The Matter With Things: Our Brains, Our Delusions and the Unmaking of the World

By Iain McGilchrist

Is the world essentially inert and mechanical - nothing but a collection of things for us to use? Are we ourselves nothing but the playthings of chance, embroiled in a war of all against all? Why, indeed, are we engaged in destroying everything that is valuable to us?

 

In his international bestseller, The Master and his Emissary, McGilchrist demonstrated that each brain hemisphere provides us with a radically different 'take' on the world, and used this insight to deliver a fresh understanding of the main turning points in the history of Western civilisation.

 

Twice before, in ancient Greece and Rome, the perception that evolved in the left hemisphere, which empowered us to manipulate the world, had ultimately come to eclipse the much more sophisticated take of the right hemisphere, which enabled us to understand it.

 

On each occasion this heralded the collapse of a civilisation. And now it was happening for a third, and possibly last, time.

 

In this landmark new book, Iain McGilchrist addresses some of the oldest and hardest questions humanity faces - ones that, however, have a practical urgency for all of us today.

 

Who are we? What is the world?

 

How can we understand consciousness, matter, space and time?

 

Is the cosmos without purpose or value?

 

Can we really neglect the sacred and divine?

 

In doing so, he argues that we have become enslaved to an account of things dominated by the brain's left hemisphere, one that blinds us to an awe-inspiring reality that is all around us, had we but eyes to see it.

 

He suggests that in order to understand ourselves and the world we need science and intuition, reason and imagination, not just one or two; that they are in any case far from being in conflict; and that the brain's right hemisphere plays the most important part in each.

 

And he shows us how to recognise the 'signature' of the left hemisphere in our thinking, so as to avoid making decisions that bring disaster in their wake. Following the paths of cutting-edge neurology, philosophy and physics, he reveals how each leads us to a similar vision of the world, one that is both profound and beautiful - and happens to be in line with the deepest traditions of human wisdom.

 

It is a vision that returns the world to life, and us to a better way of living in it: one we must embrace if we are to survive.

 

This ebook contains both Volumes I and II. Please use the latest version of your e-reading app for the best reading experience of this book.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Perspectiva Press
• Release date: Nov 9, 2021
• ISBN: 9781914568053

Book preview

THE MATTER WITH THINGS

OUR BRAINS, OUR DELUSIONS AND THE UNMAKING OF THE WORLD

IAIN MCGILCHRIST

Perspectiva Press Perspectiva Press

The Matter With Things:

Our Brains, Our Delusions and the Unmaking of the World

Copyright 2021 Iain McGilchrist

First published in 2021 by Perspectiva Press

PO Box 75779, London, SW15 9HW

www.systems-souls-society.com

All individual copyright information for material incorporated in this book can be found in the credits for the colour plates in volumes 1 & 2, and in the Acknowledgments.

The author and publishers have made every effort to trace the owners of copyright material reproduced in this book. In the event of any omission, please contact the publishers, who will make appropriate restitution in future editions.

Iain McGilchrist asserts his moral right to be identified as the author of this book.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior written consent of the copyright owner and the publisher, other than as permitted by UK copyright legislation.

ISBN (hardback) 978-1-914568-06-0

ISBN (ebook) 978-1-914568-05-3

A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

CONTENTS

A Note to the Reader

Introduction

THE WAYS TO TRUTH

Part I

THE HEMISPHERES AND THE MEANS TO TRUTH

1. Some preliminaries: how we got here

2. Attention

3. Perception

4. Judgment

5. Apprehension

6. Emotional and social intelligence

7. Cognitive intelligence

8. Creativity

9. What schizophrenia and autism can tell us

Coda to Part I

Part II

THE HEMISPHERES & THE PATHS TO TRUTH

10. What is truth?

Science & truth

11. Science’s claims on truth

Plates

12. The science of life: a study in left hemisphere capture

13. Institutional science and truth

Reason & truth

14. Reason’s claims on truth

15. Reason’s progeny

16. Logical paradox: a further study in left hemisphere capture

Intuition, imagination & truth

17. Intuition’s claims on truth

18. The untimely demise of intuition

19. Intuition, imagination and the unveiling of the world

Coda to Part II

Appendix 1

Appendix 2

Appendix 3

WHAT THEN IS TRUE?

Part III

THE UNFORESEEN NATURE OF REALITY

20. The coincidentia oppositorum

21. The One and the Many

22. Time

23. Flow and movement

24. Space and matter

25. Matter and consciousness

26. Value

Plates

27. Purpose, life and the nature of the cosmos

28. The sense of the sacred

Coda to Part III

Epilogue

Appendix 4

Appendix 5

Appendix 6

Appendix 7

Appendix 8

Bibliography

Notes

List of Figures

List of Plates

Acknowledgments

About the Author

Also by Iain McGilchrist

About Perspectiva Press

A NOTE TO THE READER

THE ARGUMENT

This book is what would conventionally be called a single argument. That is why I have chosen not to publish it as three separate books: one on neuropsychology – how our brains shape reality; one on epistemology – how we can come to know anything at all; and one on metaphysics – the nature of what we find in the cosmos. It is intended as a single whole, each part illuminating, and in turn illumined by, the others.

And yet it is also not an argument, in the conventional sense, at all. If we want others to understand the beauty of a landscape with which they may be unfamiliar, an argument is pointless: instead we must take them there and explore it with them, walking on the hills and mountains, pausing as new vantage points continually open around us, allowing our companions to experience it for themselves.

Such, at any rate, is my intention in this book. The journey matters – because it is the arrival. This means that while, for some, every succeeding view will disclose some new aspect of an always changing landscape with which at every turn they become better acquainted, for others the landscape will appear to be, unrewardingly, always the same landscape.

Importantly, this also means that the reader must not feel that the whole book has either to be read in its entirety or not at all. Continuing the analogy of a journey, it can be taken in (I hope) enjoyable stages; and can be put down and picked up, or explored according to whim. My hope is that my reader will end by reading much of it anyway, but do so in a spirit of an intellectual friendship, not as another challenge to fit in to a busy life.

At one point I was going to call this book There Are No Things. I changed my mind when I saw that it might align me with a nihilistic trend in post-modernism that I deplore. It also gave the impression that I was arguing for ‘truth-as-correctness’ rather than ‘truth-as-unconcealing’. My aim is to clear away the assumptions that cloud our vision: and the assumption of a materialist world composed of ‘things’ is the greatest impediment we face. In an obvious sense, there are things: my hope is that the reader will not abandon them, but reconceive them in a richer way. In summary, my trust is in my readers, that for them something deeper will be unconcealed, and that they will literally dis-cover a new vision of the world for themselves.

REFERENCES

I apologise for the number of references. If I were merely relaying the conventional dogmas of neuroscience, they would hardly be necessary: but I am not, and so they are. I very much hope that this book, large as it is, will be read by the widest possible audience of intelligent general readers. I have therefore taken care that no specialist knowledge is assumed. At the same time, I aim to make a modest, but I hope significant, contribution to neuroscience. This makes the presentation of a very large body of research evidence inevitable; that should not deter the non-specialist reader, who may feel free to pass over the detail, mainly contained in notes as far as possible next to the text to which they refer. For colleagues, I have tried to make references as easy as possible to track down. It can be frustrating to be referred (as now seems to be the norm) to a volume of a journal without being directed to the part, leaving one to guess which of, perhaps, 12 such parts to access; I have tried always to give the full necessary information, and, to save the reader’s time, to indicate precise pages, where relevant, within a larger work. I have saved space by removing the conventionally supplied city in which a book is published: to know that Oxford University Press is based in ‘Oxford, UK’ is hardly a revelation, and in today’s world where a publisher claims to be based is largely irrelevant.

TRANSLATIONS

In the book there are many translated passages, sometimes from sources that have not been translated, or might have been better translated, into English. In this I hope to have made a small contribution to future scholarship in the area. Unless the reader is referred in the notes to a particular English translation as the source, all translations may be assumed to be by myself. To avoid repetition, I have omitted reminders of this fact. Where possible, if using another’s translation, I have consulted the original; and where I rely on my own translation, I have generally given the original, so that those more adept than I can judge for themselves.

The problem of neurology is to understand man himself.

—Wilder Penfield ¹

ἡμεῖς δέ – τίνες δὲ ἡμεῖς;

But we – who are we?

—Plotinus ²

INTRODUCTION

Yes, a key can lie for ever in the place where the locksmith left it, and never be used to open the lock the master forged it for.

—Ludwig Wittgenstein ¹

This book is an attempt to convey a way of looking at the world quite different from the one that has largely dominated the West for at least three hundred and fifty years – some would say as long as two thousand years. I believe we have systematically misunderstood the nature of reality, and chosen to ignore, or silence, the minority of voices that have intuited as much and consistently maintained that this is the case. Now we have reached the point where there is an urgent need to transform both how we think of the world and what we make of ourselves; attempting to convey such a richer insight is the ambition of this book.

We have been seriously misled, I believe, because we have depended on that aspect of our brains that is most adept at manipulating the world in order to bend it to our purposes. The brain is, importantly, divided into two hemispheres: you could say, to sum up a vastly complex matter in a phrase, that the brain’s left hemisphere is designed to help us ap-prehend – and thus manipulate – the world; the right hemisphere to com-prehend it – see it all for what it is. The problem is that the very brain mechanisms which succeed in simplifying the world so as to subject it to our control militate against a true understanding of it. Meanwhile, compounding the problem, we take the success we have in manipulating it as proof that we understand it. But that is a logical error: to exert power over something requires us only to know what happens when we pull the levers, press the button, or utter the spell. The fallacy is memorialised in the myth of the sorcerer’s apprentice. ² It is hardly surprising, therefore, that while we have succeeded in coercing the world to our will to an extent unimaginable even a few generations ago, we have at the same time wrought havoc on that world precisely because we have not understood it.

This book, then, is about the nature of reality. It’s about how we are equipped by our brains to try to understand it, and what we can learn from that. It’s about the approaches that are available to us to gain an understanding of reality, given that equipment. It attempts, consequently, to give an account of reality that seems truer to the evidence than the one to which we have long been accustomed; one that is far-reaching in its scope, and consistent across the realms of contemporary neurology, philosophy and physics.

And from that follows an account of who we are, on which nothing less than our future depends.

What in particular I offer here is a new synthesis of philosophy and science which I believe is importantly, and excitingly, liberating to both parties. As a rule, philosophy and science go on as if the other did not exist. Scientists tend to see philosophy as a luxury they can’t afford to get involved with, a ball and chain that will slow them down in their race for the next discovery; philosophers to see science as somewhat beneath them, and in any case irrelevant to the ponderings of the mind on itself. But as the great physicist Erwin Schrödinger put it in Science & Humanism,

it seems plain and self-evident, yet it needs to be said: the isolated knowledge obtained by a group of specialists in a narrow field has in itself no value whatsoever, but only in its synthesis with all the rest of knowledge and only inasmuch as it really contributes in this synthesis toward answering the demand, τίνες δὲ ἡμεῖς; ‘Who are we?’ ³

Here Schrödinger is remembering Plotinus, one of the greatest of Greek philosophers; but his point is of a contemporary relevance that it is impossible to overstate.

Seventy years on from Schrödinger’s pronouncement, specialisation makes it even harder to expect more than a tiny handful of scientists and philosophers to be in a position to venture into a genuinely new understanding of their (in reality) common enterprise, one that has the potential hugely to enrich both parties. When any attempt is made to reach out a hand across the distancing void, it is almost invariably an exercise in reinforcing the status quo: the scientists telling the philosophers that they find only machinery, and the philosophers reflecting back to the scientists that a mechanistic view is the best option on offer. Since what you find is a product of how you attend, this is a more or less pointless exercise in making sure that both parties sink to the bottom in the shortest possible time.

Philosophy is engaged in weighing evidence so as to decide between conflicting ways of understanding the world, each of which has something to be said for it. This is why philosophy never ends. But what if, among the evidence, there were some way of recognising a particular take on the world as – not just floating in a contextual void, but rather – the predictable result of paying a quite particular kind of attention to the world? And what if we happened to know a great deal about the evolutionary purposes, and the consequences, of such a way of attending, including what weight we should attach to its findings?

And what if such insights, gained from science, and explicated by philosophy, could be applied in turn to the science of mind itself? Then might we not begin to see a fertile symbiosis of philosophy and science, helping one another, each turn building on the next, to rise to a new, more truthful vision of who, indeed, we are?

RE-THINKING SOME ASSUMPTIONS

At the core of the contemporary world is the reductionist view that we are – nature is – the earth is – ‘nothing but’ a bundle of senseless particles, pointlessly, helplessly, mindlessly, colliding in a predictable fashion, whose existence is purely material, and whose only value is utility. Neither Plotinus nor Schrödinger would have been impressed. I cannot remember a time when I thought this sounded at all convincing; and a lifetime’s thinking and learning has done nothing to allay my scepticism. Not only is it mistaken, I believe, but actively damaging – physically, to the natural world; and psychologically, morally, and spiritually to ourselves as part of that world. It endangers everything that we should value.

Reductionism can mean a number of things, but here I mean quite simply the outlook that assumes that the only way to understand the nature of anything we experience is by looking at the parts of which it appears to be made, and building up from there. By contrast I believe that the whole is never the same as the sum of its ‘parts’, and that, except in the case of machines, there are in fact no ‘parts’ as such, but that they are an artefact of a certain way of looking at the world. For this reason it is every bit as true that what we call the parts can be understood only by understanding the whole to which they belong. And with the reductionist outlook goes determinism, the belief that if we knew enough about the position and momentum of every particle in the universe we could predict everything that happens from here on in, including your every thought, desire and belief.

Even if contemporary physics did not demonstrate that this is an impossibility, there is a problem with this kind of argument. Reductionists and determinists unerringly fail to take account of the fact that their own arguments apply to themselves. If my beliefs are ‘nothing but’ the mechanical products of a blind system, so are all views, including those of the reductionist. If everything is already determined, the determinist’s tendency to embrace determinism is also merely determined, and we have no reason to take it seriously (since we are all determined either to believe it or not already). As the philosopher Hans Jonas observed, there is an unspoken hierarchical principle involved:

the scientist does take man to be determined by causal laws – but not himself while he assumes and exercises his freedom of enquiry and his openness to reason, evidence and truth. His own working assumptions involve free will, deliberation, and evaluation as aspects of himself, but those qualities and capacities are stripped away from and denied to the human object or thing that he is inspecting… ⁴

If it were not for the fact that this world-picture is mistaken, you might argue that we ought, nonetheless, to ‘man up’ and accept it. But it is, as I hope to demonstrate, massively mistaken. My aim is to show the reader the magnitude of the error, and its consequences. I say ‘show’, because I cannot, any more than anyone else, prove anything finally and irrefutably – the material with which we are dealing makes that impossible; but rather I wish to take my reader by degrees to a new vantage point, one built upon science and philosophy, from which, in all likelihood, the view will appear at the same time unfamiliar, and yet in no way alien – indeed rather the opposite. More like a home-coming. From there the reader must, of course, make up his mind for himself.

‘To put the matter in a nutshell’, wrote the philosopher Friedrich Waismann,

a philosophical argument does more and does less than a logical one: less in that it never establishes anything conclusively; more in that, if successful, it is not content to establish just one isolated point of truth, but effects a change in our whole mental outlook so that, as a result of that, myriads of such little points are brought into view or turned out of sight, as the case may be. ⁵

Such a whole shift of view, rather than the adjustment of a few points within a familiar landscape, is what I hope for my reader.

And that process must begin with the very idea of things. ‘The world is not just a set of separately existing localized objects, externally related only by space and time’, writes Tim Maudlin, Professor of Philosophy and Physics at NYU. ‘Something deeper, and more mysterious, knits together the fabric of the world.’ ⁶ Indeed, according to Richard Conn Henry, Professor of Physics and Astronomy at Johns Hopkins, ‘to see the Universe as it really is, we must abandon our tendency to conceptualize observations as things’. ⁷

Reductionism envisages a universe of things – and simply material things at that. How these things are related is viewed as a secondary matter. However, I suggest that relationships are primary, more foundational than the things related: that the relationships don’t just ‘connect’ pre-existing things, but modify what we mean by the ‘things’, which in turn modify everything else they are in relationship with. That is because what we are dealing with are, ultimately, relations, events, processes; ‘things’ is a useful shorthand for those elements, congealed in the flow of experience, that emerge secondarily from, and attract our attention in, a primary web of interconnexions. I have nothing against things, provided we don’t see them as primary.

In our ordinary way of thinking, things must be established before there can be relationships, and so this about-turn should seem paradoxical; but as I shall explain, paradox very often represents a conflict between the different ‘takes’ afforded by the two hemispheres. However, we must also be prepared to find that, as Niels Bohr recognised, whereas trivial truths manifestly exclude their opposites, the most profound truths do not. This is itself a version of the realisation that what applies at the local level does not necessarily apply in the same way at the global level. The failure to observe this principle underlies some of the current misconceptions of both science and philosophy.

I believe that nowadays we live no longer in the presence of the world, but rather in a re-presentation of it. The significance of that is that the left hemisphere’s task is to ‘re-present’ what first ‘presences’ to the right hemisphere. This re-presentation has all the qualities of a virtual image: an infinitely thin, immobile, fragment of a vast, seamless, living, ever-flowing whole. From a standpoint within the representation, everything is reversed. Instead of seeing what is truly present as primary, and the representation as a necessarily diminished derivative of it, we see reality as merely a special case of our representation – one in which something is added in to ‘animate’ it. In this it is like a ciné film that consists of countless static slices requiring a projector to bring it back into what at least looks to us like a living flow. On the contrary, however, reality is not an animated version of our re-presentation of it, but our re-presentation a devitalised version of reality. It is the re-presentation that is a special, wholly atypical and imaginary, case of what is truly present, as the filmstrip is of life – the re-presentation is simply what one might call the ‘limit case’ of what is real. Stepping out of this world-picture and into the world, stepping out of suspended animation and back into life, will involve inverting many of our perhaps cherished assumptions.

This concept of the limit case is one I will recur to. I am using it to mean that what is essential to the phenomenon has in this case reached its minimum, without being actually extinguished. It should not be taken as typical, but as the very opposite. Thus, reverting to the example of relationships and the ‘things related’, relationship is the norm; isolation, if it could ever be wholly achieved (which it cannot), would be the limit case of interrelation. Or again, to continue the image of the ciné film: in the Newtonian universe, the natural state of any ‘thing’ is stasis. According to Newtonianism, motion is an aberration from this primal state of perfect inertia, requiring the equivalent of the projector (some energy conceived as added from outside) to set it going. However, nothing we know is in reality ever entirely static; and relative stasis, not motion, is the unusual circumstance that requires explanation. Stasis is, in other words, the limit case of motion, in which it approaches, but never completely reaches, zero. Motion, then, is not an unusual departure from stasis, but stasis an unachievable imaginary state, which in reality can be approached only as an asymptote.

Let me give a few further examples, which I grant may seem at first sight surprising, even nonsensical. We could start with our own thought processes and their expression in language. The explicit is not more fully real than the implicit. It is merely the limit case of the implicit, with much of its vital meaning sheared off: narrowed down and ‘finalised’. The literal is not more real than the metaphorical: it is merely the limit case of the metaphorical, in which the wealth of meaning is collapsed into a 1:1 correspondence for a useful, temporary, purpose.

More importantly, it’s the wider cosmos whose deep structure we are inclined to misunderstand. It may seem obvious that randomness is the primary condition and that order is an unusual phenomenon that emerges from (how?), and is supervenient on, that primary chaos. However, order is not a special case of randomness, but randomness merely the limit case of order, which is the universal norm. Indeed, true randomness is a theoretical construct that does not exist.

Complexity and simplicity are relative terms. However, complexity is surely, we imagine, a more unusual state of affairs arising out of the agglomeration of more simple elements – isn’t it? I believe that this is a mistake – one all too understandable, given our world view, but a mistake nonetheless. Rather, complexity is the norm, and simplicity represents a special case of complexity, achieved by cleaving off and disregarding almost all of the vast reality that surrounds whatever it is we are for the moment modelling as simple (simplicity is a feature of our model, not of the reality that is modelled). In keeping with this – and, don’t worry, right now this should seem crazy – inanimacy is better regarded as the limit case of animacy, something I will come to later in the book.

Potential is not simply all the things that never happened, a ghostly penumbra around the actual. The actual is the limit case of the potential, which is equally real; the one into which it collapses out of the many, as the particle is the collapse of a quantum field. (The particle is not more real than the field, rather it is a special case of the field, in which its field-like characteristics are at a minimum.) Similarly, the wholly determinate, were it to exist, which it does not, would be the limit case of the indeterminate.

Straight lines, in as much as they can be said to exist at all, do so as the limit case of curves, which constitute all the lines in nature (even space and the paths travelled in it are curved). Linearity is the limit case of nonlinearity, and can be approximated only by taking ever narrower views of an infinitely complex picture. The discontinuous, in as much as it can be said to exist at all, is the limit case of the continuous, which is the norm. Total independence is an imaginary construct, the limit case of interdependence, which is universal.

And the whole is shot through with purpose (a notion, by the way, that has nothing to do with some sort of engineering God), and endlessly creative, not pointless and passive. This cosmos is one from which we are never separate, but out of which we arise, in which we dwell, and to which, finally, we return.

My ultimate aim is to contribute a new perspective from which to look at the fundamental ‘building blocks’, as we think of them, of the cosmos: time, space, depth, motion, matter, consciousness, uniqueness, beauty, goodness, truth, purpose and the very idea of the existence or otherwise of a God. These will form the subject of the last part of the book. Of course, these are vast topics, ones that have been grappled with by the ablest human minds for millennia; naturally I don’t presume to try to settle the disputes that have arisen. Moreover, I am very far from being the first person to argue that the prevailing view is badly mistaken. But I do believe that the hemisphere hypothesis casts a very revealing new light on those disputes and strongly suggests that the view that has prevailed – a view heavily indebted to a belief in reductionism – very seriously distorts the evidence of the nature of reality that is before our eyes if only we would attend to it fully. It provides a genuinely new and compelling context in which to revisit these issues, one that may encourage us toward very different conclusions.

At the end of the book I shall return to considering the possible relevance of all this to the crises the world so palpably faces and to the condition of our own culture in the West. By then, though, I hope the relevance will have become all too obvious to the reader through following the argument of the book.

A BRIEF CLARIFICATION

Before I go any further, I am going to offer some indications towards an important aspect of the philosophical position I have come to espouse, and which I will advocate in this book. It is one that has arisen slowly through reflections on experience, and, in a way, I would rather have left an expression of it to emerge more slowly and organically out of what I will be going on to discuss. But I think that without some preliminary statement, however brief, the reader might jump to erroneous conclusions which may ultimately make it harder to see the fuller picture when we arrive there. I hope that questions I raise without addressing them immediately here will be found to be addressed in due course: my position will become much clearer as the book unfolds. These are my first words, by no means my last.

I wish, at this stage, to do little more than clearly distance myself from two positions. In the last century or so, there has been a tendency, at least in popular discourse, to pull reality in opposing directions. Some scientists, whether they put it this way or not when they are asked to reflect, still carry on as if there just exists a Reality Out There (ROT), the nature of which is independent of any consciousness of it: naïve realism. These are usually biologists; you won’t find many physicists who would think that. In reality, we participate in the knowing: there is no ‘view from nowhere’. Of crucial importance is that this fact does not in any way prevent science legitimately speaking of truths – far from it; a point I will return to in subsequent chapters. We desperately need what science can tell us, and postmodern attempts to undermine it should be vigorously resisted. Two important truths, then: science cannot tell us everything; but what science can tell us is pure gold. Any attempt to suppress science (I distinguish science sharply from technology), for whatever reason, is dangerous and wrong.

Meanwhile, on the other hand, there are philosophers of the humanities who think that there is no such thing as reality, since it’s all Made Up Miraculously By Ourselves (MUMBO): naïve idealism. Such people, by the way, never behave as though there was no reality. Nor of course, by its own logic, can they claim any truth for their position.

These viewpoints are closer than they look. One party fears that if what we call reality were in any sense contaminated by our own involvement in bringing it about it would no longer be worthy of being called real. The other fears that, since we manifestly do play a part in its coming about, it’s already the case that it can’t be called real. But just because we participate in reality doesn’t mean we invent it out of nowhere, or solipsistically project it on some inner mental screen; much less does it mean that the very idea of reality is thereby invalidated.

I take it that there is something that is not just the contents of my mind – that, for example, you, my reader, exist. There is an infinitely vast, complex, multifaceted, whatever-it-is-that-exists-apart-from-ourselves. The only world that any of us can know, then, is what comes into being in the never-ending encounter between us and this whatever-it-is. What is more, I will claim that both parties evolve and are changed through the encounter: it is how we and it become more fully what we are. The process is both reciprocal and creative. Think of it as like a true and close relationship between two conscious beings: neither is of course ‘made up’ by the other, but both are to some extent, perhaps to a great extent, ‘made’ what they are through their relationship. If this seems at this point a step too far, the reader can, I hope, embrace a weaker position, that at least, as I say, our world is what comes into being in the encounter between us and this whatever-it-is.

The relationship comes before the relata – the ‘things’ that are supposed to be related. What we mean by the word ‘and’ is not just additive, but creative.

There is no one absolute truth about the world that results from this process, but there are certainly truths: some things we believe will be truer than others. A maximally open, patient, and attentive response to whatever-it-is is better at disclosing or discerning reality than a response that is peremptory, insensitive, or – above all – shrouded in dogma.

Importantly, what we experience is not just an image of a world ‘outside’, some sort of projection on the walls of a Cartesian theatre inside our heads, and watched by an intracerebral homunculus on an intracerebral sofa. As I will explain, such a viewpoint could be predicted to arise from the left hemisphere’s attempt to deal with a reality it does not understand, and for which everything is a representation. True, we can deceive ourselves by mistaking our own projections for reality – and we often do; but that does not entail that we are always victims of self-deception. When we are properly attentive, what we experience is the ‘real deal’, though it be only a tiny part of all that is. To appreciate that, you need the right hemisphere – and preferably, of course, both hemispheres – to be in play. It is true that we can see the world only partially, but we still each see the world directly. It is not a re-presentation, but a real presence: there is not a wall between us and the world. Our experience is of whatever-it-is and not another thing, even if we can’t get away from the fact that it is we who experience it.

Yet, I say, we take part in its creation. How can that be?

An analogy may help get closer to what I mean. There is such a ‘thing’ as Mozart’s G minor quintet. It is in a way quite specific. It certainly is not a fantasy, and it cannot be made up by me any way I want it. However, it doesn’t exist in the closed score on my bookshelf (the potential alone is there). It doesn’t exist in Mozart’s mind, either, because he’s dead, and the moment when he died made no difference whatever to the existence or the nature of the quintet. And there isn’t a single ideal quintet that we are always imperfectly imitating in our encounters with it. It keeps coming into being, it keeps becoming, each time a mind, with all its history and preconceptions, encounters it, or when many minds do so together. Each time it will be real. And each time it will also be different, although it will be recognisably the ‘same’ piece of music. It is certainly not a matter of ‘anything goes’. Not every rendition will be equally good, or equally true to the spirit of the quintet. And saying so should not be a problem: in life we don’t find it difficult to discriminate between better or worse performances, and, crucially, we expect at least a degree of consensus on the matter among those who know enough to recognise a good performance when they hear one.

However, no-one would expect me to say precisely how I know that it is a ‘true’ performance of the work, let alone to prove to them that it is. At best I could point to certain aspects of the performance, and hope my fellow-listener picks up. And that’s not just because of the particular nature of music. No-one expects me to say how I know that my understanding of Hamlet is more or less true, either. As a critic of Hamlet I state what I see: people either ‘click’ with what I say – get an insight from it – or don’t. They either feel that I (and now they) know more about Hamlet, or they don’t. This is not to give a single crumb of comfort to the ‘my view is as good as yours’ types. There are, very clearly, better and worse interpretations. I could get it indisputably wrong, for example, by claiming it is really an account of peasant life in Azerbaijan in the tenth century, or, less dramatically, but nonetheless clearly, by claiming that it is primarily a critique of James I’s foreign policy. There are in fact an almost limitless number of ways in which I am free to get it wrong.

I believe philosophy is like that. With the best will in the world, on both sides, I can’t make you see what I experience as the truth. I can never convince you of a point of view unless you already, at some level, get it. As Friedrich Waismann put it,

We cannot constrain anyone who is unwilling to follow the new direction of a question; we can only extend the field of vision of the asker, loosen his prejudices, guide his gaze in a new direction: but all this can be achieved only with his consent. ⁸

We can’t make a plant from a seed; we can, however, choose to stunt it or permit it to flourish. I want to permit something that I believe is already there in the reader to flourish. Philosophy may at times aspire to be, but cannot ever be, coercive: it cannot compel to a point of view. It can only allow an insight to dawn. Sometimes this can happen quite suddenly: I hope that will be the experience of at least a few of my readers. Plato described the process as a spark that crosses the gap: ‘suddenly a light, as it were, is kindled in one soul by a flame that leaps to it from another’. ⁹ The truth is not arrived at ultimately by argument alone, though discussion plays a valuable role along the way in dispelling misconceptions (if it didn’t, I would hardly have bothered writing a long book): in the end every individual must choose what carries conviction, commands allegiance. The experience of understanding involves a shift from what seems initially chaotic or formless, to a coherent stable form or picture, a Gestalt – or from an existing Gestalt to a new and better one, that seems richer than the one it replaces.

The idea of a Gestalt is central to this book: by it I mean the form of a whole that cannot be reduced to parts without the loss of something essential to its nature. Indeed, what I hope to offer in this book is just such a Gestalt – one that is based on an understanding of the import of the structure of our brains.

The flow of the universe is always creative, though it has order, and is not random or chaotic; the world is always a matter of responsiveness, though it is equally not a free-for-all. It is a process of creative collaboration, of co-creation.

In that spirit, I now want to modify my image of the quintet, which corresponds to some, but not all, aspects of reality. What if the music is not Mozart, but something more like some sublime jazz, or an Indian raga or Portuguese fado? Something we improvise – within bounds. Whatever it is will emerge from a balance of freedom and constraint. It won’t exist until it is being performed: no-one can know exactly what it will be like. But it will not be random: it will emerge from the players’ continuous interaction, and from the music’s own ‘history’ as it unfolds; what comes next will be anticipated by what has gone before. It will also be moulded by the imagination, skill and training we bring, our past experience of playing (together and apart), the conventions of certain traditions, and shared expectations, quite apart from the fundamental laws of acoustics. Our co-creation of the music does not occur ex nihilo, and is not just a projection of ourselves. Yet we, and you, partake of its making, even if we are only listeners.

Our immersion in a culture of recorded music, in which we are passive and inert consumers, encourages us to think of music as a ‘thing’, separate from the hearer and the musicians who make it. Yet any performer who has had the experience of being taken up by the flow of either music or dance, of being ‘in the groove’, knows this is a dreadfully reductive account. To be in the groove, in the flow, is to feel oneself played by, as much as playing, the music. As Yeats says, ‘How can we know the dancer from the dance?’ ¹⁰

Again, just because I use music as an example, I am not making a point specifically about music. Music happens to be a very clear case of how what we take to be a thing emerges from a complex of relationships, both those between notes and those between individual consciousnesses. But all our experience, not just in music but in life, both mental and physical, is of such a complex flow, a constantly unfolding, responsive dance of reciprocal gestures. It exists in process and in relationship; our taking part in that reciprocity does not leave us inhabiting a solipsistic fantasy, but, precisely, confirms that it is not a solipsistic fantasy. We interact with one another and the world at large in a myriad ways without being able to have more than limited control of the outcome. What comes to be does so through an interaction of a multiplicity of elements, some ours, some not.

Whatever-it-is-that-exists-apart-from-ourselves creates us, but we also take part in creating whatever-it-is. By this I do not only mean the common sense view that I have an impact on the world, as the world has an impact on me: that I leave my footprints. That would lead immediately to the reflection that I am very small in relation to the world, and so effectively my impact is so small that for all intents and purposes it can be ignored. There is, it might seem, an inexpressibly vast universe and an inexpressibly tiny individual consciousness (I’d say that this is the left hemisphere’s attempt to represent spatially and quantify something that is experiential and developed in time, but I hope that will be more comprehensible when we come to the discussion of time and space in Part III). Such a reflection seems to posit an objective position – the view outside of history or geography, time or space – a view from nowhere, in which all can be measured and compared. It implies a Measurer of all the measurers, measuring the other scales and putting each part in its place according to its overall worth. But though that cannot be, the alternative is not just a merely subjective position, either: this very polarity – subjective/objective – is misleading. In the fado, in the raga, in jazz, it is what it is because of me, and I am what I am because of it. I will have much more to say about the crucial issue of the subjective/objective ‘divide’ throughout this book.

Similarly whatever-it-is is potential until the encounter: in each authentic encounter – one in which the individual truly apprehends and is apprehended by this Other – the Other becomes fulfilled. Each time this comes about in a unique fashion; but one that is not alien to the coming into being of that Other as a whole. And the actualisation, which at first seems to be a narrowing or collapse of potential, positively adds to the now enlarged field of the potential, which only discovers itself through (the repetition of) such actualisations.

Within my experience of the world, very much can be changed by my response to whatever-it-is – in a sense everything can be changed. Though that may seem to be ‘just for me’, how big or small is that? We cannot weigh consciousness against the universe. It is like trying to say precisely how much you love someone, if you really love them. It is not fixable in space or quantitative, but qualitative and experienced in the living flow of time. And if things turn out to be interconnected, not atomistic – and they are – each consciousness has its impact on the universe that cannot be quantified. ¹¹

Does this mean that there is no such thing as being wrong? Of course not. Though there can be no rules for jazz – indeed if it merely followed rules it would no longer be jazz – there are many things that just can’t be done; much as in the middle of a flamenco dance, whose form is not predetermined, one cannot suddenly start balancing on one’s heels, or stop and scratch one’s nose, or do the can-can, without the dance ceasing to be. Flamenco is more formalised than jazz, but even in jazz there is literally no end to the list of what one doesn’t do. However, there’s no recipe, no procedure or algorithm to follow, for getting it right, either. ¹² An algorithm is what the left hemisphere wants; the recognition that it’s got to be free of any algorithm, yet not at all random, is characteristic of the understanding of the right hemisphere. We can specify what is not jazz, but not what is. Our knowledge of anything unique is similarly apophatic.

Just as ‘and’ is not merely additive, ‘not’ is not merely negative. Both are creative. Indeed resistance – ‘not-ness’ – is an absolute necessity for creation, another apparent paradox that will become clearer as this book unfolds.

That of which I have no inkling – whatever I just don’t ‘get’ or ‘see’ – does not exist for me. That manifestation of whatever-it-is is simply not available in my world. But this doesn’t mean that things come and go from everyone else’s reality dependent on my understanding of it. If I can’t see the moon, that doesn’t mean it stops being there for others. If we are all tuned in to the same whatever-it-is – and I believe it makes no sense to assert we are not – something very like what I can’t see is probably being seen by others, and ultimately that will affect me. It is perfectly possible to be deceived about, or to be in denial about, an aspect of whatever-it-is.

As I hope to demonstrate, there is much evidence that the left hemisphere is less veridical, more ready to embrace denial and more likely to be taken in by an illusion than the right. For that to be the case, there has to be some test of reality. Truth certainly has a meaning – I shall explore this explicitly in Chapter 10, which is devoted to the question. But truth, like reality, is an encounter. It is in the nature of an encounter that more than one element is involved. And what I find in whatever-it-is does not pre-exist my encounter with it. There must be a potential, true enough, but it is actualised only in my encounter with it. The encounter is genuinely creative. The whole universe is constantly creative – but not out of nowhere.

We are dealing here with a phenomenon or process whose shape can be intuited, but to which our everyday language is not well adapted. When the world is viewed as a flow, albeit a differentiated one, rather than as a succession of points or a world of things, these problematic formulations can be approached from a fresh point of view, wherein many of the difficulties get to be resolved. But that is to jump ahead. For now, I will simply say that I hope that in what follows the reader may come to see grounds for a view that the world is a seamless, always self-creating, self-individuating, and simultaneously self-uniting, flow that is only truly knowable as it comes to be known. (I say ‘it’, for convenience at this point; it is a question worth considering whether this is the appropriate pronoun.) ‘It’ is like a stream, with its whirlpools and eddies, that come into being for a time, and resolve; while they are there they are present to all observers, even measurable up to a point; and yet, while distinct, they are inseparable from the stream, not just in the sense that without the stream they do not exist, but in the sense that they are the stream. And creativity is always discovery of the self as well as of the other. ¹³ Once one sees this, the objectivising, time-denying, change-denying, diagrammatic mentality of modern Western thinking appears as I believe it is: a hindrance, not a help, on the path to truth.

The world we know cannot be wholly mind-independent, and it cannot be wholly mind-dependent. Once again, this leaves no room for a philosophy of ‘anything goes’. What is required is an attentive response to something real and other than ourselves, of which we have only inklings at first, but which comes more and more into being through our response to it – if we are truly responsive to it. We nurture it into being; or not. In this it has something of the structure of love.

Where this leads will, I hope, be clearer by the end of the book, when I will return to its implications. As I say, I have reservations about the usefulness of such a statement as I have given at this stage. It is rather like trying to convey the ‘meaning’ of a novel or a film by a couple of sentences outlining the plot in advance. The very people for whom this excursus was designed are the same ones at risk of getting too hung up on the detail of terminology, rather than seeing what is being pointed towards. That can only be recognised, not defined: in this it is like the Zen image of the philosopher pointing at the moon, while those around him are focussed on his finger. If I may borrow the words of Fichte:

I have sought so far as possible to avoid a fixed terminology – the easiest way for literalists to deprive a system of life, and make dry bones of it … It will be necessary first to obtain a view of the whole before any single proposition therein can be accurately defined, for it is their interconnection that throws light on the parts; a method which certainly assumes willingness to do the system justice, and not the intention of merely finding fault with it. ¹⁴

Once again, the whole illuminates the parts as much as the parts can illuminate the whole. To the left hemisphere, you find the truth about something by building it up from bits. But, as the right hemisphere is aware, to understand it you need to experience it as a whole, since the whole reveals as much about the nature of the parts as the parts do about the nature of the whole.

This clarification was necessary, because I will be explaining that the world we experience – which is the only one we can know – is affected by the kind of attention we pay to it. This implies that there is no simple and single, wholly mind-independent, truth. What I did not want to appear to be saying, at any cost, was that there is no such thing as truth; or that reality is simply made up at our whim. Absolutely not.

ATTENTION AND THE BRAIN

Attention changes the world. How you attend to it changes what it is you find there. What you find then governs the kind of attention you will think it appropriate to pay in the future. And so it is that the world you recognise (which will not be exactly the same as my world) is ‘firmed up’ – and brought into being.

What, then, is attention? Is it really just another ‘cognitive function’ of that supposed ‘machine’, the brain? It’s clearly something pretty special if it takes part in the creation of the only world we can know. Is it a thing? Hardly. Is it something we do? Nearer, but not exactly. Perhaps a manner of doing? Or even a manner of being?

The best way I can put it is that it is the manner in which our consciousness is disposed towards whatever else exists. The choice we make of how we dispose our consciousness is the ultimate creative act: it renders the world what it is. It is, therefore, a moral act: it has consequences. ‘Love’, said the French philosopher Louis Lavelle, ‘is a pure attention to the existence of the other’. ¹⁵

In The Master and his Emissary: The Divided Brain and the Making of the Western World, I aimed to dispel the unscientific fiction, popular at the time, that there was no significant difference between the hemispheres. This misconception was just as popular, and just as absurd, as any of the myths about supposed differences that were, and for all I know still are, being peddled in management seminars, and to which it was a knee-jerk reaction. In reality, as anyone who has worked with neurological and psychiatric patients knows, there is a world of difference between the two hemispheres: literally, since they give rise to two different experiential worlds. The question was not whether there was a difference – that was clear, beyond a shadow of a doubt – but why there was, and of what kind it might be.

My argument was, and is, that the nature of the difference between the hemispheres is far from anything hitherto imagined, and that it fulfils an evolutionary purpose of the utmost importance. It is not a separation of reason from emotion, or language from visuo-spatial skills, or any of the other things that used to be said, since, indeed, each hemisphere deals with absolutely everything – just in a reliably different way. The character and sheer extent of that difference, as well as its significance for the future of our civilisation, formed the subject of that book. And that difference could be seen as rooted in a difference in attention, as I shall explain.

Many of the findings of neuroscience simply offer us a description of the brain correlates of human experience. For example, it is hardly a revelation that certain parts of the brain ‘light up’, as we say, on a scan, when we fall in love. Something has to, because every single experience you have has its correlates in the brain somewhere, and where exactly that may be does not tell us much about the experience of falling in love. As such, these and other similar findings offer a description of experience at a reduced level, but do not directly illuminate the nature of that experience. By contrast, my thesis, though it depends on neuroscience, has no reductionist agenda. I do not claim for an instant that our experience merely is some function in the brain. Quite the contrary, in fact, since my thesis implies that only one part of our brains – the part that understands less – would pursue such an agenda in the first place.

Some philosophers deny that scientific research can tell us anything at all about human experience, on the grounds that experience is an ‘inward’ matter (which is undeniably the case). By definition, or so it is said, our experience is the authority on what it itself is, and we cannot get a better handle on it by the approach from ‘outside’. Sympathetic as I am to this position, I cannot entirely agree. There are some aspects of our experience which, while perhaps not technically impossible to discover by introspection, are relatively opaque, since, for reasons of survival, nature has taken care to hide them from us. Too great an awareness of them would bring life to a standstill. But they may be nonetheless important for all that.

For example, take a look around you at the room in which you are sitting. Much of what you believe you are seeing is not actually seen at all, but is filled in at a level below conscious awareness on the expectation of familiarity. And we know this, not from introspection, but from neuropsychological research. There are many such aspects of what has been dubbed the ‘grand illusion’ that is our daily experience of the world, and ingenious experiments can sometimes bring them to light. Some of these experiments have become part of entertainment culture and are by now well known. ¹⁶

Examining the brain, then, can sometimes add to our knowledge of what it means to be a human being, precisely because in some areas direct knowledge from experience is providentially shielded from us. And there is one very important aspect of experience, right at its centre, that we are not aware of as experience unfolds, because awareness of it would bring life to a standstill. That is the fact that our experience is constantly synthesised from the divergent ‘takes’ on the world offered to us by each of our brain hemispheres.

SOME CORE IDEAS OF THE HEMISPHERE HYPOTHESIS

In one way, the hemisphere hypothesis is deceptively simple: the bi-hemispheric structure of the brain makes possible attending to the world simultaneously in two otherwise incompatible ways. It is the implications of this that are manifold. Immediately it gives rise to a number of further hypotheses: that this is a requirement of survival; that this difference underlies and makes sense of a host of observable cognitive and emotional differences that in its absence appear inexplicable and incoherent; that it underlies and makes sense of otherwise unexplained aspects of the relationship between the hemispheres, both structural and functional; that it explains the tension between phenomenologically different experiential worlds. And that that, in turn, helps to illuminate aspects of philosophy and psychopathology. In place of what hitherto looked like a myriad discrete pieces of information that one must accept with a shrug ‘just are that way’, there emerges a coherent picture that has meaning. When I refer to the hemisphere hypothesis from now on, I mean the whole of this set of hypotheses, and the overall picture they make possible.

Can all this be compressed into a few sentences? No, but I do understand the need to say something. So what follows is a crude summary, the best that can be hoped for in a short space, provided principally as a kind of aide-memoire to the reader of The Master and his Emissary, with no attempt here at nuance, or to argue a case, or adduce evidence. ¹⁷ All that is taken care of in the book from which it derives.

In brief, then, a few questions; and then a few possible answers.

The brain is asymmetrical in almost everything that can be measured, at many levels, in both its structure and function. Why?

The power of the brain exists only through making connexions (between neurones) – and the reach of that power depends on the number of connexions it can make. Yet it is deeply divided down the middle. Why?

The principal band of fibres that connects the two hemispheres at their base in humans, known as the corpus callosum, has got proportionately smaller, not larger, over evolution – and is, in any case, to a large extent inhibitory in function. Why?

Fig. 1. Human brain, displaying the corpus callosum, from Andreas Vesalius, De humani corporis fabrica (1543): Book VII, Plate 3. The left hemisphere is retracted to display the corpus callosum (‘L’) in the midline, joining the two hemispheres at their base

The full answer to the last of these is, I believe, more complex, and even more intriguing, than the answer to the others, and it is a story I will turn to in Chapter 1. But there is one observation that lies behind the answer to all three questions, and makes perfect sense in Darwinian terms.

Every animal, in order to survive, has to solve a conundrum: how to eat without being eaten. It has to pay precisely focussed, narrow-beam attention that is already committed to whatever is of interest to it, so as to exploit the world for food and shelter. Put at its simplest, a bird must be able to distinguish a seed from the background of gravel on which it lies, and pick it up swiftly and accurately; similarly, with a twig to build a nest. Yet, if the bird is to survive, it must also, at one and the same time, pay another kind of attention to the world, which is the precise opposite of the first: broad, open, sustained, vigilant attention, on the lookout for predators or for conspecifics, for friend or foe, but also, crucially, open to the appearance of the utterly unfamiliar – whatever may