The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast - 436. What Your Left Brain Won’t Tell Your Right Brain ｜ Dr. Iain McGilchrist

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00:00:14.720 Hello everyone. I had the opportunity today to meet in person with Dr. Ian McGilchrist.

00:00:35.980 I've spoken with Dr. McGilchrist a couple of times. A couple of times in person and also on my podcast by Zoom.

00:00:45.080 And we're here in Georgia today and we happen to be in the same place at the same time.

00:00:49.740 So we thought we'd sit down and conduct a lengthy investigation into the similarities in our thought and the differences.

00:00:58.640 And to see where we could get. And that's what we're inviting you to partake in.

00:01:03.740 I wanted to talk to Dr. McGilchrist because we share an interest in neuropsychology.

00:01:10.540 Particularly in hemispheric specialization.

00:01:12.600 He's very interested in the relationship between the manner in which the left hemisphere and its relatively reductive proclivity sees the world compared to the more expansive and holistic, in some sense, right hemisphere.

00:01:26.760 I'm very interested in how that maps onto conceptualizations of the Luciferian intellect, which are pervasive in mythology.

00:01:34.260 That's one of the things we discuss.

00:01:36.020 We discuss also the surprising relationship between attention and morality.

00:01:40.600 Because Dr. McGilchrist believes, as I do, and I think this is more than a belief, I actually think it's an established fact, that attention is a valuing process.

00:01:52.240 And what that essentially means is that the way the world makes itself manifest to us is in accordance with our aim, our attention, and our values.

00:02:02.320 That we see the world through a structure of values.

00:02:04.960 And we attend to those things that we value.

00:02:07.800 And that is a realization, and an empirical realization for that matter, of immense import, because it suggests that the world presents itself in accordance with your aims.

00:02:24.660 And that's a very interesting and terrifying thing to understand.

00:02:28.380 So we talk about all that, and so welcome to the discussion.

00:02:31.720 Dr. McGilchrist, you spent a lot of time thinking about hemispheric specialization, and that's an understatement.

00:02:39.260 And one of the things I find quite remarkable about the fact of hemispheric specialization is something like its implication for, what, understanding the reflection of the world.

00:02:51.120 And Richard Dawkins said something very interesting about biological organisms.

00:02:55.560 He said they have to be a model of the environment in order to function in the environment.

00:02:59.140 Sure.

00:02:59.500 Well, there's a duality of hemispheric specialization, and that implies a kind of ontological duality, essentially.

00:03:08.640 And so let's start with what you make of that.

00:03:11.920 I mean, I'm curious about two things, what you make of that, and also why the issue of hemispheric specialization gripped you so much.

00:03:18.480 Yeah, yeah.

00:03:19.500 Well, the first thing I'd say is about the word duality, which suggests, in the way we often use it, a kind of severance.

00:03:28.200 And that's not what I'm talking about.

00:03:31.000 And people say, oh, you're creating a duality.

00:03:37.120 But I'm not creating a duality.

00:03:38.760 Nature has given us a duality.

00:03:41.020 Right, to contend with.

00:03:42.460 Making sense of what it is for.

00:03:44.800 And it's about, as so many things are, about both division and union.

00:03:48.560 It's about connection and distinction.

00:03:51.860 So it's not an absolute thing, and it's also, importantly, mediated by the corpus callosum in human beings.

00:04:01.960 The two hemispheres are connected by this body of fibers at the base of the brain, of course, called the corpus callosum.

00:04:06.980 And this is a mammalian invention.

00:04:09.460 That's fascinating in itself.

00:04:11.100 Because all the neural networks we know that led up to the mammalian brain have this bi-hemispheric or at least separated or distinguished network.

00:04:23.700 But there's only this band of fibers when you get to mammals.

00:04:28.800 So birds, for example, have no corpus callosum.

00:04:31.080 And so that's intriguing in itself.

00:04:34.460 It's not like somehow the thing is getting more separated.

00:04:40.840 In fact, it's getting slightly less separated.

00:04:42.660 But here's the kicker.

00:04:45.320 Much of the purpose of the corpus callosum is to stop the other hemisphere interfering.

00:04:49.540 Now, that's one of the things.

00:04:50.880 You ask why I got interested.

00:04:52.340 When I learned that in medical school, I thought, that's fascinating for a start.

00:04:57.100 Also, I then discovered that the corpus callosum is, funnily enough, not keeping up in size with the expansion of our brains.

00:05:05.480 So it's not true that somehow we're trying to weld these things together more.

00:05:10.680 We need just enough connection to pass essential information between the hemispheres

00:05:16.440 and enough connection to enable them to inhibit the contralateral hemisphere.

00:05:24.680 Yeah, well, it's easy to fall prey to the delusion that more connection is better.

00:05:29.560 Absolutely.

00:05:30.100 No, and this is actually a problem that we're facing as we wire ourselves together on the net.

00:05:35.240 Yeah.

00:05:35.560 Because the problem is that you can communicate what's necessary when you're all wired together,

00:05:40.840 but you can really communicate what isn't necessary incredibly quickly as well.

00:05:46.440 I know.

00:05:47.100 Right.

00:05:47.460 So you have the problem of the signal being subsumed by the noise.

00:05:50.680 Exactly.

00:05:51.320 Right, right.

00:05:51.960 And I first came across this when I was working at Johns Hopkins in the early 90s,

00:05:57.920 doing neuroimaging on asymmetry in the brain.

00:06:02.320 And the head of the department, the great guy, came in and said,

00:06:06.520 you know, the thing is, we need to be communicating more.

00:06:09.600 And having arrived there from England, I felt that I was being flooded with unnecessary information.

00:06:14.680 Right, right.

00:06:15.240 And I thought, no, actually, we need to be communicating less, which is an odd thing for me to say,

00:06:20.860 because one of my war cries, if you like, is that we've become hyper-specialized.

00:06:26.300 Everybody's in a silo.

00:06:27.740 And we have no respect for and no actual candidates for seeing the overall picture.

00:06:33.740 But if we don't see the overall picture, it's no good having brilliant specialists in a pit somewhere separate from other people.

00:06:42.360 So we do need to draw things together.

00:06:44.120 But once again, it's not all or nothing.

00:06:46.520 It's this question of how you filter it so that it makes sense.

00:06:50.060 And indeed, on the word filter, I take the view that the brain is, in fact, a filter.

00:06:56.260 It doesn't emit consciousness.

00:07:00.120 Nobody could ever suggest, nobody's got anywhere near suggesting how the brain can emit it.

00:07:05.200 Right, right.

00:07:05.660 I don't think it exactly transmits it, but I think it permits it and also, therefore, filters what it finds.

00:07:12.280 And that process of negation or filtering is part of creativity, isn't it?

00:07:15.980 You know, when Michelangelo made a statue of David, he didn't make an arm and then a leg and so on.

00:07:22.920 He just had a block of stone.

00:07:24.500 And for several years, all he did was throw away stone.

00:07:26.940 And then at the end of it, there is this David.

00:07:30.080 So I was reviewing your book again last night in preparation for this podcast.

00:07:36.760 And one of the things that I found, I mean, I've been trying to put together for myself a conceptualization of right versus left hemisphere function.

00:07:45.620 And I really liked Alcon and Goldberg's work.

00:07:48.660 So do I.

00:07:49.580 Yeah, yeah, yeah.

00:07:50.740 So that's a commonality.

00:07:52.440 And he was very interested in the antithesis between novelty and routinization.

00:07:59.240 And that seems to be a theme that permeates your work as well.

00:08:02.100 It's the right, like you're, and correct me if I've got any of this wrong,

00:08:06.320 but you're looking at the right hemisphere, at least in part, as something that produces like a quick and dirty overall picture, for example, of a new room when you walk into it.

00:08:20.080 You get a gestalt of it.

00:08:21.460 And then as you pay attention to the details, the degree to which you pay attention to the details is proportionate to some degree to the degree that the left hemisphere is involved.

00:08:31.480 And that brings up all sorts of interesting philosophical questions, too, like the distinction between part and a whole.

00:08:37.560 Yes.

00:08:37.960 Because every part is made up of smaller parts.

00:08:40.400 Exactly.

00:08:40.520 And so what constitutes, how do you understand the relationship between perception of the part and the whole and hemispheric function?

00:08:51.220 Well, you've raised a range of things there that differentiate them.

00:08:54.800 First, the idea of what is new and what is familiar, and then the idea of the part and the whole.

00:09:00.580 I want to just chip in there on the word quick and dirty, because one of the things that people imagine is that something like Kahneman's type one thinking, the sort of immediate thinking, is more related to the right hemisphere, and the more considered thinking is related to the left.

00:09:19.640 But that is not the case.

00:09:21.700 When we jump to conclusions, it is the left hemisphere that is quick and dirty.

00:09:26.160 It's always wanting to get what it is.

00:09:28.620 Now, I need to know for certain, is it this or is it that?

00:09:32.700 Whereas the right hemisphere is allowing things to be open and saying, well, it could be that or it could be something else.

00:09:38.060 Now, the problem is that when you want to grab a detail, you can't afford to be hesitant for too long.

00:09:43.820 You've got to kind of pounce on that mouse or pick up that seed or whatever it is.

00:09:47.360 And so, the left hemisphere being essentially in service of our ability to grab things does tend to simplify very, very much compared with the right hemisphere.

00:10:00.140 So, I definitely appreciate the word gestalt.

00:10:03.160 The right hemisphere is the one that sees gestalten.

00:10:06.020 That is to say, holes which cannot be reduced to their parts without loss.

00:10:11.760 I wish we had a proper word for that in English.

00:10:14.060 But perhaps the word is hole, because holes are of this nature.

00:10:18.060 But as you say, when you go down, what we call a part, and I think that's an artifact of the left hemisphere, is a hole at another level.

00:10:26.120 Yeah, so there's always that paradoxical interplay between unity and multiplicity at every level of perception.

00:10:33.480 At every level of perception.

00:10:34.780 And that is another theme of mine, the business of mediating unity and multiplicity, because, of course, we need both.

00:10:40.460 And we need diversification, but we also need to have it so that it doesn't threaten the integration of the whole.

00:10:46.180 And I see the process of the cosmos, actually, as maybe we're running on here, but, I mean, why not, as an endless unfolding of something that is infolded.

00:10:58.120 So, the implicit becoming explicit.

00:11:00.240 But at another level, that now seems explicit.

00:11:03.240 It's implicit for something else.

00:11:04.480 It's constantly unfolding.

00:11:05.480 That's like the blooming of a flower.

00:11:06.700 It's like the blooming of a flower in that, as it opens out, something new is coming about.

00:11:12.700 But it's not, and it's a diversification within, but it's not threatening the integrity of the whole.

00:11:17.800 That's why you have the symbolic association of the rose with the Holy Spirit, and why you also have Buddha sitting in the lotus flower.

00:11:24.940 It is that idea of the implicit unfolding.

00:11:28.460 That is exactly right.

00:11:29.580 And I think flowers are the image with which we anchor this truth.

00:11:33.920 Yeah, right, right.

00:11:34.660 So, yes, but it's not so as to damage the integrity of the whole, but, in fact, to fulfill it, to fulfill its potential.

00:11:46.120 But the parts and the whole, you wanted me to say something about.

00:11:51.160 Well, let me just say something about newness and familiarity and then about parts and whole.

00:11:55.040 Yeah, okay.

00:11:55.740 So, it's not, I mean, Goldberg is exactly right, and that's something I importantly learned from him.

00:12:03.240 But it's not just in the way that a lot of people would think newness per se, but it's the ability to see the thing as it is without having conceptualized it, abstracted it from its context, disembodied it, and put it into a category.

00:12:18.460 That's what the left hemisphere does almost immediately.

00:12:21.000 And when we're young, the great thing is we see commonalities, we see a child learning, and it goes, birdie, because it's got that concept.

00:12:31.180 And it's not just a one-off, there are other birds.

00:12:34.260 And they go, doggy, in fact, it's a cat.

00:12:36.800 But they've got the idea there's a four-legged thing, you know.

00:12:39.200 But as we get older, what is really important is get back to the individuality of the stimulus, because we so quickly put it into a category and abstract it that we've lost its power.

00:12:50.140 Yeah, well, you replace the perception with the category.

00:12:53.680 And there's efficiency in that.

00:12:55.200 There's efficiency.

00:12:55.940 But there's a loss of quality.

00:12:56.940 There's a huge loss.

00:12:58.480 And this is what Wordsworth was talking about.

00:13:00.800 Right.

00:13:01.500 When he remembered that as an eight- or nine-year-old, when he was rambling on these hills and with the waterfalls and the crags and so on, the thing was magical.

00:13:12.020 It was present.

00:13:12.680 But latterly, he couldn't help thinking, oh, yes, it's a picturesque landscape.

00:13:18.180 It's Oldsport or whatever it is.

00:13:19.880 And it's so hard for us now to get beyond what is effectively the map back to the real palpable living presence.

00:13:30.140 So, okay, so let me run something by you.

00:13:32.460 It's a vision that I've been developing or that's been developing within me about how we come to complex knowledge.

00:13:41.020 So, and it's a vision of hierarchical mapping.

00:13:44.420 And I think it probably maps on the movement from the right hemisphere to the left.

00:13:49.560 So, you tell me what you think about this.

00:13:51.440 All right.

00:13:51.580 So, the first strata.

00:13:55.440 So, imagine a tree.

00:13:56.980 All right.

00:13:57.440 I imagine the tree with the trunk of fire.

00:14:00.180 And I imagine the tree emerging from the head of God.

00:14:04.300 That was part of this vision, by the way.

00:14:06.680 We'll leave that in the background for the time being.

00:14:08.880 Okay.

00:14:09.140 So, up the trunk, there's a disk.

00:14:13.100 And that disk is the realm of patterns in the world.

00:14:18.180 Right.

00:14:18.620 And so, what we perceive are patterns in the world.

00:14:21.320 And we perceive functional patterns as obstacles or tools.

00:14:25.340 It's something like that.

00:14:26.220 But the patterns are in the world.

00:14:28.020 So, that's the logos of the cosmos, you might say.

00:14:32.300 All right.

00:14:32.560 And then the second tier is the behavioral mapping of that.

00:14:36.500 So, of course, if we're walking across hills and dales, the path of our navigation maps the trajectory of the landscape.

00:14:43.940 And as we interact with each other, we modify our behavior to take the reality of other people into account.

00:14:50.220 And as we maneuver together in groups, we adapt ourselves to the reality of the environment that we're traversing.

00:14:57.540 And so, the behavioral realm contains a compressed representation of the, let's say, the underlying patterns of material reality.

00:15:06.440 All right.

00:15:07.340 So, that's both adaptation and representation because we can act out things we understand.

00:15:14.720 Right.

00:15:14.960 And that would be equivalent to procedural memory in the memory literature.

00:15:20.680 Right.

00:15:20.900 Like the knowledge of how to ride a bike, for example, or how to ski.

00:15:24.140 I'll come back to that.

00:15:24.820 Okay.

00:15:25.180 Okay.

00:15:25.520 Well, next strata.

00:15:27.120 It's imagination.

00:15:28.100 See, one of the things I was trying to crack is how dreams can contain more information than the dreamer understands.

00:15:34.820 Right.

00:15:34.980 Like a book of fiction can be susceptible to analysis because the work of fiction contains more information even than the fiction author intended.

00:15:43.300 Yeah.

00:15:43.560 It's partly because it contains representations of behavior.

00:15:46.920 Yeah.

00:15:47.080 Okay.

00:15:47.560 So, we establish an imaginative realm and it captures some of the contours of the environment but also some of the contours of the behavioral world.

00:15:56.400 Yeah.

00:15:56.620 And so, in our dreams, we have images of action and those images of action represent social mores and the world.

00:16:04.360 But then there's a further level of abstraction and that would be the linguistic level.

00:16:08.260 And what the linguistic level seems to me to do is to compress the imaginative level, which is compress the behavioral level, which is in some ways compress the material level.

00:16:18.480 And I'm wondering if that move from novelty to routinization parallels that, right?

00:16:24.600 So, we first grip things in this sort of Piagetian sense behaviorally.

00:16:30.440 Then we can imagine that, right?

00:16:32.360 So, we've got, I mean, in dramatic using images, per se, and then we further compress that.

00:16:38.100 And that also helps us understand what we mean when we say understand because if you can take a word and you can unfold it to an image and then you can decompress that to an alteration in behavior, which is, I think, what you do if a word has significance.

00:16:53.380 Then you've united all those levels of analysis, but there's also a concordance there that I think is indicative of something like the validity of an idea.

00:17:04.460 So, okay.

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00:18:44.380 Yeah, I mean, my initial reaction is it's over-schematic.

00:18:54.000 Because I think what's really happening is that experience is taken in at a bodily level and is immediately grasped by the right hemisphere,

00:19:08.580 which is better in touch with the unconscious than the left.

00:19:11.760 But then I think, as you say, we sort of, we stand back from reality in order to create pattern to see the way in which things relate.

00:19:24.120 But I think this is more or less a function of the frontal lobes of both hemispheres,

00:19:28.180 that they enable us to stand back enough to get, as it were, the bird's eye view of the landscape.

00:19:33.400 But the abstraction, I'd like to separate that out because I think that's what the left hemisphere really specializes in,

00:19:39.840 is abstracting.

00:19:41.340 And when you abstract, you are left really with something like a skeleton.

00:19:45.240 You're left with a diagram, a theory, a map that doesn't have all the embodied knowledge.

00:19:50.400 But the thing is that we imagine, or a lot of people imagine, they have this image in their mind.

00:19:56.860 The unconscious is a tank somewhere down there underneath.

00:20:00.240 But we're living in this conscious realm.

00:20:02.180 And occasionally things pop up and so on.

00:20:04.520 But actually, the bit of our cognitive function of which we are aware is less than half a percent.

00:20:11.720 And it's been estimated that 99.44% of our cognition is we're unaware of.

00:20:19.020 Now, of course, the specificity of that is only amusing to me.

00:20:22.680 But nonetheless, it drives home the point that most of everything we know is extraordinarily fertile in a way that our abstracted thinking can't be.

00:20:34.320 Because it's always got to simplify.

00:20:36.540 It's always got to state this in preference to that.

00:20:39.580 Whereas in the unconscious realm, nothing has to be sacrificed in that way because things are drawn together.

00:20:46.480 And I believe our intuitions are much richer than our reasoning on the basis of them.

00:20:54.140 So we need to reason on the basis of them.

00:20:56.500 We need to validate them or not, perfectly correct.

00:20:59.900 But we shouldn't too quickly collapse our intuitions because our intuitions are able to hold a number of strands that to our expressive intellect seem to be contrary to one another.

00:21:12.180 But they're not.

00:21:13.120 They fulfill one another, importantly.

00:21:14.940 So I believe that the whole onslaught on intuition, which we now find with high-paid psychologists going around businesses telling people not to trust their intuitions, is a scam.

00:21:28.240 And it's a very delusional one.

00:21:30.520 It's encouraging people to disattend to something incredibly important.

00:21:35.000 And of course, the intuition can be wrong.

00:21:36.800 But so can just a line of reasoning lead you to the wrong place.

00:21:39.700 So the other thing that struck me when I was reviewing your book last night, it was something like the—you talked about the left hemisphere's proclivity to fabricate.

00:21:52.980 And so is it something like—do you suppose it's something like the proclivity of the left to reduce things to algorithms, to rule-governed algorithms, and then to try to extend the domain of those rules beyond—I mean, the purpose of having a theory is so that you can use a simple set of principles to generate a variety of explanations, right?

00:22:15.580 And so there's obvious utility in that if the principles are correct.

00:22:18.940 But there's very little difference between that and the delusion if the first principles are incorrect.

00:22:23.680 Absolutely.

00:22:24.200 Right.

00:22:24.500 And so—

00:22:25.020 Yes.

00:22:25.260 And that's really at the basis of a condition like paranoid schizophrenic, because they'll have a set of principles, and they can endlessly spin off explanatory theories, and they're credible, but they're wrong.

00:22:36.580 They're wrong.

00:22:37.140 Yeah.

00:22:37.440 And seriously wrong.

00:22:38.700 Which illuminates perfectly the—you did my work for me there—in unpacking how reason can lead you to the wrong place.

00:22:46.340 Because, as Chesterton said, a madman is not somebody who's lost his reason.

00:22:50.220 He's lost everything but his reason.

00:22:52.440 Right, right, right.

00:22:53.320 That's especially true for a condition like paranoid schizophrenia.

00:22:56.260 It is.

00:22:56.740 It is, absolutely.

00:22:58.300 And Eugen Mankowski, the Franco-Polish psychiatrist and philosopher, wrote about this very, very beautifully about schizophrenia, and effectively illuminating the difference between the left hemisphere and the right.

00:23:10.780 Because I see schizophrenia as a condition in which the left hemisphere is in overdrive, and the right—in an attempt, if you like, to compensate for a hypofunctioning right hemisphere.

00:23:20.440 And so, yes, the business with—

00:23:26.260 Hypo or malfunctioning?

00:23:28.420 Sorry?

00:23:29.140 Hypo or malfunctioning? 0.97

00:23:32.000 Both.

00:23:32.820 Both.

00:23:33.160 Okay, fine, fine, fine.

00:23:34.220 But what you're talking about, I think, is confabulation, effectively, where it's more important—and this is a good, simple distinction, if you like—the right hemisphere is more interested in truth to experience, but the left hemisphere is further removed from experience.

00:23:51.200 This is more interested in internal consistency.

00:23:56.580 So, if some new information comes in that isn't consistent with what it thinks it knows, it will initially reject it or try to substitute something else that fits.

00:24:06.040 And also, this is a reasonable thing to do up to a point, because, you know, you may get—if you didn't have that, you would—certainly a scientist would be swithering all over the place with new pieces of information.

00:24:18.940 So, you need to have an anchor, but you don't want that anchor to be too confining or too strongly holding you to a place.

00:24:26.320 You need to be allowed to accept new information, and it's the right hemisphere that's far, far better at that.

00:24:33.320 So, I read some analysis of network function that described the dichotomy between the left and the right hemisphere as something like the paradox between consistency and comprehensiveness.

00:24:49.360 Those are two—right, right.

00:24:50.560 So, the left hemisphere is very much concerned with internal consistency.

00:24:53.780 Internal consistency of a model.

00:24:55.520 Well, and it's interesting to see that, so that confabulation is over-reasoning from a set of finite principles that are erroneous, let's say.

00:25:05.240 Yes, yes.

00:25:05.740 Right, and there's very interesting overlap between that and something like ideological reduction and totalitarian certainty.

00:25:12.240 There certainly is.

00:25:13.460 Right, right, right.

00:25:14.500 Well, so let's take an example of that.

00:25:18.040 Tell me what you think about this.

00:25:19.200 Okay, so I've been trying to get down to the bottom of the algorithms that drive the culture war, let's say that.

00:25:28.960 Okay, so imagine this.

00:25:31.640 So, a huge part of the thinking on the radical left is something like, I think about it as a representation of the story of Cain and Abel.

00:25:42.140 Cain is a victim in his own eyes, and he becomes very bitter and resentful about it.

00:25:47.300 And I think that's actually the story that underlies Marxism.

00:25:51.300 And so, it's an algorithmic story, and the algorithm is something like, there's a dimension of comparison.

00:25:58.220 There is, on that dimension of comparison, there's those who have and those who do not have.

00:26:03.800 And so, that's a hypersimplification to begin with.

00:26:06.900 And then that, the distinction between those that have and that don't have is that those that have took from those that don't have.

00:26:13.960 So, it's a victim-victimizer narrative.

00:26:16.020 Okay, so now, there's real algorithmic advantages to that theory, because to some degree, there's some truth in it.

00:26:23.180 Because some people who have cooking, and every dimension of comparison where there's a differentiation in, let's say, ownership or privilege, can be corrupted by power.

00:26:36.680 And so, if you have that algorithm, you can explain a lot with it.

00:26:40.640 And it has another advantage, which is, what would you say, an additional benefit of the algorithm, which is once you've decided that you can construe every social relationship as an oppressor-oppressed story.

00:26:56.220 Well, you don't have to think anymore, because you can account for marriage, and you can account for family, and you can account for economics and history, everything.

00:27:04.380 But there's another advantage, too, which is that all you have to do is identify with those who are oppressed, and you're moral.

00:27:11.420 And so, you can see a tremendous attraction in that, and I'm wondering if that's a reasonable variant of something like algorithmic oversimplification.

00:27:21.420 Yes.

00:27:21.760 Well, I think what you're pointing to is very much simplification, which is one of the, I don't really want to say virtues, but it is one of the usable strengths of the left hemisphere.

00:27:34.960 It radically simplifies.

00:27:37.540 And I think that what we're seeing in our culture is a whole range of things happening, just so many, but they do align with the preferences of the left hemisphere over those of the right.

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00:28:56.560 Right, so experience is at an all-time low in terms of its value.

00:29:05.840 We disattend to experience unless it fits with our theory, and even deny facts or cease to pay any attention to them if they would question the theory that we're currently in hock to.

00:29:17.180 And then I think there is the problem that we disattend to intuition, we disattend to our bodies and our feelings about things, and of course, they also need regulation, but everything needs regulation, including the tendency to over-regulate.

00:29:33.780 Right, so we're in a world in which we think we've got a theory, and it's very simple, and as you say, it means that if you buy into it, you don't have to think, and there's goodies and baddies, and you are moral because you know which side to go on.

00:29:50.220 And for heaven's sake, life is so complicated.

00:29:53.940 And in the third part of The Matter of Things, can I talk about the structure of The Matter of Things?

00:29:59.840 Yes, absolutely.

00:30:00.600 Yeah, yeah. So this was the book that came out in November 21, my latest work, and I'm sure my last long book.

00:30:08.960 And in it, I wanted to use hemisphere theory to talk about what it is that we can trust.

00:30:15.940 What can we actually know to any degree to be true?

00:30:19.420 And of course, I don't think that there's a single great truth out there, but I also think that there are things that are just more true than others.

00:30:26.600 Otherwise, if we didn't, all of us, believe that, there would be no reason for saying or doing anything.

00:30:31.220 Everything would be chaos.

00:30:32.220 Everything would be chaos.

00:30:33.380 So we all implicitly...

00:30:34.240 There has to be a hierarchy of chaos.

00:30:35.440 There has to be a hierarchy.

00:30:36.440 So I just wanted to start from neuroscience to use that as a basis for philosophy in looking at what kind of things we can say about the world we're in, what a human being is, and how it relates to it.

00:30:50.260 So the first part of the book is the neurology, the neuroscience, and in that, I'm asking questions like, why does the brain have the structure that it has?

00:31:03.060 And since we know that the right and the left hemispheres have different tendencies in their take on the world, I mean, very, very clearly, this can be demonstrated in intact individuals by temporarily suppressing one hemisphere at a time.

00:31:19.980 It's demonstrated every day by accidents of nature, tumors, injuries, and so forth.

00:31:26.680 So we do know that there's a vast body of evidence about hemisphere difference, and it frustrates me that there are still people ignorant enough to say there's no evidence.

00:31:36.060 I mean, go do your homework.

00:31:37.660 I've been doing it for 30 years.

00:31:40.440 And one of the things I wanted to do in the book was demonstrate the extent of what we know about this.

00:31:45.340 And I think there's about 6,000 references to the literature.

00:31:48.060 But in that first part, what I'm intent on demonstrating is that the left hemisphere's overwhelming advantage is in grabbing, getting, simplifying, and grasping.

00:32:04.020 And that's why it controls the right hand, which for most of us is the one with which we do the grabbing and grasping, and does the kind of thinking where you say, I've grasped it, you know.

00:32:12.860 Yeah. Whereas the right hemisphere is left basically with everything else, because looking at it from an evolutionary point of view, if you're that bird trying to catch that seed before another bird, you've got to have highly focused attention on the detail.

00:32:28.580 But you'd never survive if that was the only attention you had, because you quickly become somebody else's lunch while you're getting your own.

00:32:34.160 So there has to be another part of the brain, which is effectively the right hemisphere, which is doing all the putting together of information about the world at large.

00:32:42.280 So the left hemisphere apprehends, the right hemisphere comprehends.

00:32:47.340 And so I look at the various portals, as I would say, through which we get information about the world, attention primarily, which is so much more important than people think.

00:32:57.400 I mean, there's nothing less than the way in which you dispose your consciousness towards the world, and therefore depends what you find there, and determines what you become, because you become like what it is you think you find there.

00:33:10.380 You develop habits of thought that limit you to seeing only certain aspects of reality through the way in which you attend.

00:33:17.160 So I call attention a moral act, yeah, because it both creates the world and creates you.

00:33:22.460 And then a perception, which is not the same, of course, as attention, but is built on what you attend to and some of the things that you don't attend to.

00:33:30.040 And then judgment, i.e. what we make of this in terms of our thoughts about what we're attending to and perceiving, emotional and social intelligence, cognitive intelligence, good old-fashioned IQ, and creativity, the ability to be flexible in thinking about things to take a slightly different perspective and see what it is.

00:33:52.100 So in terms of getting information from the world around us, what I demonstrate is that in every case, the right hemisphere is superior to the left.

00:34:02.360 It is veridical where the left is not.

00:34:04.840 The left is unreliable.

00:34:06.920 And this is, of course, one of the hurdles I have to get over, because people think the left hemisphere is at least down to earth and reliable, even if it's a little bit boring.

00:34:14.680 But it is not.

00:34:16.260 It's highly emotional.

00:34:17.980 Anger, of all emotions, lateralizes most strongly to the left hemisphere.

00:34:21.940 And it is the characteristic.

00:34:25.100 Dismissal, self-belief, contempt, anger.

00:34:29.980 Willful blindness.

00:34:30.980 Willful blindness, of course, because that comes into this business we were talking about of confabulation, of turning.

00:34:37.040 When you don't know something, you make up something that fits in with your theory.

00:34:40.120 And you disattend to things that you don't want to know.

00:34:45.860 So that's really, in a great hurry, I've just covered 400 pages, but really that is establishing at great length that the right hemisphere is a better guide to what's going on than the left.

00:34:59.820 And people say, how do you know that?

00:35:01.340 Because you've only got your left and right hemisphere to go on.

00:35:03.680 But the way I would put it is this, if you followed what the left hemisphere tells us, you'd be caught out by reality all the time.

00:35:10.480 Whereas if you followed what the right hemisphere tells us, you'd largely not find yourself caught out by the experience of living.

00:35:18.160 So it's a better guide.

00:35:20.080 Then I say, okay.

00:35:21.060 The reason I want to do that is because in philosophy, you can see patterns that are more congruent with the left hemisphere's way of thinking.

00:35:29.400 And those are the more congruent with the right hemisphere's way of thinking.

00:35:32.340 And up till now, all we've been able to do is say, well, some philosophers say this and some philosophers say that.

00:35:40.260 Take your pick.

00:35:41.360 But I don't think that's right.

00:35:43.320 I think we can discriminate between philosophical positions and say this has a better chance of being right because the picture of the world it gives correlates with the best synthesis of knowledge from right and left.

00:35:56.800 But a lot of them has a advantage of bringing them together, which the right hemisphere will do.

00:36:03.960 Because not only is the right hemisphere more veridical, but it's also more open to what the left hemisphere has to say than the left hemisphere is open to what the right hemisphere has to say.

00:36:13.540 The right hemisphere is inclusive.

00:36:15.360 The left hemisphere is exclusive.

00:36:16.740 And so it believes in an either-or world, but it is as much a both-and world.

00:36:22.580 And we need both of these types of thinking.

00:36:24.880 As I sometimes say, we don't need either, either-or, or both-and.

00:36:28.580 We need both either-or and both-and thinking.

00:36:31.600 And the right hemisphere is able to do this.

00:36:34.380 So I'll do the second part.

00:36:36.380 Yeah.

00:36:36.640 It was epistemology very, very quickly.

00:36:38.440 So I say, what are the sort of things in which people would place their confidence for finding some truth?

00:36:44.780 I think most people would say science.

00:36:47.260 I think most people would say reason.

00:36:50.060 I think some people would say intuition, but increasingly few.

00:36:54.920 And some would say imagination, although most people nowadays no longer understand what is meant by imagination.

00:37:00.920 They think it's fancy.

00:37:02.160 Right, right, right.

00:37:03.180 So I look at the claims of each one of these to have something to do with truth.

00:37:08.960 And truth itself is a concept that can be seen either from a left hemisphere or right hemisphere point of view.

00:37:13.960 What I mean by that is the left hemisphere is used to tracking something and getting it.

00:37:19.760 So it imagines truth is at the end of a path that has a sequence of steps.

00:37:23.680 And if you take these in the right order, you will end up at truth.

00:37:26.820 Whereas the right hemisphere sees that true actually comes from a root which means faithful.

00:37:33.180 It means being faithful to what you experience.

00:37:37.100 And there is a meaning of true, as in being true to someone, being true to an idea, which is constantly seeking knowledge, listening, and responding to what reality is saying to you.

00:37:51.640 The resonance between the attending consciousness and whatever it is that is external to it or appears to be external to it.

00:37:59.060 And so what I end up by saying, and here I'm covering another 400 pages, is that there are good reasons for attending to each of these, but each has limitations.

00:38:09.360 And each on its own is not a sufficient guide.

00:38:11.500 So we need not just one or two of these, but preferably all four, at least three of them, in that there are realms in which science simply can't answer questions.

00:38:27.160 I mean, that's sort of criticism of science.

00:38:28.500 I find myself defending science all the time against people who want to turn it into a free-for-all.

00:38:35.700 You know, they want to demonize science if it doesn't fit with their narrative of what truth is.

00:38:43.460 And that is where science ends, you know.

00:38:46.240 And there are lots of important questions, and you and I would immediately think of the realm of the spirit, and not even the conventionally spiritual in the sense of what we associate with the religious life, but even love.

00:38:59.480 I mean, love is an example of something that cannot be measured, cannot be demonstrated in the laboratory, cannot be measured, and cannot be manipulated.

00:39:06.720 And yet, according to science, it's not real, but, excuse me, love is probably the realest thing that we ever experience.

00:39:15.880 So, overall, I say we need all of these.

00:39:18.940 And then, in part three of the book, it's ontology, what is there?

00:39:24.600 And I begin with the coincidence of opposites.

00:39:27.280 Now, when you consider that we've been talking about making things cohere and that we exclude things that don't fit,

00:39:35.120 there is no chance of getting anywhere near the truth if you have a black-and-white picture of reality which doesn't contain a little of its opposite.

00:39:45.600 And, after all, if you pursue a particular line far enough, you end up with the very thing you feared that you were trying to flee from.

00:39:52.920 So, you think freedom is good, and it is.

00:39:55.840 You increase that freedom, and you get…

00:39:58.280 Anarchy.

00:39:58.840 Anarchy.

00:40:00.120 Hedonistic anarchy.

00:40:00.860 What happens in anarchy, well, not only do a lot of people get hurt and killed, but the response is tyranny.

00:40:06.620 So, I mean, it's just one very obvious example.

00:40:08.980 In fact, all opposites work like this.

00:40:10.960 That's the serpent that eats its own tail.

00:40:12.600 The serpent that eats its own tail.

00:40:14.660 So, the first chapter is on the coincidence of opposites and how important this perception is.

00:40:19.360 And nowadays, we don't see this.

00:40:20.880 We think that if something is good, just more and more of it is good, and whatever is excluded by it must be bad.

00:40:26.940 But, in fact, it's always a balance of things, and we don't attend to the dark side of the things that we think are good.

00:40:33.440 And we exclude from possibility that there might be good in some of the things that we've demonized.

00:40:39.420 So, you know, this whole idea of rationalizing everything down and crazy…

00:40:43.580 Is that a vision of idealist harmony?

00:40:46.680 Is what I'm talking about.

00:40:48.580 Well, you see, the word idealism worries me slightly, depending on, of course, what you mean.

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00:41:45.500 Well, you were implying there, at least to some degree, that an ideal state isn't the reduction of everything to one linear pathway, but something like the balanced multiplicity of a variety of viewpoints.

00:42:05.060 Listen, I was thinking about that in terms of musical harmony, because I think music portrays precisely that.

00:42:11.120 It does.

00:42:11.580 Okay, okay, so that's what I was trying to clarify.

00:42:13.580 And it's Heraclitus' tension that's in the bow string.

00:42:17.820 Or in the string of the lyre.

00:42:19.360 Or in the string of the lyre.

00:42:19.380 A musical instrument, yes.

00:42:20.040 And if there isn't tension, i.e. pulling in opposite directions, the left-handed instinct, that's a waste of energy.

00:42:26.100 Two things pulling opposite, just stop pulling.

00:42:28.780 But then the string goes slack, and no music, and no arrow.

00:42:32.860 So we need that tension all the time between the opposites.

00:42:36.480 Not alternating between them, but holding them together.

00:42:40.060 And only the right hemisphere is able to do this, because the left hemisphere is always trying to collapse into, so I need to know now what is the truth.

00:42:47.180 Is it this or is it that?

00:42:49.260 And no wise person can answer that question for the left hemisphere.

00:42:53.520 And then I go on to talk about the one and the many, which is very, very important.

00:42:58.100 And again, Heraclitus says, it is wise, listening not to me, but to the logos, to agree that all is one.

00:43:09.060 But because of the way the Greek is structured, it can also mean one is everything.

00:43:14.520 And that's lovely.

00:43:15.220 And then the next chapter is on flow, because I find that this is actually, I never anticipated this.

00:43:21.560 This is the lovely thing for me about writing, is that I discover in the process of writing things I didn't know when I started the book.

00:43:27.540 And one of them was the importance of flow, the perception that everything flows is not trivial.

00:43:34.300 And instead, we have lost this sense because we discretize everything into packets and think we put them together to make something, because that's the only way in which we make artifacts.

00:43:45.940 But, you know, everything is modeled on the machine.

00:43:48.600 But if you think about it, there is nothing in the entire cosmos that is at all like a machine, except for the few machines we've made in the last few hundred years.

00:43:57.540 And one or two go back longer.

00:43:59.800 But nothing is mechanical in that sense.

00:44:03.120 It's all to do with complex systems, which are neither fully predictable, although they're not chaotic, and are not achieving their end by adding another bit towards it.

00:44:15.760 So is it machine the externalization of the left hemisphere?

00:44:18.320 Absolutely.

00:44:18.920 Okay, fine.

00:44:19.600 And I would say AI is the final…

00:44:22.800 Frontier.

00:44:23.780 Yeah, it's the final triumph of the left hemisphere.

00:44:27.540 Yeah, well, hopefully not the final one.

00:44:30.340 Well, that's it.

00:44:31.260 I guess we're going to find out.

00:44:32.640 We're going to find out.

00:44:33.660 Okay.

00:44:34.440 So, and I think, you know, that actually the whole administrative mind, which is now the only mind that has control, is an expression of the left hemisphere's simplified procedural way of thinking.

00:44:48.700 Right, right.

00:44:49.220 And it stultifies imagination.

00:44:51.380 It gets in the way of creativity.

00:44:53.260 It slows us down.

00:44:54.520 It's hugely costly.

00:44:55.800 And it vilifies all kinds of people who don't fit into the slots, the categories that it's developed.

00:45:02.200 But anyway, and then I go on and look at, you know, time, I have a chapter on that, a chapter on space and matter, a chapter on matter and consciousness, the nature of consciousness and the nature of matter.

00:45:14.740 And then, rather surprisingly, on values, on purpose, that no-no in science, which scientists are now, I mean, they've long accepted it in private, but they're now coming out, as it were in the saying.

00:45:28.200 Well, it's hard to write a scientific paper without a purpose.

00:45:31.780 Yes.

00:45:32.500 Yes, and no one ever talks about that.

00:45:34.420 No, no.

00:45:34.700 It's like, okay, well, there's no purpose.

00:45:37.060 It's, well, you had a purpose when you wrote the paper.

00:45:38.920 I'm trying to think who it was who said it's amusing watching a science demonstrate purposefully that there is no purpose.

00:45:44.760 Yes, right, right, right.

00:45:45.960 But I think it's very, very important.

00:45:49.720 And I think increasingly that values are the thing we should be thinking about.

00:45:53.800 I don't think they're things that we make up to comfort ourselves.

00:45:57.080 I don't think we paint them on the walls of our cell to cheer us up without any contact with reality.

00:46:02.880 No, I believe they are places in which we contact reality.

00:46:06.780 And I'd even go so far as to say, but this would take us a while to unpack, but it might be worth going there, is I believe that life, why is the life at all, you know?

00:46:15.440 It's very costly, and it kicks against entropy.

00:46:19.280 And, you know, why did it arise?

00:46:22.000 If it's in order to have things that last, it's not a very good project because, as Whitehead pointed out, the secret of lasting is never to have been alive.

00:46:31.560 Life brings with it precariousness, expense of energy, and so forth.

00:46:36.520 And, indeed, as it becomes suffering, as it complicates.

00:46:40.760 So, I don't know whether actinobacteria at the base of the ocean actually suffer.

00:46:44.840 They may do.

00:46:45.880 But single examples of them can live to half a million years.

00:46:50.300 So, being able, after all this evolution, to live 70 years is hardly a triumph for survival.

00:46:55.140 It's about something else, which is the ability to respond to a cosmos that is, in itself, beautiful, good, and true.

00:47:03.380 I mean, to understand what one means by that would take us a while.

00:47:07.420 That's why I was building that hierarchical tree, by the way, for exactly that purpose.

00:47:12.660 That's fine.

00:47:13.260 I mean, the hierarchy I prefer is Max Schaler's hierarchy of values.

00:47:18.680 Well, I would definitely want to delve into that as well, because you talked about two things.

00:47:23.580 Well, a number of things that I want to bring up.

00:47:25.820 Intention as moral act is something I definitely want to concentrate on.

00:47:29.220 Is there more that you want to add to the compression of the book?

00:47:33.080 Well, there's always more I could, of course.

00:47:34.680 But I've sketched it out, really.

00:47:36.620 And the reason I wanted to do that was to say that right at the start of, you know, I've said, so, we've heard about what the brain can tell us about what to trust in philosophy.

00:47:45.560 We've looked at the philosophy and seen where it can lead us.

00:47:48.120 Now, use that information to examine the cosmos.

00:47:51.160 And what do we find?

00:47:52.760 At the very start of it, we find the coincidence of opposites, yin and yang and so on.

00:47:58.200 This is in every other culture than our own.

00:48:01.020 But actually, it's also in ours, because Heraclitus, right at the start of it, probably the greatest Western philosopher of all time, is foundational for this idea.

00:48:10.360 Well, you know, when the Israelites cross the desert, they're led by a pillar of fire and a pillar of cloud.

00:48:16.060 Yes.

00:48:16.540 Right, right.

00:48:17.280 It's the coincidence of opposites.

00:48:18.660 That's lovely.

00:48:19.360 I haven't thought of that.

00:48:20.140 Oh, yes.

00:48:20.880 It's a major league revelation, that.

00:48:23.520 Yeah, yeah.

00:48:24.240 Yeah, yeah.

00:48:25.540 That's brilliant.

00:48:26.580 So, well, and it's a reflection of the underlying instinct, because you might say, well, what is it that guides you when you're utterly lost, when you escape from tyranny, let's say, and it's the interplay.

00:48:38.500 There's an interplay, right?

00:48:40.980 And that is very much similar to the Taoist idea of yin and yang.

00:48:44.760 Yes.

00:48:45.120 I think they're the same idea, actually.

00:48:46.780 I think so, too.

00:48:47.660 Yeah, yeah, yeah.

00:48:48.640 So, and that's portrayed as the spirit of God himself, that guides the Israelites through the desert.

00:48:54.340 Are you interested in the Kabbalah?

00:48:57.280 Not only peripherally, because I don't know much about it.

00:49:00.640 So, why did you ask?

00:49:02.780 Well, the only reason I say this, and I know you know a great deal more, I think, about early Jewish history than I do, but I started finding out through Christian theologians about 10 years ago,

00:49:17.240 of key ideas in the Kabbalah, and they were like a blinding light.

00:49:24.680 They really were.

00:49:25.400 I thought, good heavens, this is so deep and true.

00:49:29.480 And, of course, ultimately, it's not irreconcilable with Christianity.

00:49:36.920 But it has an emphasis on certain aspects, including the balancing of opposites.

00:49:42.360 Well, you see, one of the other things that seems quite clear in the Old Testament corpus, in particular, when the stories are characterizing God, is that God is presented continually as the interplay between calling and conscience.

00:49:57.600 And that looks to me like something like the dynamism of positive and negative emotion, because positive emotion, especially the incentive-reward element, calls you forward.

00:50:06.420 And conscience looks to me something like the voice of negative emotion.

00:50:10.480 So, you can imagine that there's an instinctual force that pulls you forward, right?

00:50:14.660 That's the manifestation of the burning bush, by the way.

00:50:17.540 That's what that represents, right?

00:50:18.960 This thing that calls you, and then speaks more deeply as you investigate it.

00:50:23.220 And then conscience is also highlighted multiple times in the Old Testament, especially with the prophet Elijah.

00:50:30.060 Because Elijah is the prophet who replaces the God that's in the natural world, essentially, with the voice of conscience within, right?

00:50:38.300 And so, then there's an interplay there constantly in the Old Testament between what calls you forward and what keeps you on the straight, narrow path.

00:50:45.860 Yes.

00:50:46.240 And it's a play.

00:50:47.620 And in Kabbalah, there is a structure in which there are two sides, as it were.

00:50:57.300 And one is Chesed, which is a creative, constantly outgoing, and, if you like, right hemisphere orientated.

00:51:07.000 But it's not a very good, actually, parallel.

00:51:11.100 But then there's Gevura, which is this constraining element.

00:51:15.860 And we need them both.

00:51:16.820 And, in fact, it's not a good parallel with right and left hemispheres because the one that, you know, people think the right hemisphere in popular culture has this reputation for being the let it all hang out sort of hemisphere.

00:51:27.440 But it's not at all.

00:51:28.500 It's not only much more in touch with deeper emotions rather than superficial social emotions.

00:51:34.200 But it is also the locus of emotional control comes from the right hemisphere, not from the left.

00:51:40.740 So, these parallels can be misleading.

00:51:43.760 Right, right, right.

00:51:44.620 All dichotomies are not necessarily the same dichotomy.

00:51:48.180 They are not.

00:51:49.000 They are not.

00:51:50.080 Very important.

00:51:51.540 Okay, so let me ask you.

00:51:53.420 So, you lay out the left as reductionist and algorithmic and often petulant and somewhat totalitarian.

00:52:02.660 And you also associate it with reach and grip.

00:52:07.180 And, like, well, so let me offer you something and you tell me what you think about this.

00:52:12.880 Because what you are talking about with regards to the false of the left, let's say, sound a lot to me like the mythology of Luciferian intelligence.

00:52:21.840 So, let me give you an example.

00:52:23.720 You tell me what you think about this.

00:52:25.320 Well, the sin that the snake entices Eve and Adam into in the Garden of Eden is overreach.

00:52:33.400 Right.

00:52:33.980 And there's not a lot of difference between overreach and pride.

00:52:37.140 Pride, right, and that rigidity of pride, that intellectual rigidity of pride is something that seems quite typical of the left hemisphere pathologies that you describe in the book.

00:52:48.100 And resentment.

00:52:49.720 Right, okay.

00:52:50.780 And resentment.

00:52:52.180 Why have you, the snake, why have you been told you can't eat it?

00:52:55.500 Yes, yes, yes.

00:52:56.680 You can eat it.

00:52:57.840 How does that map onto your understanding of the left hemisphere with regard to resentment in particular?

00:53:03.760 Well, I think it's to do with hubris, really.

00:53:05.860 Yeah?

00:53:06.120 And that's equivalent to overreach.

00:53:08.760 To overreach.

00:53:09.660 Yeah, yeah.

00:53:10.140 And it's also, it's something like the Dunning-Kruger effect.

00:53:14.660 You know, the less you know, the more you think you know.

00:53:16.520 Yeah.

00:53:16.680 And vice versa.

00:53:17.500 Yeah.

00:53:17.720 And because the left hemisphere knows colossally less than, sorry, the left hemisphere knows colossally less than the right hemisphere, it thinks it's got it all.

00:53:27.240 And hence, you see these people who think, oh, we've worked out the answer to everything.

00:53:31.940 We understand its structure and its meaning.

00:53:34.160 And if there's a few things we haven't yet, we will do so.

00:53:36.560 A few things are always the annoyance, right?

00:53:38.380 The stumbling blocks.

00:53:39.420 But of course, there are many more than a few.

00:53:42.740 But because of the constrained view, they only see a few things that they don't know.

00:53:46.600 They don't see everything else outside the blinkers.

00:53:49.220 You know, I love, and it's still so true, William James's remark that our knowledge is a drop and our ignorance is an ocean.

00:53:57.640 I mean, this is true, and we've stopped seeing this, and we're far too arrogant.

00:54:03.060 A bit of humility would be a good thing.

00:54:04.700 But Lucifer is the expression of pride, of resentment.

00:54:09.020 It was intellectual pride, specific.

00:54:10.760 Intellectual pride.

00:54:12.000 Resentment, overreach.

00:54:13.900 Resenting this other power.

00:54:15.360 Also that desire to usurp, which I think is also something that you, because the stories that you tell about people with right hemisphere damage point to the proclivity of the left to usurp.

00:54:27.640 And to deny, right?

00:54:29.560 And that's part of, you can imagine that.

00:54:32.320 So maybe it's also curious, I wonder how much of the inadequacies of the left hemisphere that you point to in your book are actually a consequence of its misuse rather than its intrinsic nature.

00:54:44.500 Well, that comes down to the whole point about it being a servant.

00:54:47.960 It's a good servant, but a very poor master.

00:54:49.740 Right, right, right.

00:54:50.680 Well, that's the intellect in a nutshell.

00:54:52.500 Well, that's what Einstein also said.

00:54:54.160 Yeah, yeah.

00:54:54.420 So it is the intellect in a nutshell.

00:54:56.340 It is a useful servant, but it should never be the end point.

00:54:59.180 Well, it's the worst possible master.

00:55:01.560 That's the Luciferian story, fundamentally.

00:55:03.900 Right, and that seems to me to be exactly right.

00:55:06.200 Yeah, and actually at the end of the master and his emissary, in the end of the final chapter, I bring in Paradise Lost.

00:55:14.160 Because it seems to me to be the story of what has happened with the overreach of this intellect.

00:55:21.400 And I think, you know, the Luciferian intellect is what I'm really talking about, that thinks it knows what it's doing, but because it knows so little, is intent on destroying the good that there is.

00:55:34.740 Well, I think that's a consequence of the failure of the project, right?

00:55:40.160 Because, well, you mentioned the resentment, and what happens, the resentment emerges in part because the theories fail.

00:55:48.840 And part of the reason I think that the left hemisphere, so to speak, is antithetical towards the right, is the right tends to announce the failure of the left with negative emotion.

00:55:58.760 And so that's very troublesome, because who wants that?

00:56:02.100 And so you can certainly understand why the resistance develops.

00:56:06.740 You know, it's evidence of failure.

00:56:08.140 It's evidence of failure that invalidates your theory.

00:56:11.900 And so one route to rectifying that is to abandon your theory.

00:56:16.280 But then you have the exodus problem, which is you abandon the tyranny of your theory, and you're lost in the desert of your doubt, which isn't exactly an improvement, even though it might still be the way it works.

00:56:25.860 Well, yeah, yeah.

00:56:27.160 But it's a bit of a rough interregnum.

00:56:29.000 It is a rough interregnum.

00:56:29.860 Yes, well, that's, yes, yes.

00:56:31.380 And you need faith.

00:56:32.380 The thing is, that's the thing that comes to the Israelites in Exodus, is there's a revelation that they require faith to traverse that land of chaos.

00:56:42.640 And the question then is, what guides you in the realm of doubt?

00:56:46.180 What is there that guides you in the realm of doubt?

00:56:49.340 The proclamation of the intellect would be something like, well, there can be nothing that guides you in the realm of doubt because you don't know what you're doing.

00:56:56.960 So if the intellect is the guide, you're lost.

00:56:59.460 Yeah, but in cultures other than our own, we understand the importance of unknowing, that there is an unknowing which is the opposite of ignorance.

00:57:09.360 Ignorance is what you have before you know, but unknowing is what you have after you've let knowledge lapse because of its inadequacy to tell you.

00:57:19.800 It's archaic nature.

00:57:20.780 It's archaic nature.

00:57:21.120 It's anachronistic.

00:57:22.060 So a certain kind of unknowing is a really, really important step towards wisdom.

00:57:29.960 And so it's very helpful not to be certain.

00:57:33.300 But the left hemisphere cannot live with this.

00:57:35.400 The right hemisphere is perfectly okay with an uncertainty because it realizes that all the time it's calibrating things.

00:57:42.180 And it's very much more aware of information from out there than the left hemisphere, which is still working in its closed sort of cell.

00:57:52.140 So do you think that that's a shift of vision in some ways?

00:57:57.320 I mean, you talk about hemispheric specialization for different forms of vision.

00:58:01.200 So imagine that your target vanishes and your theory collapses.

00:58:04.600 Well, you could be lost or you could switch to a different kind of attention, right?

00:58:08.700 And that other attention is information gathering.

00:58:11.580 So, you know, the Egyptians, so in the Egyptian cosmology, they have a god of the state, Osiris, right?

00:58:20.400 And so he's like the characterization of an administrative theory.

00:58:25.320 That's a reasonable way of thinking about it.

00:58:27.120 And he becomes willfully blind and he's overthrown by Seth, who's essentially Satan, who's essentially the Luciferian intellect.

00:58:35.100 That's how that story works.

00:58:36.260 And Seth rules then, rules the kingdom, and the kingdom is destroyed in consequence.

00:58:42.620 And so that's the overthrow of the rightful king by the evil brother of the king, right?

00:58:46.860 Very, very common motif.

00:58:48.280 It is.

00:58:49.400 Universal, I don't want to say.

00:58:50.780 Yes, universal.

00:58:51.400 Well, and it's because theories age and decay and they're abetted in their age and decay by the willful blindness of their adherents, right?

00:59:00.020 That's a universal story.

00:59:01.180 Mircea Eliade documented that in multiple, multiple cultures, right?

00:59:04.760 And so when the state collapses, uncertainty arises.

00:59:11.380 That's Isis in the Egyptian cosmology.

00:59:14.640 So she's the goddess of the underworld, or the unconscious.

00:59:17.400 That's another way of thinking about it.

00:59:18.860 And she makes herself pregnant with the remnants of Osiris after he collapses.

00:59:24.920 And she gives birth to Horus.

00:59:27.220 Now, Horus is the eye.

00:59:29.160 See, this is the thing about the Egyptians is they didn't worship the intellect. 1.00

00:59:33.080 But they associated the Luciferian intellect with the force that destroys the blind state, right?

00:59:40.620 They associated their redemptive God with the open eye.

00:59:44.700 And it seems to me that it's something like the preference for information gathering attention.

00:59:49.440 You know, because if your theory collapses, you can pay attention.

00:59:53.940 But it's a special kind of attention, right?

00:59:55.900 It's the attention that's predicated on humility.

00:59:58.680 Because now you know you don't know.

01:00:00.220 And maybe that's associated with this unknowing that you described.

01:00:03.060 I think so.

01:00:03.820 Okay, so elaborate on that idea of unknowing.

01:00:05.980 You know, I don't know enough about Egyptian mythology, although it's something I've read a little into.

01:00:12.040 Well, it's the eye at the top of the pyramid as well.

01:00:14.320 Well, that's it, you see.

01:00:15.720 And so I think it's a very ambivalent image.

01:00:18.200 Because one thing that happens, and one day I want to write a book.

01:00:22.900 I've got all the material.

01:00:24.260 I've been gathering it for a lifetime of paintings and images by psychotic subjects.

01:00:29.880 And people with schizophrenia tend to paint disembodied eyes, just an eye in the picture or something like that.

01:00:37.420 And I think this represents the tyranny of the intellect that is overlooking everything all the time.

01:00:45.760 Yeah, right.

01:00:46.140 That's like the eye of Sauron in Lord of the Rings.

01:00:49.180 Exactly.

01:00:49.960 Although I've never read it, but I know the idea.

01:00:53.080 What was I saying?

01:00:54.300 The eye...

01:00:55.620 You said represents a tyranny or a totalitarian vision.

01:00:57.160 The tyranny of the intellect which doesn't allow any more of the darkness, the fertile darkness,

01:01:02.060 in which something much greater than the intellect that is within us can work,

01:01:07.320 which is largely the unconscious mind.

01:01:09.640 And we have the idea that the unconscious mind is somehow inferior to the conscious mind.

01:01:13.420 But it's not.

01:01:14.020 Not only is it much bigger, but it's also capable of doing many, many things,

01:01:17.600 like solving complex mathematical problems and coming to scientific insights.

01:01:21.340 In fact, most of the stories of science and mathematics in the tales of those who made the discoveries are tales of a sudden insight into a gestalt.

01:01:29.280 Right, flashes of intuition, yeah.

01:01:31.080 So in our unconscious minds, we resolve problems, we compromise with things, we fall in love, we appreciate a painting.

01:01:38.320 All these things, they happen to us when we're not necessarily studying them.

01:01:42.460 And they grow in us.

01:01:45.820 Now, when you put the eye of the intellect over everything, it's almost like that all-seeing eye of the panopticon,

01:01:54.520 you know, this tyrannical idea of an institution in which everything can be seen from a central point.

01:02:00.660 And this is very much associated with the enlightenment, as is the pyramid with the eye, I think.

01:02:06.880 I mean, I'm not an American, so I wouldn't like to hold forth about what it means on your money.

01:02:11.940 But the thing is that both pyramids, actually, but much more disembodied eyes are the kind of things that...

01:02:19.900 Well, that's a dark eye as a substitute for the proper eye, right?

01:02:23.620 Because the totalitarian...

01:02:25.480 So the question is...

01:02:26.660 Not the eye of God, but...

01:02:27.680 Right, right, exactly, exactly, exactly.

01:02:29.860 And so, I see exactly what you mean with regards to the ambivalence, because, well, the eye of Sauron is a very good example of that,

01:02:39.000 because it's definitely, it's the totalitarian eye on the top of the Tower of Babel, essentially, in the Lord of the Rings stories.

01:02:45.580 And it has to monitor everything, because it can't trust anything, right?

01:02:50.500 That's the world where we are.

01:02:51.420 It's the substitute of the eye of the state for the eye of God, it's something like that.

01:02:54.600 Yes, absolutely.

01:02:54.980 And, of course, the difference is that the eye of state is out there in powerful structures, but the eye of God is something in here, in each of us, in the sense that Atman is in us, and Brahman is God as a whole.

01:03:10.140 But there is something of the divine in the human spirit, so, whatever you like to call it, I believe.

01:03:16.240 And I also believe that, ultimately, whatever the ground of being is, it is conscious.

01:03:21.540 So, in a more ungodly culture, we talk all the time about consciousness, and, of course, that's perfectly right.

01:03:29.420 And there's a distinction there that is full of meaning.

01:03:32.500 But I believe that, ultimately, consciousness and the divine ground of being cannot be separated, because I believe that…

01:03:40.640 What led you to that conclusion?

01:03:42.280 Well, a lot of things, really.

01:03:44.560 One is that I believe that everything is relational.

01:03:49.940 Let me just state that for a start.

01:03:52.060 Yeah, yeah, yeah.

01:03:53.900 And that nothing is just a thing on its own.

01:03:56.540 It only is what it is because of all the things that are its context and with which it is in relation.

01:04:02.280 And that's something the right hemisphere understands, that the left hemisphere takes things out of context, abstracts them, generalizes them…

01:04:09.100 And isolates them.

01:04:09.960 Isolates them and loses their living uniqueness.

01:04:14.300 So, let me just say.

01:04:16.460 So, I believe that everything is relational.

01:04:20.420 And I believe that God, the ground of being, ends off whatever you like to call it, is relational.

01:04:28.260 And I think the reason it is to creation is that this, whatever it is, needs something to love.

01:04:34.600 And it needs something to be related to.

01:04:36.700 Well, that's definitely the insistence in the Old Testament.

01:04:40.060 I know.

01:04:40.280 Because the relationship, the proper relationship between man and God in the Old Testament is covenantal.

01:04:45.760 Yeah.

01:04:46.020 It's a relationship.

01:04:47.480 Exactly.

01:04:47.860 Right, right, right.

01:04:48.920 But love is in any case a relationship.

01:04:51.900 And I would see the covenant as not a legalistic thing, but as a matter of faith.

01:04:56.640 That, you know, we undervalue fidelity in our culture.

01:04:59.740 That if you have…

01:05:02.380 Another musical term.

01:05:03.680 Yes.

01:05:04.260 If you trust in people, if you believe in them, as we say, then faithfulness to them is involved in that.

01:05:13.380 I mean, of course, that faith may be betrayed and it may not work.

01:05:17.200 Still your best bet.

01:05:18.440 Still your best bet.

01:05:19.440 But we live in a world in which nothing can be trusted anymore.

01:05:23.380 And therefore, it all has to be specified centrally in some incredibly thin, jejun, abstract schema to which we're all supposed to conform.

01:05:32.560 But in fact, nothing living ever does conform to it.

01:05:35.360 So it's a thoroughly going disaster.

01:05:36.960 But anyway, so the fact that God is relational and the fact that our consciousness – and I believe we are not the only beings by any means to have consciousness.

01:05:49.480 In fact, I believe consciousness is throughout the cosmos.

01:05:52.040 In fact, I believe the stuff of the cosmos is consciousness.

01:05:56.420 The trouble is I'm saying so many things so fast here because we don't have a lot of time.

01:06:00.640 But people say, why?

01:06:01.780 Why?

01:06:02.380 But, I mean, I'm not alone in the world.

01:06:04.720 Well, after all, this has been the belief of many of the wisdom traditions of East and the West, is that consciousness is the stuff the universe is made of.

01:06:14.480 And matter is a manifestation of consciousness in a particular way.

01:06:18.840 It is, if you like, a phase of consciousness.

01:06:21.780 And I'm not using phase in the temporal term, but in the sense that physicists say that water has phases.

01:06:27.380 Ice.

01:06:28.540 Water vapor in the air.

01:06:29.880 And so people may say, well, matter doesn't look like and behave like consciousness.

01:06:34.060 But, excuse me, ice doesn't look like and behave like water.

01:06:38.320 And certainly the tons of water in this room, without which we couldn't live and breathe, don't look at all like a river.

01:06:44.420 But water is what they all are.

01:06:46.420 And I believe that consciousness, in order to create, and that divine element that is the source of the universe as a creative project, wishes to unfold and create something ever more beautiful, ever more complex, that is within its potential to produce.

01:07:06.020 But it doesn't actually know it in advance.

01:07:08.000 That's the play.

01:07:10.260 I love the fact that you say, and I think you're quoting the Torah, you know, what does a being that's omnipotent, omnipresent, and omniscient lack limitation?

01:07:20.100 Yeah.

01:07:20.220 And so, and I think that is why we mustn't get, or maybe we should go to the problem of evil, but anyway.

01:07:28.380 So, you asked me, why do I see God like this?

01:07:31.700 Because.

01:07:32.960 That's Jacob's ladder, that upward play.

01:07:35.180 I know.

01:07:35.740 Well, of course, you know that the symbol of Channel McGilchrist is that illustration by Blake of Jacob's ladder, which is the only one I know that is not a linear ladder, but it's actually a spiral.

01:07:48.200 And spirals play a very big part in my ontology.

01:07:52.520 So, both in physics.

01:07:55.200 Yeah, well, spirals return to the same place except transformed, right?

01:07:58.780 And therefore, what they do is they combine a linear process with a circular process.

01:08:05.460 A circular process is just static.

01:08:07.040 Circular and upward.

01:08:07.840 It's just static.

01:08:08.880 A linear process is thin, but a spiraling process that is constantly evolving is the best of both, if you like.

01:08:16.260 And although Elliot said, you know, we arrive back at the place we started from and know it for the first time, I say, not quite.

01:08:22.440 We come back to a place very close to where we started from, but one step higher on the…

01:08:26.660 Well, that's what the knowing is.

01:08:27.960 That's what the knowing is.

01:08:28.720 Yeah, yeah, yeah.

01:08:29.560 So, just to finish, I'll try to on consciousness and why I think that that is the divine nature of the cosmos is that in order to create, you need things that people think are surprised by.

01:08:44.720 So, they think distance?

01:08:47.140 No, surely closeness.

01:08:49.940 Resistance?

01:08:51.100 No, surely facility.

01:08:52.340 But actually, in order to create, you need both a degree of distance and togetherness, as two heavenly orbs that circle one another, or a well-functioning couple, have togetherness and distinction.

01:09:07.520 They don't fall into a toxic fusion.

01:09:10.260 And so, in order to do this, there needs to be some distance but also manifest closeness, and there needs to be something that will create opposition and something that will create a degree of permanence.

01:09:23.980 Because, after all, if everything is already known and abstract somewhere, then it's just a ball of nothing that has no existence in space and time.

01:09:31.980 So, you need this, you need space and you need time, well, you certainly need time, I'm not sure about space, but you certainly need time, and you need matter to produce things that are beautiful and endure.

01:09:44.100 And so, I see matter as not an opposition to consciousness, but as something that is a reciprocal aspect of consciousness.

01:09:53.600 And you can't have matter without, and you can't have consciousness without the other.

01:09:56.540 Let me ask you about intention as a moral act.

01:10:00.680 Yeah, because I've been trying to work through the, what would you say, the formal flaw of the empirical presumption.

01:10:14.000 And so, the empirical presumption is something like, we inform ourselves with the facts and we can orient ourselves with the facts.

01:10:19.940 And the problem with that, as far as I can tell, and I don't believe this to be an opinion, I think this is now established fact in and of itself, is that there's as many facts as there are phenomena and combinations of phenomena.

01:10:32.460 And so, you can't orient yourself by the facts, because the facts are an infinite chaos.

01:10:39.760 And so, you have to prioritize the facts.

01:10:42.080 And this is where, this is why I wanted to ask you about intention as a moral act, and about intention as the basis for attention.

01:10:51.080 Well, what I say is attention is a moral act, but I could say intention is a moral act as well.

01:10:57.420 So, let's go with attention.

01:10:59.880 I like that better, and that is what I should have noted in the note.

01:11:03.720 Right.

01:11:04.320 Attention is a moral act.

01:11:06.040 Right.

01:11:06.600 Okay.

01:11:07.000 Okay.

01:11:07.380 Okay.

01:11:07.620 Well, and it's a moral act, because I think there's a technical reason for that.

01:11:12.920 It's a moral act, because a moral act is an act of valuing, and an act of valuing is an act of prioritization, and attention is an act of prioritization, because you attend to the thing you're attending to, and not the infinity of other things you can attend to.

01:11:27.560 So, with every act of attention, there's an underlying hierarchy of value, and the thing that you're attending to is, at the moment at least, is at the pinnacle of that.

01:11:36.500 Yeah.

01:11:36.700 Right.

01:11:36.840 At least momentarily.

01:11:38.340 So, this is, I think, what undoes the empirical endeavor, because if attention is a moral act, and attention is the precondition for the observation of facts, then attention is a precondition for the fact.

01:11:50.240 And so, that means the fact itself, the facts themselves make themselves manifest within the confines of a hierarchy of value.

01:11:59.000 It has to be that way.

01:12:00.560 And the scientists do ignore that, because they always act, as far as I can tell, as if the value that they're pursuing is so self-evident that it doesn't have to be factored in.

01:12:10.820 So, you don't start your scientific paper looking at the molecular functions of cancer with a description of why we should eradicate cancer.

01:12:19.260 That's a given, but it's the given that structures your attention to begin with, and it's part of a moral enterprise.

01:12:25.920 So, I don't see that there's any separation of the, I don't see there's any separation of the moral enterprise from attention itself.

01:12:33.980 And that seemed to be what you were talking about when you talked about attention as a moral act.

01:12:38.340 So, I'd like you to elaborate on that.

01:12:39.940 Tell me how you understand that.

01:12:41.340 Yes, I mean, first of all, I wouldn't say that we only attend to the things that are our goal at the time.

01:12:50.680 That is a way of attending.

01:12:52.680 But there is another kind of attention one can practice, which is not an instrumental hierarchy,

01:12:59.160 but is attention to things in themselves, in their own right.

01:13:04.860 And this takes practice.

01:13:07.280 And the much cliched concept and probably misunderstood concept of mindfulness at least does prioritize not constantly seeking to verbalize, to judge,

01:13:22.180 but actually just to be present for the first time.

01:13:24.800 And, you know, the word representation.

01:13:27.620 Do you think that that's an allowance for the implicit moral order to speak for itself rather than the imposition?

01:13:34.420 Is it something like that?

01:13:35.640 I think that's possibly.

01:13:37.380 I was going to come on to the moral bit, but yeah.

01:13:39.680 Sorry.

01:13:41.040 So, where were I?

01:13:44.340 You were talking about the other kind of attention.

01:13:46.380 Yes.

01:13:46.880 So, there are different kinds of attention and one can practice them.

01:13:49.500 And some of them are more generous than others.

01:13:51.000 And there's a certain kind of attention, which is the attention of a predator, effectively.

01:13:56.580 Which is a stare in which you're fixing something because you know what it is you want.

01:14:01.300 But, of course, that will enable you more likely than not to achieve that particular target.

01:14:07.460 But you don't know about the 999 other things that it's stopping you from doing and seeing.

01:14:12.020 Right, right.

01:14:12.620 So, the type of attention you pay governs what it is you find.

01:14:18.540 And what you...

01:14:18.820 Yes, there's a hell of a statement.

01:14:20.240 Well, it's very important.

01:14:21.560 Yeah, that's for sure.

01:14:22.960 So, the way in which we attend changes what we find, changes, therefore, what we look for in future.

01:14:30.940 Because if that confirms the type of attention, then we think, well, that type of attention worked.

01:14:35.860 So, I'll generalize that type of attention.

01:14:38.120 So, if you are the predatory psychopath, then you think, well, that worked. 0.85

01:14:42.180 So, let's just carry on with that. 0.87

01:14:43.620 And, you know, the example I usually give because it just works so nicely for me is the mountain behind my house, which is a lump of rock, according to most people these days.

01:14:54.620 But its name in Norse, tell us, means the sloping rock.

01:14:59.720 And that tells you something.

01:15:00.860 What it means is that for the Norsemen that came there 1,000 years ago, it was a sign of where they were and it was a sign to avoid danger because the bay, where it is, is very rocky.

01:15:13.160 So, that was what that mountain was for them.

01:15:17.160 But the Picts had been there for 1,000 years before that.

01:15:20.400 And for them, they built their houses in the shelter of it.

01:15:23.360 For them, it was their shelter and the home of the gods.

01:15:26.260 And then in the 18th century, people came there with their sketchbooks because there's a beautiful, many-colored, many-textured form to paint.

01:15:35.080 And then in the 19th century, geologists came there because it happens to be a spectacular example of columnar basalt formation.

01:15:43.760 And to a speculator, therefore, it's dollars.

01:15:46.820 And to a physicist, it's 99.99% empty space.

01:15:50.860 And we don't know what the other 0.01% is.

01:15:53.420 I just say that because which of these is the real mountain?

01:15:56.960 Because we're obsessed with what is real.

01:15:58.760 The answer is every single one of those is a real facet of the mountain that is brought out by the kind of attention that's paid to it.

01:16:07.460 You go to it as a something, you see that something.

01:16:09.760 And so we should all be questioning what we take to be the obvious all the time.

01:16:15.060 And that should be the feature of an education to teach us the question.

01:16:19.660 Because if not, we don't exercise morality.

01:16:23.240 We reduce things to the simple way that are useful to us.

01:16:27.800 And that is to—

01:16:29.220 Narrowly useful.

01:16:30.460 Narrowly useful.

01:16:31.880 And that has detrimental effects on the value of what we're looking at and on us because we become these cynical people who are only capable of seeing use everywhere.

01:16:41.500 Right.

01:16:41.680 And my God, how impoverished.

01:16:43.300 Narrow use.

01:16:44.120 How impoverished the soul of such a person must be.

01:16:47.440 Well, it's—

01:16:47.780 So in that sense, sorry.

01:16:49.680 I mean, I'm just—

01:16:50.560 You asked about the moral thing.

01:16:51.820 Yeah.

01:16:52.080 So I just think it is a moral—

01:16:55.160 It's moral in probably two ways.

01:16:57.400 One is in the sense I've elaborated that it changed—it literally changes what's there.

01:17:02.340 Right.

01:17:02.480 We changed the world.

01:17:03.900 I mean, since we now think of it in terms of utility, we build things that are good for utility but are ugly and actually rather inhuman and actually rather dangerous and not satisfying to the human soul.

01:17:15.060 That's that unidimensional utility.

01:17:16.620 So we have a crime-ridden population who have high levels of mental illness.

01:17:22.100 And, of course, it's not all just due to the surroundings, the architecture and so on.

01:17:25.940 But that's part of it because that also expresses an attitude which is present in the whole of the society.

01:17:31.920 But it's also a moral act in another way that we should, as I say, be testing our perceptions against other possibilities.

01:17:42.140 We should have an open mind about things.

01:17:44.340 And the trouble is that the way we are taught is that, no, these are the truths and you must close down on them, which is very much the left hemisphere's way.

01:17:51.960 It finds truth by closing down.

01:17:53.840 But the right hemisphere finds truth by opening up.

01:17:56.300 It does the exact opposite thing.

01:17:57.640 It opens to a possibility where the left hemisphere closes to a certainty.

01:18:01.920 And we've lost, amongst many, many other things that the right hemisphere offers us, the sense of the spiritual, true emotional depth, the convivial nature of a society, our fellowship with nature, and our closeness to a spiritual realm.

01:18:19.460 Relationship.

01:18:19.780 All of it relational.

01:18:21.780 And instead we substitute stuff for me.

01:18:25.040 And the more I can get and the richer I can become, the better I've succeeded in life.

01:18:30.900 So, it looks to me like the, one of the things that the collection of stories that make up the Old Testament, I'm sort of obsessed by that at the moment, by the way, because I've been writing about it.

01:18:43.220 Of course.

01:18:43.660 So, it's actually training in a form of attention.

01:18:50.280 So, because it's, so for example, when Christ is called upon to name the most fundamental commandment, he actually points to a principle that's underneath the commandments.

01:19:04.760 He says, you should love God with all your heart and your soul, and you should treat other people as if they're you, essentially.

01:19:11.820 Relational.

01:19:12.260 Right, it's relational.

01:19:13.540 Yeah, well, and, well, both of those are relational, right?

01:19:16.460 Exactly.

01:19:16.620 Both of those.

01:19:17.280 Exactly.

01:19:17.700 And the, the, the emphasis there is something like the hypothesis that if you devote your attention to what is properly put in the highest place, then the world lays itself out to you in a manner that's as close to the approximation of paradise as can be managed under the circumstances, right?

01:19:39.380 And it is viewed as a relational element.

01:19:41.480 And so, that, that, what, so that the question, of course, emerges, what is it that's properly put in the highest place?

01:19:51.080 And, and the Old Testament hypothesis is, well, it's an ultimate unity.

01:19:55.540 That's the monotheistic hypothesis.

01:19:57.220 And it's a unity that can be characterized in a multitude of ways, like the mountain that you described, right?

01:20:02.680 So, for example, in the story of Abraham, God is presented as the voice that calls the unwilling to adventure, right?

01:20:12.400 And, and, and, but more than that, it's very, it's fast, it's a fascinating thing to see.

01:20:16.360 So, that's the first part, which is a very interesting equation, right?

01:20:19.360 Which is that, because psychologically speaking, that means the story is characterizing what's put in the highest place by the ancient Israelites as the same proclivity that draws the infant to develop towards the adult, right?

01:20:32.800 And as the same instinct that requires the adult, entices the adult to move out of his or her area of comfort and to continue to develop.

01:20:41.240 So, it's that spiraling motion up, upward.

01:20:44.160 But then, there's more, because, and this all is offered in the first paragraph of the opening of the story of Abraham.

01:20:49.680 So, what God says to Abraham is, get out of your tent.

01:20:52.940 You've been there 75 years.

01:20:54.360 It's time to leave your kin and your, and your comfort and to go out into the terrible world.

01:20:59.200 And, and he says, if you abide by that calling and you make the proper sacrifices along the way, which is something like the abandonment of your archaic presuppositions as you move forward, it's something like that.

01:21:12.500 Then, and this is what's on offer, you'll be a blessing to yourself.

01:21:16.680 Your name will resound among other men.

01:21:18.940 You'll establish a nation and you'll be a blessing to everyone else.

01:21:22.680 And so, there's this, it's this ridiculously promising offer, which is that if you attend to the calling of the spirit, so orient your attention in the proper direction, then you'll move forward with the adventure of your life.

01:21:36.640 But that will unfold in a manner that produces this harmonious balance.

01:21:40.940 It won't just be about you and it won't just be about other people.

01:21:44.380 It'll be about the establishment of the balance that enables you to develop continually in a way that makes you better and better for yourself, but simultaneously offers that to everyone else.

01:21:54.360 And then that's presented as isomorphic as the call of that spirit of development.

01:21:59.420 So that's a, now the reason I brought that up is because we talked about the relationship between attention and the moral act.

01:22:06.480 And if you, the question is to some degree, how do you get your attention in order?

01:22:13.800 And the answer to that is something like, it's not the instrumental utilization of what's proximal for the purposes of narrow self-interest.

01:22:23.760 That's a bad technique.

01:22:26.320 You're aiming at something that's much more akin to the harmonious balance that you talked about and to this multiplicity of vision, right?

01:22:34.020 This balanced multiplicity of vision.

01:22:35.800 And it seems to me that, so there's other characterizations too that I think are in keeping with the hypothesizing that you're laying forward.

01:22:44.320 So you talked about intuition.

01:22:46.280 So the God that makes itself manifest to Noah is the God of intuition, right?

01:22:52.140 Because God speaks to Noah as intuition.

01:22:58.180 So Noah is presented as a wise man who's oriented himself properly for his time and place.

01:23:02.860 And he gets an intuition that society has become so unstable that a catastrophe is ensuing.

01:23:08.700 And that's a form of intuition.

01:23:10.580 And that's presented as the same spirit that calls Abraham to adventure.

01:23:14.820 It's the same spirit that punishes the totalitarian certainties of the builders of the Tower of Babel as well, right? 0.93

01:23:21.680 You know, they're engineers, say, the builders of the Tower of Babel and they're descendants of Cain. 0.98

01:23:27.260 They're resentful technological worshippers who embody the spirit of the Luciferian intellect, right?

01:23:34.940 And they build a totalitarian state.

01:23:36.800 That's what the Tower of Babel is, right? 0.94

01:23:38.880 It's a spiraling upward structure dedicated to the wrong pinnacle of attention.

01:23:47.720 It's something like that.

01:23:49.640 So there's a playoff.

01:23:52.020 There seems to me to be a playoff in the fundamental writings of the West between the Luciferian intellect that tempts people into this narrow, instrumental, self-serving utilization and the spirit that orients attention properly.

01:24:09.560 And if you understand that attention is a moral act, which is a hell of a thing to say, right?

01:24:13.740 That's a very, very deep statement.

01:24:16.440 And one of the things I tell my audiences, and you tell me what you think about this, said, well, the world reveals itself in accordance with your intent, right?

01:24:25.340 And that's a very terrifying thing to understand.

01:24:27.380 Because if all you see in front of you are obstacles, the first thing you might ask is, well, are you sure you're aiming in the right direction?

01:24:33.220 So, what are you working?

01:24:37.660 Okay, let me see what else have I got here.

01:24:39.160 We talked about pride as overreach.

01:24:41.680 Oh, do you know if there's any research pertaining to individual differences in the rigidity of the left hemisphere post-damage?

01:24:52.680 Well, yes, there is.

01:24:57.240 I mean, a lot of it's observation of patients, if you mean, that when they have damage to the right hemisphere, they become more obstinate.

01:25:10.920 Well, I'm wondering if, like, are those who are inclined to be more Luciferian and obstinate to begin with made much more that way with right hemisphere damage?

01:25:21.980 Because I'm wondering if some of the narrowness that the neurological literature is pointing to is not necessarily so much a reflection precisely of the function of the left,

01:25:32.700 but a reflection of the function of the left that's already gone badly and only has itself, then, in the case of the absence of the right.

01:25:41.340 That's the problem, is that on its own, it doesn't understand what to do or where to go.

01:25:46.200 It is instructed, if you like, in that by paying attention to what the right hemisphere is able to tell it.

01:25:53.140 If it was a left hemisphere that habitually rendered itself opaque to the right, is it a worse tyrant in the aftermath of brain damage?

01:26:03.960 I'm not sure that specific question has been addressed.

01:26:06.860 Right, right, that's what I was wondering.

01:26:08.220 Well, that's a very sophisticated question.

01:26:09.960 But it would be odd if it were not the case.

01:26:12.240 Right.

01:26:14.160 Because, of course, nobody is the left hemisphere person or the right hemisphere person. 0.92

01:26:19.480 And simply, there is always an interplay, unless there is a hemispherectomy or damage to one hemisphere or the other.

01:26:26.280 Right.

01:26:26.660 Well, and obviously, each person's left hemisphere is socialized and trained.

01:26:30.820 Yes.

01:26:31.020 And so, it could easily be...

01:26:33.260 It seems to me that a theme that runs through your work is something like, also something like,

01:26:37.980 the increased pathologization of the left hemisphere by a certain kind of, let's say, narrowly technical or instrumental training.

01:26:46.340 Right?

01:26:46.880 And so, something distorts its balance.

01:26:48.860 Yeah.

01:26:50.120 And the religious enterprise, at least in part, is obviously an attempt to restore something like balance,

01:26:57.360 but it's certainly something like the attempt to restore the proper target of attention.

01:27:04.720 Yeah, that's right.

01:27:06.300 And I think I'd say, and I'm probably not alone in thinking this, that actually, it's no good at solving the problems that we know we face to do with degradation of the natural world

01:27:22.820 and the damaging of the fragmentation of society and so on, unless we return to a spiritual vision, one which has a place for God in it.

01:27:37.540 And I keep coming back to Solzhenitsyn's words, that if he had to account for the horrors of the last hundred years of Russian life, whatever,

01:27:49.440 he had to say that it's because men have forgotten God.

01:27:53.840 I mean, that sounds a simple answer, but actually, it's a very deep one.

01:27:58.220 And it rings true for me, even though, as I've explained, I'm not sure that I'm a fully paid up member of a particular religion,

01:28:10.120 although I incline enormously to, and I'm spoken to enormously deeply by the mythos of Christianity.

01:28:17.620 It's extraordinary, the meaning of this story and the beauty of what it has created.

01:28:23.940 And how do you align that with your studies of the relationship between the hemispheres, do you think?

01:28:29.900 What's the relationship between those two things?

01:28:33.760 Well, it would be a simplification to say that the left hemisphere doesn't contribute to what we call the spiritual,

01:28:41.420 but it does so to things that I think are not necessarily the best part of a spiritual life by...

01:28:49.940 It's codification, for example.

01:28:52.700 It's rendering of the spirit into dogma.

01:28:55.520 Yes, and I think it's envisioning of what we are doing when we are partaking in a spiritual life as a way of subtly securing power.

01:29:06.640 Right, right.

01:29:07.220 That we'll be the chosen ones, and we'll be able to sort everything out, because God is on our side.

01:29:13.980 Now, I...

01:29:14.740 And of course, well, you know more about this Old Testament story than I do,

01:29:18.440 but I'm not certainly saying that any spirit of criticism for Judaism.

01:29:24.200 I have profound respect for Judaism.

01:29:28.260 But I'm just saying, I think that the left hemisphere's contributions to spirituality are not the ones we're most interested in,

01:29:35.680 which are the ability to maintain a sense of opposites without closing down on something that we already know.

01:29:44.040 Because God is always something that we never completely know.

01:29:46.980 I mean, if we completely knew God, then that's not God that you know.

01:29:50.000 Even Augustine said that.

01:29:52.520 Right.

01:29:53.100 God is that which continually escapes the nets in which it's put.

01:29:56.520 Yes, yes, that's right.

01:29:58.120 Yes.

01:29:58.460 And he bluntly said, if you understand God, then it's not God you understand.

01:30:02.640 So that's something the left hemisphere is not happy with.

01:30:06.360 It's not happy with it.

01:30:07.200 It hasn't got a full grasp of the situation, because it's dedicated to control.

01:30:11.220 I mean, that's what it's there for.

01:30:12.300 There's nothing wrong with that.

01:30:13.460 As long as it's in the service of something that seems more...

01:30:15.540 As long as it's not put in the highest place.

01:30:16.360 Exactly.

01:30:17.140 Yeah.

01:30:17.280 So I think the trouble is that only a profound attention to a call that is quite different from anything we're used to paying attention to,

01:30:26.100 namely the beauty, the goodness, and the truth of a certain dedication of our lives to something higher than ourselves.

01:30:34.700 Without that, I think we're going to be lost.

01:30:36.860 I think those things that you just described, that beauty, goodness, and truth, there's other virtues that you could put in that bin.

01:30:43.080 There's something like the spirit of calling.

01:30:46.000 Yes.

01:30:46.260 Right.

01:30:46.740 So you could imagine, and this is maybe a way of reconciling, in some ways, the left and the right hemisphere view.

01:30:53.020 So when Moses encounters the burning bush, something calls to him, and it's something that's specific to him.

01:30:59.960 When that happens in each individual's life, it's something specific to them.

01:31:03.860 So whatever interests you is going to make itself manifest in accordance with your character.

01:31:09.800 Right.

01:31:10.140 So it's going to be particularized.

01:31:11.420 But you could imagine that there's a spirit that underlies all calling.

01:31:14.780 And you can tell that because once, I mean, you can have a calling that occupies you for your whole life,

01:31:22.280 but you can also have a calling or micro-callings that transmute, right?

01:31:26.380 Something inspires you.

01:31:29.820 Something produces incentive-reward activation.

01:31:32.680 It pulls you forward to the destination, and then the calling transmutes.

01:31:35.960 And then the calling transmutes again.

01:31:38.080 But you could imagine that there's something behind the set of all possible callings that's like the spirit of calling.

01:31:44.140 And that's the thing that should be attended to, right?

01:31:46.360 If you're going to put something in the proper highest place, it's not going to be the specifics of anything that grips your attention.

01:31:53.020 It's going to be something like the spirit of that which grips your attention as such.

01:31:57.500 And that's a much more abstract conceptualization.

01:32:00.780 Yes.

01:32:01.100 I mean, I would say that it's not so much that this calling is replaced by another, but that calling like everything else flows.

01:32:08.400 And so it seamlessly changes.

01:32:10.520 It doesn't wait for a change and then change stepwise.

01:32:13.720 It is constantly refining itself, and other things are speaking to one.

01:32:17.960 That's my experience.

01:32:20.220 And I think we've degraded many things in life by capitalizing them.

01:32:26.660 I think health care is one of the things I would point to, that being a doctor or a nurse or whatever is a kind of calling.

01:32:36.620 And it's not, you know, it's not.

01:32:39.960 A relational calling.

01:32:40.900 It's a relational calling.

01:32:42.420 And it is a calling to aid other human beings who are suffering.

01:32:47.600 And teaching is a calling.

01:32:49.820 It's not just a job that you get a pay packet for.

01:32:53.300 And it's not just to carry out procedures laid down by the government.

01:32:57.260 You need people who are both doctors and teachers and, you know, many other things too.

01:33:03.500 But those specifically speak to me, and, of course, clergy, that are not just fulfilling a role in a hierarchy, but are, in a way, guided by something that is a great deal of knowledge, but also something spiritual.

01:33:19.220 Well, tell me about that flow.

01:33:20.840 Okay, so let's investigate that for a minute, that notion of flow.

01:33:24.560 I mean, there's the Csikszentmihalyi flow, which is something like immersion in the moment, right?

01:33:29.740 But the flow that you're talking about maybe has something.

01:33:32.360 That's not that.

01:33:32.580 No, you're talking about it.

01:33:33.940 Okay.

01:33:35.420 How would you conceptualize the relationship between your notion of flow and play?

01:33:44.380 Never really thought about that one.

01:33:47.880 I mean, play, incidentally, needs to be, to a large extent, intuitive, not simply the following of rules.

01:33:54.020 And it's responsive to the demands of the moment, right, in a dancing way.

01:33:59.280 So it's extremely responsive.

01:34:01.980 But, I mean, it's more obvious in things like dance or in music, but it's also there in life.

01:34:08.680 It's in everything that we do.

01:34:10.020 That if we are in sync with or attentive to the flow that is called the Tao or whatever, then things naturally do follow that.

01:34:23.360 Yes, yes.

01:34:23.780 I liked your thing that when you meet obstacles everywhere, you might ask yourself, am I really on the right path?

01:34:29.620 Right, right, right.

01:34:30.700 But, I mean, Csikszentmihalyi's idea of flow is an important one, which is about being present in the moment, which is part of the right hemispheres way of attending and being.

01:34:46.960 But the flow I'm talking about is that we really need to get back to seeing everything as in process.

01:34:52.940 I mean, even the mountain behind my house is in process.

01:34:56.400 It's actually a wave that's frozen, and it will carry on moving until eventually it crushes my house.

01:35:02.280 But I think I'll see it out.

01:35:04.420 But it's that that I'm getting at.

01:35:08.000 Because, you know, it's a very toxic idea that things are made up of compartmentalized ideas.

01:35:13.820 And getting away from that to seeing the way in which things are flowing.

01:35:16.940 That's a mechanical idea.

01:35:17.700 It's a mechanistic, exactly, idea.

01:35:20.720 You do see that in schizophrenic delusions.

01:35:22.880 You absolutely do.

01:35:24.160 Yeah, the delusion of mechanism.

01:35:26.000 That's it.

01:35:26.860 Oh, the delusion of mechanism and the delusion that time is made out of instance.

01:35:31.100 Like, now, now, now, now, sometimes they describe it like this.

01:35:33.960 And they can't put them together to find the flow anymore.

01:35:37.100 And their movements also become more machine-like.

01:35:40.480 They find it difficult to know how to act naturally.

01:35:43.580 Right, right.

01:35:44.160 And so, and I believe that is because over-dominance of the left hemispheres for the expense of the right.

01:35:49.740 But there's one way in which we can bring together the Csikszentmihalyi notion of flow with the idea of flow and time.

01:35:58.660 Because time seems to be passing by when you are standing on the border of the stream with a clipboard and a stopwatch.

01:36:08.040 And you can see things moving down it.

01:36:10.260 But when you are in the flow, the river is no longer moving because you're moving at the exact same speed as the river.

01:36:17.900 And so, as far as you're concerned, you are completely in the flow.

01:36:21.580 And if you like, there is no time.

01:36:23.740 Because this is one of the things people say is that when you get into certain mental states, you don't feel that there is time anymore.

01:36:29.880 There is, of course, time.

01:36:31.480 Time is not abolished by the fact that you don't notice it.

01:36:34.220 But you don't notice it because you're in a less...

01:36:37.880 Self-conscious.

01:36:39.260 Less self-conscious.

01:36:39.940 Less self-conscious.

01:36:41.260 Well, that's kind of what I was pointing to with regards to play as well.

01:36:44.500 Yes, yes.

01:36:44.960 So, it looks to me like possibly you could conceptualize play as concordance with that flow.

01:36:51.820 Yes.

01:36:52.200 It's something like that.

01:36:53.160 And it's very dynamic, right?

01:36:54.520 Because if you're playing, you have to be very attentive to what the moment is calling for.

01:36:58.180 Absolutely.

01:36:59.360 And, you know, a really good footballer, for example, can't really tell you how they've managed to be in exactly the right place at the right time.

01:37:06.140 You know, Beckham is asked, how did he do this?

01:37:08.020 He said, I don't know, I'm a footballer.

01:37:09.480 Yeah, yeah, right.

01:37:10.780 And, you know, when that pilot landed his plane on the Hudson River, he was asked how he did it.

01:37:15.320 He said, I don't know, I'm a pilot.

01:37:17.220 And surgeons do this instantaneously.

01:37:19.540 They respond to something, which if they had to think, now, what do I do here?

01:37:23.800 I look up rule number.

01:37:25.000 No, they just do it.

01:37:26.100 And as much as possible as we get into that, we build that realm of the intuitional, the better we are, the more skilled we are.

01:37:36.760 Right, right.

01:37:36.980 Well, that's what, yeah.

01:37:37.820 There's an attack on skill now.

01:37:39.780 So that skilled professionals are made to follow algorithms.

01:37:42.620 Yeah.

01:37:42.960 And the work of...

01:37:44.420 That's part of that all-seeing eye of the state.

01:37:46.560 Yes, yes.

01:37:47.780 That's right.

01:37:48.440 We have to document every move you make because otherwise you can't be trusted.

01:37:51.600 That's it.

01:37:53.240 But, you know, in the learning of a skill, at the early stages, having an algorithm to follow is actually beneficial.

01:38:04.960 Right, right.

01:38:05.420 But when you get to the last couple of stages approaching expertise, it becomes an impediment.

01:38:10.920 The obstacle, yes, yes.

01:38:11.820 Right, something that needs to be sacrificed.

01:38:13.260 And so what we do in our society is make absolutely sure that we can never have excellent people anymore. 0.80

01:38:18.960 We can only have semi-moronic people who follow rule books.

01:38:24.800 We're ruling out excellence and imposing mediocrity because everything militates against excellence now.

01:38:33.560 That instrumental use of attention is for something like immediate grip.

01:38:39.340 Yes.

01:38:39.520 That's fair?

01:38:40.080 Yeah.

01:38:40.360 Okay.

01:38:40.740 So, and you might say, well, what's wrong with immediate grip?

01:38:43.200 And the answer is it doesn't take everything into account.

01:38:46.240 No, it doesn't.

01:38:47.180 Right, right.

01:38:47.820 And you might be gripping.

01:38:48.780 You might be reaching out for the wrong thing or overreaching.

01:38:51.700 Yes, and also the gripping may not be exactly what's needed.

01:38:54.220 So, the art of things like tai chi and so on and the other…

01:39:01.500 Jiu-jitsu is like that too.

01:39:02.560 Well, jiu-jitsu and so on.

01:39:03.500 Or judo.

01:39:04.040 It's about sometimes moving with something rather than to grasping or holding, but actually learning how to move in an instinctual way that uses the flow rather than tries to oppose it.

01:39:15.960 So, when you make people narrow down to ticking boxes and making sure they proceduralize what they're doing, you're hoping that you will avoid disaster.

01:39:25.720 Yes, right.

01:39:26.520 But you enforce mediocrity.

01:39:27.940 You enforce mediocrity and you do not stop there being disasters.

01:39:32.860 Absolutely not.

01:39:33.380 Yeah, but you get planned disasters.

01:39:34.940 You get algorithmically predictable disasters.

01:39:37.740 Yeah.

01:39:37.960 Well, look, one of the things is obviously psychiatrists work with people who are likely to harm themselves or kill themselves.

01:39:44.320 And so, everybody has to fill out a risk assessment form, you see.

01:39:49.100 And there's now evidence that shows that these risk assessment forms are perfectly useless.

01:39:53.460 And they have another disadvantage, which is that if you sit down and ask people a rote set of questions, you project a mechanical approach which is not empathic.

01:40:03.720 And indeed…

01:40:04.680 Or you can also give them all sorts of ideas with your risk assessment questions.

01:40:07.320 You can.

01:40:08.720 Although I don't think that's so bad.

01:40:10.720 But I think that the feeling that you're not really attending to them, you're busy filling in your form, is not in itself good.

01:40:17.020 And, you know, my…

01:40:18.500 Especially if they're feeling a little alienated, for example.

01:40:20.760 Exactly.

01:40:22.000 So, my risk assessment instrument was an, in fact, untrained nurse who had 40 years of experience on the ward.

01:40:30.640 And she'd just say, I don't like the look of Mrs. Sensei.

01:40:33.300 And I just, there's something about her that I'm concerned about.

01:40:37.640 And if you were intelligent, you took that seriously.

01:40:41.240 Mm-hmm.

01:40:41.280 Mm-hmm.

01:40:41.880 Mm-hmm.

01:40:42.560 So, what are you working on now?

01:40:45.020 Well, I'm working on myself.

01:40:47.980 How's that going?

01:40:49.260 In a sense of disaster.

01:40:51.640 No, I mean, I'm…

01:40:53.800 I got very tired writing the matter with things.

01:40:57.580 The last three years, particularly, were completely manic.

01:41:02.080 And I somewhat burnt out.

01:41:03.740 So, I'm gradually coming back to a more fulfilled life and fulfilling life.

01:41:14.960 What I'm working on is I have an idea of finally writing a shorter book, which I think would reach more people.

01:41:22.440 And it's quite funny, really, that, I don't know if you know this, but the reason I wrote the matter with things was because I was asked to write a shorter version of The Master and His Emissary.

01:41:34.420 People said, this is a great book, The Master and His Emissary, but you need to write something about half the length that will be more accessible.

01:41:40.780 And so, I got a contract with Penguin Random House to do that.

01:41:44.280 And after I'd been trying to do it a little while, I thought, I don't like doing this.

01:41:48.280 This is not what I want to do at all.

01:41:50.320 What's in it for me to say crudely things that I'd said more subtly at length?

01:41:55.600 And if the idea is that the crude version will become substituting in people's minds for the better one, that's not good for me either.

01:42:02.720 Sounds like a left hemisphere problem.

01:42:04.060 It's a left hemisphere problem.

01:42:05.400 So, I said to my editor, I want to do something quite different, which is unpack the philosophical implications for finding truth that come from the hemisphere theory.

01:42:13.600 And that's, of course, what I tried to do in that book.

01:42:16.060 And he said, that's fine.

01:42:17.000 We trust our authors go away and do it.

01:42:18.480 I said, it'd be longer.

01:42:19.160 He said, that's all right, too.

01:42:21.040 And then I turned up with a manuscript that was four times the length of the contracted book.

01:42:27.180 And he didn't throw a fit, but he didn't say anything for five months.

01:42:31.940 And then he said, yeah, we want to publish it.

01:42:33.660 It's great.

01:42:34.300 But it's got to be half the length.

01:42:35.980 And I said to the people, there were about four or five of them, perhaps half a dozen, who'd read it at that stage, the manuscript, and said, you've got to be brutally frank to me.

01:42:44.960 You know, would it really be a lot better if it were half the length?

01:42:47.640 Not one of them said it would be.

01:42:49.240 They said, you'd lose so much because it's so dense.

01:42:51.880 There's so much in it.

01:42:52.740 And so I thought, no, rather than spend another year sort of chopping this, and every morning will be misery, I'm going to just publish it.

01:43:03.840 How's it done?

01:43:05.080 It's done very well.

01:43:06.160 And how do you account for that?

01:43:08.800 I think people are hungry for something that really speaks to them.

01:43:13.800 Right, right.

01:43:15.300 So they wanted length and difficulty.

01:43:17.260 They do, in a way.

01:43:18.900 Yes, I think that's right.

01:43:19.920 This is one of the problems.

01:43:20.760 There's so many problems with the so-called elite, mainly left-wing intellectuals. 1.00

01:43:28.240 Frankly, they're patronizing, and they think that people are stupid. 1.00

01:43:32.000 And, you know, I have a colleague who makes wonderful films. 1.00

01:43:34.620 And shallow. 1.00

01:43:35.240 Stupid and shallow. 1.00

01:43:36.160 Shallow. 1.00

01:43:36.720 Yeah.

01:43:37.140 And I have a colleague who makes wonderful films, David Malone, and I've been in two of them.

01:43:41.660 And he makes them independently.

01:43:43.560 And then the BBC go, yeah, okay.

01:43:46.180 Well, he'd been to the BBC earlier.

01:43:48.220 No, no, they won't get it.

01:43:49.400 He makes the film.

01:43:50.300 Then they want it.

01:43:52.040 And every time it's the same, they never seem to learn.

01:43:55.360 Of course, they're stuck in the set in that left-hand way.

01:43:58.040 No, the rules are.

01:43:59.260 And the thing that was quoted to me was apparently, and it may have general truth,

01:44:03.660 that for every thousand words over a certain level, the sales will be predicted to be lower.

01:44:10.660 But this hasn't happened with this book.

01:44:13.280 I haven't been able to keep up with constantly publishing it.

01:44:16.820 I mean, it's published by Perspectiva Press.

01:44:19.980 I'm, I think, a board member of Perspectiva.

01:44:22.880 It's a very good charitable structure in London that wants to put forward ideas I believe in that are ecologically sound and spiritually sound and meaty intellectually.

01:44:35.900 And so, I think, see, people have been starved of it for so long.

01:44:40.320 Because every time these films by David go out, they get five-star reviewers in the papers and people say, why can't we have more of this?

01:44:46.780 Well, he can tell you why. 1.00

01:44:48.240 Because idiots run the kind of gatekeeping of these things. 1.00

01:44:52.440 We need people to relax about that. 1.00

01:44:54.600 Stop trying to over-control.

01:44:55.860 They literally have, oh, we had something on spirituality there.

01:45:00.700 We can't have another one till, you know, whatever.

01:45:02.760 Well, I don't know about that.

01:45:04.660 But in any case, although my work is, for those who have eyes to see, is guiding them towards seeing a broader picture, which might be identified with a more spiritual way of looking at it, I don't rub anybody's nose in it.

01:45:21.000 I want to keep people with me.

01:45:23.840 Yeah, well, I think that's part of what accounts for the popularity, too, right?

01:45:26.900 I think so.

01:45:27.740 Yeah, it's an exploration, right?

01:45:29.240 It is.

01:45:29.420 And an insistence.

01:45:30.420 It's not an insistence.

01:45:31.680 And, you know, that's terribly important.

01:45:34.600 And I always, you know, I think when people say, well, what do I do with people who don't understand what it is I'm saying?

01:45:39.160 I say, relax.

01:45:40.420 You know, because one thing that you learn as a doctor, and especially as a psychiatrist, and just by living, is there are plenty of people that you can never get to see certain things.

01:45:50.320 And that's their problem, actually.

01:45:52.140 I mean, you're not put on the world to get everyone to see things.

01:45:56.360 You do what you can.

01:45:57.720 And I'm doing just what I can.

01:45:59.200 And I'm thoroughly delighted by the very warm response and the sales, you know.

01:46:04.800 Yeah, it's quite the miracle, all right.

01:46:06.740 Yeah, it is, actually.

01:46:07.600 Yeah, definitely.

01:46:08.120 Yeah, because it's a big book.

01:46:09.340 But people like the challenge of something that's meaty, not just a soundbite.

01:46:13.900 Yeah, well, it's also an accomplishment to work your way through it.

01:46:16.400 And, you know, Kierkegaard, I read a great piece from Kierkegaard years ago.

01:46:20.840 I used to teach it to my students all the time in the personality course.

01:46:23.840 And he talked about his absolute lack of utility in terms of ever making anything easier and more efficient.

01:46:29.960 He thought that instead he'd take the opposite tack and make things more difficult and challenging.

01:46:34.540 Because there would come a time when everything had been made so easy that there would be a clamor for what was more difficult and challenging.

01:46:41.040 And I've been in constant discussion with people I've talked to within the Catholic Church, particularly with regard to that.

01:46:48.960 It's like, well, why don't we have any people coming?

01:46:51.160 Well, it's because you've made everything far too welcoming and easy.

01:46:53.800 Yes, facile.

01:46:54.900 And the problem is this.

01:46:57.360 They go, oh, well, they won't really get it, you know.

01:46:59.800 So we must do away with the Latin mass. 1.00

01:47:01.920 We must do away with ritual.

01:47:03.580 We must do away with the core beliefs we have and say, well, basically anything goes.

01:47:08.560 And make it more like being at home in the sitting room.

01:47:11.080 But the reason you go to church is not to be at home in the sitting room.

01:47:13.880 You can do that by doing nothing.

01:47:15.420 But they want to be introduced to something that speaks of the transcendent.

01:47:20.380 Absolutely.

01:47:20.660 And now you can only get this, I believe, in the Orthodox Church.

01:47:25.600 It's the one Christian church, Russian and Greek, that has not sort of sold out, really.

01:47:31.520 But once you start having motorbikes and whatever in the church, it's not.

01:47:35.500 You know, in Canterbury Cathedral, they put on a rave.

01:47:38.900 Colored lights and people dancing and all that.

01:47:42.840 Did they have a golden calf on the altar?

01:47:45.340 Just curious.

01:47:46.600 Just curious.

01:47:47.760 Because that would have been perfectly appropriate.

01:47:49.320 It would have been.

01:47:50.040 Yes, yes.

01:47:50.920 And also extremely hilarious in a very, very dark way.

01:47:54.040 I know, I know.

01:47:54.700 Yeah.

01:47:55.420 Well, very good talking to you, sir.

01:47:57.300 Thank you for walking through your book and a variety of associated ideas, including the ones I was inflicting on you.

01:48:03.520 No, they're very good.

01:48:04.480 And I love being with you.

01:48:06.000 I think it's much better than being on the ends of things thousands of miles apart.

01:48:11.340 Yeah, well, there's a lot of things to keep track of in our conversations.

01:48:14.280 So if the channel narrows, it's more difficult.

01:48:16.760 Yeah, yeah.

01:48:17.200 Yeah, yeah.

01:48:17.920 Well, it's very good to talk to you.

01:48:19.180 Yeah, yeah.

01:48:19.500 So, yes, thank you very much.

01:48:21.720 Thank you very much.

01:48:22.680 And for everybody watching and listening today, your attention and time is always much appreciated.

01:48:28.520 And I'm going to continue to talk to Dr. McGill-Chris for half an hour on the Daily Wire side.

01:48:33.560 We'll speak, I think, more autobiographically in that half an hour interview, which is generally the theme.

01:48:39.880 And so you're welcome to join us there.

01:48:41.600 And to throw some support to Daily Wire away, they facilitate these conversations and make them available to everyone, which is, you know, quite the act of generosity.

01:48:51.660 And they've been a pleasure to work with and made all of these episodes more professional and more compelling.

01:49:00.640 And thank you very much to the film crew today for helping out and making sure this could proceed.

01:49:05.820 And thanks again, Ian.

01:49:07.660 It was very good to talk to you, as it always is.

01:49:09.520 Thank you.

01:49:18.820 And I'll see you in the next week.

01:49:20.160 Thank you.

The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast - April 01, 2024

436. What Your Left Brain Won’t Tell Your Right Brain ｜ Dr. Iain McGilchrist

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