The Matter with Things | Iain McGilchrist | EP 278

Mephistopheles's credo is that being is so permeated by suffering and catastrophe and tragedy and betrayal that it would be better if it was just brought to a halt. And you know, in some sense, we're pulled in the world between those two poles, right? Because part of us would like to build something better and to bring what's greater and more magnificent into being, and another part of us is bitter and resentful about the tragedy and catastrophe of existence. And so what Mephistopheles doesn't understand is that you cannot have a thing without its opposite. There's this left hemisphere fantasy that we can create a world in which all is simply peace and joy. I don't believe that this is a possibility. Blake actually also said that in heaven there must be some degree of suffering, otherwise, it couldn't be joy.

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Hello everyone! I'm extremely pleased today to be speaking once again with Dr. Ian McGilchrist. I've spoken with Dr. McGilchrist a number of times, the first time a very intense half-an-hour conversation, which was about 150th as long as I wanted it to be, which was very well received. Ian and I have a lot of interests that overlap, I would say particularly in what you might describe as the neuropsychology of philosophy, because we both operate, to some degree, at the nexus between biological psychiatry and neurology and philosophy, especially philosophy that's associated with narrative.

It's very interesting to talk to Ian; he's come to similar and different conclusions than I from a similar and different pathway. It's a lovely interplay between things we're both familiar with and things we're not. I'll tell you a bit about Ian, and then we'll jump into his new book, which is a masterpiece—a very long work concentrating on this vital interplay between the scientific and the philosophical. Dr. McGilchrist is a former fellow of All Souls College, Oxford, an associate fellow of Green Templeton College, Oxford, a fellow of the Royal College of Psychiatrists and of the Royal Society of Arts, a consultant emeritus of the Bethlehem and Maudsley Hospital in London, a former research fellow in neuroimaging at Johns Hopkins University Medical School, Baltimore—one of the great world's great research institutions—and a former fellow of the Institute of Advanced Studies in Stellenbosch. He now lives on the Isle of Skye off the coast of Northwest Scotland, where he continues to write and lectures worldwide.

Ian is committed to the idea that the mind and the brain can be understood only by seeing them in the broadest possible context—that of the whole of our physical and spiritual existence and of the wider human culture in which they arise, the culture which helps to mold and is in turn molded by our minds and brain. He is perhaps most well known publicly for his best-selling book, "The Master and His Emissary," published by Yale University Press in 2009, which has sold approaching 200,000 copies worldwide—what would you call that? A home run for an academic book? It brought him to very wide public attention.

So, Ian, it's great to see you again! I'm so glad we have a chance to talk. Shall we dive right into the structure and the origin of your new book?

Let's do that. It's great to be talking with you again, Jordan, thanks. Yes, I would like to be able to talk to you a bit about my new book, "The Matter with Things," which I think you have had a chance to look at. It's quite long, and I know you're a very busy man, so it will be good for both of us to be able to just take a tour around it a bit.

It follows on from the book that you mentioned, "The Master and His Emissary," but it takes the philosophical implications of the fact that our brains are divided and that each half of the brain produces a different version of the experiential world. It takes that much further, particularly in relation to something that I know concerns both of us and I imagine concerns many viewers and listeners, which is the devastatingly reduced vision of the world that we now have—this reductive materialist ideology which is absolutely not compelled on us as people seem to think by science or by reason.

It's a version of the world which is very much consonant with the view that one of the hemispheres of our brain takes—the left hemisphere—and we shouldn't be paying too much attention to what it has to say, except for the business of getting our daily bread. But actually, in terms of understanding the world, it's the right hemisphere that helps us here. And in what you said in your introduction, you suggested that I think context is very, very important. In fact, context is everything. Context can completely change the meaning of any situation, of any words or anything that we're trying to put across. The right hemisphere is able to take in this broader context.

Perhaps I'll just say something very brief about that. From an evolutionary point of view, we know that all the brains we've looked at going way back into prehistory all seem to have this divided structure. Indeed, the oldest neural network, that of a cnidarian called nematostelovic, is 700 million years old and is already asymmetrical, which is a fascinating fact! Why would it be asymmetrical? The world isn't asymmetrical in that way, and it seems that this is because all brains have to do two things at once, each of which could take up the whole attention of the brain. That is basically to focus on a detail so that you can grab it and, at the same time, not yourself become prey to someone else who wants to grab you.

So there's two kinds of attention that we all need to be able to pay, like how we get food. I give the example sometimes of a bird picking up a seed on the background of grits or gravel and being able to get it swiftly, accurately, and before anybody else. But if it's only paying that kind of attention, it will soon become somebody else's lunch while it's getting its own because it needs to be looking out for everything else that's going on—for predators, for conspecifics, for its kin, for those that it's looking after, and so on. Effectively, this is something that is constant throughout the history of evolution but has been taken a step further in the human brain because we are very good at standing back from the world. Our frontal lobes are highly developed, and they enable us, as you know, to stand back from the world and to be able to see things in a more dispassionate way and to see them with more of a bird's eye view.

But that has meant that we need to be able to devote a lot of time to theorizing, to mapping the world, to exploring the possible—what would happen if we did this? What would happen if we did that? One crude and simple way of putting it is that the right hemisphere is our anchor in reality. It's actually looking at what we're experiencing right now and enabling us to understand it in all its complexity, whereas the left hemisphere is giving us just a theoretical take on a certain kind of situation.

So is it reasonable to assume that a bunch of thoughts have been going through my mind? Part of this is that you need a brain if you start to move. And if you start to move and interact with the world, then you have the problem of the part versus the whole—that's it. You talked about the bird that has to distinguish something very specific, a seed against a background, let's say, of pebbles. But the same bird has to be concerned about the broader context for the presence of predators, for example. The problem is that while you're focused on something specific, the rest of the world is still there.

And also, the separation between the part and the rest of the world is, in some manner, what would you say? It's artificial and arbitrary. Because if you're trying to eat and then you get eaten, that pretty much does in the utility of eating. Effectively, there aren't parts. Parts are an artifact of a certain way of attending to the world. There are only wholes, and things that we think of as parts are wholes at another level. Things that we think of as wholes can be seen as parts of an even bigger whole. But this business of carving things up into parts is an artifact of the left hemisphere's piecemeal attention.

So because it's trying to focus on this small detail, it's homing in on a certain little tiny bit—perhaps three out of the 360 degrees arc of attention, right? And that leads to a different take on the world from that of the right hemisphere. If I can just put this in a couple of simple sentences, the left hemisphere sees a world which is made up of fragments of tiny pieces that are familiar because they're what it wants. It knows it's targeting them; they are missing and separate from the other parts. They're static because it freezes its target, even if it's actually following a moving target, like an eagle trying to catch a rabbit. It's, as it were, trying to fix that rabbit in the frame.

And so this world is one that this left hemisphere's version of the world is one made up of bits that are separate, distinct, fixed, certain, decontextualized, abstract because they've been categorized. Oh, it's one of those—no, I know! Yeah, yeah, yeah. Right? It's effectively an inanimate, mechanistic vision of the world. Meanwhile, the right... So, let me ask you. Let me ask you. I'll let you return to that in a second. Let me ask you about that.

So I'm thinking, as a way to help people understand this, do you think that that's akin to the difference between listening to music, let's say a piece of music, and only hearing it note by note and listening to a piece of music and hearing it at the level of all of the phrases, let's say, and the sequences and the totality at the same time? Because those are obviously very different things.

You could say that, and indeed I sometimes say that the two kinds of understanding given by the hemispheres need to be combined. It's not that something's wrong with the left hemisphere's understanding; it's just that it's so very powerful, so very simple compared with what is actually going on that if we start believing the map instead of the world that's mapped, then we misunderstand. I think that's one of the things that we're doing in our society now. But I think I need, anyway, before we go on, to be able to say something about the contrasting vision of the right hemisphere.

Instead of this vision of stasis, particulate, atomistic elements that have to be put together in order to find any meaning or direction in them, the right hemisphere is seeing something which is coherent, in which nothing is ever completely separate from everything else, in which it's constantly moving, flaming, and changing—in which it's embodied, and that embodiment, like the rest of its context, makes it what it is. When you take it out of that context, it's something else completely. The right hemisphere understands the implicit—all the things that are not being said—the bits between the perceptions that make the thing rich and make it live.

And in fact, this world that it creates for us is a rich, embodied, implicit, living world. You can experimentally suppress one hemisphere at a time, and what we find is that when the left hemisphere is working alone, it does see things that we would normally see as living as mechanisms, as zombies, as inanimate. Whereas the right hemisphere, working alone, will see things that normally we would think of as inanimate as alive. So we'll see the sun, for example, as living because it's a life force that's moving across the heavens.

So this is all very simple, and for the sake of the argument and for the sake of our discussion, I've compressed an enormous amount. But I expand this, as you know, into a section of about 450 pages in the new book, looking at these hemisphere differences. So, one of the things I noticed, and maybe this will help people get a flavor for this too, is I worked with anorexic clients for a good while. One of the things I noticed about the anorexics, because they already have a problem of perception—not just conception—absolutely, it's a body image problem.

But if you work with someone who's anorexic, what you soon learn is that they cannot see their body as a whole. No, what they're doing is obsessively—they're very orderly people—and they fixate on parts. And so they'll take a look at their calf, say, and maybe there's some residual calf muscle, and they'll look at the muscle really independently of the rest of the leg and they'll try to figure out if there's any fat there on the muscle. The problem with that is that when you parse your perception of your body up too focally, you can't actually distinguish between what's acceptable in terms of, let's say, obesity and fat layer and what isn't.

You have to solve that problem by glancing at yourself comprehensively, say, as a gestalt in a mirror, so you see your whole body. And then you also have to be able to do that while you're simultaneously remembering how other people look and contextualizing yourself that way. And so the anorexic is so focused on the part that they can no longer see the whole. And then they can't even see their body properly. And why this is so important to me is that the right hemisphere sees the body as a whole, but the left hemisphere only recognizes parts. It doesn't contain the full body image that is in the right hemisphere, and there's several lines of evidence that suggest that anorexia nervosa is, in fact, a right hemisphere deficit condition.

It has many of the elements of autism about it, which also simulates a right hemisphere deficit condition in some cases. I mean, I would say that there are autisms rather than one single autism, but that would take us perhaps too far away from where we are at the moment. So that means the body dysmorphias are, at least in part, a substitution of the map for the territory.

I wanted to talk a bit about that left hemisphere issue idea too. You know, so imagine when you detect something as a part and you've defined it as a part, you've also in some sense—like I'm looking at a little black box in front of me right now—and I can see it as a single pixel entity in some sense. So it's a black box. So black is a very low-resolution idea and box is a very low-resolution idea. And if I really look at the box, I can see all the subtle variations of color because it's not just pure black and there's all sorts of shades of gray and I can see all the things that distinguish it from other boxes.

But when I say "box," and I see "black box," what I've done is I've compressed the world into a concept, which would be a map, let's say. And then you can see that we do that so much now because we communicate so much, and our part detection has become so powerful, our ability to focus in on details technologically amplified by our ability to exchange linguistic ideas and the power of our science.

So do you think maybe that as we've progressed over the last several thousand years, that intense social communication that's allowed us to parse up the world into finer, finer, and more detailed bits has also suppressed our relationship with the right?

I think it has, but it would perhaps make a lot of sense if I were able to unpack the structure of my new book a bit, because it will answer some of the points that you're making. So, the book's divided into three parts, and in that first part, I am focusing almost exclusively on neuropsychology and the philosophical implications of it.

What I'm showing is that in all the what I call portals, whereby we can gain information about the world, the left hemisphere is inferior to the right. So it's not just attention—I've been focusing on attention because I think it's extraordinarily important. Attention helps us construct the world that we live in. How we attend changes what we find in the world and also changes us, so it's pretty important stuff.

I'm looking at the attention, perception—which is not the same, of course, as attention—judgment, which is the kind of conclusions we draw from the basis of what we attend to and perceive, our emotional and social intelligence, our cognitive intelligence (good old-fashioned IQ), and creativity. In all these respects, the left hemisphere is inferior to the right. It's interesting that I look at a lot of what must be, to somebody not familiar with them, really extraordinary syndromes that are familiar to people like you and me in the world of neuropsychology and neuropsychiatry, and the ones that are characterized by the grossest delusions and hallucinations are almost exclusively due to damage to the right hemisphere—not to damage to the left.

That is an important place to start because if we're going to talk about what is the world really like, what do we really like, and you've got two versions, in the past philosophers have said, "Well, some people see it like this; some people see it like that," and then they shrug their shoulders and go, you know, "but these are just two different ways of looking." We can now, I think for the first time and this is exciting, go further forward and say this has all the hallmarks, the characteristics of the misperceptions, the misconceptions of the left hemisphere, and this, on the other hand, has the hallmarks, the stamp of coming from the right hemisphere, which is more vertical.

That's one reason that I need to spend some time on that particular aspect in the beginning of the book. Because as we go on and, as it were, if you like, pan back a bit from those portals whereby we get information about the world to the powers that we might go down when we're trying to understand the world—like science, reason, intuition, and imagination—we need first of all to have established something about the degree to which each of the hemispheres can be taken to be vertical.

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When I wrote "Maps of Meaning," my first book, I structured it in some ways similarly because the first large chapter is this chapter on neuropsychology and hemispheric function. I felt, as you feel, that it was necessary to make the case that there are these two fundamental differences in perceiving the world before investigating that both philosophically, and I would say at the narrative level, and also conceptually.

Now you—let's talk about the last two parts of the book, the second two sections, and then maybe you could also describe a bit, if you would, why you think the right hemisphere and its concentration on narrative per se and narrative understanding is relevant to this venture.

So we have the right and the left, and they look at things differently. The right is contextual. You spend the first third of the book talking about hemispheric differences and making the case that first of all those are deep and old and profoundly important and philosophically significant. The next part of the book deals with...

Yes, deals with the ways in which we use the information that has come to us through those various portals, those faculties that I've described, and they are effectively science, reason, intuition, and imagination.

Science and reason, I don't think many people would quarrel with because there has been a motivated attack on intuition and imagination in recent years. I think that people do... there are some people who might question the value of those, and I think those are the left hemisphere types that you're talking about.

Well, of course! Yeah, I mean, you and I know that people are not so simple that they can simply be summed up in that way, but it is quite true that a certain way of looking at the world, that of the left, has a kind of cohesion of its own, and the way of looking at the world that the right hemisphere has too, and yet they’re not quite compatible.

In a world like ours, in which there’s a lot of public debate and public discussion, as the way in which we come to our understanding of the world, this explicit difference between these two becomes more important. If you—let me just explain what I mean there—if you look back, most people until the last couple of hundred years have developed an understanding of the world through a consistent, coherent culture, often partly a religious tradition, through living close to nature, through narratives, myths, as you mentioned, through drama, through poetry, and so on.

Only part of the way in which they think about the world will be due to public debate, and until the advent of modern media, probably very little of anybody’s world was made up by public debate. But in the world where we are, one of the worst things that can happen is people say you’re inconsistent. They feel like if you’re inconsistent, that shows you must be wrong. But it might show that actually what you’re trying to do is to balance two things that, in slightly different ways, in different circumstances, are equally important but appear to our rather simple-minded way of looking at the world like contradictions.

You know, in the last part of the book, I have a whole chapter on the coincidence of opposites.

Okay, so one of the things I found very interesting about the psychoanalytic tradition and also some of the neurological work on dreams in relationship to this issue of hemispheric specialization was the idea that dreams, which would be in the domain of imagination/intuitiveness, are willing to sacrifice consistency for inclusion. And so you can see these contradictory perceptual and conceptual elements being brought together in a dream because the dream—this is a Jungian idea derived from Carl Jung—that the dream extends the narrow range of what we might describe as left hemisphere consistency into a broader domain where that consistent theory is not comprehensive enough to account for everything.

Because it's consistent but not comprehensive, it's going to produce paradoxes and then in order to increase the degree to which it's comprehensive, you have to introduce what looked like paradoxes within the system, and from within the system that looks like a categorical or a logical error, but from the broader context, it's actually a movement to a more inclusive and comprehensive way of perceiving the world.

And dreams do that, and it’s one of the things I loved about the Jungian notion was that we have this delimited domain of explicit propositional knowledge, but partly because of the requirements for consistency and our finite nature, it can't be comprehensive. And so we need something to fill the gap between the consistent and narrow and the ultimately unknown, and that is in fact the realm of dream and imagination.

Yeah, yeah, no, that’s right. There are virtues to the dream world if necessary, but certainly to intuition that are not open to pure reason, which is not in any sense to devalue or disparage reason. It's in fact, I worry that in our age, reason is being sacrificed—that we’re becoming completely unreasonable.

There are two kinds of ways of thinking about reason; one is a kind of logical, formulaic carrying out of procedures and following of pathways that in a sense could be programmed into a computer. The other is a very powerful idea that has been important in Western history for hundreds of years, which is the idea of being able to bring together what we know from logic with what we understand from experience, from intuition, from context, from our embodied lives—the kind of wisdom that a good judge would be able to bring to a case—not just saying, well, look, I’ve looked at the rulebook and it says in clause 186 or whatever. No! I mean, that judge should be a fully functioning human being.

And this kind of reason, which is nuanced, which is sober, which is much more inclusive and less combative than the kind of reason—the very sort of skeletal kind of reasoning that now seems to have tossed the other kind of reasoning out of the nest.

What did I—what? Well, you saw this. Go ahead, go ahead.

What I want to do, perhaps I could just explain a little bit about this part of the book. I want to take each of these things; I'm not going to go through what I say of course; it would take too long, but just to give people some idea of the structure. So I look at science as having peculiar strengths which are incredibly important and on which everything that I do and say depends, but it also can't be taken in the way that scientism does.

It can't be taken as being able to answer all our questions. That's simplistic and misguided! So it’s seeing where it has strengths and where it really needs to say, this is not an area on which science can really pronounce.

And I do the same with reason; you know, it has enormous strengths, but it can also lead us to certain kinds of abstract ways of thinking which lead us to false conclusions. It is interesting that abandoning reason is dangerous and can lead to the wrong conclusions. But actually, merely following it in a blind kind of way can lead to falsehoods as well.

There's a patient of Damasio's called Elliot, who has lost his ability to use intuition and emotion, so he has to reason every single thing out from scratch. In this, he's rather like certain kinds of schizophrenic and autistic subjects, which have no conception of the intuitive and have to base everything on reasoning from first principles. Of course, what it means is that they're often deluded and their lives are intolerable.

Well, I had a client who had obsessive-compulsive disorder, a number of... he was very, very intelligent and obsessive-compulsive disorder shares some features with anorexia. Part of it is this focus on the part to the exclusion of the whole, and he would ask me very complicated questions, which were deceptively simple.

So he said, for example, lots of people with OCD they won't touch something that's contaminated because then they feel that they're contaminated and that they contaminate others. And that's a big part of the moral quandary that besets people with OCD because there is some possibility that if you go out into the world, you'll contact a disease, let's say, if you touch something you shouldn't, and then there is some possibility that you'll bring that back, say, and transmit that to your children.

And the question of exactly how much precaution you should take therefore becomes a very important question, especially if you try to solve it with the use of let's say a propositional expert system instead of being able to analyze context. And he said, "Look, I don't know when I'm sitting on a subway at night and there's a newspaper that someone left behind. I don't know when it's acceptable for me to pick it up and read it or not. How do you decide that?"

And I thought, I actually have no idea how I'd decide that because I was trying to figure out how to guide him with a set of principles. It's like, well do I touch it if it's a little damp? Do I touch it if it has a footprint on it? Do I touch it if it's folded too many times? Do I touch it if it's on the floor? Do I touch it if it's more than two days old?

And the answer is I have no idea how I know whether or not that newspaper or magazine that's been sitting there and abandoned by someone is an object that I would be willing to pick up, but I can more or less tell at a glance.

No, no! It's a misconception that when we make things explicit, we're closer to the truth—because often what we do when we make things explicit is that we conflate half a dozen or more different considerations that our intuitive and unconscious minds are able to weigh remarkably effectively. We substitute for that holistic vision a single thing that collapses into the explicit statement that we make, and so all the time that you're having to make explicit what you would do under what circumstances, why you're limiting the world, you're driving it down and down to less and less meaning.

And one of the things that amused me because I had, of course, patients with OCD as well was that I had one particular one who was a philosopher, and he said that when he was studying Anglo-American analytic philosophy, his OCD got terrifically bad. But when he was studying phenomenological philosophy, his OCD relaxed, and he was able to see things in a much broader, wider, and more sustainable and coherent way.

So I thought that was a nice sidelight on this question of—and also one relevant for treatment considerations because if there are focal disorders of narrowed perception and that's a consequence of loss of context, I mean, I can't also help seeing the recent arguments, let's say, that are raging about gender identity in exactly the same light—is that we've lost the context and so we're producing these focal dysphorias because, in a real sense, we're using the wrong part of our brain to solve the problem. And all the public clamor about that is actually making it worse, not better.

Okay, so you talked about the second part of your book about rationality and imagination and intuition and science, and what about the third part?

Well, yes, just before going there, if I may, I just want to comment on intuition and imagination because I think they are extraordinarily important for understanding the world, and partly due to Dan Kahneman's very entertaining and successful books, a lot of people have come away with the idea that intuition would be a very bad thing to be guided by at any stage, to any degree.

But I say that these clever scenarios that are set up by psychologists in which you can show that what you would probably intuitively think is wrong are simply the equivalence of optical illusions. There are optical illusions that are so striking that you know I say look, those two lines are the same length. If you say they can't be, but they are! But I’ve never heard anybody after being shown one of those optical illusions going, "Oh, well that does it. From now on, I’m never going to use my eyes again!"

But our intuition, you know, you can set up these artificial situations in which we seem to be getting things wrong by following our intuitions. That's often because 99 percent of the time we followed this intuition, it would intelligently and quickly take us to the right solution. And so I really want to rehabilitate intuition! I have some fascinating, I think, studies that came to me; people who wrote to me after reading "The Master and His Emissary." One's a man who tips horses at races; another is the physician who looks after the motorbike riders in something called the TT races in the Isle of Man—the most dangerous sporting event in the world—and the reflections they have to make about how these people are able to do what they're doing through very much things that are identified with the right hemisphere—an intuitive grasp that if they stop and think explicitly, they're completely ruined!

It's like—it’s like thinking implicitly or explicitly when you’re trying to play a piece on the piano—absolutely! It interferes right away. And I would say that's really relevant. We should make this case quite clearly.

I mean one of the things that really disturbed me about the COVID response was we reduced the entire realm of political intuition to expert knowledge. Yes! And we made the assumption that we could focus on one thing at the expense of everything else.

And that that was actually the right way to do it—to follow the science, let’s say. But the problem with that is that complex political decisions are often equivalent to diagnostic moves on the part of a physician, and we haven’t been able to develop expert systems that can do diagnosis worth a damn. And it’s because, however we do diagnosis, it’s obviously dependent on our ability to simultaneously apprehend a very wide range of potentially relevant contextual issues rather than reducing it to this algorithmic process, for example, that the person with OCD might demand!

Yeah, yeah. Well, I do discuss medical diagnostics in the book because interestingly in "Thinking Fast and Slow," there's a passage where Dan Kahneman says some things that struck me as very odd about physicians' inability to be consistent in their diagnoses. I have done a lot of spadework in research; there are 5,600 papers referred to in the bibliography of this book, all of which were consulted in the making of it. And when Kahneman quotes these rather odd things, I looked them up and found that they didn’t show—didn’t show what Kahneman says they show at all!

In fact, they showed the opposite. So it's always worth it—oh, that’s how you look! Well, there we go. This work by Kahneman, you know, this sort of thing has really annoyed me too because I read through these things and I think, just— and I think your optical illusion metaphor is really a good one.

Just because we can come up with contrived situations where intuition fails doesn’t mean that intuition doesn’t function properly in a huge range of appropriate contexts. Absolutely! And can be much more subtle and much more revealing. And we disattend to it!

I mean, it should always be something that we could be skeptical about—we should be skeptical about our reasoning; we should be skeptical about science. Science is a skeptical undertaking. But so there’s nothing wrong with being skeptical about it as well, but we should at least attend to it.

I think— I mean, there's a lot more to say about COVID, and maybe we’ll come to that later because there's a lot of interest I think that connects the hemisphere hypothesis.

How would you define intuition and imagination?

Well, of course, they are almost impossible to define, and it’s a mistake to think that we can’t discuss them until we’ve clearly defined them. Often, the only way in which we can understand them is by approaching them from different points of view and working out what they are.

I use about eight different categories of things as possible constituents of intuition. Things like instinct, ready-to-go knee-jerk reactions, heuristics, prejudices, which is an interesting area because it’s not anything like as dire a situation as people now think.

Anyway, but I deal with those and, of course, the “aha!” moments, with scientific and philosophical insights. And then in imagination, of course, I’m making the distinction, which is a very, very important one, between fantasy and imagination. I mean this originates with Wordsworth and Coleridge and no doubt probably with Schelling!

But the distinction is fantasy is something that covers up reality and takes one away from it, but imagination is one’s only chance for feeding one’s way into reality. So the distinction that they were keen to make was between the sort of a prettifying Augustinian pastoral in which lords and ladies dressed up as shepherds and shepherdesses—that’s fantasy and imagination, which was this divine gift, as both Wordsworth and Coleridge very clearly saw it, which enabled one, by paying a certain kind of attention, to have insight into the deep life of the world—obviously the living world of other creatures but also of mountains, of rivers, streams, lakes, and so forth, to see them in a new way and actually experience them as real rather than just categorical examples in the way the left hemisphere isn’t.

So in any case, all I’m really saying is that I rehabilitate intuition and imagination somewhat, but show their limitations and I hope wave a flag for better science and better reason. There’s nothing at all wrong with science and reason in themselves. The problem nowadays is that science is not scientific enough and our reasoning is not reasonable enough.

That point there is that it has dogma—science has at the moment a number of dogmas. We're due a paradigm shift, and to be ruled by dogmas and not by following the evidence is not scientific.

I’m curious about a couple of things on the imagination and the hypothesis front, so I want to offer you another—foray into defining where imagination might begin on the fringes of rationality.

So if you give people creativity tests, one of the things you can do is you can ask them, for example, how many uses can you think of for a brick? Sure, write them down in three minutes. And then you can categorize those by number of responses, so that’s a fluency response.

And then you can categorize them by originality, and originality is something like pragmatic utility. So you have to identify a real use for the brick but also statistical unlikelihood; so the more original responses are pragmatically practical but also rare.

So then imagine that there’s a nexus of associations around any given concept, and the tighter the associations are, the more they look rational in the algorithmic sense; and the looser the associations, the more they look imaginative.

And that, as you move out into the looser associations, your probability of making a false positive increases, right? Because you're associating two things that shouldn't be associated, but your possibility of making a dramatic discovery also increases because now you're associating two things that have heretofore been distinct.

Of course.

But yeah, okay! So you can imagine that rationality shades into imagination. And then you made this distinction that fantasy is the misuse of imagination to replace reality, which is a nice distinction.

And then, so one twist on that too, one of the weird things about the way scientists are educated, especially to write scientific papers and to think about science, we think a lot about the method and we think a lot about writing the introduction to a scientific paper as this algorithmic description of the algorithmic process that we walk through to get to the hypothesis. But that’s rarely true!

You know, I had one student who was very creative, and she’d come up with an idea that was a leap—an intuitive leap. And then I could see where she was going but why—and why? But she didn’t know how she got from point A to point B, and then when she had to write out the introduction to her paper, she had to come up with a story about how she derived that logically—even though that had nothing to do with how she came up with it!

And that’s the typical thing that happens when we have to consciously say how we did something! The left hemisphere, which knows diddly squat about how we actually did get there, comes up with its own version of how it would have gotten there if it had been in control—which it wasn’t!

So you're absolutely right that most of the great discoveries in science and maths were made intuitively, through pattern recognition, through seeing gestalt. They weren't made by following a linear sequence.

And even—I mean, this point that’s made by George G. Lord Simpson, one of the founders of the modern synthesis of evolution—he says, you know, the scientific method as such is more or less a fiction in that it’s right more honored in the breach than the observance, although it is a useful paradigm to have at the back of your mind for a lot of the rather plotting early work in science and reason.

So what I want to be able to say here is that there’s no conflict between science, reason, imagination and intuition; in good science, they all work together! In good reason, they all work together; in good intuition, they all contribute, and so forth. So there is no need for these things to be set up as they so often are as in conflict with one another.

And another important element is that it’s actually the right hemisphere contribution to them—more obviously in the case of intuition and imagination, but nonetheless importantly in reason and science. It is the right hemisphere's contribution that is a really important one.

Well, I was just thinking about Einstein in light of our conversation! I mean, when Einstein published those three remarkable papers back, I believe it was in the 1920s, he had spent a tremendous amount of time in the world of the imagination—imagining, for example, what it would be like to travel at the speed of light.

And we could also point out, I think as well, that the imagination differs from the propositional in that it actually does rely on images more, and images are closer to the world in some sense than linguistic concepts.

And so the imagination tends to be less linguistic and reductive and abstracted than the purely linguistic, and so it’s richer but not as precise!

No, no, absolutely! And in the book, I look at so many examples of how this is true, that what we need is this broader combination of intuitive work and more routine, humdrum work. And Einstein himself famously used to say that it took him a long time afterwards to explain in words how he reached conclusions that he found came to him sometimes while playing music, and of course, music is a perfect example of what I call “betweenness.” It is only connection! It is only gestalt!

The notes in themselves have no significance. Only as they come together in the patterns that we call music do they come to have their meaning. And incidentally, you said that if we start breaking things up and get explicit about the playing of the music, we won’t play it well. Exactly!

But that doesn’t make a sort of left hemisphere procedural analysis of the piece worthless! So I sometimes say that everything has this structure—it's the right hemisphere's open active receptivity that allows something to come into being for us to presence to us.

And that then goes to the left hemisphere where it’s seen as, "Oh yes, it’s one of those! We put it in one of those categories.” And it’s abstracted, taken out of context and so on, and then that work having been done, it should be taken back into the right hemisphere where a new, richer whole can be created.

Now that's perfectly imagined in a piece of music! You're attracted to it as a whole, the right hemisphere phase, you then start to play it and discover that you have to practice over and over again a certain piece of fingering because it’s difficult. You look at the harmonic structure of the piece and that helps you understand it, but then finally, when you go out on stage and play it, you must forget all of that! Otherwise, you won't be able to play a note!

But that doesn’t mean that time was wasted! The left hemisphere's contribution is very important, but the point is it’s always the intermediary stage. It shouldn’t be the final stage! But in our culture, we take things apart, analyze them, fragment them, and that we have like a heap of bits on the garage floor where there used to be a motorcycle.

And we go, "Oh, I have no idea what all this stuff means!" That’s where we end the story! And of course, a motorcycle is a bad example of what we're talking about because I’m talking about organisms, which are nothing like machines!

But anyway, you wanted me to move on to talk about the third part, and so we can cover a little bit of that.

Yeah, well, and then we’ll go back to the first and start walking through it again, so go on to the third part.

Well, the third part is, so the second part is epistemology, that’s what I’ve just described, and the third part is metaphysics. So when we've decided that we know how to weigh the different paths and the different portals to an understanding of the world, what do we actually find there?

In the first few chapters of part three, the final part of the book, I look at two elements. One is, as I say, the conjunction of opposites, which is so important, and it’s something we’ve completely lost sight of. And by the way, of course, Jung was cognizant of this.

But we often think nowadays that we think in a very linear, left hemisphere way, that opposites are the two ends of a pole, and as long as you keep moving further and further in a certain direction, you get further and further away from the thing that you feared.

But often we come back and find ourselves actually approaching the very thing we feared! Because you know, famously too much desire for freedom causes tyranny and you know, so these—just for one example!

But so I look at that, and there's a lot to say about that but I shan't say it now. And then there's a chapter on the one and the many, which is an ancient thing in philosophy, at least in Eastern philosophy, but it's also something we can't ignore in any kind of philosophy—the difference between the individual and the unique and the value of it and its place in a whole, which by its uniqueness and individuality, doesn't do anything to impair it.

It doesn't help disintegrate that whole; in fact, it enriches it! I sometimes give the idea of a bud or a flower that unfolds, and you see all the different parts of it, but those parts have done nothing to make the bud less whole. In fact, it’s now made it a richer whole, the flower.

So those are the two on structure. And then there are what you might call the constituents of reality. So I look at, guess what? Time! I look at space, I look at flow, I look at matter and consciousness, which I take to be aspects of the same foundational element in the cosmos.

And then perhaps through many people's surprise but to a lot of readers already highly expressed delight, I look at values and purpose and the sense of the sacred as irreducible elements that we don't make up as we're painting them on the walls of our room in order to cheer ourselves up, but we don't invent them but we discover them if we can!

In other words, the business of living is about discovering, exploring, unveiling these values, that purpose, and that sense of the sacred. So this is one of the arguments that I've been having with people like Richard Dawkins, for example! And sometimes when the religious types take Richard Dawkins on, they accept some of his a priori presuppositions, and that scuttles them from the beginning!

One of the presuppositions, and this allows the scientist/scientism types to win in religious arguments all the time, is that they basically make the presumption that a religious system is a set of science-like propositions about the world and its description, when, in fact, the religious enterprise, much more broadly construed, involves no shortage of experiences like awe!

Which are, I mean, awe involves piloting erection and piloting erection is a response that's 60 million years old. And that religious experience, that domain of religious experience, also involves phenomena like our sense of being intensely gripped and moved by the meaning that is produced by artistic beauty and music and ritual and dance and all these things that are embodied and emotional and motivational—far, far deeper than any cognitive overlay!

To reduce the religious enterprise to a series of descriptions about the world is to do it great disservice but also to make it entirely demolishable on the scientific, reductionist, materialist, atheist front.

Yes, you’re so right about the importance of awe and wonder, and recently there was a day in Oxford of seminars devoted to my work on which that was the theme. And I gave a lecture at the end on that, which I hope is available somewhere. I didn’t think it was filmed, actually interestingly, but I think I may have put the text up on my channel, Channel McGilchrist. But it is a very, very important element, and of course, it's quite different from sheer curiosity. We don’t say I’m curious to know what God is like!

We don’t say I’m curious to know what the meaning of life is! Things that strike us as marvelous or inspiring or wonderful have a great depth, and once we lose that sense, we collapse them into this the little bit of the world that is illuminated in the dark when we flash our torch around a lumber room and we see little bits and pieces.

But actually, if you didn’t do that but allowed your eyes to adapt, you’d see that there was a rich sky, a universe, a cosmos beyond. All of that is extremely important! You’re quite right about it!

It seems that scientists don’t seem to understand different kinds of knowledge or meaning, and they don’t imagine that somehow King Lear would be less important as a play if one could demonstrate, as indeed one can, that if there was indeed a historical Lear, King Lear, the story of that king was completely different from one told by Shakespeare in evaluating Shakespeare’s play as more truth in it than many a book of genetics!

But it’s just of a different kind of truth, isn’t it? Well, the best lecture on evolutionary biology, the differences in men and women in evolutionary biology— the best lecture I ever saw was Wagner’s "Die Meistersinger,” which nailed it.

The libretto nails the difference between men and women in the psychological, sociological, and theological sense almost perfectly! And Wagner went places that the evolutionary biologists haven’t yet gone, as far as I can tell.

I'm writing about that in my new book!

It sounds very interesting; there is this—well, I want to ask you something, you said something very deep in a very truncated manner, that I wanted to return to. I saw some of this emerging in the parts of your book that I was reading most recently. You talked about the collapse of the waveform and the collapse of possibility into actuality and the role of the right hemisphere in doing that.

You just walked through a sequence of thoughts where you said that the right hemisphere, in some sense, presents the global meaningful contextual reality to us. And then we break it down into parts and master it.

Jonathan Pajot told me, by the way, that when God tells people at the beginning of time that the purpose of mankind is to subdue reality, what it means is to give everything its proper place in the hierarchy of being. And so that would extend all the way from the conceptual to the transcendent, let’s say.

But it’s sort of like making Jacob’s Ladder. That’s another image that I would say. And your vision of the left hemisphere operating at the level of detail, in the right hemisphere operating at the level of totality and the need for all of that to be fleshed out simultaneously with no loss on either end seems to me to be in keeping with the Jacob’s Ladder vision. And the idea of subduing reality with the logos, which is how it’s laid out in Genesis.

I'll just make an aside on Jacob’s ladder. To me, what is completely wonderful is Blake’s image of this, which is unlike any other image. Mostly, the image of the ladder is a straight ladder like that, but Blake’s image is of a spiral and I think there’s an enormous amount of depth in that—the idea that as you go up, and approach nearer to heaven, your process is not just simply linear but also, in a way, circular.

But not in such a way that you come back to, as Eliot said, the place where you first started and I know it for the first time, but you actually come back to a position which is similar to where you were, but now on a higher plane. You can look down and see where you were before, and you can relate these two things, so you can see both the progress and the return in one.

But anyway, what I wanted to distinguish was I do talk about the collapse of the wave function and quantum field theory. But what I don't think I do say, at least explicitly, because I don't know enough to be able to state that, is that that collapse is caused by the right hemisphere. I don't know that at all!

What we know is that somehow it’s connected with the tension, and there are plenty of physicists suggesting that, and particularly in Pauli's work, that the quality of the attention paid may change how that process is carried out and what results from it. But I mean, that is speculative.

Well, you know, that's worth wandering down for a second or two. You know, it's definitely the case if you think about imagination and intuition that imagine that, in some sense, you lay out or you ask for a revelation of a vision of the world that could be to guide you.

And let’s say that you would like to bring a better world into being, and so—and you make that part of your meditative practice and part of your ethical goal. And it's true in a fundamental sense.

And then what that means is that as a consequence of that practice, your attention is going to be paid to those pathways and phenomena that make the bringing of a better world into being a more real possibility. And we certainly do believe that we can dream and then achieve and we do believe that we can't even achieve without dreaming.

So obviously, there’s some relationship between our ability to intuit and imagine and the manifestation of the reality that we experience itself, because otherwise, why would thought be useful? Or vision be useful? Or planning be useful?

So it's speculative in some sense, but in another sense, it's... what do we do? We either operate randomly or we're going to operate with vision.

We come back to the importance of attention and I sometimes say attention is a moral act because it changes what actually is there in the world for us to find and it also changes us, so it has very important consequences! It’s not just a passive process like the exposure of a photographic plate; it’s an active open receptivity which is going to meet whatever it is that comes out of that world to which we attend.

So it is a very important point there!

So, Ian, in some sense, I hate to do this, but since we are trying to build Jacob's Ladder all the way down to the level of detail, maybe we could delve a little bit more into the practical necessity of such knowledge!

So why do you think this matters in the concrete sense to—and why do you think that we're dominated now by what you might describe as this left hemisphere-reduced ideological view of the world?

Yes, I may well have compiled one of the most comprehensive analyses of hemisphere differences in the 450 pages of the first part of this book, but it’s not just of technical interest. It seems to me to be part of a very important overall philosophical project. As I explained, we don’t know how to evaluate different thing.

I have a whole chapter on paradoxes, by the way, in which one can see that one arm of a paradox comes from the left hemisphere and one from the right hemisphere, and guess what? The one that comes from the right hemisphere actually describes what we know to be real.

Anyway, to come to pan back a bit, I feel that there is something— I think we all know that there's something amiss with the vision we have of the world at the moment, and that’s the other meaning of the title, "The Matter with Things," and another subtitle is "Our Brains, Our Delusions, and the Unmaking of the World." I think we’re unmaking the world in several respects.

One is very familiar, which is the disfoliation, destruction, desecration of the natural world of forests, of seas, and so forth, and the consequences that that will have for us. But another is a complete misunderstanding of the human being who is now seen as a kind of a machine, perhaps even not a very efficient machine. Perhaps it would be better if we were hybridized with a machine.

All of this speaks to me of something that is profoundly missing—the meaning of a human being and a human life. We seem to have lost our compass; we seem to have lost all bearings, and part of this is I think because we are dominated by the way in which the left hemisphere sees the world.

The left hemisphere, after all, helps you grab stuff, but it doesn’t do anything else in terms of helping you understand it. The understanding of the world comes from the right hemisphere, but it’s the left hemisphere that makes you rich, powerful for a while.

And it always seems to take over just as a civilization goes into tailspin and declines. So you see this with the acquisition of two great territories in both the Greek and the Roman civilizations, and you see it again with the expansionism of the West over the last 150, 200 years since the Enlightenment.

What seems to happen is that partly because of the necessity of administering a huge realm, whether that be a military realm or a civil realm or a commercial realm, that requires the generation of rather rigid, inhuman rules that can be applied in all situations. Therefore, the takeover of essentially the bureaucratic mind—it's not to oversimplify to say that what many of the troubles that we have now are because of the extraordinary expansion of the bureaucratic vision of the world in which the human is left out, and it’s not caused, I think, by a sinister cabal.

I know the paranoid idea… there’s a group of people who are really wanting to control the rest of us! I mean, I can't rule it out, but I think much more likely from my experience in life, I believe that there are more cock-ups and there are conspiracies.

Yes, yes! And that, in this particular case, it's something that is bigger than all of us, including those members of government, administrative bodies, bureaucracies themselves—they're the victims of this same thing.

Well, you’re talking about it as a neurological proclivity in some sense, which is way more profound than any mere manifestation.

Let me ask you a mythological question. So I've been spending a lot of time trying to unpack the story of the Tower of Babel. And so what happens after the catastrophe of Cain and Abel in Genesis is you get two negative outcomes, let's say, to sinful existence. One would be the chaotic flood that envelops Noah and the other, then—so that’s like the catastrophe of the natural world gone completely uncontrollable.

The next is the catastrophe of the bureaucratic state! And so the Tower of Babel is an attempt to replace the heavenly hierarchy by a human creation. And the consequence of that is the destruction of the ability to communicate.

And so what happens is that fundamental perceptual categories, perceptual and linguistic categories, become—what would you say? They become unstable as this top-heavy administrative process develops.

And it is an element of Luciferian presumption; it’s the attempt to replace the context by the part. I think it is, and it's interesting that even Adorno back in the forties was describing what he saw then as the "administered world," the "Fifa Volta Velti"— and I don't want anyone to think that I'm just talking about bureaucracy!

But bureaucracy, right, as an image of a whole way of thinking, which is the mechanistic one—the reductionist one—the wonderful one that there are rules and so on. And what this does is it privileges the theory over the reality!

Yes, absolutely! That's what the post-modernists do, as has been pointed out! Experience has fallen in value, and instead, theories about how life should be have become the reality!

And this is something you notice in bureaucracies that actually having ticked the box is more important than the event in the real world with that—that was supposed to evaluate.

So, for example, in medicine, it’s quite possible to do extremely good medicine, but if it's not cataloged in a certain way and certain boxes weren't ticked, it doesn’t count, and it didn’t happen!

So—

Well, and I do think it is important as you point out! It’s extremely important to note that this is a deeper problem than merely that which is manifested by any of its manifestations!

Exactly! We don’t want to blame the bureaucrats!

And the notion that there’s an evil cabal—well, there is the World Economic Forum and they might count, but fundamentally we’re looking at something that’s much more profound, and it is something like...

I do think it’s something that’s represented in Christianity, for example, as the Luciferian presumptions of the untrammeled intellect. And it is associated with this idea of left hemisphere domination!

It’s hyper-systematization at the cost of the whole. Yes, I think that’s right!

And one thing that struck me very much in the last few years is that the myth of the master and his chemistry, on which the title of the you know that the title of the first book or the earlier book is based, is something that actually crops up all around the world! That there is a wise ruler, and there is an intemperate hot-headed general or underling who wishes to—who actually is put out by the feeling that there is this more powerful being.

And actually once he wants to use up that being; it’s a very common theme!

A common theme!

And one—and, but there are actually this precise myth of the being two beings, one of them that is willing to take under its aegis the other, and to allow it to work well, but that other doesn’t want that, like Satan—yeah—in Milton’s—

In "Paradise Lost."

Absolutely! Absolutely! It has a very expression of resentment, envy, and the desire to destroy if it cannot own something!

And this seems the really important element in the picture that we’re looking at!

Yeah, well I think it's the crucial element. I think you’re putting your finger on—Milton’s Lucifer is absolutely perfect! You know, I thought about Milton in relationship to the rise of totalitarian states!

And so Milton was writing about Luciferian presumption before totalitarian states in the modern sense really came into being! And one of the things that his poetic genius intuited was that our Luciferian intellectual presumptions would entice us into producing representational systems that would then attempt to replace the territory with the map and to privilege epistemology and to privilege this narrow rationality that you're describing above all.

And then also to insist upon that representation and that replacement. You really saw this with the Soviets, right? Where the Soviets and the Maoists—they were so insistent that their representation replaced reality that it became criminal to admit that you were suffering!

It’s like you can’t be hungry! The state is perfect! Yes, oh yes!

And you know, in Venezuela, they’ve made it illegal—in Venezuela, they made it illegal to list starvation as a cause of death by physicians!

Wow, that is incredible!

But yeah, what fascinates me there is that denial is one of the key features of the left hemisphere's take on the world and it’s so striking in medical cases!

That people who've had a right hemisphere stroke will claim that black is white; they will just deny that a completely obviously uselessly paralyzed limb is fully under their control and they can move.

There isn’t anything wrong at all! Well, so in keeping with your notion and Goldberg’s notion of the right hemisphere, let’s say as an anomaly detection system, so imagine this.

You know how you know what happens when you have a tooth pulled, eh? It takes your tongue and it’ll do this all by itself—like three months of exploratory work to map out that new crevice!

And so you imagine that your left hemisphere built up, or there's a representation of that section of your mouth that’s unbelievably highly detailed, and then you upset it, and now there’s an anomaly detected by the right. It says, “Oh! Oh, there’s something here where the map no longer matches the territory.”

And then there’s all this exploratory work that has to be done in order to map out the contours of the mouth. And the mouth is really relevant because, you know, the mouth and the tongue are unbelievably—and so thoroughly represented at a neurological level—

And so like it takes six months—or three months—of constant busy work to re-familiarize yourself just with the inside of your mouth!

So now, let’s say you have right hemisphere damage in the parietal lobe and you lose half your body, but you don’t notice!

And I think the reason you don’t notice is because the left has no choice but to impose its axiomatic presumptions when there’s nothing indicating the lack!

And there’s no pathway forward to a new representation. I’ve seen people who—I had a cousin who got really ill, and she was diabetic and had a lot of immunological problems and she had to radically modify her whole life to deal with what she could and couldn’t eat.

And she didn’t do a very good job of it and my parents and other people—her relatives—were often upset with her not so much my parents specifically, but many people who knew her were hurt and upset with her because they felt that she was denying her illness.

But I thought, man, if something happens to you that’s cataclysmic and it changes your entire identity in an extraordinarily complex manner, it can take you—it can take you months to years to re-adapt. Three months just to remap your tooth!

And then the left will insist that the pre-theory is the only one that abides.

Yeah, well, I’ve seen it happen. I’ve learned that denial very much is a defense mechanism!

Or, for example, isolation, you know, linking that also to my role of the right hemisphere. Because as soon as you block any response or connection with the environment or anything else, you lose sight of your own reality.

Well, yes! It’s categories—they’re like categories which mean that when you look at it, if you isolate one thing from it, it disappears!

Well, you see that in the cultural situation at the moment. You can begin to cast some light on how how people, who can’t be that stupid and who can’t be that perverse nonetheless argue that black is white!

You know?

Yes! Yes!

Well, I’ve been trying to think about the phenomenology of neglect a lot, you know, because it is such a weird thing that people even lose the notion that what’s absent, what is absent!

So it’s not even not there! It’s it’s a category we don’t even can’t even comprehend!

But imagine so you look straight ahead, and you move your hands to the side like this, and what happens is, when your hands are in front of your eyes, they're pretty high resolution.

And then when you move them this way, they get lower and lower resolution, and then they get black and white out here—although you can’t tell that! But scientific investigations have shown that!

And then about here, they just cease to exist!

So I’m kind of wondering if that sense of neglect, phenomenologically, is akin to having that which is in our visual field behind us now moved three quarters of the way around instead of halfway around.

I’m not sure I’d say that.

Okay, okay! I think there’s a distinction between not being able to see something but knowing that it’s there.

And the right hemisphere doesn’t engage in this kind of denial at all; it’s perfectly aware that you can’t see something!

Or it—But the left hemisphere, for the left hemisphere, if it isn’t in the map, as it were, then it doesn’t exist!

It’s not on the map!

So it can’t be real, and this is—that’s deconstructionism in a nutshell, right?

It’s this privileging of epistemology; this image throughout various movements in the history of ideas—in our lifetime—that—and is getting more and more extreme so that people’s theory about what the world should be like is now the only reality!

And if things don’t conform to it, it’s because some terrible people have been deliberately trying to frustrate it!

Right, well, so imagine I’ll take a bit of a detour here to talking to Sam Harris. And so Harris is a reductive rationalist!

And he believes in algorithmic processing; he doesn’t believe in free will.

And one of the things that's happened that’s really interesting to Harris—and I’m saying this with all due respect; I really like Sam and he’s really smart and I think his orientation is fundamentally good—but what's so interesting to see what’s happened to him practically is that he’s really abandoned his rational atheism in a phenomenological sense to pursue meditation.

He’s developed this meditation app which is his central focus now, and he’s teaching people all over the world to meditate.

What I see happening is that he’s taking a respite from the narrow confines of his reductive materialism in the world of the transcendent right hemisphere. And it’s...

He wants to keep that non-linguistic and that’s sort of the Buddhist twist on that because if it was propositionalized and transferred into something like a comprehensible religion, then his intellect would just criticize it out of existence.

But he finds respite and sakura in these practices that I think produce a right hemisphere revelation of harmony and totality and love and all of that.

And then you might imagine that absent that, so absent that proper relationship between the left and the right, so the left—so you can’t find respite from your narrow preoccupations and your doubt in a relationship with the right; you have to start to depend on ideological certainty as a buffer against the anxiety.

Because you’re not properly having you’re not properly integrated in the part of the contextual understanding that would lead you to genuine meaning!

And that's where that emergence meaning is like an antidote to anxiety—absent that you have to occupy a narrower and narrower certainty to keep your—to keep yourself from, well, from panicking in some sense.

Well, attention is so fragmented nowadays because it’s valuable and is therefore being grabbed out by so many different sources all day long that we are no longer able to pay the sort of sustained vigilant, non-verbal, non-judgmental openness of attention, which is the very business of mindfulness, to try and nourish.

And I think that people are gravitating to this because in it, for the first time, they can begin to see a world that makes sense.

Because, as I say, everything depends on the attention. If your attention is fragmented, and it’s making presumptions about what you’re seeing, that it’s purely meaningless, purposeless, and mechanistic, then you are trapped into something.

And I suppose that what he is trying to do there is to say this is a way in which we can open that up, and I think that's welcome!

I suppose I always worry about people adopting spiritual practices, as it were, for utilitarian purposes.

But sometimes it’s better that they adopt them and then see what comes of that than that they don’t adopt them at all!

I think it’s a mistake to, you know, for example, to think that the point of meditating is to lower your blood pressure or make your mind work faster so that you can be a better stockbroker.

And that is really not—that is to misunderstand this process that you’re entering into, and it’s typically to—it’s typically to turn it into a commodity, right?

To instrumentalize it!

Yes, to instrumentalize it! Exactly!

Well, a lot of these bureaucratic enterprises and ideological enterprises are also characterized by the instrumentalization of everything!

And the problem with that, in some sense, is that that instrumentalization, which would be a left hemisphere function, is extremely useful if you have a narrow goal-directed necessity in mind and you need to undertake it efficiently and in a short period of time.

But if the question of, well what's all this for in the broader sense comes up, then that kind of attention interferes with the apprehension that would allow you to conceive of the broader context!

And I think there’s a couple of things that are really key and important in what we’ve been discussing that people should perhaps contemplate in a deep sense, and one is your insistence, which dovetails I would say with my insistence, that there isn’t in some sense anything more important than trying to understand the processes by which attention is directed.

There’s something absolute—you know, the Egyptian god Horus that I—that everyone knows, the falcon that was Horus—that is that attentional capacity that you described!

And they worshipped that as the redemptive god in himself!

Like the eye of Horus—Horus was the god who redeemed the dead state and who fought off Seth, and Seth eventually turns into Satan, by the way, via the Coptics.

But Seth is exactly that force that always threatens the bureaucratic state!

It’s the usurping force, and so the Egyptians knew in their mythos that the attentive eye—the eye of the falcon, right?

And that’s the bird’s eye view, was the antidote to totalitarian—to the totalitarian proclivity!

And the Mesopotamians knew this too, because their god Marduk, who was the top god and also the model for the proper emperor, had eyes all the way around his head!

And say, they knew that it wasn’t intellect that was the antidote to the totalitarian state—not this narrow left hemisphere intellect, let’s say!

Not this narrow left hemisphere intellect!

Let’s say—it was the capacity for attention!

That we seem to be focusing on when discussing right hemisphere functions!

There’s a couple of ways in which one can see the eye of Horus.

And one is in the benign way that you do, and the other is as the sort of somewhat predatory all-seeing eye, the disembodied eye!

And one day, one day I want to write about this because it’s something—an enormous number of Egyptian symbols, including the disembodied eye, come up in the artwork of patients with schizophrenia who don’t know anything about Egyptology!

Oh!

And I would love to talk about that one day, write a book about that!

Well, the Egyptian—whew! Good!

That’s something else we can talk about.

You know, the Egyptians knew this too because they—for them the optimal pharaoh, so the principle of sovereignty wasn’t the eye of Horus.

It was the eye of Horus having revitalized Osiris, who was the spirit of the state.

And so Horus gives one of his eyes to Osiris.

Osiris is his dead father, so their union—and!

Yeah!

So that’s a very complex thing!

It is, it is!

But how did we get onto the eye of Horus? I’ve forgotten!

Oh! Well, while we were talking, we were talking about the potential redemptive value of attention!

Oh, yes! My goodness!

Exactly!

And the fight of attention against intellectual arrogant intellectual totalitarian presumption!

Yes!

Yes!

And I just want to sort of say something very briefly about purpose that I—people may think, “Oh dear, he thinks that as it were there’s an engineering god who sort of got it all—the deistic vision—you know that God wound up the universe and let it go or can occasionally move into the clockwork.”

That’s not what I mean at all!

I mean that there is some purpose that is transcendent, that is sacred, and is not deterministic, which is a really important point to make!

Anyway, I think the science points in that!

Well, I think the science points in that direction too, Ian!

So yes, that’s another place where we can be really hard-headed about this!

You know, I talked to Roger Penrose about this because Penrose does not believe that consciousness itself is reducible to an algorithm or computational.

And he believes that, I believe on grounds that, from the physics perspective, are similar to the—what would you say? They come from the same conceptual universe as the ideas that you’re propounding, in relationship to the idea of consciousness at the forefront of, let’s say, the revelation of possibility, something like that.

So we can—nobody can come at, let’s say, and criticize the these—the ideas that we’re discussing, you and I, by saying, “Well, the biology doesn’t point in that direction.”

And neither does the physics!

It’s like no, the biology points very strongly in this direction, and so does the physics!

I mean, this is it!

It does!

I mean the argument that there is no direction or no drive, no purpose in biology, that it’s all simply accidental lives—I think there must be a few people left in the world who still believe that!

But I think it’s largely been discredited completely!

It’s very obvious, in fact, that biology is highly expressive of purpose!

But I think even the inanimate universe is as well!

And I adopt a rather unusual position, but perhaps we mustn’t go there because it will take us for a long time