Wisdom, Delusion, Consciousness & the Divine | Dr. Iain McGilchrist | EP 436

Hello everyone. I'm pleased to announce my new tour for 2024, beginning in early February and running through June. Tammy and I, and an assortment of special guests, are going to visit 51 cities in the US. You can find out more information about this on my website, jordanbpeterson.com, as well as accessing all relevant ticketing information.

I'm going to use the tour to walk through some of the ideas I've been working on in my forthcoming book, out November 2024, "We Who Wrestle With God." I'm looking forward to this. I'm thrilled to be able to do it again, and I'll be pleased to see all of you again soon. Bye-bye.

You need space, and you need time. Well, you certainly need time. I'm not sure about space, but you certainly need time, and you need matter to produce things that are beautiful and endure. So I see matter as not an opposition to consciousness, but as something that is a reciprocal aspect of consciousness.

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Hello everyone. I had the opportunity today to meet in person with Dr. Ian McGilchrist. I've spoken with Dr. McGilchrist a couple of times, um, a couple of times in person and also on my podcast by Zoom. We're here in Georgia today, and we happen to be in the same place at the same time. So we thought we'd sit down and conduct a lengthy investigation into our, um, into the similarities in our thought and the differences, and to see where we could get. And um, that's what we're inviting you to partake in.

I wanted to talk to Dr. McGilchrist because we share an interest in neuropsychology, particularly in hemispheric specialization. He's very interested in the relationship between the manner in which the left hemisphere and its relatively reductive proclivity sees the world, compared to the more expansive and, in some sense, holistic right hemisphere.

I'm very interested in how that maps on to conceptualizations of the luciferian intellect, which are pervasive in mythology. That's one of the things we discuss. We discuss also the surprising relationship between attention and morality because Dr. McGilchrist believes, as I do, and I think this is more than a belief—I actually think it's an established fact—that attention is a valuing process.

What that essentially means is that the way the world makes itself manifest to us is in accordance with our aim, our attention, and our values. We see the world through a structure of values, and we attend to those things that we value. That is a realization, and an empirical realization for that matter, of immense import because it suggests that the world presents itself in accordance with your aims. And that's a very interesting and terrifying thing to understand.

So we talk about all that, and so welcome to the discussion, Dr. McGilchrist. You spent a lot of time thinking about hemispheric specialization, and that's an understatement. One of the things I find quite remarkable about the fact of hemispheric specialization is something like its implication for understanding the reflection of the world.

Richard Dawkins said something very interesting about biological organisms; he said they have to be a model of the environment in order to function in the environment. Sure. Well, there's a duality of hemispheric specialization, and that implies a kind of ontological duality. Essentially, so let's start with what you make of that.

I mean, I'm curious about two things: what you make of that and also why the issue of hemisphere specialization gripped you so much.

Yeah, yeah. Well, the first thing I’d say is about the word "duality," which suggests, in the way we often use it, a kind of um, seance. And that's not what I'm talking about. There are— and people say, "Oh, you’re um, you're creating a duality," but I'm not creating a duality. Nature has given us a duality to contend with, making sense of what it is for, and it's about, as so many things are, about both division and union. It's about connection and distinction.

So it's not an absolute thing, and it's also importantly mediated by the corpus callosum in human beings. The two hemispheres are connected by this body of fibers at the b...