " each has a version of closeness, each has a version of distance. As I keep saying, every concept you care to name has a left hemisphere take and a right hemisphere take. So it's not, as I say, that they do different things, they do the same things, but they do them always from a coherently different perspective. I see coherently different. Because I can imagine they don't call differently different."
},
{
"end_time": 7211.032,
"index": 279,
"start_time": 7183.848,
"text": " Yes, what I'm trying to suggest is within themselves coherent. I see, like a self-consistency. Yes, self-consistency. So that, for example, you might say, so how does the left hemisphere view language, how does the right hemisphere view language, how does the left hemisphere view distance, how does the right hemisphere distance? They don't sound like they've got very much in common, but when you come to look at how each of them"
},
{
"end_time": 7242.244,
"index": 280,
"start_time": 7212.807,
"text": " looks at everything there are very common threads that are consistent through how the right hemisphere deals with every aspect of existence and very common threads that characterize the way the left hemisphere does so they're not coherent together so much as coherent within themselves but the art of life is bringing these two things to bear in such a way that the richness that they can only really come from them both is not swamped by the left hemisphere trying to take over the whole show"
},
{
"end_time": 7265.657,
"index": 281,
"start_time": 7242.619,
"text": " It doesn't happen the other way around because the right hemispheres often say well you've put your finger on you know what a left hemisphere world looks like because at the end of the book in the last chapter I sort of describe a world in which the left hemisphere based on what the reader knows about it would make of a world and in reading it you I think most people see a very clear portrait of what is happening to us now."
},
{
"end_time": 7280.691,
"index": 282,
"start_time": 7266.015,
"text": " So people say, but what would a right hemisphere world look like? The answer is, well, it would be a very balanced one. And there's never been a civilization that didn't have its left hemisphere aspects, because the right hemisphere sees more, it therefore knows that it needs the left hemisphere."
},
{
"end_time": 7307.722,
"index": 283,
"start_time": 7281.152,
"text": " it after all if it's the if it's the master it appointed the emissary because it realized it needed the emissary the emissary coming into existence and being crowned as this you know very wise minister thinks it knows everything when it doesn't and that's the problem it's people who think they've got it all in the bag now is our consciousness i think sorry sorry i was wondering is our consciousness"
},
{
"end_time": 7333.66,
"index": 284,
"start_time": 7309.65,
"text": " Residing in the left brain or residing in the right hemisphere or is it in the interplay between both or is it being fed from both? Because as I hear you say the left thinks it's in charge it reminds me of our consciousness that thinks we're the ones that are in control and then it has and then we have to be confronted with a myriad of psychological studies to show no you're a monkey on a Elephant's back and you think that you're controlling it, but this elephant's gonna go wherever it wants. So are we"
},
{
"end_time": 7360.862,
"index": 285,
"start_time": 7334.07,
"text": " When I'm speaking with you right now, or when one is speaking with you, are we either engaging in one of those modes? Are we primarily on the left? Are we both somehow being fed from each? When you start talking about the relationship between consciousness and the brain, then you know you really are in very, very rarefied areas. And I don't shy from talking about it in the book, a chapter, which is the length of a short book on its own on it. But I think that"
},
{
"end_time": 7391.903,
"index": 286,
"start_time": 7362.824,
"text": " You see, let's start with the monkey on the elephant. In my experience, the elephant is all that we are not currently aware of. And the monkey is just that foolish little bit that is doing the thinking and talking consciously now. So earlier I said, most of everything we are doing is not stuff we're doing consciously. In fact, if we try to do it consciously, we do it very badly."
},
{
"end_time": 7415.52,
"index": 287,
"start_time": 7392.21,
"text": " It's one of the interesting things is that the better you get as a chess player, the less you think consciously about it. Right. So the same is true of a surgeon or a pilot. They have to think a lot to begin with, but as they get better, they think less and less. So the role of that monkey is rightly considered not important compared with the elephant, which is wise and has memory."
},
{
"end_time": 7440.862,
"index": 288,
"start_time": 7415.879,
"text": " So that's the way I'd look at that. I don't see those images as therefore telling us that we're just the puppets or playthings of something else. I mean, that's a very, very skewed left hemisphere way of thinking about it, because of course it's only interested in power and control. But actually what it is, it's saying no. What you are is rooted very deeply in the whole of your experience."
},
{
"end_time": 7464.616,
"index": 289,
"start_time": 7441.391,
"text": " including the bits that you're now conscious of, but including many that you were conscious of in another moment and aren't now, and things that you're perhaps never conscious of. So anyway, and complicatedly, consciousness has two meanings. One is as against the things you're not aware of, like, oh, at that moment I wasn't conscious of the fact that it's, you know,"
},
{
"end_time": 7494.462,
"index": 290,
"start_time": 7465.469,
"text": " my friend's birthday or something like that. But it also is used in the sense of what you lose when you go into a coma or die. So what I'm really saying is there is a kind of consciousness that we find all too obvious and overvalue, which is the one that does the chatting and talking and thinking right now. But what I mean by our conscious awareness of the world is a deep thing that is going on in both hemispheres all the time."
},
{
"end_time": 7518.814,
"index": 291,
"start_time": 7495.111,
"text": " When we narrow down to the conscious mind, we're talking about that focus of the left hemisphere. An image I sometimes use, I don't know if it's helpful, is that we sometimes think of the unconscious as underneath the conscious, as like a sort of a deep tank that you would come to if you went through the floor of your conscious, the conscious tank. But instead I would hear that sound."
},
{
"end_time": 7545.913,
"index": 292,
"start_time": 7519.787,
"text": " That's the sweet sound of success with Shopify. Shopify is the all-encompassing commerce platform that's with you from the first flicker of an idea to the moment you realize you're running a global enterprise. Whether it's handcrafted jewelry or high-tech gadgets, Shopify supports you at every point of sale, both online and in person. They streamline the process with the internet's best converting checkout, making it 36% more effective than other leading platforms."
},
{
"end_time": 7565.759,
"index": 293,
"start_time": 7545.913,
"text": " There's also something called Shopify Magic, your AI powered assistant that's like an all-star team member working tirelessly behind the scenes. What I find fascinating about Shopify is how it scales with your ambition. No matter how big you want to grow, Shopify gives you everything you need to take control and take your business to the next level."
},
{
"end_time": 7595.35,
"index": 294,
"start_time": 7565.759,
"text": " Join the ranks of businesses in 175 countries that have made Shopify the backbone of their commerce. Shopify, by the way, powers 10% of all e-commerce in the United States, including huge names like Allbirds, Rothy's, and Brooklynin. If you ever need help, their award-winning support is like having a mentor that's just a click away. Now, are you ready to start your own success story? Sign up for a $1 per month trial period at Shopify.com"
},
{
"end_time": 7621.357,
"index": 295,
"start_time": 7595.35,
"text": " There's a stage that is basically in darkness except where the floodlight happens to go and when that moves to a certain place, something suddenly shows up."
},
{
"end_time": 7648.404,
"index": 296,
"start_time": 7621.8,
"text": " But when it moves away, that something doesn't go away. It's just that at the moment you're not looking at it, you're looking at something else. So we are a field of consciousness. In fact, Lichtenberg says and Schelling says, it thinks in me. So as it were, there is a field of me, which is the minus of me and all that goes into that. And it's not something alien from me. It is who I am."
},
{
"end_time": 7678.319,
"index": 297,
"start_time": 7648.899,
"text": " And it's out of that that my thinking comes. The Cartesian idea that there must be a little chatty ego for there to be an I helps us forget or miss the two depths of our being. So anyway, when you when you do brain experiments, you can interrogate each hemisphere at a time and each one is conscious. It's just that the right hemisphere can't speak those things."
},
{
"end_time": 7706.578,
"index": 298,
"start_time": 7678.933,
"text": " Sorry, sorry, sorry to interrupt, because I'm super curious about this. Okay, so you have a colisotomy, and then you asked a question, and then you confabulate an answer because you don't know it, or at least the part of it. Okay. But that's the part of you that is conscious. And it seems like the consciousness is still in the left and the right is in control, but it's unconsciously in control doing a process. So is that another way of thinking about it? Or can you attribute consciousness to the right hemisphere?"
},
{
"end_time": 7717.79,
"index": 299,
"start_time": 7708.046,
"text": " Well, I think consciousness is not a thing. It is, of course, a process. And indeed, the brain itself is not a thing but a process."
},
{
"end_time": 7742.637,
"index": 300,
"start_time": 7718.439,
"text": " Every cell of your body is a process. It's much more like a process than a thing. It looks like a thing because you can photograph it or do a diagram of it, but actually that thing that looks like a cell membrane is actually very fluid and it's changing its position and its composition all the time. So even a single cell is actually a sea of things that are changing and moving and interconnected."
},
{
"end_time": 7752.91,
"index": 301,
"start_time": 7743.439,
"text": " Now the brain is like that on an infinitely larger scale. I have a feeling that your new book, this is pretty much what it's talking about, is that there are no things, there are only processes. Is that correct?"
},
{
"end_time": 7775.64,
"index": 302,
"start_time": 7753.797,
"text": " It's not that I think there's anything wrong with conceiving of things as things. I mean, for example, this laptop on my lap is perfectly properly described as a thing in a certain way. It's just a way in which we encounter the world for certain purposes, a very good one. It's just that on the whole, it's a mistake to think that the world is structured out of things. Anyway,"
},
{
"end_time": 7798.968,
"index": 303,
"start_time": 7776.63,
"text": " When it comes to the consciousness and the brain, I mean, I think of consciousness as being sequestered for a while in a kind of area. And I sometimes think of this as like the outpouching of a membrane. I mean, if people remember looking down slides or down microscopes or seeing slides of"
},
{
"end_time": 7825.742,
"index": 304,
"start_time": 7799.497,
"text": " organic membranes of living tissue, they will often see that they have sort of outpouchings called drilli or that an amoeba has something called a pseudopod that it can extend and if you're in the middle of one of those those long things you can think you're completely surrounded on all sides but at the foot of it you're connected to the main and I think that our consciousness is quite rightly seems to us"
},
{
"end_time": 7849.497,
"index": 305,
"start_time": 7826.135,
"text": " and it would be no good it being flooded with everything else going on in the universe or nothing original would ever happen nothing would be creative and i keep saying the only way i can explain the cosmos it's through a deep creative urge that's the most i can say of it and one that probably is connected to to love which is relationship anyway um what i'm saying is that"
},
{
"end_time": 7856.186,
"index": 306,
"start_time": 7850.282,
"text": " Consciousness is my consciousness whatever it is my brain is experiencing as consciousness"
},
{
"end_time": 7886.067,
"index": 307,
"start_time": 7856.937,
"text": " is for the moment absolutely connected with my brain you know if I get an injury in the brain to affect the consciousness and to go back to James's thing about the vocal cords if he has an injury to the vocal cords his voice will disappear and so on so but he and his thoughts and his everything that we've expressed through that will carry on I know it's not an exact analogy another image I use sometimes is of the the consciousness in the brain"
},
{
"end_time": 7912.346,
"index": 308,
"start_time": 7887.739,
"text": " being able to divide and go around an island. So at a certain point in the flow of a stream, there may be two seemingly quite distinct streams that don't know much about one another at that moment. But if you moved 100 yards down the river, you'd see that they came together as they'd been together before. And they weren't, therefore, entirely separate streams, although it would be perfectly reasonable to talk of them as separate streams at the time."
},
{
"end_time": 7937.159,
"index": 309,
"start_time": 7913.285,
"text": " but ultimately they are connected, and of course the image of the stream, which is the image that my all-time favourite philosopher Heraclitus said was at the heart of, you know, everything flows, is a brilliant perception because the stream both remain, so the stream that passes my house and it"
},
{
"end_time": 7960.947,
"index": 310,
"start_time": 7937.398,
"text": " I recall you talking about Heraclitus and saying that it is both that the stream is the same and that you don't step in the same river twice. It's more like"
},
{
"end_time": 7986.886,
"index": 311,
"start_time": 7961.186,
"text": " those are two different modes of being with the river or the stream. Okay now see that's different than the standard analytical answer would be the Wittgenstein which is while you're playing different language games and so it depends on what you mean by so-and-so but you're safe you've changed it from the analytical to saying no no it depends on how you be okay yes might outlining that briefly or as lengthily as you like for the audience I think that was incredibly insightful"
},
{
"end_time": 8012.09,
"index": 312,
"start_time": 7987.961,
"text": " Well, in a way, it's another way of saying something I said before, which is that it's not either or, or both and. It's both either or and both and. So it is both true that the stream is the same stream and that it is a different stream."
},
{
"end_time": 8035.845,
"index": 313,
"start_time": 8013.507,
"text": " Each of these has a sort of truth, and in either or cast of mind, you can go, well, come on, which is it? But in another way, you can say it's perfectly coherent that it is both. Not actually because in some part, as I've just suggested with an image of an island, but all the time it is one and the other."
},
{
"end_time": 8066.766,
"index": 314,
"start_time": 8037.142,
"text": " And there are many things in life and in the wider structure of things, it seems to me, that have this dual, not dual quality exactly, but this unwillingness to finally split it into it's got to be this way or that. In fact, the further you go towards deep things, the more you find that opposites come together. And I know I'm hardly the first person to have said that, but it still needs to be said."
},
{
"end_time": 8095.998,
"index": 315,
"start_time": 8067.329,
"text": " Is that why you said at one point that the logical mind, while it reinforces itself, reinforcing at its extreme, you would get to the right mind? Well, I think into the extreme, it ought to be able to encounter its own bounds. So, for example, in a way, Gödel demonstrated that a certain kind of entirely logical thinking eventually demonstrates its own limitations."
},
{
"end_time": 8118.916,
"index": 316,
"start_time": 8096.527,
"text": " And Pascal said that reason is feeble indeed if it cannot see its own limitations. And don't forget that Pascal was a great mathematician and logician. So, I mean, as well as being a great spiritual thinker. So if you take the left hemisphere thing far enough, it will encounter its own"
},
{
"end_time": 8142.346,
"index": 317,
"start_time": 8119.599,
"text": " self coming the other way. And we sometimes see this happening in the world. If you take a certain point of view, far enough, if you take an intolerant attitude that's dogmatic and cruel on the right, and a similar one on the left, you can hardly tell the difference. It's in the mentality. It's in an approach to the world."
},
{
"end_time": 8164.565,
"index": 318,
"start_time": 8142.892,
"text": " and you know by going further and further away to the right or the left you don't avoid the fate that you're trying to avoid the nemesis will come to you if you insist on having a black and white either or way of thinking so we must for our own sakes get back to seeing that it's a both and world"
},
{
"end_time": 8190.674,
"index": 319,
"start_time": 8165.043,
"text": " in which you may have truth on your side and I may have truth on my side and we ought to respect one another and talk about it in a grown-up way, not vilifying, hating and silencing people, but listening to people who say things different from ourselves. That's so fundamental. It's how our civilization got to have a culture and now we're throwing it away."
},
{
"end_time": 8219.787,
"index": 320,
"start_time": 8191.442,
"text": " Anyway, sorry, it does distress me very much. This, this sudden rise in, in the not being shades of meaning, I think it's to do with the way we're educated. I don't think we're taught any longer to think. There's a phrase in Greek, in classical Greek, men, there, and then many of the great philosophers of Greek, they would say, men, on the one hand, this, there, on the other hand, that, and"
},
{
"end_time": 8233.763,
"index": 321,
"start_time": 8220.299,
"text": " In a way that was part of the way I was taught to think that you should see yes is good in that but there's also something else to be said that you need to be aware of."
},
{
"end_time": 8260.896,
"index": 322,
"start_time": 8234.411,
"text": " In the last year or two, you come across a couple of Zen sayings that I like very much, and I think I might write a book with one or other title. One is, yes, but, and the other is, not always so. And that really brings one back into the world of the right hemisphere, because the right hemisphere thinks yes, but. It's the one that always says, yes, but hang on. It inhibits headlong action. It's actually more intelligent."
},
{
"end_time": 8288.046,
"index": 323,
"start_time": 8261.271,
"text": " It literally is a more intelligent hemisphere in the sense that if you have damage to the left hemisphere, damage to the right hemisphere, overall damage to the right hemisphere will drop your IQ more than damage to the left hemisphere. That's extremely interesting. I know that you can function in the world more adaptively if you have a left lesion, not the right lesion. You can certainly function more because your emotional intelligence is not impaired and your understanding of human beings is not impaired, but your good old-fashioned"
},
{
"end_time": 8298.712,
"index": 324,
"start_time": 8288.49,
"text": " cognitive intelligence, whatever it is IQ measures is also more highly dependent on the right hemisphere than the left."
},
{
"end_time": 8328.899,
"index": 325,
"start_time": 8299.036,
"text": " There's a study by Barbie et al 2013 where they looked at 150 people who'd had strokes and had a pre-morbid IQ measurement and looked at their post-morbid IQ measurement and then they put the maps over the top of one another and where were the really key areas for dropping your intelligence? Hardly any was in the left hemisphere. Interesting. Almost all of them are in the right hemisphere which is not of course again part of that bad old"
},
{
"end_time": 8355.503,
"index": 326,
"start_time": 8329.343,
"text": " caricature difference between the left and right. You know, the right hemisphere is all very well, dear, but it's a bit, you know, kind of not very reliable and silent. Right. But yes, but actually, it's both more reliable in the sense of more likely to make the good decision and more intelligent. But anyway, there we go. But let's say about inhibition, because you said to me earlier on, and then I actually I really must stop. I'm enjoying this conversation."
},
{
"end_time": 8383.575,
"index": 327,
"start_time": 8355.828,
"text": " so much no no bless you no i could i could talk to you all day i wish we had time um but i said early on something about inhibition well here's a fascinating thing first of all the corpus callosum which started up that's the band of fibers that connects the two hemispheres at the base of the brain started out largely facilitatory in other words it was largely conveying information from one to the other hemispheres but it has now"
},
{
"end_time": 8398.951,
"index": 328,
"start_time": 8383.951,
"text": " And when the"
},
{
"end_time": 8429.531,
"index": 329,
"start_time": 8399.94,
"text": " It involved more and more inhibitory neurons. Mammals have more inhibitory neurons, primates have more inhibitory neurons than other non-primates, and humans have more inhibitory neurons than any other primate. And the really important neurons for"
},
{
"end_time": 8451.237,
"index": 330,
"start_time": 8429.804,
"text": " the effectiveness of carving experience, coming back to the idea that as it were like carving a statue in the stone, something only comes into being by the turning away of something else, so that the inhibition of the discarding of something that might have been brings the thing into being."
},
{
"end_time": 8473.319,
"index": 331,
"start_time": 8451.527,
"text": " I was always wondering if there's a more precise marker of intelligence or sophistication than the encephalization quotient or the brain to body mass ratio. And I was wondering if you can use the inhibitory neurons and the proportion of them."
},
{
"end_time": 8500.213,
"index": 332,
"start_time": 8473.882,
"text": " I think any of the known markers has a little to be said for it and quite a lot to be said against it. And one of the things again, you know, think about the crow, able to solve all kinds of problems, a brain the size of a pea. Though birds do have a higher encephalization quotient than us. Well, there's a higher encephalization quotient, that is correct. But nonetheless, the actual"
},
{
"end_time": 8517.09,
"index": 333,
"start_time": 8500.828,
"text": " Number of possible connections is very much smaller, which is probably why they're not building things that are destroying the world. This one comes from Sam Ford. Nice one. I'm a big fan of"
},
{
"end_time": 8540.111,
"index": 334,
"start_time": 8517.551,
"text": " Ian McGillicrest. I think he's perhaps one of the most important thinkers of recent times. He cites Jung a few times in the Master and his Emissary and mentioned Jung in his first talk with Peterson. I've always wondered how well he thinks Jung's ideas about the different aspects of the psyche map on to his own. He gives a little postamble. It seems to me that maybe the persona slash ego in the left hemisphere may match up to some degree."
},
{
"end_time": 8553.848,
"index": 335,
"start_time": 8540.52,
"text": " and that the unknown greater personality of self matches up to the union of the left and the right hemispheres maybe. Either way I would like to know his ideas on how Jung matches up with his."
},
{
"end_time": 8571.032,
"index": 336,
"start_time": 8554.957,
"text": " Well, that's a very nice question and a good one. I have to say right away that I've not really made any systematic study of Jung. I read Modern Man in Search of a Soul,"
},
{
"end_time": 8591.135,
"index": 337,
"start_time": 8571.032,
"text": " When I was a teenager and it struck me as a very important and powerful book and since then I have I've read bits and pieces here and there so I don't really I wouldn't say I'm a paid-up Jungian or anything like that although I do find that Jungians like Buddhists and I'm also not a Buddhist"
},
{
"end_time": 8608.865,
"index": 338,
"start_time": 8591.135,
"text": " I have great sympathy with both Jungians and Buddhists. They seem to come to my talks and write to me. So obviously in their probably better informed minds, whatever it is I'm saying has resonances and I'm always interested in those."
},
{
"end_time": 8637.261,
"index": 339,
"start_time": 8609.787,
"text": " I think the key thing about Jung for me, I can't really talk definitively about things like the ego and the animus and the anima and all these things but I can say that his general world picture is very sympathetic from my point of view and one of the most important points which is something that he shared with Goethe"
},
{
"end_time": 8664.275,
"index": 340,
"start_time": 8638.336,
"text": " was this sense that opposites come together and that's something that I do strongly believe as I've said earlier when we were talking about that and so yeah but I'm afraid I'm not really in a position to it's slightly like the Freudian question you asked about you know can we line up the id and the ego and the superego with I think to an extent you can but"
},
{
"end_time": 8691.971,
"index": 341,
"start_time": 8665.725,
"text": " And I'm sure that, you know, it's possible to make good analogies between Jung's work which I don't, you know, as I say, I don't know the detail of. I've always thought of him as a very sympathetic soul basically. So I'm afraid I'm going to have to disappoint some there. But the thing that interests me though is, you know, that although"
},
{
"end_time": 8711.135,
"index": 342,
"start_time": 8692.415,
"text": " You see, looking back over history, there are so many people who, long before even Freud and Jung, and who knew even less about the structure of the brain than they did, have posited something very like what I think I've discovered and am promulgating from"
},
{
"end_time": 8732.739,
"index": 343,
"start_time": 8711.425,
"text": " You mentioned once in your book about the Greeks that they had"
},
{
"end_time": 8741.459,
"index": 344,
"start_time": 8733.353,
"text": " some intimation about the left and the right hemisphere either one is for i think perception and the other one was for understanding"
},
{
"end_time": 8767.005,
"index": 345,
"start_time": 8742.176,
"text": " That's right. Yes, and it's fascinating that so long ago people were speculating on the uses of the two parts of the brain. I mean, what one has to remember is that in Galen, who is, you know, one of the first great physicians, he thought that the brain was actually a kind of air conditioning system. He thought that it helped the person lose"
},
{
"end_time": 8794.821,
"index": 346,
"start_time": 8767.005,
"text": " Excessive heat so clearly they were very long way off modern science, but I do cite and footnote the sources for I think their third century AD Suggestions that the right hemisphere was perception and the left for understanding now Unfortunately, it's actually true that the right hemisphere is better at both perceiving and understanding but one sort of knows what was being got at the right hemisphere is definitely better at perception and"
},
{
"end_time": 8820.435,
"index": 347,
"start_time": 8795.333,
"text": " and the sort of taking of things as reality rather than having an idea about them in the way that the left hemisphere has. So, you know, that is also remarkable. Thank you for reminding me. Well, thank you for pointing it out. I make extensive notes. Okay, that's another reason when I was telling you before that this podcast is killing me in many ways, in one way, in a salutary manner, hopefully."
},
{
"end_time": 8834.923,
"index": 348,
"start_time": 8820.811,
"text": " In one way it's destabilizing, in another it takes so much preparation and hopefully the preparation shows in the questions. Sometimes I read the comments and often they indicate that they do, but I always wonder how much am I overextending myself."
},
{
"end_time": 8864.172,
"index": 349,
"start_time": 8835.896,
"text": " No, no. Well, look, I mean, let me say quite genuinely that you do, your questions are some of the best. They target very important areas. And no, I think you're, you know, from that point of view, you're one of the best interviewers that I've come across. So thank you. Well, thank you. Thank you, man. It makes me blush. I'm brown. You can't tell, but I am blushing."
},
{
"end_time": 8891.613,
"index": 350,
"start_time": 8864.616,
"text": " Okay, Joanne Dong says, can you ask McGillicrest about the substitution effect from psychology and its impact on the imbalance between the right and the left hemispheres over the course of Western civilization? Daniel Kinneman states, in thinking fast and slow, when faced with a difficult question, we often answer an easier one instead without noticing the substitution. Thank you. Well, yes."
},
{
"end_time": 8910.486,
"index": 351,
"start_time": 8893.848,
"text": " Well first of all let me say about Daniel Kahneman and the hemisphere hypothesis. It would be wrong to suppose that when he talks about thinking fast and slow he's talking about the two hemispheres."
},
{
"end_time": 8936.493,
"index": 352,
"start_time": 8910.486,
"text": " In a conversation that we had, he confirmed my impression that he's talking about more top brain versus bottom brain than right versus left. The frontal cortex of both hemispheres taking more time, being more thorough, and the posterior cortex of both hemispheres being more likely to be jumping to conclusions or going for the familiar. However, having said that,"
},
{
"end_time": 8963.882,
"index": 353,
"start_time": 8936.92,
"text": " Your questioner does touch on something very interesting because research shows that the left hemisphere jumps to conclusions and tends to see what it wants to see in what is being presented or what is being asked. It will actually ignore or just not hear or just not see things that invoke something that it's not interested in or not aware of."
},
{
"end_time": 8985.879,
"index": 354,
"start_time": 8963.882,
"text": " So in that sense, our tendency to give a fast answer to something we can answer rather than a slower, more thoughtful answer to something that would require deeper reflection, that is a left-right distinction. So the left hemisphere being the more superficial and quick and dirty"
},
{
"end_time": 9013.353,
"index": 355,
"start_time": 8986.442,
"text": " Okay, C. Wren Dudley, hopefully I'm pronouncing that correctly, says, by positing an absolute division between the brain hemispheres, aren't we already thereby engaged in holy left brain thinking?"
},
{
"end_time": 9019.889,
"index": 356,
"start_time": 9013.695,
"text": " In other words, isn't the notion of different sides, quote unquote, confined to only one side of the brain, namely the left?"
},
{
"end_time": 9046.51,
"index": 357,
"start_time": 9022.142,
"text": " Yes, I mean, sorry, the answer to that question is no. I have talked about this quite a bit. I certainly addressed it in the new introduction to The Master and His Emissary, the new edition that came out a year or so ago. But I do also address it in the matter with things."
},
{
"end_time": 9074.77,
"index": 358,
"start_time": 9046.51,
"text": " There's a sort of sense that you know you're dichotomizing aren't you people sort of say that but um I remember your exact line about this because sorry to interrupt for the people listening the preface alone of the master and its emissary is already one of my favorite books of the past few years the preface alone I remember listening to the preface I had to listen to it because I I was driving and so on so the preface alone"
},
{
"end_time": 9102.329,
"index": 359,
"start_time": 9075.316,
"text": " had me pausing so often and thinking and I'm just wondering how the heck is Ian coming up with this? Anyway, if you can only read the preface, do so. I would point out that the preface I'm talking about is for the new version 2019 onwards. It has a green cover, so if your version doesn't have the green cover then that doesn't have the preface."
},
{
"end_time": 9132.551,
"index": 360,
"start_time": 9102.688,
"text": " but it's very nice that you say that because actually somebody sent me a very nice email saying man I've just read your preface and you know it's worth buying the book just for that so it's almost exactly what you said yeah so but I try I try to I try to encapsulate you know some of the the questions and answers there but you know in life there are things that are false dichotomies and there are some that are genuine dichotomies even if there is a degree of overlap"
},
{
"end_time": 9158.2,
"index": 361,
"start_time": 9132.944,
"text": " So for example, you know, bad drivers versus good drivers, that's a false dichotomy. I mean, it's a matter of degree and it's all on the spectrum. And then you could take some other things like being a tree or being an animal, you know, there is a kind of pond life, it's very hard to say whether it's actually a plant or an animal."
},
{
"end_time": 9168.319,
"index": 362,
"start_time": 9158.2,
"text": " but nonetheless on the whole we can tell the difference between an elephant and a tree and and this is the this is a perfectly good dichotomy if you like"
},
{
"end_time": 9188.217,
"index": 363,
"start_time": 9168.797,
"text": " So what I would say about the divide between the brain is that I always start off very early in any book, I'm talking about it, I say, yeah, there is a certain degree of overlap that's necessary and important. But nonetheless, don't reject the fact that there are very startling differences"
},
{
"end_time": 9200.998,
"index": 364,
"start_time": 9188.217,
"text": " just because you happen to think that dichotomies are impossible. You know, dichotomies can be simple, but it can also be simplistic to reject a dichotomy if there is one."
},
{
"end_time": 9219.394,
"index": 365,
"start_time": 9201.544,
"text": " and in this case there is one and let me just repeat because people don't find this easy to take in there is overlap there is overlap and an example I gave is between the culture and climate of Iceland"
},
{
"end_time": 9249.548,
"index": 366,
"start_time": 9219.77,
"text": " and indonesia so iceland is a very cold country and its landscape its vegetation even the temperament of the people is bound to have been molded by its climate indonesia has a different climate a much warmer more humid climate and again the vegetation and the history and the culture and even probably the temperament is different"
},
{
"end_time": 9277.688,
"index": 367,
"start_time": 9249.957,
"text": " But it is still true that the hottest year ever recorded, the annual average temperature in Iceland was higher than the lowest average temperature for the year ever recorded in Indonesia. So itís perfectly possible for there to be overlap in things that are radically different."
},
{
"end_time": 9301.834,
"index": 368,
"start_time": 9280.043,
"text": " Actually, that line is burned into my memory. The line is people don't like dichotomies because they say dichotomies are simplistic, but it's also simplistic to dismiss something just because it's a dichotomy. Now that one I'm going to take. I will credit you. Don't worry. But I'm doing interviews. I'm being interviewed because I'm putting out a film soon on the extreme left. What makes the extreme left extreme on the political spectrum?"
},
{
"end_time": 9322.773,
"index": 369,
"start_time": 9302.773,
"text": " Right. Not because I'm a right-winger. In fact, I'm apolitical, but because it's difficult to analyze what's extremism on the left. Extremism on the right is blatant. Anyway, I may use that line. Well, I think extremism on the left is also blatant. As I said earlier on when we were talking, they have an enormous amount in common."
},
{
"end_time": 9350.145,
"index": 370,
"start_time": 9323.592,
"text": " Right. Exactly. Exactly. So that's why I was like, okay, that's the horse shoe theory, I believe, in a nutshell. And that's interesting, because the further you run away from a point, the closer you get to it after a certain location. So it's like a circle. Right. In some cases, that is absolutely true. Maybe you want to quickly comment. This is something I was thinking about as I was reading your book is, is there a way of mapping the hemisphere differences, the left right onto our left right spectrum, maybe it's inverted, like the right brain is the left and the"
},
{
"end_time": 9367.807,
"index": 371,
"start_time": 9350.879,
"text": " The reason I was thinking about this is because while the French Revolution is posed as a left phenomenon and they espoused rationality and so on, but that's a left brain. But then on the other hand, they loved Rousseauian thinking, which seems to me to be more romantic, which is right-brained."
},
{
"end_time": 9397.892,
"index": 372,
"start_time": 9368.131,
"text": " So there's many contradictions I see and I couldn't map them on directly and I was wondering if you had any experience or thought about this? Well, to come back to the previous question, this is a case where it would be simplistic. So any culture is a mixture of many things. And what I say about this is easily to identify right hemisphere style thinkers on the right and on the left and left hemisphere style thinkers on the right and on the left."
},
{
"end_time": 9414.462,
"index": 373,
"start_time": 9398.677,
"text": " so that you get thinkers that are dogmatic, uncharitable, angry, Mr. Right, knows what's good for people, you know, that is your left hemisphere type and there's plenty of them on the left just as there are on the right."
},
{
"end_time": 9443.78,
"index": 374,
"start_time": 9414.462,
"text": " and there are thoughtful, flexible, compassionate people who don't treat people as belonging to boxes or categories or ticking something but are actually complicated human individuals with many many facets to their experience, to their personality and that exists on both sides so it's quite coherent I think to say that no it doesn't map on to right and left in politics at all"
},
{
"end_time": 9474.445,
"index": 375,
"start_time": 9446.032,
"text": " in fact in some ways you know the interesting thing is if anything the left hemisphere is much more theoretical and the right hemisphere is much more interested in experience and one way of thinking about the divide between the political spectrum is that the left end of it tends to prioritize theories over the experience of history of culture whereas the right wing or the righter wing of thinking"
},
{
"end_time": 9501.476,
"index": 376,
"start_time": 9474.445,
"text": " tends to be very interested in history and culture and context and embodiment, not in a theory that on paper looks like it's going to make everybody happy. So I think there is an argument that if you had to put it either way I would associate the right spectrum with the right hemisphere and the left spectrum, particularly the extreme left, with the left hemisphere. Interesting."
},
{
"end_time": 9518.302,
"index": 377,
"start_time": 9501.766,
"text": " But as I say, I don't think that you can make a clean mapping, no. Right. Nietzsche to me was paradoxical because he repudiated rationalities and then that to me puts him on the right hemisphere, as well as loved the passions. But then at the same time,"
},
{
"end_time": 9547.705,
"index": 378,
"start_time": 9518.609,
"text": " I do want to get away from the idea that somehow reason is associated with the left hemisphere and emotion with the right. Reason is associated with both hemispheres and so is emotion. They are both capable of being emotional. The left is actually more intemperate, less inhibited when it gets emotional."
},
{
"end_time": 9562.739,
"index": 379,
"start_time": 9547.705,
"text": " and the right hemisphere plays a very important part in reason which is the coming together of thoughtful reflection on experience and even in some kinds of logic it is actually superior to the left so it's a very complex picture"
},
{
"end_time": 9593.404,
"index": 380,
"start_time": 9563.404,
"text": " This is a good point for you"
},
{
"end_time": 9608.609,
"index": 381,
"start_time": 9593.404,
"text": " a sort of isolated abstracted form formulation of rational processes in the sense that a computer could be programmed to carry them out and reason which is often in conflict with that"
},
{
"end_time": 9629.206,
"index": 382,
"start_time": 9608.609,
"text": " being reasonable means taking into account rationality but also taking into account what one knows wisely from experience and from living and in German there's a distinction between Verstand which is more like this rather abstract theoretical reason"
},
{
"end_time": 9649.087,
"index": 383,
"start_time": 9629.206,
"text": " and vernunft which is a kind of quality that you get from being wise and living which means you're able to reason but do so as a wise judge in a court would do I mean a judge in a court shouldn't really be just applying rules in a computer-like way but should be thinking contextually and that is what we used to mean"
},
{
"end_time": 9674.514,
"index": 384,
"start_time": 9649.087,
"text": " by reason and that's what we used to think was the flower of education that the reason for educating people was they could think in this very balanced flexible way taking many sides of things into account but in our world today where everything is very much skewed towards the left hemisphere we tend to think of reason as like a kind of rote rationality and I think that's a huge loss so yeah"
},
{
"end_time": 9699.036,
"index": 385,
"start_time": 9675.811,
"text": " You mentioned the judge and that reminds me I had a speculative question or speculative thought about Jesus who had an emphasis on the spirit of the text versus the text and one isn't keeping with God and the other is pharisaical, it's a literal interpretation and Jesus said you keep with God, you take the spirit and that to me was more right-brained and then I wondered does that mean there's a theological argument for the primacy of the right hemisphere?"
},
{
"end_time": 9716.527,
"index": 386,
"start_time": 9700.879,
"text": " Well there is actually and I make it in the matter of things, but it's a long argument and it needs to reflect on many many many things. I can't wait to read that book man."
},
{
"end_time": 9737.21,
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"text": " But what I would just say is there's an interesting, you know how my vision is that the left hemisphere is either or, but the right hemisphere is sort of both and. Well, the left hemisphere tends to be very given to the letter of the law as you hinted, but the right hemisphere is able to see that sometimes the letter of the law"
},
{
"end_time": 9754.633,
"index": 388,
"start_time": 9737.892,
"text": " needs to be respected as well as the kind of spirit of the law, because the spirit of the law is generally what one wants to find, not the letter of it. But if a person has relied on the letter of the law, because that's what it says,"
},
{
"end_time": 9775.213,
"index": 389,
"start_time": 9754.94,
"text": " then they ought to be given some protection under law because they did abide by what the letter of the law said they might find themselves still open to the criticism that they didn't understand the spirit of it but i think that a wise judge would take both into account and it's not necessarily one way or the other that they would"
},
{
"end_time": 9793.319,
"index": 390,
"start_time": 9775.213,
"text": " I think their judgment would depend on the circumstances and the person and the case before them. A KFC tale in the pursuit of flavor. The holidays were tricky for the Colonel. He loved people, but he also loved peace and quiet. So he cooked up KFC's 499 chicken pot pie."
},
{
"end_time": 9812.346,
"index": 391,
"start_time": 9793.319,
"text": " warm flaky with savory sauce and vegetables it's a tender chicken filled excuse to get some time to yourself and step away from decking the halls whatever that means the colonel lived so we could chicken kfc's chicken pot pie the best 499 you'll spend this season prices and participation may vary while supplies last taxes tips and fees extra"
},
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"text": " I know I want to get to Daigo's question, but you just said, please, I have to interject with one thought. Pascal, in your book, you mentioned that he had a quotation about the whole point of reason. I believe it was reason, not rationality. But let's imagine it's reason that the whole point of reason is to realize that there's an infinitude of more important aspects to life than reason. And then I was wondering, Well, what does one say to the retort that"
},
{
"end_time": 9872.022,
"index": 393,
"start_time": 9844.616,
"text": " When giving a reason to not use reason, you're still appealing to reason. So it's somewhat self-defeating. How do you get out of that? I didn't quite catch the meaning of your last remark. Let's say you're explaining to someone, here's why you shouldn't use reason alone, or if it's rationality alone. But either way, you're giving a rational argument. There are different levels of reason."
},
{
"end_time": 9886.817,
"index": 394,
"start_time": 9872.705,
"text": " There's a kind of meta level of reason and I think the meta level, the overarching view that takes in both, is usually the one I would say is best associated, more likely to be associated, with the working of the right hemisphere."
},
{
"end_time": 9909.019,
"index": 395,
"start_time": 9887.227,
"text": " and so as i say the right hemisphere is no stranger to reason absolutely not and it would be a big mistake to say that it in any way rejected it but it's more likely to see the limits of it because it's it's able to stand outside of its own viewpoint and see there are things that it doesn't know which the left hemisphere is very"
},
{
"end_time": 9919.224,
"index": 396,
"start_time": 9909.019,
"text": " bad at doing so it thinks I've got this schema which will solve all my problems I run them through this mental computer and a solution comes out which is the right answer"
},
{
"end_time": 9943.148,
"index": 397,
"start_time": 9919.565,
"text": " The right hemisphere is the one that would be using elements of reason, and there's nothing wrong with reason in itself."
},
{
"end_time": 9972.927,
"index": 398,
"start_time": 9943.148,
"text": " to show the limits of reason. This is really what Pascal was saying, and you've just demonstrated that that is okay. He made a distinction between what he called géomètre, diameters, and esprit fin, fine spirits, and he says the fine spirits, by the word fine he means subtle. So the subtle spirit is different from the slightly bull in the china shop, black and white, hard and fast, inflexible"
},
{
"end_time": 9997.381,
"index": 399,
"start_time": 9973.353,
"text": " Geometric spirit in which he's saying you know you you you turn away you do a diagram and you've you've got the answer whereas the the espy fan he says can see things understand things that can hardly be put into words but a very very important now coming from a mathematician that is a very and a very great mathematician that's a very important thing to hear"
},
{
"end_time": 10021.596,
"index": 400,
"start_time": 9999.189,
"text": " Is this related to at one point in the book you reference that we need to transcend utility and I always wondered well tongue-in-cheek what's the use of that but also how does one transcend you till is this related to it is not related to it or is it all related because at some point everything's related but no no it is it is related Kurt but in the"
},
{
"end_time": 10048.916,
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"start_time": 10022.534,
"text": " I don't know whether you've got to a chapter where I talk about Schuyler's pyramid of values. Schuyler was a contemporary of Heidegger's, but died much younger, whom Heidegger called the greatest philosopher in Europe of his age. And he focused on values more than Heidegger. And he had a hierarchy of values, which at the bottom is things that are merely useful or pleasurable."
},
{
"end_time": 10074.974,
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"text": " the sort of things that actually any animal would would go for and then there are the higher values that transcend those of pure utility and I think those are the very important values that render us moral beings and give our lives meaning and that just to be following utility and pleasure is self-defeating in fact by doing it very much more than any previous"
},
{
"end_time": 10081.084,
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"text": " civilization has ever done. We are endangering our very existence as a civilization."
},
{
"end_time": 10111.118,
"index": 404,
"start_time": 10081.425,
"text": " We're just grabbing things as they're useful, taking courses of action because they're easy and pleasurable, whereas when a civilization is at its height, it inculcates a spirit of self-denial to a point, of a certain degree of bravery, of courage, of humility, of moral consideration of the value of others, and that this is not the way that we now think."
},
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"end_time": 10127.585,
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"start_time": 10113.541,
"text": " I'm assuming then when you use the term utility you mean in a short term or short-sighted or self-centered manner because we could always say that we could always reposition utility to be utility for God so that if you hear that sound,"
},
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"text": " That's the sweet sound of success with Shopify. Shopify is the all-encompassing commerce platform that's with you from the first flicker of an idea to the moment you realize you're running a global enterprise. Whether it's handcrafted jewelry or high-tech gadgets, Shopify supports you at every point of sale, both online and in person. They streamline the process with the internet's best converting checkout, making it 36% more effective than other leading platforms."
},
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"text": " There's also something called Shopify Magic, your AI-powered assistant that's like an all-star team member working tirelessly behind the scenes. What I find fascinating about Shopify is how it scales with your ambition. No matter how big you want to grow, Shopify gives you everything you need to take control and take your business to the next level. Join the ranks of businesses in 175 countries that have made Shopify the backbone."
},
{
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"text": " of their commerce. Shopify, by the way, powers 10% of all e-commerce in the United States, including huge names like Allbirds, Rothies, and Brooklynin. If you ever need help, their award-winning support is like having a mentor that's just a click away. Now, are you ready to start your own success story? Sign up for a $1 per month trial period at Shopify.com"
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{
"end_time": 10221.049,
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"text": " If we're acting in accordance with our morals then that's useful for the group as the whole."
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"text": " But that would be a terribly debased way of thinking about one's attitude to God. It's rather like the old argument that if you believe that you will go to heaven if you're good then you're just really basically pursuing a good for yourself. But that is really to"
},
{
"end_time": 10260.862,
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"start_time": 10240.265,
"text": " I'm"
},
{
"end_time": 10289.633,
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"start_time": 10261.271,
"text": " Yes, a kind of selfishness and it's what we mean by hypocrisy, you know, where people say things and do things in order to look good and, you know, sound like they're something that they're not. Okay, Daigo Pinto says, his book, The Master and His Emissary is one of my favorite books about the brain. If you could sneak in one of these questions, I'd be appreciated. He has five. Sorry, he has four. I'm going to"
},
{
"end_time": 10315.316,
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"start_time": 10290.06,
"text": " Briefly align them and then you can answer one or two if you like, okay? Okay, so he says a section on the book that deals with evolution of the solid self though He's uses in brackets that I'm using these words on my own here I'm not he didn't use these words there would be a non unified voice or several in an individual which could be interpreted as an outside other being and then you make reference to Moses and the ancient Greeks or and so on as hearing God's voice as an example and"
},
{
"end_time": 10343.353,
"index": 414,
"start_time": 10315.555,
"text": " He said, could he elaborate on this and point out other sources on the topic? That's number one. OK, so save that. Maybe you want to respond to that. Number two, he mentions that language and the music have a common ancestry and then give some evidence for the claim. And I'd like to hear if he's learned anything new since the publication of this book. There's that. OK, so that's the other voices, language and music. Then what are his thoughts, if any, on Chomsky versus Lakoff ideas about language? That's number three."
},
{
"end_time": 10361.596,
"index": 415,
"start_time": 10344.002,
"text": " And then number four, what does he think about objective truth? Can we apprehend it? Pretty much just that. Well, okay. Okay. So again, to briefly briefly outline the God and the other voices that are internal but perceived as such. Number two is language and music and then Chomsky and then objective truth."
},
{
"end_time": 10391.834,
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"text": " Well I think the first two I have covered either in what I've said or in the book actually to some extent but the last two are both very big questions and to me more interesting ones. I very much think like Lakoff and Johnson about language and I find Chomsky's views, I may simply not have"
},
{
"end_time": 10420.333,
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"start_time": 10392.585,
"text": " given them the credit that's due to them, of course, but I find them less attractive because they seem more schematic, more programmatic, more like there is a sort of software in the hardware that does certain things, whereas I'm a great believer in what one might call the power of imitation in humans and I spend quite a lot of time on the fact that humans are particularly good"
},
{
"end_time": 10439.565,
"index": 418,
"start_time": 10420.691,
"text": " at imitating, not just copying but actually imitating and getting into the skin of another creature or another person and feeling something about how they are and why they are doing and saying what they're doing."
},
{
"end_time": 10464.599,
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"start_time": 10439.565,
"text": " So I think language grows in this way, as I've said, from a sort of a basic sense that is embodied, profoundly embodied, in movement, in the voice, in music in the voice, and the business of breath, and that it is not really an abstract code"
},
{
"end_time": 10492.807,
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"text": " It can become that, but it actually, I don't know that Chomsky gives enough credit to the way in which language is constantly metaphorizing embodied experience, and Lakoff and Johnson very much do show how everything we say has a reference that is understandable in terms of the body, and we can't get deeper than that in a way, than our embodied experience."
},
{
"end_time": 10522.073,
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"start_time": 10492.807,
"text": " It's where, as Wittgenstein said, I hit bedrock and my spade is turned. You know, one can't dig down any further, but it's from there that that language comes. And I've got time just to say a little bit about the objective thing. Do I believe there's objective truth? Annoyingly, I'm going to say yes and no. And I think we do, yes, we do to a degree have access to it."
},
{
"end_time": 10536.186,
"index": 422,
"start_time": 10522.705,
"text": " I think very importantly that like many other things, it's a journey as it were, not an arrival. I mean it's not something we get and then we have it. It's a cast of mind or disposition for exploring"
},
{
"end_time": 10563.166,
"index": 423,
"start_time": 10536.613,
"text": " life in the world, which enables one to have more solid grounds for believing what one believes. So I absolutely repudiate the idea, which is a devastatingly destructive idea, a very silly one, that anything that anybody says is equally true, because there's no criterion by which to judge it."
},
{
"end_time": 10594.718,
"index": 424,
"start_time": 10565.094,
"text": " It's almost beneath rebuttal, but it's so obviously wrong. You know, if I believe that, as Sokal says, that I can walk out of the 22nd window of my apartment, 22nd floor window of my apartment and survive on the landing, I'm wrong. Or very likely to be. So, on the other hand, it's not at all true that there's a single truth that is the truth, because"
},
{
"end_time": 10617.944,
"index": 425,
"start_time": 10595.35,
"text": " All truths are contextual. And that doesn't mean that every context renders it completely different. There are trends, and for me the important thing is to see that the path to truth is not a line, but a matter of circling or spiralling. So the important thing is not to say, I've taken this step, now the next logical step is this, and at the end of the road there will be truth."
},
{
"end_time": 10645.794,
"index": 426,
"start_time": 10618.507,
"text": " you might even say well I know I'll never get there that's true but you know at least I can see exactly where I'm going but I'm not sure that truth is of this kind I think truth is of the kind where you look at something from as many different viewpoints as you can and when you hear somebody say something else about it you don't just rule it out and you know dismiss it you think now let me search for what's the truth in that because there are aspects of truth in it"
},
{
"end_time": 10673.899,
"index": 427,
"start_time": 10646.425,
"text": " And I sometimes quote Dunn on this, the poet John Dunn, 17th century English poet, one of our great poets, who says words to the effect that truth is like a castle that stands on a steep and craggy hill, and who wants to arrive at it doesn't go straight up, but has to circle around the hill to get there. And that image is a very useful one to bear in mind. In fact, I returned to the image of the spiral path"
},
{
"end_time": 10694.957,
"index": 428,
"start_time": 10674.411,
"text": " in which it's not exactly a circle which means that you just end up where you were when you get round the circle, but actually a spiral whereby you come to somewhere like where you were before but the view is now different, a little bit like T.S. Eliot's famous thing about arriving where we started from but knowing it for the first time."
},
{
"end_time": 10715.845,
"index": 429,
"start_time": 10695.333,
"text": " And so I think life is a series of these things, and the path to objective truth is to commit yourself to this process of spiralling around and learning as much as you can about it, and knowing you'll never get the absolute truth, but you can get much, much closer to truth, and that matters very much. So truth matters."
},
{
"end_time": 10733.37,
"index": 430,
"start_time": 10716.101,
"text": " and it is not the case that you know well i just see it differently so my truth is good as yours your truth may be as good as mine it may be better than mine but it may equally by the same token be worse so you know there is meaning to this idea a very important meaning to it and"
},
{
"end_time": 10758.422,
"index": 431,
"start_time": 10733.37,
"text": " I do find earphones very funny. I didn't know something about my ears but they always keep flopping out. Anyway, there we are."
},
{
"end_time": 10787.346,
"index": 432,
"start_time": 10759.531,
"text": " Okay, is that in the mind's eye or what is that? No, no, it's its own book. It's a huge book just about how analogy is the core of cognition. Even the fact that when we imitate, I don't believe he uses the word memes. But Susan Blackwell even points this out that Blackmore points it out that to imitate is extremely complex to copy is wrong. But to imitate is complex. You have to take the essence of it."
},
{
"end_time": 10814.07,
"index": 433,
"start_time": 10788.2,
"text": " Yes, that's exactly right. And what's also nice about it is that, again, the right hemisphere is better at this, because you're getting into the skin of somebody else and understanding the complexity of it, but it is also the one that thinks that understanding is analogy. So that these, when I've talked about mathematicians and scientists having a sense of a form and"
},
{
"end_time": 10833.166,
"index": 434,
"start_time": 10815.094,
"text": " and then finding that through a revelation or intuitional insight, they saw the solution to a problem. That was by analogy, not by going, well, I'm nine tenths of the way there down this path, and if I just do a few more pages of work, I've reached it."
},
{
"end_time": 10856.681,
"index": 435,
"start_time": 10833.558,
"text": " Nothing is an understanding in that way. We don't just gradually work our way along a line. We have to see and feel analogies. And this is how Einstein describes his own discoveries, that he would play a piece of music and he would ponder about it, then he'd get up from the piano and go, I've got it. Or at least his daughter, I think, describes him in this way."
},
{
"end_time": 10872.705,
"index": 436,
"start_time": 10856.681,
"text": " Have a great day, man. Have a drink."
},
{
"end_time": 10901.032,
"index": 437,
"start_time": 10873.166,
"text": " Get some rest while for you. I don't know what time it is. I got the Chomsky interview. It's just a little early for a drink for me but I'll get onto it in due course and drink your very great health and I look forward to talking again perhaps in a year when you've had a chance to take a look at the matter with things. Thank you so much. I keep wanting to call you professor. I was surprised that you weren't a professor because the corpus of Master in its emissary is"
},
{
"end_time": 10929.718,
"index": 438,
"start_time": 10901.408,
"text": " It's a huge intellectual achievement. Well, I'm a maverick and Jung and Freud were doctors. I'm a doctor. I like that. True, true, true, true, true. My wife liked the advice that you said about me taking some time off and having a break. So we're likely going to do that after the Chomsky interview. OK, have a great one. Very, very good. I want the audience to look up. OK, first of all, where can they find out more about you?"
},
{
"end_time": 10960.981,
"index": 439,
"start_time": 10931.237,
"text": " The best places to go is channelmcgillchrist.com which you can just put in as an URL or you can google my name it will automatically come up. The main book of my thinking is the one that you referred to but in the next few months I'm publishing a very large book which is my attempt to explain why the whole way we think about ourselves, nature,"
},
{
"end_time": 10981.561,
"index": 440,
"start_time": 10961.613,
"text": " the cosmos and reality is mistaken and it's based heavily on the hemisphere hypothesis and I think it shows a way in which we could go forward in the world and flourish and survive rather than come to a disastrous end. So there we are."
},
{
"end_time": 11009.036,
"index": 441,
"start_time": 10981.8,
"text": " I'd love to talk to you again one day, but right now I'm going to go and have a drink. Okay, go ahead. Go have a drink. At some point. I didn't want to ask you about cognitive behavioral therapy for what I was going through, but what I am going through, like I want to know, should I just be out of nature more? Should I listen to more music? I definitely going to stop or try my best to stop being so self-conscious and and let's say left brain. I think I think being able to be mindful, being out in nature, listening to music,"
},
{
"end_time": 11027.415,
"index": 442,
"start_time": 11009.565,
"text": " slowing down and doing precisely what your left hemisphere is telling you you mustn't do which is waste time would be a terribly good idea. I mean I think that's such a destructive idea that time is a resource. It's a typical left hemisphere idea that time is money as Jeremy Bentham, a man with no right hemisphere"
},
{
"end_time": 11057.637,
"index": 443,
"start_time": 11027.756,
"text": " detectable to the human eye said and it's this idea that we husband time as material and the more we do that the less time we have the more hurried we are the less we inhabit the world at all and then we die so i think it's a very good idea to slow down and to learn to listen and not to be too active i mean i don't always take my own advice i have to say yeah well you're i don't know how you were able to do that"
},
{
"end_time": 11079.684,
"index": 444,
"start_time": 11058.234,
"text": " I have no idea how you were able to come up with that book. You know, 14 years sounds like quite a long time, but as I have done my own research, I feel like in 14 years, I would have come up with 20% of what you came up with. So that's a tour de force, man. Well, I sometimes think the mice came in the night and wrote it for me."
},
{
"end_time": 11109.906,
"index": 445,
"start_time": 11080.776,
"text": " Thank you so much. Please get some rest, have a drink. I feel like in many ways this podcast is killing me because I have so many pages here. I go through such lengths for each guest. Hey, we can do this again. If you don't mind, I would love to. You're too kind. I'll tell you what. What about we do it again in say a year's time? My book will have come out, you can have a look at it."
},
{
"end_time": 11130.094,
"index": 446,
"start_time": 11110.367,
"text": " We'll have another go. That would be great. Yeah. Great. Great. Okay. Where are you, by the way? Are you in LA or what? I'm in Toronto. Toronto. Ah, yes, that's right. Because yes, because you said I attended the first sharing of the film, which and that was the one in Toronto. Somebody had"
},
{
"end_time": 11159.104,
"index": 447,
"start_time": 11130.606,
"text": " some sound engineer got a very red face afterwards yeah yeah that's right we could barely hear you and i think peterson had to talk to you over a phone i know all right then lovely to have been your guest thank you very much we'll meet again it was a pleasure it was a pleasure thank you i honestly mean it like your book is life-changing at least for me and i think slowly it's going to dawn on me your the realizations that you've just incepted or implanted thank you"
},
{
"end_time": 11175.316,
"index": 448,
"start_time": 11159.974,
"text": " Thank you very much. Hopefully it's not too destabilizing for me. All the very best. Have a great one. Thank you. Okay, I'll try and be more embodied. I'll try my best because I don't I definitely don't want to hear voices. Okay, have a great one, man. All right. Thank you. Bye bye."
}
]
}No transcript available.