Scientism: A New World Dream

By Greg Heard

In Scientism: A New World Dream, the author delves into the rise of left-brain dominance in Western culture and its impact on our understanding of the world. The author argues that this shift has led to a more distanced and factual approach, akin to the denatured view of science and the emergence of scientism. Through examination of cultural movements throughout history, the author suggests that this mindset has resulted in a disregard for actual fact-checking and a reliance on ideas over reality, leading to the prevalence of fake news and opinions. This book provides a thought-provoking examination of the impact of scientism on our society and raises important questions about the nature of truth and reality.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Austin Macauley Publishers
• Release date: Apr 28, 2023
• ISBN: 9781685627317

Greg Heard

Greg Heard lives and works in Toronto Canada as a Carpenter in the IATSE film technician’s union. He also played drums and shares in writing lyrics in a band called The Fires of Greg has been reading in psychology, history, world religions, neuropsychology and many other areas of his personal interest for over 40 years. His writing is a reflection of a deep interest in and love of music and culture from around the world.

Book preview

About the Author

Greg Heard lives and works in Toronto Canada as a Carpenter in the IATSE film technician’s union. He also played drums and shares in writing lyrics in a band called The Fires of Greg has been reading in psychology, history, world religions, neuropsychology and many other areas of his personal interest for over 40 years. His writing is a reflection of a deep interest in and love of music and culture from around the world.

Dedication

I would like to acknowledge my indebtedness to Iain McGilchrist.

Copyright Information ©

Greg Heard 2023

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The story, the experiences, and the words are the author’s alone.

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Publisher’s Cataloging-in-Publication data

Heard, Greg

Scientism: A New World Dream

ISBN 9781685627300 (Paperback)

ISBN 9781685627317 (ePub e-book)

Library of Congress Control Number: 2023902357

www.austinmacauley.com/us

First Published 2023

Austin Macauley Publishers LLC

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New York, NY 10005

USA

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Acknowledgment

I would like to thank Jim Kinney for reading the manuscript in full and making many useful suggestions. I would like to thank Randy Boyagoda for helping me as well and I would especially like to thank my good friend Marc Stapleford for listening to me ramble on about this stuff for hours and for his always considered viewpoint in any and all matters, from music to quantum mechanics.

The Dim Perfume of the Mind

Scientism is the mistaken effort of man to try to bind nature

toward his will.

Scientism: A constructed belief system in which you try to scientifically prove that your belief system accords with science and/or reality, while only having a vague familiarity with the actuality of the critical scientific methodology. Or, said another way, we imply meaning back into things where our intuition of that meaning is unwarranted and inappropriate.

Scientism is also the desire to encompass all that can be known into a rational framework that may pretend toward internal consistency. It tends toward suspicion of that which cannot be compressed into its expressible intellectual framing. This suspicion is also projected toward those aspects of reality which we are ignorant or unconscious of. In this sense, we can only know that which we can reflect upon. The mirror of that reflection in turn covers up what is behind it and so there is a price to pay in our ignorance of that which we can know, against that which is behind the mirror, lost in the further unconscious.

Introduction

This is a book about our outlook on information and our ability to understand the difference between our insight into what is being said and what the meaning is.

With the current rise in information and misinformation in the world, it has, I believe, become a much pressing issue in both my mind and across our current culture. History is full of misinformation; this is nothing new. Misinformation has been used to bend toward ideological ideals in an effort to support many different agendas from blaming the Hun invasions on God’s desire to punish wayward Christians to Hitler’s burning of the Reichstag in order to create a power vacuum that his Nazi party could take advantage of. On up to Trumps flitting with the QAnon conspiracy for whatever end he imagined.

Popular delusions are, in turn, supported by unconscious cultural struggles that we may be only dimly aware of. These projections are all around us from the Y2K computer collapse theory of the 2000s or the current belief in a deep state cabal of united power brokers who try to control everything from liberal pedophilia to the government’s attempt at a systematic removal of all of our personal liberties.

Divide and conquer is then the oldest of strategies. One of the handiest tools used to create this division is, misinformation: The Roman Empire used this ploy repeatedly. This division is also within the structure of our own minds and I believe that much of our ability to believe misinformation is due to firstly: a general lack of critical thinking but even more than that it is tied to our desire to believe that we are rational beings in the first place. We have, as a culture, largely turned our back on our deeper attachment into the irrational foundations of our collective unconscious experience. Our naïve belief in the power of the intellect and an unreasonable misunderstanding of the effects of the unconscious in the world, have allowed much of our current problems to remain unseen or at least misinterpreted.

All belief systems flirt with projected representations of the unconscious and this brings with it the double edge sword of the intellect. The unconscious can be our greatest source of inspiration, though, our desire to place the unconscious into rigorous intellectual packages can also result in great folly.

For instance: all talk of God is an expression of that which we can never clearly express intellectually. If you think you know who or what God is: you are wrong, and if you know that you don’t know, you at least have something you can be sure of. We easily trip into error when we seek to impose a solid shape into our dim intuitions, we very rarely understand the full dimensions of reality this clearly. The Greeks called this intellectual error of presumption, hubris, and it was the amongst the greatest sins that a man could make. The individualist arrogance and the refusal to support the collective in much of American society is exactly this hubris spread out as an unexamined social contagion.

The continued effort to issue some form of control over reality is, I think, a far to rational approach, which has a long history stretching directly back into the age of reason and beyond. The age of reason or the enlightenment (1600–1700s) is ironically one of the most unreasonable ages to have emerged into almost constant war. This unreason is in part the result of the emergence of Protestant extremes in politics. For instance: The Puritan and Calvinist movements in England and Europe contained within them the seeds of many of the Americas founder’s presumed ideals. But the age of reason also reflects an indulgence in intellectual graft, and one of the great hubs of this introspective hyper think, is Rene Descartes. We shall return to him repeatedly as a symbol of the wider intellectual problem.

I will be patently simplistic here: the age of reason is in my view a misnomer in that this age was striving to be rational. A rational approach to reality is concerned with measuring and ratio which reflects an effort to compress reality into relationships within the mind through comparison with that which is known. This is an intellectual effort to both contain and create an understanding that holds to some form of consistency, at least to itself.

I will give some quick examples. Within a system of logic, any proposition must be defined in order to hold a form of truth. To misrepresent Gödel’s thinking somewhat: any system of thought that pretends to logical coherence must then have a frame outside of that system in order to define the rules of its internal consistency. In other words, logical systems must be defined outside of themselves in order to hold to a form of truth. That definition may simply include the rules of logic. I call this intellectual abstraction ‘the frame problem’ and I will refer to forms of it, as such, throughout the book and I will give another quick example which will be elaborated further on in the discussion.

This is an example from the Stanford encyclopedia of philosophy’s entry on model theory. The statement: He’s killing all of them, is used as an example of an idea. To understand this statement, we need to know who he is and who all of them are. He is Alphonso. And all of them are the pigeons in his loft. In the world of logic: the truth or even usefulness of this statement is predicated on me defining the terms and giving the reader an understanding of who and what is going on. I must frame the statement in order to give it flesh as it were. This is a rational process in which we define an abstract in order to create coherence, and this idea extends into many areas of thought including math and logic. My point being that real-world understanding is highly contextual, as opposed to a framed logical coherence which must be defined to hold itself together.

The real world is a lot messier that logic might imply. My larger point being that thinking in general naturally drifts into forms of abstraction as we compare the world into our thinking process itself.

In the real world, you and I may actually know Alphonso and we both might be having coffee together talking smack about him, and I might blithely say He’s killing them all. Within this conversation, you would not need me to qualify anything about this statement, because the thread of our conversation may have included a casual remark earlier about Alphonso and his pigeon trouble already. You would intuitively make the leap of mind needed to connect my statement with Alphonso and we would continue on to other things.

As human beings in the world, we need to frame out conclusions or assumptions less often because we are people talking with each other. Why then does the written intellect take up so much verbiage to express simple things? Are we mistaken about their simplicity or does the written intellect overcomplicate understanding? I believe that understanding is both and neither of these problems but context is everything.

Problems arise when we look at language in the abstraction of it. We seek to then qualify it into systems in order to hold it to a rational abstracted frame. This is, in many forms, the locus of my further discussion. Within the more rational and comparative left brain: this disconnect between thinking and reality can become overtly problematic, the problems that arise in thinking are thought problems, and I believe that they are ultimately a result of a disconnect from a more intimate contact into reality that is available to us through the more unconscious right brain.

This very disconnect from reality is both encouraged and exacerbated by computers and the compressed half-truths of the meme world internet. The hall mark of the dystopian conspiracy theorist in particular is an intellectual isolation from the real world as we travel down the rabbit hole of ‘facts’ and speculation, further away from the balance of a social contract with our community. This rational disconnect is everywhere around us. ‘It’s only business’ or ‘mistakes were made but not by me’ are phrases that are used to absolve ourselves, in the world from the fall out of intellectually abstracted misdeed.

I would like to give a quick example of the multi leveled aspect of reality from an example of our current political situation here in Canada. Recently the new leader of the federal conservative party Erin O’Toole has asked the Prime Minister of the liberals Justin Trudeau; to publicly condemn the Chinese Governments treatment and incarceration of the Uighurs in northwest China by officially declaring it a genocide. This all started when President Trump, asked us to hold the CFO for Huawei: Meng Wanzhou for her expected extradition into the United States. We have an agreement with other countries to hold people for extradition if they are being prosecuted for crimes, because we in turn expect that other countries will hold criminals for us, as well as protect our diplomats.

Meng Wenzhou’s company was believed to be illegally trading with Iran against U.S. embargoes and it is also believed that she lied about her knowledge of this. President Trump had placed tariffs on Iran because he had somewhat arbitrarily, withdrew from the internationally agreed, Iran nuclear deal. It is widely believed that China, in retaliation for this act, arbitrarily incarcerated two Canadian businessmen Michael Kovring and Michael Spavor for our holding Meng Wanzhou under house arrest in Vancouver. Mr. Trump very inconveniently, did not go on to extradite Meng Wanzhou, but he also did not retract the impending extradition. Knowing that Canada would have to continue to hold her here under that order from the U.S. This allowed Trump to inconvenience the Huawei company without having to legally prove that they did anything wrong. This then put Canada in a very awkward position.

The conservative leader in Canada, asking for a condemnation of the treatment of Uighurs knows all of this, but he also knows that he can make Justin Trudeau look weak by bringing the subject to light in the media. He can make it look like Justin Trudeau will not stand up to China by condemning them for the obviously distasteful crime of genocide. With the administration change in America, has come a new president Mr. Biden who is now on record specifically asking the Chinese government to set the two Michaels free.

Justin Trudeau would be foolish to jeopardize these ongoing negotiations in any way, especially by publicly declaring that China is committing genocide. Nor can he let Meng Wanzhou free without the explicit American say so. In September 2021, two days after Canada released Meng Wenzhou, the two Michael’s were set free and it was immediately understood that they were in fact being held in retaliation for Meng Wenzhou. In another bit of political theater, she emphasized how awful her incarceration was in her luxury apartment in Vancouver.

How this situation looks and how it really is, are very different things and I should imagine that much is being said on all sides that we in the public are not privy to. It’s hard to know if condemnation or further engagement with China is the right road. It seems quite certain that China has a historically poor human rights record and that they are most certainly interfering with the largely Muslim, ethnic minority of Uighur’s. Erin O’Toole’s public vetting of a condemnation of genocide costs him nothing while the public optics that he creates are great. He is on record (in a tv sound bite way) as a strong champion of human rights. While not having to pay any price at all in international relations with China; because he does not speak for the government or the people of Canada. We can frame this story in many ways, I have only tapped on the window treatment.

Currently the more extreme of the political left is trying to control language in a possibly naïve belief that it will further solve social and gender inequality everywhere. Elements of our current militant gender politicking has focused its laser on the words we use to describe each other, perhaps believing that changing the names will bring about some form of further social enlightenment into the situation, which indeed it might; but my argument is with, the presumed right to militancy, that leads this linguistic enforcement. The belief that top-down nomenclature interference will bring radical change is in my humble opinion mistaking the frame for the problem. Words are both powerful and only indicators of reality. In a world where you are felt to be powerless, controlling the names of things (words) is one of the only things easily available. Problems in the world are real and like Erin O’Toole asking Justin Trudeau to condemn China for genocide, words can be issued cheaply and they hold to the patina of control.

This speaks directly to the internet rhetoric/illusion of the QAnon conspiracy theory as well: the prophesied, apocalyptic storm hasn’t come, and Jesus seems to be still waiting somewhere to reappear. There is a divide between what the intellect believes will happen in the future, and what actually occurs. This divide is actual reality. The real difficulty in projecting thinking into the future, is proving that beliefs are an accurate reflection of the shape of reality as it exists now and not simply a belief in what will happen. Does changing the name of everything, really change everything?

The Trump impeachment case hinges on whether he actually incited a riot on Capitol Hill with his speech. His defense is being able to argue ‘plausible deniability’ in what he did or did not say, as it effected thing on the ground. Did Trumps speech actually cause people to storm the capital, is there a direct line between what he said and what others did? It seems that he has been intentionally using the jargon of the QAnon and was very aware of his follower’s desire to want to disrupt the political system. Like Hitler burning down the Reichstag, if the capitol hill was accidentally burnt down, there may have emerged an inadvertent power vacuum which Trump could insert himself into. Words can be both cheap and costly.

It is my hope that with this book, I can illuminate what I have come to understand are two different approaches to thinking/being in the world. I believe that these two styles of thinking/being are broadly represented in the physical bilateralization of the brain itself. There appears to be distinct and identifiable functional differences between each hemisphere, that emerge in how we address the world and our self-image, as well as our perceived relationships to them.

Nature has seen fit to separate our brain into two halves which allows us two oppositional, but not mutually exclusive ways of apprehending the world or bringing the world into being. These different modes of thinking/being are simultaneously shaping our inward perceptions as well as outwardly shaping the form of our perceptions in the reality we experience. This bilateralization of the brain also has observable effects in the culture that we are creating. We can both see what we are, in our culture and we are also shaped by the culture that we see. Our bilateral brain, in a myriad of ways, shapes it all. It is impossible to disentangle the ultimate drivers behind this state of affairs. Does culture drive us or do we drive culture? Are we a product of culture or do we both reflect and produce it? Are words costly or are they cheap and easy to cast about?

As hinted at above, one of the main theses of this book is that, we have become an overly text driven society. This reliance on written text is much more closely aligned with the left hemispheres take on the world. Words almost exclusively reside in the left hemisphere, with some important exceptions. The way in which our language is in the left hemisphere in turn helps to create a very particular type of viewpoint in the world, based more on the fixity of words, exclusion, abstraction and intent. This will take some time to unravel and I will try to describe the style of each hemisphere from a number of viewpoints, within the evolving weave of the narrative, instead of simply working through the neurological evidence all at one time.

I wish to explain right away that this book is both heavily indebted to and an imperfect reflection of a book by Iain McGilchrist called The Master and His Emissary, The Divided Brain and the Making of the Modern Western World. I had become very interested in neuroscience and I was reading a lot of it, as well as listening to Ginger Campbell’s brain science podcast quite religiously. Then I came across The Master and His Emissary. Mr. McGilchrist not only illuminates the neurological relevance of the bilateralization of the brain, he also spends a great deal of time exposing the ramifications of this divide in the mind as it becomes our world, as reflected in culture.

I have spent many of my years reading in psychology and science and even more years reading history, world religion and world mythology. Reading Mr. McGilchrist’s book was like having someone show you how a massive tapestry was woven when you had been studying separate areas of the carpet for years. I knew enough about almost all of the subjects he talks about and I feel I have correctly understood the relevance and inherent truth laying in his work. I’m not evangelical about this book, but every once and a while you read a great truth and you know it.

In this book that I’ve written, I have cast my net a bit wider, into aspects of our modern corporate and political structure, world mythology, history, as well as the sciences. But I inevitably return to music as it is one thing that reaches more directly into the soul. I will try to explain many of the premises and insights that Mr. McGilchrist has set in his book through the lens of my understanding. My book relies on his having done the hard slog of providing the case for bilateralism from the neurological perspective. I accept his theses and I am convinced by his proof, but really that’s not the whole point of his book or mine.

The brain’s reflection in culture has a feel to it that cannot be captured by brain science and his book reflects the truth of that feeling. Mr. McGilchrist’s book is like one of my other favorite books which is Jacque Barzun’s master work, Dawn to Decadence, these types of books can only be written by someone who has lived a life immersed in the richness and wonder of our culture writ large.

Mr. McGilchrist has gone to great effort to supply a coherent proof of his bilateral thesis. He has put all of the neurological evidence into his first chapter which runs some 130 pages and I would refer the interested reader to his work. I have instead placed some relevant neurological tidbits all through the narrative, like bread crumbs in a fairy tale, instead of piling it all up in one area. The first part of this book tends toward a more analytical and possibly vitriolic exposition of the main tenets of the left brain as reflected in our current cultural dis-ease, though, I will be balancing this starker view of the left with the softer focus of the right-brain. The way that the right brain functions is easier to come to by first setting it against the more easily described left brain. The world of the right brain will more slowly emerge from within the narrative itself.

I have, over my life, had the luxury of reading about anything that I was even vaguely interested in. I have simply followed the whim of my interests and what I care about. As a result, I have learned to care deeply about many things that might at first seem disconnected. I have also grown to enjoy the act of writing itself. Writing is a very different task than simply talking with your friends about what you know. The frame of writing lends coherence to thinking.

This book is then a reflection of a life time of reading and doing stuff. I am running an uphill bicycle race, in that I hold no scholastic credentials, I have then tried to create a readable book, placing a fig leaf over my neither region, as it were. My main passion is playing Drums and a love of music which will be apparent soon enough. I have also been lucky enough to have a job that I love, which is being a carpenter in the film industry. Essentially what I’m saying is that; this book is a reflection of my interest in all of these things. Like Jacques Barzun, I aim for that ambiguous multi-faceted target of a cultural criticism.

I have developed a narrative style that I think of as a braiding of ideas. What this—somewhat meandering—style allows me to do, is to shine a light on many things which will eventually be seen to be a reflection of one greater unity seen from multiple angles. I have thought a lot about grouping all of the discussions together into longer unified narratives sections, but I have not done this. The one thing I’m driving toward: is the way of the mind, and the many things reflected back through it; which is our culture.

I wish to state at the outset that I am not a Christian apologist but this book evolves around extended and repeated discussions of the historical roots and mythology of the early Christian movement as well as discussions of the current views of Christianity in America right now. My thinking in these specific discussions is that we can create a touch stone to witness a foundational mythology of our western culture. As we move through western history, the view from this Christian base and others, will allow us to then use a more critical eye, as we eventually look into India’s most prolific and profound culture. This initial ground work will allow us to shuttle back and forth through both cultures with a wider perspective.

The braided narrative technique may seem at first quite arbitrary, but if you—dear reader—can hang with it, you will start to understand that it is actually moving in a spiral. Ideas come around again and are then seen from a different perspective based on the preceding thought clusters. This style allows me to gradually reinforce my initial assertions so: if an idea seems unclear or unjustified, it will come around again. The overall thesis of the book is complicated and I believe that I could not and should not patronize the reader by dumbing it down. I have instead made a concession to the reader by repeating key ideas and themes with an eventual eye toward later easing the reader into the texture of mythological thinking. This set of ideas is ultimately the driving force of this book along with a presumption of the readers relative ignorance of the circular mythological narrative style.

The second half of this book becomes, stylistically, more a reflection of the right brain as I bring the earlier developed threads together. As you progress through the whole of the narrative, many re-emergent threads will be understood to have been a part of a larger carpet all along reflecting the bilateral brain. This view of our cerebral bilateralism is intrinsic to all discussions and should be held between the teeth if the going gets choppy, the harbor will come around again I promise. As we get closer to the end, we will eventually have a comfy place to sit down, relax and enjoy some tea. For now: let’s set the kettle on the stove.

Chapter One

The New World Dreaming Itself

We, as a human culture have developed simultaneous threads in our outlook. These threads can be seen as a reflection of two styles of thinking and being, that exist within the bilateral structure of the brain. The two styles warp and woof on the loom of our ongoing expression in the world, the result is our culture. Though it seems quite clear to me that we in the west—especially North America, have generally bent harder toward one side of this style, which is that of the left brain. The left brain is more, literal, abstract, analytically distanced and ultimately, word and text reliant. We are so immersed in this particular style of our culture, that it effects the very way that we look at and then think about everything. It is so leavened in us, that it appears or can appear as a self-evident truth.

If I try to prove that I have even a dim understanding of the ramifications of this bilateralism in the current western mindset, the attempt at a formal proof will be immediately driven up against this current style of thinking (the style of the left brain). It is actually difficult the present the counter balance of the opposing viewpoint; the more passive and integrative right brain. I will rail against this current left-brain textual style if only to try to expose some of its weaknesses, but I wish to state emphatically that the left brain is extremely useful and that its rise to dominance has been nothing short of spectacular for a number of reasons which I will also touch on.

As a second caveat; I would mention that all parts of the brain (the two hemispheres and the limbic system) are highly integrated and always functioning in concert. Having said that: there do seem to be discernibly different styles to each hemispheres approach to seeing the world. Much has been discovered in the realm of neurobiology to back this up, especially through the study of stroke patients—in which one hemisphere has been shut down. Multiple examples clearly support this idea of a discernible difference in work load between hemispheres. Much later on in this book I will attempt a more textured exposition of the integrated right brain’s style as it expresses our culture through the arts, music and humanities.

As mentioned in the introduction, there are real problems trying to explain the right brains stand point or vision because we are so immersed in this culturally dominant and text driven style of thinking, which relies on written documents and talking about issues. Language is primarily expressed, though not exclusively through the left brain. Our capacity to engage in deductive logic and the more linear style of rational thinking occurs across the two frontal lobes of the neocortex—the so-called ‘executive brain’. Though formal and expressed thinking—as I will endeavor to explain—is more the tool of the left brains agenda as it seeks to extend itself into the world, specifically though language.

As a counter to this, watch an artist trying to explain what they do and you will inevitably witness someone fumbling around with language as they try to describe what it’s like to grab the intrusion of the more unconscious right-brain. The artist might eventually admit that they simply play with stuff or even that they are being played when they create, but that they have learned to trust that the next idea will emerge at some point. The Netflix series Abstract is an excellent example of people doing artwork.

I will tackle the balance between the insight and outlook of the hemispheres by first looking at the notion of free will. My best shot is to assert that; I believe we have free will simply because it feels as though we do. If it could be logically proved that we don’t have free will. Say if we think that we are caught in a matrix like illusion, and that this illusion can be shown to be tricking us into believing that we have free will. It simply doesn’t feel that way. In fact, believing that we don’t have free will is, actually an act of free will. The dynamic of this argument is one of the main treads in the book and it will come up repeatedly right to the end, so bear with me. See the Desperate Philosophical Addendum at the end. Pg. 304

I have heard a number of arguments from neurology trying to promote the idea that our neurons fire slightly before our body starts to move. This argument runs something like; because the unconscious brain reacts before we are consciously aware of our desire to act. We are, in this way, not the authors of our actions and therefore we do not have free will: we are ultimately controlled by our unconscious desires that clearly happen in the brain before we do things. Our brain then creates the illusion of our having a free will to fool us. This illusion of free will is, in part, created by the self-assertion of our ability to think, largely though our conception and belief in an ego.

This style of deductive thinking in which we, trace neurons to deduce free will, is I believe grounded on a mistaken notion of who we are. This line of thinking relies on the idea that our explicit consciousness of the world as well as our ability to think and represent ourselves within that thinking process: is us, as expressed through consciousness. This framework of conscious intent implies the ideal that we, on some level, should then be in control our actions. This is the reflective aspect of consciousness as it turns inward or the meta level of self-consciousness. From this viewpoint, free will is about control and the power of expression, and this meta level of consciousness seeks to be the alpha and omega of our expression of intellectual being.

My proposition with this book is to explain that in an overtly thinking culture: feeling and our unconscious being are at least misunderstood or not considered at all. We in the west, as a culture, have mistakenly overvalued our explicit ‘frontal lobe’ thinking, as the ability to have a conscious perception of that very thinking process. Put more succinctly: free will, in the left brain, becomes an idea to be proven, in the right brain, it is process to be experienced. Like art, free will occurs to us, we do not have to be the central uber comptroller of our free will to in fact have it. We do not have to consciously direct our creativity to be creative. We do not have to be free in every intimate nook and cranny of the mind to have free will. We don’t have to be in control, to be free.

In many books about consciousness, the ego or the so-called executive functions of the frontal lobes of the brain, are propositioned to be where our free will is thought to reside. The leading idea being expressed about how the brain works, is based upon a logical exposition of the functioning of our thinking. This exposition of what’s going on, is primarily a reflection of the position of the left brain discussing itself with itself. It’s not completely wrong, its only part of the picture, it reflects the part of the brain that is easily viewed and expressed through this format of observation, in words. The emotional/instinctive substrate of the mind is not so easily exposed in this way and in fact, is then viewed with suspicion from the left brain’s viewpoint.

I will come back to this; but for now, I will say, we are more than a linkage of neurons and, though it can be proved that the potential toward actions occurs in some part of the brain before we are aware of our desire to act. This does not mean that free will doesn’t exist. It simply means that we create a limited view of who we are, if we restrict ourselves to thinking that we are only consciousness or a result of our conscious intent. I can in fact think of things, and then do them, I do it all the time and I really don’t care what logical model is being propositioned. This argument about free will is an example of the intellectual trap of scientism that this book is set against.

The mind is nothing if not an expression of nature herself. Nature does not work in this explicit identifiable thinking way, and an excellent example of natures guided, hands-off approach to creation is how genetic expression actually works. I will illustrate with a story. There was a show here in Canada called Market Place. The host of the show and her identical twin sister submitted five separate DNA tests each, to the various current ancestry companies that have become so popular. They did this so that they could discover a hint of the genetic history, of their shared DNA ancestry.

Identical twins share 100% of the same DNA because identical twins are the result of one egg splitting inside the womb. The interesting thing was that in most of the DNA tests that they got back, there were conflicting results about where their genetic ancestry may have come from. Some of the tests were more than 8% different for assigning their presumed racial origin, on to the exact same set of genetic markers.

The two girls shared a specifically Italian ancestry and I believe they were both ultimately from Sicily. The island of Sicily in particular has been a European grab bag of mixed genetics for thousands of years. The first recorded information about Sicily was from when it was a Greek colony, it was then taken over by the rising Roman empire. In the Middle Ages, it was a very active trading port for the whole Mediterranean. This island has, at various points in history, been supported by a very enlightened rulers who have allowed Muslims and Jews to come and go as they pleased with varying degrees of full protection. All of this liberal medieval love fest was floated by Jewish financers who it seems, got along quite well with everyone else. The DNA of these girls reflected this historical cultural mongrelism in that they had smatterings of most of the later European and north African markers from the whole of the Mediterranean.

According to the DNA series of tests they had taken, it was implied that there was a discrepancy between the quantities or qualities of markers between them, this occurred because each individual genetic marker’s purpose can be seen as ambiguous, and in turn the markers are difficult to place into a specific geography. The various markers that the twins shared, pop up all around the Mediterranean due in part to this Mediterranean cultural mongrelism. There is only a hand full of genetic markers that are absolutely unique and traceable into any culture and it is my weak understanding that the markers for aboriginal Australians is one of the few sure bets in the game. My point being, the ancestry companies claim to be reflecting a hard science. The truth is that genetic information is highly susceptible to human interpretation. Though they don’t say this as they promote the story of a ‘scientific’ agenda.

Hitler would lay claim to racial purity for the Aryan race, simply because he wanted to believe it. The greater truth is that of a significant and repeated genetic mixing of the Aryans, that started well before the 4000 B.C. year mark. This is the point in history where we can begin to observe the movements of the Aryan tribes as they spread deep into Greece, Iran and India and all the way up into Ireland and all along north Africa and through the Levant. My point being: science rarely holds a smoking gun and the ancestry companies have no vested interest in telling people about the reality of the human race’s historical genetic ambiguity. CSI everything shows would have us believe that tech can get to the bottom of everything but this is to misunderstand the complexity of nature and her wily ways, at a fundamental level. All information looks good when it’s coming from a great looking woman or man out of a smoky blue lit CSI laboratory.

The facts are never clear cut and scientism and by extension, the ancestry version of factoids, is an example of this desire for a belief system, dressed up as real science. The whole of the DNA code, as it expresses itself is also highly influenced by the environment and open to interpretation. Even identical twins look different as they grow up and DNA isn’t a text book that nature reads to create humans. DNA was initially thought to be a code, like the bible, that a human could be built from. It is much more interesting and flexible than that.

Real science proceeds on building theories which reflect an interpretation of information. Scientism at its worst, holds to a belief in a single myopic interpretation of the facts, usually based on a presupposed idea. This presupposition then only allows in, ideas that reinforce the initial presumed belief. In essence scientism is prejudiced or a prejudged idea of science. The scientism version of DNA would contend that DNA is a divine code from which a human could be built, DNA is actually a framework or scaffold of instructions on which a human grows. The growth is epigenetic, and is in turn, a reflection of the environment that the human actually exists in, which is being influenced by many things like climate or subsequent nutrition. All of the environment then directly effects this epigenetic growth. DNA is an indicator of the potential of a result: humans and nature are an evolving process of the interconnections that we embody.

The error in explaining DNA then, is in the metaphor that we choose. DNA is not a fixed script to be read. Epigenetic growth is the term used to describe this unfolding interaction between environment and the code over time. To press my analogy with DNA further into the bible code book, in a somewhat cheeky fashion. DNA could be thought of as the Old Testament and the New Testament is the actual historical time period and environment that Jesus grew up in. The New Testament, as it was composed, is constantly referring back to the Old Testament. Jesus’s mission is then seen as both a reference to and a further fulfilment of elements of that original code. Jesus’s mission was also a new revelation in a continuous process that occurred within the greater time period of both Jewish and Roman history. The stories that emerged (the bible as we have it) were shaped by these historical factors of setting and much more. The code (bible) was and is being read in multiple ways.

To then stretch this analogy to the breaking point. Scientism is the fundamentalist desire for fixity and certainty in an ambiguous and metaphorical text/world. The real scientific endeavor is in fact much more tentative, and that very uncertainty of its theoretical postulates is its continued strength. Though even science falls into the ever so human desire to proclaim its certainty.

I was watching a show on Netflix called The Mind Explained; and in that show, they were explaining the connection between the ego and memory. The concept of the ego is predicated on a contact with your biographical narrative memories, and in that sense of yourself, you are both seen as the result of the narrative as well as allowing yourself be projected forward through this conception into the future, as planed imaginings. The ego and your sense of the intimacy of the self—your ipseity—is also repeatedly lived through again, as a recalled memory. This sense of our self, in part, involves two parts of the brain, the first is the frontal lobes around the eye (three sub areas collectively known as the orbitofrontal cortex) and the second includes the memory equipment in the lateral ventricle (which includes the hypothallus extending into the temporal pole cortex which also includes the limbic system and specifically the amygdala). It was not discussed whether these areas were right or left brain specific but I know there is a lot of cross chatter, especially across the frontal lobes.

What was interesting was that in a study of expert meditators, certain specific areas in the upper frontal lobes calm down and I suspect that they also calm down in psychedelic drug use. My point in this is that: the areas that are lighting up and calming down in an fMRI scan are never going completely offline and then coming back on again. They are receiving less blood flow and or neural activity, than an established median. In meditation practice people train the brain (develop and strengthen the neural wiring) into allowing the ego to drop away. The closest analogy we have of what meditation is like, is the passive global activation that happens in REM sleep. Thought it is not like that at all. My point being that, like our understanding of DNA, we are in the infancy of our understanding of these neural processes and conclusions drawn from this information should remain tentative.

If we then seek to place certain types of thinking into specific areas of the brain, there is only a limited truth exposed in seeing the brain in this way, and so it is with the right and left-brain bilateralism. This is also true of the epigenetic unfolding of DNA; if we wish to affirm that DNA is a direct road map to human construction, we have misunderstood the texture of its unfolding over time (its epigenesis).

The fact is that, there appears to be a general division of labor between the two hemispheres. It is a propensity toward division, that holds across many animal species including birds. Like DNA there is no firm lock on how bilateralism expresses itself into the world and it must be understood that like DNA we are always responding to the environment in which we exist with both hemispheres acting in concert. Certain genes only kick in or express themselves when the environment around them is ready, or not. Certain genes do not express when the individual is under sustained stress or poorly fed, and so it is with the brain. Each hemisphere has a more or less specific role to play but they are always allowing each other dominance and in constant communication with each other.

We can learn. Learning in turn firms up neural wiring and these neural pathways and connections strengthen over time to both accommodate and facilitate, new and learned styles of thinking. It is my contention that we as a society have become more accustom to the left brains style of think/being in the world. My understanding has emerged as I have observed this division in style repeatedly in the world and my point with the DNA tests above is to create a wider metaphor in which to expose the preconceived fallacies and assumptions that lay behind this left brain, culturally dominant style. While also asserting a wider caveat to be remembered, that science isn’t a smoking gun, but scientism is more smoke than gun.

I have chosen the term scientism to express two opposing ideas that infect the scientific outlook. In the scientism view, there is a tendency to rail against scientific thought in general. As if science presents us with a universal consensus, and possibly that science is involved in an atheist driven arrogance, set to disprove God or vaccinations or the roundness of earth, etc. Alternately scientism tries to co-opt statistical facts or even the patina of scientific language to sit in as proof of some viewpoint that we might already believe in or wish to prove true.

For instance: we want to believe that Ancestry.com can tell us who we really are at some elemental level, but the identical twin test exposes the real truth and ambiguity behind DNA’s relationship to specific genetic history (the 8% divergence). This drive to scientism is best exposed in the extreme versions of some fundamentalist factions who have taken to co-opting ‘scientific terminology’ to sustain their particular belief in a literal and biblical world view, as well as actively denying other theories that they disagree with like evolution or climate change in particular.

Without the broad understanding of science from within or as an extension of, its setting in the natural world. We then turn our eye into a positive glut of electronic, text driven information in the world, which can succeed in reinforcing some very wrong-headed thinking. DNA can be seen as an absolute liturgical text; fMRI scans can seem to prove that very specific sections of the brain do exceedingly particular jobs to the exclusion of the global nature of the mind existing in the world. Brain science somehow proves we don’t have free will. Dinosaurs haven’t seemed to change much over the 6543 years that the world has existed. This tendency for a definitive absolutism in thinking is a spin-off of Scientism which is actually a reflection of the left brain’s stance in the world. It will take some time to elaborate why I believe this.

The flip side of this coin is the right brain, and I can only elaborate the right brain style of thinking through cunning. Its exposition is much more difficult to express clearly than is the lefts, but only in exposing the right brains way in the world, can we really clearly see how the left’s dominance has become what it is. To begin with the right brain has trouble gaining equal ground in formal expression, in that it tends toward a long form of narrative elaboration, along with a preponderance toward the poetic and/or more mythological, metaphorical types of expression. This type of circular expression needs unwrapping, and personal engagement within the extended context of a personal relation to be seen/felt and then understood.

This right brain type of expression is closer to the etymology of a spell in which we are caught up in the storyteller’s narrative. Within the right brain’s frame of reference, the rhythm and tone; or what is known as the prosody of the words, is at least as important as what is actually being said. For instance: many people have no idea what the lyrics to songs are, but we all understand the emotional intent of the whole. Music is almost completely within the right brain.

This right brain’s reflection of connectivity can be seen in the etymology of the word etymology itself. To find the etymology of a word we try to carry words back into the original meaning and usage or the root of the word. By understanding the root, we expose the deeper implied meaning of the later terms that have emerged from the root and are now being expressed. By tracing a word’s meanings, back to the origins of themselves we can literally be cast into the spell of the narrative of God when we read the gospels, or in the old Germanic: God’s spells. When we are in the spell, we are engaged in the unfolding stories and parables as a reflection of our own participation with understanding. We can then grasp a greater meaning in the words by holding them in our mind and turning them around to see them in relief. The left brain is more concerned with the comparison of ‘facts’ and a straight expression of a linear and/or logical exposition. Where are we? What is Jesus doing now? Was the last supper after 6 p.m. on a Tuesday?

Unfortunately for us, the extended texture or mixed flavor of the right brain can be seen slightly clearer through, and set within, its cultural reflections. The more passive right-brain is a bit of a ghost in the machine and it clings closer to the ambiguity and expression of language as it emerges through the left-brains dominance of that very linguistic expression (words). The right brain is forced, in part, to shape itself into the left brain’s domination of words, in order to express itself, though it’s not a total domination. Another more obscure way to say this is that; the right brain hides itself in the shifting emotional harmony of a chord change. The left brain presses for a political fiat or immediate action plan.

The left brain and its ideological compatriot, the ego, is tailored to and has also become empowered through a twitter feed, compulsive meme, mindset in our culture. This modern form of dialogue and exposition are seen as, at best, to be time consuming and boring, but at worst, myopic liberal intellectual weakness which restricts definitive action. The drive toward shutting down reasonable dialogue and debate has risen hand in hand with both the rise of efficiency; as seen in our reliance on technology within our corporate culture on the one hand, and on the other; with the hard-political lefts antiseptic over intellectualization of political correctness: both linguistic and behavioral.

Over intellectualization is contingent on the implied control of our use of language that has emerged as a part of a higher arts education. Both viewpoints—the fundamentalist right and the hard left—although seemingly antagonistic and oppositional are actually both deeply reflecting the left-brain style of thinking. I hope this will be seen clearly—in my boring and ensuing extended context. First there is some learning we need to settle. I will try to gently guide us through an elaboration of these two styles of thinking/being if only to, initially cast a harsher light on the ramifications of our particularly egotistical and uniquely western left-brain lop sidedness. We will begin the hard slog through the ego’s metric of power first.

Chapter Two

How the Brain Works

The left brain is largely responsible for our ability to use tools, as it seeks to extend itself into the world. Along with this it bends toward the denotative or explicit usage of language; the, one to one, tagging of words onto things (boat, car, house, etc.). Both of these functions, tool use and denotative language, hold a distinctly utilitarian bent to them and both can be seen as ways to both extend ourselves into the world and ironically abstract ourselves away from that very world as we describe it. Tools function as a physical extension of ourselves into action and denotative language also, in part, removes us from the things we are talking about. This abstraction of denotative language helps to create distance from objects so they can be represented. That thing, is used for doing this, and it is represented by this particular word.

Most of the words we use emerge from a large area of the left hemisphere that surrounds the ear. (Broca’s and Wernicke’s areas are both involved in language production.) This area of the brain shapes thought or tags the words that are being expressed as they make their way out and into the world or onto the written page. That is not to say that speaking is strictly a left-brain function, it is more complex than that. It means that the linguistic tagging or the assembly of words seems to occur primarily in the left hemisphere and along with this, the left brain primarily: controls the muscles that move the mouth and tongue; so, it is no exaggeration to say that language functions primarily out of the left brain’s purview. In some great measure, our thinking is also being shaped by our ability to express it.

The dominance of our ability to speak from the left brain is also reflected in the way that the left brain looks at a face, the right eye (which the left brain sees the world through) tends to focus only on the mouth and the lower jaw when watching someone speak. Presumably because it is verifying what the tongue is doing so that it can be sure of what is being said. For instance: when we watch a foreign commercial that has been dubbed into English, we pick up on the mismatch of sounds immediately because we are aware of the physical disconnect between the shape of the mouth and the sounds, we are hearing coming out. We also notice if a cartoon characters mouth doesn’t reflect the word mouth shapes that we would predict as we (relatively unconsciously) observe the cartoon figures tongue moving as it forms the sounds.

Deaf people watching sign language speakers, tend to watch the signers face as opposed to what their hands are doing, the hands are glanced at mostly to confirm any apparent mismatch. Most of the linguistic intent—as opposed to what is being said/signed—is actually mirrored on the face of the speaker/signer. This aspect of communication (the context of the face and the expression in the eyes) is being observed by the right brain, left eye. The hand gestures are glanced at to confirm the intuition.

The ramifications of the way of the left brain’s control over language are manifold. They can be seen as a greater metaphor for the whole of the left brains style of being in the world, so I will continue with this thread for some time while trying to point out some of the implications of this linguistic dominance, in our thinking as it is being expressed.

There is a style of thinking that is bound to the left brains tool box and as mentioned above; tool use is posited through the left brain. This is true even if the tool user is left-handed (primarily/potentially right brain oriented). We can think of language as being one of the great expressions of tool use; in that it allows us to externalize our thoughts. Through this externalization of thinking we can shape our environment or at least our relationship to it. Tool use is an expression of our ability to see beyond what is; and forward, toward what can be. It is, in this sense, an abstraction out of the immediacy of the world. Linguistic representation participates in this drift toward abstraction, if only to the extent that it seeks to name everything—denotative language as opposed to symbolic thought. The creation of names; in this sense, places everything into an express-able form.

There will be a lot of discussion of language coming up and so I will give a quick example of what I’m driving at here. Marshall McLuhan through his teacher, the political economist Harold Adams Innis, realized that the expansion of the British train system was, in essence a form of media expression. The train system not only allowed the exchange of goods, it created a new way for people the communicate over longer distance in shorter time spans by speeding up mail delivery. This ability to compress distance and time allowed an exponential increase in our ability to get things done through this new integrated communication medium. Radio and then T.V. were a further extension of this communication network, with of course cell phones and computers creating yet another exponential increase in this ability.

McLuhan then realized that the medium in which communication occurs in turn shapes the form of the message being expressed. The rail lines allowed the transfer of physical mail and goods. In this way, the medium is the message. What McLuhan is really saying is that the message is shaped by the medium that is used to carry it. Mail service within London was soon expected to occur twice daily, which in turn shapes the messages being sent by mail. In one day, you could expect a response from a letter you had sent out that morning. Now of course: we expect everyone to be at the other end of the cell phone always. In this wider analogy between the brain, trains and messages: the left brain is literally the medium through which linguistic expression takes place and in essence McLuhan’s thoughts on this, are reflecting primarily the position of the left brain.

In linking the medium and the message, McLuhan is making explicit to us, the utilitarian view of messages as an expression of function, not form. The letters, delivered through the mail might have been love letters or an Anglican sermon or John Donne’s poems. McLuhan is looking at the functional expression of the medium as it shapes our viewpoint. How the mechanics of mail delivery influence our use of that medium.

McLuhan is not discussing the value of the messages, or the extended physical relationships that the messages bridge, and symbolize. If language is only a medium for expression, then content can be seen as irrelevant or at least only tangentially important.