The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast - 168. A Brain Divided ｜ Iain McGilchrist

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00:01:16.880 Hey everyone, real quick before you skip, I want to talk to you about something serious and important.

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00:02:09.820 Welcome to the JBP Podcast Season 4, Episode 21 with Ian McGilchrist. I'm Michaela Peterson.

00:02:16.440 This episode was recorded on February 15th, 2021. If you're not familiar with him, Dr. Ian McGilchrist is

00:02:23.860 a psychiatrist, author, intellectual, and lecturer. He might be best known for his book, The Master and

00:02:29.500 His Emissary, The Divided Brain and the Making of the Western World. Dr. Ian McGilchrist and my dad

00:02:35.600 discussed a variety of topics related to the bifurcated brain, how we process reality as human

00:02:41.320 beings, and the downfalls of the views that have shaped Western culture, according to McGilchrist.

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00:09:38.480 I'm pleased today to be talking to Dr. Ian McGilchrist.

00:09:46.440 I met him in 2018 in London, and we had the good fortune to have a relatively brief conversation,

00:09:55.620 which was taped and put on YouTube, and it was very productive.

00:10:00.060 And so now I get to talk to him again, and hopefully for a longer period of time.

00:10:06.080 Ian is a psychiatrist.

00:10:08.000 Dr. McGilchrist is a psychologist, a psychiatrist, a former fellow of All Souls College, Oxford,

00:10:14.380 an associate fellow of Green Templeton College, Oxford.

00:10:17.780 He's lectured all over the world.

00:10:19.080 He's published a number of scientific papers.

00:10:20.900 He's most well-known for his book, The Master and His Emissary, and I think you have a copy of that.

00:10:27.320 I asked you to get that so that you can show people The Master and His Emissary,

00:10:32.960 The Divided Brain in the Making of the Western World,

00:10:36.240 which is an analysis of hemispheric specialization and its philosophical and scientific significance.

00:10:45.140 And he's working on a new book, which I have and have started to read.

00:10:49.240 I'm a long ways into it at the moment, called The Matter of Things,

00:10:52.880 which will be forthcoming at some point in the future and will shape some of our discussion today.

00:10:59.700 He's published broadly, scientifically and publicly,

00:11:03.360 a study of paintings of subjects with psychotic illnesses.

00:11:07.320 That's coming out, I believe.

00:11:09.920 I'm planning that.

00:11:12.180 And a series, and also forthcoming, a series of essays about culture and the brain.

00:11:16.320 So, welcome.

00:11:18.740 Thank you very much for agreeing to talk to me.

00:11:21.860 It's a huge pleasure, Jordan.

00:11:23.280 Thank you very much.

00:11:25.180 So, one of the things, I was rereading the introduction to your new book this morning,

00:11:32.860 and I was struck by many different topics, but I was particularly interested in your conception of attention.

00:11:41.020 And so, you talk about attention as something that, in some sense, brings things into being.

00:11:50.980 I don't think that's a misreading of your writing.

00:11:55.260 And maybe I could get you to expound on that a bit and to tell me what you think attention is,

00:11:59.660 because I've had a hell of a time differentiating it from, well, from fluid intelligence, for example,

00:12:04.960 or from consciousness.

00:12:06.860 It's a word that makes sense when you hear it in the context of a bunch of other words,

00:12:11.160 but when you extract it out from that context and try to grip it, it falls apart in your grasp.

00:12:16.860 So, I think one could say that attention is the way in which the individual disposes his or her attention.

00:12:27.580 It's a disposition of one's consciousness.

00:12:32.100 So, attention is how you dispose your consciousness towards the world.

00:12:36.020 And when I discovered, when I was researching The Master and His Hemisphere,

00:12:42.200 the book that's now 10 years old, I came across this fascinating thing,

00:12:49.460 that one of the most fundamental differences between the hemispheres is their way of attending.

00:12:55.860 And it didn't entirely hit me at the time how important it is.

00:13:00.520 But we can talk about that later.

00:13:03.220 But you were asking the rather sort of interesting philosophical question

00:13:06.300 about how attention helps to bring things into being.

00:13:11.080 And I think it does, both generally and in a very particular sense in the left hemisphere.

00:13:19.640 Generally, what I mean is that how you attend to the world depends, you know, on that,

00:13:27.100 depends what world you find.

00:13:29.320 The qualities of the world that comes to your attention is determined by the quality of the

00:13:34.680 attention you bring to it.

00:13:37.420 And not only that.

00:13:40.620 So, that's a very significant statement.

00:13:44.480 I was talking to someone the other day who's somewhat theologically minded,

00:13:48.320 and he was also very interested in the role that attention played on in constituting the world.

00:13:55.780 I mean, you pay attention to things that you value, one way or another.

00:14:02.080 And what that means is that the world tends to manifest itself in relationship to your value structure.

00:14:09.340 And that's a very troublesome idea, in some sense, with regards to our conceptions of the objective world.

00:14:17.160 Because it's not easy to parse out what's objective when what manifests itself to you is dependent, in large part, on what you value.

00:14:27.940 It's very complicated to sort that all out.

00:14:31.520 Well, possibly very much later.

00:14:34.140 We can come to the question of what objective and subjective mean, and how one can...

00:14:42.160 I think it's a mistaken dichotomy.

00:14:45.200 I think one can interpret the words in important ways that give them meaning.

00:14:49.800 But I think to think of just being an objective world out there and a subjective world in here is one of the problems with modern Western philosophy.

00:14:58.920 But to come back to the creation of the world, I was going to say that not only does it sort of bring into the world the world that you know,

00:15:07.940 which is, after all, by definition, the only world you will ever know, but it also changes who you are.

00:15:14.080 So the quality of the attention you pay changes you, the attender.

00:15:18.860 So it's a very profound difference.

00:15:23.460 And in the first book, The Master and His Emissary, one of the things I was expounding was how this business of attention creates a whole distinct world.

00:15:36.020 So the hemispheres have evolved to two different sets of values.

00:15:43.320 You mentioned values, and it's very germane.

00:15:46.160 They have different reasons for existing and therefore have different things they respond to.

00:15:56.040 And what I have tried to explain in that book is that this gives rise to a whole way of seeing the world in a whole world,

00:16:07.920 which is not just for the individual, but also at times it becomes the way of looking at the world for a whole culture.

00:16:14.980 Because, of course, we're, as individuals, never entirely distinct from our culture.

00:16:18.780 We're partly created by our culture and make it what it is.

00:16:22.940 So it's a very fundamental thing.

00:16:25.860 Well, you take pains in The Master and His Emissary to promote the idea or to call attention to the idea

00:16:34.960 that something extremely mysterious is going on in relationship to hemispheric specialization.

00:16:40.940 So it's a very ancient phenomenon.

00:16:45.760 Many creatures or most creatures with developed nervous systems have a bifurcated brain.

00:16:52.860 And the hemispheres differ substantially in terms of their neuroanatomical structure.

00:16:58.600 And the question arises, why is it necessary, assuming that that differentiation of structure reflects some profound differentiation of function,

00:17:08.820 why is it necessary to look at the world, so to speak, in two ways?

00:17:13.480 And why is it so necessary that that bifurcation is conserved across evolutionary history?

00:17:19.900 You'd think that one way would be sufficient, but it doesn't seem to be.

00:17:25.060 And so the first question is, why do you have to look at the world in two ways?

00:17:28.960 And the next question might be, well, what are those two ways?

00:17:33.680 One of the things you outlined that's particularly fascinating to me is that

00:17:37.360 the right hemisphere seems to be specialized more for what you don't know,

00:17:42.820 whereas the left hemisphere is specialized more for what you do know.

00:17:48.160 And I've sort of defined knowing pragmatically.

00:17:53.240 You know something if you undertake an action and the outcome is what you specified.

00:17:58.440 And you don't know something if you undertake an action and the outcome is other than what you specified.

00:18:02.900 And that sort of reflects that novelty organization division that was Goldberg, I believe,

00:18:11.900 that originated that, the neuropsychologist.

00:18:17.080 Well, Jordan, you've raised a whole bunch of points there.

00:18:20.380 So I need a little bit of time to explain that.

00:18:26.260 First of all, every neural network that we know of is asymmetrical.

00:18:30.920 We're going down to the very most basic network that we know and the most ancient one that we know.

00:18:37.700 Nemetostella vectensis, a sea anemone that is 700 million years old,

00:18:42.780 is already asymmetrical in its neural network.

00:18:45.540 And that's the earliest neural network we know of.

00:18:47.920 And it's true of insects.

00:18:49.180 It's true of worms.

00:18:50.080 It's true of, you know, all the way up to human beings.

00:18:52.660 And the three questions that really got me going on this was if the brain is there for making connections

00:19:01.920 and its power is largely lies in the questions it can make, why is it divided down the middle?

00:19:10.480 Wappingly divided.

00:19:11.560 I mean, most people don't realize quite how big this differentiation is if they haven't actually seen a brain.

00:19:17.440 And the second thing is, why is it asymmetrical?

00:19:21.620 Because if you just need to grow this brain, you'd grow it symmetrically.

00:19:25.220 The skull that contains it is symmetrical.

00:19:27.540 And the third thing is, why is the connection, the principal connection between the two hemispheres

00:19:32.440 at the base of the hemispheres, the corpus callosum,

00:19:35.580 why is it at least as much, if not more, in the service of inhibition than facilitation?

00:19:42.520 So it's as though there's something really important about keeping two things apart.

00:19:47.820 Now, my hypothesis, and it's just that, is that this results from something that all creatures need to do.

00:19:59.840 All creatures without exception need to eat and not be eaten.

00:20:03.360 They need to live and to manipulate their environment, to get food, to catch something,

00:20:09.620 to pick something up quickly, deftly, to pick up a twig, to build a nest.

00:20:14.180 In other words, for all the kind of day-to-day stuff, food, shelter,

00:20:17.300 they need to be able to manipulate the world very precisely.

00:20:21.600 But at the same time, they must pay a precisely opposite kind of attention,

00:20:25.540 which is sustained, vigilant, open without presupposition as to what it may find.

00:20:32.480 And so, on the whole, the way in which this has been addressed by evolution

00:20:39.200 is that there are two neuronal masses that can direct attention at the world.

00:20:45.320 And the left hemisphere tends to specialize in targeted, precise attention,

00:20:49.640 and the right hemisphere in a much broader, vigilant kind of attention,

00:20:53.700 which actually sustains the being of the world.

00:20:56.340 Nothing about these tiny fragments that are isolated, disconnected, meaningless,

00:21:01.160 gives you any idea of their meaning.

00:21:04.920 It's only when you see the broad picture and you understand that they're not actually

00:21:08.560 things that go to be put together to make that broad picture,

00:21:11.740 but are things that are isolated out of an already connected picture.

00:21:16.320 So that's the basis of that.

00:21:18.880 I just wanted to pick up your thing about,

00:21:20.380 because I don't think it's quite right to say that the left hemisphere is about what you know

00:21:25.960 and the right is about what you don't know.

00:21:28.200 Somebody, I can't remember who,

00:21:32.440 some philosopher said that knowledge is what we're uncertain of.

00:21:38.720 The things we're certain of are things that we don't really know properly.

00:21:41.880 I think there's a good deal of truth in that.

00:21:43.800 The left hemisphere tends to jump to conclusions.

00:21:48.040 It's much more quick and dirty than the right hemisphere. 0.87

00:21:51.220 The right hemisphere is the one that says, hang on, wait a moment.

00:21:54.340 You may be getting this wrong, because it wants to get things quickly.

00:21:58.060 Its job is to manipulate.

00:21:59.660 Its job is to get.

00:22:00.660 It's to catch.

00:22:01.420 It's to grab stuff.

00:22:03.060 It's the one that controls the right hand that does all the grabbing.

00:22:06.300 So the left hemisphere tends to prize certainty,

00:22:10.360 and it's very uncomfortable when there's ambivalence.

00:22:14.520 Well, when there's ambivalence, you can't act.

00:22:18.080 Exactly.

00:22:19.360 Whereas the right hemisphere seems to appreciate the possibility

00:22:22.220 that we have to hold multiple views,

00:22:26.600 multiple possibilities together.

00:22:30.080 And so it has a quite different take on reality.

00:22:34.060 It's more interested in discovery and exploration

00:22:38.800 rather than capture.

00:22:40.780 The left hemisphere is more interested in capturing a thing

00:22:42.480 that it thinks it knows, often not in any deep way.

00:22:46.560 It's just identified an object it needs.

00:22:48.840 But to understand things, the right hemisphere is better.

00:22:51.920 And the idea of the master and the emissary is,

00:22:55.080 I won't go through the myth of it.

00:22:57.400 I've explained it so many times.

00:22:58.720 But the basic idea is that the master, the right hemisphere,

00:23:02.460 knows that it needs an emissary

00:23:04.180 to do the sort of functional administration work.

00:23:06.680 So it's aware that the stuff that it mustn't get involved with

00:23:11.020 and that it can't know.

00:23:12.360 Whereas the left hemisphere knows everything, as it were,

00:23:16.640 in its eyes, because it only knows a tiny bit,

00:23:19.880 which is explicit.

00:23:21.440 And there it is in broad daylight, down in black and white,

00:23:25.660 no shades of meaning, no nuances, nothing implicit about it.

00:23:30.720 So it thinks, it knows it.

00:23:33.000 And if you like, the downfall of the left hemisphere,

00:23:36.040 and therefore I would go of the society,

00:23:39.140 the civilization, as it once was, that we belong to,

00:23:43.240 is that the left hemisphere doesn't know what it is it doesn't know.

00:23:48.140 It's, you know, the famous thing, the Dunning-Kruger effect,

00:23:53.160 that the more you know, the more you think you don't know.

00:23:55.560 And the people who know least think they know everything.

00:23:58.380 It's a little, that's not quite fair,

00:24:00.620 but there's something of that about it.

00:24:02.260 Yeah.

00:24:03.320 But can I pick up something that I touched on earlier?

00:24:06.600 Please do.

00:24:07.160 We were talking about creating the world through attention.

00:24:09.800 And I think that is, that is true.

00:24:13.700 And there's a very big question there about what I mean by that.

00:24:17.240 Do I mean, just as you say, subjectively or objectively?

00:24:20.040 Maybe we should park that for the moment, but I don't mean either in a very simple way.

00:24:27.680 But what is fascinating is that the right hemisphere, as I say,

00:24:31.380 knows that there are things that it's not aware of.

00:24:34.020 But the left hemisphere seems to take the attitude that if it's not attending to it,

00:24:39.820 it doesn't exist.

00:24:42.060 And this is very dramatic in clinical neurology.

00:24:44.040 So people who've had a right hemisphere stroke, they not only, as it were,

00:24:51.260 don't now pay attention to something, but they deny that that thing ever existed.

00:24:56.480 There's wonderful, you know, very rich accounts of patients.

00:25:02.780 One of the ones that I really like is an experiment done by, who was it?

00:25:07.400 Busiach and Luzzati, I think, back in the late 1970s, where they got a couple of highly educated

00:25:13.600 people with right hemisphere strokes.

00:25:16.840 And they are, and they was in Milan at the time.

00:25:18.940 And they said, you know, these, these people lived in Milan.

00:25:21.840 And they said, imagine you're standing in the Piazza del Duomo in front of the cathedral

00:25:25.360 and looking at the square.

00:25:29.040 Describe all the buildings in the square.

00:25:32.020 And they would describe only the ones on the right side that the left hemisphere only pays

00:25:36.760 attention to.

00:25:37.860 Whereas, you know, but I need to say for the viewers that the right hemisphere pays attention

00:25:41.780 to both parts of the world.

00:25:44.120 So when you have a left hemisphere stroke, the world is relatively preserved globally.

00:25:49.340 But after a right hemisphere stroke, you're only relying on this left hemisphere.

00:25:53.240 It's interested in the bit of space which it can manipulate, the bit on the right.

00:25:56.040 So they named the buildings down the right hand side of the view of the square they had

00:26:01.800 then.

00:26:03.020 And then the experimenters asked them to go to the other end of the square and look at

00:26:06.460 the cathedral facade and name the buildings.

00:26:10.120 And this time they named all the ones down the other side of the square, but didn't mention

00:26:14.200 any of the ones they just mentioned.

00:26:16.580 So there's something, it's been commented by one philosopher that it's almost like there's

00:26:22.320 an ontological landslide.

00:26:23.820 Things come in and out of existence.

00:26:26.040 For the left hemisphere.

00:26:27.520 And when it was pointed out to these people what they'd missed, they became angry, irritable

00:26:32.960 and frustrated, which is a typical left hemisphere emotional town.

00:26:39.400 Impatient to dismiss this.

00:26:43.660 So I think that's intriguing.

00:26:45.300 I mean, it's just one image.

00:26:47.120 I mean, the very dramatic one is to do with denying that you have parts of the body.

00:26:50.400 And as was pointed out by Pritz Langelaar, I think, way back in the second decade of the

00:26:57.440 20th century, they don't only deny after a right hemisphere stroke that they have the

00:27:03.960 left half of the body, which is not functioning because of the right hemisphere stroke.

00:27:08.260 They will become very irritable if questions are asked about it, or they will just go blank.

00:27:14.780 I mean, they will be talking perfectly coherently and they're asked about that and they will go

00:27:18.140 stum or they will become very irritated.

00:27:21.120 And if you force them to recognize that they have a body on that side, although they're perfectly

00:27:26.320 intelligent people, they know they must always have had a left half of their body, they will

00:27:29.980 deny it.

00:27:30.820 And he says, it's as though they never had a left half of the body.

00:27:33.980 It's not only that it's not there now, it never was for them and never will be.

00:27:37.780 Now, that's what I mean when I say that there are different levels of creativity of the world

00:27:43.860 or the creation of the world through attention, I should say, in the two hemispheres.

00:27:50.160 Now, you're in your new book, and to some degree in The Master and His Emissary, you're

00:27:55.600 also making, you're mixing your neurological analysis with philosophical speculation, and

00:28:02.020 you're trying to solve a problem.

00:28:03.880 So maybe you could tell us what the problem is that, and then we can discuss the solution.

00:28:10.080 Well, I suppose the problem is the one that I mentioned, that there was a puzzle about

00:28:18.360 why brains are set up in this rather odd way.

00:28:23.840 But you're also pointing to a kind of philosophical malaise, right?

00:28:28.200 So there's a conceptual problem, but also an emotional or broad-scale philosophical problem.

00:28:35.700 There is, there is indeed.

00:28:37.020 And indeed, if I may say so, the book that I hope will come out fairly soon called The

00:28:43.180 Matter with Things, which is a pun on several levels, because I think it's a critique not

00:28:49.320 only of the way we think now, but of our obsession with thinking of the world as composed of things

00:28:54.960 and that only matter exists.

00:28:57.060 But anyway, in that book, what I'm really trying to do is marry science and philosophy again.

00:29:02.200 They never should have been separated.

00:29:03.980 Science cannot properly be done by philosophy, many, without philosophy.

00:29:09.580 Many scientists and philosophers have commented on this over the years, and the divorce has

00:29:13.800 been disastrous for them both.

00:29:15.560 You get a mindless kind of science that jumps to very naive conclusions that everything is

00:29:20.580 mechanical.

00:29:21.460 And you get a kind of philosophy that thinks it's above dirtying its hands with science.

00:29:27.780 Now, I think each of these parties can benefit from a rapprochement, which is long overdue.

00:29:36.740 And it's that that I try to do in this very big book, to show how strands of neurology, philosophy

00:29:42.860 and physics and physics and even of world mythologies come together to show the same very similar pictures, the same

00:29:51.680 gestalten, the same differences between a world such as the world brought into being by the left hemisphere and a world such

00:30:00.680 as is brought into being by the right hemisphere.

00:30:02.460 And perhaps if we're going on any further, you did invite me earlier to say something about what those

00:30:06.360 differences are.

00:30:07.540 Well, to try and sum it up very quickly, what I'd say is for the left hemisphere, things are

00:30:13.860 known, familiar.

00:30:19.500 Literally, things that are unfamiliar are better dealt with by the right hemisphere until the

00:30:23.260 left hemisphere can go, oh, I see.

00:30:24.840 It's one of those and put it in the category box.

00:30:26.780 It's one of those.

00:30:27.780 They're more distinct.

00:30:29.500 In fact, they're probably entirely fragmentary or isolated in the left hemisphere, whereas

00:30:34.860 the right hemisphere sees that nothing is ever ultimately unconnected from everything else.

00:30:42.360 Things in the left hemisphere are frozen.

00:30:45.420 They don't move.

00:30:46.360 They don't change.

00:30:47.320 Things in the right hemisphere are constantly flowing and changing, although flowing and changing

00:30:53.800 and remaining the same are not necessarily an opposition.

00:31:01.540 As we know, Heraclitus, my favorite philosopher, said, by changing, it remains the same, which

00:31:08.060 is the image of a river, which is never, ever still for a moment.

00:31:11.000 But the river outside my house that was there at breakfast time is probably there now.

00:31:16.480 So in that sense, it's remained.

00:31:19.100 And we're all, I believe, like these rivers, all living beings are.

00:31:23.760 In fact, probably everything that exists is, as Heraclitus pointed out.

00:31:27.260 So what other things?

00:31:29.040 The left hemisphere abstracts.

00:31:31.080 It tends to abstract from the body.

00:31:32.960 It tends to abstract from the context.

00:31:36.640 And something I learned very early on in life was the importance of context, how it utterly

00:31:41.600 changes anything that somebody says or any image.

00:31:45.640 And this is particularly true, of course, of literature, which I, you know, studied and

00:31:51.540 taught for a certain while when I was a young man, that once you start paraphrasing a poem

00:31:57.100 and taking its sentiments out of the context, they've utterly changed themselves.

00:32:00.800 They're no longer what they were.

00:32:03.120 And the left hemisphere is more interested in categories, the right hemisphere in the unique

00:32:08.280 case.

00:32:08.900 So it sees that you're not just a member of a certain group.

00:32:12.660 You tick certain boxes, you fall into that category, but that you're massively complicatedly

00:32:17.720 different.

00:32:18.860 And I mean, this has a very real basis.

00:32:21.040 You know, when you look at neurological patients, people who have right hemisphere strokes are

00:32:26.300 examples, two I know of that both come from the same research group in Switzerland, but involve

00:32:34.560 a farmer who used to know all his cows by name.

00:32:39.360 And after the right hemisphere, right parietal stroke, he couldn't really, well, he not only

00:32:46.560 couldn't tell his cows one from another, but he could hardly tell a cow from a horse.

00:32:50.540 And another woman who very plaintively commented after right hemisphere stroke, she'd spent her 0.99

00:32:55.280 whole life studying the birds of Switzerland.

00:32:57.780 She was an authority on them.

00:32:58.880 And she said, all the birds look the same.

00:33:00.820 So that's what happens in the left hemisphere world.

00:33:05.020 Quality is replaced by quantity.

00:33:09.640 Uniqueness is replaced by the category.

00:33:13.580 And then again, the left hemisphere tends to see things as inanimate, where the right hemisphere

00:33:25.520 will see them as animate.

00:33:26.620 Well, a category, a category implies in some sense that the, the members of that category

00:33:34.380 are indistinguishable, right?

00:33:36.080 Because otherwise you don't have a category, you just have particularity.

00:33:38.840 And so you can imagine that, that, I mean, to understand this completely, you have to understand

00:33:45.420 to some degree what categories are for, but, or what, yeah, what categories are for, at

00:33:52.060 least in part, you put things that you can act towards the same way in the same category.

00:33:59.100 And so young children might think of cats and dogs as dogs, all of them as dogs, because

00:34:05.780 they're cuddly, pettable entities.

00:34:10.200 Not because they have four legs or because they have fur, but because you interact with

00:34:14.140 them the same way.

00:34:14.880 Then you can differentiate cats and dogs as you get a little older.

00:34:18.160 But the first category, dog, which is pettable things, is a perfectly reasonable category.

00:34:23.900 And you can imagine that once a categorical structure has been imposed, that it's easy

00:34:30.180 just to see the category.

00:34:31.620 I wrote an essay in my new book, which is called Beyond Order, about the function of artists.

00:34:38.360 And I believe that part of what artists do, and I think this is maybe, you can tell me,

00:34:44.060 but I think it might reflect the differences that you're talking about.

00:34:47.640 When I was a kid, I lived in a small town and I can remember all the houses on my block.

00:34:55.100 I can remember them in detail.

00:34:57.200 They're familiar to me as individual entities.

00:34:59.820 But now that I'm an adult, I live, I've lived on this street for like 20 years, but the houses

00:35:06.160 are indistinguishable to me.

00:35:07.400 I can't see them as different entities.

00:35:10.780 And I think it's because I'm so familiar with the category house, which is a practical category,

00:35:16.420 that I can't see beyond the category.

00:35:19.160 And it's very efficient because I know what houses do.

00:35:22.280 They sit there.

00:35:23.360 You don't have to pay attention to them.

00:35:25.520 And so it's really a useful perceptual shorthand just to see the category.

00:35:30.820 But what an artist will do is take you outside the category and make you see the particulars,

00:35:36.700 again, that you're missing.

00:35:37.980 And I guess that's partly the context to remind you of what's beyond what your memory forces

00:35:45.400 you now to see.

00:35:47.900 And is that akin to this distinction that you're making between the left and the right?

00:35:52.480 Well, it is a distinction.

00:35:55.260 It's a related distinction, but not exactly the same distinction.

00:35:59.440 I mean, interestingly, it relates to the difference, a very important difference.

00:36:03.700 In fact, I think probably the single most important difference of all, which doesn't at first strike

00:36:09.140 people, partly because they're so used to living in a world of representations, that it is the

00:36:14.760 distinction between the presencing of something as it comes into being for you and your mental

00:36:21.160 representation of it, which is like a caricature or a category thing or a verbal sign so that

00:36:28.560 the left hemisphere's addiction, if you'd like, to understanding things via language is very

00:36:38.760 important because, after all, language makes everything the same.

00:36:44.740 You know, as Nietzsche said, it makes the uncommon common.

00:36:47.520 Because, you know, when you say somebody's got brown hair or something, then you've got 0.92

00:36:52.860 everything just like in a category.

00:36:55.240 But when you see that person, there's something quite different about the way their hair is

00:36:58.880 and so forth.

00:37:00.120 So these finer distinctions...

00:37:00.800 And you'd find that out if you painted it.

00:37:03.520 You know, because you wouldn't paint it with brown paint.

00:37:06.000 You'd paint it with a multitude of colors if you were really looking at it.

00:37:08.800 You certainly would.

00:37:09.920 And you'd see that it wasn't...

00:37:11.400 And I mean, artists play with...

00:37:12.860 Was it Manet who painted the haystacks or Monet?

00:37:16.520 I don't remember.

00:37:18.240 At multiple different times of the year.

00:37:21.180 And the haystack...

00:37:22.420 I mean, the shape was the same, but the haystack was completely different.

00:37:25.820 And that's really, in some sense, what he was portraying was the category is haystack.

00:37:30.980 But the reality is extraordinarily complex.

00:37:36.260 But the category seems to have functional significance.

00:37:41.340 So you dump things together that you can act towards the same way.

00:37:45.060 And then a word is labeled on top of that to serve as an even further compressed shorthand

00:37:53.220 for that category.

00:37:54.400 So you have a complex world that's multitudinous and too complex to even see.

00:38:01.680 And then there's a perceptual act that categorizes that into like a perceptual image, house, say.

00:38:08.620 And then there's a further compression and eradication of information that enables that to be represented by a word.

00:38:16.260 Well, the Greek philologist Max Müller said, it's interesting that we read encyclopedias, we have dictionaries, we read books, and we are with all these words.

00:38:29.720 But none of the things that these words represent actually exist.

00:38:36.320 Because in the act of being represented, they are no longer the thing that was present.

00:38:41.020 The very fact of representing it suddenly stops the presence of the thing.

00:38:44.380 For me, this is very vivid in Wordsworth.

00:38:46.520 And this comes back to some of the things you were saying about the liveliness of the childhood mind.

00:38:50.880 That when he was a young man, and particularly as a boy, rambling in the Lake District, the world was very much still alive to him and coming into being for him.

00:39:04.020 But that as a man, he went back there and, as it were, couldn't avoid seeing the landscape as, oh, a picturesque mountain, a picturesque lake, one of those, if you like.

00:39:16.160 And this is what he means by the phrase, the shades of the prison house, closing round the growing boy, in his intimations of immortality on reflection of his early childhood.

00:39:30.220 So, this is from this book.

00:39:36.200 There was a time when meadow grove and stream, the earth and every common sight, to me did seem appareled in celestial light.

00:39:43.860 The glory and the freshness of the dream.

00:39:45.920 The glory and the freshness of a dream, yes.

00:39:48.060 That's it.

00:39:48.840 This is what I'm referring to.

00:39:50.320 And this really is one of the more important differences.

00:39:53.440 I would say probably the core difference.

00:39:55.500 That, as it were, one world is real, vibrant, unknown in part, only known ever to a degree, and ever more coming into being and ever more coming into knowledge for the right hemisphere.

00:40:09.560 And for the left hemisphere, already cold, finished, known, dead, put in a book, stuffed on the shelf, filed away.

00:40:17.000 And we now live so much in this virtual, represented world, partly because we're very much cut off from nature, which constantly reminds you of its vivid, uncertain liveliness.

00:40:30.560 It confronts you with its audacious beauty and vitality all the time, partly because we've learned to cut our minds off from our bodies.

00:40:39.400 And so we think in this enormously abstract way, and partly because of city life, partly because of technology, which means we interact with two-dimensional screens rather than the three-dimensional depth, which is in a room when you're with someone.

00:40:55.140 Which is why, as you know, which is why, as you know, and I know, because we've both helped patients in our time, that it's very important to be in the room with the patient.

00:41:05.160 It's a completely different thing that happens from anything you can do on the telephone or even like this.

00:41:10.980 So part of the philosophical case that you're making is, I believe, that while we have a terrible conundrum as human beings, we need, in some sense, for the purposes of efficiency, to move towards the most efficient representations possible.

00:41:32.140 And this has real bearing on the nature of perception itself.

00:41:36.880 So I know, for example, that even in the primary visual cortex, so in principle, you know this, but I'm going to explain it for people who are listening.

00:41:47.080 As the signals, as the pattern signals from your retina move back towards your brain, they move upwards, so to speak, through a hierarchy of processing units.

00:41:56.680 And even at the first stages of that processing, there's still more top-down input from other brain centers than there is input from the retinal structures themselves.

00:42:09.020 And so what that implies is that even at the beginnings of perception, you know, if you think about it as being built up from perceptual elements up towards the whole gestalt, which isn't exactly accurate, but it'll do for now.

00:42:20.720 Now, even at the beginnings of the visual process, there's more input from what's inside than there is from the external world, so to speak, or at least as much.

00:42:29.440 And then what seems to happen as we age is that, perhaps, is that increasingly that perception becomes solipsistic.

00:42:38.520 And so we're only seeing what we know.

00:42:40.460 And that's extraordinarily efficient because it's very hard to build up a new perception.

00:42:44.160 You have to really investigate something in detail to see it anew, whereas if it's the same old thing that you've seen 10,000 times, you can already use what you know.

00:42:53.920 And it's not surprising you'd be annoyed if you were forced to jump out of that, because there's a tremendous amount of work that has to be done if you want to see something for the first time again.

00:43:02.960 Well, as we both know, people would rather deny obvious truths than let go of a cherished belief.

00:43:12.460 So that's certainly right.

00:43:14.940 And we don't perceive the world as, you know, in a naive way.

00:43:21.460 We come to the world with our history, with our vast range of experience.

00:43:27.140 And so, as you say, there's top-down effects on the lower end of things, or the lower end of perception, from higher cognitive functions.

00:43:37.360 But that's an image of something very important to the philosophy I try to put across in the matter with things,

00:43:43.500 which is that in order to understand any element in experience, it's at least as important to see what holes it goes to make up,

00:43:56.940 or potentially can go to make up, as it is to see what it turns into when you break it down.

00:44:03.460 In fact, often it's not very revealing to find out what happens when you break it down.

00:44:07.860 And so, in a way, every...

00:44:09.140 ...offers from that. It's like, psychology is a discipline that consists, at least in its present form,

00:44:15.560 mostly of disparate experiments, which demonstrate very particular things about people,

00:44:21.280 about how people behave in very particular circumstances.

00:44:24.740 But there's nothing, there's very little that unites that back up to something that's...

00:44:32.140 that isn't merely fragmentary observation.

00:44:35.240 And so it's very difficult to get a grip on.

00:44:36.880 And there's billions of potential separate observations.

00:44:41.280 And they're not that helpful in some sense.

00:44:45.260 Well, it's all part of the world picture, which, from the philosophical point of view,

00:44:49.600 is the purpose of the long book, which I sent to you in manuscript,

00:44:54.980 the matter with things.

00:44:56.620 Effectively, I can state quite simply, that I want to give a considered response to the philosophy of our age,

00:45:10.300 which is that there is only matter, and that things are understood by reducing them to their parts,

00:45:16.020 and this doesn't change them.

00:45:17.200 It's a very naive philosophy.

00:45:21.600 It's simplistic, and it's immoral, because it changes the way we treat the world and other people, and nature.

00:45:30.400 It changes our idea of who we are in a very damaging way,

00:45:34.600 ruling out things that other traditions have traditionally held as very powerful.

00:45:40.300 And, you know, coming back to your comment about how people cling on to things that they believe,

00:45:46.300 and it's much more difficult to try and see something in a different way, especially with age.

00:45:51.660 This is why, of course, most traditions of spiritual growth

00:45:58.700 enjoin on the person paradoxes, to see things in a completely new way

00:46:03.740 that violates all the ways that they thought they knew.

00:46:06.340 So I use paradox in this new book, but not in some blind way.

00:46:12.260 In fact, I show that what we mean by a paradox is that the view of the left hemisphere of something

00:46:18.980 and the view taken of the right hemisphere of the same thing can never actually completely marry up.

00:46:25.460 They have different qualities, and if you push the comparison or the desire to make them logically come together too far,

00:46:33.980 you end up with a paradox.

00:46:36.240 And this started happening, you know, early on in the Greek,

00:46:40.940 the ancient Greek period of philosophy with Zeno.

00:46:44.800 This is where the first paradoxes come from.

00:46:47.300 And I have a whole chapter on paradox, which I see as generated by the desire of the left hemisphere

00:46:53.860 to say it must be this or it must be that,

00:46:56.420 clinging on preferentially to the very fragmentary view of the left hemisphere.

00:47:00.820 See, the left hemisphere is not good at understanding.

00:47:04.280 That sounds a very blanket statement, and it is.

00:47:07.400 But the whole of the first part of that book, the new book,

00:47:11.820 is massively more thorough neuropsychology than is in The Master and His Emissary.

00:47:19.460 So it's about as thorough as I could possibly make it.

00:47:23.320 And what I do is I look at the ways in which we have any chance of getting an idea of what the world is.

00:47:29.820 What are the portals of entry of, if you like, information about the world to us?

00:47:35.820 And I take it that it depends very much on our attention, how we dispose our attention,

00:47:41.080 perception, the judgments we form on the basis of perception,

00:47:46.960 the ways in which we apprehend what we're dealing with rather than comprehend it.

00:47:54.960 In other words, grasp it, as we say, with the right hand of the left hemisphere, take it, use it.

00:48:01.360 How we understand it in terms of emotional intelligence, which is not a small thing.

00:48:09.740 It's the whole way in which we understand everything human.

00:48:12.480 By emotional, I don't mean sort of in some, you know what I mean.

00:48:18.020 I'm talking about social and emotional understanding,

00:48:20.280 the sort of thing that is absent in people with autism.

00:48:22.860 And cognitive intelligence, this may surprise people, but all these things, and creativity.

00:48:29.980 So creativity, intelligence of the cognitive kind, IQ kind, emotional and social intelligence,

00:48:38.440 apprehension is a separate case, I'll come to that in a second,

00:48:43.520 perception and attention and judgment.

00:48:46.220 All these are better performed by the right hemisphere. 0.98

00:48:48.920 Only apprehension is better performed by the left hemisphere.

00:48:52.860 So the only thing the left hemisphere is better at is getting a hold on either an idea,

00:48:58.720 very precise, clear one, or on a thing that it wants to use.

00:49:04.260 But all the manifold complexity, which our intelligence brings to bear in order to understand the world,

00:49:09.820 all of that is better done by the right hemisphere.

00:49:12.660 And I can say that on the basis, not just of experiments in normal subjects,

00:49:17.540 but on seeing what happens when you have either left hemisphere damage or right hemisphere damage.

00:49:22.860 To summarize a vast chunk of information, which I hope will be, you know, there for people to read very, very soon.

00:49:29.420 And to summarize that very briefly, what one would say is that when you have damage to the right hemisphere,

00:49:37.020 your grasp of reality is the main thing that's impaired.

00:49:40.920 You don't understand it.

00:49:42.120 You don't connect with it.

00:49:43.580 Your ability to understand what's going on disappears.

00:49:46.980 Whereas when you have a right hemisphere, sorry, when you have a, that's when you have a right hemisphere stroke,

00:49:52.580 when you have a left hemisphere stroke, the main things are, you have difficulty speaking and using your right hand.

00:49:58.220 They're practically very important, but essentially the understanding of the world,

00:50:02.760 the grasp of the meaning of the world,

00:50:05.960 I'll use these words grasp again, but the overall comprehension of the world is sustained by the right hemisphere.

00:50:12.540 Okay. So let me ask you a question.

00:50:14.600 Can I?

00:50:15.280 Sure. Go ahead.

00:50:16.140 Okay.

00:50:16.380 And then, yep.

00:50:18.140 All right. Okay. Let me just make this point.

00:50:20.700 Yep.

00:50:20.900 Because I want to, people might say, well, okay, but so what?

00:50:24.800 We've both got right and left hemispheres, so we're not missing anything.

00:50:29.400 So does it matter?

00:50:30.700 Well, yes, it matters very importantly for my philosophical project,

00:50:34.020 because as I show in the second part of the book, where I look at the proper contributions to understanding made by reason, science, intuition, and imagination,

00:50:47.300 what I can show is that in those attempts to grasp, we can see the world,

00:50:56.320 we can see the signature of the right hemisphere or the signature of the left hemisphere on a particular model.

00:51:01.680 So if we have two possible models of a certain action or an aspect of reality or of space or time,

00:51:09.060 which I deal with in the third part of the book,

00:51:11.680 and indeed in philosophical history and in the history of physics and so on,

00:51:15.160 there have tended to be opposing views of the world.

00:51:19.060 Once you know how the left hemisphere sees it and how the right hemisphere tends to see things,

00:51:24.040 you can see the hallmark of the left hemisphere's understanding on a certain philosophical standpoint,

00:51:30.160 on a certain scientific take of the world,

00:51:33.320 and you can see the hallmark and the imprint of the right hemisphere in certain other ways of reasoning and of science and philosophy.

00:51:44.020 So this is very important, because up till now, we've never been able to judge between these two.

00:51:49.780 We've got A, we've got B, we just have to go, can't tell, we can't reconcile them, we can't do without either of them.

00:51:56.660 That's true.

00:51:58.760 Ultimately, that's true. 0.83

00:51:59.960 But we can get a very sharp idea, I believe now, of which of these is fallacious,

00:52:07.220 which one is going to lead us down a blind alley, which one is out of touch with reality,

00:52:11.360 and which one is more in touch with reality.

00:52:13.620 I just wanted to say that, because it's behind the whole philosophical drift of my book,

00:52:17.600 which is, how do we know who we are?

00:52:20.380 I asked Plotinus' question, who are we?

00:52:23.440 That's effectively the question.

00:52:25.120 What is the cosmos?

00:52:26.440 What is nature?

00:52:27.540 And how do we all relate?

00:52:29.640 Sorry, I'll hand over to you.

00:52:31.560 No, no, that's good.

00:52:33.620 Okay, so to do something, you have to zero in on it.

00:52:38.620 So let me lay something out for you,

00:52:41.380 and then I'm going to ask you a specific question about it.

00:52:44.500 So imagine that I'm concentrating on the computer screen.

00:52:48.260 I'm attending to it.

00:52:49.020 I'm writing a book.

00:52:50.280 Okay, so the question might be, well, what am I doing while I'm writing that book?

00:52:53.300 What is it to write that book?

00:52:55.540 Well, at the most focused level of my consciousness,

00:53:00.980 the most focal level,

00:53:02.720 that involves voluntary control of my fingers.

00:53:06.320 I'm going to be typing single letters.

00:53:09.780 And there are muscle movements that are associated with that,

00:53:12.220 but I don't really know what the muscle movements are.

00:53:14.040 I know how to move my fingers.

00:53:15.400 That's the highest level of resolution I can manage.

00:53:18.820 I can press T with my left hand and H with my right hand,

00:53:22.580 and with these two fingers.

00:53:26.280 And so that's sort of where the pedal hits the metal in some sense.

00:53:30.020 That's where my intent meets the world.

00:53:32.680 Okay, so, but I'm not typing letters.

00:53:35.300 Sorry, I am typing letters, but at the same time, I'm typing words.

00:53:39.360 And at the same time I'm typing words, I'm typing phrases.

00:53:42.880 And then I'm typing sentences, and I'm typing paragraphs,

00:53:46.540 and I'm typing chapters, and then I'm typing books.

00:53:49.500 And then the book itself is an artifact that's nested inside higher order structures.

00:53:55.980 So, well, I'm writing the book, but the reason I can write the book is because I'm imagining a world

00:54:03.020 within which the book is nested.

00:54:05.700 And so I'm focusing on something very specific.

00:54:09.560 Like, I can't write the book without pushing the letter T with my left index finger.

00:54:14.700 But I also can't write the book without apprehending the book as a whole.

00:54:18.520 And, you know, when I edit, I edit not letters because I can spell, but I edit words.

00:54:24.680 I substitute one word for another.

00:54:26.320 I edit phrases.

00:54:27.160 I edit sentences.

00:54:28.180 I edit at the paragraph level.

00:54:29.680 Like, all of these levels actually exist.

00:54:32.300 Now, is it reasonable to suppose?

00:54:36.120 So, sorry, I'm going to add one more level outside that.

00:54:39.340 So you might ask, well, why am I writing a book?

00:54:41.500 And it might be, well, because I'm a practicing scientist.

00:54:45.240 And why is that important?

00:54:48.660 It's, well, I'm a dutiful citizen, let's say, trying to uphold my moral responsibility.

00:54:54.360 And you might say, well, why is that important?

00:54:55.920 And I would say, well, that's part of my proper moral engagement with the world.

00:55:01.900 And then I can't go farther outside than that.

00:55:04.540 Now, is it reasonable to suppose, if you think about that whole structure as a kind of lens

00:55:10.180 that focuses us in on the world, is it reasonable to suppose that it's the left hemisphere, so

00:55:15.880 to speak, that's concentrating on the T's and the H's, and that as you move up that hierarchy 0.95

00:55:20.900 to broader and broader levels of conceptualization, that the manner in which those higher levels

00:55:27.620 are conceptualized shifts more and more to the right, or is processed more and more by

00:55:31.040 the right?

00:55:31.500 Is that a reasonable way of looking at it?

00:55:33.900 I think you could, but I'd need to sort of gloss it a bit.

00:55:38.740 And what you've beautifully described is what the right hemisphere knows, and which John

00:55:44.740 summarized by saying, if you try to get hold of any one thing and pull it, you find that

00:55:50.100 they bring with it the whole of the rest of the universe.

00:55:52.740 Yet that sentence you're writing is informed by your personal history, and the history,

00:56:00.180 therefore, of your culture, and therefore, and so on, and so on, and so forth.

00:56:04.200 So everything that has gone to make you is present in that business of the book.

00:56:09.660 And so you're not, of course, at any one time aware of more than a tiny bit, but there's

00:56:16.480 a very fallacious and superficial argument that if you're not conscious of it, in that

00:56:24.520 sense of the word conscious, then somehow you're not doing it.

00:56:27.640 But of course you are.

00:56:29.260 The whole thing emanates from what I call the field of you.

00:56:33.620 Now, suppose rather than, you know, we can take the example of the typing, but you wouldn't

00:56:39.240 be able to type at all if you were thinking about what your fingers were doing. 0.62

00:56:42.360 And, you know, but nonetheless, it would be stupid to say that you're unconscious while 0.92

00:56:49.120 you're typing. 0.90

00:56:49.760 Of course, you're not unconscious.

00:56:52.020 Somebody playing a Bach fugue has got to use all their fingers and their hands, you know,

00:56:57.300 and their feet at the same time.

00:57:00.200 And if they concentrated, they could only concentrate and focus on one finger.

00:57:04.360 Of course, that would stop the whole music for a start.

00:57:06.740 But they're conscious.

00:57:08.280 Of course, they're just as conscious when the whole thing is happening as they are if

00:57:12.140 they think about the finger and stop it.

00:57:14.160 So what this illustrates is what Alfred North Whitehead was keen to point out, that as soon

00:57:22.800 as we master something, we relegate it to another part of the mind that we don't any longer have

00:57:28.240 to focus on.

00:57:29.240 And the focusing of tension is costly.

00:57:32.560 He said, it's like cavalry charges in battle.

00:57:36.520 Well, it should only be done rarely.

00:57:40.360 You need fresh horses and it comes at a high cost.

00:57:43.720 So that's a good analogy.

00:57:46.180 Because you build a little machine.

00:57:48.300 The things that we do unconsciously are in no way inferior stuff.

00:57:56.000 So, for example, the Bach fugue is not inferior.

00:57:58.260 When a surgeon is learning, he or she has to be very conscious of what he or she's doing,

00:58:05.120 the actual business of the hand cutting.

00:58:07.520 But when the surgeon is very skilled, it can hum, listen to the radio, chat with colleagues,

00:58:14.060 and it's all happening.

00:58:15.600 Similarly, a chess player, a bad chess player has to be conscious of every move.

00:58:19.540 But a really good one is not unconscious.

00:58:22.060 It's very, very highly conscious, but it's not focused.

00:58:25.820 Now, my distinction to, sorry, finally answer your question, is that focused attention,

00:58:33.760 this focal attention on the detail is what the left hemisphere does.

00:58:37.900 It can only take in about three degrees for the attentional arc.

00:58:41.400 So it's incredibly limited.

00:58:43.780 And as Whitehead says, it has its uses in an emergency, but really it's not a satisfactory

00:58:50.900 way for living.

00:58:52.600 And what I think is happening is that we are now more and more saying anything that I'm not

00:58:57.320 actually focusing on right now doesn't exist.

00:58:59.640 All the implicit stuff, all the unconscious stuff, all the things that go to make up the

00:59:05.400 richness of our both cognitive and emotional and embodied selves isn't really important.

00:59:12.140 We focus down on this tiny bit that the relatively unintelligent left hemisphere knows about and

00:59:19.380 is aware of.

00:59:20.360 So when I say conscious and unconscious, I like to say, don't think of these as two separate

00:59:25.660 realms, like, you know, two tanks with perhaps a trap and things can pop up from the lower

00:59:32.200 tank into the higher tank or whatever, but instead think of it like a stage and there's

00:59:37.780 a spotlight and the spotlight may just illuminate one part of the stage, but the rest of the

00:59:42.380 stage hasn't gone anywhere.

00:59:43.700 It's still there.

00:59:44.760 And you just need to move the spotlight and suddenly it's there again in the middle of

00:59:48.260 what you're thinking about.

00:59:49.540 That's how I would see that question.

00:59:52.680 Okay.

00:59:52.860 So let's go back to this typing example again.

00:59:55.560 So when you learn to type, you're going to be paying conscious attention to

01:00:01.940 pushing the T's and the H's.

01:00:04.560 As you learn to type, you start perhaps being conscious more of maybe you're attending at

01:00:10.760 the level of the phrase, like you don't have to be consciously attentive to those things

01:00:16.020 you've built automated machinery for.

01:00:18.600 Now they say when kids learn to read, it isn't enjoyable to begin with because it's

01:00:23.960 effortful to learn to process the letters and it's effortful to learn to process the words.

01:00:29.480 And it's not until they can automatize the letter and word processing.

01:00:33.980 And so they can read the word at a glance that they start to be able to be conscious

01:00:38.380 of the phrase and the sentence.

01:00:40.460 And that's when they get the meaning from the text.

01:00:42.640 And that's when it starts to become enjoyable.

01:00:45.600 Right.

01:00:46.100 It's not just effortful.

01:00:47.280 And then so the consciousness of a reader isn't consciousness of letters and it's not

01:00:51.840 consciousness of words.

01:00:52.940 It's consciousness of something like the interplay between sentences and paragraphs.

01:00:56.440 And it's like your consciousness floats above the highest level of automatization that you've

01:01:03.300 been able to manage.

01:01:05.040 Does that seem reasonable to you?

01:01:08.060 Well, I mean, when you're playing a musical piece, for example, you don't pay attention

01:01:12.380 to what you've practiced because you've got that.

01:01:15.060 You pay attention to the sequencing of what you've practiced.

01:01:18.120 And the greater a musician you are, the higher up in the abstraction hierarchy you can focus

01:01:24.160 because you've automated all the lower stuff.

01:01:27.620 Well, yes.

01:01:28.500 And that comes back to what?

01:01:30.440 I'm sorry.

01:01:32.020 No, I'm trying to get the relationship between that and the hemispheric specialization.

01:01:36.860 Well, I think I've done my best to point out that the right hemisphere is the one that

01:01:43.840 is able to attend to the whole gestalt.

01:01:47.140 Ultimately, it is dealing not in fragmentary entities that have to be put together, but

01:01:52.200 in gestalten that already exist and are nested so that you go down from one level and you

01:01:57.720 find another.

01:01:58.820 You know, famously, you can go from the from the body to the organ, to the tissue, to the

01:02:04.560 cell, to the organelle, to the, you know, and each of these at each stage is a whole

01:02:11.860 that has its own qualities and its own rules, really, and works in a semi-autonomous way.

01:02:17.640 So there's always freedom between the levels of understanding.

01:02:23.300 There's always space.

01:02:24.620 It's rather like the gaps in the structure are where the light gets in.

01:02:28.680 You know, if you tighten everything up, then you've got total darkness.

01:02:31.520 So what we're trying to do all the time is to know enough to be able to act, but to leave

01:02:37.620 it open so that we can know more and really understand where we are and what we're doing

01:02:42.000 when we're acting.

01:02:43.240 So I think these are significant differences between the left hemisphere, which is utterly

01:02:47.780 goal-directed and very direct in the way in which it achieves or aims to achieve its goal,

01:02:55.700 and the right hemisphere, which is sustaining this and also seeing the goal in a wider whole.

01:03:03.640 You know, the reason of typing these letters is not just to make the keys go up and down

01:03:07.920 and to have a bit of paper at the end of it, but because you want to influence minds that

01:03:12.540 are now unaware of this, but will know about it soon.

01:03:16.060 So I think it's the difference between this very, again, Whitehead says, as a civilization

01:03:21.480 advances by the number of actions that can be made automatically or below the level.

01:03:28.880 Sorry?

01:03:29.520 Without thinking.

01:03:30.920 Without thinking.

01:03:32.260 Because thinking is a very complex thing, isn't it?

01:03:36.720 I mean, what is it?

01:03:37.640 And a number of people have commented, rather along the lines that I'm saying, that it's

01:03:42.800 not so much right to say, I think, as in cogito, but in the words of Liechtenberg, the 18th

01:03:49.520 century German philosopher and physicist, es denkt, es denkt in mir, something is thinking

01:03:57.120 in me.

01:03:58.560 And that is the me.

01:04:00.580 It's not separate, and it's not unconscious in the sense of it has no life, it has no

01:04:07.040 meaning, it has no purpose, it has no direction.

01:04:09.280 Absolutely not.

01:04:10.140 It has all those things.

01:04:12.340 And one of the things I'm trying to argue in the last part of it, may I say something

01:04:17.580 just about the structure of this book?

01:04:19.040 I started off on it, this new book, and I'm just going to say a little bit more about

01:04:22.000 it.

01:04:22.220 Yeah, yeah.

01:04:23.280 So I've explained the first part of the book.

01:04:24.280 Yeah, well, we're trying to grasp something large going through its parts, and it's not such

01:04:28.600 a simple thing to do.

01:04:30.200 It's not a simple thing to do.

01:04:32.460 So the first part of the book I've explained, it gives one an insight into a simple fact

01:04:39.060 that in terms of having access to the reality of the world, the right hemisphere is better

01:04:45.200 than the left.

01:04:46.260 And it has a special take, if you like, which we can recognize, so that when we're having

01:04:51.660 to choose between two opposites, we can choose one, if we want to, over the other.

01:04:56.340 And in the second part of the book, I'm looking at the pathways to knowledge, using attention,

01:05:02.120 perception, judgment, intelligence, how do we put them to use?

01:05:05.620 Well, I think the main ones are science, reason.

01:05:09.200 I think most people would say they're important.

01:05:11.440 I would say intuition and imagination are also vastly important.

01:05:16.120 Now, none of these is infallible.

01:05:18.240 None of these can say that it can deal with everything.

01:05:21.100 There are proper limits to science, otherwise you're peddling untenable, naive scientism.

01:05:28.320 But it is a very important thing for us to respect and to do honorably.

01:05:33.680 Reason is enormously important.

01:05:36.940 I use science and reason as the basis of my book.

01:05:39.660 But again, reason, as Pascal, a famous mathematician and philosopher, said, reason is poor if it

01:05:45.460 cannot see its own limitations.

01:05:48.640 And so it has limitations, but it can achieve of a very great deal.

01:05:53.360 And the same actually is true of intuition.

01:05:55.680 It's had a very bad press in recent years because I think, again, psychologists, I think

01:06:00.280 you've alluded to this, they like things that can be taken down into bits and shown that

01:06:05.420 we can find the mechanisms.

01:06:07.260 Intuition is a bit hard for that.

01:06:09.460 And imagination has been, again, relegated to the sort of children's play box, that this

01:06:15.460 is something to do with fantasy.

01:06:18.920 Whereas, in fact, I argue that quite the opposite, that whereas fantasy may be an interesting

01:06:24.000 decoration on things that we already know, and the left hemisphere can do that.

01:06:28.540 Imagination is actually how we go to meet the world and understand it.

01:06:33.100 And we have to imagine it into being.

01:06:35.280 There is no alternative.

01:06:36.800 If we are not imaginatively engaged with the world, we just can't see a lot of things that

01:06:41.700 are there.

01:06:43.140 So we need to use all of these faculties together, not just one or two, as we now do.

01:06:50.200 Sorry, carry on.

01:06:50.780 Well, I wanted to comment on your discussion of imagination and the manner in which it brings

01:06:57.420 the world into being.

01:06:58.440 So we've already discussed the fact that the realm of your experience is dependent to

01:07:06.000 some degree on your attention, and that that's associated with intent.

01:07:10.840 And intent seems to me to be, it's future-oriented.

01:07:14.180 To have an intent, intent means to attempt to move from one place to another.

01:07:18.860 And hypothetically, it's a better place because why move otherwise?

01:07:22.860 And so to act in the world with intent means that you're playing out something that's imaginative

01:07:30.200 because to posit that one thing is better than another and therefore want to move towards

01:07:36.980 it, you have to have imagined up a better world.

01:07:40.160 And so what that means in some sense is that we're always meeting the world in a way that

01:07:44.920 imposes our imaginative attempts to make it better upon us, upon the world.

01:07:49.920 But that also brings the world into being.

01:07:52.840 And so, and I guess I'm saying that because I'm trying to grapple with the why of your book

01:08:01.220 again.

01:08:02.100 You're implying throughout, and more than implying, that we have a paucity of viewpoint that's

01:08:10.060 demotivating and dangerous.

01:08:11.820 And you're implying as well that that has something to do with our obsessive concentration

01:08:18.200 or utilization of left hemisphere functions.

01:08:21.660 That reminds me of Heidegger to some degree in his claim that moderners use the world as

01:08:27.040 produce, you know, that we tend to reduce everything to its functional utility insofar

01:08:32.720 as it can be exploited.

01:08:33.780 Like, I have some sympathy for that, because we have to exploit the world to live.

01:08:37.780 But it, so let's say we do lose something by being specific, and narrow, we gain something,

01:08:49.120 which is functional utility.

01:08:50.580 What do we do about that?

01:08:52.500 You're trying to understand it, why it is.

01:08:54.680 What do we do to fight against it?

01:08:56.240 Well, that's a whole separate question.

01:09:02.540 But at the moment, I'm trying to unpack what the problem is.

01:09:06.500 Okay, well, I won't push past that for now, Ben.

01:09:09.860 I mean, quite what we do about it is the million dollar question.

01:09:15.380 And we may not be in a position, unless we radically alter the way in which we think about

01:09:22.740 the world, understand it, and feel it, and experience it, and interact with it, we may

01:09:27.340 not have a world in which to live.

01:09:30.200 So it's a pretty important topic.

01:09:33.540 But, so having sort of more or less, as it were, gone over what are the portals to understanding,

01:09:40.720 what are the paths to understanding, I then, in the part three, which is really, if you

01:09:45.500 like, the reason we've had parts one and two, you can't get to part three without them.

01:09:50.620 But when you get there, we want to know, so what is the world like?

01:09:55.040 And so I look at the structure of the world, the theories about it, and what we can tell

01:10:01.200 from physics and from the hemisphere hypothesis, what parts of it we may be perceiving with

01:10:06.500 the left hemisphere and what we may be seeing with the right.

01:10:09.860 And I look at the structure in the sense of the coming together of opposites, and a very

01:10:15.100 interesting philosophical question of the relationship between the one and the many.

01:10:18.720 And then in the rest of the book, I look at time, space, motion, meaning largely flow, but

01:10:28.000 all kinds of motion, matter and consciousness, value, purpose, and the sense of the sacred.

01:10:39.720 Now, I argue that these elements, like consciousness, are not secondary, they're not derivative.

01:10:48.200 It's actually irrational, I suppose they are.

01:10:51.340 Reason is on the side of the fact that they are ontological primaries.

01:10:55.920 And I argue that actually also...

01:10:58.340 Unpack that for people, because there's a lot...

01:11:00.960 Well, it would take a very long time.

01:11:02.000 Well, I can unpack the phrase.

01:11:06.560 What I mean by ontological primary is that it can't be reduced to other terms.

01:11:13.280 It can't be said that as long as you look at a brain in a certain way, you can work out

01:11:19.160 what consciousness is.

01:11:21.000 Consciousness is sui generis.

01:11:23.180 Consciousness, it is of its own kind.

01:11:25.780 It is not something that is derived from anything.

01:11:28.860 It has to be a primary constituent of the universe.

01:11:31.280 This is not a particularly any longer controversial view.

01:11:36.820 It's held by many philosophers now in the form of panpsychism,

01:11:41.660 in which something like consciousness is in the cosmos,

01:11:45.860 and the cosmos perhaps exists inside consciousness.

01:11:48.960 Not my consciousness, but a consciousness field.

01:11:53.180 And there are plenty of neuroscientists who say this too.

01:11:58.820 Ramatron, Colin Blakemore, not known for being kind of away with the fairies, 0.64

01:12:04.500 but they say this too.

01:12:07.420 But I would also argue, and it's a perhaps harder thing to make comprehensible

01:12:13.200 in a very short space, but that actually values are things that are there.

01:12:17.860 They're not things we make up.

01:12:19.320 They're not things that are like, hmm, I rather like that.

01:12:25.240 They are built into the drive of everything.

01:12:31.020 And I think that the cosmos has drives.

01:12:33.240 You can describe them in all sorts of ways.

01:12:35.440 It has the fact that it changes and moves in certain ways according to, quote,

01:12:41.000 laws, which may actually not be laws, but maybe temporary habits.

01:12:43.960 We don't know.

01:12:44.520 They may be evolving too.

01:12:45.700 But the very fact that this thing has this energy to evolve, to differentiate,

01:12:51.200 to produce differentiation within union, this is a value of a kind.

01:12:55.740 You can't get behind these.

01:12:57.720 And most of our values, other than those of utility, this is good for me,

01:13:02.620 and I want to have more of it, which is what the left hemisphere is devoted to.

01:13:05.740 Most of those other values are not reducible to sheer material greed or feathering your own nest.

01:13:16.340 They're often actually the things that are vastly important.

01:13:19.660 Probably the whole point of the being consciousness at all is to come to appreciate the meaning of truth,

01:13:25.860 goodness and beauty, to have a sense of something awe-inspiring,

01:13:30.160 which is really what we mean when we talk about the sacred, that we're humble enough to say we don't know everything,

01:13:35.600 and we probably will never know.

01:13:37.560 I mean, why should we?

01:13:38.340 That's also a totally irrational idea that our brains are so constructed that we should know everything.

01:13:43.600 I mean, a mouse might think that if it could think that much, you would think it knows everything, but it doesn't, you know.

01:13:49.160 And we're evolving.

01:13:50.840 There may be creatures in the future who think, what the hell did Homo sapiens in 2021 know?

01:13:55.420 So I just want to get back into the frame that not all the things that matter to us,

01:14:01.780 they are enormously important aspects of a universe that is not dead and static unless given a push,

01:14:10.580 not without purpose, not without meaning, not without value.

01:14:14.120 These things are in the grain, in the warp and the weft of the cosmos, of that I'm certain.

01:14:19.220 And the job is for us to find this.

01:14:22.500 And most philosophers, wise people, sages, whatever you like to call them, in the past,

01:14:30.600 have adopted a view of the cosmos, which is exactly the one that one would expect the right hemisphere to hold,

01:14:37.420 which is one in which things are not always certain or known.

01:14:41.820 They're changing.

01:14:42.540 They're interconnected.

01:14:43.680 But the whole thing has a meaning.

01:14:45.480 It is not a heap of fragments that don't mean anything.

01:14:49.360 They're changing the modern malaise.

01:14:52.280 So that's really where I'm driving at, if you see.

01:14:55.280 That's the philosophical goal, is to help people see something that I think they already intuit.

01:15:04.080 I mean, that was the response to The Master and His Emistry.

01:15:07.280 Apart from people enormously movingly writing to me, saying things I never thought I would ever hear from writing a book,

01:15:15.180 like your book changed my life, and I'm sure you've had this too.

01:15:18.720 But, you know, people saying, what you're saying, I kind of knew.

01:15:23.820 I've known this, but I couldn't find any way of articulating it.

01:15:27.420 Well, there's a reason why you couldn't find a way of articulating it,

01:15:30.440 and that is articulation in language is controlled by the left hemisphere.

01:15:34.780 It developed very good tools for mapping out the world in a way that is very useful to its purposes.

01:15:41.580 But the important things are hard to articulate in words.

01:15:46.000 They're implicit meanings.

01:15:47.760 All the deep things like love, religion, poetry, music.

01:15:52.860 How do you say these in words?

01:15:54.480 How do you say them in language?

01:15:56.040 But they have extraordinary meaning and power.

01:15:58.560 They're the things we live for, not for the things that we can say, put down in a notebook, if you know what I mean.

01:16:05.740 So what's driven you in this direction, do you think?

01:16:09.940 I mean, you made a very large number of claims in that last section of thought.

01:16:16.120 For example, you've come to the belief that value is somehow implicit in the structure of being.

01:16:24.540 That's what I understood what you said, and correct me if I'm wrong.

01:16:27.780 No, that's right.

01:16:28.780 Okay, that it's unfolding across time.

01:16:31.320 And I mean, I've been thinking about this, that exact issue an awful lot.

01:16:37.300 Do you...

01:16:39.740 It's very difficult to formulate this question.

01:16:43.060 So imagine that we're drawn towards an ideal.

01:16:46.740 Human beings are drawn towards an ideal.

01:16:48.480 Imagine that you can detect that draw by your own dissatisfaction, in part, is that you don't feel you're living properly, or your conscience is bothering you.

01:16:59.760 You feel that there's something more to be attained.

01:17:01.980 You're embarrassed at your insufficiencies, right?

01:17:04.620 So there's this ideal that's pulling you onward and judging you at the same time.

01:17:09.980 And that ideal might be, well, the ideal human being.

01:17:12.880 That's one way of thinking about it.

01:17:14.180 And that's partly why I got so interested in hero mythology.

01:17:16.940 I mean, do you...

01:17:20.280 Is it a reasonable conclusion of your line of thinking that the notion of the ideal human being is somehow built into the structure of the cosmos?

01:17:30.340 Because the class...

01:17:31.740 I don't know how to...

01:17:33.400 No, it's not.

01:17:34.560 No, I don't think that at all.

01:17:36.000 I want to scotch that immediately.

01:17:38.400 Okay, well, how do you scotch that if you start with your presuppositions?

01:17:41.900 Well, because I don't...

01:17:44.300 My presuppositions have nothing to do with an already conceived plan that is just being acted out.

01:17:52.760 No, I wasn't implying.

01:17:54.340 It wasn't necessarily implying.

01:17:55.420 Oh, all right.

01:17:55.840 Well, okay.

01:17:56.380 But let...

01:17:56.880 All right.

01:17:57.320 Okay.

01:17:57.600 Well, I'm glad you weren't.

01:17:58.920 But a lot of people think that if I say these things, I must be positing an engineering god who sort of tinkers with things and makes things happen according to his purpose.

01:18:08.280 Yeah, okay.

01:18:08.740 That's fair.

01:18:09.300 I mean, I was implying that in some sense.

01:18:12.460 I mean, I guess the question would be where does your insistence that values are part of the structure of being, like, where does that find its limit?

01:18:21.800 Because the classic limit of that is something like...

01:18:26.640 In fact, the definition of the utmost place of value in some sense is almost indistinguishable from the claim that there is a god.

01:18:34.500 Well, a god is not the same as an engineering god.

01:18:39.460 And I take enormous pains in the book.

01:18:41.780 It costs me more than anything I've ever written to write the chapter called The Sense of the Sacred, in which I try to help people to a place where they can understand why people use this extraordinarily difficult word, god.

01:18:56.840 You know, it's not a satisfactory term, but it's the term we have to name an aspect of our experience that if we don't name it, disappears from our lives.

01:19:08.260 And that's not to say that there isn't something there that merits whatever we mean when we say divine.

01:19:15.480 I mean, we haven't defined what we mean by divine.

01:19:19.220 And we're back in the nets of language.

01:19:21.160 We're trapped in the nets of language, as Schelling said.

01:19:24.380 But what I'm suggesting is that, as Whitehead suggested, and come on, Whitehead was also the co-author with Russell of the Principia Mathematica.

01:19:35.900 He wasn't a fantasist.

01:19:38.480 He had this, I think, incredibly deep idea that whatever one likes to call the divinity, god, whatever, is the thing that the cosmos has relation with.

01:19:52.600 Relation is at the core of being.

01:19:55.540 I even argue that relation is prior to the relata, prior to the things that are related.

01:20:01.420 That sounds nonsense.

01:20:02.320 How can you relate?

01:20:03.480 How can you have a relation if there isn't anything yet to relate?

01:20:06.380 But there's a wonderful image called, in Indian mythology, called Indra's Net, which covers the universe.

01:20:13.340 And in it, the idea is that the filaments of the net exist before the net, before the crossing points, which are the things we see.

01:20:20.840 And on those crossing points, there are little gems which reflect every other gem in the net.

01:20:26.840 And that would take a very long time to unpack, but perhaps it can set things going in people's minds.

01:20:32.240 But the idea I have is that relation is prior to anything at all, really.

01:20:40.840 And that, therefore, whatever we mean by God and whatever we mean by the cosmos are in some sort of dynamic relation, which is an evolving one, in which the outcome is excitingly not known.

01:20:54.320 If it were known, it would all be some horrible, possibly sadistic play by an almighty, all-knowing God.

01:21:03.700 I mean, look, I'm going to be talking to Rowan Williams shortly, but I don't want to go into all that I mean by that.

01:21:11.260 I don't think God is omniscient and omnipotent, but I don't think he's not either.

01:21:16.080 Just in the same way, I don't think he's green, and I don't think he's not green.

01:21:19.220 I think the terms are wrong, but, you know, we can go there if we want, later or another day.

01:21:24.260 But the thing, what I'm really saying is that these, that God is discovering, becoming unfulfilling whatever God is through the relationship, which classically in most religions is described as love, which is, after all, just like a form of gravity in the world of life and emotion rather than just in the world of the so-called inanimate.

01:21:49.800 So, therefore, we are coming into being, God is coming into being, and we're necessary to one another's coming into being.

01:22:00.800 It's not that God does a bit to us, and then we do a bit back to God.

01:22:03.980 It's like, I've read a very good book, I keep mentioning it, by a young microbiologist in America called Kriti Sharma, called Interdependence.

01:22:11.280 And she argues, very importantly, that it's not just that, certainly it's not just that an animal or an organism molds its environment, nor is it just good enough to recognize that while an animal affects and shapes its environment, the environment shapes the animal or the organism.

01:22:33.280 But that this is not a, you know, turn by turn process.

01:22:38.680 It's not that the animal shapes the environment, which would then, in its turn, shapes the animal.

01:22:44.420 It's an entirely simultaneous process of coming into being, of co-creation, if you like.

01:22:50.480 Now, this idea of simultaneous coming into being is an ancient one, but I think it's a very deep one philosophically and a very important one.

01:22:57.820 So that accounts for your objection to the idea of the omniscient determining God.

01:23:04.180 Absolutely, absolutely, because the God has, God would have no creation.

01:23:10.520 Creation is not really just the unfolding of something that's already there.

01:23:14.660 What's the name of the book?

01:23:15.780 What's the name of the book by the microbiologist?

01:23:19.100 It's just called Interdependence.

01:23:20.680 It's by Kriti Sharma.

01:23:23.360 Can you spell her last name?

01:23:25.160 S-H-A-R-M-A. 1.00

01:23:28.480 It's quite a short read.

01:23:29.960 Okay.

01:23:30.640 I'm mentioning her quite a lot these days.

01:23:33.240 Okay, so let me ask you a question.

01:23:35.560 So now, I'm going to try to pack up what you're doing.

01:23:41.120 And so, again, tell me if I'm wrong.

01:23:42.800 So we have these opposed viewpoints of the world, paradoxical viewpoints.

01:23:48.220 They're expressed, they make the hemispheric differences necessary, or they're a consequence of the hemispheric differences.

01:23:56.920 If there wasn't a paradox, we wouldn't need the two hemispheres.

01:24:00.060 We need these two different ways of looking at things.

01:24:02.520 We've tilted, we're in danger of tilting too far to a left hemisphere view.

01:24:08.360 And that's keeping us from, from what?

01:24:11.580 It's keeping us from apprehension of the relationship with the sacred that you're describing?

01:24:17.400 The co-creation relationship?

01:24:20.680 Is that reasonable?

01:24:23.000 Well, it's ruling out so much.

01:24:27.080 I mean, I can't begin to tell you, but you can imagine all the things that this very reduced, abstract, schematic, bureaucratic, essentially, it's a bureaucratic, you know, you push something, it has an action on something else.

01:24:42.760 And, you know, we can predict the outcome, we can organize it.

01:24:45.460 That's the left hemisphere's vision of the world, inanimate stuff that it can move about.

01:24:49.920 Very much, the Industrial Revolution was a kind of acting out in the outer world, of the world picture of the left hemisphere, in some ways.

01:24:59.100 I talk about that more in The Master and His Hemisphere, but it's ruling out everything, really.

01:25:07.520 It's ruling out our ability to understand, to see, to see at all.

01:25:13.480 I mean, a number of very important people, one of them, Goethe, said, you know, thinking is good.

01:25:19.260 But seeing is so much better.

01:25:22.640 And I think we just don't see things anymore, because we don't expect them.

01:25:26.260 We don't understand them.

01:25:27.240 We've ruled them out from the word go, because our world picture doesn't contain them.

01:25:31.940 And if you stop doing that and start attending in a more flexible way, you find there's a massively complex and fascinating, rich, nourishing response to your attention.

01:25:43.440 It's the absence of that that causes the meaning crisis, which is constantly being banded about.

01:25:49.980 There is a meaning crisis.

01:25:51.380 You know, the Egyptians knew that.

01:25:52.880 The ancient Egyptians knew that.

01:25:54.300 Yeah.

01:25:54.500 Because the god Horus is the eye and its attention.

01:26:03.460 And it is Horus that revitalizes Osiris, and he's the god of structure.

01:26:09.180 And they saw the proper sovereignty was a combination of attention and structure, a dynamic combination of attention and structure.

01:26:17.920 Well, this is absolutely brilliant.

01:26:19.400 Well, I quite agree, but this is where we come to, I need to make a correct, a possible misapprehension.

01:26:28.420 There is absolutely nothing wrong with the view of the right hemisphere.

01:26:32.240 It's, in fact, necessary.

01:26:34.020 It's part of a dialectic, backwards and forwards, between these two ways in which things can be built.

01:26:40.960 You can't have the one in a way without the other.

01:26:43.740 You're quite right.

01:26:44.400 We need them both, but we live in an age which is completely obsessed with the idea of equality as some eternal sort of truth about the cosmos.

01:26:56.600 I can see no evidence for this idea.

01:27:00.080 It's a lovely idea, a humanly invented idea, which is a good one in society, although it can't be realized, and it may actually not be necessary or even good for it to be ultimately realized.

01:27:12.600 It might lead to a horrible kind of totalitarianism, as many 20th century philosophers pointed out.

01:27:19.400 But these two things don't have to be...

01:27:21.700 Well, that's the problem with elevating one virtue above all else.

01:27:24.260 It's a left hemisphere problem.

01:27:26.740 It's an ideological problem.

01:27:28.540 Well, no, the point is this.

01:27:30.980 We need the left and the right, but we need the right to be in control.

01:27:35.760 Now, this is very important.

01:27:36.900 This is the image of the master and his emissary.

01:27:39.180 The emissary and the master are not equal.

01:27:40.800 The master needs the emissary and knows he needs the emissary.

01:27:44.560 The emissary, being inferior, doesn't know that he needs the master.

01:27:48.660 So the emissary is good as long as he's under the control of the master.

01:27:54.080 Now, that image is extraordinarily important for understanding this picture of the cosmos.

01:28:00.400 And it's actually present in ancient Chinese, Navajo, not Navajo, Iroquois mythologies and so on.

01:28:11.760 This idea of there being an unequal pair, that one has to be the guardian of the other. 0.82

01:28:18.160 And as long as the one that is, as it were, a potential problem remains under the supervision of the wise and one that sees all, everything works well for everybody.

01:28:29.300 And that's why in the master and his emissary, I suggest there were three periods in the West, in early Greek civilization, in the peak of Roman civilization, and again at the Renaissance in the West, where these were working well together.

01:28:41.920 But in every case, it slid further to the viewpoint of the left hemisphere.

01:28:46.260 And in every case, the civilization has crumbled.

01:28:49.340 And I see the evidence for that all around me now.

01:28:52.820 So I'm not saying that we just need these two things.

01:28:57.060 I'm saying we definitely need them both.

01:28:59.880 Neither of them is bad.

01:29:01.420 But what is bad is for the inferior one, the one that sees less, to take control.

01:29:08.480 And it's very easy for it to take control, because like the less intelligent person that thinks it knows everything, it thinks I've got it.

01:29:15.380 I've understood it.

01:29:16.420 There's no more.

01:29:17.240 You know, we do three more experiments, and we've cracked the universe.

01:29:20.420 You know, it's all just a matter of, you know, a few more years of science, and we'll understand everything.

01:29:25.560 I don't believe that's the case.

01:29:26.960 Let me let you in on some of the things I've been grappling with here.

01:29:32.040 So I talked to Matt Ridley and Bjorn Lawberg recently, and they're enthusiastic Enlightenment rationalists, I would say.

01:29:43.500 They look at what's happened as a consequence of the Industrial Revolution and the tremendous technological advances that that's produced and the immense increase in human well-being.

01:29:54.800 And they say we can continue with that into the future.

01:29:57.960 We can produce a world and perhaps are already producing a world where poverty is increasingly going to be a thing of the past.

01:30:05.280 And we can bring the rest of the world up to the standards of living that characterize the West, and we can continue to expand the pie.

01:30:12.720 And I'm not interested in discussing whether that's possible or not, because it's possibly possible and possibly not.

01:30:20.760 But it's a particular vision, right?

01:30:22.480 It's a vision of the extension of material comfort to everyone.

01:30:27.760 And that comfort has been extended tremendously over the last two or three hundred years.

01:30:32.880 It's absolutely amazing.

01:30:34.340 And I would say in large part, it's a consequence of that left hemisphere reduction of the world to manageable bits and the manipulation of it.

01:30:42.980 And this is not to say anything negative about your thesis whatsoever.

01:30:47.000 But one of the things I've noticed is that that materialistic utopian vision, and I'm also not insulting Ridley or Lomberg, who I admire greatly, that materialistic vision of incremental material progress has very little motive power.

01:31:03.160 Like, it isn't an exciting story for some reason.

01:31:06.240 And, you know, what do we want?

01:31:08.880 Incremental improvement.

01:31:10.180 When do we want it?

01:31:11.140 In due time.

01:31:13.300 It's not a gripping story.

01:31:14.980 It's lacking something.

01:31:16.060 And you seem to be pushing towards something that might be the medication for that lack.

01:31:25.900 There's nothing in that vision that speaks of, like, a grand destiny for the individual, for society.

01:31:33.100 And there are many religious traditions that insist that human beings exist in a relationship with the divine,

01:31:40.480 and that it's only in living out that relationship that life is imbued with the proper kind of meaning.

01:31:48.820 And proper means sufficient to keep you from malevolence, I suppose, sufficient to be in love with life.

01:31:55.660 Now, you posited in some of your statements a while back that we're in this co-creation relationship with the divine.

01:32:04.580 And that isn't too far off, from my understanding, of many classical religious propositions that human beings participate in the act of creation.

01:32:16.080 Whether we participate in the act of creating God is a whole different question, but we can leave that aside.

01:32:23.120 I mean, you're...

01:32:25.920 So then the question is, what's the question that arises out of that?

01:32:31.000 I'm still trying to drive down at exactly what the main point you're making.

01:32:38.300 You've worked on this book for a tremendous amount of time.

01:32:40.680 Something's driving you hard.

01:32:43.180 And it's the revelation of a solution to a very important problem.

01:32:47.580 And the revelation seems to be something like an attempt to explicate a higher-order vision for...

01:32:55.520 To explicate a higher-order vision, something that we can aspire to.

01:32:59.300 And the drive to this is that I don't think that we live in an enlightened era.

01:33:09.180 We live in what David Bohm called an endarkened era, in which what we think is enlightening us is, in fact, inducing misery.

01:33:18.820 The strange thing is that, unarguably, when people are enormously poverty-stricken,

01:33:25.660 and, of course, one needs then to define what poverty is.

01:33:29.460 Are people who lead the lives that their ancestors have lived as hunter-gatherers,

01:33:37.180 are they poor?

01:33:38.160 Or do they only become poor when their whole world is ripped apart

01:33:42.040 and they're brought into the nearest large industrial slum

01:33:44.940 and have no bearings on the life, no relationship with the world,

01:33:49.080 no pride, and their health suffers and they kill themselves?

01:33:51.400 So what is poverty? That is a very important question first.

01:33:56.080 But also remedying poverty, extreme poverty, is, of course, enormously important.

01:34:00.600 No feeling person could argue against that.

01:34:03.620 But it's not enough.

01:34:05.020 You know, as one rather well-known historical figure said,

01:34:11.400 man cannot live by bread alone.

01:34:13.720 And the thing is that there's only bread in this story.

01:34:18.100 But that leaves out everything.

01:34:21.140 Peter Cook, he plays the part of a publisher who says,

01:34:24.900 the trouble with your book is that it lacks everything.

01:34:29.540 And I feel that this kind of philosophy lacks absolutely everything.

01:34:34.100 It's got nothing whatever to offer.

01:34:35.560 Now, let me just put some facts to this,

01:34:38.140 because it may sound, you know, it's just my opinion.

01:34:41.000 What do we know?

01:34:42.240 Well, fortunately, going back to the 30s,

01:34:45.900 schoolchildren in America in a certain system

01:34:49.600 have been asked the same questions about their happiness in life

01:34:53.460 at the same age, going back now 70 years.

01:34:57.880 And Jean Twenge, who has looked at this data,

01:35:02.080 which avoids all sorts of problems of defining what you mean by happy

01:35:06.760 and, you know, retrospectors scopes and all the rest.

01:35:10.200 You've got the data from the 1930s, the 40s, the 50s.

01:35:14.080 And nowadays, the numbers of children that would qualify

01:35:21.420 by a very well authenticated and commonly used standard

01:35:27.420 as being depressed is five to eight times what it was in the 1930s

01:35:33.680 when poverty was a big issue.

01:35:35.680 So five or eight times, not five or 8% more.

01:35:40.820 So there's something horrendous we're doing to ourselves.

01:35:44.600 Suicide rates are going up,

01:35:46.480 particularly among women who register much greater dissatisfaction with life now

01:35:51.240 than they did 20 years ago, interestingly,

01:35:53.900 because one might think that a number of things

01:35:56.860 that would have made life hard for them have been removed.

01:35:59.720 But it just shows how complicated it is knowing what works well for people.

01:36:04.600 And three things overall, three things seem to be incredibly important

01:36:09.020 for human fulfillment and happiness.

01:36:12.480 And one of them I touched on at the end of The Master and His Emissary,

01:36:16.000 which is feeling socially connected,

01:36:18.240 being bound into a meaningful community of trust.

01:36:21.960 That's one.

01:36:24.220 The second is being in the presence of nature.

01:36:27.700 Just going off for half an hour into a forest and being quiet

01:36:31.580 has an effect on your blood pressure, on your physical health and so on.

01:36:36.060 And these effects, if practiced, are greater than those in going to the gym.

01:36:40.640 And the thing that really struck me is there is the Oxford Handbook of Religion,

01:36:46.680 I think it's called, but it looks at enormous bodies of evidence

01:36:50.760 about the well-being of people who are adherents to a religion

01:36:55.660 and those who are not.

01:36:58.080 And not only, as you very well might expect,

01:37:00.660 are the people who are not adherents to religion

01:37:04.040 much more prone to anxiety, depression, drug addiction.

01:37:09.440 They cope less well with crisis.

01:37:13.000 They're more vulnerable generally.

01:37:14.420 But they're actually physically not so well.

01:37:18.740 So, for example, rates of stroke, of heart disease,

01:37:22.340 are comparably better amongst the believing group

01:37:27.980 than the unbelieving group,

01:37:29.740 with the difference between those who do cardio exercise

01:37:33.640 for several hours a day.

01:37:36.380 And even smoking.

01:37:38.620 It's a more powerful effect than smoking.

01:37:41.660 Social connectedness is more powerful than smoking.

01:37:43.700 Being in nature, I think, is more powerful than smoking.

01:37:47.260 And being a part of a religious community that worships

01:37:53.640 and even holding spiritual or religious views, to some extent,

01:37:58.660 is a mitigator against unhappiness and illness.

01:38:03.520 So, you know, is that any answer to your question of why, you know,

01:38:06.860 why I don't think that Matt Ridley's idea of,

01:38:10.700 it's totally left hemisphere idea,

01:38:12.500 we just sort of crank out some more government departments,

01:38:15.700 do some marvellous technical things,

01:38:17.640 and everybody gets to be living in a fantasy land of happiness.

01:38:21.860 I don't believe this.

01:38:22.920 Well, I don't think he believes that.

01:38:25.500 I mean, he's a complicated person,

01:38:26.920 and he's more concerned with applying material resources

01:38:32.480 where they could be most effectively applied.

01:38:35.180 I think the question of what material comfort and plenitude

01:38:39.780 needs to be embedded in is a different question.

01:38:41.960 I think it's reasonable to say,

01:38:44.020 well, we should do what we can to alleviate destitution

01:38:47.320 and catastrophic poverty.

01:38:50.780 We should improve child nutrition.

01:38:52.980 We should eradicate tuberculosis.

01:38:55.520 Obviously, right, right.

01:38:56.840 The question is,

01:38:57.800 what does that have to be nested inside for it to be worthwhile?

01:39:02.220 And that's, so that's what you're aiming at.

01:39:05.400 And I believe is what does that need to be nested in

01:39:09.440 to make it worthwhile?

01:39:10.880 And you've come to this conclusion.

01:39:12.260 Was this a shock to you over the years

01:39:13.980 that you came to the conclusion that,

01:39:15.600 okay, why not?

01:39:18.440 I mean, the reason I'm asking is because

01:39:20.440 it isn't an everyday occurrence in some sense

01:39:25.180 for a committed scientist to point out that

01:39:28.380 the scientific viewpoint needs to be embedded inside

01:39:31.780 a broader, what, value-oriented viewpoint?

01:39:36.060 It's something I believe,

01:39:37.200 but it isn't an everyday occurrence for that

01:39:38.940 to be stated forthrightly.

01:39:40.300 And as a scientist,

01:39:41.240 it isn't necessarily the first thing that would come to mind.

01:39:43.760 Like, have you always thought this way

01:39:46.540 or have you come to this as a consequence of your thinking?

01:39:50.440 Well, I have the advantage of having come to science

01:39:54.000 from a fairly thorough grounding in the humanities.

01:39:57.900 So I had a philosophy of life that was based on reading,

01:40:02.640 thinking, talking.

01:40:05.980 And I was a relatively aged customer

01:40:11.880 when I started to study medicine,

01:40:14.880 compared with most people who do that,

01:40:18.020 at least in this country.

01:40:19.500 So I brought a background,

01:40:24.920 which has always been my passion,

01:40:26.880 an interest in philosophy,

01:40:29.320 but not just a kind of forever analytic philosophy

01:40:34.340 in which you,

01:40:35.460 it's more or less like sort of angels dancing on a pinhead

01:40:39.060 and breaking everything down to the tiniest parts.

01:40:41.280 This doesn't really particularly interest me,

01:40:42.740 but a kind of more human philosophy,

01:40:46.100 which doesn't become theology,

01:40:50.320 but which is open to the idea

01:40:52.340 that there is more in the world

01:40:54.120 than we can know or understand.

01:40:57.640 But it does sound like it is,

01:40:59.580 that it has become theology.

01:41:01.900 This isn't a critique.

01:41:03.320 Like, it's an attempt to observe

01:41:04.860 what you're telling me.

01:41:06.360 It's not a critique at all.

01:41:07.640 I'm trying to understand this.

01:41:09.240 Well, it depends what you mean by theology.

01:41:13.900 You see, I don't think the most important part

01:41:16.380 of a relationship with God

01:41:17.800 is necessarily theology.

01:41:19.760 I'm not disrespectful of theology.

01:41:22.880 Well, but you claim that people are involved.

01:41:26.180 I've read a lot of, for example, the Kabbalah.

01:41:32.520 I've acquainted myself with Buddhist philosophy,

01:41:35.540 and I've always been very interested in Taoism.

01:41:39.240 Hinduism, and the deep wisdom of these things,

01:41:44.260 including, as I say, North American native people,

01:41:48.800 and even circumpolar people.

01:41:51.140 I mean, the wisdom is embodied in their mythologies.

01:41:53.920 We think of these as somehow childish myths,

01:41:56.780 but in fact, these myths contain,

01:42:00.060 and in fact are the only way of containing,

01:42:02.300 or not containing, because they're not ever contained,

01:42:04.860 but of transmitting, bringing into being for other people,

01:42:11.520 the things that are the deep truths.

01:42:13.520 And it's that that motivates you.

01:42:15.120 I have only one, you know,

01:42:16.320 I'm not going to be alive much longer.

01:42:19.300 I mean, I'm not in imminent danger of dying,

01:42:23.600 but I mean, we're all actually here

01:42:25.740 for an extraordinarily short time,

01:42:27.360 and there was great wisdom in the past

01:42:28.780 in having a memento mori on your desk,

01:42:31.040 you know, a skull.

01:42:32.120 And we're not here for very long,

01:42:34.040 and it behoves us to behave

01:42:36.440 and to understand the world

01:42:38.860 in the most fruitful way,

01:42:40.440 for human fulfillment and happiness,

01:42:42.080 and for the greater fulfillment

01:42:43.600 of whatever it is that we sense

01:42:46.560 in whatever is around us,

01:42:49.700 in the being of the world.

01:42:50.880 And, you know, the word cosmos keeps coming to mind,

01:42:54.020 which also in its root means beautiful,

01:42:56.180 because I think what one sees

01:42:58.340 when one looks at the natural order

01:43:00.320 is that it is,

01:43:01.360 as scientists and mathematicians

01:43:03.000 are constantly saying,

01:43:04.540 it's outstandingly beautiful,

01:43:06.460 complex, and orderly.

01:43:08.000 Why?

01:43:08.800 Where does that come from?

01:43:10.200 Well, I don't pretend to have an answer,

01:43:12.800 but I see the difference

01:43:14.520 is between people who think they know the answer

01:43:17.720 and people who don't.

01:43:19.280 I'm one of the people who don't think

01:43:20.840 they know the answer,

01:43:21.620 so please don't ask me what the answer is.

01:43:23.800 I think I would disqualify myself

01:43:25.620 from having anything worthwhile to say

01:43:27.220 if I thought I had the answer.

01:43:30.020 The difference in life is not between...

01:43:31.940 You hinted at an answer, though.

01:43:32.640 It's not between atheists on the one hand

01:43:34.720 and believers on the other,

01:43:38.760 but it's between fundamentalist believers

01:43:41.720 and fundamentalist atheists on the one hand,

01:43:44.980 and people who often call themselves

01:43:46.860 honest agnostics on the other.

01:43:48.500 That openness of mind,

01:43:50.160 that willingness to acknowledge

01:43:51.540 that one doesn't know everything,

01:43:52.760 that one's reaching and searching for something,

01:43:54.900 is far more fruitful and spiritual to me

01:43:57.220 than saying,

01:43:57.960 I know it,

01:43:58.520 it's written down in this book,

01:43:59.740 and these are the rules.

01:44:03.340 The...

01:44:04.060 I want to go back to the...

01:44:06.500 I listened to all of that,

01:44:08.500 and I want to go back to the...

01:44:10.500 this co-creation idea,

01:44:12.760 because that's like...

01:44:14.740 that's not a trivial idea.

01:44:17.200 That's an overwhelmingly massive idea,

01:44:21.020 and...

01:44:23.020 see, I've...

01:44:26.280 the audience...

01:44:27.680 I've talked...

01:44:28.420 the audiences I've talked with,

01:44:30.460 I've talked about the necessity of a vision of life

01:44:36.740 that's sufficiently demanding,

01:44:40.640 meaningful,

01:44:41.080 to justify the trouble of existence.

01:44:47.440 And...

01:44:48.000 you...

01:44:48.760 it seems to me that it's necessary,

01:44:52.000 psychologically,

01:44:52.740 to be in pursuit of a noble goal.

01:44:56.480 And...

01:44:57.240 there isn't a goal that's more noble

01:44:59.500 than the one that you outlined.

01:45:02.860 Virtually by definition, right?

01:45:04.480 I mean,

01:45:04.960 if...

01:45:06.160 if you're co-creating

01:45:07.620 the cosmos,

01:45:09.780 but also,

01:45:10.860 if you're in a co-creating relationship

01:45:13.540 with God,

01:45:14.620 that involves you at the highest level of being,

01:45:17.440 with the structure of being.

01:45:25.880 Well, I...

01:45:27.180 you know,

01:45:27.900 again,

01:45:29.200 because we're talking

01:45:30.380 inevitably in shorthand,

01:45:32.900 because this is why...

01:45:33.580 why...

01:45:34.080 this book is so colossally long.

01:45:37.180 I mean...

01:45:37.860 it's apparently as long as the Bible.

01:45:43.660 The reason I had to do that

01:45:45.300 is that I'm...

01:45:46.360 what I'm doing is...

01:45:47.540 is nothing less than this.

01:45:48.940 I'm saying

01:45:49.540 the whole way

01:45:50.940 in which you are taught

01:45:52.280 by your education,

01:45:53.720 by science,

01:45:55.120 popular science,

01:45:56.500 not by...

01:45:57.580 you know,

01:46:00.320 quantum physicists

01:46:01.020 who have a very much

01:46:01.920 more sophisticated grasp

01:46:03.000 of philosophy,

01:46:03.660 but by the sort of

01:46:05.080 19th century

01:46:06.180 mechanists

01:46:07.280 who still dominate

01:46:08.240 biology unhappily,

01:46:10.900 a version of some

01:46:12.300 engineering,

01:46:13.160 if you ever like.

01:46:14.940 This is not a good way

01:46:16.480 to think.

01:46:17.340 This is not even

01:46:18.240 likely to be

01:46:19.460 true.

01:46:21.900 It doesn't

01:46:22.240 answer to

01:46:23.880 any aspect

01:46:25.680 of experience

01:46:26.460 of the world,

01:46:27.680 except the most

01:46:28.520 tiniely detailed.

01:46:30.080 So, for example,

01:46:31.080 what I think is

01:46:31.980 that the whole

01:46:32.860 structure of things

01:46:33.740 is infinitely complex

01:46:35.140 and has many

01:46:35.980 recurring loops

01:46:36.960 in it.

01:46:38.140 And when you try...

01:46:38.880 and just an organism

01:46:39.760 is like that,

01:46:40.740 or even a cell,

01:46:42.660 or even,

01:46:43.500 you know,

01:46:44.100 part of a cell,

01:46:45.120 an organelle,

01:46:45.800 is amazingly complex.

01:46:47.620 The number of

01:46:48.500 interactions,

01:46:49.740 the number of

01:46:50.740 chemical reactions

01:46:51.700 that are going on there

01:46:52.580 is colossal,

01:46:53.620 and they all have

01:46:54.440 cascades

01:46:55.920 that interact

01:46:56.520 with one another.

01:46:57.020 However,

01:46:58.120 if you take

01:46:59.420 from this very

01:47:00.580 large picture

01:47:01.320 right down

01:47:02.100 to the tiniest,

01:47:03.380 tiniest bit of light,

01:47:04.980 you can see

01:47:05.620 a little chain

01:47:06.520 of arrows.

01:47:07.260 This leads to that,

01:47:08.300 leads to that.

01:47:08.960 You can't see

01:47:09.480 all kinds of

01:47:10.340 other things going on,

01:47:11.120 and you can identify

01:47:12.500 that,

01:47:12.980 and that's what

01:47:13.560 we're good at doing.

01:47:14.580 And we say,

01:47:15.040 if I interfere in that,

01:47:16.260 I can cause

01:47:16.960 something to happen,

01:47:18.160 which might be

01:47:18.840 beneficial,

01:47:19.440 for example,

01:47:20.360 to somebody

01:47:21.020 who has a health

01:47:22.320 condition.

01:47:23.180 So I'm not saying

01:47:24.180 there's anything

01:47:24.780 wrong with any

01:47:26.620 of this.

01:47:27.340 Again,

01:47:27.680 I come back to

01:47:28.240 there's nothing

01:47:28.920 wrong with the

01:47:29.780 left hemisphere.

01:47:30.780 There's only

01:47:31.240 something wrong

01:47:31.960 with it

01:47:32.340 when it adopts

01:47:33.880 the hubristic

01:47:35.340 cloak of

01:47:36.040 knowing everything.

01:47:37.700 And when you said

01:47:38.360 scientists are not

01:47:39.600 often heard

01:47:40.440 to voice

01:47:42.400 the sort of

01:47:42.900 things that I'm

01:47:43.580 saying and that

01:47:44.180 you are saying,

01:47:45.720 I'd like to say

01:47:46.880 that physicists

01:47:47.940 very often do,

01:47:50.020 but that biologists

01:47:51.080 relatively less

01:47:52.380 often do now,

01:47:53.900 although in the

01:47:54.640 early part of the

01:47:55.320 century there

01:47:55.820 were many great

01:47:56.520 biologists such

01:47:57.440 as J.B.S.

01:47:58.960 Haldane,

01:47:59.700 his father

01:48:00.200 John Scott

01:48:01.160 Haldane,

01:48:02.220 Conrad Howe

01:48:02.780 Wallington,

01:48:05.160 Ludwig von

01:48:05.880 Wertelanti in

01:48:07.100 Austria,

01:48:07.760 who saw a very

01:48:09.460 sophisticated vision

01:48:10.840 of the living

01:48:12.320 world of biology.

01:48:13.920 But what happened

01:48:14.580 was because there

01:48:15.820 were great

01:48:16.640 successes in

01:48:17.920 molecular

01:48:18.360 engineering after

01:48:20.480 the war,

01:48:21.840 this vision,

01:48:23.100 which as I say

01:48:23.740 is technically

01:48:24.280 correct,

01:48:24.700 that you can

01:48:25.020 interfere as a

01:48:25.720 detail and do

01:48:26.680 something very

01:48:27.420 valuable.

01:48:28.180 But the mistake

01:48:29.180 is to extrapolate

01:48:30.180 from that,

01:48:31.240 to say this is

01:48:31.800 the structure of

01:48:32.500 the whole thing

01:48:33.140 we're looking at.

01:48:33.800 It's not,

01:48:34.900 it's not like

01:48:35.560 that.

01:48:36.220 There are at least

01:48:36.780 eight or nine

01:48:37.340 ways in which

01:48:38.040 a living being

01:48:39.060 is not like a

01:48:40.300 machine.

01:48:41.220 So I am sorry

01:48:42.880 that scientists

01:48:43.760 diminish themselves

01:48:44.800 by adopting this

01:48:45.820 very narrow vision

01:48:46.960 of what life is,

01:48:48.920 because after all,

01:48:49.820 the whole point of

01:48:50.480 science, as

01:48:50.980 Schrodinger said,

01:48:51.960 is to answer the

01:48:52.660 question, who are we?

01:48:53.460 And if it's not

01:48:54.160 answering that

01:48:54.600 question, and it's

01:48:55.760 not assumable into

01:48:56.760 an answer to that

01:48:57.480 question, it's not

01:48:58.060 really getting us

01:48:59.960 to what the meaning

01:49:02.140 of our life demands

01:49:03.240 from us, that we

01:49:04.120 have not an answer

01:49:05.440 to the question,

01:49:06.700 who are we?

01:49:07.280 Not an answer to

01:49:08.280 the question, what is

01:49:08.960 the meaning of life?

01:49:10.120 Of course, by

01:49:10.860 definition, there

01:49:11.500 isn't one.

01:49:12.160 But the very

01:49:12.840 knowledge that we

01:49:14.000 have to strive for

01:49:14.980 it and not lose

01:49:16.200 sight of it is very,

01:49:17.440 very important.

01:49:18.700 There's a saying

01:49:19.900 in the Midrash,

01:49:21.160 you are not

01:49:22.860 obliged to finish

01:49:23.740 the work, but you

01:49:24.920 are not permitted

01:49:26.420 to cease from it.

01:49:27.960 And I think that is,

01:49:29.020 I mean, I would say

01:49:29.660 that is my vision

01:49:30.820 of what I do.

01:49:32.440 I think it's what

01:49:33.180 all seekers after

01:49:34.980 truth have to do,

01:49:36.060 whether they're

01:49:36.540 philosophers or

01:49:37.240 scientists.

01:49:38.920 And, you know,

01:49:39.640 I would love

01:49:40.360 science to be

01:49:41.260 more scientific.

01:49:42.180 The curious thing

01:49:44.280 is I honour

01:49:45.020 science deeply.

01:49:46.960 And I think that

01:49:47.500 it has nothing to

01:49:48.640 lose by making,

01:49:50.580 you know, being a

01:49:52.200 little bit humbler

01:49:52.980 than it is, by

01:49:53.840 accepting that there

01:49:55.100 is a lot that is

01:49:56.280 deeply puzzling and

01:49:57.420 that the more we

01:49:58.080 know about physics,

01:49:59.640 for example, the

01:50:00.100 more we understand

01:50:00.700 what we don't know.

01:50:02.400 And it's not

01:50:03.300 scientific to rule

01:50:04.480 out certain ways of

01:50:05.540 thinking, to say

01:50:06.200 that thinking in

01:50:06.880 terms of organic

01:50:07.620 holes, in terms

01:50:08.620 of gestalten and

01:50:11.880 so forth, is

01:50:12.900 somehow not

01:50:13.840 scientific.

01:50:14.680 No, it's just

01:50:15.400 not the way that

01:50:16.240 a certain very

01:50:16.960 narrow form of

01:50:18.160 science is

01:50:18.660 practised.

01:50:19.600 And I want

01:50:20.420 science, before

01:50:21.420 I die, to

01:50:22.480 become more

01:50:23.100 open, as

01:50:24.020 science should

01:50:24.600 be, to be more

01:50:25.500 questing, more

01:50:26.360 imaginative.

01:50:27.600 You know, in

01:50:28.040 writing this book,

01:50:28.720 I've had a lot to

01:50:29.980 do with the

01:50:30.960 story of how

01:50:31.760 scientists made

01:50:32.540 their discoveries,

01:50:33.440 how mathematicians

01:50:34.460 made their

01:50:35.040 discoveries, and

01:50:36.940 they very rarely,

01:50:37.940 if ever, as

01:50:38.640 George Gaylord

01:50:39.360 Simpson himself

01:50:40.140 said, you know,

01:50:40.780 one of the great

01:50:41.360 mainstream molecular

01:50:43.880 biologists of the

01:50:45.040 last century, it's

01:50:46.600 very rare that they

01:50:47.700 make them by

01:50:48.300 following the

01:50:48.780 scientific method.

01:50:49.940 The scientific

01:50:50.440 method is a

01:50:51.320 retrospective thing

01:50:52.360 that is fitted on

01:50:53.200 to what actually

01:50:53.860 happens, which is

01:50:55.300 extraordinary

01:50:56.720 insights of

01:50:57.720 intuition, seeing

01:50:58.740 shapes, testing

01:50:59.800 them out, of

01:51:00.480 course, which is a

01:51:01.280 scientific method,

01:51:02.340 of course, but

01:51:03.800 it's not this kind

01:51:04.860 of boring, rule-bound

01:51:07.540 thing that it's often

01:51:08.500 made out to be.

01:51:10.740 Well, I think

01:51:11.820 with that

01:51:13.160 statement, that's a

01:51:14.300 good place to end

01:51:15.020 for today.

01:51:17.180 It was a nice

01:51:18.100 conclusion.

01:51:21.020 Gone for an hour

01:51:21.960 and a half or so,

01:51:23.240 and I appreciate

01:51:24.920 it very much you

01:51:27.400 talking with me.

01:51:28.960 Hopefully, we can do

01:51:29.720 this again.

01:51:30.760 I want to get

01:51:31.300 further through your

01:51:32.040 book.

01:51:32.700 I'll keep everybody

01:51:33.680 posted as to the

01:51:35.100 progress of the book

01:51:36.040 and to where they

01:51:37.000 can obtain it when

01:51:38.860 that becomes

01:51:39.380 possible.

01:51:40.480 Is there anything

01:51:41.080 else that you

01:51:41.940 wanted to mention

01:51:43.620 today that you

01:51:45.160 want to bring up

01:51:45.800 before we close?

01:51:49.160 Well, no.

01:51:50.200 I mean, I want to

01:51:51.460 say, first of all,

01:51:52.720 which I haven't

01:51:53.200 really had an

01:51:53.620 opportunity to say,

01:51:54.880 how enormously glad

01:51:56.080 I am that you are

01:51:57.080 back in debate with

01:51:58.900 us all, and long

01:52:01.720 may that be.

01:52:02.400 And I do, I

01:52:06.000 think the

01:52:06.700 conversations we

01:52:07.460 have are good.

01:52:08.320 I hope other

01:52:08.820 people may think

01:52:09.560 that too.

01:52:11.540 Well, we're going

01:52:12.240 to put that to the

01:52:13.000 test.

01:52:14.780 And I'd like to

01:52:15.860 just draw people's

01:52:16.700 attention to the

01:52:17.920 fact that in the

01:52:19.040 last six months,

01:52:20.940 six months, I

01:52:21.880 think, six or

01:52:22.380 seven months, we've

01:52:24.060 developed something

01:52:24.580 called Channel

01:52:25.140 McGilchrist, which

01:52:26.020 is a place on the

01:52:28.040 internet where you

01:52:28.780 can find out more

01:52:29.860 about my stuff.

01:52:30.800 You can see talks,

01:52:33.480 lectures, podcasts,

01:52:34.940 things I've done,

01:52:36.040 what I'm, you

01:52:36.520 know, and generally

01:52:38.360 keep up to date.

01:52:39.180 There's a forum

01:52:39.760 there where you can

01:52:40.400 enter into and

01:52:41.060 discuss my work.

01:52:43.200 There's a place

01:52:43.680 where you can ask

01:52:44.360 questions of me.

01:52:45.840 So once a month, I

01:52:47.160 answer four questions

01:52:48.440 out of a list of

01:52:49.640 things that members

01:52:51.200 of the, because you

01:52:52.380 can either be a

01:52:52.940 non-member or a

01:52:53.620 member, but if you're

01:52:54.340 a member, you can

01:52:54.940 ask me a question,

01:52:55.900 which I will then

01:52:56.480 spend a quarter of

01:52:57.160 an hour answering.

01:52:57.860 So, you know,

01:52:59.280 that's my attempt

01:53:00.780 to try and give

01:53:02.620 back something that

01:53:03.840 isn't just, you

01:53:04.800 know, the odd book

01:53:05.640 every 10 years.

01:53:06.860 So, well, we'll

01:53:08.620 make sure that we

01:53:09.300 put the links and

01:53:10.080 all of that in the

01:53:10.820 description of this

01:53:11.600 video.

01:53:12.580 And with any luck,

01:53:13.660 we'll get a chance

01:53:14.320 to talk again in the

01:53:15.200 future after we've

01:53:16.100 both digested this

01:53:17.280 and this conversation.

01:53:21.960 It was really good

01:53:22.860 to see you again.

01:53:24.600 Oh, and you.

01:53:25.760 Thank you.

01:53:27.100 Thank you.

The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast - May 13, 2021

168. A Brain Divided ｜ Iain McGilchrist

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