Ian McGilchrist, Part 1: Right-Brain Thinking critiques his dualistic framework where the right hemisphere acts as a superior "master" and the left as a reductionist "emissary." Hosts Matt Brown and Chris Kavanagh dismantle this binary, citing distributed neural networks like the prefrontal cortex and mirror neuron systems that defy strict lateralization. They expose logical fallacies in McGilchrist's dismissal of materialism, arguing that emergent properties such as love and beauty exist within physical reality without requiring supernatural forces or anti-woke institutions. Ultimately, the episode reveals McGilchrist's approach as a revival of Platonic dualism that falsely pits scientific reductionism against metaphysical insight. [Automatically generated summary]
Transcriber: CohereLabs/cohere-transcribe-03-2026, sat-12l-sm, and large-v3-turbo
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Welcome to Coding the Guru00:05:03
Hello and welcome to the Coding the Guru.
It's a podcast where an anthropologist and a psychologist listen to the greatest minds the world has to offer and we try to understand what they're talking about.
I'm Matt Brown.
I'm the psychologist resident in Australia.
With me is Chris Kavanagh, the anthropologist slash psychologist, as he always likes to point out, resident in Japan, though not Japanese is he, which he also likes to point out.
Quickly, you are.
Yeah, no.
Yes, that's right.
Matt, I like to think of you.
As the left hemisphere to my right hemisphere.
Oh, you're the emissary to the master.
Listeners, as you will shortly find out, that was a definite ding.
It is not good to be the left hemisphere.
There's two parts of the brain, Matt, or two major hemispheres.
They're each important in their own way.
Oh, yeah.
Yeah, yeah.
Yeah, just one that's a little bit better.
But we'll follow up.
Why am I invoking?
Why are we even talking about hemispheres?
Exactly.
What brought that up?
Well, why don't you tell people, Chris?
Well, we are looking today at someone that's actually been requested quite a long time.
But I have to say, I wasn't particularly familiar with his output until we did the research for this episode.
I knew who he is, but I hadn't spent that much time with his stuff.
And his name is Ian McGilchrist.
He is a British psychiatrist, philosopher, and neuroscientist, amongst many other things.
He's most well known for a book he wrote in 2009.
Called The Master and His Emissary, The Divided Brain and the Making of the Western World.
He's more recently published a book called The Matter with Things.
Yeah.
Oh, and also he's had various fellowships at prestigious colleges in Oxford.
He was at All Souls College.
He was at Green Templeton, which was my old college, Matt.
And he's now the dean or the kind of head honcho of Ralston College in America, which is one of these, like, you know, quasi.
Anti woke universities type thing.
He replaced Jordan Peterson, I believe, who's currently, you know, indisposed.
Ah, yeah.
Well, that would make sense.
That would make sense.
There's a lot of correspondences with Jordan Peterson.
And yeah, he's had a long and storied career.
Unlike you, Chris, I knew absolutely nothing about him until we did our research for this.
Now I know a lot.
Well, more than I expected to know.
Yeah.
Recommended to read his book before.
So I had come across, you know, his general thesis.
And I know that he is regarded a little bit like an earlier career Jordan Peterson, you know, where Jordan Peterson was often presented that, well, he might, you know, his culture war takes you might not agree with, but you've got to respect his level of knowledge about psychology and world religions.
So Ian McGilchrist is often invoked very similarly that, you know, you might not agree with all his takes, but Boy, does he know his neuroanatomy and neuroscience research.
Yeah.
Yeah.
And widely considered a very deep thinker about the nature of culture, religion, society, philosophy, all that stuff.
Lauded.
Yeah.
Lauded.
Lauded.
Yeah.
Definitely.
Yeah.
Very much so.
It is very hard to find a critical word to be said about him.
His background is kind of interesting because it seems early on, it seems to be almost entirely in the humanities.
So, you know, he published literature.
Yeah, a bunch of English literature scholarships and things.
And then he taught English literature, I think, and then sort of, you know, moved more into philosophy and psychology and then even in psychiatry.
It doesn't seem to, you know, he's published in things like essays and criticism or, you know, language and history type journals or stuff about Shakespeare.
But he does have a couple of papers to do with psychiatry.
Yes.
And yeah.
So, you know, a kind of, yeah.
Storied career.
I mean, he had a period, right, working as a psychiatrist and I think eventually ascending to consultant psychiatrist at a hospital in London.
So, like, he has had a partial career as a psychiatrist, a career as a literary scholar or philosopher, and also now a sort of, Popular writer, kind of philosopher, theologian, the writer of popular books.
So, yeah.
Ian McGilchrist Joins Us00:03:52
So, okay.
But as you said, Chris, his main claims to fame do revolve around his writing, not surprisingly, these big books with big ideas in them.
And yeah, looking around at the various interviews that exist on YouTube, and there are quite a few of them, he's mostly talking about themes essentially connecting how our brains work.
With how we construct the world and see the world and establish meaning and everything, and the implications that has for society and human flourishing.
So, very much big ideas, big thinking.
He's been seen in the company of sense makers.
You just pointed that out to me before.
Often.
Often seen.
Yes.
In leather bound chairs in very beautiful rooms.
Wood paneled rooms.
Yes.
I think his natural habitat is leather bound chairs and wood paneled.
Dining halls.
That seems to be converted dining halls, maybe.
That's the way it is.
And, you know, very much to me, Matt, he is the quintessential image of an Oxford professor, if you like.
You know, he's got a big beard.
He sits back on chairs and he issues profound thoughts about a variety of topics.
Yes.
He's a man who looks very comfortable in tweed and very, very serious as he gazes across the moors on his property in Scotland, that kind of thing.
Correct.
Well, he's on the Isles guy, though, but yes.
The moors aren't the moors like on the mainland.
I thought I don't know.
I don't know.
Are they, or maybe moors is just a topographical description, like mountains.
Is that the way they work?
I definitely saw a photo of him standing in Heath on a heath, and it could have been on the mainland, it could have been on an island.
We don't know.
You can't locate it, but he's at home there.
He does.
That's fair to say.
Yeah.
So, so yeah, I think it's also fair to say that the content we're covering today is pretty representative.
And I think we're following our format, which is we do a deep dive into a single long form unit.
And tell us all about that then, Chris.
A single long form piece of content.
And in this case, it's an interview with cosmic skeptic Alex O'Connor.
And I chose an episode that is from a year ago.
So, relatively recently, it is about a topic that he often talks about.
The title is Why Evolution Give You Two Brains.
And the thumbnail says You Are Not a Machine.
But this is actually written after his more recent book has been published.
So he's incorporating ideas from the matter of things as well as the master and the emissary, right?
So that's why I thought it's good.
Alex O'Connor is associated with previously veganism, but also atheism and like a kind of critical look at theology in this.
He studied theology at a master's level.
But it's fair to say that he's become more recently a channel that likes to have conversations with sense maker y type people, right?
He will have on Jonathan Peugeot or Jordan Peterson, but have like mainly conversations about their philosophical understandings or so on.
I think we covered him before whenever he was moderating a debate between Jordan Peterson and Richard Dawkins, that you may recall.
It comes up in this conversation as well.
Yeah, so that's Alex O'Connor, another much younger guy, but also somebody that gives the quintessential Oxford graduate, postgraduate vibe about him, like theologian postgraduate vibe.
Yeah, yeah.
Okay, all right.
So lead us in, Chris.
The Two Brains Thesis00:14:46
How does this conversation start?
Well, yeah, I'll ease us into things.
So, you know, it starts off with Alex and Ian outlining, you know, the general contours of the conversation.
Ian McGulchrist, welcome to the show.
Thank you very much, Alex.
Delighted to be here.
Why is the brain separated into two physical hemispheres?
It's a basic and very good and important question.
And it's not really discussed very much, but we know that all the brains that we've ever looked at are divided in this way.
So it's not a human thing only.
That's the start, Matt.
Okay.
So you did there get, you know, the kind of framing.
They don't talk about this a lot, Matt.
You won't hear this elsewhere, right?
But it is a very important question.
Yeah.
So I probably should warn people that there's a lot of discussion of the brain, bits of the brain, connections in the brain, what the brain does, where it does it in this.
I'll just mention for people who may not know that I did teach neuroscience for quite some years, neuroanatomy and things like that in the psychology department.
I always found it very difficult to remember.
Would I be wrong in saying, Matt, that you also did your PhD on things related to neuroanatomy?
Well, that'd be approximately correct.
I did do my PhD on analysis of the EEG.
In particular, I was focusing on the primary motor cortex, which is the The little bit of the brain, it's like a strip that runs over the top of your head, which is kind of the immediate control signal for sending information out to move your fingers, move different parts of your body.
There are other parts of the brain, obviously, involved in motor functions, but they sort of lead into the primary motor cortex, which then goes out basically towards actual motor control.
So, yeah, my background, I do have a bit of a background in this, but there are a lot of parts of the brain, and my memory is not all that great.
So, I actually did brush up.
A fair bit on this because he does make a fair few claims about the brain.
And yes, he does.
It did inspire me to go and just do some checking and refresh my memory.
So I guess what we could summarize that as you know, I don't want to put words in your mouth, Matt, but you've taught neuroanatomy and neuroscience at the university level for, you know, six years or so.
And you've got a PhD, which is based on analysis of brain regions and, you know, exploring.
Things and that kind of thing.
Whereas E. McGilchrist, despite having a very storied career and covered a lot of topics, I don't believe he's actually taught neuroanatomy at any point at university.
No, I don't think so.
Just saying.
I'm just saying.
Just voting that out.
That's all.
So, before we get the emails saying, check yourself, Matt is qualified to offer opinions on some of the claims made.
I'm less so, but I did my due diligence as well around various of the claims made.
But we'll get into that.
So, anyway, the framing at the start, Matt, you got any issue?
In general, brains are split into two hemispheres, including non human brains.
Is that right?
Yeah, yeah.
It is true that the very macro organization is hemispheric, at least in terms of the cortex.
There's a bunch of other.
Regions inside the deeper in that are not necessarily like that.
And I think the framing here is useful for him because he, you know, it sort of frames a bit of a mystery.
Why is the brain, what does it have this symmetrical organization in the cortex at all?
And what if it's asymmetrical?
What if different things are happening?
There's some sort of specialization happening in different hemispheres.
And, you know, to a degree, that is certainly true as well.
Can I just raise a kind of stupid point, Matt?
You know, just, you know, just human eye, just some thoughts here.
But like humans also are bilaterally organized in general, right?
Like we have two arms, two legs, two eyes.
Yeah.
There's a symmetry, right?
We've got two lungs, we've got one heart, but you know, whatever, we're not Klingons.
But so it's not like there is only one part of the human that is split, if you like, around a symmetrical organization thing.
I'm just pointing out that that is not a unique feature.
Of the brain, yeah, yeah, yeah, that is uh absolutely true, of course.
So, yeah, I mean, there is you know, I don't think it is a mystery, you know, any more mysterious than we've got two arms or two legs, exactly.
It is a good question, you know, you could say, like, why do humans have two arms?
It's a reasonable question, like, why are insects organized in the way they are around forracks and abdomens and so on?
And there is answers to those, right?
I'm just pointing out that.
As he says, it's a good question to ask, but not the only thing with split down the middle in humans.
Yeah, that's right.
I mean, it's pretty well understood that the sort of developmental pathways, you know, interaction between genetics and actual embryonic development and so on.
But, you know, through the like nodal signaling and things like that, that, you know, leads to the creation of symmetries and also asymmetries throughout the body throughout development.
And so, in a very broad macro level, obviously, you do have.
Two hemispheres, as well as a bunch of other macro organizing principles.
And you've got a sort of mix, like in the rest of the body, of symmetries and asymmetries, right?
There are some things that happen on both sides, and there are some things that specialize in one.
And the two hemispheres are obviously connected mainly.
I think most people have heard of the corpus callosum, which is a thick bundle of white fibers that connect the two hemispheres.
And it's responsible for, I think, upwards of 90% of the Communication that happens between the brains, and there is a lot of interconnectivity between the two hemispheres.
But there are other connections as well.
We'll get to that, Matt.
Don't get ahead of your skis.
I know you neuroanatomy geeks like to talk a lot about all these funny names and whatnot.
But all right, so we've got a little bridge between the two hemispheres of the brain.
And we acknowledge that, you know, there's different stuff occurring as well as maybe things which are more networked.
But we'll hear about that.
So let's continue.
Because one thing is that maybe people have heard some myths about left and right brains.
And it's good to address them up front.
And I suppose the first thing I have to say is, That most people who don't know about the recent developments and particularly about my work on hemispheres think that they've heard it long ago was exploded.
It was a myth, a popular piece of psychology that had no basis in fact.
And this is sort of slightly right and mainly very, very wrong.
The slight bit of right is that the questions were good.
Why are the hemispheres?
Separated, how are they different?
It's just that we didn't get the right answers at the time.
And when people start asking questions in science, they don't expect to find the right answers immediately.
They expect to have to do further thought, further gathering of data, and to be able to come up with something that actually does fit the realities.
And the answer is, if you like, to cut to the chase, that all creatures, in order to survive, have to do a remarkable feat, which is to pay attention to something that they need to get.
And at the same time, look out so that they're not themselves got.
And for this, you need two types of attention.
And these types of attention are so different that they require neuronal masses, each of which can sustain conscious attention independently.
There we go.
So, the original idea about left and right brain people, you know, that the right brain people are artistic and the left brain people are kind of scientific and mathematic.
Is mostly a myth, but actually it is speaking to the existence of actual differences that might be important.
And here he posits that's connected to like different attentional processes.
Fair summary.
Well, no, no, it's not.
I don't think.
By me?
No.
Oh, sorry.
Sorry.
Sorry, him.
No, I think his summary of attention there is not a fair reflection of what the current understanding is.
He basically is saying there's two kinds of attention, right?
One, and there's an evolutionary basis, one is kind of broad, vigilant, and contextual.
And he says that's all happening in the right hemisphere.
At the same time, there's kind of an independent, functioning, Type of attention happening in the left hemisphere, which is narrow and targeted, like a spotlight, and much more acquisitive.
And he says they're so different that they require separate neuronal masses, right?
Yes.
Now, in some, that is very, very sweeping and completely out of step with mainstream models of attention.
So, modern attention models, Chris, it's a current area of research.
So, I'm not saying this is the final story or there aren't other views, but you tend to break stuff down to alerting, orienting, and executive control, right?
So, keeping an eye out.
So, there's some similarities with what he said.
There's the stuff that you notice something, it brings it to your.
Awareness or the further processing orientation towards it, and then sort of interaction or responses.
And actually, the main frameworks that actually have traction that are actually supported by a lot of empirical evidence now is not about left and right hemispheres.
It's about a dorsal attention network, right?
Which is dorsal means over the top, right?
Like a fin, a dorsal fin.
Yeah, yeah.
Just think fin of a dolphin.
And that's that more sort of goal directed selection, right?
So that's you giving your attention to something that you initiate, right?
That you're focused on.
And then a ventral route, right?
Which is more towards the bottom and the sides, which is more like reactive, I guess, and reorienting, right?
So that doesn't really.
But that's in the wrong dimensions.
Yes.
That's like backwards and upwards, not left and right.
You've just exploded a whole other dimension.
That's right.
Unfortunately, the brain is three dimensional and you can go in, you can go deeper and out, or you can go to the sides and go to the top.
There's a whole bunch of stuff going on.
And look, in a nutshell, I don't want to give you a lecture or anything, Chris, but the way that researchers think about attention is not like a left brain doing this and a right brain doing that.
It's more about there being distributed networks that recruit or incorporate multiple.
Different nodes, and these have scary names like you know the interparietal sulcus and the ventral frontal cortex, the anterior cingulate, things like that.
And those nodes are distributed in different places, right?
And so that dorsal ventral mapping is a pretty coarse one.
But you know, if you had to make a sort of a simple kind of flowchart thing, you'd go that way.
But it's it doesn't map at all really to his left brain, right brain thing, like the ventral detection network is a bit right lateralized, like it is a bit.
More of a right brain or right side of the brain emphasis there.
But importantly, it's not like a whole picture.
It's not that the right side of the ventral attention network gives you the whole broad scale kind of gestalt or anything like that.
It's more of a reorienting function.
Yeah.
And the dorsal system, which is more voluntary and more kind of a matter of your own will, that absolutely involves both hemispheres.
So it's not lateralized at all.
Okay, we're already introducing fact checks, but that's all right.
But maybe he'll address some of that.
So he was cautioning against the previous view, right, which might have provided some insights but was wrong.
And he does explain that further.
It used to be said that one did reason and language and the other did pictures and emotions and so on.
But all that is wrong.
We know that both hemispheres are involved in everything.
But that doesn't mean that there's nothing there.
That doesn't mean we've met a dead end.
It's that we were asking the question in a slightly wrong way, which was what do they do, these hemispheres, as though they were machines?
It's the question you ask of a machine.
But in fact, they're part of a person.
And an important question to ask about anything to do with living beings and human beings is how, in what way, with what reason, with what purpose are we doing what we're doing?
Why are we attending, and in what way are we attending?
So there is a clear thing there, Matt.
You know, he's saying that both hemispheres are involved in everything.
So our questions are up.
So he is adding in a disclaimer there that, like, ultimately, we've got to talk about humans as unified units, right?
Their brains are left and right operating within a single organism.
So it would be wrong.
To assign them purely to one side of the brain or the other, because everybody has a left and right hemisphere, right?
Barring some terrible accident.
Yeah, yeah.
And, you know, he's right in that both tennis fees are involved with everything.
But, you know, I guess there's an unfalsifiable framework that he's setting up here.
Left Brain vs Right Brain00:16:02
On one hand, he goes on, maybe you have the clip, but he talks about how the two halves of the brain and their vastly different types of attention are sustaining essentially two versions of reality, right?
Let me play that for you.
Yes, you are correct.
One of them is going to pay very targeted attention.
Very narrow beam attention to something that it wants to get that it knows is important, usually food, or eventually something like a twig to build a nest, or in apes, to get something to use as a tool.
And that is the left hemisphere's attention, narrow, fragmentary, piecemeal attention.
But at the same time, the brain has to be able to look out for predators, but also for kin, for your mate, your offspring, and so on, so that while you're busy in surviving by getting stuff to eat, you're also looking out for the whole picture.
And that has evolved in the right hemisphere.
And so effectively, the right hemisphere is looking out for everything else, for the big picture of the world.
While the left hemisphere is concentrating on a detail that it already knows it wants.
And this has important consequences because the way we attend to things changes what it is we find there.
Yeah, so some issues, Chris, some issues there.
Firstly, remember what I talked about earlier, which is that the way he's characterizing it as a purely left brain thing and a right brain thing is not accurate, at least according to science.
But the second issue is like a logical contradiction there.
Like he's having his cake and eating it too, right?
On one hand, he's saying he's got these two halves of the brain that are basically encompassing different versions of reality.
And notice the left hand side there.
He not only says it's more directed and more focused, but also that it's fragmentary and superficial somehow.
And he portrays the piecemeal.
That's right.
Whereas the right side of the brain, which, as I said, the research shows it's more about, you know, any specialization there is more about reorienting.
But for him, it's more of a deeper gestalt, connecting more deeply with the fabric of reality.
Now, he says on one hand that they are doing that.
But then he also says that we know that both hemispheres are involved in everything.
So, there's an obvious tension there.
Like, if both hemispheres are involved in everything, then in what sense do they sustain two different versions of reality?
I don't see a way in which it's not, it's an unfalsible, like, whatever he's doing, whatever his framework looks like, it sounds like it could fit anything and is kind of immune to criticism because he's doing it both ways.
Well, I have two clips that speak to that.
So, the first is to sharpen that point you're making about, like, it does sound like he's suggesting one.
Hemisphere is better than the other.
And if you didn't get that from the clip that we just played, maybe this one will make it a little bit clearer.
And so, in the left hemisphere, there is built up a phenomenological world which is disposed, composed rather, of discrete fragmentary pieces that are decontextualized, static, so that they can be easily frozen and picked up rapidly, and effectively inanimate.
And everything that it understands is.
Clear, explicit, cut and dried.
It's a seed, it's a rabbit, it's whatever.
It's my lunch.
I need to get it.
Whereas the right hemisphere is very much more subtle.
It's looking out for everything else.
It sees that nothing is ever ultimately completely devoid of connections with everything, really, everything else.
That things are always in motion, they're never actually finally static.
That they're also never wholly certain.
They may carry a certain degree of conviction, but they're not black and white and cut and dried in the way the left hemisphere makes them.
The left hemisphere really understands what's explicit, and the right hemisphere understands.
What is implicit, and that's a very big thing because all the things that really matter to us most need, in a way, to remain implicit because they're reduced by the process of bringing them into prosaic everyday language.
And effectively, this is an animate world.
So, again, if I might paraphrase there, it sounds very much like the left hemisphere, useful though it may be for you know finding food or identifying tables and chairs, fundamentally, it misunderstands the nature.
Of the world, because we occupy a world where things are interconnected and there is animacy.
And the left hemisphere doesn't really get this.
The right hemisphere is understanding implicit connections and so on.
So, like, it does very much sound like the left hemisphere, while it might be necessary, it's not as good as the right hemisphere, right, in this framing.
Yeah.
Yeah.
And in this framing, he's already beginning to move into kind of, I don't know, kind of metaphysical language, which is becoming increasingly disconnected from what evidence exists about lateralization or modularity and specialization in the brain.
And just it simply doesn't really conform to the sort of archetypes that he's drawing for the left and right hemispheres.
I mean, he describes the left hemisphere as kind of, you know, this narrow.
Procedural, superficial processing, and the right hemisphere is broad and notices the implications and so on.
And there are grains of truth in a lot of these things, but there is also a huge number of disconfirming examples, like examples of specialization that absolutely runs contrary to that kind of division.
Well, let's again provide more illustrations from this.
So he talks about language kind of metaphorically, but let's hear a little bit about the hemispheres and how language is produced.
I mean, one pairing would be the left hemisphere is, in a way, only aware of, only interested in what can be made unambiguous and explicit, whereas the right hemisphere is capable of sustaining things that are on the surface of them.
Of them, perhaps opposites, but that coexist and need one another and are perhaps at the same time in different ways present in the situation, it's also much better at understanding the implicit.
So, there was some truth in what you just said, but let me try and separate it out.
So, as I said, the difficulty with the way we used to think was it was about what they were doing, so reason, language, pictures, emotions.
But in each of those cases, I can very clearly Explain that, for example, language, some of it is very much a part of the left hemisphere.
And what is very, very largely true is that speech, the articulation of speech, is in almost everybody in the left hemisphere.
But that's not the whole of language.
And the most important part of understanding language actually is supplied by the right hemisphere.
So the left hemisphere is a little bit like a computer that's been given.
The Oxford English Dictionary and a book of rules of syntax, and it's trying to decode the message.
Whereas the right hemisphere sees that the meaning of this is something that is not being stated, that is quite different.
So, left hemisphere is important for language, but it's like a dictionary and grammar rule book, right?
So, it's working in that respect, like important for producing speech, but it's not really doing the most important thing, which, you know, with language involves understanding.
The connections, the implications, the emotional tone of what people are saying and what they might be trying to communicate.
If you just have a dictionary, right, with no living understanding of a language, you won't get that far.
So, what about that, Matt?
There, you're having at least acknowledgement that the speech and language is across both hemispheres, but the right side's role is presented as perhaps the deeper. component of the language system.
Yeah, I mean, there's some truth in what he says in terms of where things are localized.
So, obviously, there are so many ways in which the brain is modular, and the lateralization is probably, in my opinion, one of the least important ways.
Language, in particular, is quite modular in the sense we've got specialized regions that do different things.
So, you have, for instance, Broca's area and other areas sort of in the interior front area on the left, which is.
Is true.
It's more to do with speech production and aspects of syntax.
Then you've got Wernicke's area, right, which is the posterior temporal area.
And that's important for language recognition.
Right or left?
Right or left?
Is that right or left?
Thank you.
Left.
Left.
Thank you.
And then again, on the left, you've got the visual word form area, which is the other big one they sort of teach students about, which seems to be important for like reading and things like that.
So, hence the name.
So, you know, in terms of where the important regions are specialized a bit on the right, you know, there's some truth in that in terms of like picking up on metaphor and broader context and sort of prosody and things like that.
That seems to incorporate some areas on the right.
But the more correct way to describe what's going on is that what we've got is a strongly left lateralized core language network.
Yeah, network of modules.
Yeah.
Well, I'm sorry, network.
Yeah, a network of modules.
And that's taking care of a lot of core language features, both in production and in understanding.
But, you know, there's some areas on the right that are kind of performing a sort of a support role in terms of incorporating context and stuff like that.
But, yeah, there's obviously a lot of intercommunication between all of these regions and including across the hemispheres.
So, there is no way for any of it to work, really, I think, unless they're all cooperating.
With each other.
Yeah.
So, yeah.
But that sounds like, you know, at least broadly, the distinctions are mapping onto the kind of hemispheres as he describes right there.
Yes.
But importantly, it's not the hemisphere in general, of course, right?
It's particular modules that happen to be, you know, localized on the left or the right in some cases.
Yeah.
Yes.
But I think, you know, he would respond, yes, but it is on the left.
Yeah.
Yeah.
But I think where he's wrong is that, correct me if I'm wrong, Chris, but he presented it as like understanding is on the right and production is on the left.
Well, yes, deeper understanding is on the right.
So, yes, but I don't think that's accurate, right?
Because on the left, you have, you know, lexical and semantic processing going on, right?
So, in other words, understanding meaning is also happening on the left.
Well, you know, I can imagine his response to this would be, well, yes, there's lots of things going on in both sides, right?
But that kind of makes the point that you made that, yes, you can always then just say, well, I'm not.
I'm not saying the left isn't involved in any of that, right?
And actually, Alex chimes in at a point during this to kind of make that distinction clear.
And it's interesting how he responds.
So here's Alex trying to clarify the distinction being made.
So you've given a sort of sketch of what the different hemispheres do.
And I know it's quite tricky to pin it down exactly.
And like you say, they're both involved in everything.
But if you had to sum up, you say that it used to be the case that people would think left brain is like.
I don't know, reason, rationality, you know, language, maybe.
And the right brain is like art, music, poetry.
And that's misleading.
It seems like you're saying.
Could you give us maybe three better words on each side of the brain to try to approximate what it is that these hemispheres are responsible for?
Okay.
So I think that's a good question.
Teeing up, you're not making this simplistic distinction of the previous era.
So, what is the distinguishing feature of your approach?
And here's his answer.
In fact, if you wanted to make another difference between the left and right that is global, the left hemisphere's whole raison d'etre, if you like, is to try to narrow down to a certainty.
Whereas the raison d'etre of the right hemisphere is to open up to a possibility.
So, it's always saying, yes, but it might not be that.
Ramachandran calls the right hemisphere the devil's advocate because it's seeing other possibilities here.
So that's true of language.
It's true of reason too.
So some kinds of reasoning are better done by the left hemisphere.
But when you get beyond the carrying out of rote procedures, often the right hemisphere is better able to understand the meaning of a calculation.
So the left hemisphere is better at times tables, partly because they're all recited and ingested in that way in childhood.
And it follows rules and procedures.
It's very good at that.
It is, in fact, a bureaucrat.
It was appointed as the emissary, you know, the one that would go about and be a high functioning bureaucrat for the master.
The master's the one that sees the whole picture.
So you've got a high functioning bureaucrat that can memorize the times tables.
But on the other hand, you have a subtle, you know, master who's able to appreciate different approaches to weigh up and play devil's advocate and look at things from different perspectives and so on.
So, I mean, the very clear.
Implication is that the right hemisphere is the one which is the most important when it comes to understanding the subtle nature of the world and social interaction and so on.
Yeah, I mean, the issue with responding to that is that it doesn't map onto any of the neuroanatomy that I know, right?
Like, it's like simply the sort of the way in which cognitive functions are described and their localization in networks in the brain just doesn't correspond to this two hemisphere framework that he has.
So, like, if you take the example of, like, he's, So now we're sort of talking about higher order things, you know, reflecting and considering and decision making and seeing other alternatives.
So he's talking about higher order functioning, right?
Beyond Simple Hemispheres00:15:20
So really, he should be talking about the prefrontal cortex, right?
That should be featuring in this kind of discussion rather than the left and the right hand brain.
Because the prefrontal cortex, the sort of big area in the neocortex at the front, yeah, hence the name, you know, that's executive function, working memory, having a goal in mind.
Social cognition, theory of mind, your personality, thinking about the past and the future, right?
Like, you know, big picture stuff, right?
Human stuff, stuff that humans tend to do more than, say, lizards.
And so, about the prefrontal cortex, you know, it's got different parts too, right?
You can divide it up into different regions and it's connected to all kinds of other regions of the brain as well, obviously.
But the issue that he's got there is that the various parts of the prefrontal cortex exist in both hemispheres.
What?
It's organized by function and connectivity, not the left part and the right part.
And furthermore, like a particularly problematic for him is the medial prefrontal cortex.
And that sits directly on the longitudinal fissure.
That's the division between the two hemispheres.
And that has heaps of bilateral connections, right, to other important parts to do with memory, emotions, and things like that, like the hippocampus, the amygdala, and so on.
So.
Yeah, like it doesn't really fit this framework that he's got.
Like the reality is, I mean, I'm only touching on the surface because it's an incredibly complicated topic.
And it's like trying to describe London in a few words, right?
But the issue is that very little of it really maps to his left right thing.
I won't say none because I think there are cases in which you can find some elements that sit on the left or the right.
That happened to fit his dichotomy.
But things like goal directed attention, bilateral, things like reflection or broad or internal attention, that's kind of organized around what's called the default mode network, which again is organized around that midline PFC that I mentioned or the medial PFC.
So, yeah, there are asymmetries, absolutely.
So, on the left hand side, you'll tend to have more of that.
Verbal working memory, approach motivation, and so on, and selecting stuff for retrieval based on what you're attending to.
So, I think there's a grain of truth in what he's saying.
There is a kind of a left orientation, you know, charitably, you could say it's got to do with goal directed type activity.
And on the right, we do see stuff that's more to do with global attention.
But there's no way in which sort of this global attention, like a broader focus, there is in any way deeper or more in touch with.
I don't know.
Reality?
Yeah, reality.
The sort of narrative he puts on top of it is not consistent with what we know about what they do.
Yeah, so the general things seem to be that he's taking lateralization findings, which in some cases map onto established findings, right, where there are differences.
But one, he overstates them and ignores, for example, that attentional processing doesn't neatly map into this left and right frame, right?
But also that he then extends out from that to much more loaded judgmental.
And really, quite binary comparisons, right?
The left hemisphere is explicit, right hemisphere is implicit, left hemisphere is static, right is dynamic, left is fragmented, right is connected.
You know, all these kind of like binary things where one is the emissary, the other is the master, right?
I mean, that's the clearest encapsulation of it.
And all along the way, it's not that nothing that he's saying maps onto established research, it's just that it is very much over extrapolated and kind of.
Simplified and very selective in terms of the things that he points to.
Like, there's so many examples of bilateral activation when it comes to both goal directed attention and broader vigilance style stuff.
And also, the stuff that we know experimentally doesn't map onto the stories that I guess he is inferring from that.
Well, he's going to go on quite far though.
But yes, it is interesting because I actually anticipated before the episode, from what I knew, that.
His description of neuroanatomy and the functions and different components and stuff that that would basically all be rock solid.
And then it would, the issue that I would take would be the extrapolations that he makes from that.
But every time I looked into the status of something that he claimed, the thing I kept coming back to was like, well, this is a dramatic oversimplification and it's overstating the strength of the evidence that we have for the kind of thing that he's claiming.
So the part where I expected him to be beyond.
Reproach is actually fairly, you know, like it's quite rhetorically littered with judgment and overstatement.
So, this was interesting.
Um, and we'll see where he goes from there.
But one other thing, Matt, that he links into this lateralized presentation is emotions.
See if you can pick out which side has the better emotion.
Okay, see if you can detect that.
And to come to emotions, the most lateralized of all emotions is anger, and it's Lateralizes to the left hemisphere.
The left hemisphere is not a cool customer.
It is not without emotions.
It tends to have more self centered, self righteous emotions and more social emotions.
But the deeper ones like empathy and melancholy and so on are more appreciated by the right hemisphere and so on.
I could go on.
But what I'm really pointing out is it's the mode in which you're thinking about whatever it is will tell you which hemisphere is more important, not the actual. sphere of activity, of human activity.
So, how about that claim, Matt?
I mean, I detected the sly taint that the emotions on the left side were denigrated slightly.
They're the self righteous, self centered ones, whereas the ones on the right are deeper, more reflective, more, shall we say, elevated.
And his broader point is it's not about whether you're looking at art or doing science, it's whether you're doing it in a kind of reductionist, static way.
Freedom of mind, where you're not really seeing connections, versus are you a global galaxy brain thinker who's appreciating the beauty of the world and you know understands all these things?
So, you could be doing the exact same activity and using your right hemisphere or your left hemisphere.
That's the implication I get there, but yeah.
So, what about the emotions?
Yeah, yeah, the emotions are a fun one.
So, yeah, um, yeah, so according to him, the bad emotions, the self centered, self righteous emotions are on the left, and the deeper ones like empathy.
Yeah.
And melancholy.
Or I'd imagine religiosity.
Yeah, wonder.
Or I bet they're on the right.
Yeah.
And look, as always, right, the story about how the brain processes emotion is vastly more complicated than this two hemisphere model that he's got.
There's a bunch of things involved.
The amygdala is involved in terms of fear and threat processing.
Where's the amygdala?
Left or right?
Neither.
What?
It's deeper, and if you'd bilateral, call it bilateral.
That's right.
Most of them are bilateral, actually, now I think about it.
So, yeah, if you work through a bunch of really important structures of the brain that are involved in emotion, so you've got the hypothalamus, the ventral striatum, which is kind of reward and pleasure and things like that, the medial prefrontal cortex, which we mentioned, the orbital prefrontal cortex, reward and punishment and social emotions, insular and so on.
So, there's a bunch of core brain structures.
There, that are kind of core brain structures, and they're pretty much all either midline or bilateral, right?
So, basically, the core processing of emotions doesn't fit this two-hemisphere thing at all.
And, like, I think the research on any kind of left-right asymmetry in terms of the valence of emotions, there was like an early kind of view actually that the left hemisphere was actually more to do with the positive emotions.
Approach motivations, things that you want to go that sort of attract you, right?
And the right hemisphere was associated with negative emotions and withdrawal motivations, right?
But that's been heavily undermined or qualified, I guess you would say, because the sort of asymmetries seem to be pretty small and really dependent on the situation and the task and things like that.
It all turns out to be a lot more messy.
But what we do know about In terms of what specific emotions you could maybe associate with the hemispheres, it's really just much more complicated, right?
So, disgust, much, much more to do with the insular, you know, happiness and joy, more to do with bilateral activations.
Fear processing, again, you know, it involves the amygdala, but both the right and the left hand sides are involved in that sort of fear processing.
So, yeah, like the idea that anger being a specifically left lateralized emotion.
Would be, yeah, would be a great exception.
Well, so there's some issues.
Is that perhaps the way that we can summarize around those claims?
And like throughout, there's the constant refrain out there.
So I should explain a little bit.
I think what he did, or where there's a grain of truth in it, is that anger is like an approach motivation, right?
So fear is like a withdrawal motivation, right?
Like fear and anger are both negative emotions, right?
I guess, you know, bad emotions, I suppose.
But one of them sort of activates a kind of an approach and one of them causes withdrawal.
So it seems like he's conflating the true fact that maybe the left hemisphere has got more to do with approach motivations with anger, right?
Because that is also an approach motivation.
But I think his narrative that he puts on it, which is these bad, sort of more animalistic or reductive emotions are on the left hand side, I don't think that's consistent with what we know.
Yeah, well, it is interesting whenever you know you start thinking about emotions and whatnot and what they're for psychologically or, you know, looking from an evolutionary frame.
And like a lot of them, as you say, are about do I want more of this and to pursue it, right?
Or make it so that I can interact with this more?
Or do I want to avoid this because it's scary or it might eat me or I feel threatened by it?
And similarly, disgust triggering.
You know, the feeling that you want to avoid certain potential contaminants and they tend to revolve around similar kinds of substances, right, that are harmful to humans.
And when you think about the kind of evolutionary functional role of a lot of emotional stuff, it is in some sense a deflationary account because it makes it, you know, well, of course, like we would want to have a system that is making us want to do more things that are beneficial to us and less of things that are harmful to us.
But there are Higher order emotions or emotions which appear to be more detached from that, like everyday evolutionary, avoid the predator type thing, like feelings of awe or melancholy or this kind of thing.
So he does seem to be tapping into that distinction about what have been sometimes referred to as primary emotions versus secondary or more reflective analytical ones.
Yeah.
Yeah.
But he's, you know, he's got a, I think he's got a high regard for sort of emotions like empathy, for instance, right?
And he would like to attribute these to the right hemisphere.
But, you know, I refreshed my memory on this, a little bit of research.
And again, there's no citations provided for this.
And they do know a fair bit about, you know, the brain regions involved in empathy.
It involves things, you know, those brain regions I rattled off before the amygdala, the insula, the medial prefrontal cortex.
They're all involved and they're all bilateral.
You can't assign them to one hemisphere or the other.
And also, the mirror neuron system.
You'd be interested in mirror neurons, Chris, because they're connected.
I'm interested in them.
However, I know that the degree to which they're responsible for things like fear of mind and whatnot have, yeah, and also cultural transmission and imitation and things like that, right?
Yes.
But, but you know, they do seem to be co opted too for that kind of, you know, empathy, right?
Because that idea of having an internal model.
They play a role.
Yeah, they play a role.
Anyway, again.
Like oxytocin, right?
People overstate the role that oxytocin does for everything, but it is a hormone involved in bonding and all the things.
Yeah.
So if you had to guess, Chris, mirror neuron system, left or right hemisphere?
It's a trick question.
Well, if I was Ian McGill, Chris, I'd say it's a, well, it's got to be the right.
Come on.
You know, but as a well informed psychologist, Matt, I know they're dispersed across the hemispheres, right?
Both.
Both, yeah, bilateral, bilateral, bilateral.
So, like, I mean, the story is like, it's pretty much like Leona, we'll look at a lot of you know cognitive functions in this, but pretty much any cognitive function you look at, whether it's processing of emotion or language or attention, the correct mental model to have is like a network of nodes, and the actual network connectivity and the nodes differ as well as where they happen to be located and so on, but it's a bunch of cooperating.
Nodes that function together as an integrated system.
Balance Between Modularity00:07:27
So, there is, like in any of my textbooks that I taught students with about neuroscience, Chris, there is no chapter dedicated to left brain processing and right brain processing.
It's all talking about what nodes are recruited into functional networks.
Well, that's just because they won't let you talk about lateralization these days, Matt.
But we should be talking about it.
And just to preempt this, So, Alex at one point raises that he's been reading the book, Amy Gilchrist's Master and the Emissary.
And one of the interesting tidbits he's got from it is that the anatomical feature that you mentioned, Matt, the corpus callosum, is actually this anatomical feature which is often presented as enabling transmission between communication between the two hemispheres, right?
Aiding it.
But he says that, you know, in your book, you kind of make The point that it's actually in large part about inhibiting the communication between the two, right?
So we've essentially got here two brains.
And the thing that I find fascinating reading.
The Master and His Emissary, which is an extraordinary volume.
I sort of only got a little bit into it and was already thinking this is kind of blowing my mind, or my mind's, I suppose, I should say.
One thing that caught my attention is that this isn't something that people, I mean, people might think that, well, there are sort of two brains right now that are doing different tasks, super specialized, but if we evolve, if we evolve further, they'll probably sort of merge into one big brain.
It seems like evolution is selecting for this asymmetrical brain separation.
And as you've already said, the corpus callosum or colossum that connects the two does more to inhibit communication between them than it does to facilitate it.
I mean, that's an extraordinary finding that the connector between the two parts of our brain is purposefully trying to stop them from communicating, and that this is something that is evolutionarily selected for.
And Ian McGilchrist responds by correcting him.
About, like, his understanding and presentation here.
And it's perhaps relevant to a correction that maybe you and I need to understand, Matt.
So, listen to this.
Yes, there needs to be a necessary balance between separation and togetherness, if you like.
And funnily enough, nature in general works with competition and cooperation.
One of the myths that really needs to be revised is the idea that evolution is all about competition and that we are somehow competitive apes.
There's no doubt that competition plays a very important role in evolution, but actually, those species that have really thrived have been those that have learned to cooperate and collaborate.
So, in fact, the situation is the same in the brain.
Everywhere in nature, there is, and this was an insight that Goethe had in the 18th century, that in nature, all that is unified is being divided, and what is divided is being unified.
I think that it doesn't perhaps sound very important, but it is actually.
A crucial insight.
And hence that the hemispheres need to work together, but part of the way of working together is not to get in one another's way and try to compete to do the same task.
I sometimes say, you know, in order to carry out a successful operation, there needs to be a surgeon and there needs to be a scrub nurse as a minimum.
And without the scrub nurse, the operation would be extremely difficult, without the surgeon, impossible.
But it doesn't make sense for the scrub nurse to make the incision.
The scrub nurse needs to do the job of the scrub nurse, and the surgeon needs to do the job of the surgeon.
So that's the way it is.
What I would say is you're completely right to say that the tendency of evolution is not towards homogenization, but towards preserving this distinction.
I think we know which side is the scrub nurse.
But what about that, Matt?
So it's reciprocal roles or things working in unison, but they're, you know, they're working together, but they have very specific roles.
Yeah.
Yeah.
I mean, there's a way in which he's completely right, which is that balance between separation and togetherness, which is what he said, right?
A better way to put it would be there's a balance between modularity.
And integration going on in the brain, right?
So it's like an incredibly complex system, and there are specialized modules, structures, and there is a lot of communication happening between them.
And then you have sometimes more generalized structures as well that are more plastic.
So, where he's totally right is that there's always going to be a balance between functional specialization and functional connectivity.
But I think where it's a misdirection is that he applies this principle.
Completely to the left and right hemispheres of the brain, as if those are the only two modules.
And, you know, anyone can Google this and check, but like that is incredibly reductive.
It's so much more complex than that.
I mean, what he said about evolution, too, I guess, Chris, what did you think about that?
Yeah, I mean, he's correct, right?
That like there's been a whole bunch of evolutionary theorists that have highlighted that humans are hyper social, right?
And extremely cooperative with non-kin in a way that is.
Frankly, unique right amongst the animal kingdom.
And, you know, ants and social primates and other sorts of organisms living together in groups, yes, it is important for them to cooperate in various ways.
So, the notion that all of evolution is just driven by competition and the survival of the fittest and nature red and tooth and claw, there is an important caveat there, but it is a caveat that has been added by evolutionary theorists.
And for quite some time.
For many, many, many, many decades.
That's right.
I mean, I think the point is a bit broader, though, to be fair.
I mean, and he's right that, you know, you see so many examples of cooperation in biology.
So, you know, symbiosis, multicellularity, the mutualism.
Yeah, eusocial insects and all that stuff.
And so that's true.
It's all going on.
But as well as symbiosis, the symbiotic relationships, there's also predator prey relationships and there's also parasitic relationships, right?
And ultimately, I still think.
The selfish gene kind of point of view is fundamentally correct, which is that fundamentally a genotype doesn't care.
Like it doesn't wish other genotypes ill.
It just simply doesn't care.
If a relationship works for them, whether it's symbiotic or parasitic or predatory or whatever, then it works for them.
It's as simple as that.
So it certainly permits a very broad range of relationships.
So, but you know, he's basically right about that.
Evolution is not just about competition.
Religious Beliefs and Logic00:11:35
I think the only other point I'd raise here is like, you know, when you're talking about like nurses and doctors, you're talking about two different entities.
They're individuals.
And so they have different roles.
It's very easy for us to understand.
But the metaphor here is doing the work because he's arguing the brain, you know, the brains are in an individual, like a human.
So they aren't two separate individuals.
They are both the same person.
Yeah, that's right.
There's like a fundamental category error that is intuitive, but he keeps returning to in his explainers.
And it's inconsistent with how the brain works.
We know that the functions are spread across these distributed networks and that each hemisphere is contributing lots of different specialized regions.
And if you take any given task or any given function, like emotion or attention or whatever, it's going to typically rely on multiple modules communicating furiously with each other across both hemispheres.
And to the extent that there is any kind of lateralization, It's often relative and not absolute.
It's not kind of an either or sort of thing.
So when you work with analogies of his, the nurse, and his, the doctor, and they both understand their different roles and they're working together, that's a poor metaphor, I think, for what the brain does.
Yeah.
And it also said kind of counteracts his claim that he's treating people as like unified entities, right?
He will go on, as we'll see, to chastise people for not looking at people as like holistic units.
But his very System tends to do that.
Yeah.
And well, so Matt, there's a section of it, as you know, where he goes on, Alex, I mean, goes on to discuss the debate that he moderated between Jordan Peterson and Richard Dawkins, right?
And he wants to use this as an illustration, if you like, of the right brain versus left brain view of the world.
So listen to this.
What I'm interested in, I suppose, is what this means for us, because we've got these two different hemispheres sort of governing different ways of being in the world.
Like you say, it's not so much a different way of thinking about the world, but different ways of being in the world.
It's just a different way to react.
I mean, you often see people have discussions with each other, and it feels like they just don't understand where each other are coming from.
And the terminology of saying one is being too left brain and one is being too right brain can be very helpful there.
It's kind of like if you see Jordan Peterson and Richard Dawkins.
Have a conversation about God and religion.
And Peterson is talking about sort of narrative and how things are truer than true, and that, you know, it's kind of fiction, but it's a special kind of fiction.
And then Richard Dawkins being like, I want to know if you put a camera in, you know, if you put a camera in front of the tomb, would you see a man walk out of it?
Like, did it literally happen?
And it's extraordinary.
I mean, it seems more understandable to me that Richard Dawkins is baffled by Jordan Peterson being asked, Did the Exodus story happen?
And Peterson responds, It's still happening.
That's his response, quite baffling.
But it seems equally baffling to Jordan Peterson when somebody asks him, Do you think it actually happened, though?
Like, literally, do you think that a man rose from the dead?
Do you think that Jesus was born of a virgin?
There, Ma, I just want to point out that Alex is framing this as this is kind of different ways looking at the world.
Both lead to people not really representing the other's position very clearly, right?
They get like baffled by things which otherwise might seem straightforward.
So he's kind of presenting that, well, these are two different ways of looking at the world, not really that one is automatically better than the other.
Yeah, but firstly, we have to reiterate that his framing there that one hemisphere, the left hemisphere, gives you one way of being in the world, and the right hemisphere gives you another different way of being in the world.
We just have to reiterate this is not true, right?
It's not true, but it's the fundamental premise of all of you, Michael Chris.
So it's going to be like peaking as a given throughout the rest of the conversation.
So, with that in mind, So let's see how Ian McGilchrist responded to bringing up this as an example.
Because I would think that this is a softball layup to hit out.
Yes, these are different ways, and that illustrates the different perspectives you can have.
That's not quite what McGilchrist does.
Well, I rather resist these rather simple ways of using the terms, but I can't entirely disagree with you.
I think that.
Ultimately, when you start unpacking the way in which the right and the left hemisphere see the world, you can see that there are such differences.
I mean, in many ways, Richard Dawkins is a scientific reductionist, he's a reductionist materialist.
I hope I'm not doing him an injustice in saying that.
But I think he therefore misunderstands the meaning of many things.
One of them is that when it comes to certain things, like, for example, consciousness, the ability to grasp it, to pin it down, to say what it is and where it arises, this is almost the wrong way to approach it because it's not a thing like that.
It's not another thing in the world alongside the things that consciousness allows us to be aware of.
And God is not a thing in the world.
In the way that a rock or a stone or a tree is a thing in the world, or at least we, I would begin to want to qualify that as well.
But, but you know, for these purposes, let's say a bicycle is a thing in the world, but God is not a very complicated machine, He's not a very complicated anything of the kind that we know.
And so, to try to approach God in that way is going to produce no insight into what people mean, and you have to be a very Either a very arrogant or a very confident person to say, well, all these people who think that they understand something that I can't see, they're just wrong because I can't see it.
Yes, yes.
So, Chris, I think the takeaway there is that Dawkins isn't so much wrong as neurologically limited.
He's stuck, you see, in this rigid, literal, and narrow left hemisphere thinking, right?
Where you really have to access right hemisphere.
Wisdom, which is about symbols and how things are connected and the processes of things, in order to see things more deeply.
And if you deny that, then that's simply arrogant.
Arrogant and wrong.
And yeah, so I mean, one of the things here is that he starts off by saying, you know, I resist these moves to try and pin things down in this coarse way.
But he doesn't.
I mean, he really doesn't.
As we'll see as it goes on.
If anything, he goes much more extreme than this.
Yes.
Well, he has a strategic disclaimer at the beginning because he knows that you cannot say there are right brained people and left brained people.
This is scientifically nonsensical.
He knows this, yet he still wants to do it.
So, exactly.
So, he, I mean, this is connected to his previous statements where he says, well, you know, of course, both hemispheres are involved in everything, of course.
But then goes on to speak.
Very definitively about the entirely different and independent ways of knowing that the left hemisphere has and the right hemisphere has.
Yeah.
And again, here, there is the elevation that the way that Eve McGilchrist, as you can clearly hear, thinks about God and these kinds of questions is the correct way to do it.
Richard Dawkins is doing the wrong thing by asking, you know, reductive questions about whether there was actually a resurrection or whatever, because that's not really what any of it means.
Right.
And I object, Matt, that first of all, to the claim that religious people never mean. anything literal in what they're saying.
Lots of religious people all over the world believe in very specific literal claims, but Ian McGilchrist kind of presents it, well, they're all, you know, they're all essentially theologians who will be very careful to never state something clearly about whether a claim actually occurred or not.
So he's wrong that that applies to all religious people.
When he's saying, you know, so you're so arrogant as to believe that everybody in the world who believes in God or something like that, that You can say they're wrong.
But he equates that to like the most elevated and abstract theological discussions, right?
Which doesn't accurately represent the majority of normal religious people around the world.
But also, he's essentially skipped over Alex's thing about, you know, is this two ways of seeing the world?
And instead moved on to you either acknowledge his view as the better one, or you're kind of doing things wrong.
So it's just like, it's a very, to me, transparent and quite self centered response to Alex's question, where instead of engaging with the point about different perspectives or whatever, he just wants to say the one that he likes is the correct one.
And like Dawkins is a bad guy because he doesn't approach it in the kind of metaphorical sense maker style that Imical Chris prefers.
Yeah, yeah, he's a left brain thinker.
It is very similar to Ken Wilber's integral theory, where Ken Wilber positions his kind of integral thinking at the tippy top of his framework.
So it's so funny because it's a theory about why the theory is true and people who believe the theory are correct.
And likewise, this is very much a case of where right brain thinking.
That is the Gilchrist's way of thinking, is indeed the correct and appropriate way to deal with deep and substantive questions as opposed to superficial materialist approaches.
Logos, Spirit, and Truth00:13:49
Yes, quite right.
And, you know, he elaborates a little bit more on this point about, you know, why the reductive approach is bad, Matt.
So let's hear him expand a little.
Another way of looking at it would be well, maybe I need to revise my thoughts about.
What is true, and I know this sounds like sort of hedging one's bets, but is there a truth that can be stated in words that is true to what human nature is?
So, is human nature, in other words, something that can be written down in a scientific text and that pins down and exhausts what a human being is?
Now, human beings we know exist and we all have experience of them.
But in order to convey the realities of what a human being is, encounters, and is capable of, you'd have to turn to art.
You'd have to turn to the works of Shakespeare.
You'd have to turn to narratives.
You'd turn to stories, to great myths which explain our relationship to a divine realm or to the cosmos or to one another.
You don't have, and I think some people are just born without the capacity to feel what it is that art tells us, what poetry tells us, what music tells us, what rituals tell us, what narratives tell us, then you won't understand why you're missing a very great deal because you're trying to make it all fit into a very pro Crustean bed.
Yeah, yeah, it's um, it's kind of incredible, really.
Um, like it is very arrogant that you have to like.
And appreciate the things that he likes and see deep fundamental meaning in those particular things, or you're fundamentally kind of broken as a person.
And, you know, I think you and I, like, here's a good example.
Like, as you know, I like abstract expressionist modern art.
That's one of the things that I happen to like.
I also know that a lot of other people don't like it and they look at those paintings and go, I don't like it.
You don't like it.
That's right.
Yeah.
But I would not say that you.
Would you not?
Well, I think you have bad taste.
That's, you know, I've made that clear many times.
But I mean, I wouldn't claim that you're simply unaware of what it's like to be a human and the.
Thank you.
And you're incapable of deep feeling or emotion or connection to other human beings in a phenomenological way or whatever.
Of course, despite your artistic.
Limitations, Chris.
I think you are a fully realized human.
Quite right.
Agreed.
But that's not something that I think he extends to people who disagree with him.
And he's mixing up the levels as well, because what he wants to say here is oh, so you want to write down that we are social primates and that we have two legs and two arms and that we're made up of cells.
And you think that exhausts, you know.
Does that explain the beauty of looking at a sunset and feeling emotions?
What about when you hold the hand of your infant for the first time?
Does the fact that you're genetically connected encapsulate everything that you experience there?
And of course not.
But knowing those scientific facts about evolution, about genetics, about human biology, one, it doesn't remove the phenomenological side of being a social primate, orientating yourself through the world and having social relations.
But secondly, it actually also doesn't in any sense prevent you from developing an appreciation for things like art or literature, right?
I'm a reductive materialist, Matt.
I've managed to listen to music and I've read Shakespeare and so on.
And Ian McGilchrist here implies that there's a division, right?
And it's a very silly division where he's basically suggesting that there's the reductive.
Scientists who wouldn't understand poetry or art, and there are the kind of artistic philosophers.
And actually, he will go on later to claim that they are the real scientists, right?
The real insights come from the people who are operationalizing that part of their brains.
But it is, like you said, it's just extremely arrogant to suggest that because you disagree with people about what he talks about there, God and metaphysics and the spiritual realm, that your opponents are simply.
Devoid of any ability to appreciate art.
Like it's supremely arrogant, and he puts it.
In their mouths, in a sense, that they are the arrogant ones by, you know, dismissing that these things matter.
But like the majority of scientists do not say there's no value to art or subjective experience is meaningless because we're made up of atoms.
Yeah, I know.
Like it is completely a straw man of like a scientific worldview.
And I've read this in various critiques of him that I've encountered, which is he makes these very basic category errors in mixing up.
These sorts of levels, as you said, and other people have spelt that out pretty well.
Like Jordan Peterson, he actually does believe that there is a deeper truth, like a mythos, as opposed to logos, which he, in his heart of hearts, feels is truer than true and it is the underlying fabric of reality.
You know, in the true sense maker fashion, Jordan Peterson is focused.
Are fixated on the logos, right?
Like they often present the logos as the mystical force animating true science and so on.
But Amy Gilchrist, in good sense maker fashion, thinks it's not the logos, it's the mythos.
And we'll hear him explain why.
So Dawkins should hold them in great respect.
And they did make extraordinary scientific advances, but they didn't think that these advances would tell them the answers to the big questions like what is a human being?
What is What does consciousness mean?
Where is it?
Who has it?
What is the divine?
What do we mean when we talk about the sacred?
Which almost everybody experiences and finds a need to talk about the sacred, even if they don't use the term God.
It doesn't really matter.
And so in this ancient Greek world, there were two conceptions of truth mythos, or mythos as it would be originally, and logos.
And mythos has given us the word myth, and logos has given us the word logic.
But they believed that the big truths, the really deep truths, the great truths, could only be encompassed by poetry, by narrative, by what falls in the realm of myth.
And that logic was the sort of thing that a lawyer would do in a courtroom to settle a dispute and decide how much money was owed by one person to another.
So it operated on a much more trivial realm.
Again, they're just a very clear value judgment, right?
Like logic, which he's associated with logos, which I think Jordan Peterson might have an issue with, but that deals with the much more trivial.
You know, it might be good for sorting out who owes who more.
Money, but like the truths about human nature and beauty and art and consciousness, this is all related to mythos.
And do you notice, Matt, every time that he does that, he always inserts God and the supernatural as part.
You know, he talks about human nature and consciousness and so on.
And then he always adds in the spiritual, the sacred, as if they are also equally facts that need to be explained about the universe.
So he kind of sneaks in the premise.
But yeah, so.
What about that?
Yeah.
Yeah.
Well, the things he doesn't like include science, essentially.
And it's quite interesting because so much of his book relies on this scientific basis, supposedly, in terms of neuroscience, from which he builds this great, I guess, mythical frameworks.
But then it was said by someone else that he basically treats science as like a ladder.
And Jordan Peterson does the same thing.
So he uses it as a ladder to sort of climb up.
To support his main claim.
And then he kicks the ladder away because he's frankly not very interested in that.
Really, what he's wanting is for that neurological stuff to serve as a grand metaphor for the stuff that he's really interested in, which is religion, mythos, and these grand narrative arcs.
Now, he doesn't just dislike science in general as being reductive and petty, but also analytic philosophy, in particular, you know, logical positivism and things like that.
And that's kind of the stuff that he's hinting at there.
That kind of logic is based on certain presuppositions.
There's nothing wrong with that.
It's not a weakness.
It's the conditions on which you can carry out these processes.
The mistake is to think that this can answer all our questions.
So what has happened to Anglo-American analytical philosophy, what I call AAA philosophy, is that it's disappeared up its own fundament.
It's become more and more petty.
It's become less and less in touch with any of the really important questions.
And all the great philosophy of the last hundred years has been in other traditions, in the pragmatists, particularly people like C.S. Peirce, William James.
I mean, I defy anyone to tell me that they weren't insightful and highly intelligent people.
And then I think that not everything that comes out of the phenomenological tradition, but not everything that comes out of any tradition, particularly the purely analytical one, is worth listening to.
And Wittgenstein and other philosophers who were trained in the analytical tradition eventually found that they had to go beyond it.
Heidegger studied Aquinas and then decided that actually, in order to understand the deep things in being, you had to go beyond it.
And I will also note that it's also related to this exact pose that we see in other gurus, right?
Like Dr. K will often say, you know, he's extremely scientific, he's pro science, but then.
In the majority of his content, he is creating a comparison between scientific and Ayurvedic insights and spiritual insights, and suggesting that the scientific ones are less useful than the spiritual ones.
And it's always the case, right, that the gurus who actually included in health and wellness influencers and pseudoscientists always suggest that actually they respect science.
It's just that they recognize its limitations and have kind of gone beyond it.
But they always claim that, like, the true science supports what they say.
So there's nothing unique in Ian McGilchrist claiming that he is a hard nosed scientist who's done his work in the scientific minds and now he has transcended it because that is what they all say.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
So, like, essentially his philosophical tastes run to the continental and the phenomenological.
And he doesn't like analytic type philosophy, right?
That's left hemisphere.
His stuff is right hemisphere.
The analytic stuff is arid and petty, and his stuff is deep and meaningful.
People like Dawkins try to be ultra clear, but they're far too technical.
And people like him are speaking to profound truths.
So he likes people like Heidegger rather than the logical positivists.
But the irony is kind of what you were saying is that he's constantly using analytic style reasoning.
And argumentation when it suits him in a cherry picking fashion to base his claims on scientific findings.
So, I don't know.
It's basically incoherent.
I mean, his own approach is largely left brained in that he's systematizing and categorizing and analyzing stuff.
It's just like it's a bad example, I guess, of left brain thinking because his left brain, right brain schema for how the brain works is just an incredibly reductive approach.
And simplistic version, but it's in the same mold as the actual ones that are much more complicated and nuanced, but actually supported by the empirical evidence.
Reductive Thinking Explained00:02:23
Yes, well, I'm just going to play a clip.
I'll get back to the Dawkins thing after this, but just to illustrate Matt, because I think this is what people will pick up on that he does at times speak and correct Alex about misrepresentations in regards to like the scientific literature and stuff.
And I think this is part of what would give him the impression of being somebody that is very careful scientifically when it comes to claims.
So here's an example when, after Alex has talked about The visual cortexes, like, or the visual fields and the relationship to the hemispheres.
Listen to this.
Yeah, I don't want to be annoying and chip in, but I have to say that actually it doesn't work like that in humans.
So, in humans, the left visual field of both the left and right eye goes to the right hemisphere, and the right visual field of both the left and right eye goes to the left hemisphere.
Many animals, they have eyes on the sides of their head, and there is almost literally just a straight crossover.
But because humans have eyes on the front of their head, partly because we evolved from apes that needed to be able to judge distances of branches ahead, they needed to be able to do this, you know, bifocal way of seeing things.
And so it's not quite true.
So, you know, that is the kind of thing where, you know, if you took someone who did not really care about science, like, why would they correct someone for overstating, you know, the way that vision works in the human system?
And he is correct there, right?
That it is not left brain, right eye, and right brain, left eye.
That's right.
So he does do it when it suits him.
The issue, of course, is we have is that he's quite selective of when he chooses to lean on reductive materialist science.
Yeah.
Well, now, so we heard, you know, in general, in his response to Alex's prompt, that he basically just goes into a bashing thing about how materialists are, you know, hollow humans who can't really appreciate the real answers to the important questions.
Love and Material Reality00:11:06
But Alex tries to bring it back to again restate, right?
But, you know, we get all that, but it is ultimately like different ways of thinking about the world.
And there isn't one that is necessarily worse or better.
And listen to the response.
So, we think that we live in a world which is constituted by random lumps of senseless matter bumping into one another, and none of it has any purpose, meaning, or direction, or any beauty for that matter.
So, I'd strongly differ from that point of view.
But it's also, you've said that the hemispheres are not two different ways of thinking about the world, they're different ways of being in the world.
It's like no one is more legitimate than the other.
They're not sort of.
Competing hypotheses or something.
They're just both ways of approaching the world.
And so when somebody says, Well, when I observe the material world and I see atoms and I see them bumping into each other and I don't observe anything else, are they making a mistake there?
The way you've just described it, sort of parodying this person who says, You know, there's nothing.
I mean, earlier you were talking about somebody who doesn't have meaning or love because all they see is sort of.
Materialism, and I guess you know, there's a sense in which I agree with you.
I saw someone put it like, you know, do you kiss your mother with that worldview?
Like, do you really sort of believe that?
Do you live like that?
Um, maybe not, but are they like making a mistake?
So, this is a good question to to Rias because he correctly highlights that your rhetoric at times suggests that you're not intending to denigrate an approach as being wrong, but as we just heard, he does do that.
So, um You probably remember how he responds, Matt?
Do you know what he does here?
No, I don't recall.
Remind me.
Well, it's going to bring us to another set of clips, but this is the answer to that question.
Well, I think a very simple point, which can be made in a sentence, is do you think love is real?
If you do think love is real, then you have to accept that something that we don't know where it is, we don't know what it is, we can't measure it in the lab, we can't manipulate it in the lab, we can't see it or photograph it, we don't have a dial or a meter which will respond to it.
We can find, but this is a very erroneous way of thinking, you can find a kind of different.
You can find something that you presume is a proxy for love.
But mistaking things for the proxies that can be measured is a fundamental, a very basic area of thinking.
Well, that's all that, Matt.
Yeah.
Love is real.
So, what are you going to do with that?
It's rhetorically effective.
May I respond to it?
Sure.
Is it rhetorically effective?
But, okay.
Yes, please go.
So, what he's doing there, so he's saying, you know, so you could follow it pretty easily.
So, love is real, right?
We can all agree about that.
We all feel love, except for Richard Dawkins, probably.
But it can't be measured, you can't weigh it.
It doesn't have an atomic number.
They can't be photographed like physical objects.
So, therefore, reality includes things that are not reduced to their material physical atoms.
Therefore, materialism is wrong.
Yes.
Yeah, that's the kind of logic.
Have I been fair with that?
Yeah.
Yeah.
So, there's a fallacy there in terms of his conflating all of these levels of description with like ontological categories.
And, you know, love, just like every other emotion, Can be described at multiple physical levels from physical, biological, psychological, or social.
And unless you accept this ridiculous straw man of a scientist who will only talk about atoms, doesn't see a cup there, just sees, oh, that's a collection of atoms, then obviously what people really think is that there are many emergent systems that arise from the material world.
And there are, you can describe things at an atomic level, at a quantum level, at a chemical level.
And you can talk about neurological structures in the brain.
These are all different levels of describing what's going on.
And you can talk about how people experience things, how people feel, and how they relate to each other as well.
And you can, and scientists have, of course, investigated lots of the biological substrates of emotions like love without denying that it is experienced by conscious beings and so on.
So there's that fallacy there around confusing the levels.
There's also the measurement fallacy, right?
If you can't measure it, Precisely, like get its atomic number, then it has to be, you know, not physical or in the material world.
It's got to belong to this other realm of mythos that only people like him are qualified to deal with.
But, you know, so it just totally ignores the fact of emergence, which is, you know, there's nothing special about love or humans.
It occurs in so many different ways, like wetness, right?
Something being wet, right?
That's an emergent property.
Temperature, temperature, like things being hot or cold.
That's an emergent property of physical systems.
It's not something that can be described really at lower levels of description.
And so, if you're a materialist or a physicalist or whatever, you're not claiming that everything is just atoms bumping around and that all phenomena are reducible to the lowest level of description and that everything has to be measurable using a microscope or something like that.
You know, it's got a much more nuanced thing there.
So, I think the rhetorical argument there is that, first of all, you get the gut punch of, you know, love is real.
People deny that love are real.
What a pack of bastards.
And then the straw man of claiming that unless you accept his, you know, phenomenological, religious, metaphysical kind of worldview, then you're denying the existence of all of these things.
Yeah.
And so, you know, there's quite a few things that I will say in response to this, but I'm going to let him spell out a little bit more how it connects to other parts of his view, right?
So he did reference this in a slightly earlier part of the conversation.
So again, he raises the topic, but let's see how it connects in with the rest of it.
You can say I'm only interested in that trivial realm in which things can be measured and demonstrated by a photograph and so forth.
But do you believe in love?
Do you think that love is real?
If you don't think it's real, I pity you because it's the most staggering experience in life and it has many forms.
There's the love one has, erotic love for a partner.
There is the love one has for nature.
There is for those of us who sense something greater and divine.
There is the love one has for that.
But love cannot be demonstrated in a laboratory.
It cannot be manipulated.
It can't be measured in any way.
Does that make it unreal?
Not at all.
So I feel this is just a huge discrepancy between a very narrow idea of what truth is and.
A broader one.
And if you'll permit me, I just want to say something about truth there.
That there are two, well, there are many ways, of course, of thinking about what truth is, and many types of theory and philosophy about how to think of truth.
But two that are very important because they're quite different and we can recognize them.
I stopped there because we don't need to hear it.
You know, it's essentially going to be the Jordan Peterson style truth and the Richard Dawkins style truth, right?
But I wanted to note there that he very often connects these ideas about love, his kind of rhetorical gotcha.
Into his broader framework, right?
Where he wants to endorse like his metaphysical reality.
And like you said, Matt, first of all, there's the notion that a construct, an abstract concept like love, which as he highlights there, can include, depending on how you define it, all sorts of different things like romantic love, affection for friends, enjoyment of the environment, so on, right?
That you use one word for that does not mean all the things are the exact same.
And also, it doesn't mean that you cannot measure something.
Right.
Because, like, in the most trivial sense, if I bring someone into a psychology laboratory and they pick out people in their life and I ask them to rate, you know, how much do you love this person from zero to 10?
There, I've just measured a subjective experience of love.
And it's true to their internal thing, whatever they take that to mean.
And it will generally be the case that people that are closer to them, family members, children, partners, right, close friends will score higher on the love scale than not now.
Emma Gilchrist will say, Oh, but come on, that's not you measuring on that.
But who's the one then demanding that we put everything into like a microscope and physiological reactions?
No, I'm measuring someone's subjective assessment of their connection to someone else.
Now, you can also measure things like physiological reactions and his objections, they work most because he's invoking love, right?
And people like to imagine love as, you know, this kind of thing beyond the physical, you know, like a higher, yeah, yeah, a higher emotion, right?
It's a force that exists in the world, and the thought of reducing it to anything material is kind of unpleasant.
But let's take anger for a second.
Is it possible to measure anger scientifically, explicitly in a laboratory setting?
Well, yes, the way I talked about self reported, but you can also see physiological indications of anger, right?
Like elevated heart.
Well, in fact, McGill Christ himself talks a lot about how the emotions can be localized in the hemispheres of the brain.
So he's very happy to talk about, oh, look, we could measure where the emotions are happening and attribute them.
To the physical structures, the hemispheres of the brain.
So, yeah, I mean, you can't have a place, right?
I know.
So, on that sense, I think like he's obviously wrong.
Challenging Naive Reductionism00:06:05
But also, again, I know you've highlighted it, Matt, and I just want to keep repeating it that the implication is that if you adopt the scientific worldview, if you believe that humans are made of atoms and we are social primates and so on, that you simply must dismiss that love has any value or meaning.
But like, Why would that be the case?
Because the very fact that I know that, you know, in my worldview, humans form these social relations.
We're a highly social species and we are very bonded with the partners and people in our life that we are closely connected to, including children for genetic reasons or also just for caregiver type reasons.
That does not therefore mean that that robs the sense of beauty or enjoyment of spending time with loved ones.
It doesn't mean that you don't feel Affection or fall in love.
And I actually feel like people like McGilchrist, who demand that we invoke a supernatural force that is the ultimate origin behind it, they're the ones like saying the actual experience itself is not enough.
It has to be more special and magical because if it's just the material world, if it's all caused by atoms and the brain hemispheres reacting, well, that's just not enough.
Like that doesn't do justice.
And I'm like, Why?
What's the problem?
I'm a reductive materialist.
I love my kids.
I love my wife.
I'm very happy with my friends and stuff.
So, just it's such a straw man that the only people who get to have rich inner lives and experiences of love are, you know, sense maker inclined and windbag theologians.
Why?
Why do they think this?
Because I think they can experience love.
You know, I don't have any issue assuming that Jordan Peterson and other people that are sense maker inclined that they have.
Rich emotional lives, but somehow they just aren't extending the same things to the people that they disagree with.
And then they kind of lament how arrogant that their opponents are, which is just a surprisingly effective rhetorical tactic because they're the ones being dismissive and patronizing and arrogant towards people that don't agree with them.
Yeah, well, as we will see after you play the rest of the clips, there is a grand narrative arc that is being traced by the Gilchrist.
And it starts with undermining sort of a kind of naive materialism and naive reductionism.
It started off with mentioning about stuff like, actually, things are quantum fields, so it's more complicated than that.
Or actually, evolution is not just about this, it's actually more complicated than that, right?
So, actually, using actual Real science to kind of knock down a little straw man of other science.
Then he sort of kicks away the scaffolding of science altogether because now he's moving towards an anti materialist kind of position.
Oh, yeah.
We'll get there.
We'll get there.
That's right.
But I think this thing about love is really important because it bridges the neuroscience stuff to his anti materialist metaphysics and makes materialism sound as if it's absurd.
But it It fails, right?
Because materialism does take into account emergence at all kinds of levels.
And the straw man that he's describing simply doesn't exist.
There aren't people who believe that kind of thing.
There might be some people.
Come on.
There might be some.
There's always going to be some.
Yes, we always have to say.
Yeah.
When it comes to Richard Dawkins, for example, I have heard him talk about how fiction might be harmful because it makes people think about words that don't exist.
Okay.
Well, the point that I want to make is that just because love is not well described at the molecular or atomic level, it doesn't mean that it transcends material reality altogether.
Rather, most people believe that it emerges just like democracy or inflation or consciousness or anything else, right?
These are emergent properties that can still be real and they're abstract, but they can be grounded in the material world.
Can you put democracy in a lab, Matt?
Can you see it under a microscope?
Can you?
Yeah, that's a good example, actually, democracy, because we have all sorts of indices of democracy across nations and whatever, but none of it involves measuring in the way that Ian McGillchrist is suggesting.
But it doesn't mean there's nothing there, right?
Or that the measurement is stupid.
Yeah, that's right.
People do measure democracy.
There's a democracy index that they track, they do measure the economy.
Economists are all about that.
So, you know, it's obviously possible.
And if you think that we're doing an injustice about, you know, well, he's not really denigrating it.
He's just saying, you know, that he has a more inflationary view of it.
Oh, no, he is denigrating materialists.
So listen to this.
But I'd say it's simple minded because, you know, it's promissory materialism.
We can't tell you how the feeling you have for your partner, your loved one, emerges from colliding atoms.
But we're just going to say so.
Because we're going to stick to our dogma.
That's stupid.
That's the kind of thing that people who have no flexibility, no imagination do.
They go, oh, it's all going to be atoms bumping into one.
How do they know that?
Where did they derive that?
Is that really science?
Yes, they derived it from science, Ian.
That's where they derive it.
They're basing it on the evidence that is available, whereas you are talking about the Bible and what you want to be true.
The View from Earth00:03:24
I think, ultimately, Ultimately, it's such an elaborate kind of rationalization for his own preferences, right?
And I understand his preferences.
Like, I understand why he likes Shakespeare and he likes listening to Bach.
And he feels that, you know, coming to grips with great literature is going to give you insights into the natural love.
I totally get that.
And that's fine.
But it's interesting how his own preferences and tastes are sort of developed into this whole metaphysical, philosophical worldview.
The world must, the cosmos, in fact, must bend to endorse his, you know, religious intuitions.
But so, one thing I just offer as a final analogy for this point, Matt, and you can hear Alex O'Connor's version of pushback in a second, but is, you know, we know the sun is a giant flaming ball of gas and chemical reactions going on out there, right?
And yet, at the same time, Matt, you can appreciate the beauty of a sunset.
Now, I know that the sun is a big ball, right?
And that the sunset is an illusion caused by visual perceptions and the angles of the earth and all that.
But it doesn't mean that, like, when I see a sunset, when my wife or my friend says, Oh, look at the beautiful sunset, I don't say, Well, you know, though, it's actually just a ball of gas.
And if we were outside the earth, there wouldn't even be a sunset, right?
But that is true.
But it neither prevents me from appreciating.
The beauty of a sunset, nor does it make it untrue that the sun actually is a big ball of gas, right?
And it's just the view from Earth that makes it look a particular way.
So it's just that he demands that you must only accept like one, right?
And that if you are focused or accepting of the material reality, you simply can't appreciate the aesthetic terminological one.
And you're like, why?
Why?
It's perfectly possible to hold two ideas in your head.
Maybe the problem is that I'm saying.
You can be both left and right, right?
And that doesn't fit the narrative that he wants.
But look at you, Chris.
You're holding multiple levels of description of everyality in your head at the same time.
I'm sending two paradigms at the same time, only two, but I'm working up to it.
So here's Alex O'Connor trying to offer the same pushback, but in a gentle form.
And let's see how far he gets.
But first, I do want to, I suppose, push back on this idea.
I mean, you said that the The position can be summed up in a single question Do you believe in love?
And I think a lot of my listeners will say it sort of depends on what you mean because I experienced this thing, love, you know, at least.
Sometimes.
And a lot of people are satisfied to say that this is an emergent property of atoms bumping into each other.
And it's an interesting one and a fascinating one, and one that we still have a lot to learn about, but can essentially be understood by reducing it to its material parts.
That is a very left brain way of thinking about what love is.
Cynicism and Conspiracy00:02:37
And a lot of people are simply satisfied to say, well, that's what love is.
It's a bit cynical, it's maybe a bit depressing, it's maybe not sort of.
How you behave, but then people are constantly exercising self delusion all the time, and that this is what love is.
I mean, what would you say to somebody who says that?
I'd say a lot of things.
I mean, first and most trivially, of course, people believe that if they're being cynical, they're being more intelligent.
Unfortunately, all the psychological research shows that people who are cynical are less intelligent than people who's, yes, I quote it in The Matter with Things.
The matter of things took my thinking very, very much further than what is in the master and his emissary into these realms, particularly.
But I just say that trivially.
So don't pride yourself on being cynical.
Yes, yes, the cynicism claim.
Did you fax check this particular one, Chris?
I did, yeah.
And it's, well, so the basic claim is correct that there are not many, but there are a couple of studies that show a correlation between.
Cynicism measures and lower scores on things that are usually it's not actually IQ, it's things associated with IQ.
But in any case, like, yeah, things associated with intelligence, but it's an extremely weak correlation.
And the measures of cynicism are like it's proper cynicism, which is, you know, do you think that people are all liars and are constantly trying to screw you over and that kind of thing?
So, what he's talking about is cynicism as like, you know, recognizing that people are made of.
Matter, which is not quite the same thing.
Yes.
That's the same thing.
Yeah, I fact checked it as well.
And that was the same thing I found.
But it's, you know, yeah, there are some findings out there, but it's significantly overstated.
And it doesn't surprise me if it did turn out to be true.
I mean, like conspiratorial thinking.
Exactly.
It's very close to the measure, I thought that the measure was quite close to the way that you measure conspiratorial ideation.
But he states it here as yes, this is completely validated and blah, blah, blah, blah.
But it's only.
A very weak, minor relationship in these large correlational data set studies.
It's not what he implies, which is like, it's this completely robust finding that's across the literature and so on.
Different Ways of Knowing00:05:05
Like, no.
Yeah, marginally true, but way overstated just as it stands.
But the important thing, of course, is how he uses it, right?
So it plays this role in his rhetorical argument.
So cynicism is, I assume, a left brained kind of thing.
And it's the kind of thing.
That people who don't think like him are, right?
It's cynicism about God.
It's cynicism about mythos.
It's cynicism about the great truths that literature and ancient stories have to tell us.
That's what he means.
So it's really a pretty weak rhetorical maneuver.
Well, I also feel that Alex didn't do a great job of steel manning the counter position.
I'm glad that he brought it up, you know, that some of his listeners are going to be like, well, I experienced love.
But he again suggested that, like, they would, you know, fundamentally accept that the ultimate level that's of significance is the atomic level and that this is just like a kind of depressing worldview because you're just saying, well, it doesn't matter because we're all just atoms.
Bumping and so on.
And you're like, but it doesn't like it doesn't follow that you can acknowledge that people are made of atoms and that therefore that's all that matters, right?
Because it's the same thing as saying, well, this pile of dog crap is made of atoms and this chocolate cake is made of atoms.
So fundamentally, what's the difference?
You know, why wouldn't I just eat the dog crap?
It's all atoms.
And you're like, no, that doesn't follow, right?
It doesn't logically follow that just because atoms are at the Underlying basis of things, that therefore that's the appropriate level for humans to be discussing objects and how they're going to feel or interact with the map.
Yeah, yeah, indeed.
Yeah, it doesn't feel new though, does it?
I mean, we've definitely.
Oh, no.
I mean, Jordan Peterson obviously is all about this kind of thing.
And dualism, the idea that there's these non overlapping magisteria of the physical world, but also.
You know, the world of ideas and feelings and the human spirit and love and consciousness and all that stuff, that it exists, not that one emerges from the other, but rather that it exists in its own parallel world.
And then actually that it is more true, more real, kind of like Platonic forms or something than the ugly, base material world.
This is a very old idea that he's kind of reprising.
Oh, yes, yes.
And he actually ties it in to some of his later philosophizing.
So, I mean, we might just at least draw the connection that he puts here.
I mean, we came there earlier when talking about Dawkins.
But of course, this is right.
And this is a point that is, I mean, no doubt some people will think, well, that's just a sort of get out clause and so on.
But I can't help people like that because you've got to actually broaden your mind to see that there are different ways of knowing things, there are different kinds of truth.
You can either accept that or not.
And in a way, you have to live with your choice about whether you do accept that or not.
But I would recommend opening your mind and reading more philosophy and seeing that there's more going on than just mechanical, certifiable facts that can be put into a textbook and verified by an experiment.
Now, we're going to get to what he was talking about there, right?
Because this is related to his theological worldview.
But I just think that's a perfect encapsulation that, like, you know.
What you got to do, Matt, is open your mind.
Yeah.
Yeah.
If you're open minded, then you will obviously agree with him.
Yeah.
No, it reminds me of Sam Harris and also just Zen Buddhism more generally, which is that I can't explain this to you.
I mean, you know, I can, I can, but, you know, ultimately you have to accept it.
But, you know, if you don't accept it, you're going to be living a limited, more base kind of life.
You have to open your mind and, you know, do the reading, do the work and experience it.
So, yeah, it just falls back on a claim of revealed truth, essentially.
And it's so funny that people like him always call the opposition arrogant.
And yeah, Dawkins can be a bit arrogant, perhaps.
But I mean, it's so incredibly arrogant for him to assume that someone like myself that doesn't hold his dualistic, I don't know, whatever you call it in philosophical terms, phenomenological, continental, whatever it is, just because I don't agree with that.
Then I'm just fundamentally limited as a human being.
I can't think of anything more arrogant than that.
Foundations for Next Time00:03:48
Oh, yeah.
Yeah.
And we've got a long ways to go.
Yeah.
Because this is really what we've covered so far is basically the foundation for where he really wants to go to the conversation.
Right.
And the, you, the head of the story.
This is not just a preamble, folks.
This is not the main story.
This is just all scaffolding.
Yeah.
This is, this is true because he wants to leap from.
This is to diagnose society, talk about the nature of the cosmos, and also his own bespoke versions of panpsychism and theological beliefs and so on, right?
He has a whole much bigger worldview that he's going to outline, but this is the foundation that it's based on, right?
Yeah, yeah.
Well, there you go, folks.
So much exciting new ideas, big ideas to sink our teeth into.
But, Chris, I don't think we're going to have time to cover it all in this episode.
Not in one sitting, not in one sitting.
We're going to move on.
But I think a nice way to end might be to give people just a taste of where we're going.
You know, like at the end of Back to the Future, where they say, you know, where we're going, we don't need cars.
And the car flew off.
And you're like, oh, there's going to be, you know, look at this.
So let's just hear Alex's question.
Why don't I play Alex's question to free him?
Where are we going to go in this conversation next?
And this will give you a taste of it.
So, where have we gone wrong here then?
Because the kind of Dawkins esque approach of the primacy of, I suppose, in a way, left brain thinking seems to be dominant.
And I think you've said in the past and recently that the world is sort of becoming a bit left brain dominant or is a bit left brain dominant in a way that maybe it once didn't sort of used to be.
And I'm interested for two reasons.
The first is sort of like, You know, when I say how does that happen, I don't just mean what are the social conditions that make people think this way, but I mean, how is it that the brain starts acting differently?
Is it like this mind that connects the two hemispheres just sort of starts ignoring one side?
Are we able to train the mind into sort of residing more in the right brain or the left brain?
That seems very strange.
If you have one brain that is all connected and communicating with each other, how could it even be the case that people would just sort of switch one of them off in a lot of these conversations?
Very good questions, Alex.
That's an excellent question.
It is strange, Chris.
It is strange.
He does have an answer.
He does have an answer.
We'll go delving into what it is next time.
So, yeah, there you go, Matt.
This is part one of a two parter on Ian McGilchrist.
And really, could it be any other way?
Because there's just a veritable smorgasbord of ideas and high level thinking being presented to us.
It's not at all simply this dichotomy that right brain things are good and those are the kind of things Ian McGilchrist likes.
No.
Left-wing things are bad.
And that's what I do with materialism.
No, no.
It's much more complex.
It's so much more nuanced than that.
Very nuanced.
Both hemispheres are involved all the time.
He said that.
He said that.
He did say that.
He did say that.
And he said several times that he's not making that simple dichotomy.
So I guess he's not.
But we'll hear the various ways that he's not doing that next time in more detail.