Iain McGilchrist faces rigorous scrutiny as scholars dismantle his reliance on neurobiology to support anti-materialist claims, citing meta-analyses refuting his hemispheric theories of culture and empathy. Critics expose his misrepresentation of flatworm studies and genetic transposition data, arguing he constructs an unfalsifiable panentheistic worldview where God directs evolution through attractive forces rather than chance. The discussion highlights his dismissal of empirical evidence in favor of mythos, drawing parallels to Jordan Peterson while addressing controversial assertions about demons, near-death experiences, and the brain as a mere receiver for cosmic consciousness. Ultimately, the episode reveals McGilchrist's methodology as decorative scholarship that uses scientific credentials to validate a self-sealing religious narrative immune to logical or empirical verification. [Automatically generated summary]
Transcriber: CohereLabs/cohere-transcribe-03-2026, WAV2VEC2_ASR_BASE_960H, sat-12l-sm, script v26.04.01, and large-v3-turbo
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Flawed Left-Right Brain Premise00:14:36
Hello and welcome again to Decoding the Gurus, the podcast where an anthropologist or 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.
With me is the great, the world famous, renowned scholar, Chris Kavanagh, the man with more theories about the brain than you have had hot dinners.
He's my emotional support animal and cognitive apparatus, prosthesis, helping me understand what's going on in part two.
Of Ian McGillcrest.
Hi, Chris.
Hello, that's right.
A very right brain introduction, if I do say so myself.
It was good, therefore, it's my brain.
I was actually winging it.
Could you tell?
Could you tell?
Well, that's the kind of thing the right brain lets you do is wing it and do things like that.
So that's what we like to see.
Actually, yeah, it's been a while, Matt.
There's been a little bit of a gap between it.
So this is us returning to the Hypnotic world of the McGill Christ.
Um, Gilchrist or Gilchrist?
You said Gilchrist, but I think it's Gilchrist, but whatever.
I think it is Gilchrist.
You know me, I like to put my own little spin on how things are said, I don't do it consciously.
Yeah, so it'll be like approaching them with fresh eyes.
Maybe this time it'll all land a bit better.
To remind the listener, I'll just give a very brief recap of where we've been and where we're going on this podcast.
So, like where we have been is that Ian McGilchrist, through his work experience and research and philosophical insights, has come to discover that the structure of our brain, which is lateralized between right and left hemispheres, is very important for understanding how people behave and think and reason about the world.
And basically, there is the left brain and there is the right brain.
And although there's some lip service paid to both of them being important and both of them having important roles, in McGilchrist's model, the right brain is responsible for everything good and the left brain is kind of bad and limited and reductionist.
And, you know, it's really like Richard Dawkins, an internal Richard Dawkins.
And all of his friends are right brained.
All the people he likes are right brained.
All the good things in society are right brained.
And all the things which are limited or bad or not looking at things right, they're left brained.
But he's not doing the simple dichotomy because that would be wrong.
So that's the background from the last episode.
Yep, that's right, Chris.
It's obviously far more complicated than that, far more nuanced, but I think you've covered it pretty well in broad brushstrokes.
Yeah, that's it.
And we're going to, we mentioned last time that that was really just the foundations that he was laying for his bigger insights into society, civilization, the universe, and so on.
And that is where we're going to head today.
But before we do that, Matt, I believe you had something that you wanted to show the class.
Yes, Chris.
Yes, yes.
Well, listeners may remember that I was relatively critical, even scathing, one might say, of Gilchrist's representation of the neurobiology.
So before we leave that, because as you say, that is merely the foundation.
It's going to come up again, but yes, carry on.
In the meantime, since we last recorded, I did a little bit more homework, did a little bit more research.
So, what do we do?
Just to.
That's not like you.
No, it's not like me.
An enthusiasm came upon me.
And yeah, I found that, you know, several, although the general response to Nicola Christ is just seems to be uncritical acceptance, there have been a few qualified academics who have actually responded to many of the claims that he makes in these books.
So if you don't mind, Chris, maybe we could just mention a couple of those.
Why not?
Why not?
We like to hear from scholars and theologians and insightful people across the discourse here.
So be my guest.
Yeah.
So one of those articles was written by someone called Corballis, 2014, in PLOS Biology.
And yeah, would you be surprised to hear, Chris, that it's really rather damning?
The hemispheric theory of culture and mind that is proposed, Corballis says that it goes far beyond the neurological facts.
This left right cultural symbolism stuff that he's got going on is described as myth.
Rather than evidence.
And in general, the core verdict is that he's simply quite wrong in all of those claims.
That, yes, of course, there is a lot of asymmetries going on in the human brain, but it's multidimensional front, back, left, right, in, out, pretty much every dimension you can imagine, there's asymmetries going on and specializations happening, not this left, right thing that he's got.
The higher order things like creativity and emotions recruit bilateral networks across.
The hemispheres.
And yeah, so really, really very much in line with my own critique there, Chris.
Does that surprise you?
No, but wouldn't the retaliation from McGillchrist and others be?
Yes, that's right.
Because like these reductionist, materialist, neuroscience people, they are allergic to things like myth and larger holistic narratives drawing in sources from.
Outside of biological reductive approaches.
So they regard it all as just stories and ideas and that kind of thing.
But actually, that's the very point that it's not just based on knowledge of brain structures and that kind of thing.
It is all in the interpretation.
Yeah.
Well, that's as may be the retreat into myth.
But, you know, I think the fact remains that Gilchrist does make a lot of claims about.
The brain and uses this as scaffolding or a foundation to build his more abstract and metaphorical structures.
And yeah, scientists like myself have responded to those claims, which it may be reductionist to say things are true or false or have evidence or not, but still, that's how we do it.
We're old fashioned like that, Chris.
I have more.
Can I tell you about the second one?
Okay.
Yes, yes.
What's second?
Okay.
So there was actually a really rather good meta analysis done.
So I I think a professor of neurobiology who's based in New Zealand by the name of Spezio contributed to a special issue of Religion, Brain and Behavior that was, I think, dedicated to Nicholas Christ's book.
And this researcher did a very careful meta analysis.
So I won't go into the technical details too much, but basically did like a scanning for all the claims made in the book.
And there's obviously heaps of them, it's all very complicated.
But then did a very systematic check of whether or not.
Those were supported by the literature.
So, over 11,000 studies went into his meta analysis and basically considered all of the kinds of claims.
And in a nutshell, the conclusion was that the results offered no support for McGill Christ's central claims.
Spezio was really not ambiguous in the assessment.
And to get more, to take some specific ones empathy, as we talked about last time.
Bilateral, not right lateralized, as McGilchrist would have.
Emotion, actually, in general, left lateralized.
Imitation, you know, social kind of attraction, that kind of thing, opposite, left lateralized.
He makes claims about global attention, and there's really no lateralization going on there.
And even in terms of the most important thing, according to Gilchrist, which is the understanding of metaphor, no, not a right brain thing, actually, slightly left hemispheric.
Right.
So, all of this is taking the premise of McGilchrist that actually, you know, everything can be kind of categorized or divided up into left and right brain, which is, as we've talked about, is not actually a correct premise.
And he's actually got more, even, I guess, deeper kind of critiques, which is that I think they fall into the category of like not even wrong.
Right.
So, on one hand, if you actually take the claims that are being implied, yes, a whole bunch of them can be shown to have no support.
The vast majority of them, in fact.
But I think he had a deeper critique there, which was about how much of it is unfalsifiable.
Many of the concepts that McGilchrist has, this is what you hinted at, is that it's lacking what he calls bridge laws, which is like a way it can be properly operationalized and tested.
So I think we talked about before, which is that on one hint, there'll be the confident claim that all the good things, all the important things are on the right.
But then there'll be the disclaimer, which is, Oh, of course, it's a complex tapestry and things are happening all over the brain.
So it's all very complicated.
But the problem with that is that it's unfalsifiable.
There isn't any evidence that can be brought that can show that the claim is wrong.
So it doesn't fall into the category.
So I think the important thing for people to take away from this is that it's not like a scientific theory that just turns out to have the weight of evidence against it.
It fundamentally doesn't fall into the category of scientific theories.
Yeah.
And I think for some people, they regard that as not being of concern.
But in my experience, they want it both ways, where they want to retreat from, well, it doesn't really matter if the actual evidence supports him, because it's more about a kind of values or philosophy based view of human society.
But that's not where his authority draws from.
So when you see him introduced in Lectures or discussions or panels, he's very much drawing his authority from the fact that he's basing all this on this scientific knowledge of the brain and the way that it functions and so on.
And if that's all wrong, it means that it actually undermines a lot of the claims that he makes, or at the very least, makes them retreat into just his personal interpretations of literature.
Like he's basically come up with a classification system.
That is not related to the actual structures of the brain, but is just his way to classify everything into a good or a bad how.
So, yeah, I think you can't have it both ways, and he wants to do it.
But do you have more, Matt?
Is there more?
There's actually quite a lot more, but I will restrain myself a little to just one.
Okay, one more.
One more.
So there was a review done in the British Journal of Psychiatry, which was a review of the book by a chap called Alan Carson.
And, you know, he says a couple of positive things.
For instance, McGilchrist has written a book of breathtaking scope.
The breadth of the source material is dazzling, and the actual writing is at times superlative.
But then.
Is that good?
Well, it's friendly, shall we say?
Superlative writer, it's like a backhanded councilmember.
No, superlative is good.
Superlative is good.
But then the review does become quite negative, very much along the lines that we identified.
So he says that Nick Ilkris talks eruditely, and we hope from a position of knowledge about the scientific framework on which he bases his more artistic interpretations.
However, this foundation does not seem entirely sound, and many of the conclusions presented go far.
Far beyond the available data.
Furthermore, he goes on to say that Nick Gilchrist has a tendency to acknowledge the limitations of the data and then swiftly ignore them, selecting only those findings which support his thesis.
Yes.
So he mentions a growing disquiet coming from the perception that the book was, in fact, another pop science representation of intra hemispheric differences, albeit exquisitely packaged and persuasively presented.
So, yeah, so I think these other authors are identifying exactly what we did, which is that the book is drawing a lot of authority from neuroscience.
And so, therefore, you cannot say that the very weak version of neuroscience that he is doing is a side issue or not relevant because you cannot, as you said, have it both ways.
Yes.
Well, you know, this is a good illustration, Matt, that other people agree with us.
It's good to be proven right.
I don't mind.
I'm going to take you to this proof that I'm right.
I've got at least three people who agree with this.
Well, look, no, I think the relevant point here is triangulation.
And it is good to see that other people out there, not just people in discourse land, but in academic spheres, are noting the same issues and bringing them up.
So it hasn't gone unremarked upon, but perhaps not fully appreciated by the wider discourse.
I feel like more people.
Should have picked up that he's just saying people are left or right, and then categorizing them as good or bad.
But you know, whatever, hope springs eternal.
Beyond Monocausal Explanations00:15:24
Why don't we move on, Matt?
You hear the man himself outline his thesis, yes?
Let's, Chris.
Enough of this, um, scientific nitpicking.
Let's get to the big ideas.
Well, we're about to get to more scientific, thank you, but that's all right.
That's all right.
So, as I mentioned, he's going to move from the individual to the wider society, and uh, this is Alex introducing that topic I'm raising.
You know, there's some questions about that approach.
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 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?
Good questions.
Good questions there, Alex.
And the thing I've often been thinking about in recent contemporary history, Matt, is too many people being logical and rational.
Our society just really valorizes, you know, scientific thinking and people being reductive materialists.
That is what we see far too much of in society these days.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
When I look back at the worst events of the 20th century, for instance, my first, the underlying theme is just people being too rational.
Too logical.
That's been the cause of most of our problems.
And that's all because of the fact that it seems strange, but we've got these two parts of our brain that aren't talking to each other.
And we've just, as a civilization, been using the bad half, not the good half.
Well, Alex raised those questions.
So let's see what Ian says.
And, you know, I think communism would probably be a left brain thing, right?
It's definitely got, you know, the anti religious component historically in there.
So, Ian McGilchrist, I suspect, would put communism in the left brain side.
Yeah.
So, yeah.
I think if you put all the bad things in the left brain side, then I think you'll see a lot of support from McGilchrist theory.
It's kind of self proving.
But anyway, let's hear from him.
Let's hear.
Yeah.
As it turns out, Matt, Alex's questioning the self is too reductive.
Well, because they're not, I mean, you're thinking in terms of, An alternative, this is on, this is off, or whatever.
Whereas what I'm talking about is a spectrum, if you like.
So it's more like, it's not like a switch that's on and off for one or the other.
It's more like a slider in which one hemisphere can be more attended to or it can be more in use in our attention to the world than the other.
And I think that what has happened is that it's not so much that our brains are any different.
I mean, of course, they're always.
Different and evolving slowly over time as everything evolves.
So it is true that our brains are probably subtly different from those of Achaean Greeks, you know.
But if you put them into a scanner, if you did the thought experiment and put them into a scanner, you wouldn't expect to see their brains very different from ours.
So it's not that the brain itself is the key here, it's how the brain is being used.
I think the way to think of it is rather like if you Bought a new radio and you listen to a couple of stations that are your favorites.
After a while, you begin to listen only to one.
I think that's more the way it is.
Right, right.
So, very reductive.
We shouldn't think of it in terms of left brain on or off.
It's not a binary.
It's not a binary.
It's a spectrum.
So, what we're talking about is a slide to where these are maybe 70 or 80% of our left brain now and only 20 or 30% of the right brain.
So, it's much more nuanced than being binary.
Yeah, although then there is the analogy of like tuning into radio stations, which are set to specific frequencies.
Anyway, he kind of reduces it down from the spectrum into like a spectrum where there are, you know, a set amount of stations.
But anyway, yes, so he corrects, like, no, no, not a binary.
And I'm not claiming the brain has, you know, changed dramatically via evolution.
That's not the claim.
It's how people are using.
So it's the same software, sorry, the same hardware being used in different manners, right?
That's the idea.
But he elaborates further.
I should emphasize that I don't think that the great.
Changes in cultural history that I map out in the second half of the Master's Emissary, in which I look at the West from the time of the ancient Greeks through to the present day.
I look at the sort of great changes and moments of change in the history of ideas and in the rise and falls of the Greek, the Roman, and if you like, the modern civilization.
And I'm not saying that the brain causes these changes, but what I'm saying is that the causes of changes may be many, many things.
They may be economic, they may be environmental changes, they may be wars, they may be political upheavals, they may be many things that cause people to change the way in which they live or think.
But inevitably, their thinking is.
If you like, molded by the brain through which it is brought to be articulated.
And so it's perfectly coherent to talk of a period during which you can say that most of the phenomena of that culture appear to be expressive of a more left hemisphere dominated take on the world or a more right hemisphere take.
And that's really all that I'm saying when I'm talking about those things.
And I do, to come back to your.
Earlier point.
I do definitely think that at the moment it's quite extraordinary how much this left hemisphere takes, dominates, and that we are not any longer apparently aware of all the richness, the beauty, the complexity, the meaning that the right hemisphere gives to life.
Yes.
So there you have it.
So we currently live in an age, Chris.
It's a fallen age.
I feel like it's a third age of the.
Middle earth, you know, Newman has fallen, there's goblins and in the mountains, it's bad times.
Um, and why, indeed, indeed, and why?
Because we've become very technocratic, we've become very analytical, we've been carving things up, secularization, yep, science, bureaucracy, modernity, basically, um, is not a great thing.
And but he's he's hinting, he's alluding to some.
Earlier times, Chris, where things were much better, more right brain times.
Would you like to tell us about those?
Well, I will, but I'll just note that the I do like that he starts off with a disclaimer that suggests we're not here advocating a simple monocausal account, right?
We're not saying it's only the brain that matters.
There's things like history and economics and, you know, wars and all these kind of things.
It's not a simple Monocausal account where it's just to do with brains.
He says that, but then he goes on to say, But I do think it's completely coherent to focus on people adopting a left and right approach in general in circumstances, and that this explains the tendency and appearances in culture.
So it's kind of funny because it's like it's got the thing of somebody recognizing all these other factors and saying, I'm not proposing there's only one factor, but then going on to just ignore all the other factors.
And focus on the one thing that he talks about.
So he is, in fact, really only interested in like a single thing, which is his explanatory framework, because he never talks about these other factors that are important, right?
Like they're not part of the story.
Yeah, if I understand his model correctly, he's acknowledging that civilizations change, culture changes due to a broad number of unspecified economic factors.
Cultural, military, whatever factors.
But then these come to be reflected or somehow influence the brain and the way in which thinking occurs, which then becomes the monocausal explanation for why things have changed, like why things were good then and bad now, that kind of thing.
But yeah, you're completely right.
Even if you accept the premise of all of that, what role is his construct of this hemispheric brain playing?
Because you don't actually.
Need it.
You could go straight from saying all the stuff, for instance, to pick someone random, Gibbon's reasons that he gives for the decline and fall of the Roman Empire.
Why not just those?
Why require an intermediate left brained thinking interposed between them and the decline and fall of the Roman Empire, right?
You don't really need it.
No, though he'll probably say he's just describing the mechanism, right?
Maybe that is like his get out of jail treat guide.
But I just think this is a A familiar pattern where people who are advocating a monocausal account to peons to say, I'm not doing that, and then immediately do it.
So I'm just flagging up that that is going to happen.
And as you said, Matt, where do we need to go?
It's a fairly predictable set of prescriptions that he has for us, but let's hear them nonetheless.
But as you say, the difference between the hemispheres is not just in ways of thinking, it's in ways of being, which includes thinking and feeling and behaving.
And a way of approaching the world, a way of attending to it, a way of being in it.
In other words, it affects every aspect of your life.
It doesn't just stop with an articulation of a few paragraphs of rather simple propositions.
It's a whole way of being, and a civilization can adopt a way of being and a way of thinking which it's hardly aware of as.
You know, peculiar because it's forgotten the alternatives, and that this can be very destructive.
I believe that's the world we live in now, where I think a lot of people are simply no longer aware of what the world can offer because we've disengaged ourselves from all the ways in which we used to be made aware of it.
I mean, number one, living in close proximity to the natural world, which until very recently almost everybody in the world did, living in a culture which has evolved.
Evolved over time and has evolved in such a way as to help stabilize that culture so that it can live in harmony with its environment, so that it can understand its experiences, worship of a divine or sacred realm.
These are all the ways in which we can be reminded of things that are bigger, more complex than we are.
And we've lost a sense of wonder before the world.
We've lost a sense of modesty about what it is we can know.
In other words, we've become arrogant and simplistic in our thinking.
Yeah.
So he's pretty clear that we're in a dismal state of civilizational decline at the moment.
Things were better in the olden days.
He's not super specific, but at points he kind of applies, he's thinking of ancient.
Greece, ancient Rome, perhaps the Renaissance, that kind of thing.
And yeah, so a strong streak of nostalgia there for a loved past, a better time, Chris.
Yeah, well, and also this is just the predictable prescriptions of the sense maker inclined.
You could write them down without listening to their conversation.
They're going to say, we need to return to being more religious, attuned to the secret, and probably engaging in rituals.
This is something that they often say as well.
You need to touch grass, Matt.
You got to be outside in nature, right?
Appreciating the beauty of the world and, like, you know, in general, scientific reductionism, all that kind of thing.
It's been alienating for people and it's led to these atomistic lifestyles, living in cities, not the way humans were meant to be.
But, you know, one thing, Matt, I will just say is that he talks about getting in touch with nature in order to have like senses of awe.
Invoked, right?
But actually, cities like mega architecture and that kind of thing achieve the same effect in large part.
There's studies around this, but like, you know, being in a huge cityscape where there's massive skyscrapers around you or there's the Statue of Liberty or whatever, these are not natural things that exist out in the environment, but they can invoke the same sort of sense of, you know, scale and appreciation for the wider.
Society or like the history, you know, who built those skyscrapers?
And so, you know, humans like to have natural vistas as their backdrops on their computers, but they also do like to go up to the top of skyscrapers and look at cityscapes at night and this kind of thing.
So I think he's very much lionizing the Scottish heaths and this kind of approach.
But my argument is for what he is talking about, invoking a sense of scale and recognition.
That you are just a component of this wider world.
Actually, modern cities and stuff do that quite a bit, like the Colosseum and all that, right?
Darwin's Grandeur and Scale00:03:31
That's the product of civilization.
The Library of Alexandria, Matt, again, not something that arose in the jungles.
Yeah, so it's a common sentiment, right?
And it's not just conservatives that tend to romanticize and valorize nature, but it is a strong stream of thought on the right at the moment and in the past.
Where you know, you have this organic way of being connected with nature and the cycles of the year and the sun and so on, and yeah, you know, I think everyone has an appreciation for nature, as you said, though, Chris.
It isn't the only source of wonder and awe.
Lots of popular science writers, whether they're writing about evolution or writing about physics, writing about things like black holes, like Stephen Hawking does, or whatever, you know, people viewing the moon landing and stuff like that.
I felt awe when I was in New York City.
So, yeah, certainly there are other sources that are not kind of at that organic human scale.
Though, you know, we're all evolved creatures, so we all like nice green fields and forests and rivers and so on.
So, but yeah, I guess, you know, this is all part of the mental landscape in which McGilchrist inhabits.
There's a very clear dichotomy in his mind, which is the artificial, the mechanistic on one hand, and that is the modern, essentially.
And the pre-modern stuff is very great.
And anyone who's been on the internet, Or seen, or as you said, listen to sense makers will know that this is really, really familiar territory.
It's why they call paleoconservatism, right?
Because there is a big part of this return to nature.
And there is also a big part of it, which is based on nostalgia and valorizing Roman society, for instance, or Greek society with all of the masculine virtues.
There's not much mention about how they treated slaves or women or anything like that.
But, you know, because there were some downsides to those periods, it should be said.
But, you know, regardless, it is a very common and popular trope to think that we are in a state of decline.
Basically, the easy times have bred weak men and perhaps women as well.
You know, back in the olden days, men were real men, women were real women, and small fairy creatures from Alpha Century were real small fairy creatures from Alpha Century.
Yeah.
And like you said, Matt, you know, we've mentioned it before, but reading the book about the immune system and Appreciating the incredible complexity that is there and the kind of like evolutionary history that goes into, you know, just your body reacting to a cut or an infection.
It does give you a sense of wonder, if you want, at the kind of complexity of life.
And, you know, Darwin famously said, I'll read it, there is grandeur in this view of life with its several powers having been originally breathed into a few forms or into one.
And that, whilst this planet has gone cycling on according to the fixed law of gravity, from so simple a beginning, endless forms, most beautiful and most wonderful, have been and are being involved.
Right?
They're an example of somebody.
I think Emma Goldquist would probably claim Darwin as a right brained type person.
But yeah.
Yeah.
Billiard Ball Materialism Critique00:14:07
Although I think he wouldn't necessarily instinctively reach for a Darwin quote, because I think there's sort of two modes of appreciation.
You know, people like Richard Dawkins have.
Often rattle on about how much there is to be amazed about, just like you and I were about the immune system, how much there is to be amazed at evolution and just how it all works and how all the species came to be.
And from our perspective, this is wondrous and amazing and mind blowing.
And it doesn't diminish it at all to also have a scientific appreciation for how these things come to be.
However, there's a different mode of appreciation for natural phenomena.
A right brain?
Yes, there's a right brain one, which You know, it's not bad or wrong.
It's just, it's like poetic, right?
It's about, you know, the feelings and, you know, hazy images, poetry, right?
The humanities generally.
And, you know, I think for a certain temperament, that kind of appreciation of nature is just much more appealing.
And it's not one where you think about the how and the why, you kind of just lose yourself in the vibe of it all.
And this is not a thing that's, you know, localized to conservatives, right?
The human, The humanities and the sort of expressive arts and creative arts and so on, famously very much a left coated thing.
So, yeah, I think there are different tastes, if not hemispheres.
I will agree with Mikkel Christen that there are people with a spectrum of tastes.
Yes, yes.
Well, let's hear a little bit about his approach to science and what it's doing or what it's robbing the world of in certain respects.
So, this is him talking about physics and biology.
Let's go to physics.
Let's go to the physics of atoms.
We now know that atoms are nothing like little billiard balls bumping into one another that we thought we were.
We now know that the basis of matter is interchangeable with energy, first of all.
Matter is interchangeable with energy if that's what E equals MC Scrabb means.
And what exists, and we call the basis of matter, is probabilistic form fields.
And those things that we used to call particles have no existence in the sense of like little tiny balls.
Straight out of school, you might go around thinking.
So forget all that.
Spend a little time acquainting yourself with what physicists actually say.
So, physicists are much more, in my experience, philosophically sophisticated than biologists.
Biologists have been subjected to a really thoroughly uninteresting, unethical, intellectually barren way of thinking, which physics jettisoned over 100 years ago.
And I'm very relieved to say that biologists are beginning to realize they've got to jettison it as well.
So, just in the last 10 to 15 years, there have been enormous steps forward in biology, in which we now realize that organisms, living things, are nothing like machines and that the machine model is an extraordinarily dangerous model to apply.
It can help you solve small problems in a complex system.
I don't know how much to go into this.
I think.
Some interesting rhetorical maneuvers there, Chris.
I have thoughts, but would you care to comment?
Well, the main thing for me is that he talks about the billiard ball view of physics, right?
And he goes on to say, you know, physicists have moved beyond that.
And they're now, I think the physicists that he's talking about are the kind of ones that write speculative books about quantum mechanics and consciousness and so on.
I think that's the physicist that he likes, which is not representative of the general.
Physics field.
But setting that aside, he mentions it as like, oh, this is kind of the thing that you would learn in school.
But he seems to feel to recognize that always it was understood that those are just models that are intended to help conceptualize things, right?
It wasn't that people thought when they zoom in, they'll see these little circles visible under the microscope.
I mean, in modern physics, I'm talking about, like, so those are.
Just conceptual models, but he seems to present it that, oh, well, now we know the conceptual models aren't actually accurate because it's like, and you're like, no, but, and also that seems to be talking about the arrival of quantum physics, right?
Which has been around for quite a while.
So those insights that he's kind of suggesting, you know, like you learned this in school, but it's all wrong.
Well, actually, when those books were written, people were, Already aware of it.
It's just that, like, some of that is harder for school children to understand.
So you start with the simplified models and it becomes more complex as you grow up.
So, yeah, that was just something I noticed.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Well, you know, part of it is, of course, pedagogy, you know, using simpler models as abstractions to teach concepts.
But partly he's pointing to, you know, earlier, cruder scientific models, which have since been revised and made more sophisticated, right?
So I think this is an interesting rhetorical maneuver because he'll make a bunch of these claims.
Like now we know that evolution is not just about competition and survival of the fittest, it's more complicated than that.
Now we know that atoms are not little billiard balls.
And that organisms are not simply machines like Tinker Toy type things.
And the genome, the DNA is not the full blueprint in the sense that everything you need for ontogenesis actually now.
So he's pointing to real revisions.
Yeah.
But what he wants to do is to show that science generally and cellular and developmental complexity and biology in particular exceed simple mechanistic pictures, which is left brained.
And actually, science.
Is moving towards his view of sensemaking.
That's right.
And that's right.
So it's essentially, I think the rhetorical flow is you present this straw man or a very crude or early historical version of a scientific theory, say, look, now even science agrees that's completely wrong, then point at that delta and say that what's actually happening with science is science is converging.
To my non reductionist kind of cosmic worldview, which we're going to get into later, but that's not true.
That's not true at all.
Yes, you know, we even before quantum mechanics, they knew that atoms were not billiard balls, right?
They knew there was an electron and protons and neutrons, and a lot of it was empty, but that doesn't mean it was slowly converging towards Ian McGilchrist's religious cosmic views, which we'll talk about later.
So, um, yeah, I think it's a rhetorical trick, and it actually is in keeping with his pattern because if you remember our critique of the neurophysiology.
Was that he's leveraging the credibility and the authority of scientific neurophysiology to support his cosmic view of how the brain works in relation to everything, right?
So he's using the authority of science essentially against it.
And he's doing it here too by using these straw man examples of where science is doing what it should do, which is revise and make more nuanced and create progressively more sophisticated models of reality.
Yeah, yeah.
And like his main objection, which you heard there come out and was the title of this episode, was humans are not machines, right?
Where the brain is not like a computer.
He objects to these kind of analogies or metaphors being used.
And that is primarily what he's going to focus on in the next little bit.
I feel that there's an overstatement to the degree to which people using the metaphor of computation. mean that the brain functions exactly like a computer.
But nonetheless, anyway, let's hear him spell that out a bit more.
Humans are not like computers.
Yeah, I want to get into it.
I think it's interesting.
What do you mean when you say the idea that humans are like machines or computers is totally wrong?
Well, first of all, you can switch a computer off and come back 10 years later and switch it on.
It'll probably work.
You can't do that with a living organism.
I mean, it's a simple point, but it's an important one.
Yeah.
Machines can't themselves, in the process of making themselves, write the instructions that are the instructions to make themselves.
A machine can be made by another machine if the instructions are put into that machine, the first machine, it can make a second machine.
But there is no machine that, in its coming into being, is capable of planning its own existence.
And we now know that in the genome that was going to be the blueprint.
There's almost no information.
I mean, it's so vanishingly small.
Yeah, that was like getting a bit lost.
I think he got a bit lost there with what he's trying to say.
Perhaps he clarifies things later.
Well, he does.
I've got another clip that builds on it.
But I will point out, Matt, that his point here, the point that seemed to cause him to get a little bit stuck in what he was saying was about, you know, It's a common point.
Machines cannot be produced themselves without a set of instructions.
He wants to make the point that they're not, you know, unlike a human, right?
Because humans come with the blueprints to produce other humans embedded in the genes.
But he also says there's almost no information in the genes.
I mean, it also doesn't work because, you know, he also says that machines can make copies of themselves.
But then he gets confused because he then needs to say that people have a concept of themselves and themselves and what it was like.
Actually, no, people can actually get pregnant.
Of course, they want to get pregnant without really understanding how any of that stuff works.
But put all of that aside, Chris, I can help you out here.
I can help you out because where he's leading to, and you've probably got a clip here, is he's wanting to lead to an argument against materialism, right?
Yes, of course he is.
This is where he's going, people.
And all of this stuff about organisms and machines is a way to get there.
So, this is the argument that he would like to make, which is, first of all, that organisms are.
Complex and self organizing, irreducibly complex.
Yes.
So they're different from machines because machines are merely complicated, lots of moving parts, but complex systems are special.
Now, all of this has some degree of truth in it, even a lot of truth in it.
There are obviously important differences between machines and computer programs and organisms, right?
But those are the points he sets up.
And then he leaps to, therefore, materialism is false.
And that's where I think he is a complete non secreteur.
Well, let's hear him go through some of those points.
So he does give an example, Matt.
And you're right.
Essentially, he wants to argue for a biological teleology, right?
Like that there's a purpose to biological systems, which is not there in machines, except insofar as we insert it into them.
And the key thing is the missing premise, which is implicit in his argument, is that materialism requires everything to be mechanical.
Yeah, billiard balls, machines, you know, computer programs in a clockwork kind of sense.
But materialism doesn't require that.
And I think that's the logical error he's making.
Okay, but just to clarify so when you say that, what do you mean?
Like, because he wants to imply there's a will behind those things, which is oriented in them.
And you're saying materialism doesn't require that there's no will.
No, no.
So he's building up an argument about this fundamental distinction between organisms as complex systems that are not mechanical, billiard balls, clockwork, automata, right?
Yes.
So he's saying there's a fundamental difference there.
And therefore, you cannot describe humans and, in particular, what we do in terms of materialism.
Because he equates materialism with this basically a bit of a straw man of a mechanical automata.
It requires reality to be like a mechanical automata or billiard balls or whatever.
That's the argument he's developing.
And it sort of feels approximately right on the surface, but there's just a Big missing puzzle piece there, which is that it assumes that materialism as a sort of philosophical epistemic requires everything to be like that.
And that's just not true.
It's quite happy to encompass biological things like cells, which are squishy and gooey and don't behave like automata.
Worm Regeneration Confounds00:06:43
Exactly.
Yeah, yeah.
I see what you're saying.
Okay.
Yes.
Well, let's hear him flesh out those points with some examples, Matt.
I mean, look at him.
A nematode worm, you can cut its head off and it will regrow a new head.
And in that head, it will have the memories that the old head had.
Where do those memories come from?
Yes.
I mean, I don't know where to go.
There's just so many things to say here.
The human brain in utero develops on average 4,000 new neurons every second, 4,000 new neurons every second.
And when you look at the brain and you realize how complexly it is constructed, how important it is that different neurons are in the areas they are, where is the map for that?
It's certainly not in the genome.
So there you go, Matt.
You chop the head of a worm and it can regenerate and will have the memory.
So take that materialist.
How do you explain that?
Yes, I think you fact checked this one as well.
So the organism in question is planarian flatworms.
Yeah, not nematodes.
And he seems to be referring to an article by Shomrat and Levin, 2013.
And the way he describes it goes way too far because, on one hand, like what they did is they did several, they cut these flatworms in half or they cut their head off and then they put them in another environment where after they sort of regrew, which they do, they then measured what would happen to their feeding patterns.
Into which involved repeated exposure to one distinctive feeding area versus another, right?
So, the actual finding is based on some statistics of rates of feeding just doing their normal planarian stuff being slightly higher in a familiar environment than an unfamiliar environment, even when the head was cut off.
Have I reflect, have I summarized that correctly?
Yes, that's the research agenda, and probably worth mentioning that there were some extremely dramatic claims made in the 70s about this, which failed to be replicated, but then they're.
Were experiments as you highlighted that took part in the 2000s and 2010s, which claimed that some of it may have been dismissed too readily.
And then there is further complexity after that, which I might speak to.
But yes, so as you describe, that's the way to end.
Yeah, there's absolutely not, it's not that there's nothing to it, but it's just not quite the way the dramatic thing that he's describing.
So there were eight statistical tests that they did.
Six of the eight tests were statistically significant, but actually, both the non significant ones were the most direct.
Post regeneration comparisons.
So that's sort of one problem with the results.
And the other issue is that the statistical comparisons were one tailed.
And you always love this, Chris.
P values in the range of 0.027 for feeding latency and so on.
So, you know, I mean, there may well be something there, but what we're talking about is slightly lower latencies of feeding in these regenerated flatworms.
So, you know, there are a bunch of plausible mechanisms here.
Notably, they have very simple neurology, which may well be somewhat distributed, like would be distributed throughout their bodies.
So, there could well be retention in terms of their behavioral characteristics from that.
So, there's heaps of things you could say about it.
It's just that this is presented by McGilchrist in the context of saying, science cannot explain this.
This is wondrous.
You cut the head off a flatworm and it still remembers everything that it knew before.
And obviously, we don't know what flatworms know because we can't ask them.
What we do is we measure stuff like feeding latency, which is not.
As mystical or as baffling as it sounds.
Yes.
So I did look into this because this is the kind of thing where a direct claim is made and it's a dramatic claim.
So I was like, well, what's this?
Right.
And nearly every step of it is not representative of the way Mick Gilchrist has presented it, right?
Because he's basically presented it that just completely removed the brain and the worm.
Regrows it and it knows all the same stuff.
But, like, when you think about that for a minute, you have to think, what do we know that a worm knows and how do you train it and so on, right?
And so there's noisy stuff all along the way there.
And, you know, you chop the head of a worm.
So, are you sure you removed all of the, you know, the brain or the equivalent biology in a worm, the neural tissue and so on?
Like, it's not so simple as he presents it.
Plus, The actual studies, even the positive ones, are very noisy, meaning that the effects are not large.
They're not generally replicated reliably.
And there are various potential confounds about the effect.
If it exists, what could be causing it?
Right.
So his explanation is that, you know, he wants to apply this to like a knowledge coming from outside the kind of biology, right?
Like an orientating principle that cannot be reduced to the biological.
Material that's there.
And no, none of the evidence actually supports that.
Maybe slightly more so the claims made in the 70s, which were shown to be absolutely false, right?
So it's just this is the standard pattern with Dr. K or any of them is that they are citing something which is real, often quite interesting ideas, but their presentation of it is just like a really inaccurate and rhetorically infused version of it.
So you can't take anything that he says about studies.
At least value, just like with Scott Galloway or any of the other gurus.
Yeah, yeah, it's decorative scholarship, your wonderful term there.
And it again follows the pattern of leaning heavily on scientific studies, scientific evidence to use as a cudgel to say, look, science cannot explain this, which is kind of annoying, right?
Engine vs Digestive Complexity00:15:14
Especially when, as you say, it's just quite wrong.
The way he represents it, That the decapitated animal simply regrows a head containing all the same stored memories that it had before.
Therefore, it must be getting this knowledge or mind from elsewhere in the cosmos.
Totally misleading and wrong.
And it's being used as, you know, I guess a scientific finding being used against science in general, right?
Because where he wants to go with this is that scientists are baffled.
Standard orthodox scientific thinking cannot explain this stuff.
We have to embrace anti materialism.
And we'll hear about his philosophy later.
Yeah, yeah.
Well, let's continue on.
And you brought up the issue of like a complex versus complicated.
This is the kind of thing Sensmakers love to do.
Well, let's see here.
But it's the difference between a complex system and a complicated system.
So, a complicated system is one in which you just keep adding modules.
And so, for example, a fighter jet engine and the whole jet plane is a very complicated system.
But it's not a complex system.
A complex system is a system in which there are Whole ranges of processes going on that interact with one another in ways that we can hardly describe, in which bits of one cascade will then link into another cascade.
And we couldn't plan this even for one second in a single cell organism.
We couldn't map it.
There are in that single cell, in a second, millions of interactive processes going on, including feedback loops.
So the process that is coming out of one of these processes, feeding into another process.
It is nothing like a machine.
Machines are not like this.
The parts of machines are not changing as a machine is moving, but an organism's parts are changing and rebuilding and reconfiguring all the time.
So, if I might say so, a living being and a machine are almost as different.
In fact, I can't think of any two more different things in the entire cosmos.
And what's more, I would say that there is nothing in the cosmos that is like a machine except a few million lumps of metal that we created in.
The last few centuries, so you know, that speaks to the point you made, Matt.
That you know, he really wants to emphasize physical machines like a jet fighter engine built out of metal, put together, complex, right?
Static in comparison to the fluid and dynamic biological world, right?
But like, as he's talking about this, since he brought up computers, I kept thinking, okay, so like, you know, if you want to argue jet fighter.
Systems are like that.
I think the claim that there isn't complex interactive things going on in an engine might be debatable, but okay, let's accept it's still a lot less complex than a digestive system, for example.
But in that description, when you add in computer programs and the way that they operate, the potential feedback mechanisms and all this kind of thing, I think it becomes A little less of a clear thing now.
Maybe he carves that out at the end by saying, you know, the million lumps of metal that we produce that do that, but like machine learning and various other things, they have interactive feedback processes and stuff going on.
So, we absolutely can't wrap our heads around what's going on in those layers of a large language model, Chris.
Um, so it must be magic.
I mean, the issue here is that you know, like, remember, just before he described.
This materialist way of thinking that biologists have accepted and which physics has apparently jettisoned is totally barren, right?
And he relies heavily on this distinction between machines, which are comprehensible, and the marvelousness of life, which isn't.
And as you said, there's some problems with that because there are things going on, even in a jet engine, there are things going on with LLMs that are difficult to explain.
Even a simpler example, right?
Weather is far too complex to explain precisely, but nobody thinks that it isn't fundamentally based on.
Physical laws around air pressure and moisture and temperature and so on.
So, our inability to fully model it doesn't make it spiritual or ineffable.
And so, you know, in order for this argument to work, he's got to paint a caricature of science, which looks more similar to that vitalism era, like Descartes and his clockwork animal type of metaphors, has to rely on that a fair bit.
But the big problem there, which I think everybody should know, Is that contemporary materialism, which science is largely based on, accepts emergence and self organization and multiple explanatory levels?
We talked about it, right?
The different ways in which you can describe things.
All that stuff, when we're talking about the bits of the brain, that's operating on a pretty high level of description, right?
You can go far deeper.
So, all of that stuff, you know, nonlinear dynamics, chaos theory, complexity science, all that, they are all a part of physics and they are not a refutation of physics.
They are not.
Like a wedge or an open crack where you can funnel in ineffable mysticism.
So, systems biology studies exactly the kinds of properties that Midgilchrist likes to highlight again, never with invoking non physical causes.
Yeah, yeah.
Well, so let's hear.
Alex is going to raise some of these points to him, and well, kind of, and we'll hear his response.
So, This is, you know, Alex trying to get clarification about like what point specifically he's making about the distinction here.
I didn't say that, Alex, because somebody could reply, Well, I can make a machine that I can leave alone and I can program and it will make more machines.
That's not the point.
The point is, no one machine can write its own program in the process of coming into being.
Right.
And it's, and what I'm asking is, that's definitely a distinction of principle.
That's not just a case of like, Machines being a couple of hundred years old, as you say, and biological organisms being literally billions of years old.
And so having much more time to develop complexity and abilities that machines haven't sort of.
In other words, I'm trying to preempt what somebody listening to this might say in objection, which is that, yeah, of course, machines are totally different from organisms, but give machines four billion years to sort of evolve and communicate with each other and artificial general intelligence.
And all of this kind of stuff.
And eventually you'll end up with something that looks just like an organism.
The interviewer there definitely applying the Amiga rule in trying to find the most reasonable nugget to expand on there, Chris.
Yeah.
What do you think?
Well, you know, there's just that point.
You know, we brought it up about the reproduction thing, but like, I feel like McGill Chris needs to think this through better because he's saying, you know, there's no machine that if it just came into existence on its own that could produce other machines, you're like, there's no human that can do that either.
You have to be.
In an evolutionary chain where information from your parents has come to you and you have to interact with another separate person, right?
In order to reproduce.
So, his view that like a human could just come down, beam down, like it doesn't work, right?
Because they would have genetic material from their parents as well.
But he's actually even more confused than that because earlier on he said, Oh, yes, but of course machines can create copies of themselves.
But he sort of drifts a little bit, but they don't intend it or they don't do the act of creation.
I don't know.
So it's all very confused, the argument that he's wanting to make there.
But I think the problem is that they are both getting caught up in the details, and the details is where it all falls apart.
It works well if you stay in the realm of allegory and metaphor.
And broad intuitive concepts.
Because at that level, I'm sure people who have read his book will have found this, it can feel very compelling as long as you don't actually analyze what's being said.
The point that I think a lot of people will agree with, and which is probably not controversial, is like presently we don't have machines, even versions of AIs, that have their own independent.
Set of desires and wants and so on.
They have to be set by the software engineer or the programmer, what the priorities are.
And they're not an inherent property of the system.
Whereas life and biology do seem to have self organizing and principles that guide towards reproduction and so on.
Through the processes of evolution, which are understood.
But Alex's Correct to flag up is this actually a like a golden barrier that can never be crossed, or is this purely that you know this will be just something that is crossed in like 10 years?
We are declaring that it could never happen because it requires a biological substrate.
Yeah, it's got to be said, it's a very weak argument against materialism to be saying, Oh, look, look how different machines and living organisms are.
There's something ineffable and mysterious that must explain this difference, therefore.
Anti materialism.
There are better arguments you could go down, right?
I don't want to open any cans of worms, Chris, but you were getting at intentionality.
Yes.
And there's also what the philosophers call the hard problem of consciousness, which we've discussed before and we don't ever need to discuss again.
Or you could talk about accessing abstract truths and mathematical knowledge.
And I'm aware of there being arguments against materialism, which I don't actually accept personally.
But there are stronger ones out there.
I just want to point out that McGilchrist's resting his on, frankly, a pretty primitive one.
Well, Matt, you wanted them to bring up consciousness.
Your wish is my command.
Here you go.
Well, there are two separate points here.
Is it legitimate to make an organism more comprehensible, you think, by comparing it to a machine?
The machine's the only machine to be known and have.
And the answer is definitely no.
So, the other point you're making is a quite separate one, which is again a promisory one.
I mean, nobody knows what in millions of years.
There won't be machines in millions of years because we'll have destroyed ourselves and the planet.
But let's just suppose that machines could evolve.
It's really a bit of a cheat to say, I say now that if they're given millions of years, they will come to this.
Because we didn't, life didn't start in machines at all.
People say, oh, well, they could become conscious.
But how do we know that they could become conscious?
Where does that idea itself come from?
Makes you think.
Makes you think.
There you go.
Well, what's the problem, Matt?
There you go.
Some of the more higher level issues that you wanted brought in?
I didn't want them brought in.
No.
Yeah, look, I don't think the rejoinder there about, you know, what about, you know, what if machines could evolve for billions of years like people?
How would we know?
Like, that doesn't identify the biggest problems with McGilchrist's point of view, I think.
So it's beside the point, I think.
You don't want to provide like what the bigger problems are?
No.
I think the major problem there is that he's jumping from, oh, look, these two things seem very different.
Maybe a clockwork mechanistic model of organisms isn't the most useful one.
Therefore, you cannot adopt a materialist approach to understanding organisms.
That just doesn't follow.
That actually will take us, Matt, to you mentioned irreducible complexity, right?
Which raises the specter of intelligent design.
And you might be hearing in some of these points the ghost of intelligent design haunting the sentiments.
That is raised and addressed by Ian and Alex.
So let's hear.
I mean, the other thing that's quite interesting, just because people will say, oh, nonsense, evolution is completely has no purpose.
And I'm not going into intelligent design, I'm not saying I'm talking about intelligent design.
I'm referring to things that we do actually know.
So what we know, and Barbara McClintock won a Nobel Prize.
In the 80s, I think, of the last century, for her discovery that cells can, first of all, a part of a cell can respond to another remote part of the cell in an intelligent way when that cell needs something from that other part of the cell in ways that we don't understand.
But it can also very rapidly invent a way of dealing with a threat that it has neither been prepared for.
By its genes or by its heredity or by its own experience.
So, in other words, it is intelligent.
I say that, you know, a good criterion of intelligence is if this organism can see a new way of tackling a problem very quickly that it has not been prepared for in any way.
There is no antecedent for it.
So, you find that, for example, a particular Change needs to happen in an organism, a metabolic change needs to happen very rapidly.
And it's not one that it has any known mechanism for achieving.
Sometimes within as little as two or three days, it will have made a change that helps that organism persist in being.
And it doesn't have to wait for the two billion years that that change would have taken to happen randomly.
Teleological Design Arguments00:15:20
So biologists are realizing that very little is random in that way.
There needs to be a degree of order and a degree of disorder.
Okay.
All right.
Bunch of words there.
Can you summarize that for us, Chris?
Well, he's basically suggesting that through work like Barbara McClintock's 1983 Nobel Prize about genetic transposition, that these support the notion that there is kind of other forces acting in evolution and genetics that.
Insert a kind of intelligence where it's basically a bit like lineage theory in Brett's approach, right?
That, like, there's a storehouse of knowledge that the species, or maybe even pan species, are tapping into that allow them to come up with novel solutions to environmental issues or environmental resource issues, right?
That they otherwise could not solve through brute genetic, you know, evolutionary processes.
So, there are these kinds of deeper, if you like, processes.
Which we know about and which are challenging the productive approach.
Yeah.
Yeah.
So he's doing the, I have to say, decorative scholarship thing again, or rather just overselling, over egging a legitimate scientific discovery, which, as you mentioned, McClintock did find genetic mobility activated under conditions of stress, transposable elements becoming more active, producing genetic variation.
That kind of thing, right?
So, important and interesting work that he's alluding to.
The problem is the over egging, right?
Because he moves from that to stating that cells intelligently invent these novel responses to things that can't be explained.
Also, that it happens in two or three days.
That's not true.
Yeah, that's completely true.
And then pointing out this would take two billion years to happen randomly.
Right, which misrepresents how evolution works.
And, you know, a good example of why this is a misrepresentation is the immune system, your favorite thing in the world, Chris.
Yeah.
That can also respond to stresses and promote reactions and, you know, generate novelty, if you like, in terms of antigens and so on within a relatively quick period of time.
It doesn't make it a mystery.
It doesn't make it a mystery.
So, you know, where he's going with this, and it's really just a matter of it forming a little.
Decorative flourish in the broader and more speculative argument that he wants to work towards, which is after saying that he's not interested in talking about intelligent design, that he's perhaps not endorsing an overtly teleological view of things.
Actually, he is, right?
I think that's where he wants to get to.
Yeah, that is it.
So, like a reference, a real scientific discovery misrepresented to endorse much.
More extreme claims, and then attach it to like his religious and mystical teleological interpretation of the results.
And it's those other steps, not the first one, the one about the biological discovery and the Nobel Prize and interesting discoveries around the processes of evolution.
That is the non controversial part.
It's the second part that makes it controversial.
And that is the part that is like very weak and also.
Not supported by the first part, right?
So, like, the first part is in large part just there in order to provide validation.
Because, like, if you ask Barbara McClintock if her research supports this kind of teleological interpretation, I strongly suspect that she would not be endorsing that.
No, no, that doesn't stop these fellows from citing them.
Yeah, so we're getting pretty familiar with the McGilchrist two step at this point.
Beautiful mechanism that is being alluded to, but fully explicable within evolutionary biology.
It doesn't require explanation via some kind of ineffable cellular intelligence or directed evolution or any kind of designing mind behind nature.
So, it does not, in fact, support where he wants to go.
Yes.
So, let's hear him then move on a little bit more, still on the intelligent design question.
So, he's disavowed, you know, the embarrassing form of intelligent design, at least explicitly.
But let's see how much that holds up.
There's another thing you mentioned, which is that you said, I'm not doing intelligent design here.
I'm not talking about God.
Given the nature of my channel, we're very interested in religion and philosophy of religion.
I have to ask the question Does this not all point when you talk about sort of Non randomness and complexity, and the impossibility of biological matter just sort of springing up out of nowhere randomly by chance.
It sort of sounds a lot like many conversations I've had with theists.
And I'm not going to ask you if you don't want to say it.
It's in many ways a personal question whether you personally believe in God.
But do you think that this is pointing to some kind of intelligent design?
Well, to answer your difficult question, I think the answer is yes.
But of course, rather like all the difficult questions, There comes the rider, it does depend what you mean.
And what I don't mean by God is an engineer in the sky.
And it's that kind of idea of intelligent design that I would not accept.
In fact, I think that's a very left hemispheric idea.
It's the left hemisphere's way of flattering itself is to say, well, yes, of course, there could be a God.
It really has a kind of intelligence we have and simply is applying it on a large scale to a cosmic machine.
What instead I am suggesting is that the ground of being, which is another way of saying the God that is the source of being in the cosmos, is not chaotic, is not random, but is beautiful and has purpose.
In other words, has direction.
When you look at the cosmos, I mean, one thing you can say is that the movements, both inanimate and animate in it, Certainly seem to have direction to them.
They don't just go in any old direction.
They do tend to have consistent tendencies.
And those consistent tendencies are, if you like, either attractions, which I prefer to the idea of drives, but it may be more comprehensible for me to say those are drives in the cosmos.
Yes.
Right.
So there we have it.
He's not an intelligent design person.
That would be a left brain.
Yes, yes.
It would be so reductionist to put him into that category.
And it's also fair to say that he's not quite that, right?
I think it's called, what is it called?
Process philosophy or something.
But basically, yeah, he concedes that he's not an intelligent designer, but his position is that the cosmos isn't random, but it actually has a direction and kind of a response towards attractive forces.
So there is this apparent purposefulness in nature, but it doesn't imply a cosmic engineer.
But rather, it is dressed up in this process theology language.
So, I think there's a real distinction there if you want to get into the philosophy of these things, which I'm not interested in doing, between vanilla creationist intelligent design people and this philosophical position, whatever it is.
But still, it largely does endorse much of the things that intelligent designers endorse, which is that there is an inherent direction, there is an inherent purpose, and that things are drawn to move in a certain way.
And yeah, so I think from the same point of view, right, like it's there are more sophisticated versions, basically, of intelligent design where an intelligent designer might say that God is there and he's intervening directly in history, whereas a process theologist would say, no, there's not like personal intervention, but the cosmos is inherently directional.
It has this kind of stuff baked into it.
A creation of verticality, if you will.
Yes, that's right.
A vanilla creationist would say that the species were created by God.
Right, just like that, but yes, but rather a more sophisticated process theologist would say, No, no, evolution is real, but the directionality and the impulse towards these ends operates through it, right?
Um, yeah, so you know, it's slightly more sophisticated if you know, I don't know, I like, I don't respect that kind of sophistication, frankly, but that's my taste, but uh, yeah, that's that's I think a fair description of where he's at, yeah.
And you heard him reference God as the ground of being.
Right, which is a phrase associated with Paul Tillich.
I don't know how to pronounce his name.
Tillich.
Paul Tillich, who was a Christian existential philosopher.
Okay.
And sounds to me quite similar to Thomas Aquinas kind of things, right?
Arguing that talking about God as a thing or like an agent, right, is making a mistake because he is, or it is, the necessary.
Foundation on which all things exist, right?
So it's philosophers and theologians like this kind of discussion quite a lot.
And actually, you're going to hear more of it here.
So the future is not foreclosed, but it doesn't mean that it could be random.
It has directions.
Exactly what they will lead to, I don't think even the divine source knows.
I argue strongly that if there is a God, that God is not omniscient and not omnipotent, but is also not omniscient and not omnipotent.
What do I mean by that?
If you think of these things in a very left hemispheric way, the omniscience would mean that God knows everything that ever has been, ever will be, and all the possibilities.
And therefore, the future is known, everything is closed, and the whole business of us leading out our lives is really a sorry charade because we have no freedom.
And as it were, the cosmos is not achieving anything creative, it's just unfolding something that's already there.
And omnipotence can be of a similar kind that it means that God can just do anything, can make You know, two equal five or whatever.
I don't believe that God is of this nature, but I don't think that you can say, well, God is not omniscient or not omnipotent.
You can only say he's not omniscient and not omnipotent.
Well, there you go.
I mean, a left brain thinker like me might have problems with untangling, not being able to say it is God is or isn't omnipotent, but only that it is not omnipotent.
I've already lost the thread.
Yeah, this is a thing that philosophers in general have a lot of fun with.
Nagarjuna is like a Buddhist philosopher that had a similar discussion about emptiness, I think.
But it's like, I mean, this is a little bit mean, but it's a little bit like Jordan Peterson saying, I'm not saying that it's true, but it might not be wrong.
I think it's just.
I think it's like a simple rhetorical trick.
If you put enough negatives, if you layer them up, then people's brains just can't follow it and go, well, that sounds deep.
But I do, just on a side, Chris, but I do like how, on one hand, throughout, he talks about left brained people as being arrogant, dismissive, and basically all those bad things.
But he constantly refers to left brained thinking just with.
Such disdain.
Like, it's such a simple minded, reductive kind of thing.
Anytime there's any opinion that he doesn't agree with, he like throws in, that's like left brain thinking, right?
Like, he said, you know, the embarrassing intelligent design people, they're left brain.
These theologians who have deemed to respond to reductionist critique by treating God as a thing, they are also like left brain.
And so, like, it just bears repeating that this is just.
Identical to Ken Wilber's integral theory, where oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, all of the potential rejoinders or disputes with his philosophy are all symptoms of the lower colors, lower non integrated thinking, yeah, exactly.
Yeah, that's the way it is.
Um, just before we proceed, I just maybe this is a point to just point out what he's saying and why I think there's major problems with it, right?
Because it's fine, right?
If you want to be a process theologian, if you want to assert these things and say you believe them, then.
Fine, right?
Believe whatever you like.
But it's just worth pointing out here, right?
That the way the McGilchrist deploys it there has got serious problems, right?
Because he asserts this idea of a direction and of attractive forces that are going on there.
And it's doing incredible metaphysical work, but it's just asserted.
It's not even defined, let alone having any evidence for it being true or even being testable.
And making that inference from, oh, that things are non random.
That there is some direction to things to implying that there's a purpose, implying intent.
That's not established at all, right?
Like water flowing downhill and forming a lake or whatever, you know, it has a direction and so on, and there are forces acting on it.
It doesn't imply intent or a plan.
So, yeah, like I think this theological move where they do like to dissociate themselves from literal creationists and very fundamentalist literalists in religion because that's very unsophisticated and crude.
But what they do is they retreat to these elaborate and abstract formulations with undefined and unmeasurable things like directionality that is structured to resist falsification.
Theology as Window Dressing00:15:24
Like his idea of a limited God that isn't omnipotent, but kind of is.
We're unclear about that, whether he's not omnipotent or not.
But this is a kind of limited God that kind of persuades and attracts and evolves.
But that doesn't make any specific predictions.
There's no way to prove or disprove.
Such a thing.
It's just a bold assertion.
And I don't respect it any more than the literal creationists.
In fact, I kind of respect them a little bit more because they have the courage of their convictions.
Their metaphysics are stupid, but they just stick to their guns because they have faith and they're much more upfront about it.
I kind of prefer those people.
I'm not sure I'm on board with that set of it, but nonetheless, I do agree that there's a lot of that going on.
But to be honest, Matt, it just sounds like with your falsifications and predictions and all that, that's just very left.
Brian, to be honest, it's great that you're approaching that.
But let's hear a bit more right brain descriptions about old God up there.
Those terms don't really apply.
It's like if you ask people, is God green?
And I say, well, no, God's not green.
But, you know, he's not not green either.
I mean, it's just the wrong kind of terminology.
Yeah, so it's like asking if God is even.
And it's like, no, he's not even.
Yes.
But he's not odd either.
You know, it's just like the wrong terminology.
I mean, famously, Thomas Aquinas.
Is famed for pointing out that all religious language is analogical.
That is, God is not omnipotent, God is not loving, God is not powerful, God is none of these things, because these are human terms to sort of approximate the kind of thing that God might be like.
And maybe the only way that we really have the authority to use these as analogies is because we have like scripture using these terms, so we know they must be accurate at some level, but we have to keep in mind that God is not any of these things.
These are just essentially metaphors.
Well, there you go.
As you say, well, as I said, unfalsifiable.
There's nothing that can be said about God, but you know, it kind of is an evil.
You have to use human language.
Yeah.
Yeah.
You have to use human language, and we're all limited by that.
And Alex, I do like that Alex in general is able to just quite directly articulate what is being said and referenced, right?
Like, I think it's because his background is.
In theology, but he also previously was somebody more critical of these kinds of sense making type approaches.
So, like, he is correctly outlining there that, you know, ah, this is similar to Thomas Aquinas saying, well, all of the things that you may say or not say about God are not actually quite correct anyway, right?
Yeah.
Because you're expressing them in like human language and with human thought, which cannot comprehend.
The nature of God.
I got that impression too that he, you know, he's doing the excruciatingly polite kind of interview format where you don't actually overtly challenge anyone ever on anything.
But the way he does frame it is kind of subtly undermining a lot of the time by pointing out that, well, everything is all just a metaphor and analogy, though, isn't it?
So maybe we can't be too definite.
Well, let's hear Alex invoking the potential audience reaction to this, though.
With his audience, I think it's not going to be entirely like this.
But anyway.
When you first start talking in those terms, well, it's not that he's omnipotent, it's that he's not omnipotent.
People are probably going to be a bit sort of befuddled by that.
But if I'm understanding you correctly, you're meaning something a bit like that?
I am meaning exactly something like that.
I'm meaning that you're asking a question, which is a question you could ask of something that is already a creation, a machine or an object.
But God is not a machine or an object.
God is the terms, as it were, on which there can be anything.
So God is not the first cause in the sense of a first actor who temporarily started a process, but God is the prime cause in the sense that without which there can be nothing.
So the basis on which there can be something.
And the questions you can ask of that are different questions.
So, if you want to get into the be it, you have to accept there can't be any to be it without first recognizing that God is the source.
Yes.
And you have to reject all the binary thinking, all the binary thinking about it being omnipotent or not omnipotent.
It's both and neither.
Very sense making.
And this is the thing, I guess, it sounds very sophisticated, escaping binary logic and.
How's that?
Yeah, well, not to me.
But it obviously has the purpose of making these theological claims immune to rational evaluation.
You literally can't do it.
They are quite clear about that.
As soon as you start trying to do that, Then you're doing left brain reductive binary thinking.
And it's very reminiscent of Jordan Peterson.
Yes, very reminiscent.
Then there's two clips I have, Matt, that I think speak to fundamentally what Ian McGillchrist is about.
Then the first one is that he wants to make clear his precise position in these kinds of debates.
So listen to this.
And the first thing one has to say is one's bound to be ignorant in talking about these things, including people who say there isn't one.
I mean, it's just one of those areas.
And my idea, my hunch, my intuition, what speaks to me is the idea of a cause, a God, an ontological cause, a source of being, the ground of being, that, as I say, neither has determined everything, nor is completely absent.
He's not that sort of God that is.
You know, disappeared off somewhere and is not the least bit interested.
I believe that God is Himself in evolution.
I'm an evolutionary, a process philosopher.
If I'm a theologian at all, I'm a process theologian.
So I believe that the divine essence is in process all the time.
And some people, like Rowan Williams, to whom I've often talked, don't like this.
He agrees with me about almost everything I think I can say that I have.
Have written on these topics, but he's very cautious about evolution, not about evolution, about process theology.
Yeah.
Most theists or whatever they are generally have this concept of God as being singular and perfect in some way.
So if God's always evolving and changing, maybe improving over time, then that is something in contradiction, right?
Yeah.
Well, I don't know the specifics of why Rowan Williams disagrees with the specific.
Version of process theology that Emma Gilchrist has.
But I think the point for me is that this is what he's actually interested in is debating out the intricacies of his ontological model of God with the Archbishop of Canterbury, right?
Or the ex Archbishop of Canterbury.
Like that's what it's about.
And his kind of discussion about, I think of God as kind of like this, but he's not that kind of God, right?
He's this kind of God and so on.
And Really, all this stuff about biology and all that kind of thing, it's just window dressing for he wants to talk about, you know, this view of God that he has, which is a specific God traced back to like these theological debates around processes and all that kind of thing.
But it's nothing to do with the like the brain hemispheres or any of that kind of thing.
It's just like Ian McGilchrist's intuitions about the nature of the universe.
And for me, That should be treated as such.
Right.
Like, if you want to hear his thoughts about the nature of God, you know, you should listen to stuff like this.
But if you're expecting to hear a thing which is linked to science and biology in a legitimate way, it's not, right?
Like, none of this is related to any of the stuff that we talked about on the last podcast, really.
Yeah.
I mean, this is the fundamental tension, right?
If your point of view that all of this is metaphor and analogy, or, you know, you can't make these binary.
Claims of truth or falsity.
It's both and neither.
And if you are operating on this incredibly abstract theistic level, then why are you making claims about the left and the right hemisphere of the brain?
Why are you citing these scientific pieces of evidence that purportedly support your way of doing things?
Surely all of that is irrelevant, right?
This, you know, planarian flatworms both do and do not.
Retain their memories after they cut their heads off.
And same with all of the stuff.
Like he's got hundreds and hundreds of citations in his book to cherry picked neurophysiology in his book.
So, but why do all that if it's frankly irrelevant?
Later on, at one point, he does say, look, if it's all just a metaphor, I won't be particularly surprised if the whole left brain, right brain thing is just a metaphor and actually has no grounds in.
In reality, the important thing is the metaphor, then why bother?
Why bother with all of the scientific wing bedressing?
Yeah, but we know the reason why.
It's the reason that they introduce him focusing on those credentials and stuff.
Like without that, it's just like these kind of theological claims that I think are much less compelling.
So that is why.
But we will get to that, Matt.
We'll get to the whole metaphors thing.
But You brought up Jordan Peterson, right?
And like Jordan Peterson, he has a particular preference for Christianity, right?
Because of course he does.
If Christianity is true, its strength is to be able to say that God can be both transcendent and immanent in his creation.
I think that is an extraordinarily powerful idea that is best expressed through the Christian mythos.
And I use the word mythos without any sense that I'm talking about something true or not true.
I'm just saying it is a very powerful missile and may very well be true.
But if that's the case, then God can be both, in one sense, that transcendent being that is beyond all change and knows everything and so on.
But the God that interests me is the God that is in communion with this world and is, in fact, changing in response to it.
So, Whitehead, A.N. Whitehead, had this vision that the divine cause and the creation were evolving in tandem, responding to one another.
And I actually believe that the reason there is life at all is to have something that can respond to that divine source of being.
Because, again, as Whitehead pointed out, the business of life is a puzzle.
There you go.
Some even broader and more sweeping theological claims.
I'm at a loss.
I don't really have a response to that, do you?
Isn't it useful to have a version where you can retreat to?
Like, I'm not saying that God is a thing that is in the universe.
I'm saying it is the ground for which existence can even be, right?
It is the nature.
So, talking about, like, does it do this or does it not?
And also a God that is very interested in the processes of evolution and guiding them and interacting in the world in a specific way, right?
To orientate things.
So, suddenly it is no longer the abstract completely.
It doesn't make sense to use human language to discuss anymore.
Now, it is something that actually has to be understood and have a will acting on evolutionary processes, or you cannot at all understand what is going on in the biological world and with life.
So, it's like God is exactly as nebulous as he needs to be to escape any criticism of a directional claim or something like that.
He really likes the abstract God when it suits his purposes.
And he likes the more tinkerer type God, which he said that he doesn't like when it sounds good in his argument.
So, yeah.
And he likes making concrete theological claims.
Well, maybe not concrete, but strong.
Concrete is the wrong word.
Yeah, concrete is the wrong word.
Strong is the right word when it suits him.
But then when it suits him, you can retreat to.
Well, it both is and is not true, and it's reductionist to even expect that.
And you can't even use human language to describe this kind of thing.
So, well, look, McGilchrist likes metaphors and analogies, and I know you like them too, Chris.
So, here's my visual metaphor of what's going on with McGilchrist.
So, he's created like a pagoda, like imagine a pyramid built out of science, scientific facts, scientific bits of credibility.
And he takes these steps up the pyramid till he gets to the tippy top, and then he fastens a bunch of balloons.
To himself, they involve some of these things like the metaphor is the most important thing, and actual facts don't matter.
Binary thinking in terms of truth and falsity can't be done.
Human language to describe important stuff like God isn't really real.
And then he kicks away the little pyramid, which turned out to be just scaffolding, and floats away to where he wants to go, which is up in the sky, doing a process theology up amongst the clouds where nothing can touch him.
This is the mental model.
Wow, that's a hell of a metaphor, Matt.
Especially because it only was a pagoda for one sentence and then it morphed into a pyramid and then it was kicked away.
It's both a pyramid and a pagoda.
Panentheism and Process God00:09:02
This is so left brained of you to try to hold me to one.
That's true.
And it can be both kicked down as scaffolding and be filthy.
Yeah, so a perfect example, illustration of that approach and style of thinking, I think.
Yeah, so you know, as is the case, Matt, it's all very complex.
There's a lot of very fine grained theological stuff that goes into it, but ultimately, as is often the case in Sense Maker World, it comes back to Christianity.
Christianity is the most powerful instantiation of the mythos and it has an appeal.
God knows why.
Why could it be that all these middle aged people from Christian countries raised in environments with that being the dominant religious system?
Why would they turn?
To that, as the thing that appears to them, who knows?
Who knows?
It could be any number of reasons, but yeah, so there we go.
Though he thinks he likes the Christian mythos, right?
And he doesn't mean we're mythos disparagingly.
Yes, I know that.
And he thinks it's very important to carve out what particular type of Christian theologian he is.
If you're into Christian theological discussion, I'm sure this is great and exciting.
He does, however, bring up a topic which is close to your heart, Matt, which is panpsychism.
And I know that you like to discuss the intricacies of panpsychic approaches.
You've said it's a very coherent and beautiful system.
So let's hear his version.
Maybe this will get your juices flowing more.
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.
And, you know, 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.
Indeed.
Indeed.
So, yes, all very much in line with his anti materialism.
There's different ways of knowing Chris.
Some of them can't really be articulated, they're beyond true and false.
You can't put them in a textbook.
You either accept it or you don't.
So, kind of.
Yeah.
He kind of also assumes that if you read more philosophy, if you have an open mind, that fundamentally you'll come to agree with him, which again is slightly putting the cart before the horse in terms of things.
Is it possible for someone to be well informed on philosophy and theology and not agree with Ian McGillchrist?
And I don't mean just like minor disagreements about the details, but like fundamental disagreement.
Is that possible in his model?
I wonder.
Well, I think it is impossible because, you know, this epistemic that he likes, which is very Jordan Peterson esque, relies on metaphor, relies on allegory, and it's something you grok, you feel in your heart, and you either see it or you don't, and you have to be able to hold mutually contradictory things in your mind at the same time.
It's basically immune to being demonstrated wrong.
Either empirically, but also logically.
Yeah.
So it's logically impossible to prove it wrong.
So, kind of as he says, you either accept it or you don't.
Well, you might have made the schoolboy error of assuming he's a panpsychic like you.
He's not.
And there are important differences in his point of view from your broad standard Matthew Brown type panpsychic.
So, you need to stop calling me a panpsychic.
There are very literal people out there that have come to believe this about me.
Sorry, that's right.
I forgot you have some bespoke terminology that you're in group likes.
Whatever you call yourselves, Pat, we accept you here at the Coded Gurus.
But let's hear.
He's not like you and your rubble.
He's a bit, you know, a little bit more bespoke.
But this is life goes to a whole other level.
What life produces is creatures that can respond almost infinitely faster and respond to many more things that are in consciousness.
So, I believe that this ground of being is conscious and that all things that we call material are manifestations of consciousness.
Now, that is not quite the same as panpsychism in the sense that I believe that a rock has consciousness.
If it does, and I couldn't rule it out any more than I can rule out that one day in the future a machine might.
Become conscious, or I doubt it.
I can't rule out that a rock has consciousness, but that's not my meaning.
My meaning is that all things are in consciousness.
This is like a distinction between pantheism and panentheism.
So, panentheism is simply the idea that God is simply the sum of everything.
But panentheism, as I imagine you know, is the belief that God is in everything and that everything is in God.
And my belief about consciousness is like that.
I don't believe that consciousness is just.
As it were, literally in a teaspoon or something.
At least if it is, it's not the consciousness I can recognize.
But I believe that all the things that we encounter in our consciousness are manifestations of consciousness.
And matter is one way in which consciousness can manifest.
Yeah.
He's actually being very clear there.
He's delineated exactly what intersection of philosophicalslash theological beliefs he holds, I think.
Yeah, basically.
Panentheism.
Panentheism and idealism.
It's a bit of both.
So, the idealism part is that all things that we call material are manifestations of consciousness.
Yes.
So, this is quite a radical point of view and completely the opposite of materialism.
Dr. K. Obviously.
Yeah.
He talks about that.
Like Dr. K.
Well, Dr. K thinks the fundamental unit is like consciousness, right?
Right.
Yeah.
And so, Jordan Peterson obviously is in the same sort of mold.
And like Jordan Peterson, he's not just an idealist like that.
He's this panentheist.
So, that is, it's not just consciousness, it's God.
So, the underlying substrate of reality is consciousness, and the material stuff is kind of ephemeral and manifested by consciousness.
And it's not panpsychism, quite right there, Chris.
It's God is in everything, everything is in God, God is evolving.
It's a particular kind of idealism, I guess, where the primary consciousness is divine.
If I so, yes, have I made any mistakes there?
I think I've done it very well.
The amount of angels that are dancing on this pin has been nailed down specifically, very specifically.
It's very sophisticated, it's very nuanced, but it's also just radical, you know.
And I mean, that's the thing.
I mean, he's free to believe, everyone's free to believe whatever they like and tell other people, but it's not a There's no actual evidence for it.
There's obviously no evidence for it.
Like, there actually can't be by definition because he's already established that, right?
It's not amenable to normal standards of logic or evidence.
So it's just a very bespoke form of faith, really.
Yep.
Yep.
I mean, this is the kind of stuff that theologians really enjoy discussing, and more power to them when they're not claiming that it's supported.
By scientific evidence and based on the structure of the brains.
I don't have any issue with it, but sadly for us, that's not what Ian McGilchrist does.
And just to be clear, Matt, he does, and this is another conversation he has with a neuroscientist called Anilsef.
And they're talking about their different perspectives.
It's another wood paneled room and a lofty discussion being chaired, right?
Field Consciousness Claims00:06:48
And in that, he talks about consciousness and how he understands it to interact with the human brain.
Now, it probably won't surprise you that he doesn't think that the brain can explain consciousness, as we just heard.
But I think he does a good job here.
Of outlining what he specifically believes.
Yes.
I mean, essentially, I think there are three possible things that the brain can be doing with consciousness it can be emitting it, it can be transmitting it, or it can be permitting it.
Now, I don't think there is any compelling description of a mechanism whereby matter, if it has nothing to do with consciousness, can of itself give rise to consciousness.
I can't believe it emits it.
I don't think it just transmits it, but I think it permits it.
In other words, I think it shapes it.
And in this, I think a useful image is that of water falling on a landscape, and that water goes into streams, and the streams have banks.
Now, are the banks the water or the stream?
No.
Do the banks explain away the water?
Not at all.
But they do contain and shape the water for the time that the water is flowing through that river.
And I think that consciousness can be thought of in this sense as a probably indefinitely large volume or area of consciousness that is normally for us restricted to your consciousness, my consciousness, whatever.
And that makes it possible for us to lead independent lives.
But I don't think that it's ever completely cut off from.
A bigger field of consciousness.
I think it's simply an isolated area in a field of consciousness.
Yeah, yeah.
So it's a beautiful metaphor there the river, the banks.
I guess our brains are the banks containing the stream of consciousness that's flowing through us and eventually it reaches the sea, Chris.
And the sea, of course, is the divine consciousness where we all unite.
So it's a nice thought.
It's actually much more radical, I've realized.
Idealism than panpsychism.
So you often mock panpsychism, Chris.
We know your feelings.
And he said.
I'm defensive panpsychism.
I knew it was coming.
Go ahead.
But he frames his version of it as more nuanced and subtle.
But it's actually not a more modest position than panpsychism.
It's actually much more radical because panpsychists wouldn't say that matter is not real and fundamental.
Right.
And whereas for McGilchrist, Matter just is a manifestation of consciousness, right?
So basically, consciousness for him is everything, it's ontologically primary.
And so, just like Jordan Peterson, who's got the word and the ephemera of the material world is really not important compared to that substrate.
So, panpsychists think, well, there are some people, right, or dualists or whatever, I don't know what to call them, but some people think that matter can't explain consciousness, right?
He thinks so too.
But his position's even more radical because he's saying that consciousness actually explains matter, right?
So it's beyond that.
And as you pointed out, that's all fine.
You can say all these things and he expresses them well.
But this is the massive explanatory burden there that is not picked up.
There's no evidence for any of this and none of these questions are answered.
Like, how does consciousness produce the appearance of matter?
How does that happen?
Is that a.
You know, for reductive materialists like me, Matt, whenever he says, you know, this relationship between consciousness and matter, like, it's impossible.
To bridge, it doesn't make any sense.
So, obviously, it's not an emitter.
I'm like, what?
Like, I don't concede any of that.
I don't agree that the brain cannot produce consciousness.
All existing evidence indicates that Bruins is very important for experiencing consciousness.
And there's nothing without Bruins that we are of that has any conscious awareness.
So, like, he very quickly sweeps that away as, like, well, that's obviously a completely, you know, that just doesn't hold up.
And you're like, no, that is a perfectly legitimate.
Point of view.
And then he's off on the races, right?
Because whenever he's talking about, you know, it's like a river and the banks and the thing, the problem that he has there is that we understand water and banks and how they interact and the physical things that are interacting there, right?
And nobody's debating about the relationship between the two of them.
So his metaphor is it's like that, but for substances that we can't see and we don't have.
Evidence for beyond like religious intuition.
So it's always the power of the metaphor or the analogy that is doing the work.
And then, you know, we will hear, as you've flagged, that he thinks that's fine.
That's the way, you know, you need to reason.
But actually, metaphors can.
Metaphor is not evidence, right?
Like, metaphors are good.
I like metaphors.
But how you use metaphors is to help explain something.
That has other independent evidence for it, right?
It's a visualization tool.
It's a mental thing.
What does Dan Dennett call it?
It's an intuition pump.
It's a way to wrap your head around something.
But a nice metaphor isn't of itself evidence for something.
And that's the thing we continually see with our gurus.
Jordan Peterson thinks this too, which is that if you can imagine a nice metaphor, then that serves as a form of evidence that your position is true.
And it's really not true.
And the, there's so many, like it raises so many questions, this, his theory of the world.
Like, if consciousness was the primary thing, then why does the complexity of our nervous systems, like, why is it even needed?
Like, why is it so coupled?
Like, why do you only see consciousness in humans?
Why does brain damage reduce consciousness?
What about anesthesia?
You know, like we can see lots of examples of the mental, the physical one.
Suborned Will and Spycraft00:11:46
No, Interfering with the consciousness, you've got a problem there.
That's see, I've got the answer for you.
It's because this is the receiver, you know, like if you damage a radio, you're going to pick up the signal like in a garbled thing, but the signal itself underneath it is still crystal clear and pure, right?
The waves are still transmitting.
So, if you damage the receiving equipment, you would make the mistaken thing of saying, Oh, you've damaged, you know, consciousness.
But no, Matt, that is I get it, I get it, I get it.
I get it.
So, our brains and all the neurons and the neural firing and the neurotransmitters, everything that's going on in there, it's not actually producing consciousness.
It's a very complicated receiver.
All of that, but it just happens to turn out that the proper functioning of all those of everything in your nervous system has to be doing just what it's doing, otherwise, it won't receive the consciousness properly.
I see, yes, that's it.
Now, where that goes, by the way, and not in this conversation because this is with Alex O'Connor, right?
So he doesn't go this far, but you know, Mima, I'm a thorough person, I go and listen to many other conversations which you don't subject yourself to, generally.
So, um, he had a conversation with our Favorite orthodox woodcarver, Jonathan Peugeot, okay, about AI, consciousness, demons, various other things, right?
And it does relate, I promise you.
So they're talking about AI, and he's going to make a comparison here, talking about intelligence in the brain and that kind of thing.
But this is in the context of them trying to puzzle out what's going on with AI, okay?
So listen to this The brain is not intelligent.
It's a very complex structure.
But the brain itself is not intelligent.
What is intelligent is your consciousness, my consciousness, using that brain.
And I think that the way to think about AI is that it will never achieve intelligence, but it may act as a gateway for an intelligence.
And I think that's where I would agree with the idea of an alien intelligence, in the sense that we don't know.
What forms of consciousness exist in the cosmos, and we don't know how they can come to express themselves.
But one of the ways this has been traditionally thought of is that there are forces for destruction or forces for evil that can ingress into a situation and derail it, take it over, use it for their own means, towards their own ends.
And I think that that is a reasonable idea.
I don't, you know, nothing but a dogmatic belief that everything is nothing other than mechanical, which has no longer any basis in science, could lead people to think that we shouldn't take the idea of consciousness and drives within consciousness seriously.
And Matt, you laughed there.
What was funny?
That was funny.
But only the most dogmatic.
Believer in the now discredited materialist versions of intelligence and consciousness would think that actually brains are doing anything, but rather our brains are connecting to this deep ocean of consciousness that exists out there in the cosmos.
And by extension, AIs too are never going to be doing anything intelligent either.
But what they can do, and I have to admire him in a way for this because he is being logically consistent.
Just like our brains, they can connect to the cosmic conscious forces that are out there.
But there's a sting in the tail of this because not all of those consciousnesses are good.
There's evil out there that could be entering through the gateway of AI.
Wow.
That's pretty spicy now.
Getting pretty spicy.
And I think this actually is, to be honest, what Ian McGill Christ is actually about, having this kind of big idea discussion with someone like Jonathan Peugeot.
That's more what the whole left hemisphere, right hemisphere is in need of, right?
Getting into these big discussions.
And just to be clear, by the way, Matt, Jonathan Peugeot's response to this makes some points that, you know, a dogmatic reductive materialist might take some issue with, but he does have an answer to it.
So let's just hear, you know, where that conversation goes there.
Yeah.
And I mean, I think for people that when they hear this idea of disembodied intelligence that would want something, you know, they get freaked out and they start to think, oh, this is just woo.
A good way, I think, of understanding it is to understand it at a more local, at a more local, like the image that I mentioned, for example, this idea of spycraft and the notion that a nation or a group can be manipulated from the outside by someone who has a lot of.
Who's very tricky and is able to influence people in a direction that isn't towards their good.
And so anybody can understand that.
Like, that's not, I don't think that that's something that is weird or contentious.
Like, this is something that you've seen happen that you can notice that happening in different groups and it can happen in yourself too.
That's when you become addicted to gambling.
That's what's happening to you is that you're literally being, there's a will that is.
Colonizing you and it's taking certain weaknesses that you have inside you and it is leading you in a direction that is to your own destruction, but that is to the service of something else.
There's something that is benefiting from your actions.
It's just not you, it's something else.
And so I think that that can maybe help the more, let's say, the more materialist thinkers to see what it is or lower examples of what it is we're talking about.
Yeah, yeah, no.
A reductionist materialist.
He thinks in simple terms, one go, Hey, wait, this sounds a bit like woo that there's an ocean of consciousness out there and evil forces within that might be invading us through our brains and taking control of us and influencing us for their own ends.
They might be skeptical about that.
Yeah, they might be skeptical about that.
That's true.
But then you point out, Well, hold on, but addiction.
Matt, or intelligence agencies, don't these things operate in the world?
And like intelligence agencies, nobody says that intelligence agencies aren't, you know, organizing campaigns and stuff in secret and exerting the wills of nations.
And I mean, the addiction, people do talk about, you know, they're being controlled by the like, you know, the drug or the hunger for the drug or whatever.
And, you know, gambling, there's the gambling industry, which is hijacking psychology.
In what sense is any of that different than what they're proposing?
It's quite interesting because Peugeot there is another good example of their thinking in terms of analogies and metaphors.
So, you know, like imagine addiction.
Doesn't it feel as though an external force is taking control of you and forcing you, guiding your activities?
And so when a spy agency infiltrates another one, you know, that thing happens too.
So, therefore, It's the same thing that's going on with the cosmic consciousness and demons.
Like, I think he genuinely and they both would genuinely see that, oh, they've thought of an analogy here.
They've thought of an evocative metaphor that feels right.
Therefore, they're establishing the plausibility of what they're claiming.
Now, arch materialist that I am, I can actually pop that spiritual bubble for them, which is that although people talk about their consciousness being colonized or them being victims to.
External forces, the demon drink, right?
You know, these kinds of things.
What mainstream psychology and science would say is that that is all you.
Like, in the same way you want to eat the cake and you want to have the summer board for the beach, and the two things can coexist in the same being, right?
It doesn't require that there's an external cake eating monster that is taking control of me and making me conserve the cake.
No, human psychology.
Is just not the thing that there's a single homunculus there that's in control of every single thing.
We have conflicting drives.
Some of them are selfish, some of them are short sighted, and so on.
So, actually, materialist science and psychology can deal with the fact that we are complex entities with conflicting drives and motives.
And sometimes our physiological or psychological addictions can act against our better interests in health or life, but they can't.
They are attributing that to supernatural forces and they don't want to defend the existence of those supernatural forces.
So they say, well, it's just the same as all these materialist things that we acknowledge exist.
And it's like, no, it's not the same.
That's why there's a question around it.
And you know what?
Just to make it clear as well, so just to finish Peugeot's point there, there is a Lovecraftian aspect to the way Peugeot talks because, you know, he invoked.
You know, there's malign consciousnesses out there that mean us harm, and they go quite old, Mark, and they go quite deep.
While understanding that, you know, that maybe it's bigger than you think, you know, that maybe there are some wills that are ancient, ancient, ancient, and that have been even, you know, when we think of the way that ancients would worship certain gods to get certain behaviors to land in their, if you worship the god of war, Then you are submitting yourself to a certain pattern of being that wants something.
Okay.
Now, unfair of me there.
Unfair of me because, well, that's Peugeot.
We all know he's a metaphysical mediocre, right?
Who sees symbols in everything he looks at around him.
It's all religious symbols.
Ian McGillchrist, a more serious, scientific minded person, as he says, a skeptic amongst believers and a believer amongst skeptics.
So when he hears that, He does respond by saying, Oh, well, okay, that's a provocative thesis, and you've raised a lot of points there.
Schizophrenia Voices Debate00:03:04
I don't know that I would quite agree that addiction is necessarily caused by these external factors.
Well, yes, yes, Gosh.
Yeah, there's a lot there.
I mean, I think that on the question of addiction, I probably wouldn't see it quite that way.
What I would take from the lesson of addiction is that.
Your conscious will can be suborned by other processes which may be going on in your brain.
And I'm not sure that they represent another, I think they could represent another will acting.
And you think, oh, oh, good.
Okay.
Right.
But he does go on.
So, what he goes on to explain is that, you know, he was a psychiatrist and he had to deal with people with things like schizophrenia and, you know, addiction and other such things.
Right.
There are conditions, quite common ones, like forms of psychosis, where I'm not sure that it is wrong.
To think, at least to entertain the possibility of something happening here that has harm as its goal.
Because let me just give you a very striking but very, very common scenario, which every psychiatrist in the world will have seen.
Some parents bring a young man, as it usually is a young man, to see me, and they say, just recently, he's.
He's been locking himself in his room.
He doesn't show any interest in anything.
He says some very odd things from time to time.
And sometimes he seems to be preoccupied with something that we can't hear.
And so I take a history.
I suggest that he's developing schizophrenia or a psychotic illness.
And I say, well, there are various ways to treat this.
But certainly at this stage, the really important thing is to take some medication.
And he would treat them with medication, anti psychotic medication, usually, and it would help the people, right?
The voices that they heard in their head would go away.
So I discuss the medication, and I say there are certain side effects and so on, so you must be honest with me and let me know if you don't like them.
And so I, because such medication can act very quickly, often within 24 to 48 hours, to remove an acute psychosis.
So I usually review that person in a week's time.
And in a week, the chap comes in again with his parents, who are useful to hear the story from their perspective.
And I can see already that he's more himself.
He seems more natural.
He seems more open.
He's more expressive.
Ouija Boards and Psychic Influence00:08:58
Not perfectly right, but still there's been a change for good.
And so I say to him, how are you feeling?
And he says, well, you know.
I think better.
And I say, we talked about voices you were hearing.
Are they still there?
He gives a non committal kind of answer.
And then this goes on for a few weeks.
So, so far, this sounds pretty good.
A psychiatrist saying, hold on, let me just use my clinical experience to talk about medications that work.
And then he goes a slightly different route.
So, this is him talking, you know, he's done the treatment, but the patient, unfortunately, sometimes.
Uh, stops taking the medication or they crash, and what is the cause of that?
And let's hear what the cause of that is sometimes.
So, but this crash usually happens, it's very unusual that it doesn't at some stage.
And you know, when you talk about a voice in the past, people would have said, Well, there's a little goblin or a demon or something that's sitting on my shoulder and it's speaking into my ear and it's saying, You're worthless, you're a piece of why don't you go and jump off that building?
That is what they're hearing.
No, I mean, of course, I've treated loads and loads of patients with all sorts of diagnoses, and I have always treated them in the way that conventionally doctors would, and it's been mainly rather successful.
So, I'm not saying that the medications are not working or therapies are not working, but they might be working because they're pushing back against and making more difficult for some influence to be getting into an unusual brain.
So, if you think of it like this if you think of a brain as being a sort of beautifully crafted building where all the doors are sort of usable but secure, and you think of another building which has a A sort of different structure, and because of its different structure, it opens portals for something else to get in.
And that structure may allow that thing in.
And what you've really been doing is making sure the doors are properly defended.
So, and this is not as wacky as it sounds.
There are, I've been to a talk at the Royal College of Psychiatrists by a therapist that many psychiatrists in the room had used, who does actually.
Think that some mental illnesses are caused by a kind of possession.
And he talks to the spirit, and I've never attended one of his sessions, but says that he doesn't so much antagonize it, but as explain to it that it's in the wrong place and it needs to go somewhere else.
Amazingly, this seems to happen extraordinarily frequently.
And so that is an interesting sidelight on mental illness.
And now everybody says, oh, McGilchrist is completely mad.
He thinks that psychiatric illnesses are caused by demons.
But I'm just asking for an openness to the idea that there are psychic influences, some of which may not be benign.
That's fine.
You know, those people who will say he's suggesting there's demons like causing mental illness.
No, no, no.
He's talking about psychic influence from external sources that are not necessarily benign and can be treated if you imagine that your mind is a kind of palace where evil entities may enter and take control.
I'm certainly glad that he's talking to schizophrenic patients.
You know, he isn't anymore, but my God, Matt.
Yeah, it's very much, I'm not saying it's aliens, but it is aliens scenario.
Like that kind of disclaimer just carries no weight whatsoever because he is articulating the extension of what he's talked about just previously with Plate the Clips, that this is his worldview.
There is a broad ocean of cosmic consciousness out there in the universe.
It's full of Forces, powers, some of which are good, presumably, some of which are evil and wish us harm.
And our minds are like receivers that can tap into this ocean of consciousness.
And they're banging at the doors.
And sometimes they get in.
And you can treat it by explaining to them that they're not welcome and sort of push them out again.
But it's not demons.
Don't call it.
It is very much the Pajorian and the Egregores and stuff.
Like, I'm not saying literal demons, but also actually demons.
Yeah, now he is saying it's not demons, right?
I mean, he is talking about Joe, who's perfectly on board with demons.
But immediately after that thing, right, where he said, you know, oh, people will say immigrant requests is saying demons exist.
This is literally the next paragraph, okay?
That's going to go play you where he goes from there.
And it does seem to sort of undercut his disclaimer.
And can I just segue from there to, you know, you're aware.
As I am, that the church, I think the Anglican church actually, but the Catholic church certainly, and probably every church has its exorcists.
And you might think these people are crazy and dramatic, but actually they're very down to earth, rational, reasonable people.
And they work with psychiatrists and make sure that they're not doing something that the psychiatrist wouldn't recommend.
So, in a way, they're the end of the road when whatever psychiatric intervention hasn't worked.
And it can be assumed that this really is a kind of a possession that is resistant to change.
And they do have a very high track record of success.
But one of the things that really shocked me was reading that one of the Vatican most honored exorcists, most respected exorcists, was engaged in such an exorcism involving a young woman and he was casting out a spirit.
And apparently, I can only believe what I'm told here, but apparently her mobile phone started to receive messages that said, We are greater than you, you will never triumph over us.
I mean, if it's true, and I don't have reason to doubt it, it is extraordinary, but it would be exactly what I'd expect if AI opened up the door to such a thing.
I mean, until you've got AI and until you've got mobile phones and things, there isn't a way in which a maligned spirit can easily speak to me, unless indeed I develop a psychotic illness.
But it can now speak to all of us through our machinery if we offer it pathways to do so.
Well, it's a good thing you offered that strategic disclaimer just earlier about the demons because it sounds an awful lot like.
I mean, it sounds a lot like there's demons here text messaging people.
I mean, why?
There's no reason to doubt it, right?
Why would you doubt that?
I mean, if you heard that story, if somebody told you that they were getting text messages from demons, what reason would you have to doubt that?
Only an arch dogmatic materialist would have any skepticism around those claims.
And, you know, quite interesting to discover that before we had technology like phones and AIs, the demons couldn't really get in unless you had a mental illness.
Like, I guess, you know, typewriters, were they able to infest those?
I'm not sure.
Oh, Ouija boards.
Ouija boards.
Oh, yeah.
Well, Ouija boards are brought up as an example.
Of course, they are, Matt, as an example of like a technology through which demon influence previously traveled, right?
Now that we're building this massive, massive machine, you know, I think of a Ouija board as also a good example.
You know, when you're using a Ouija board, everybody puts their hand on the thing and nobody's moving it, but there's something moving it.
And maybe it's actually the unconscious will of someone in the group that's actually moving it, but you can't really know that.
And then you're basically yielding your behavior to an intelligence that you don't understand.
And it surprisingly will bring about types of coherence, you know?
And so, all of that can help people understand the difficulty of what we're doing because we don't seem to have the wisdom to see what it is we're submitting this machine to, except for maybe greed, like you mentioned a little earlier.
Metaphor Over Syllogized Argument00:15:23
And look, I'm playing these because, you know, in this conversation we've been primarily listening to with Alex O'Connor, of course, he doesn't go to this extreme that he's going with Pajot, but this is the same in McGilchrist.
And this is the quality of his thought, okay?
This is what it leads to.
That kind of approach that he's taking, where he heard a story about an exorcist who exercised.
Apparently, they're very successful.
They've got a great track record.
Now, of course, we don't need to get into how the numbers are crunched or anything like that.
No, it's very successful.
And of course, they do everything aligned with psychiatrists, only best practices for exorcists around the world.
Like, oh my God, come on.
So I just want to point out that, for all this deep theological and philosophical sophistication, At the end of the day, it's demons and malign entities sending you text messages after you've cast them out with an exorcist.
That is what Ian McGilchrist is into.
Exactly.
And that's why I said before, in some ways, I have more respect for your bullet headed fundamentalist who is a literal creationist, et cetera, because they don't put on airs, they don't hide behind complicated layers of philosophy because they believe the same things, right?
They believe in demons being a force on earth and literal God and all of that stuff, but they don't feel the need to dissemble.
So, I've never felt any inclination to dedicate much mental energy into digging into theology, Chris, for exactly this reason.
And I think now is probably a good time as any to just mention, Chris, that as you said, like this is the same McGilchrist who previously is citing scientific studies, supposedly building up.
A careful and well researched case for his model of the neurobiology of the brain.
So I just want to read out this quote If it could eventually be shown that the two major ways, not just of thinking, but of being in the world, are not related to the two cerebral hemispheres, I would be surprised, but not unhappy if it turns out to be just a metaphor.
I will be content.
I have a high regard for metaphor.
So this is a similar admission, I think.
Like it reveals that the thousands of citations.
In his book, are just optional decoration for, I mean, what he is really about, and this is the point you've been making, is this it's this conversation he's having with Pajot.
This left brain, right brain thing is really just a prop for the right brain thing encapsulating everything that he feels is good and true and beautiful and right about the world, including our communion with God.
So, all of the scientific stuff.
And all of the references to evidence and studies and so on, it's merely window dressing.
Yeah.
Now, Matt, just after we've heard all of that, I also want this to contextualize how Alex O'Connor is treating what Ian is talking about.
Because listen to this this is him framing what the discussion is covering.
And of course, he didn't hear all the stuff about the demon typewriters.
But he's been having a much more enjoyable, I'm not a, Pan psychic, I'm a pan atheist, blah, blah, blah, blah.
Yeah, so listen to this.
It's a far cry from the way that people will have been talking about God at a popular level, you know, 10, 20 years ago at the height of new atheism and their debates with evangelicals.
That was all very, I suppose, left brained.
It was all syllogisms, it was all debates about premises and technicalities and fallacies.
This is like a totally different approach to the question, which makes it difficult.
Like, suppose that we were sort of.
In some kind of debate about God's existence, and I'm the atheist and I'm here to criticize what you've just said.
There's kind of, it would be a very difficult thing to do because what you're doing is sort of telling a story about the nature of human beings rather than sort of making a syllogized argument.
And I think that that's an approach to the question which I've begun to find much more interesting.
Yeah.
Stories and metaphors are interesting, aren't they?
Like, it's very appealing.
Like, his story, a bit like integral theory, is a story of everything.
Like, it's a story of everything.
It's a story of our minds, our consciousness, God, and all of history.
All of history is encapsulated within it, and culture and art, and why some things are good and other things are bad.
It's a theory of everything, and it has that grand narrative.
And people who have read things by Jared Diamond or other kinds of popular science books that often do that same kind of thing, and you kind of see why it's very satisfying.
Some writer has attempted to Draw this broad brushstrokes narrative over it, and it feels satisfying because it appears to do so much.
But just like integral theory, I'd say McGilchrist theory has just got the feeling of being satisfied without explaining anything or being even correct in basic fact.
Yeah.
And, you know, for me, Matt, this speaks to Alex O'Connor really enjoys, you know, this kind of sense maker approach.
So it's a feature for him.
That they can escape through abstraction and not deal with concrete claims or this kind of thing.
And actually, you brought up the topic of metaphor.
So here's Emma Gilchrist talking about that.
There are certain things that cannot be approached in this way.
But let me take it just a bit further, because I don't want people to get away with the idea that there's something soft going on here in a dismissive way.
And this is to do with something you said about the only way you can approach God is metaphorical.
And I think that is.
That is true up to a point.
I'm not even sure you can do that.
I think the only way you can speak in prose about God is by saying things that God is not.
In other words, following the so called via negativa or the apophatic path towards truth.
And interestingly, science is like this.
Science can never assert a truth, it can only say that certain alternatives look to it to be untrue on the basis of the evidence so far.
So, it's not such a different process, but neither is metaphor.
Metaphor is behind all our language, including very much the language of philosophy, of mainstream analytical philosophy, and of science.
So, as I sometimes point out, even the words like abstract and immaterial are themselves entirely metaphorical.
The word abstract comes from Latin roots, meaning to be dragged away from somewhere.
In other words, taken out of its context and physically dragged somewhere else.
That is what it comes from.
Immaterial comes from a root originally, mata meaning mother, um, and going on from there to mean um, wood and as a symbol of things that are material and so forth.
So, all our thinking we couldn't get to first base without metaphors.
All our thinking is based on metaphor, and um, you you probably know that that is a highly recognized and respected stream in mainstream philosophy, yeah.
He obviously loves metaphor, like Jordan Peterson, uses it a lot and is very explicit, to his credit, about that.
That is the, it's a bit like consciousness is the foundation of the world, right?
And the material stuff is ephemeral.
For him, metaphor is fundamental.
And this stuff about, you know, logic and facts and being, you know, analytical type wordplay is really, You know, not very good.
It's very derivative.
It's like matter.
It's metaphor and symbolism that is key.
And, you know, that's the sort of justification for his methodology.
And that's why it's not possible to actually disagree with his worldview, his conclusions, because he will say that, you know, you're using the limited tools for the job, right?
You can only approach important things like what he's talking about.
Through these very kinds of metaphors that they've been using.
Yeah.
And actually, he kind of says in a clip immediately after it's a feature to be vague.
Right.
So listen to this.
And I think you should be as clear as the subject matter allows, but no clearer than that.
And if you try to make it clearer, you are now moving into error.
You're moving away from truth, towards falsehood.
And the really big questions are of this nature that they can't be clarified in that way and they can't be made consistent with.
The law of the excluded middle.
That all started with, of course, Aristotle.
And it has had an unfortunate effect that people are unwilling to see that a thing and its opposite may often obtain.
I mean, you can say that the law of the excluded middle is that any proposition P must be true or false.
It can't be both, it can't be neither.
Yes.
Saying that sometimes not only can it be neither, but it might be both.
And here again, we have to say the stuff that deals with the everyday is not a good way of dealing with the rarefied area we're going into of consciousness of God and so forth.
Of course, it doesn't apply to left right brain thinking.
No, no, that's you can get very concrete and specific about that when it suits you.
But at least when now he's being a bit more.
Honest and straightforward.
And, you know, he often talks like this.
He talks about his hunches, his intuitions about God and stuff.
He's interested in the shape of things, you know.
And so he's got an epistemological theory that's implicit in everything he does, right?
There are certain things that give real important knowledge.
It's obviously all right brain stuff, Chris.
So your aesthetic responses to nature, reverential experiences, and, you know, that sort of sense of gestalt.
Coherence and so on, you know, the resonance of a good story, a good narrative, a good liturgy, or a good metaphor.
So that's where truth is to be found.
Yes.
You are not going to find it in any kind of propositional arguments or logic or any kind of analytic kind of thinking.
You're certainly not going to find it in empirical measurements or experiments.
No.
And in fact, even analytical clarity, even being very clear and definite about what it is you're saying.
Is actually misleading, as he said just there.
So, yeah, he does adhere to an epistemic worldview that is, it basically exists in its own universe.
Like, there is no, I think if you're fully committed to that, then you live in a world with, you know, art and unicorns and vibes and feelings that you're getting from different things.
You don't live in a world where science and logic.
Actually, can prove or disprove things.
No, and demons are not responsible for AI.
Yes, exactly.
You don't know.
I'm not going to concede art to him.
I understand what you mean, Matt, that like that is part that can be part of that realm, right?
But, but not like a reductive science approach.
But I'm just sensitive to the fact that I know he wants to claim that the scientists simply can't, you know, can't appreciate art, don't have love because of this reductive approach.
So, Just to be clear, I'm just clarifying that for our metaphor, I like to be clear that yes, arts is in there and literature and so on, and he's fine with that.
We also have it on the other side, right?
Yes, yes, that's right.
We're allowed to appreciate art as well.
I have lots of art books on my shelves, and I'm still allowed to appreciate art and have feelings for that matter, Chris.
Wow, so you claim, so you're clear.
But you know, uh, there's just a few clips left, Matt, but two of them make it very clear the parallels with Jordan Peterson and you know, Alex O'Connor famously.
Managed to get Jordan Peterson to admit that he does believe in the resurrection, but it required a big long thing about the camcorder and all that.
But what Mikhil Christ has just outlined here is a defense of a Jordan Peterson style of religiosity, right?
And the funny thing is that Alex O'Connor talks as if somebody else did that.
You know, wouldn't it be very reductive if somebody asked about the camera and all?
But it was you, Alex.
You are the one that asked Peterson that.
And yeah, it's just a useful framing thing where.
Imagine those reductive people talking like that.
But he does ask McGilchrist about the resurrection and that kind of thing.
So let's see how he responds to that.
I think you can guess, but yeah.
So does that mean that it's inappropriate to approach those questions at all with sort of an empirical, material, worldly approach?
That is the approach of the new atheists of Richard Dawkins who say, and I suppose they agreed with you that, of course, there's a sense in which.
Religion as a subject, God as a being is a being of the right brain, of the right hemisphere, is a being of narrative and story.
And these are the kind of things that can be true and false at the same time.
But, however, the question of causation in the universe or the question of specific claims about Jesus dying on a cross, being born of a virgin, these are scientific questions that can be answered with specificity and empiricism.
Is it totally inappropriate to discuss this subject of religion with the sort of left brain approach?
Well, you have to understand the way in which.
I don't want to repeat myself, we haven't got time to repeat myself, but this distinction between mythos and as.
You see, mythos is not what we mean by myth is a lie.
A mythos may contain truth.
And when one talks about God being born in this way and suffering and dying, there is a truth in it.
Mythos Contains Hidden Truths00:04:42
Which is not equaled by any other story, any other revelation, any other idea about the nature of the creation and the nature of the cosmos that I know.
And people understand things in different ways.
And that's not just so, it's all untrue.
No, it may be very true, actually, that God does suffer.
I can't limit this being.
I can't limit this being and say he couldn't actually be in.
I think there's something divine in all of us.
And indeed, Christ himself thought that there was.
The sayings of Christ are very difficult to arrive at because it was all written down a long time after the fact and so on.
Well, there's the start of the answer, Matt.
That's going to go a little bit further.
But did that clarify things for you?
Oh, yeah.
Yeah, yeah.
That's exactly what I would have expected him to say.
Yeah, you know, it's just not fair to ask these.
Yes or no, factual questions about things that are in the realm of mythos.
And the resurrection of the Christ and his divinity and the spark of divinity in all of us falls into that class of truths that are deeper and actually the deepest form of truth that exists.
So you're just not allowed to do left brain thinking on right brain topics.
No.
And I actually think here that Imico Chris has picked up a technique from Jordan Peterson.
I don't know.
Maybe there's evidence that he used to do this before Peterson, but you know, the way Peterson will do exactly what he just did there, right?
That it's, look, it's more complicated than true or false.
And anyway, you know, again, there's the Christian exceptionalism.
It's the most, the best version of the story that I've ever heard and all this kind of thing.
But still, that's very much like in the sense of, you know, a narrative and story and influence.
It's not asserting the reality of it in a physical material.
It's saying that that is like kind of reductive and.
Useless, but then as you know, Peterson also, when asked, so you're saying, like, but the physical thing doesn't matter, he will say, Well, we don't know what you know a fully uh actualized person could do.
So, like, he wants to insert right the the magic and supernatural thing, or that's right.
And and he wants to say it doesn't matter again, like Gilchrist, he doesn't want to say that the brain and the neurophysiology of the brain doesn't matter, it's just subordinate to the metaphysical truths that he's interested in, right.
Yes, so now listen.
I think you'll hear the exact same thing here about the resurrection.
I would sort of say about the story, I can't rule out that very odd things do seem to happen at times, that the laws, the ordinary laws of the way things are, are not necessarily universal in experience.
And I couldn't rule out that somebody who had indeed been dead could, in fact, come back to life.
We don't really know what happens when people die, actually.
And people can be brain dead and have completely flat EEG traces for considerable periods and come back and not only come back, but come back with memories of what happened during that period.
Now, you know, you can argue about this, and there are people who will be never convinced, and there will be people whose conviction cannot be shaken.
As in most of these things, I tend to be a skeptic among believers and a believer among skeptics.
I tend to think that it's important to bear both possibilities in mind and not necessarily to have to collapse them to one or the other.
That's the left hemisphere going, oh, it's got to be a very narrow, simple truth like this.
It's got to be this if there's a camera there.
I don't know.
I'm not saying that that camera might not have recorded.
I just don't know.
And frankly, I don't care because the truth of this mythos is what is enacted in extraordinary services of worship, in rituals, in ceremonies that are ancient and bring one into contact with something, laugh at it who may, that is profoundly real and important.
So, what are we to make of that?
We should set aside these very simple minded, Almost adolescent ideas that it's got to be this, it's got to be that, and I need to know.
As I get older, I realize that there are fewer and fewer certainties, and there are very few certainties in science.
Secularist Attacks on Certainty00:04:10
Yeah.
You're not allowed to ask it, Matt.
You know, like, so they like, he's actually a bit worse than Peterson, because at least Peterson sticks out that he thinks, you know, you would see someone come out of the tomb.
But whereas his case, he's like, would I say there's someone?
I don't, like, I don't even care.
Like, if it was on the camera, it wouldn't matter.
But he at the start was like, People could rise from the dead.
And he gives near death experiences, Matt, which I looked in that literature.
It is a crux of it's terrible.
And he presents that, you know, saying both positions could be true or not true.
No, he wants to endorse the near death experience side and argue that the materialist reductionists are wrong.
But he presents it as he's being open minded.
But no, you're not.
You're like arguing we need to draw conclusions from near death experiences and the like layered interpretations.
But he doesn't have the like strength or conviction.
To actually just outright state that he believes that, but we know from like the conversation with Peugeot and stuff, that is the kind of thing that he believes in, yeah.
I mean, this seems like the now the standard modus operandi for the sense makers for Jordan Peterson and other not so much Peugeot, who's more straightforward about his um, but even him, even him, he does you know, yes, between between the two, yeah.
Like, if you've got him talking about demons, he you know, throws up a lot of dust in terms of their.
Tangibility, the reality versus non reality.
These are all adolescent questions asked by an immature mind, Chris.
Dogmatic minds, left brain minds, like that.
Dogmatic and immature.
That's the kind of person that might want to know those sorts of things.
Just don't ask.
The important thing is that it's ancient, that it's beautiful, right?
That it resonates with your soul.
That's the important thing.
So I do view all of this blather as apologia for.
For Christianity.
Yeah.
Yeah.
So religion and Christianity in particular, just because it happened to be concentrated in Western countries, you know, it's under stress, right?
It's under stress.
Secularist attack.
Secularist attack.
Modernity in general.
And it is responding in multiple ways.
One way to respond is the kind of fundamentalist, know nothing, you know, simple minded creationism that you might see in certain places in America and Australia.
Yeah.
You know, amongst a certain milieu.
But for people like McGill Christ and for Jordan Peterson, for that matter, they cater to an audience that likes to think of themselves as much more sophisticated, right?
Yes.
And therefore, their language and their apologetics for Christianity take this tone.
So, McGill Christ is a perfect topic for Dakota Nagarus.
It is absolutely religious talk, or rather, religious sentiments and arguments dressed up in.
Secular talk, right?
Scientific garb, yes.
And the other bit that tends to annoy me about these conversations is how much all the participants declare themselves the most modest, the most humble, their opponents dogmatic, ideologically captured, and so on.
And then they just at every step disparage their opponents.
You know, notice at no point have we suggested that like Emma Gilchrist doesn't have a rich inner life and friendship or the ability to appreciate art or whatever.
Our argument is like he's bad.
At representing science, and that's not what he's primarily interested in.
If you look at his output, right, and what he says, that's not what he allows to us or to Richard Dawkins, right?
He presents us as like soulless husks who are incapable of appreciating art or feeling deep emotions and so on because we're two left brain thinkers.
So, I've got a clip that comes towards the end of the podcast if I'm doing that, but let's see if you detect any of those sentiments here, Matt.
Lack of Intellectual Humility00:13:04
But actually, everybody needs to have.
A pretty open mind about things that they're not so clever that they can close their minds.
So that's really all I'm saying is that there is almost nothing of which we can be certain.
I'm not interested in certainty anymore.
I'm interested in the shape of things that speak to me as real.
And there are many things that speak to me as real.
The friendships that I have had, the love I have experienced, the beauty of the natural world, the astonishing richness of.
What science has revealed to me about the scale and the size of the universe, about the miracle of biology, all these things are things we cannot grasp fully.
And we need to get back to a place where we have more modesty and humility about what the human brain can do.
It would be, you see, it's irrational.
This is my point.
It's irrational to suppose that we can rationally achieve answers to the big questions.
That is a completely irrational.
Assumption.
It's a leap of faith, but not an accurate one in my view, not a good move.
We need to get back to a degree of humility.
We are evolving creatures.
If we evolve for millions of years from now, we could be capable of all kinds of things and know things we can't know now.
Why suppose that at this moment, I, Richard Dawkins, or whoever it may be, can know the answer to all these questions, at least potentially?
He may be very willing to say there's an infinite number of things I don't know the answer to.
But I'm not prepared to accept that I can't find them by doing science and following a logical path.
I mean, what's interesting is that most scientific discoveries were simply not made by the scientific method anyway.
They were made by imaginative leaps.
And I discuss a lot of these, both mathematical and scientific discoveries, in the matter with things.
Yeah, I mean, he's very clear about his worldview.
I feel like I have a good understanding of his likes and his dislikes and his aesthetic feelings.
He's.
There's no uncertainty about what he likes and dislikes, and like which is good.
If you want to live a good life and have one that is full of poetry and beauty and appreciation of the natural world, you ultimately agree with McGilchrist.
And if you don't, you'll end up, you know, like Richard Dawkins.
That's your true, which way Western man.
Yeah, I do, you know, there he says, like, I'm not really concerned anymore about like.
What's true, just like what appeals to me.
But the myth that gets me, Matt, is like all this appeal to humility and stuff.
He doesn't really sound that humble when he's talking about the things that other people are getting wrong and the specific type of pan-entheism that he endorses and the way the universe is structured.
Yes, he throws out a couple of disclaimers.
Now, I'm not saying that's definitely true, but he definitely is clear that materialism is absolutely a dead end.
There's no reasonable person that can do that.
And he really respects science, except the scientific method.
Like, that's the bit that he thinks is pretty, you know, he can do without.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
I mean, you know, I mean, in all fairness, he may not respect empiricism and materialism and rationality, but for my part, I don't respect his epistemics either.
So that's, you know, in fairness, I don't think it's shared disrespect.
Shared disrespect.
He's allowed to.
I'm not claiming to have mastered theology.
Well, I don't think there's anything to master.
So I am arrogant in the same way he is.
But what I will say is this, Chris, is that humility, I think, if you're approaching something like how the brain works, humility on a personal level is to go and read the literature and understand it properly and then represent it accurately and not whether or not it accords with your model.
Exactly.
Whether or not it accords with my pre existing preconceptions and what I would like to see, what would be arrogant?
It is to sort of sit in your leather armchair and go, I've worked it out.
I think I know what the two hemispheres are.
And then either ignore the literature or cherry pick it so as to fit it into the way that you believe that the brain fundamentally works.
And then when pressed, becoming aware that actually it doesn't fit the evidence at all, say that actually the evidence doesn't matter at all because my own thoughts about this in my armchair is actually the real truth.
And in fact, the way I'm doing it with metaphor and so on.
That's the only way to access the real truth.
I think that's pretty arrogant.
That sounds pretty arrogant to me.
And at the very end of the interview, he's asked about things that he thinks of that his work has achieved that he's proud of or this kind of thing.
And he gets to talking, Matt, about what happens when left brain people encounter his ideas.
So this could be our future.
Let's see here.
But one quite common one is.
I always have been looking back on it, a very left hemisphere person.
I didn't realize why people valued certain things.
But after reading you, you've opened my eyes to something.
I now kind of suddenly aware of things that I hadn't understood.
And as a result, my life is richer.
My partner is happier with me.
I seem to be doing better at work and so on.
So I never thought that I was doing that kind of work by writing these books.
But I think the first thing is to see what it is you're missing.
You can't know something until you have some idea of what it is that you're missing.
And what I try to do in my writing is open people's eyes to what it is that they have lost, because they believe me, they have lost an enormous amount.
The kind of ways in which people talk, the limited kinds of visions they have of the world are so sad these days because they rule out all the greatness that humanity has actually achieved.
Well, I think the Gilchrist could be missing a few nuts and bolts.
No, that's not possible.
I mean, but just like.
So, if you accept his ideas, your life will become better.
Your partner will be happier with you.
You'll do better at work.
You'll appreciate the beauty of the sunrise.
Your six life will improve.
You'll lose five pounds.
It's so funny.
So, this leads me to my final big thought on McGillchrist, which is that it's very simple.
I think his model is not as complex as he lets on.
You've highlighted that a lot of what he's doing is decorative scholarship.
When he's citing studies and so on, he's cherry picking or he's overstating them.
That's where the majority of his authority rests.
It is on the neuroscience mastery, it is on the background in psychiatry, and so on.
But what he's actually outlining is a metaphysical, religious worldview, which is fine insofar as each person is allowed to build whatever kind of philosophical and religious system that appeals to them.
You know, that's fine.
But he then connects that with the neuroscience and psychiatry stuff and says, well, first of all, you have a left brain.
Hemispheric split.
And this is very well documented.
And this explains most of what goes on.
And most of what goes on in the brain in the left side, it's necessary, but it's kind of very limited.
And if you lean too much into it, you'll be a very inhuman human.
The right side of the brain is like the better side and it's capable of all the higher things that humans value.
And then by extension, I and the things I like are all associated with the right side of the brain.
And when society, Values those more and agrees with me that conservative values are good and religion is good and so on, then society flourishes.
And if it at all shows preference for lefty things, which is science or reductionism or anything like that, then it goes bad.
So everything good in the world is associated with the right hemisphere.
And that is the things that me and my friends like and promote.
And also, there are demons and gods.
And if you don't believe in them, you're like a fool who's not.
Really appreciating the complexity of things.
That's like it's a really simple binary model of right is good, left is bad.
Everything on the right is everything McGill Chris likes, everything on the left is what he doesn't like.
And there's no greater complexity to it.
But the impressive thing is, he is lauded as this incredibly deep thinker with valuable insights by a whole swath of people out there in discourse land.
And well, yeah, I mean, Each to their own, I guess.
But that's my take on Gilchrist.
The Emperor's New Clothes is never a more fitting metaphor than with him.
Yeah, yeah.
So I'd done my research on Gilchrist, but I hadn't come across those clips you played towards the end when him and Peugeot were talking about demons, demons out there in the cosmos.
Not demons, but let's be careful.
Malign psychic energies.
Sorry, malign psychic energies.
That can enter your brain or text you, but need to be exercised.
But let's not call them demons.
It doesn't matter whether they're demons or not.
Yeah, so I think that is illustrative of the kind of rigor, I guess, he has, and really quite a radical point of view.
I mean, he was quite explicit about his sort of philosophical and epistemic point of view.
And it is really quite a radical one.
Like you said, you're free to accept it that consciousness underlies everything.
Matter is kind of created by consciousness, and that the only way to access truths that matter is through metaphor and this sort of intuitive right brain thinking.
And, you know, I think in terms of the structure of his theory, we really can't emphasize enough that it's very, very similar to Ken Wilber's integral theory, which is that your right hemisphere, it must be a huge place, the right side of the brain, because it holds everything, right?
Everything that McGilchrist likes, all the good culture, ability to communicate with God, all of these things, it's all in there.
But the important thing is that.
In order to have a proper understanding of the universe, the world we live in, and the human experience, you have to use right brain thinking, which is his thinking, which counts as inadmissible, annoying stuff like evidence or logic or even analytic coherence and specificity.
These things are sort of debarred.
So it's very similar to Ken Wilber's thing, which is that basically, unless you're the right color, unless you've ascended to Ken Wilber's.
Color, then in his schema, in his schema, yeah, that's good, yeah, that's right.
In his schema, then really all of the arguments against his theory are just symptoms of lower order thinking.
So, yes, so the theory becomes self sealing like that.
So, it has that structural property that is incredibly similar to conspiracy theories because conspiracy theories famously have the same kind of insulating, uh, well, they're hermetically sealed in that they can accommodate.
Any kinds of criticism by essentially ruling it out, treating it as inadmissible, which makes it so difficult to get anyone out of that kind of thinking.
Um, in other respects, I think he's he's just like Jordan Peterson in terms of his temperament, good replacement, actually.
Yeah, good replacement, actually.
Like, certainly much more psychologically well.
Uh, so yeah, he's got that going, but he seems like a happy person, yeah.
I mean, as happy as a like you know, aristocratic English guy can be.
But I bet that's pretty happy.
I reckon I'd be happy on a heath, I'd like to be on a heath.
Self-Conscious Waffling Answers00:04:11
So, yeah, no, I agree with what you said.
And I said, I think we covered everything.
Yeah, an interesting case.
An interesting case.
Yeah, I did enjoy, is one word for it, covering them.
And actually, I'm going to finish, just before we go to the Patreon shout outs, with a final clip, which is from him, which comes at the end of the conversation as a disclaimer for everything that you've heard before.
And it's one of these things that the gurus constantly do that I'm just impressed it works, where they basically say, You know, now, like in his case, you're going to hear him say, it may have seemed like I just outlined wishy washy things and did special pleading, but I didn't.
Right.
I'm like, well, can you just say that?
Because, you know, it does sound an awful lot like you did that, but I guess you've said that you didn't.
So you didn't.
So anyway, let's hear him add this to Stephen Redd at the end.
So at the end of the day, I just want to make it very clear that there is nothing smart, there is nothing clever.
About being dogmatic about these things.
And I'm not pleading for a kind of inherently wishy washy position.
As I say, I believe in being lucid and clear.
People sometimes say to me, Your writing is very clear.
You make very difficult ideas accessible, to which I say thank you.
It cost me enormous pains and a great deal of time to do that.
I believe in trying to make my thinking as clear as I can.
I haven't done a good job today, I'm sorry.
I'm just speaking off the cuff and my mind's not in the right place, but I do do that.
And I value lucidity and clarity, but only as far as they can be applied to the question that there is there.
Okay.
Yeah.
So, in case you disagreed with stuff that he was saying there and it didn't sound like it fully hung together, keep in mind he is actually very, very clear.
Many people say so.
Yeah, he's actually as clear as the question deserves.
Like, he's like a wizard.
He's never more as clear than they intend to be, even if it appears that he didn't be.
But, you know, I think he's just feeling a little bit self conscious that he has given some waffly answers.
And, you know, we've all been there.
We've all been there.
Yeah, we've all been there.
Maybe him more so than most other people.
But that's who can say, I don't know, right?
I don't know.
I'm just keeping my mind open to both possibilities, right?
Yeah, wouldn't want to.
Collapse it into a single master paradigm.
Well, I think the beautiful thing is that Nikhil Kristen and us sort of live in non overlapping magisteria.
You know, like he lives in his world and he has no respect for things in our world.
And I think the converse is true too.
I genuinely don't have, I don't respect theology really that much.
Oh dear, oh dear.
Well, okay.
Are you a big fan of the world?
I probably respect it more than you, but I will say that the interesting thing for me is that I will listen to Ian McGilchrist and Jonathan Peugeot, and I will listen to the sense makers.
I know what their arguments are, and I can represent them.
From what I've heard of McGilchrist discussing other people's ideas that he disagrees with, he doesn't seem very good at that.
And I doubt that he would waste his time listening to people.
Engage in such a materialist endeavor as what we've done.
Well, this is a common trait among our gurus, I have to say.
This is a common trait.
They do not.
It is a common trait.
To be clear, we're not talking about ourselves, but they do not tend to listen to competing theories or ideas or criticisms of any kind.
Their disinterest in such things is profound.
Dismissing Materialist Endeavors00:02:09
People would point out to me in response, Matt, that, well, but didn't he have a conversation with Anil Seth?
And yes, he did, but I listened to that conversation.
And to me, it's very clear that.
Anil is giving much more credit to Ian McGilchrist than vice versa, right?
Like, Ian doesn't seem that interested in Anil's perspective.
And I do have examples like we could illustrate that, but I'm not going to play them.
We've heard enough.
Okay, Matt, now the final thing Patreon shout outs.
We have a little housekeeping to do.
Would you object?
Would you mind if I just quickly shouted them out?
I would not object.
In fact, the whole two hour marathon, the two part series has been working up to this.
Patreon shout outs.
This is where it's at.
This is going to be a three hour episode, but five.
Yes, that's right.
That's right.
But okay, Soma, we have revolutionary geniuses and Galaxy Brain Gurus to thank.
Which would you like me to thank first?
Dealer's choice Galaxy Brain Gurus.
Okay, that's a good choice.
Let the top be first.
So there we have Chris, Michael, John, Chad Bigcock, spelled Bigcock, but pronounced Bigcum.
That is.
The name that they put on.
What?
Patreon sucks.
Lucas Jones, Seth, Louise Jones, Sylvia, and Ippi Donatello.
He has returned the prodigal son.
I don't think we should feel compelled to read out names that are beyond as rude.
Yeah.
Well, I wouldn't normally, but they actually went to the baller of getting an email address.
Their email address is chad.bidcock at scent.com.
All right.
You have to respect the commitment to it.
You've got to respect the work they put into that.
You know, that's it.
We did also have a request that somebody would like their name read out as the official Israel X Destiny Fund.
Patreon Contributors and Names00:04:34
So there we go.
You know, the secret.
Oh, yes.
The conspiracy about our funders.
So there you go.
I have done that.
Done that.
Now I'm out.
Oh, yeah.
They get a clip, don't they?
And here it is Hello there, you awakening wonders.
You may not be aware that your entire reality is being manipulated.
Become part of our community of free speakers.
We are still allowed to say stuff like this.
Science is failing.
It's failing right in front of our eyes, and no one's doing anything about it.
I'm a shill for no one.
More than that, I just simply refuse to be caught in any one single echo chamber.
In the end, like many of us must, I walk alone.
There's always a couple of weeks gap before I hear the supercuts, and it never fails to fuck joy.
It's so funny.
I think we can make another one with Russell Brown's recent appearance on Piers Morgan.
But yeah, yeah.
So now, Matt, the revolutionary geniuses.
Yeah.
Contributors, contributors, one and all.
And we appreciate them for it.
And they include, I'll read them quickly because there's more of them Wing Diggin, Ian Oberleague, John Townsend, Sebastian Karuna, James Onsley, Joss Wilkinson, Mikkel Glavind.
James Errington, Radoslaw Majesty, Michael Hutchison, Jason Worley, Clay Cobb, Mash Book, Duckman, Louise Stanley, Isabel C., Avery, Tom Stern, Bernhard, Joel Anderson,
Daniel Greek, Luke Dove, Steve Lundy, Alexander Bennett, Julian Rottenberg, Matsy, Jacob Mills, Daniel Mealy, Miguel Corkill, Anton Jall, Rob Dennis, Samarsala, Luke Ryan, Lance, Ida Dupont, Carl Watts, Joshua, and Legatus.
Those are our revolutionary geniuses.
Great.
And no obscenity in the names at all.
Well done.
Well done, everyone.
At least not in tongues we understand.
Here's your little clip through.
Thank you.
I'm usually running, I don't know, 70 or 90 distinct paradigms simultaneously all the time.
And the idea is not to try to collapse them down to a single master paradigm.
I'm someone who's a true polymath.
I'm all over the place.
But my main claim to fame, if you'd like, in academia is that I founded the field of evolutionary consumption.
Now, that's just a guess, and it could easily be wrong, but it also could not be wrong.
The fact that it's even plausible is stunning.
That actually, that clip speaks to the theme we covered, right?
Which is, you know, like I said, Jonah Pearson saying that could be right or it could be wrong, but it could also not be wrong.
Yeah.
Yeah.
And yeah, that's a profound statement.
Like, yeah.
Yeah.
Except there's a third category of truth beyond.
True and false, yeah, yeah.
So, a better form of truth, I might say, a better form of truth, yeah.
And we're going to be out of the SenseMakers for a little while.
You know, we get a blast of them.
Ian McGilchrist is firmly in SenseMaker territory.
We need to recover now from the high level ideas.
And we will return to the SenseMakers.
We've discovered Ian McGilchrist, Jordan Hall, and John Vervicki sat down to discuss not the meaning crisis, but the meta crisis.
So that's something.
Yeah.
Get ready for it, yes.
Like you've heard of the poly crisis, the meta crisis, the meaning crisis.
There's so many crises going on that we live in fraught times crisis of masculinity, crisis of masculinity.
That's all that's right about.
Yep, yep, yep.
We'll let you talk about any of them though, but they seem to do a fine enough job talking about them.
There's a lot of talking sense making territory about them, but um, yeah, so we'll be back, but um, maybe not immediately.
We've got a couple more uh cultish.
Gurus to take off the box, Matt.
Just a couple more fish to fry, a couple more cults to handle, then we're done with the cults.
Penguin shaped cult leaders might even be on the dock.
And just a little teaser.
A little hint.
A little hint for people.
Yeah.
Well, good night.
More Cultish Gurus Ahead00:00:34
God bless.
Go out and experience all the right brain wonders that are there, Matt.
And get out of your goddamn reductive left brain hellhole.
It's just all little atoms bouncing around like.
Billiards experience love, man.
Will you?
I will.
I will.
I'm gonna go tramp on the heath and open my soul to the infinite.
Yeah, not too open, not with your technology.
God knows what gets in there, but yeah.
Oh, yeah, that's right.
I'll be getting obscene text messages from demons.