Dr. Jordan B. Peterson has created a new series that could be a lifeline for those battling depression and anxiety. With decades of experience helping patients, Dr. Peterson offers a unique understanding of why you might be feeling this way. In his new series, he provides a roadmap towards healing, showing that while the journey isn t easy, it s absolutely possible to find your way forward. If you re suffering, please know you are not alone. There s hope and there s a path to feeling better. Go to Dailywire.plus/JBPpodcast and start watching Season 4, Episode 21 with Dr. Ian G. McGilchrist on Depression and Anxiety. This episode was recorded on February 15, 2021. This episode is brought to you by Leaffilters, America s protection system. Protect your home and never clean out your gutters again with Leaf Filter. Schedule your free inspection and get up to 30% off your entire purchase at Leaffiltered.co/LEAFIELD. That s a FREE inspection and up to $30 worth of warranty details at Leaffilter. See representative for warranty details and up-to-date service details. This promotion is 20% off plus a 10% senior discount plus a $200 discount per household. This is the first step towards the brighter future you deserve. Subscribe to Daily Wire Plus now and start getting 20% to $200 off all orders and 2 Free Pillows to help you get the best night's rest and relaxation in the bed you ve ever had in your life. If you don t already have a mattress or pillows, you deserve it, you can get 20% up to 20% of your pillow and 2 Pillows for 100 nights free for free, plus a discount of up to 100 nights for up to 200 nights free! This is a great deal that includes a 100 nights of bed and 2 free pillows. You ll even get 10% off all of the pillow and two pillows for free for the night and a 2-day shipping, plus an additional $200 of the bed set up in the morning and a 10-night guarantee. Thanks to Helix Sleep and Pillows, and two free night and 2-up for the entire day and a discount for the day of the day. . And a chance to try it up to get the bed and pillows at $200 up to 2-200 off your room set up for free by HelixSleep.
00:14:45.200I think one can interpret the words in important ways that give them meaning.
00:14:49.800But 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.
00:14:58.920But 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,
00:15:07.940which is, after all, by definition, the only world you will ever know, but it also changes who you are.
00:15:14.080So the quality of the attention you pay changes you, the attender.
00:15:23.460And 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.
00:15:36.020So the hemispheres have evolved to two different sets of values.
00:15:43.320You mentioned values, and it's very germane.
00:15:46.160They have different reasons for existing and therefore have different things they respond to.
00:15:56.040And 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,
00:16:07.920which is not just for the individual, but also at times it becomes the way of looking at the world for a whole culture.
00:16:14.980Because, of course, we're, as individuals, never entirely distinct from our culture.
00:16:18.780We're partly created by our culture and make it what it is.
00:16:45.760Many creatures or most creatures with developed nervous systems have a bifurcated brain.
00:16:52.860And the hemispheres differ substantially in terms of their neuroanatomical structure.
00:16:58.600And the question arises, why is it necessary, assuming that that differentiation of structure reflects some profound differentiation of function,
00:17:08.820why is it necessary to look at the world, so to speak, in two ways?
00:17:13.480And why is it so necessary that that bifurcation is conserved across evolutionary history?
00:17:19.900You'd think that one way would be sufficient, but it doesn't seem to be.
00:17:25.060And so the first question is, why do you have to look at the world in two ways?
00:17:28.960And the next question might be, well, what are those two ways?
00:17:33.680One of the things you outlined that's particularly fascinating to me is that
00:17:37.360the right hemisphere seems to be specialized more for what you don't know,
00:17:42.820whereas the left hemisphere is specialized more for what you do know.
00:17:48.160And I've sort of defined knowing pragmatically.
00:17:53.240You know something if you undertake an action and the outcome is what you specified.
00:17:58.440And you don't know something if you undertake an action and the outcome is other than what you specified.
00:18:02.900And that sort of reflects that novelty organization division that was Goldberg, I believe,
00:18:11.900that originated that, the neuropsychologist.
00:18:17.080Well, Jordan, you've raised a whole bunch of points there.
00:18:20.380So I need a little bit of time to explain that.
00:18:26.260First of all, every neural network that we know of is asymmetrical.
00:18:30.920We're going down to the very most basic network that we know and the most ancient one that we know.
00:18:37.700Nemetostella vectensis, a sea anemone that is 700 million years old,
00:18:42.780is already asymmetrical in its neural network.
00:18:45.540And that's the earliest neural network we know of.
00:37:54.400So you have a complex world that's multitudinous and too complex to even see.
00:38:01.680And then there's a perceptual act that categorizes that into like a perceptual image, house, say.
00:38:08.620And then there's a further compression and eradication of information that enables that to be represented by a word.
00:38:16.260Well, 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.
00:38:29.720But none of the things that these words represent actually exist.
00:38:36.320Because in the act of being represented, they are no longer the thing that was present.
00:38:41.020The very fact of representing it suddenly stops the presence of the thing.
00:38:44.380For me, this is very vivid in Wordsworth.
00:38:46.520And this comes back to some of the things you were saying about the liveliness of the childhood mind.
00:38:50.880That 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.
00:39:04.020But 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.
00:39:16.160And 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.
00:39:50.320And this really is one of the more important differences.
00:39:53.440I would say probably the core difference.
00:39:55.500That, 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.
00:40:09.560And for the left hemisphere, already cold, finished, known, dead, put in a book, stuffed on the shelf, filed away.
00:40:17.000And 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.
00:40:30.560It confronts you with its audacious beauty and vitality all the time, partly because we've learned to cut our minds off from our bodies.
00:40:39.400And 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.
00:40:55.140Which 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.
00:41:05.160It's a completely different thing that happens from anything you can do on the telephone or even like this.
00:41:10.980So 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.
00:41:32.140And this has real bearing on the nature of perception itself.
00:41:36.880So 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.
00:41:47.080As 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.
00:41:56.680And 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.
00:42:09.020And 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.
00:42:20.720Now, 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.
00:42:29.440And then what seems to happen as we age is that, perhaps, is that increasingly that perception becomes solipsistic.
00:42:38.520And so we're only seeing what we know.
00:42:40.460And that's extraordinarily efficient because it's very hard to build up a new perception.
00:42:44.160You 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.
00:42:53.920And 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.
00:43:02.960Well, as we both know, people would rather deny obvious truths than let go of a cherished belief.
00:50:30.700Well, yes, it matters very importantly for my philosophical project,
00:50:34.020because 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,
00:50:47.300what I can show is that in those attempts to grasp, we can see the world,
00:50:56.320we can see the signature of the right hemisphere or the signature of the left hemisphere on a particular model.
00:51:01.680So if we have two possible models of a certain action or an aspect of reality or of space or time,
00:51:09.060which I deal with in the third part of the book,
00:51:11.680and indeed in philosophical history and in the history of physics and so on,
00:51:15.160there have tended to be opposing views of the world.
00:51:19.060Once you know how the left hemisphere sees it and how the right hemisphere tends to see things,
00:51:24.040you can see the hallmark of the left hemisphere's understanding on a certain philosophical standpoint,
00:51:30.160on a certain scientific take of the world,
00:51:33.320and you can see the hallmark and the imprint of the right hemisphere in certain other ways of reasoning and of science and philosophy.
00:51:44.020So this is very important, because up till now, we've never been able to judge between these two.
00:51:49.780We'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.
01:16:39.740It's very difficult to formulate this question.
01:16:43.060So imagine that we're drawn towards an ideal.
01:16:46.740Human beings are drawn towards an ideal.
01:16:48.480Imagine 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.
01:16:59.760You feel that there's something more to be attained.
01:17:01.980You're embarrassed at your insufficiencies, right?
01:17:04.620So there's this ideal that's pulling you onward and judging you at the same time.
01:17:09.980And that ideal might be, well, the ideal human being.
01:17:20.280Is 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?
01:17:58.920But 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.
01:18:09.300I mean, I was implying that in some sense.
01:18:12.460I 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?
01:18:21.800Because the classic limit of that is something like...
01:18:26.640In fact, the definition of the utmost place of value in some sense is almost indistinguishable from the claim that there is a god.
01:18:34.500Well, a god is not the same as an engineering god.
01:18:39.460And I take enormous pains in the book.
01:18:41.780It 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.
01:18:56.840You 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.
01:19:08.260And that's not to say that there isn't something there that merits whatever we mean when we say divine.
01:19:15.480I mean, we haven't defined what we mean by divine.
01:19:19.220And we're back in the nets of language.
01:19:21.160We're trapped in the nets of language, as Schelling said.
01:19:24.380But what I'm suggesting is that, as Whitehead suggested, and come on, Whitehead was also the co-author with Russell of the Principia Mathematica.
01:19:38.480He 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.
01:20:03.480How can you have a relation if there isn't anything yet to relate?
01:20:06.380But there's a wonderful image called, in Indian mythology, called Indra's Net, which covers the universe.
01:20:13.340And 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.
01:20:20.840And on those crossing points, there are little gems which reflect every other gem in the net.
01:20:26.840And that would take a very long time to unpack, but perhaps it can set things going in people's minds.
01:20:32.240But the idea I have is that relation is prior to anything at all, really.
01:20:40.840And 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.
01:20:54.320If it were known, it would all be some horrible, possibly sadistic play by an almighty, all-knowing God.
01:21:03.700I 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.
01:21:11.260I don't think God is omniscient and omnipotent, but I don't think he's not either.
01:21:16.080Just in the same way, I don't think he's green, and I don't think he's not green.
01:21:19.220I think the terms are wrong, but, you know, we can go there if we want, later or another day.
01:21:24.260But 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.
01:21:49.800So, therefore, we are coming into being, God is coming into being, and we're necessary to one another's coming into being.
01:22:00.800It's not that God does a bit to us, and then we do a bit back to God.
01:22:03.980It's like, I've read a very good book, I keep mentioning it, by a young microbiologist in America called Kriti Sharma, called Interdependence.
01:22:11.280And 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.
01:22:33.280But that this is not a, you know, turn by turn process.
01:22:38.680It's not that the animal shapes the environment, which would then, in its turn, shapes the animal.
01:22:44.420It's an entirely simultaneous process of coming into being, of co-creation, if you like.
01:22:50.480Now, 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.
01:22:57.820So that accounts for your objection to the idea of the omniscient determining God.
01:23:04.180Absolutely, absolutely, because the God has, God would have no creation.
01:23:10.520Creation is not really just the unfolding of something that's already there.
01:24:27.080I 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.
01:24:42.760And, you know, we can predict the outcome, we can organize it.
01:24:45.460That's the left hemisphere's vision of the world, inanimate stuff that it can move about.
01:24:49.920Very 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.
01:24:59.100I talk about that more in The Master and His Hemisphere, but it's ruling out everything, really.
01:25:07.520It's ruling out our ability to understand, to see, to see at all.
01:25:13.480I mean, a number of very important people, one of them, Goethe, said, you know, thinking is good.
01:25:27.240We've ruled them out from the word go, because our world picture doesn't contain them.
01:25:31.940And 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.
01:25:43.440It's the absence of that that causes the meaning crisis, which is constantly being banded about.
01:26:44.400We 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.
01:27:00.080It'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.
01:27:12.600It might lead to a horrible kind of totalitarianism, as many 20th century philosophers pointed out.
01:27:19.400But these two things don't have to be...
01:27:21.700Well, that's the problem with elevating one virtue above all else.
01:27:36.900This is the image of the master and his emissary.
01:27:39.180The emissary and the master are not equal.
01:27:40.800The master needs the emissary and knows he needs the emissary.
01:27:44.560The emissary, being inferior, doesn't know that he needs the master.
01:27:48.660So the emissary is good as long as he's under the control of the master.
01:27:54.080Now, that image is extraordinarily important for understanding this picture of the cosmos.
01:28:00.400And it's actually present in ancient Chinese, Navajo, not Navajo, Iroquois mythologies and so on.
01:28:11.760This idea of there being an unequal pair, that one has to be the guardian of the other.
01:28:18.160And 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.
01:28:29.300And 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.
01:28:41.920But in every case, it slid further to the viewpoint of the left hemisphere.
01:28:46.260And in every case, the civilization has crumbled.
01:28:49.340And I see the evidence for that all around me now.
01:28:52.820So I'm not saying that we just need these two things.
01:28:57.060I'm saying we definitely need them both.
01:29:01.420But what is bad is for the inferior one, the one that sees less, to take control.
01:29:08.480And 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.
01:29:26.960Let me let you in on some of the things I've been grappling with here.
01:29:32.040So I talked to Matt Ridley and Bjorn Lawberg recently, and they're enthusiastic Enlightenment rationalists, I would say.
01:29:43.500They 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.
01:29:54.800And they say we can continue with that into the future.
01:29:57.960We can produce a world and perhaps are already producing a world where poverty is increasingly going to be a thing of the past.
01:30:05.280And 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.
01:30:12.720And I'm not interested in discussing whether that's possible or not, because it's possibly possible and possibly not.
01:30:34.340And 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.
01:30:42.980And this is not to say anything negative about your thesis whatsoever.
01:30:47.000But 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.
01:31:03.160Like, it isn't an exciting story for some reason.
01:31:16.060And you seem to be pushing towards something that might be the medication for that lack.
01:31:25.900There's nothing in that vision that speaks of, like, a grand destiny for the individual, for society.
01:31:33.100And there are many religious traditions that insist that human beings exist in a relationship with the divine,
01:31:40.480and that it's only in living out that relationship that life is imbued with the proper kind of meaning.
01:31:48.820And proper means sufficient to keep you from malevolence, I suppose, sufficient to be in love with life.
01:31:55.660Now, you posited in some of your statements a while back that we're in this co-creation relationship with the divine.
01:32:04.580And that isn't too far off, from my understanding, of many classical religious propositions that human beings participate in the act of creation.
01:32:16.080Whether we participate in the act of creating God is a whole different question, but we can leave that aside.