The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast - 278. The Matter with Things ｜ Iain McGilchrist

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00:01:13.960 One discount per household. Mephistopheles' credo is that being is so permeated by suffering and

00:01:20.820 catastrophe and tragedy and betrayal that it would be better if it was just brought to a halt.

00:01:26.320 And, you know, in some sense, we're pulled in the world between those two poles, right? Because

00:01:30.980 part of us would like to build something better and to bring what's greater and more magnificent

00:01:35.980 into being. And another part of us is bitter and resentful about the tragedy and catastrophe of

00:01:41.360 existence. And so what Mephistopheles doesn't understand is that you cannot have a thing

00:01:47.820 without its opposite. And so there's this left hemisphere fantasy that we can create a world in

00:01:53.220 which all is simply peace and joy. I don't believe that this is a possibility. Blake actually also said

00:01:59.700 that in heaven, there must be some degree of suffering, otherwise there couldn't be joy.

00:02:11.360 Hello, everyone. I'm extremely pleased today to be speaking once again with Dr. Ian McGilchrist.

00:02:23.840 I've spoken with Dr. McGilchrist a number of times. The first time, very intense half an hour

00:02:29.480 conversation, which was about 1 50th as long as I wanted it to be, which was very well received.

00:02:34.720 Ian and I have a lot of interests that overlap. I would say particularly in what you might describe

00:02:43.100 the neuropsychology of philosophy, because we both operate to some degree at the nexus between

00:02:49.620 biological psychiatry and neurology and philosophy, especially philosophy that's associated

00:02:56.260 with narrative. And so it's very interesting to talk to Ian. He's come to similar and different

00:03:02.980 conclusions than I from a similar and different pathway. And so it's a lovely interplay between

00:03:10.060 things we're both familiar with and things we're not. I'll tell you a bit about Ian and then we'll

00:03:14.220 jump into his new book, which is a masterpiece, a very long oeuvre, concentrating on this vital

00:03:23.380 interplay between the scientific and the philosophical. Dr. McGilchrist is a former fellow of All Souls

00:03:28.880 College, Oxford, an associate fellow of Green Templeton College, Oxford, a fellow of the Royal

00:03:36.300 College of Psychiatrists and of the Royal Society of Arts, a consultant emeritus of the Bethlehem and

00:03:42.660 Maudsley Hospital in London, a former research fellow in neuroimaging at Johns Hopkins University

00:03:49.320 Medical School, Baltimore, one of the world's great research institutions, and a former fellow of the

00:03:54.780 Institute of Advanced Studies in Stellenbosch. He now lives on the Isle of Skye, off the coast of

00:04:01.140 northwest Scotland, where he continues to write and lectures worldwide. Ian is committed to the idea

00:04:08.820 that the mind and the brain can be understood only by seeing them in the broadest possible context,

00:04:15.760 that of the whole of our physical and spiritual existence, and of the wider human culture in which

00:04:20.360 they arise. The culture which helps to mold and is in turn molded by our minds and brain. He is perhaps

00:04:28.000 most well-known publicly for his best-selling book, The Master and His Emissary, 2009, published by Yale

00:04:35.820 University Press, which is sold approaching 200,000 copies worldwide, which is a, what would you call,

00:04:42.600 all bases loaded home run for an academic book, and it brought him to very wide public attention.

00:04:48.220 So, Ian, it's a great, see you again. I'm so glad we have a chance to talk. Shall we dive right into

00:04:54.540 your, to the structure and the origin of your new book? Let's do that. It's great to be talking with

00:05:00.560 you again, Jordan. Thanks. Yes, I would like to be able to talk to you a bit about my new book,

00:05:07.740 The Matter With Things, which I think you have had a chance to look at, but it's quite long,

00:05:13.220 and I know you're a very busy man, so it will be good for both of us to be able to just take a tour

00:05:19.500 around it a bit. It follows on from the book that you mentioned, The Master and His Emissary,

00:05:26.800 but it takes the philosophical implications of the fact that our brains are divided,

00:05:32.280 and that each half of the brain produces a different version of the experiential world.

00:05:37.180 It takes that much further, and it takes it in particular in relation to something that I know

00:05:42.820 concerns both of us, and I imagine concerns many viewers and listeners, which is the devastatingly

00:05:51.000 reduced vision of the world that we now have, this reductive materialist ideology, which is absolutely

00:06:00.020 not compelled on us, as people seem to think, by science or by reason. It's a version of the world

00:06:10.280 which is very much consonant with the view that one of the hemispheres of our brain takes, the left

00:06:16.600 hemisphere. And we shouldn't be paying too much attention to what it has to say, except for the

00:06:24.120 business of getting our daily bread. But actually, in terms of understanding the world, it's the right

00:06:30.600 hemisphere that helps us here. And in what you said in your introduction, you suggested that I think

00:06:36.260 context is very, very important. In fact, context is everything. Context can completely change the

00:06:41.900 meaning of any situation, of any words, or anything that we're trying to put across. And the right

00:06:49.340 hemisphere is able to take in this broader context. Perhaps I'll just say something very brief about that.

00:06:54.120 From an evolutionary point of view, we know that all the brains we've looked at going way back into

00:06:59.760 prehistory, all seem to have this divided structure. And indeed, the oldest neural network, that of a

00:07:08.040 sea anemone called nematostella vectensis, 700 million years old, is already asymmetrical, which is a

00:07:15.540 fascinating fact. Why would it be asymmetrical? The world isn't asymmetrical in that way. And it seems that

00:07:21.540 this is because all brains have to do two things at once, each of which could take up the whole

00:07:28.960 attention of the brain. That is basically to focus on a detail so that you can grab it, and at the same

00:07:35.600 time, not yourself become prey to someone else who wants to grab you. So there's two kinds of attention

00:07:42.000 that we all need to be able to pay. How we get food. I give the image sometimes of a bird picking up

00:07:49.840 a seed on the background of grit or gravel, and being able to get it swiftly, accurately, and before

00:07:57.360 anybody else. But if it's only paying that kind of attention, it will soon become somebody else's

00:08:03.300 lunch while it's getting its own, because it needs to be looking out for everything else that's going on,

00:08:07.460 for predators, for conspecifics, for its kin, for those that it's looking after, and so on.

00:08:13.040 And effectively, this is something that is constant throughout the history of evolution,

00:08:18.960 but has been taken a step further in the human brain. Because we're very good at standing back

00:08:25.100 from the world. Our frontal lobes are highly developed, and they enable us, as you know, to stand

00:08:29.700 back from the world and to be able to see things in a more dispassionate way, and to see them with more

00:08:34.740 like a bird's eye view. But that has meant that we need to be able to devote a lot of time to

00:08:42.840 theorizing, to mapping the world, to exploring the possible, what would happen if we did this?

00:08:47.700 What would happen if we did that? And one crude and simple way of putting it is that the right

00:08:54.260 hemisphere is our anchor in reality. It's actually looking at what we're experiencing right now,

00:08:59.680 and enabling us to understand it in all its complexity. Whereas the left hemisphere is

00:09:05.540 giving us just a theoretical take on a certain kind of a situation.

00:09:11.900 So is it reasonable to assume, so a bunch of thoughts have been going through my mind, and

00:09:17.320 part of this is, you need a brain if you start to move. And if you start to move and interact with

00:09:24.260 the world, then you have the problem of the part versus the whole. And you talked about the bird

00:09:29.060 that has to distinguish something very specific, a seed against a background, let's say, of pebbles,

00:09:34.200 but the same bird having to be concerned about the broader context for the presence of predators,

00:09:40.360 for example. And so the problem is, is while you're focused on something specific,

00:09:45.340 the rest of the world is still there. And also that the separation between the part and the rest of

00:09:51.660 the world is, in some manner, what would you say, it's artificial and arbitrary. Because if you're

00:10:00.300 trying to eat, and then you get eaten, that pretty much does in any utility of eating.

00:10:04.560 Effectively, there aren't parts. Parts are an artifact of a certain way of attending to the world.

00:10:10.740 There are only holes, and things that we think of as parts are holes at another level, and things that

00:10:16.120 we think of as holes can be seen as parts of an even bigger hole. But this business of carving

00:10:21.320 things up into parts is an artifact of the left hemisphere's piecemeal attention. So because it's

00:10:28.220 trying to focus on this small detail, it's homing in on a certain little tiny bit, perhaps three out

00:10:35.920 of the 360 degrees arc of attention. And that leads to a different take on the world from that of the

00:10:43.740 right hemisphere. And if I can just put this in a couple of simple sentences,

00:10:47.040 the left hemisphere sees a world which is made up of fragments of tiny pieces that are familiar

00:10:54.220 because they're what it wants, it knows it's targeting them. They are atomistic and separate

00:11:00.180 from the other parts. They're static because it freezes it, freezes its target, even if it's actually

00:11:08.460 following a moving target, like an eagle trying to catch a rabbit. It's as if they're trying to fix

00:11:14.740 that rabbit in the frame. And so it's this world is one that this left hemisphere's version of the

00:11:22.080 world is one made up of bits that are separate, distinct, fixed, certain, decontextualized,

00:11:29.640 abstract, because they've been categorized. Oh, it's one of those. Now I know. Yeah, yeah.

00:11:33.840 Yeah, right. And this effectively is an inanimate mechanistic vision of the world.

00:11:41.160 Meanwhile, the right... Okay, so let me ask you, let me ask you, okay, I'll let you return to that

00:11:44.580 sec. Let me ask you about that. So I'm thinking as a way to help people understand this, do you think

00:11:49.880 that that's akin to the difference between listening to music, let's say, a piece of music, and only

00:11:56.260 hearing it note by note, and listening to a piece of music and hearing it at the level of all of the

00:12:02.860 phrases, let's say, and the sequences and the totality at the same time? Because those are

00:12:08.020 obviously very different things. You could say that. And indeed, I sometimes say that the two

00:12:14.900 kinds of understanding given by the hemispheres need to be combined. It's not that something's wrong

00:12:21.140 with the left hemisphere's understanding. It's just that it's so very perishable, so very simple

00:12:26.340 compared with what it's actually, what is going on. That if we start believing the map instead of the

00:12:34.220 world that's mapped, then we misunderstand. And I think that's one of the things that we're doing

00:12:38.980 in our society now. But I think I need, anyway, before we go on, to be able to say something about

00:12:44.980 the contrasting vision of the right hemisphere. So instead of this vision of stasis, particulate,

00:12:54.880 atomistic elements that have to be put together in order to find any meaning or direction in them,

00:13:00.920 the right hemisphere is seeing something which is coherent, in which nothing is ever completely

00:13:06.200 separate from everything else, in which it's constantly moving, flowing, and changing,

00:13:10.960 in which it's embodied. And that embodiment, like the rest of its context, makes it what it is. When

00:13:16.960 you take it out of that context, it's something else completely. The right hemisphere understands

00:13:21.880 the implicit, all the things that are not being said, the bits between the perceptions that make

00:13:30.140 the thing rich and make it live. And in fact, this world that it creates for us is a rich,

00:13:37.820 embodied, implicit, living world. And in fact, you can experimentally suppress one hemisphere at a time.

00:13:46.180 And what we find is that when the left hemisphere is working alone, it does see things that we would

00:13:51.660 normally see as living, as mechanisms, as zombies, as inanimate. Whereas the right hemisphere working

00:13:58.360 alone will see things that normally we would think of as inanimate, as animate. So it will see the sun,

00:14:03.280 for example, as living, because it's a life force that's moving across the heavens. So this is a,

00:14:11.360 I mean, this is all very simple. And for the sake of the argument, and for the sake of our discussion,

00:14:17.560 I've compressed an enormous amount. But I expand this, as you know, into a section of about 450 pages

00:14:25.180 in the new book, looking at these hemisphere differences.

00:14:30.420 So one of the things I noticed, and maybe this will help people get a flavor for this too, is I

00:14:35.400 worked with anorexic clients for a good while. And one of the things I noticed about the anorexics, 0.97

00:14:43.040 because they already have a problem of perception, not just conception.

00:14:46.460 Absolutely.

00:14:47.140 It's a body image problem. But if you work with someone who's anorexic, what you soon learn is that

00:14:52.540 they cannot see their body as a whole. What they're doing is obsessively, they're very orderly

00:14:57.800 people and they fixate on parts. And so they'll take a look at their calf, say, and maybe there's

00:15:02.820 some residual calf muscle, and they'll look at the muscle really independently of the rest of the

00:15:08.100 leg. And they'll try to figure out if there's any fat there on the muscle. And the problem with that

00:15:13.480 is that when you parse your perception of your body up too focally, you can't actually distinguish

00:15:19.860 between what's acceptable in terms of, let's say, obesity and fat layer and what isn't.

00:15:26.700 You have to solve that problem by glancing at yourself comprehensively, say, as a gestalt in a

00:15:33.060 mirror. So you see your whole body. And then you also have to be able to do that while you're

00:15:38.400 simultaneously remembering how other people look and contextualizing yourself that way.

00:15:44.240 So the anorexic is so focused on the part that they can no longer see the whole. And then they

00:15:51.880 can't even see their body properly. And why this is so important to me is that the right hemisphere

00:15:59.560 sees the body as a whole, but the left hemisphere only recognizes parts. It doesn't contain the full

00:16:06.420 body image that is in the right hemisphere. And there's several lines of evidence that suggests

00:16:13.300 that anorexia nervosa is in fact a right hemisphere deficit condition. It has many of the elements of

00:16:20.340 autism about it, which also simulates a right hemisphere deficit condition in some cases. I mean,

00:16:26.540 I would say that there are autisms rather than one single autism. But that would take us perhaps too

00:16:32.960 far away from where we are at the moment. So that means the body dysmorphias are at least in part a

00:16:38.820 substitution of the map for the territory. And I wanted to talk a bit about that left hemisphere

00:16:45.100 issue idea too, you know. So imagine when you detect something as a part and you've defined it as a part,

00:16:52.980 you've also in some sense, like I'm looking at a little black box in front of me right now, and I can

00:16:58.380 see it as a single pixel entity in some sense. So it's a black box. So black is a very low resolution

00:17:04.660 idea and box is a very low resolution idea. And if I really look at the box, I can see all the subtle

00:17:10.260 variations of color because it's not just pure black and there's all sorts of shades of gray.

00:17:15.360 And I can see all the things that distinguish it from other boxes. But when I say box and I see black 1.00

00:17:21.860 box, what I've done is I've compressed the world into a concept, which would be a map, let's say.

00:17:30.280 And then you can see that we do that so much now because we communicate so much and our part

00:17:35.600 detection has become so powerful. Our ability to focus in on details technologically amplified by our

00:17:43.820 ability to exchange linguistic ideas and the power of our science. And so you think maybe that as we've

00:17:49.720 progressed over the last several thousand years, that intense social communication that's allowed

00:17:55.680 us to parse up the world into finer and finer and more detailed bits has also suppressed our relationship

00:18:01.700 with the right? Yes, I think it has. But it would perhaps make a lot of sense if I were able to unpack

00:18:11.720 the structure of my new book a bit because it will answer some of the points that you're making.

00:18:17.140 So in that first, the book's divided into three parts. And in that first part, I am focusing almost

00:18:28.220 exclusively on neuropsychology and the philosophical implications of it. And what I'm showing is that

00:18:34.940 in all the what I call portals whereby we can gain information about the world, the left hemisphere is

00:18:42.020 inferior to the right. So it's not just attention. I've been focusing on attention because I think

00:18:47.600 it's extraordinarily important. Attention helps us construct the world that we live in. How we attend

00:18:54.960 changes what we find in the world and also changes us. So it's pretty important stuff. But I'm looking at

00:19:02.860 the attention, perception, which is not the same, of course, as attention, judgment, which is the kind of

00:19:11.300 conclusions we draw from the basis of what we attend to and perceive, our emotional and social

00:19:17.200 intelligence, our cognitive intelligence, good old fashioned IQ, and creativity. And in all these

00:19:23.720 respects, the left hemisphere is inferior to the right. And it's interesting that I look at a lot of

00:19:30.100 what must be to somebody not familiar with them, really extraordinary syndromes that are familiar to

00:19:35.240 people like you and me in the world of neuropsychology and neuropsychology. And

00:19:41.140 the ones that are characterized by the grossest delusions and hallucinations are almost exclusively

00:19:48.780 due to damage to the right hemisphere, not to damage to the left. So it is, it is that is a kind of

00:19:56.060 important place to start. Because if we're going to talk about what is the world really like, what are we

00:20:01.560 really like? And you've got two versions. In the past, philosophers have said, well, some people see

00:20:06.420 it like this, some people see it like that. And then they shrug their shoulders and go, you know,

00:20:12.280 but these are just two different ways of looking. We can now, I think, for the first time, and this is

00:20:16.680 exciting, go further forward and say, this has all the hallmarks, the characteristics of the

00:20:22.620 misperceptions, the misconceptions of the left hemisphere. And this, on the other hand, has the

00:20:28.560 hallmarks, the stamp of coming from the right hemisphere, which is more veridical. And so

00:20:34.780 that's one reason that I need to spend some time on that particular aspect in the beginning of the

00:20:43.300 book. Because as we go on, and as it were, if you like, pan back a bit from those portals whereby we

00:20:52.680 get information about the world to the paths that we might go down when we're trying to understand the

00:20:58.560 world, like science, reason, intuition, and imagination, we need, first of all, to establish

00:21:03.940 something about the degree to which each of the hemispheres can be taken to be veridical.

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00:22:45.260 When I wrote Maps of Meaning, my first book, I structured it in some ways similarly because

00:22:54.040 the first large chapter is this chapter on neuropsychology and hemispheric function. And

00:22:59.620 I felt, as you feel, that it was necessary to make the case that there are these two fundamental

00:23:04.920 differences in perceiving the world before investigating that both philosophically and,

00:23:10.440 I would say, at the narrative level and also conceptually. Now, you, let's talk about the

00:23:16.740 last two parts of the book, the second two sections, and then maybe you could also describe a bit, if you

00:23:21.380 would, why you think the right hemisphere and its concentration on narrative per se and narrative

00:23:28.040 understanding is relevant to this venture. So, we have the right and the left, and they look at

00:23:32.240 things differently. The right is contextual. You spend the first third of the book talking about

00:23:37.080 hemispheric differences and making case that, first of all, those are deep and old and profoundly

00:23:43.740 important and philosophically significant. The next part of the book deals with?

00:23:48.740 Yes, deals with the ways in which we use the information that has come to us through those

00:23:54.620 various portals, those faculties that I've described. And they are effectively science, reason,

00:24:02.880 intuition and imagination. Science and reason, I don't think many people would quarrel with,

00:24:09.580 because there has been a motivated attack on intuition and imagination in recent years.

00:24:15.880 I think that people do, there are some people who might question the value of those. And I think

00:24:21.880 that's kind of... Those are those left hemisphere types that you're talking about.

00:24:26.100 Well, of course, yeah. I mean, you and I know that people are not so simple that they can simply be

00:24:32.440 summed up in that way. But it is quite true that a certain way of looking at the world,

00:24:37.000 that of the left, has a kind of cohesion of its own. And the way of looking at the world,

00:24:43.400 the right hemisphere has too. And yet, they're not quite compatible. So, in a world like ours,

00:24:48.760 in which there's a lot of public debate and public discussion, as a way in which we come to our

00:24:53.920 understanding of the world, this explicit difference between these two becomes more important.

00:25:00.680 I mean, let me just explain what I mean there. If you look back, most people until the last couple

00:25:07.080 of hundred years have developed an understanding of the world through a consistent, coherent culture,

00:25:15.720 often partly a religious tradition, through living close to nature, through narratives, myths,

00:25:26.120 as you mentioned, through drama, through poetry, and so on. And only part of the way in which they

00:25:34.380 think about the world will be due to public debate. And until the advent of modern media, probably very

00:25:40.680 little of anybody's world was made up by public debate. But in the world where we are in,

00:25:47.080 one of the worst things that can happen is people say you're inconsistent. They feel like if you're

00:25:51.640 inconsistent, that shows you must be wrong. It might show that actually what you're trying to do

00:25:56.060 is to balance two things that in slightly different ways, in different circumstances,

00:26:01.440 are equally important, but appear to our rather simple-minded way of looking at the world

00:26:06.180 like contradictions. You know, in the last part of the book, I have a whole chapter on

00:26:11.400 the coincidence of opposites.

00:26:13.900 Okay, so one of the things I found very interesting about the psychoanalytic tradition,

00:26:17.580 and also some of the neurological work on dreams in relationship to this issue of hemispheric

00:26:22.840 specialization, was the idea that dreams, which would be in the domain of imagination, intuition,

00:26:28.800 are willing to sacrifice consistency for inclusion. And so you can see these contradictory

00:26:36.100 perceptual and conceptual elements being brought together in a dream, because what the dream,

00:26:42.860 this is a Jungian idea, idea derived from Carl Jung, that the dream extends the narrow range of what

00:26:50.260 we might describe as left hemisphere consistency into a broader domain where that consistent theory is

00:26:57.820 not comprehensive enough to account for everything. And because it's consistent, but not comprehensive,

00:27:03.100 it's going to produce paradoxes. And then in order to increase the degree to which it's comprehensive,

00:27:08.840 you have to introduce what look like paradoxes within the system. And from within the system,

00:27:14.160 that looks like a categorical or a logical error. But from the broader context, it's actually a movement

00:27:19.740 to a more inclusive and comprehensive way of perceiving the world. And dreams do that.

00:27:27.100 One of the things I loved about the Jungian notion was that we have this delimited domain

00:27:32.380 of explicit propositional knowledge, but partly because of the requirements for consistency

00:27:38.520 and our finite nature. It can't be comprehensive. And so we need something to fill the gap between

00:27:44.780 the consistent and narrow and the ultimately unknown. And that is, in fact, the realm of dream and

00:27:50.540 imagination.

00:27:51.540 Yeah, yeah. No, that's right. And there are virtues to the dream world, if necessary, but certainly to

00:27:59.980 intuition that are not open to pure reason, which is not in any sense to devalue or disparage reason.

00:28:08.700 It's, in fact, I worry that in our age, reason is being sacrificed, that we're becoming completely

00:28:15.420 unreasonable. And there are two kinds of ways of thinking about reason. One is a kind of logical,

00:28:23.180 formulaic carrying out of procedures and following of pathways that, in a sense, could be programmed

00:28:29.500 into a computer. And the other is a very powerful idea that has been important in Western history for

00:28:37.820 hundreds of years, which is the idea of being able to bring together what we know from logic,

00:28:45.580 with what we understand from experience, from intuition, from context, from our embodied lives.

00:28:53.980 The kind of wisdom that a good judge would be able to bring to a case. Not just saying,

00:28:59.740 well, look, I've looked up the rule book and it says in clause 186 or whatever. No. I mean,

00:29:04.940 that judge should be a fully functioning human being. And this kind of reason, which is nuanced,

00:29:11.980 which is sober, which is much more inclusive and less combative than the kind of reason,

00:29:20.300 the very sort of skeletal kind of reasoning that now seems to have

00:29:26.860 tossed the other kind of reasoning out of the nest. That's the kind that holds sway at the moment.

00:29:33.020 Yeah, well, you saw this. Go ahead, go ahead.

00:29:36.300 What I want to do, perhaps I could just explain a little bit about this part of the book. I want

00:29:41.980 to take each of these things, I'm not going to go through what I say, of course, it would take far

00:29:46.620 too long, but just to give people some idea of the structure. So I look at science as having peculiar

00:29:53.660 strengths, which are incredibly important, and on which everything that I do and say depends. But it

00:30:01.260 also can't be taken in the way that scientism does, as being able to answer all our questions. That's

00:30:07.740 simplistic and misguided. So it's seeing where it has strengths and where it really needs to say,

00:30:15.340 this is not an area on which science can really pronounce. And so I look at the strengths and the

00:30:21.340 weaknesses. And I do the same with reason, and it has enormous strengths. But it can also lead us to

00:30:29.260 certain kinds of abstract ways of thinking, which lead us to false conclusions. It is interesting that

00:30:36.460 abandoning reason is dangerous and can lead to the wrong conclusions, but actually merely following it

00:30:42.620 in a blind kind of way can lead to falsehoods as well. There's a patient of Damasio's called Elliot,

00:30:52.140 who has lost his ability to use intuition and emotion. So he has to reason every single thing

00:30:59.500 out from scratch. In this, he's rather like certain kinds of schizophrenic and autistic subjects, 0.76

00:31:04.540 which have no conception of the intuitive, and have to base everything on reasoning from first

00:31:11.980 principles. And of course, what it means is that they're often deluded and their lives are intolerable.

00:31:17.580 Well, I had a client who had obsessive compulsive disorder, a number of them. He was very,

00:31:22.220 very intelligent. And obsessive compulsive disorder shares some features with anorexia. And part of it is

00:31:29.020 this focus on the part to the exclusion of the whole. And he would ask me very complicated questions,

00:31:35.740 which were deceptively simple. So he said, for example, lots of people with OCD, they won't touch

00:31:41.260 something that's contaminated because then they feel that they're contaminated and that they contaminate

00:31:45.740 others. And so that's a big part of the moral quandary that besets people with OCD. Because there is

00:31:53.020 some possibility that if you go out into the world, you'll contact a disease, let's say, if you touch

00:31:58.540 something you shouldn't, and then there is some possibility that you'll bring that back, say,

00:32:02.380 and transmit that to your children. And the question of exactly how much precaution you should take,

00:32:08.460 therefore, becomes a very important question, especially if you try to solve it with the use of,

00:32:14.220 let's say, a propositional expert system, instead of being able to analyze context. And he said,

00:32:20.460 look, I don't know when I'm sitting on a subway at night, and there's a newspaper that someone left

00:32:26.220 behind. I don't know when it's acceptable for me to pick it up and read it or not. How do you decide

00:32:33.740 that? And I thought, I actually have no idea how I decide that, because I was trying to figure out

00:32:40.060 how to guide him with a set of principles. And so it's like, well, do I touch it if it's a little dam?

00:32:45.820 Do I touch it if it has a footprint on it? Do I touch it if it's folded too many times? Do I touch it

00:32:51.740 if it's on the floor? Do I touch it if it's more than two days old? And the answer is, I have no idea

00:32:58.620 how I know whether or not that newspaper or magazine that's been sitting there and abandoned by someone

00:33:04.380 is an object that I would be willing to pick up. But I can more or less tell at a glance.

00:33:09.100 No, no, it's a misconception that when we make things explicit, we're closer to the truth.

00:33:17.260 Because often what we do when we make things explicit is that we conflate half a dozen or

00:33:24.860 more different considerations that our intuitive and unconscious minds are able to weigh remarkably

00:33:30.860 effectively. We substitute for that holistic vision, a single thing that it collapses into

00:33:39.420 the explicit statement that we make. And so all the time that you're having to make explicit what

00:33:44.540 you would do under what circumstances, you're limiting the world, you're driving it down and down to less

00:33:51.820 and less meaning. And one of the things that amused me, because I've had, of course, patients with OCD as

00:33:58.380 well, was that I had one particular one who was a philosopher. And he said that when he was studying

00:34:04.860 Anglo-American analytic philosophy, his OCD got terrifically bad. But when he was studying

00:34:10.540 phenomenological philosophy, his OCD relaxed, and he was able to see things in a much broader,

00:34:17.180 wider, and more sustainable and coherent way. So I thought that was a nice sidelight on this

00:34:25.020 question of the OCD. Well, also one relevant for treatment considerations, because if there are

00:34:33.500 focal disorders of narrowed perception, and that's a consequence of loss of context, I mean, I can't

00:34:40.460 also help seeing the recent arguments, let's say, that are raging about gender identity in exactly the

00:34:46.380 same light, is that we've lost the context. And so we're producing these focal dysphoria, because in a real sense,

00:34:53.020 we're using the wrong part of our brain to solve the problem. And all the public clamor about that

00:34:58.380 is actually making it worse, not better. Okay, so you talked about the second part of your book,

00:35:03.260 about rationality and imagination and intuition and science. And what about the third part?

00:35:09.100 Well, yes, just before going there, if I may, I just want to comment on intuition and imagination,

00:35:13.900 because I think they are extraordinarily important for understanding the world. And partly due to Dan

00:35:20.940 Kahneman's very entertaining and successful books, a lot of people have come away with the idea that

00:35:27.100 intuition would be a very bad thing to be guided by at any stage to any degree. But I say that these

00:35:34.460 clever scenarios that are set up by psychologists, in which you can show that what you would probably

00:35:42.780 intuitively think is wrong, are simply the equivalents of optical illusions. There are optical

00:35:47.180 illusions that are so striking that, you know, I say, look, those two lines are the same length.

00:35:54.060 And people say they can't be, but they are. But I've never heard anybody after being shown one of

00:35:58.700 those optical illusions going, oh, well, that does it. You know, from now on, I'm never going to use my

00:36:02.540 eyes again. But our intuition, you know, you can set up these artificial situations in which we seem to

00:36:09.660 be getting things wrong by following our intuitions. That's often because 99% of the time we followed this

00:36:15.340 intuition, it would intelligently and quickly take us to the right solution. And so I really want to

00:36:21.580 rehabilitate intuition. I have some fascinating, I think, studies that came to me, people who wrote

00:36:28.220 to me after reading the master and his emissary. One's a man who tips horses at races. Another is

00:36:33.500 the physician who looks after the motorbike riders in something called the TT races in the Isle of Man,

00:36:40.300 the most dangerous sporting event in the world. And the reflections they have to make about how

00:36:46.380 these people are able to do what they're doing through very much things that are identified with

00:36:52.460 the right hemisphere, an intuitive grasp, that if they stop and think explicitly, they're completely

00:36:57.100 ruined. They'll probably kill themselves. So it's like, it's like thinking implicitly or explicitly when 0.97

00:37:02.460 you're trying to play a piece on the piano. Oh, absolutely.

00:37:05.500 It interferes right away. And I would say that's really relevant. We should make this case quite

00:37:10.220 clearly. I mean, one of the things that really disturbed me about the COVID response was we

00:37:14.860 reduced the entire realm of political intuition to expert knowledge. And we made the assumption that

00:37:21.820 we could focus on one thing at the expense of everything else. And that that was actually the

00:37:26.860 right way to do it, to follow the science, let's say. But the problem with that is that complex

00:37:31.180 political decisions are often equivalent to diagnostic moves on the part of a physician.

00:37:37.500 And we haven't been able to develop expert systems that can do diagnosis worth a damn. And it's because

00:37:42.700 for however we do diagnosis, it's obviously dependent on our ability to simultaneously apprehend a very

00:37:50.460 wide range of potentially relevant contextual issues rather than reducing it to this algorithmic

00:37:56.380 process, for example, that the person with OCD might demand.

00:37:59.420 Yeah, yeah. Well, I do discuss medical diagnostics in the book, because interestingly,

00:38:06.060 in Thinking Fast, Thinking Slow, there's a passage where Dan Kahneman says some things that struck me as

00:38:12.060 very odd about physicians' inability to be consistent in their diagnoses. And I have done a lot of

00:38:19.820 spade work in research. There are 5,600 papers referred to in the bibliography of this book,

00:38:28.540 all of which were consulted in the making of it. And when Kahneman quotes these rather odd things,

00:38:34.700 I looked them up and found that they didn't show what Kahneman says they show at all. In fact,

00:38:40.300 they showed the opposite. So it's always worth having a look at these things.

00:38:44.140 Well, this work by Kahneman, you know, this sort of thing has really annoyed me too,

00:38:49.340 because I read through these things and I think your optical illusion metaphor is really a good

00:38:56.460 one. Just because we can come up with contrived situations where intuition fails doesn't mean

00:39:03.500 that intuition doesn't function properly in a huge range of appropriate contexts.

00:39:08.220 Absolutely. And can be much more subtle and much more revealing. And we disattend to it. I mean,

00:39:14.780 it should always be something that we could be sceptical about. We should be sceptical about our

00:39:18.700 reasoning. We should be sceptical about science. Science is a sceptical undertaking. But there's,

00:39:23.820 so there's nothing wrong with being sceptical about it as well, but we should at least attend to

00:39:27.900 it. And I think, I mean, there's a lot more to say about COVID and maybe we'll come, come there

00:39:32.620 later, because there's a lot of interest, I think, that connects the hemisphere hypothesis.

00:39:39.580 How would you define intuition and imagination?

00:39:43.740 Well, of course, they are almost impossible to define. And it's a mistake to think that we can't

00:39:50.540 discuss them until we've clearly defined them. Often the only way in which we can understand them

00:39:55.260 is by approaching them from different points of view and working out what they are.

00:39:59.420 I use about eight different categories of things as possible constituents of intuition. Things

00:40:09.260 like instinct, ready-to-go, knee-jerk reactions, heuristics, prejudices, which is an interesting area,

00:40:20.540 because it's not anything like as dire a situation as people now think.

00:40:26.620 Yeah, that's for sure.

00:40:28.700 Yeah, anyway. But I deal with those and with, of course, the aha moments with

00:40:35.740 scientific and philosophical insights. And then in imagination, of course, I'm making the distinction,

00:40:41.980 which is a very, very important one, between fantasy and imagination. I mean, this originates with

00:40:49.660 Wordsworth and Coleridge, and no doubt probably with Schelling. But the distinction is,

00:40:55.500 fantasy is something that covers up reality and takes one away from it. But imagination is one's

00:41:01.100 only chance of feeling one's way into reality. So the distinction that they were keen to make

00:41:07.820 was between the sort of a prettifying Augustan pastoral in which lords and ladies dressed up as

00:41:13.580 shepherds and shepherdesses. That's fantasy. And imagination, which was this divine gift, as both

00:41:22.060 Wordsworth and Coleridge very clearly saw it, which enabled one, by paying a certain kind of attention,

00:41:27.900 to have insight into the deep life of the world, of obviously the living world of other creatures,

00:41:35.100 but also of mountains, of rivers, streams, lakes, and so forth, to see them in a new way and actually

00:41:43.260 experience them as real, rather than just categorical examples in the way the left hemisphere sees them.

00:41:49.260 So in any case, all I'm really saying is that I rehabilitate intuition and imagination somewhat,

00:41:56.060 but show their limitations, and I hope, wave a flag for better science and better reason.

00:42:03.500 There's nothing at all wrong with science and reasoning themselves. The problem nowadays is that

00:42:08.860 science is not scientific enough, and our reasoning is not reasonable enough. The science, I think the

00:42:14.460 point there is that it has dogmas. Science has, at the moment, a number of dogmas. We're due a paradigm

00:42:21.100 shift. And to be ruled by dogmas, not by following the evidence, is not scientific.

00:42:27.500 I'm curious about a couple of things on the imagination and the hypothesis front. So I want to offer you

00:42:34.060 another, what, foray into defining where imagination might begin on the fringes of rationality. So

00:42:42.460 if you do give people creativity tests, one of the things you can do is you can ask them, for example,

00:42:48.140 how many uses can you think of for a brick? Write them down in three minutes. And then you can

00:42:53.100 categorize those by number of responses. So that's a fluency response. And then you can categorize

00:42:58.540 them by originality. And originality is something like pragmatic utility. So you have to identify a real

00:43:05.020 use for the brick, but also statistical unlikelihood. So the more original responses are

00:43:11.420 pragmatically practical, but also rare. So then imagine that there's a nexus of associations around

00:43:17.980 any given concept. And the tighter the associations are, the more they look rational in the algorithmic

00:43:25.820 sense. And the looser the associations, the more they look imaginative.

00:43:29.900 And that as you move out into the looser associations, your probability of making

00:43:34.940 a false positive increases, right? Because you're associating two things that shouldn't be

00:43:39.420 associated. But your possibility of making a dramatic discovery also increases because now

00:43:45.820 you're associating two things that have heretofore been distinct.

00:43:49.820 Of course.

00:43:50.460 But yeah, okay. So you can imagine that rationality shades into imagination. And then

00:43:56.220 you made this distinction that fantasy is the misuse of imagination to replace reality,

00:44:01.900 which is a nice distinction. And so, and then, so one twist on that too. One of the weird things

00:44:07.900 about the way science is, science are educated, scientists are educated, especially to write scientific

00:44:14.700 papers and to think about sciences. We think a lot about the method and we think a lot about

00:44:20.060 writing the introduction to a scientific paper as this algorithmic description of the algorithmic

00:44:25.980 process that we walk through to get to the hypothesis. But that's rarely true. You know,

00:44:31.100 like I had one student who was very creative, and she'd come up with an idea that was a leap,

00:44:36.940 an intuitive leap. And then I could see where she was going, but why, and why, but she didn't

00:44:43.580 know how she got from point A to point B. And then when she had to write out the introductions

00:44:47.980 to her paper, she had to come up with a story about how she derived that logically, even though

00:44:53.420 that had nothing to do with how she came up with it.

00:44:55.580 And that's the typical thing that happens when we have to consciously say how we did something.

00:45:01.180 The left hemisphere, which knows diddly squat about how we actually did get there,

00:45:05.420 comes up with its own version of how it would have got there if it had been in control, which it

00:45:10.060 wasn't. So you're absolutely right that most of the great discoveries in science and maths were made

00:45:16.940 intuitively through pattern recognition, through seeing a gestalt. They weren't made by following

00:45:22.540 a linear sequence. And even, I mean, this is a point that's made by George Gaylord Simpson,

00:45:27.900 who's, after all, one of the founders of the modern synthesis, for what it's worth. But I mean,

00:45:31.980 he says, you know, the scientific method as such is more or less a fiction in that it's more honoured

00:45:39.100 in the breach than in the observance, although it is a useful paradigm to have at the back of your

00:45:45.340 mind for a lot of the rather plodding early work in science and reason. So what I want to be able to

00:45:51.420 say here is that there's no conflict between science, reason, imagination, and intuition.

00:45:59.900 In good science, they all work together. In good reason, they all work together. In good intuition,

00:46:05.100 they all contribute and so forth. So there is no need for these things to be set up as they so often

00:46:11.340 are as in conflict with one another. And another important element is that it's actually the right

00:46:16.460 hemisphere contribution to them, more obviously in the case of intuition and imagination,

00:46:21.740 but nonetheless, importantly, in reason and science, it is the right hemisphere's contribution that is

00:46:28.940 the really important one. Well, I was just thinking about Einstein in light of our conversation. I mean,

00:46:35.020 when Einstein published those three remarkable papers back, I believe it was in the 1920s,

00:46:40.780 he had spent a tremendous amount of time in the world of the imagination, imagining, for example,

00:46:45.580 what it would be like to travel at the speed of light. And we can also point out, I think as well,

00:46:49.740 that the imagination differs from the propositional in that it actually does rely on images more.

00:46:57.180 And images are closer to the world in some sense than linguistic concepts. And so the imagination

00:47:03.020 tends to be less linguistic and reductive and abstracted than the purely linguistic. And so it's richer,

00:47:10.620 but not as precise.

00:47:12.620 No, no, no, absolutely. And in the book, I look at so many examples of how this is true,

00:47:20.060 that what we need is this broader combination of intuitive work and more routine humdrum work.

00:47:29.580 And Einstein himself famously used to say that it took him a long time afterwards to explain in words

00:47:37.740 how he reached conclusions that he found came to him sometimes while playing music. And of course,

00:47:43.340 music is a perfect example of what I call betweenness. It is only connection. It is only gestalt.

00:47:50.620 The notes in themselves have no significance. It's only as they come together in the patterns that we

00:47:55.980 call music, that they come to have their meaning. And incidentally, you said that if we start breaking

00:48:03.580 things up and get explicit about the playing of the music, we won't play it well. Exactly. But that

00:48:09.660 doesn't make a sort of left hemisphere procedural analysis of the piece worthless. So I sometimes say

00:48:18.780 that everything has this structure that it's the right hemisphere's open, active receptivity that

00:48:25.340 allows something to come into being for us, to presence to us. And then it goes to the left

00:48:32.940 hemisphere where it's seen as, oh yes, it's one of those, we put it in one of those categories and

00:48:37.980 it's abstracted, taken out of context and so on. And then that work having been done,

00:48:43.180 it should be taken back into the right hemisphere where a new, richer whole can be created. Now,

00:48:48.940 that's perfectly imaged in a piece of music. You're attracted to it as a whole, the right hemisphere

00:48:54.780 phase. You then start to play it and discover that you have to practice over and over again a

00:48:59.420 certain piece of fingering because it's difficult. You look at the harmonic structure of the piece and

00:49:04.060 that helps you understand it. But then finally, when you go out on stage and play it, you must forget all

00:49:09.820 of that, otherwise you won't be able to play a note. But that doesn't mean that time was wasted.

00:49:14.540 The left hemisphere's contribution is very important, but the point is it's always 1.00

00:49:19.020 the intermediary stage. It shouldn't be the final stage. But in our culture,

00:49:23.980 we take things apart, analyze them, fragment them, and that we have like a heap of bits on the garage

00:49:29.420 floor where there used to be a motorbike. And we go, oh, I've no idea what all this stuff means.

00:49:34.380 That's where we end the story. And of course, a motorbike is a bad example of what we're talking

00:49:39.740 about because I'm talking about organisms, which are nothing at all like machines. But anyway,

00:49:43.660 you wanted me to move on to talk about the third part and so that we can cover a little bit of that.

00:49:49.340 Yeah, well, and then we'll go back to the first and start walking through it again. So yeah,

00:49:53.260 go on to the third part.

00:49:54.540 Yeah, well, the third part is, so the second part is epistemology. That's what I've just described.

00:49:59.740 And the third part is metaphysics. So when we've decided that we know how to weigh the different

00:50:07.340 paths and the different portals to an understanding of the world, what do we actually find there?

00:50:12.860 And in the first two chapters of part three, the final part of the book, I look at two elements.

00:50:19.420 One is, as I say, the conjunction of opposites, which is so important and something we've completely

00:50:26.540 lost sight of. And by the way, of course, Jung was cognizant of. But we often think nowadays that

00:50:35.420 we think in a very linear left hemisphere way, that opposites are the two ends of a pole. And as

00:50:41.340 long as you keep moving further and further in a certain direction, you'll get further and further

00:50:45.900 away from the thing that you feared. But often we come back and find ourselves actually approaching

00:50:51.820 the very thing we feared because, you know, famously, too much desire for freedom causes

00:50:58.620 tyranny. And, you know, so these, just for one example, but so I look at that, and there's a lot

00:51:08.140 to say about that, but I shan't say it now. And then there's a chapter on the one and the many,

00:51:12.700 which is an ancient thing in philosophy, at least in Eastern philosophy, but is also

00:51:17.420 something we can't ignore in any kind of philosophy, the difference between the individual

00:51:22.380 and the unique and the value of it. And its place in a hole, which it doesn't, by its uniqueness

00:51:28.940 and individuality, do anything to impair. It doesn't help disintegrate that hole. In fact,

00:51:37.020 it enriches it. I sometimes give the idea of a bud or a flower that unfolds, and you see all the

00:51:42.300 different parts of it. But those parts have done nothing to make the bud less whole. In fact,

00:51:48.300 it's now made it a richer whole, the flower. So those are the two on structure. And then there are

00:51:56.300 what you might call the constituents of reality. So I look at, guess what, time. I look at space,

00:52:04.060 I look at flow, I look at matter and consciousness, which I take to be aspects of the same foundational

00:52:14.460 element in the cosmos. And then perhaps to many people's surprise, but to a lot of readers already

00:52:22.380 highly expressed delight, I look at values and purpose and the sense of the sacred as irreducible

00:52:29.580 elements that we don't make up, as it were, painting them on the walls of our room in order to cheer

00:52:36.140 ourselves up. But we don't invent them, but we discover them, if we can. In other words,

00:52:42.140 the business of living is about discovering, exploring, unveiling these values, that purpose,

00:52:49.260 and that sense of the sacred.

00:52:50.700 So, this is one of the arguments that I've been having with people like Richard Dawkins,

00:52:58.860 for example. And sometimes when the religious types take Richard Dawkins on,

00:53:03.580 they accept some of his a priori presuppositions, and that scuttles them from the beginning. And

00:53:08.620 one of the presuppositions, and this allows the scientist, scientism types to win in religious

00:53:14.220 arguments all the time, is that they basically make the presumption that a religious system is a set

00:53:19.580 of science-like propositions about the world and its description. When in fact, the religious 0.79

00:53:26.620 enterprise, much more broadly construed, involves no shortage of experiences like awe, which are,

00:53:34.060 I mean awe involves piloerection, and piloerection is a response that's 60 million years old. And these,

00:53:41.020 and that religious experience, domain of religious experience, also involves phenomena like

00:53:46.860 our sense of being intensely gripped and moved by the meaning that is produced by artistic beauty,

00:53:55.100 and music, and ritual, and dance, and all these things that are embodied, and emotional,

00:54:01.340 and motivational, far, far deeper than any cognitive overlay. And to reduce the religious enterprise to

00:54:07.260 a series of descriptions about the world is to do it great disservice, but also to make it entirely

00:54:12.780 demolishable on the scientific, reductionist, materialist, atheist front.

00:54:17.820 Hmm. Yes, you're so right about the importance of awe and wonder. And recently there was a day

00:54:25.180 in Oxford of seminars devoted to my work on which that was a theme, and I gave a lecture at the end

00:54:31.180 on that, which I hope is available somewhere. I didn't think it was filmed actually, interestingly,

00:54:36.060 but I think I may have put the text up on my channel, Channel McGilchrist. But it is a very,

00:54:40.780 very important element, and of course, it's quite different from sheer curiosity. We don't say,

00:54:46.620 I'm curious to know what God is like. We don't say, I'm curious to know what the meaning of life is.

00:54:53.420 Things that strike us as marvellous, awe-inspiring, awe-wonderful have a great depth, and once we lose

00:54:59.820 that sense, we collapse them into the little bit of the world that is illuminated in the dark when we

00:55:07.420 flash our torch around a lumber room, and we see little bits and pieces. But actually, if you

00:55:13.420 didn't do that, but allowed your eyes to adapt, you'd see that there was a rich sky, a universe,

00:55:19.660 a cosmos beyond. So all of that is extraordinarily important. You're quite right about,

00:55:25.580 it seems that scientists don't seem to understand different kinds of knowledge or meaning.

00:55:29.900 And they don't imagine that somehow King Lear would be less important as a play if one could

00:55:39.020 demonstrate, as indeed one can, that if there was indeed a historic Lear, King Lear, the story of

00:55:48.780 that king was completely different from one told by Shakespeare. In evaluate, Shakespeare's play has

00:55:54.060 more truth in it than many a book of genetics, but it's just of a different kind of truth.

00:56:01.020 Well, the best lecture on evolutionary biology, the differences in men and women in evolutionary

00:56:05.580 biology, the best lecture I ever saw was Wagner's Die Meistersinger, which nailed it. The libretto nails

00:56:12.540 the difference between men and women in the psychological, sociological, and theological sense almost

00:56:17.740 perfectly. And Wagner went places that the evolutionary biologists haven't yet gone, as far as I can tell.

00:56:23.260 I'm writing about that in my new book. That sounds very interesting.

00:56:25.980 There is this. Well, I want to ask you something. You said something very deep, in a very

00:56:32.060 truncated manner that I wanted to return to. And I saw some of this emerging in the parts of your

00:56:37.500 book that I was reading most recently. You talked about the collapse of the waveform and the collapse

00:56:44.700 of possibility into actuality, and the role of the right hemisphere in doing that. And you just

00:56:51.660 walk through a sequence of thoughts where you said that the right hemisphere in some sense presents

00:56:56.460 the global, meaningful, contextual reality to us, and then we break it down into parts and master it.

00:57:03.500 Jonathan Pazio told me, by the way, that when God tells people at the beginning of time that the

00:57:09.420 purpose of mankind is to subdue reality, what it means is subdue, to give everything its proper

00:57:18.540 place in the hierarchy of being. And so that would extend all the way from the conceptual to

00:57:23.580 the transcendent, let's say. But it's sort of like making Jacob's ladder. That's another image that I would

00:57:28.860 say. And your vision of the left hemisphere operating at the level of detail and the right hemisphere

00:57:34.140 operating at the level of totality. And the need for all of that to be fleshed out simultaneously

00:57:39.580 with no loss on either end seems to me to be in keeping with like the Jacob's ladder vision and

00:57:45.020 the idea of subduing reality with the logos, which is how it's laid out in Genesis.

00:57:50.860 Just making a side on Jacob's ladder, to me, what is completely wonderful is Blake's image of this,

00:57:57.660 which is unlike any other image. Mostly the image of the ladder is a straight ladder like that.

00:58:03.420 But Blake's image is of a spiral. And I think there's an enormous amount of depth in that.

00:58:08.460 The idea that as you go up and approach nearer to heaven, your process is not just simply linear,

00:58:16.060 but also in a way circular, but not in such a way that you come back to, as Elliot said,

00:58:21.660 the place where you first started and know it for the first time. But you actually come back to a

00:58:26.940 position which is similar to where you were, but now on a higher plane. And you can look down and see

00:58:32.540 where you were before. And you can relate these two things. So you can see both the progress and the

00:58:37.740 return in one. But anyway, what I wanted to distinguish was, I do talk about the collapse

00:58:49.900 of the wave function and quantum field theory. But what I don't think I do say, at least explicitly,

00:58:59.020 because I don't know enough to be able to state that, is that that collapse is caused by

00:59:05.980 the right hemisphere. I don't know that at all. I mean, what we know is that somehow it's connected

00:59:11.020 with attention. And there's plenty in the physicists suggesting that, and particularly in

00:59:18.300 Pauli's work, that the quality of the attention paid may change how that process is carried out

00:59:25.580 and what results from it. But I mean, that is speculative. Well, you know, that's worth wandering

00:59:31.100 down for a second or two. You know, it's definitely the case, if you think about imagination and

00:59:36.300 intuition, that imagine that in some sense, you lay out or you ask for a revelation of a vision of

00:59:43.180 the world that could be to guide you. And let's say that you would like to bring a better world into

00:59:47.900 being. And so, and you make that part of your meditative practice and part of your ethical goal,

00:59:53.260 and it's true in a fundamental sense. And then what that means is that, as a consequence of that

00:59:59.420 practice, your attention is going to be paid to those pathways and phenomena that make the

01:00:06.140 bringing of a better world into being a more real possibility. And we certainly do believe that we

01:00:11.980 can dream and then achieve. And we do believe that we can't even achieve without dreaming. And so,

01:00:17.980 obviously, there's some relationship between our ability to intuit and imagine and the manifestation

01:00:24.540 of the reality that we experience itself. Because otherwise, why would thought be useful,

01:00:29.420 or vision be useful, or planning be useful? So, it's speculative in some sense, but in another sense,

01:00:35.980 it's, what do we do? We're going to operate randomly, or we're going to operate with vision?

01:00:41.900 We come back to the importance of attention. And I sometimes say attention is a moral act,

01:00:47.740 because it changes what actually is there in the world for us to find. And it also changes us. So,

01:00:54.940 it has very important consequences. It's not just a passive process, like the exposure of a photographic

01:01:01.180 plate. It's an active, open receptivity, which is going to meet whatever it is that comes out of

01:01:09.100 that world to which we attend. So, it is a very important point there.

01:01:13.340 Well, so let's delve into that, because I think it's a key insight to make the case that attention

01:01:21.180 is a moral act. And I believe that our ideas of heavenly hierarchy, in some sense, are an

01:01:27.900 intuited representation of the ethical hierarchy, fragmented or united, as it may be, that actually

01:01:36.140 directs our attention. And that a couple, I'll just decorate that a little bit. If it's not united,

01:01:41.660 then it's fragmentary, and that causes anxiety. If it is united, it has to be united towards some

01:01:47.420 transcendent goal. And that would be something like, well, let's say, well, in the mythological

01:01:53.980 sense, that's something like the paradisal vision, right? That's the best all things could be.

01:01:58.300 You know, the idea of the logos that God uses in Genesis 1 to create the order that is good out of

01:02:05.180 nothing. That logos is basically conceptualized as something like truth in language and imagination,

01:02:12.540 serving love. And so, the idea, in some sense, is the direction of attention towards possibility,

01:02:18.940 oriented towards love, infused by truth, produces the order that is habitable and good.

01:02:25.660 And that idea is, and that's the image of God in man and woman. And God stresses that repeatedly in

01:02:32.220 Genesis, right? That he has this intent that's logos guided. And every day of creation, which is

01:02:38.060 the interaction of potential to bring in new order, is then deemed as good. And I think the reason it's

01:02:43.260 good is because it's brought into being under the auspices of love and truth. And so, this idea that

01:02:49.180 attention is an ethical act, man, this is a killer, revolutionary idea.

01:02:54.940 Yes, but it goes hand in hand with something else that's highly relevant to what you've just been

01:03:00.140 saying, which is that I argue that all that exists is in relation. There are many ways of construing the

01:03:11.500 meaning of the title, the matter with things. Partly, it's a pun on our obsession with material and our

01:03:17.980 obsession with the idea that the world is made up of things. Never mind the reference to the fact

01:03:23.820 that there seems to be something that is the matter with things at the moment. But another way of thinking

01:03:28.380 about it is that these things that we call things, and I don't have any quarrel with us using the word

01:03:34.940 in daily life, are ultimately relations. So that all that exists is relation. And that the relationship

01:03:42.220 is prior to what we call the thing, the relatum. So you can't, after all, if you think of anything

01:03:51.100 as existing in a context, it is what it is because of its relationships. To try and suggest that it is

01:03:59.180 something separate from those relationships is already to have made an essential error in

01:04:05.260 misunderstanding. So I argue that all that exists is relational. And that, of course,

01:04:11.660 is what attention is. It's a way of disposing your attention to the world. But what is lovely

01:04:16.540 is that you raise this issue of love as a core part of creation, which is a common theme to every

01:04:24.380 religious tradition all over the world. And that idea, of course, that whatever it is that we mean by

01:04:31.260 God is a relation, love. Love cannot be anything other than relational. And that the creation which

01:04:39.180 you referred to, I see the story of this creation as the constant unfolding of some God and the

01:04:47.260 universe that are in process together and each coming to know themselves more and more deeply in

01:04:52.860 this process. This would be A.N. Whitehead's vision, and I have more respect for Whitehead than for

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01:06:13.020 Well, so here's another twist on that that might be interesting to you. So I've been thinking,

01:06:19.180 I thought a long time about the relationship between truth and love and their union in this

01:06:24.140 notion of logos, which encompasses both logic and also the embodiment of something like

01:06:30.940 the divine word simultaneously. And maybe that's the bringing together of the Greek and the Judeo-Christian

01:06:36.060 tradition in some fundamental sense. But we could also think about the opposite of that. So in

01:06:42.220 Goethe's Mephistopheles, in Faust, his character Mephistopheles is the great

01:06:49.020 adversary. And Mephistopheles' credo is that being is so permeated by suffering and catastrophe and

01:06:56.460 tragedy and betrayal that it would be better if it was just brought to a halt. And so his motivation is

01:07:02.380 to destroy and eliminate the ultimate in nihilism. And in some sense, we're pulled in the world between

01:07:09.980 those two poles, right? Because part of us would like to build something better and to bring what's

01:07:14.940 greater and more magnificent into being. And another part of us is bitter and resentful about

01:07:19.980 the tragedy and catastrophe of existence. And so, and I do believe that those fundamental poles,

01:07:27.180 that's Cain and Abel in some sense, they war for a war for domination of our attentional resources,

01:07:34.060 you know? And a part of what religious practice is, is to what fortify your capacity to operate on the

01:07:42.140 side of life more abundant and truth in its service and to move away from that nihilism that's

01:07:49.020 terror-based and a consequence of, what would you say, bitterly apprehending existential catastrophe.

01:07:56.540 And that this notion of that religious war that's part and parcel of that battle,

01:08:01.260 it is a battle for the domination of attentional resources, because that is key to what brings

01:08:07.740 reality into being out of the realm of possibility.

01:08:10.860 Yes. One way of thinking about the problem you illuminated by referring to Mephistopheles in Faust,

01:08:18.860 is that what Mephistopheles doesn't understand is that you cannot have a thing without its opposite.

01:08:27.180 And so there's this left hemisphere fantasy that we can create a world in which all is simply

01:08:32.780 peace and joy. And there is no suffering involved. I don't believe that this is a possibility. Blake

01:08:39.580 actually also said that in heaven, there must be some degree of suffering, otherwise there couldn't

01:08:44.060 be joy. But I think our way of thinking is to distinguish these things too sharply. And I'm

01:08:50.700 surprised in a way, I know why you've concentrated on the word logos, because it is that Greek word in

01:08:57.660 the New Testament. But going back in history, the Greeks thought that there were two ways in which

01:09:05.180 one could approach truth. One was logos, and one was mythos. And myth has now changed its meaning to

01:09:12.940 mean something untrue. But there's nothing in the word myth that means it's untrue. Indeed,

01:09:17.820 they believed that myths were the only ways in which you could embody and communicate the really deep

01:09:23.900 truth. And that logos was an essentially trivial thing that could be used in a bad way, as it were,

01:09:29.820 by a lawyer in order to win a case. But really, when you're concerned with finding out the depths of

01:09:35.900 reality, then mythos is important. That links to what you were saying, I think, earlier about

01:09:42.060 the necessity for myths and narratives in order to be able to understand what it is we're dealing with.

01:09:48.540 Science has its own myths and narratives. That's the interesting thing.

01:09:52.860 A lot of scientists think that there are known myths and narratives in science. But if you think

01:09:58.540 that there isn't one, you have espoused the myth and the narrative of a science that always makes

01:10:04.060 progress, and in which there is a mechanism involved that all can be reduced, ultimately,

01:10:11.500 to the idea of the machine. That is the model that is espoused by those people who think there is no

01:10:18.780 model in science. Right. Well, you know, one of the things that really struck me about Dawkins when I

01:10:24.060 went to talk to him is that, despite his atheism, so here's two things that are crucial as far as I'm concerned.

01:10:30.860 Dawkins and scientists like him believe in the transcendent object. So they believe that there's an ontology

01:10:36.620 outside of the domain of epistemology, unlike the postmodernists. And it isn't obvious to me at all that we

01:10:42.780 can maintain our belief in the transcendent object without maintaining our belief in the transcendent.

01:10:48.060 And he didn't see that, or doesn't see that, as an axiomatic, faith-based presupposition of the

01:10:53.660 scientific endeavor, per se. And then Dawkins, who I believe is an admirable man and a genuine seeker

01:11:00.860 after truth, because he is a credible scientist, and you can't be that without that. Dawkins always accepts

01:11:06.380 axiomatically, before setting foot in the scientific ring, let's say, that the truth will set you free.

01:11:12.780 That's not a within science presumption, right? That's what you have to bring to the table before

01:11:22.140 you can engage in the scientific endeavor. I mean, that's a very nice introduction to

01:11:28.060 the chapter I have on values, in which I suggest that, as I say, truth, goodness and beauty are things

01:11:34.460 that we find, we discover, not that we invent. I mean, although the particular ways in which we see

01:11:42.700 them at any one moment in history may be slightly different, although those differences are

01:11:46.780 greatly exaggerated. There's enormous consonants throughout the world and across time on what we

01:11:52.060 find constitute beautiful, good and true. But in any case, the question I ask is, if you believe that the

01:12:02.380 universe is purposeless, meaningless, and a heap of material stuff that has no importance colliding

01:12:12.860 with other parts of itself in an endless process of collision and destruction, why would truth matter to

01:12:22.380 you? Why does truth seem so important to scientists? I know why truth matters to me.

01:12:27.820 Yeah, exactly. That's that mythos. Because I believe that the universe is a much richer one, in which

01:12:34.300 values like truth have meaning. But in that universe, why would truth be important? Because after all,

01:12:40.940 if you really believe nothing, then the most you could do would be to say, but let's give people

01:12:47.980 pleasure and comfort. But why would a scientist set out to destroy the pleasure and comfort that somebody

01:12:54.380 might find in their religious belief? Because they believed it wasn't true. The very fact that they

01:12:59.580 elevate truth like that seems to me to suggest that they have, ipso facto, a belief in a kind of

01:13:06.060 transcendent set of values.

01:13:08.140 Well, I think that's beyond question. I mean, this is why I was so convinced when I read Jung's work on

01:13:13.660 alchemy in particular, that science was necessarily embedded inside a narrative tradition that was least

01:13:19.660 implicit. And so we could say, the scientists ignore the mythos when they don't concentrate

01:13:24.460 on the process of hypothesis generation, and they don't look at the role of imagination and intuition,

01:13:30.540 especially in the revolutionary scientific process. And that's just a matter of epistemological and

01:13:35.980 philosophical blindness, as far as I'm concerned. And then the next thing is that it's clearly the case

01:13:41.580 that science is embedded in a redemptive enterprise, because part of the enlightenment

01:13:46.460 ethos that motivated science and scientists was the notion that if we came in contact with the

01:13:53.580 ontology of the object outside of our epistemology, and we were humble in face of the revelation of

01:13:59.580 these new truths, that what we would do would alleviate suffering and bring the world to a better

01:14:06.540 state of being. And so, to operate as a scientist to begin, so because here's an example, Ian, this is

01:14:12.060 something. So, I read this book a while back, a KGB agent wrote about some of the experiments the

01:14:20.220 Soviets were doing on the biological warfare front. And they were trying to hybridize smallpox and Ebola, 0.91

01:14:29.820 and then aerosolize it, to produce a superbug that could be distributed in cities that would be

01:14:36.220 extraordinarily contagious and extraordinarily fatal. And so, here's the question. If you're a scientist,

01:14:44.700 why isn't that as good a pursuit as any other? Because it's just a factual matter, right? It's

01:14:50.300 just a clockwork mystery in some sense. Why not see how smallpox and Ebola go together? And you might

01:14:56.380 say, well, it's preposterous to even question that, but it's not.

01:14:59.180 No, no. I can imagine an atheistic scientist saying, but there's nothing about being an

01:15:07.900 atheistic scientist that means that I shouldn't be kind and I shouldn't care about other human

01:15:12.380 beings. And therefore, it would be quite wrong for me to do this dastardly thing.

01:15:16.540 Yeah, but that's the issue, is, well, there's a wrong there. Okay, where does that come from,

01:15:20.940 exactly? And I don't see that it can be derived except from this superordinate mythos that we've

01:15:25.900 been describing. Well, I think it's better based in a much bigger, broader vision. I agree. But I

01:15:33.740 still think that it's a perfectly sensible remark. And I think that Dawkins would probably say something

01:15:40.460 like this. I mustn't put words in his mouth. But that, you know, just because I don't believe in

01:15:44.700 a divine realm doesn't mean that I don't have moral values. I think it would be wrong to suggest that.

01:15:50.620 I mean, it would be a basic error to suggest that atheists are somehow therefore immoral.

01:15:57.580 Oh, well, I don't want to. I definitely don't want to make the case that atheists are by, you know,

01:16:03.100 as a class, any necessarily more immoral than any other class of people. I'm just pointing out,

01:16:09.260 and maybe I will push you here a little bit. The thing is, even if it is kindness, and I'm perfectly

01:16:15.820 willing to assume that it might be kindness, and that will get you somewhere, that kindness itself

01:16:21.980 is outside the scientific domain. Because we could talk about kindness in terms of kinship,

01:16:26.860 and we could talk about it in terms of relation and biological, what would you say, reciprocity.

01:16:32.780 But it's in the ethical domain, specifically speaking, and not in this reductive scientific

01:16:37.740 domain. Well, that's right. But I mean, the very fact that you talk in terms of biology and kinship and

01:16:43.580 thriving and so on, it would be meat and drink to the kind of atheistic scientists that I'm talking

01:16:48.780 about. I don't think it would be logical for them to say, but you know, that's perfectly

01:16:52.700 incompressible in my way of thinking. And I don't think though that they can understand,

01:17:00.300 I don't think that with that world picture, you can understand why there is goodness at all.

01:17:09.660 And I don't know why, I don't think you can understand why there is beauty. Interestingly,

01:17:15.420 scientists think they've answered... Well, beauty is a tougher one, for sure.

01:17:17.900 It's a really, really interesting one, because scientists think they've answered the question

01:17:21.260 of beauty. It's to do with mate selection and so forth. But Darwin himself twice points out that

01:17:31.260 given the existence of beauty, it can be used by evolution in certain ways. But it doesn't explain

01:17:38.700 what beauty is or how it ever came into being in the first place. He said, why do certain colors,

01:17:45.420 certain forms, so on, actually attract and have this beauty for animals, birds, and of course,

01:17:52.140 for ourselves as humans? And there are many things...

01:17:54.220 Right, well, and it's that cross-species similarity that's so interesting. You know,

01:17:58.460 butterflies apparently can detect a one part in a million deviation from symmetry on the part of

01:18:04.460 potential mating partners. And fair enough, but that doesn't explain why we think butterflies are

01:18:10.060 beautiful, because we clearly do. I'm glad I'm not mating with a butterfly.

01:18:14.140 I know, one part in a million, man, that's pretty... But I mean, it's obvious that butterflies have high

01:18:21.340 standards. I mean, just look at them. They have very high standards. But of course,

01:18:24.380 what's interesting is that humans don't necessarily find symmetry more attractive.

01:18:28.780 And there are studies that show that, in fact, human beings find faces that are symmetrical, spooky,

01:18:34.780 mechanistic, and that they actually find an asymmetry in the face or in the form more attractive.

01:18:43.420 So, anyway... So, an optimal asymmetry. There is an optimal asymmetry.

01:18:47.100 Right, right, right. I often say that we don't want just symmetry or asymmetry,

01:18:54.140 but we want the asymmetry of symmetry with asymmetry. Rather, as I say, the left hemisphere wants

01:19:01.900 either or. It wants things black and white. The right hemisphere is able to see that they can be both

01:19:06.860 and. And I don't think we should dismiss what the left hemisphere has to offer.

01:19:13.260 So, we need not either, either, or, or both and, but both either or and both and.

01:19:19.340 Mm-hmm. Well, you see that with music, you know. I mean, you want a certain degree of algorithmic

01:19:24.940 predictability in any musical piece. Yes.

01:19:27.260 But if it devolves into algorithmic predictability, it just sounds like a drum machine.

01:19:31.660 Absolutely. And the whole business of rubato, which is responsible for so much of the meaning in music,

01:19:37.980 which is often so fine that it can hardly be specifically detected consciously, but it gives

01:19:43.900 the life to the piece. And when you hear it played by a machine, it suddenly seems completely dead.

01:19:48.620 Right. And you see that difference, too, in the difference between analog and digital musical instruments,

01:19:53.340 because with an analog instrument, you can capitalize on its imperfection in an unbelievably interesting way.

01:19:59.980 You can really make an analog instrument, like a piano, sing. Yeah.

01:20:03.660 And it's really hard to do that with a digital instrument. And that is, I mean,

01:20:07.420 digital instruments have their advantages, but they don't sing like analog instruments do.

01:20:11.820 No, I've never tried playing a digital instrument, but what you say suggests, yes,

01:20:18.620 suggests a likelihood that that's exactly right. Well, you lose the context with a digital instrument

01:20:23.180 to some degree, because if you're playing a piano and you hit the hammers, the whole thing,

01:20:27.820 the whole piano and the whole room starts to vibrate. And you can play with all that if you listen to it. And

01:20:33.900 you really can't get to do that with a digital instrument, which, like I said, has their utility. So tell me

01:20:39.260 more about your fascination with beauty, because I'll just do a little intro to that. One of the

01:20:45.660 things that really propelled me down the route of the investigation that ran on similar tracks as yours

01:20:52.540 was my realization when I was in my mid-twenties that music had an intrinsic meaning and depth that was

01:20:59.660 neither reducible to propositions nor could be destroyed by propositional objection. Absolutely.

01:21:07.740 No, so you might say, well, the world is not meaningful. It's like, okay, what about music?

01:21:12.220 Oh yeah, music is meaningful. Well, why? Well, I don't know. Can you criticize it? Well, I can,

01:21:18.860 but it doesn't have any effect on the meaning of the music. And so the meaning of the music,

01:21:23.420 which is part of its beauty, clearly, and that spiraling you talked about, Bach did that perfectly

01:21:28.540 with the Brandenburg Concerto, say, that continual Jacob's Ladder spiraling that goes upward and upward,

01:21:34.220 but in some sense returns to the same place. It's a brilliant example of that. But so tell me what

01:21:40.620 gripped you about beauty philosophically and why you decided to focus on that in relation to values?

01:21:47.500 Well, I'm afraid I'm rather comprehensive in this, but which is why it's so long. So I do

01:21:53.180 look at the various, at least the three most important values to me, which are goodness, truth,

01:21:58.780 and beauty. And whatever Keats, who was a very fine poet, may have said about this, truth and beauty

01:22:05.900 can't simply be equated. We wouldn't have two different words. And I'm afraid that sometimes

01:22:10.940 beauty can be other than good and other than true. However, that's not to say that it always is. Often

01:22:17.660 it is a pathway to something both truthful and very good. What you say about music is important because

01:22:26.140 it suggests, you know, a note has no meaning whatever. Put several hundred thousand together

01:22:31.260 and you've got Bach's St. Matthew Passion. How does that happen? It's entirely to do with

01:22:36.380 the relationships between the notes, which make the harmony, make the melody and make the ictus of

01:22:41.100 the whole thing. So that's a very important part. And as you say, it can't be reduced to reason.

01:22:49.180 So it's not for that reason irrational. I think we need to make a distinction between things that

01:22:57.740 cannot be encompassed by reason, but are not for that reason irrational. They may be trans-rational.

01:23:05.020 Or epiphenomenal. You know, people like Pinker, one of the things I take issue with Pinker and

01:23:11.020 those cognitive scientist types often is that they attempt to reduce the realm of the cultural,

01:23:15.900 including the realm of beautiful, to like a cognitive spandrel, right? They're side effects

01:23:20.940 of our cognitive ability. And that seems to me to be put in the cart before the horse.

01:23:24.540 Oh, absolutely. I think somewhere Pinker says that music is a useless exaptation of speech.

01:23:32.940 Right, exactly, exactly. And he compares it.

01:23:35.420 Kind of the other way around, actually. He compares it to pornography and cheesecake.

01:23:39.980 But in any good way, we don't need to waste time on that. Why do I find beauty so very

01:23:45.180 compelling? Partly because of the part it's played in my life since my teens, the extraordinary power

01:23:52.620 for me of poetry and art and music to which I've more or less devoted a large part of my life.

01:24:01.340 I mean, I'm not making a big claim. I'm not a creator, but I mean, they have guided my life.

01:24:08.380 And they've also guided me towards the sense of the sacred. I think that if you listen to certain

01:24:13.100 kinds of music, it's rather inane to say, to reduce it to, well, it's attractive in certain ways.

01:24:20.220 It is, but there's a certain kind of music. And I think particularly of the hundred years of the

01:24:25.980 great polyphony of people like Palestrina, Victoria, Bird, Tallis, Lassus, that simply

01:24:35.420 cries out for another category to be brought to bear on it, namely that of the soul or the spirit.

01:24:41.020 But it's greatly exaggerated that it's somehow a cultural artifact. So, for example,

01:24:47.740 So, for example, we know that Norwegians who know nothing about the structure of Indian music

01:24:58.540 nonetheless can say what the meaning of certain passages in a raga, what that meaning is. And it

01:25:05.500 will cohere with what an Indian intended by playing that piece. And, you know, it's very obvious that we

01:25:13.180 find oriental art staggeringly beautiful. Our museums are full of it. And our museums are also

01:25:19.500 full of people from the Far East coming to visit them. They don't think that somehow it's ugly because

01:25:23.740 it's not part of their tradition. One of the most moving things that I've seen, I just want to say

01:25:28.620 this because I hope that some viewers will look it up. There's a piece on the internet of an Amazonian

01:25:38.300 tribesmen being shown a film by a French film crew of snapshots, as it were, or little

01:25:47.020 short clips illustrating our way of life. And they express horror at what we do to trees,

01:25:55.580 what we do to animals, what we do to our elderly, how we have no respect for the sacred in the cosmos,

01:26:02.300 all these things. And then there is this absolutely electrifying moment when they play

01:26:09.740 Maria Callas singing Casta Diva from Bellini's Norma. And suddenly they all fall silent and

01:26:19.900 something that has never happened before happens. One of the young men stands up and moves towards

01:26:24.700 the camera and says, this is not our culture, but we feel there is something very special and beautiful

01:26:30.700 in it. And then an old man says, to me, it is overwhelming. I feel that it is divine or sacred.

01:26:38.780 So I think that is quite extraordinary. And it gives the light of the idea that these things are simply

01:26:46.140 made up any old how by a culture. Well, the other thing too, Ian, like we can afford to be dead serious

01:26:52.780 about such things as scientists. If you look at the way the brain processes language, it's obviously the case

01:26:59.420 that the musical element is not simply a secondary spandrel. Absolutely not. Because we know perfectly

01:27:05.820 well that when you and I are talking and when everyone is listening, a huge part of the emotional

01:27:10.780 information that we're conveying and the motivational excitement, for example, we know perfectly well

01:27:16.540 that that's carried by the melody of our speech. Yes. And we know that music might be an elaboration

01:27:22.540 of the melodic element of speech. But that doesn't mean that music is reducible to speech. Like I would

01:27:29.260 say, if you were looking at this from the perspective of a hard-headed biologist, you would say what

01:27:34.380 Nietzsche said, which was that language emerged from music, not the other way around. And that makes a lot

01:27:39.500 more sense from an evolutionary perspective, because animals use sound, not language, to communicate. And

01:27:46.700 the linguistic came out of the musical. And so it's clearly not a secondary phenomenon. It's way

01:27:52.140 deeper. And that intuition of meaning, you know, that one of the things I want to tell you about

01:27:59.500 my theory of music just for a second, I think you might like it. And so what I realized about music

01:28:05.660 was that it consists of patterns. And that's not a brilliant observation, but then it consists of these

01:28:11.980 interleaved patterns that are stacked on top of one each other, that work in a harmonious

01:28:17.420 structure, in a harmonious manner, all simultaneously. And you know, you can walk through a complex piece

01:28:22.540 of music listening to one musical instrument or another, participating in that gestalt pattern.

01:28:27.980 And I thought, well, why is that meaningful? Why is that? And then people think, well, music isn't

01:28:33.500 representational. And then I thought, wait a second, that's wrong. Music is the most representational

01:28:39.740 art form because the world isn't made out of objects. It's made out of patterns. And what

01:28:44.780 music calls us to do is to attend to the harmonious interplay of the patterns of being, and to bring

01:28:50.620 ourselves into alignment with that. And there is no higher call than that. And the reason that music

01:28:56.060 is meaningful is because that meaning really exists, is that is what we need to do, is to align

01:29:02.140 ourselves harmoniously with the plethora of the patterns of being that exist at multiple levels.

01:29:07.980 And so it is a call to proper action in the world. And that is meaningful.

01:29:12.140 Yes, I wouldn't disagree. I mean, except perhaps to say, I prefer the concept of

01:29:20.860 it allowing something to presence rather than a representation. Music is representational.

01:29:26.060 I know what you mean, in that it acts on our bodies in a metaphorical way, that rising and falling

01:29:32.700 phrases affect our blood pressure, our muscular, the tension in our skeletal muscles, our blood

01:29:40.060 pressure, our pulse, they make, as you say, our hair stand on end, bring tears to rise. It's a very

01:29:44.700 physical thing. And so in that sense, it's very active on us through what I would call bringing

01:29:52.460 into presence something rather than actually just representing it.

01:29:55.660 So Ian, in some sense, I hate to do this, but since we are trying to build Jacob's ladder all

01:30:01.100 the way down to the level of detail, maybe we could delve a little bit more into the

01:30:05.980 the practical necessity of such knowledge. So why do you think this matters in the concrete sense?

01:30:13.340 Why do you think that we're dominated now by what you might describe as this left hemisphere,

01:30:19.180 reduced ideological view of the world?

01:30:22.860 Yes, I may well have compiled one of the most comprehensive analyses of hemisphere differences

01:30:31.500 in the 450 pages of the first part of this book, but it's not just of technical interest. It seems to

01:30:38.460 me to be part of a very important overall philosophical project. As I explained, we don't know how to evaluate

01:30:44.460 different things. I have a whole chapter on paradoxes, by the way, in which one can see that one

01:30:49.740 arm of a paradox comes from the left hemisphere and one from the right hemisphere.

01:30:53.500 And guess what? The one that comes to the right hemisphere actually describes what we know to be

01:30:57.180 real. Anyway, to come, to pan back a bit, I feel that there is something, I think we all know that

01:31:06.300 there's something amiss with the vision we have of the world at the moment. And that's the other meaning

01:31:12.460 of the title, The Matter With Things. And the subtitle is Our Brains, Our Delusions,

01:31:18.140 and the Unmaking of the World.

01:31:20.700 And I think we're unmaking the world in several respects. One is very familiar, which is the

01:31:27.580 dispoliation, destruction, desecration

01:31:30.700 of the natural world, of forests, of seas, and so forth, and the consequences that that will have

01:31:36.780 for us. But another is our complete misunderstanding of the human being, who is now seen as a kind of

01:31:46.700 machine of a machine, perhaps even not a very efficient machine, perhaps it would be better if

01:31:51.260 we were hybridized with a machine. All of this speaks to me of something that is profoundly missing

01:31:59.020 the meaning of a human being and a human life. And we seem to have, we seem to have lost our

01:32:07.580 compass, we seem to have lost all bearings. And part of this is, I think, because we are dominated

01:32:14.780 by the way in which the left hemisphere sees the world. The left hemisphere, after all,

01:32:19.500 helps you grab stuff, but it doesn't do anything else in terms of helping you understand it. The

01:32:24.620 understanding of the world comes from the right hemisphere, but it's the left hemisphere that makes

01:32:29.100 you rich, powerful for a while. And it always seems to take over just as a civilization goes into

01:32:36.060 tailspin and declines. So you see this with the acquisition of two great territory in both the Greek

01:32:42.780 and the Roman civilizations. And you see it again with the expansionism of the West in the last 152

01:32:50.380 years since the Enlightenment. And what seems to happen is that partly because of the necessity of

01:32:56.620 administering a huge realm, whether that be a military realm or a civil realm or a commercial realm,

01:33:07.820 that requires the generation of rather rigid inhuman rules that can be applied in all situations,

01:33:15.180 and therefore the takeover of essentially the bureaucratic mind. It's not to oversimplify to say that what

01:33:22.460 many of the troubles that we have now are because of the extraordinary expansion of the bureaucratic

01:33:29.260 vision of the world in which the human is left out. And it's not caused, I think, by a sinister

01:33:37.820 cabal. You know, the paranoid idea that there's a group of people who are really wanting to control

01:33:42.780 the rest of us. I mean, I can't rule it out, but I think much more likely, from my experience in life,

01:33:47.900 I believe that there are more cock-ups than there are conspiracies. Yes, yes, yes. And that in this

01:33:53.020 particular case, it's something that is bigger than all of us, including those members of government,

01:34:00.940 administrative bodies, bureaucracies themselves. They are the victims of this same thing.

01:34:07.020 Well, you're talking about it as a neurological proclivity in some sense, which is way deeper and

01:34:13.260 more profound than any mere manifestation. Let me ask you a mythological question. So,

01:34:19.020 I've been spending a lot of time trying to unpack the story of the Tower of Babel. And so,

01:34:26.940 what happens after the catastrophe of Cain and Abel in Genesis is you get two negative outcomes,

01:34:32.700 let's say, to, let's say, sinful existence. And one would be the chaotic flood that envelops Noah,

01:34:39.340 and the other then. And so, that's like the catastrophe of the natural world gone completely

01:34:44.620 uncontrollable. The next is the catastrophe of the bureaucratic state. And so, the Tower of Babel

01:34:50.620 is an attempt to replace the heavenly hierarchy by a human creation. And the consequence of that

01:34:57.900 is the destruction of the ability to communicate. And so, what happens is that fundamental perceptual

01:35:04.380 categories, perceptual and linguistic categories become, what would you say, they become unstable

01:35:10.780 as this top-heavy administrative process develops. And it is an element of Luciferian presumption. It's

01:35:20.140 the attempt to replace the context by the part. I think it is. And it's interesting that even Adorno,

01:35:27.180 back in the 40s, was describing what he saw then as the administered world, the verwaltete world,

01:35:34.780 he said. Which is, and I don't want anyone to think that I'm just talking about bureaucracy. But

01:35:42.220 bureaucracy as an image of a whole way of thinking, which is the mechanistic one, the reductionist one,

01:35:49.820 the algorithmic one, that there are rules and so on. And what this does is it privileges the theory

01:35:57.900 over the reality. So that experience has fallen, as has been pointed out, experience has fallen in

01:36:08.860 value. And instead, theories about how life should be have become the reality. And this is something that

01:36:16.700 you notice in bureaucracies that actually having ticked the box is more important than the event

01:36:22.060 in the real world, which that was supposed to, you know, to evaluate. So, for example, in medicine,

01:36:30.780 it's quite possible to do extremely good medicine, but if it's not catalogued in a certain way and

01:36:35.660 certain boxes weren't ticked, it doesn't count and it didn't happen. Well, and I do think it is important,

01:36:41.420 as you point out, it's extremely important to note that this is a deeper problem than merely that

01:36:49.020 which is manifested by any of its manifestations, right? Exactly. We don't want to blame the bureaucrats

01:36:54.060 and the notion that there's an evil cabal, while there is the World Economic Forum and they might

01:36:58.620 count, but fundamentally we're looking at something that's much more profound. And it is something like,

01:37:04.380 I do think it's something that's represented in Christianity, for example,

01:37:08.380 as the Luciferian presumptions of the untrammeled intellect. And it is associated with this idea of

01:37:15.500 left hemisphere domination. It's hyper-systematization at the context of, at the cost of the whole.

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01:38:16.700 Yes, I think that's right. And one thing that struck me very much in the last few years is that the

01:38:23.980 the myth of the master and his emissary on which the title of the first book or the earlier book is

01:38:31.500 based is something that actually crops up all around the world, that there is a wise ruler and there is

01:38:38.940 an intemperate hot-headed general or underling who wishes to, who actually is put out by the feeling that

01:38:48.700 there is this more powerful being, and actually wants to usurp that being.

01:38:54.540 Yeah, very common theme.

01:38:56.380 Common theme, and one, but there are actually this precise myth of there being two beings,

01:39:02.620 one of them that is willing to take under its aegis, the other, and to allow it to work well,

01:39:08.220 but that other doesn't want that. Like Satan in Milton's Paradise Lost.

01:39:14.060 In Milton, absolutely, absolutely.

01:39:15.500 It is a very expression of resentment, envy, and the desire to destroy if it cannot own something.

01:39:23.020 And this seems to be a really important element in the picture that we're looking at.

01:39:28.700 Yeah, well, I think it's the crucial element, and I think you're putting your finger on

01:39:32.940 Milton's Lucifer is absolutely perfect.

01:39:35.740 You know, I thought about Milton in relationship to the rise of totalitarian states, and so

01:39:45.180 Milton was writing about Luciferian presumption before totalitarian states in the modern sense

01:39:51.980 really came into being. And one of the things that his poetic genius intuited was that our Luciferian

01:39:59.420 intellectual presumptions would entice us into producing representational systems

01:40:05.580 that would then attempt to replace the territory with the map, and to privilege epistemology, and to

01:40:12.060 privilege this narrow rationality that you're describing above all, and then also to insist upon that

01:40:20.380 representation and that replacement. You know, you really saw this with the Soviets, right? Where 0.66

01:40:25.820 the Soviets and the Maoists, they were so insistent that their representation replaced reality, that it 0.95

01:40:31.660 became criminal to admit that you were suffering. It's like, you can't be hungry, the state is perfect.

01:40:37.100 Yes, oh yes.

01:40:38.140 And you know, in Venezuela, they've made it illegal. In Venezuela, they made it illegal to list starvation

01:40:43.500 as a cause of death by physicians.

01:40:45.340 Wow. But what fascinates me there is that denial is one of the key features of the left hemisphere's

01:40:55.340 take on the world. And it's so striking in medical cases that people who've had a right hemisphere

01:41:02.060 stroke will claim that black is white. They will just deny that a completely, obviously, uselessly

01:41:08.220 paralyzed limb is fully under their control, and they can move it, and there isn't anything wrong at all.

01:41:13.500 Well, so, in keeping with your notion and Goldberg's notion of the right hemisphere,

01:41:18.940 let's say, as an anomaly detection system, so imagine this. You know how, you know what happens

01:41:23.740 when you have a tooth pulled, hey? It takes your tongue, and it'll do this all by itself, like

01:41:28.860 three months of exploratory work to map out that new crevice. And so, you imagine that your left

01:41:35.260 hemisphere built a, or there's a representation of that section of your mouth that's unbelievably highly

01:41:40.700 detailed. And then you upset it, and now there's an anomaly detected by the right. It says, oh, oh,

01:41:46.540 there's something here where the map no longer matches the territory. And then there's all this

01:41:51.340 exploratory work that has to be done in order to map out the contours of the mouth. And the mouth is

01:41:57.340 really relevant because, you know, the mouth and the tongue are unbelievably thoroughly represented at

01:42:02.780 a neurological level. And so, like, it takes six months or three months of constant busy work

01:42:08.700 to re-familiarize yourself just with the inside of your mouth. So now, let's say you have right

01:42:15.260 hemisphere damage in the parietal lobe, and you lose half your body, but you don't notice. And I think the

01:42:22.380 reason you don't notice is because the left has no choice but to impose its axiomatic presumptions

01:42:33.260 when there's nothing indicating the lack, and there's no pathway forward to a new representation.

01:42:40.300 I've seen people who, I had a cousin who got really ill, and she was diabetic, and she had a lot of

01:42:46.380 immunological problems, and she had to radically modify her whole life to deal with what she could

01:42:53.420 and couldn't eat. And she didn't do a very good job of it. And my parents and other people, her

01:42:58.940 relatives were often upset with her, not so much my parents specifically, but many people who knew her

01:43:04.620 were hurt and upset with her because they felt that she was denying her illness. But I thought, man,

01:43:09.900 if something happens to you that's cataclysmic and it changes your entire identity in an

01:43:14.220 extraordinarily complex manner, it can take you months to years to readapt. Three months just to

01:43:21.340 remap your tooth. And then the left will insist that the pre-theory is the only one that abides.

01:43:27.900 Yeah. Well, first of all, it doesn't happen the other way around. So you can have just a cataclysmic

01:43:34.540 event like your right arm is paralyzed, and you don't deny it at all. In fact, you're appropriately

01:43:41.020 upset about it. So it is something to do with the left hemisphere's way of understanding things.

01:43:46.300 And what is really fascinating is that when something is not there, and there are these

01:43:53.740 descriptions of patients who simply won't recognize the existence of half of their body and fail to dress

01:44:00.220 it or shave it. But they also, as pointed out by Tsing-Ela, cannot imagine that there ever was a

01:44:05.900 left half of their body, or that there ever will be again in the future. In other words, once it's

01:44:11.660 gone from the left hemisphere's attention, it ceases to exist. So it's not-

01:44:16.140 Yes, it's not even not there. I know, it's so strange.

01:44:19.340 It's not as though this left hemisphere tendency is simply to deny something. It simply doesn't

01:44:28.060 believe that it exists. Right, right.

01:44:30.780 And when you put that on the cultural situation at the moment, it begins to cast some light on how 0.99

01:44:37.340 people who can't be that stupid and who can't be that perverse nonetheless argue that black is white, 0.99

01:44:44.460 you know? Yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, I've been trying to think, I've tried to think about the 1.00

01:44:48.860 phenomenology of neglect a lot, you know? Because it's such, it is such a weird thing that people

01:44:54.140 even lose the notion that what's absent, what is absent. So it's not even not there. It's a

01:45:02.060 category we don't even, can't even comprehend. But imagine, so you look straight ahead and you move

01:45:06.940 your hands to the side like this. And what happens is, when your hands are in front of your eyes,

01:45:11.980 they're pretty high resolution. And then when you move them this way, they get lower and lower

01:45:16.540 resolution. And then they get black and white out here, although you can't tell that, but

01:45:21.500 scientific investigations have shown that. And then about here, they just cease to exist.

01:45:27.580 And so I'm kind of wondering if that sense of neglect, phenomenologically, is akin to having

01:45:35.260 that which is in our visual field behind us, now moved three quarters of the way around instead

01:45:41.260 a half way around.

01:45:42.220 I'm not sure I'd say that.

01:45:45.180 Okay, okay.

01:45:45.900 I think there's a distinction between not being able to see something, but knowing that it's

01:45:52.060 there. And the right hemisphere doesn't engage in this kind of denial at all. It's perfectly aware

01:45:57.100 that it can't see something or it, you know. But the left hemisphere, for the left hemisphere,

01:46:01.980 if it isn't in the map, as it were, then it doesn't exist.

01:46:04.940 Right.

01:46:05.420 It's not on the map, so it can't be real.

01:46:07.820 Yeah, that's deconstructionism in a nutshell, right? It's this privileging of epistemology.

01:46:15.420 It's imaged throughout various movements in the history of ideas in our lifetime.

01:46:21.420 And it's getting more and more extreme, so that people's theory about what the world should be

01:46:27.260 like is now the only reality. And if things don't conform to it, it's because some terrible

01:46:33.340 people have been deliberately trying to frustrate it.

01:46:37.260 Right. Well, okay, so do you have some sense, sociologically, why this has intensified as of

01:46:46.380 late? Like, is it a necessary consequence of our scientific and technological prowess and the

01:46:51.980 philosophy that's come along with that? And do you think technology is accelerating this in some sense?

01:46:56.940 Well, I think our success in technology has led us to believe that we understand all sorts of things

01:47:03.500 that we probably understand less well than at any other time in human history. We may know more

01:47:09.660 technically about them, but we don't really understand what's going on or what the meaning

01:47:13.420 or value or purpose of these elements in the world is or are. And I think that's part of it.

01:47:21.420 The fact is that when you begin to see the world as meaningless and purely mechanistic,

01:47:31.580 then you lose the sense of value. And it's extremely distressing. So it causes an epidemic of anxiety

01:47:39.740 and depression. And that's something we can see the evidence of all around us. And when people are

01:47:46.700 anxious and depressed like that, they must have certainties, they cling to false certainties. And

01:47:52.620 they'd rather cling to a certainty that's clearly wrong than face the fact that they really don't,

01:47:58.780 they're disorientated. So anything that comes along that, you know, becomes the element and

01:48:04.860 particularly important is something that offers control.

01:48:08.860 Yes, because anxiety is, it's out of control. It's terrifying. I feel, quote, unsafe. I mean,

01:48:17.020 how often do we hear that these days? I mean, ridiculously enough, but we do. But the great

01:48:21.740 thing there is we have to get control back. And that leads towards intolerance and effectively

01:48:29.500 things that can't be talked about. And the foundations, as Hannah Arendt said,

01:48:35.020 as Simon Weil said, of totalitarianism. Okay. So imagine, I'll take a bit of a detour here

01:48:43.340 to talking to Sam Harris. And so Harris is a reductive rationalist and he believes in algorithmic

01:48:49.180 processing. He doesn't believe in free will. And one of the things that's happened that's really

01:48:54.060 interesting to Harris, and I'm saying this with all due respect, I really like Sam and he's really

01:48:58.780 smart. And I think his orientation is fundamentally good. But what's so interesting to see what's

01:49:05.180 happened to him practically is that he's really abandoned his rational atheism in a phenomenological

01:49:12.780 sense to pursue meditation. And he's developed this meditation app, which is his central focus now,

01:49:19.180 and he's teaching people all over the world to meditate. And what I see happening is that he's taking

01:49:24.300 a respite from the narrow confines of his reductive materialism in the world of the transcendent

01:49:31.100 right hemisphere. And he wants to keep that non-linguistic. And that's sort of the Buddhist

01:49:36.620 twist on that, because if it was propositionalized and transferred into something like a comprehensible

01:49:42.380 religion, then his intellect would just criticize it out of existence. But he finds respite and succor

01:49:48.620 in these practices that I think produce a right hemisphere, revelation of harmony and totality

01:49:55.420 and love and all of that. And then you might imagine that absent that, so absent that proper

01:50:02.300 relationship between the left and the right, so the left, so you can't find respite from your narrow

01:50:09.500 preoccupations and your doubt in a relationship with the right, you have to start to depend on

01:50:16.140 ideological certainty as a buffer against the anxiety. Because you're not properly having,

01:50:22.780 you're not properly integrated in the part of the contextual understanding that would lead you to

01:50:27.660 genuine meaning. And that's where that immersement meaning is like an antidote to anxiety. Absent that,

01:50:34.700 you have to occupy a narrower and narrower certainty to keep yourself from panicking in some sense.

01:50:41.900 Well, attention is so fragmented nowadays because it's valuable and is therefore being grabbed at by

01:50:48.540 so many different sources all day long that we're no longer able to pay the sort of sustained,

01:50:58.860 vigilant, non-verbal, non-judgmental openness of attention, which is the very business of mindfulness

01:51:06.700 to try and nourish. And I think that people are gravitating to this because in it for the first

01:51:13.180 time they can begin to see a world that makes sense. Because as I say, everything depends on

01:51:18.860 the attention. If your attention is fragmented and is making presumptions about what you're seeing,

01:51:24.780 that it's purely meaningless, purposeless and mechanistic, then you are trapped into something. And I

01:51:30.380 suppose that what he is trying to do there is to say, this is a way in which we can open that up.

01:51:37.420 And I think that's welcome. I suppose I always worry about people adopting spiritual practices, 0.95

01:51:44.780 as it were, for utilitarian purposes. But sometimes it's better that they adopt them and then see what

01:51:51.100 comes of that than that they don't adopt them at all. I think it's a mistake to, you know, for example,

01:51:57.820 to think that the point of meditating is to lower your blood pressure and make your mind work faster

01:52:06.140 so that you can be a better stockbroker. And that is really not, that is to misunderstand this

01:52:11.820 process that you're entering into. And it's typically to do what the left hemisphere always does,

01:52:19.980 which is to turn it into a commodity.

01:52:22.620 Right, right. To instrumentalize it, yes. To instrumentalize it, exactly.

01:52:26.940 Yes, yes, yes, yes. Well, a lot of these bureaucratic enterprises and ideological enterprises

01:52:33.260 are also characterized by the instrumentalization of everything. And the problem with that, in some

01:52:38.780 sense, is that that instrumentalization, which would be a left hemisphere function, is extremely useful if

01:52:44.700 you have a narrow goal-directed necessity in mind and you need to undertake it efficiently and in a short

01:52:50.140 period of time. But if the question of, well, what's all this for in the broader sense comes up,

01:52:56.380 then that kind of interfering, that kind of attention interferes with the apprehension that

01:53:01.580 would allow you to conceive of the broader context. And I think there's a couple of things that are

01:53:06.060 really key and importance in what we've been discussing, that people should perhaps contemplate

01:53:12.380 in a deep sense. And one is your insistence, which dovetails, I would say, with my insistence,

01:53:17.740 that there isn't, in some sense, anything more important than trying to understand the processes

01:53:24.140 by which attention is directed. There's something absolutely, you know, the Egyptian god Horus,

01:53:30.060 that eye that everyone knows, the falcon that was Horus, that is that attentional capacity that you

01:53:36.700 describe. And they worship that as the redemptive god himself, like the eye of Horus. Horus was the god

01:53:43.100 who redeemed the dead state and who fought off Seth. And Seth eventually turns into Satan,

01:53:49.980 by the way, via the Coptics. But Seth is exactly that force that always threatens the bureaucratic 0.81

01:53:55.820 state. It's the usurping force. And so the Egyptians knew in their mythos that the attentive eye,

01:54:04.540 the eye of the falcon, right, and that's the bird's eye view, was the antidote to totalitarian,

01:54:10.940 to the totalitarian proclivity. And the Mesopotamians knew this too because their god Marduk,

01:54:16.620 who was the top god and also the model for the proper emperor, had eyes all the way around his head.

01:54:22.540 And say they knew that it wasn't intellect that was the antidote to the totalitarian state,

01:54:27.580 not this narrow left hemisphere intellect, let's say. It was the capacity for attention that we seem to be

01:54:34.220 focusing on when discussing right hemisphere function. There's a couple of ways in which

01:54:39.100 one can see the eye of Horus. And one is in the benign way that you do. And the other is as the

01:54:44.540 sort of somewhat predatory all-seeing eye, the disembodied eye. And one day I want to write about

01:54:56.460 this because it's something, an enormous number of Egyptian symbols, including the disembodied eye,

01:55:02.060 come up in the artwork of patients with schizophrenia who don't know anything about

01:55:06.860 Egyptology. Oh, I would love to talk about that. One day I'm going to write a book about that.

01:55:13.580 Well, good, that's something else we can talk about. You know, the Egyptians knew this too because they,

01:55:19.180 for them, the optimal pharaoh, so the principle of sovereignty, wasn't the eye of Horus.

01:55:24.700 Horus. It was the eye of Horus having revitalized Osiris, who was the spirit of the state. And so

01:55:32.700 Horus gives one of his eyes to Osiris. Osiris is his dead father. So their union, and yeah,

01:55:39.340 so they knew that that… It's a very complex thing.

01:55:41.580 It is. Yeah. But how did we get onto the eye of Horus? I've forgotten.

01:55:47.180 Oh, well, we were talking about the potential redemptive value of attention.

01:55:52.220 Attention. Oh, yes. My goodness, yes. Exactly. Yes. And the fight, the fight of attention against,

01:55:58.060 against intellectual, arrogant, intellectual, totalitarian presumption.

01:56:01.740 Yes. And I just want to sort of say something very briefly about purpose that I,

01:56:08.860 people may think, oh dear, he thinks that as it were, there's an engineering god who sort of

01:56:15.180 got it all… The deistic vision, you know, that God wound up the universe and let it go or can

01:56:22.700 occasionally move into the clockwork. That's not what I mean at all. I mean that there is some

01:56:30.060 purpose that is transcendent, that is sacred, and is not deterministic, which is a really important

01:56:37.420 point to me. Anyway… I think the science points in that… Well, I think the science points in that

01:56:44.460 direction too, Ian. Yes. So that's another place where we can be really hard-headed about this.

01:56:48.860 You know, I talked to Roger Penrose about this because Penrose does not believe that consciousness

01:56:53.900 itself is reducible to an algorithm or computational. And he believes it, I believe, on grounds that from

01:57:00.780 the physics perspective are similar to the… What would you say? They come from the same conceptual

01:57:06.540 universe as the ideas that you're propounding in relationship to the idea of consciousness at the

01:57:12.700 forefront of, let's say, the revelation of possibility, something like that. So nobody can

01:57:18.380 come up at, let's say, and criticize the ideas that we're discussing, you and I, by saying, well,

01:57:24.300 the biology doesn't point in that direction and neither does the physics. It's like, no,

01:57:28.220 the biology points very strongly in this direction and so does the physics.

01:57:32.220 I mean, it does. I mean, the argument that there is no direction, no drives, no purpose in biology,

01:57:40.060 but it's all simply accidental. I think there must be a few people left in the world who still believe

01:57:46.380 that, but I think it's largely been discredited completely. It's very obvious, in fact, that biology

01:57:53.660 is highly expressive of purpose, but I think even the inanimate universe is as well. And I

01:58:00.220 adopt a rather unusual position, but perhaps we mustn't go there because it will take us for a long

01:58:04.540 time to discuss. But the inanimate and animate worlds are not totally distinct from one another.

01:58:12.300 Obviously, they are distinct in the sense that they are completely different and have different kinds of

01:58:17.900 qualities, but they're not ultimately divided. They're not ultimately separate. There is a continuum,

01:58:25.100 is the best way of putting it. I'm going to talk to Ian a bit more for the Daily Wire Plus folks for

01:58:31.500 another half an hour or so about, I would say, his intellectual biography and his personal pathway

01:58:38.460 through the intellectual and philosophical world to the point where he's developed the ideas that we've been

01:58:44.780 talking about.

The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast - August 11, 2022

278. The Matter with Things ｜ Iain McGilchrist

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