In this episode, Dr. Ian McGilchrist and I discuss the differences between the left and right hemispheres of the brain, and how they differ from each other in their understanding of the world and morality. We also discuss the surprising relationship between attention and morality, and the role of the left hemisphere in understanding the world, compared to the right hemisphere in seeing the world. And we talk about the role that the corpus callosum plays in this duality, and what it means for our understanding of morality and the nature of consciousness. This episode is brought to you by Viking, a company committed to exploring the world in comfort, a journey through the heart of Europe on an elegant Viking longship, with thoughtful service, cultural enrichment, and all-inclusive affairs. Viking is a Viking Committed to Exploring the World in Comfort, Journey through the Heart of Europe, on a graceful Viking Longship. Viking is an elegant, Viking-like longship. Discover more at viking.co.uk/travel/podcasts/Discovering-The-the-World-in-Comfort-and-all-inclusivity/Viking-Longship/ Discovering-Ameralda/Vikings-Theoretical-Intentions/ All-Inclusive-Enlightenment/Travels-Including-Theological-Aboriginal-Intellectuals/All-Inclusivity- and All-Travelers/Ameriotic-Efforts-In-Theory, we explore the similarities and differences between our thoughts and ideas and experiences, and experiences across the globe. The Viking longships. Viking, Viking is committed to discovering the world on a Viking Longboat. Viking's longship is a vessel dedicated to exploring, serving, caring for, and engaging in all things in comfort and all inclusive affairs, and making them accessible to all people everywhere. Viking's mission is to provide the best possible access to the world through their knowledge and care and care for all people. Viking has a mission to help people everywhere, everywhere they can access all things they need to know and care about the world they can do their best to make the best of their day-day-to-day. Viking.co/A Viking longboat is a place of care and information about the best way to understand the world around them. Viking Viking is dedicated to all things Viking is all inclusive and inclusive. Viking longboats are a longboat service.
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00:00:14.720Hello everyone. I had the opportunity today to meet in person with Dr. Ian McGilchrist.
00:00:35.980I've spoken with Dr. McGilchrist a couple of times. A couple of times in person and also on my podcast by Zoom.
00:00:45.080And we're here in Georgia today and we happen to be in the same place at the same time.
00:00:49.740So we thought we'd sit down and conduct a lengthy investigation into the similarities in our thought and the differences.
00:00:58.640And to see where we could get. And that's what we're inviting you to partake in.
00:01:03.740I wanted to talk to Dr. McGilchrist because we share an interest in neuropsychology.
00:01:10.540Particularly in hemispheric specialization.
00:01:12.600He'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.
00:01:26.760I'm very interested in how that maps onto conceptualizations of the Luciferian intellect, which are pervasive in mythology.
00:01:36.020We discuss also the surprising relationship between attention and morality.
00:01:40.600Because 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.
00:01:52.240And 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.
00:02:02.320That we see the world through a structure of values.
00:02:04.960And we attend to those things that we value.
00:02:07.800And 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.
00:02:24.660And that's a very interesting and terrifying thing to understand.
00:02:28.380So we talk about all that, and so welcome to the discussion.
00:02:31.720Dr. McGilchrist, you spent a lot of time thinking about hemispheric specialization, and that's an understatement.
00:02:39.260And 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.
00:02:51.120And Richard Dawkins said something very interesting about biological organisms.
00:02:55.560He said they have to be a model of the environment in order to function in the environment.
00:04:11.100Because all the neural networks we know that led up to the mammalian brain have this bi-hemispheric or at least separated or distinguished network.
00:04:23.700But there's only this band of fibers when you get to mammals.
00:04:28.800So birds, for example, have no corpus callosum.
00:07:24.500And for several years, all he did was throw away stone.
00:07:26.940And then at the end of it, there is this David.
00:07:30.080So I was reviewing your book again last night in preparation for this podcast.
00:07:36.760And 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.
00:07:45.620And I really liked Alcon and Goldberg's work.
00:07:52.440And he was very interested in the antithesis between novelty and routinization.
00:07:59.240And that seems to be a theme that permeates your work as well.
00:08:02.100It's the right, like you're, and correct me if I've got any of this wrong,
00:08:06.320but 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.
00:08:21.460And 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.
00:08:31.480And that brings up all sorts of interesting philosophical questions, too, like the distinction between part and a whole.
00:08:40.520And so what constitutes, how do you understand the relationship between perception of the part and the whole and hemispheric function?
00:08:51.220Well, you've raised a range of things there that differentiate them.
00:08:54.800First, the idea of what is new and what is familiar, and then the idea of the part and the whole.
00:09:00.580I 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.
00:09:21.700When we jump to conclusions, it is the left hemisphere that is quick and dirty.
00:09:26.160It's always wanting to get what it is.
00:09:28.620Now, I need to know for certain, is it this or is it that?
00:09:32.700Whereas the right hemisphere is allowing things to be open and saying, well, it could be that or it could be something else.
00:09:38.060Now, the problem is that when you want to grab a detail, you can't afford to be hesitant for too long.
00:09:43.820You've got to kind of pounce on that mouse or pick up that seed or whatever it is.
00:09:47.360And 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.
00:10:00.140So, I definitely appreciate the word gestalt.
00:10:03.160The right hemisphere is the one that sees gestalten.
00:10:06.020That is to say, holes which cannot be reduced to their parts without loss.
00:10:11.760I wish we had a proper word for that in English.
00:10:14.060But perhaps the word is hole, because holes are of this nature.
00:10:18.060But 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.
00:10:26.120Yeah, so there's always that paradoxical interplay between unity and multiplicity at every level of perception.
00:10:34.780And that is another theme of mine, the business of mediating unity and multiplicity, because, of course, we need both.
00:10:40.460And we need diversification, but we also need to have it so that it doesn't threaten the integration of the whole.
00:10:46.180And 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.
00:11:55.740So, it's not, I mean, Goldberg is exactly right, and that's something I importantly learned from him.
00:12:03.240But 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.
00:12:18.460That's what the left hemisphere does almost immediately.
00:12:21.000And 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.
00:12:31.180And it's not just a one-off, there are other birds.
00:12:34.260And they go, doggy, in fact, it's a cat.
00:12:36.800But they've got the idea there's a four-legged thing, you know.
00:12:39.200But 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.
00:12:50.140Yeah, well, you replace the perception with the category.
00:13:01.500When 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.
00:15:34.980Like a book of fiction can be susceptible to analysis because the work of fiction contains more information even than the fiction author intended.
00:15:47.560So, 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.
00:15:56.620And so, in our dreams, we have images of action and those images of action represent social mores and the world.
00:16:04.360But then there's a further level of abstraction and that would be the linguistic level.
00:16:08.260And 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.
00:16:18.480And I'm wondering if that move from novelty to routinization parallels that, right?
00:16:24.600So, we first grip things in this sort of Piagetian sense behaviorally.
00:16:32.360So, we've got, I mean, in dramatic using images, per se, and then we further compress that.
00:16:38.100And 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.
00:16:53.380Then 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.
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00:17:47.460Now, you might think, what's the big deal?
00:18:44.380Yeah, I mean, my initial reaction is it's over-schematic.
00:18:54.000Because I think what's really happening is that experience is taken in at a bodily level and is immediately grasped by the right hemisphere,
00:19:08.580which is better in touch with the unconscious than the left.
00:19:11.760But 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.
00:19:24.120But I think this is more or less a function of the frontal lobes of both hemispheres,
00:19:28.180that they enable us to stand back enough to get, as it were, the bird's eye view of the landscape.
00:19:33.400But the abstraction, I'd like to separate that out because I think that's what the left hemisphere really specializes in,
00:19:41.340And when you abstract, you are left really with something like a skeleton.
00:19:45.240You're left with a diagram, a theory, a map that doesn't have all the embodied knowledge.
00:19:50.400But the thing is that we imagine, or a lot of people imagine, they have this image in their mind.
00:19:56.860The unconscious is a tank somewhere down there underneath.
00:20:00.240But we're living in this conscious realm.
00:20:02.180And occasionally things pop up and so on.
00:20:04.520But actually, the bit of our cognitive function of which we are aware is less than half a percent.
00:20:11.720And it's been estimated that 99.44% of our cognition is we're unaware of.
00:20:19.020Now, of course, the specificity of that is only amusing to me.
00:20:22.680But 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.
00:20:36.540It's always got to state this in preference to that.
00:20:39.580Whereas in the unconscious realm, nothing has to be sacrificed in that way because things are drawn together.
00:20:46.480And I believe our intuitions are much richer than our reasoning on the basis of them.
00:20:54.140So we need to reason on the basis of them.
00:20:56.500We need to validate them or not, perfectly correct.
00:20:59.900But 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.
00:21:13.120They fulfill one another, importantly.
00:21:14.940So 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.
00:21:30.520It's encouraging people to disattend to something incredibly important.
00:21:35.000And of course, the intuition can be wrong.
00:21:36.800But so can just a line of reasoning lead you to the wrong place.
00:21:39.700So 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.
00:21:52.980And 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?
00:22:15.580And so there's obvious utility in that if the principles are correct.
00:22:18.940But there's very little difference between that and the delusion if the first principles are incorrect.
00:22:25.260And 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.
00:22:58.300And 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.
00:23:10.780Because 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.
00:23:34.220But 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.
00:23:51.200This is more interested in internal consistency.
00:23:56.580So, 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.
00:24:06.040And 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.
00:24:18.940So, 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.
00:24:26.320You need to be allowed to accept new information, and it's the right hemisphere that's far, far better at that.
00:24:33.320So, 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.
00:24:55.520Well, 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.
00:25:31.640So, 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.
00:25:42.140Cain is a victim in his own eyes, and he becomes very bitter and resentful about it.
00:25:47.300And I think that's actually the story that underlies Marxism.
00:25:51.300And so, it's an algorithmic story, and the algorithm is something like, there's a dimension of comparison.
00:25:58.220There is, on that dimension of comparison, there's those who have and those who do not have.
00:26:03.800And so, that's a hypersimplification to begin with.
00:26:06.900And 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.
00:26:13.960So, it's a victim-victimizer narrative.
00:26:16.020Okay, so now, there's real algorithmic advantages to that theory, because to some degree, there's some truth in it.
00:26:23.180Because 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.
00:26:36.680And so, if you have that algorithm, you can explain a lot with it.
00:26:40.640And 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.
00:26:56.220Well, 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.
00:27:04.380But there's another advantage, too, which is that all you have to do is identify with those who are oppressed, and you're moral.
00:27:11.420And so, you can see a tremendous attraction in that, and I'm wondering if that's a reasonable variant of something like algorithmic oversimplification.
00:27:21.760Well, 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.
00:27:37.540And 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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00:28:56.560Right, so experience is at an all-time low in terms of its value.
00:29:05.840We 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.
00:29:17.180And 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.
00:29:33.780Right, 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.
00:29:50.220And for heaven's sake, life is so complicated.
00:29:53.940And in the third part of The Matter of Things, can I talk about the structure of The Matter of Things?
00:30:00.600Yeah, yeah. So this was the book that came out in November 21, my latest work, and I'm sure my last long book.
00:30:08.960And in it, I wanted to use hemisphere theory to talk about what it is that we can trust.
00:30:15.940What can we actually know to any degree to be true?
00:30:19.420And 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.
00:30:26.600Otherwise, if we didn't, all of us, believe that, there would be no reason for saying or doing anything.
00:30:36.440So 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.
00:30:50.260So 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?
00:31:03.060And 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.
00:31:19.980It's demonstrated every day by accidents of nature, tumors, injuries, and so forth.
00:31:26.680So 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.
00:31:40.440And one of the things I wanted to do in the book was demonstrate the extent of what we know about this.
00:31:45.340And I think there's about 6,000 references to the literature.
00:31:48.060But 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.
00:32:04.020And 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.
00:32:12.860Yeah. 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.
00:32:28.580But 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.
00:32:34.160So 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.
00:32:42.280So the left hemisphere apprehends, the right hemisphere comprehends.
00:32:47.340And 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.
00:32:57.400I 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.
00:33:10.380You develop habits of thought that limit you to seeing only certain aspects of reality through the way in which you attend.
00:33:17.160So I call attention a moral act, yeah, because it both creates the world and creates you.
00:33:22.460And 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.
00:33:30.040And 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.
00:33:52.100So 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.
00:34:02.360It is veridical where the left is not.
00:34:06.920And 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.
00:34:30.980Willful blindness, of course, because that comes into this business we were talking about of confabulation, of turning.
00:34:37.040When you don't know something, you make up something that fits in with your theory.
00:34:40.120And you disattend to things that you don't want to know.
00:34:45.860So 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.
00:35:21.060The 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.
00:35:29.400And those are the more congruent with the right hemisphere's way of thinking.
00:35:32.340And up till now, all we've been able to do is say, well, some philosophers say this and some philosophers say that.
00:35:43.320I 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.
00:35:56.800But a lot of them has a advantage of bringing them together, which the right hemisphere will do.
00:36:03.960Because 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.
00:37:03.180So I look at the claims of each one of these to have something to do with truth.
00:37:08.960And truth itself is a concept that can be seen either from a left hemisphere or right hemisphere point of view.
00:37:13.960What I mean by that is the left hemisphere is used to tracking something and getting it.
00:37:19.760So it imagines truth is at the end of a path that has a sequence of steps.
00:37:23.680And if you take these in the right order, you will end up at truth.
00:37:26.820Whereas the right hemisphere sees that true actually comes from a root which means faithful.
00:37:33.180It means being faithful to what you experience.
00:37:37.100And 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.
00:37:51.640The resonance between the attending consciousness and whatever it is that is external to it or appears to be external to it.
00:37:59.060And 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.
00:38:09.360And each on its own is not a sufficient guide.
00:38:11.500So 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.
00:38:27.160I mean, that's sort of criticism of science.
00:38:28.500I find myself defending science all the time against people who want to turn it into a free-for-all.
00:38:35.700You know, they want to demonize science if it doesn't fit with their narrative of what truth is.
00:38:43.460And that is where science ends, you know.
00:38:46.240And 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.
00:38:59.480I mean, love is an example of something that cannot be measured, cannot be demonstrated in the laboratory, cannot be measured, and cannot be manipulated.
00:39:06.720And yet, according to science, it's not real, but, excuse me, love is probably the realest thing that we ever experience.
00:39:15.880So, overall, I say we need all of these.
00:39:18.940And then, in part three of the book, it's ontology, what is there?
00:39:24.600And I begin with the coincidence of opposites.
00:39:27.280Now, when you consider that we've been talking about making things cohere and that we exclude things that don't fit,
00:39:35.120there 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.
00:39:45.600And, 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.
00:39:52.920So, you think freedom is good, and it is.
00:39:55.840You increase that freedom, and you get…
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00:41:45.500Well, 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.
00:42:05.060Listen, I was thinking about that in terms of musical harmony, because I think music portrays precisely that.
00:42:20.040And if there isn't tension, i.e. pulling in opposite directions, the left-handed instinct, that's a waste of energy.
00:42:26.100Two things pulling opposite, just stop pulling.
00:42:28.780But then the string goes slack, and no music, and no arrow.
00:42:32.860So we need that tension all the time between the opposites.
00:42:36.480Not alternating between them, but holding them together.
00:42:40.060And 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.
00:43:15.220And then the next chapter is on flow, because I find that this is actually, I never anticipated this.
00:43:21.560This 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.
00:43:27.540And one of them was the importance of flow, the perception that everything flows is not trivial.
00:43:34.300And 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.
00:43:45.940But, you know, everything is modeled on the machine.
00:43:48.600But 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.
00:43:59.800But nothing is mechanical in that sense.
00:44:03.120It'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.
00:44:15.760So is it machine the externalization of the left hemisphere?
00:44:34.440So, 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.
00:44:55.800And it vilifies all kinds of people who don't fit into the slots, the categories that it's developed.
00:45:02.200But 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.
00:45:14.740And 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.
00:45:28.200Well, it's hard to write a scientific paper without a purpose.
00:45:45.960But I think it's very, very important.
00:45:49.720And I think increasingly that values are the thing we should be thinking about.
00:45:53.800I don't think they're things that we make up to comfort ourselves.
00:45:57.080I don't think we paint them on the walls of our cell to cheer us up without any contact with reality.
00:46:02.880No, I believe they are places in which we contact reality.
00:46:06.780And 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?
00:46:15.440It's very costly, and it kicks against entropy.
00:46:22.000If 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.
00:46:31.560Life brings with it precariousness, expense of energy, and so forth.
00:46:36.520And, indeed, as it becomes suffering, as it complicates.
00:46:40.760So, I don't know whether actinobacteria at the base of the ocean actually suffer.
00:47:36.620And 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.
00:47:45.560We've looked at the philosophy and seen where it can lead us.
00:47:48.120Now, use that information to examine the cosmos.
00:47:52.760At the very start of it, we find the coincidence of opposites, yin and yang and so on.
00:47:58.200This is in every other culture than our own.
00:48:01.020But 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.
00:48:10.360Well, you know, when the Israelites cross the desert, they're led by a pillar of fire and a pillar of cloud.
00:48:26.580So, 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.
00:49:02.780Well, 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,
00:49:17.240of key ideas in the Kabbalah, and they were like a blinding light.
00:49:25.400I thought, good heavens, this is so deep and true.
00:49:29.480And, of course, ultimately, it's not irreconcilable with Christianity.
00:49:36.920But it has an emphasis on certain aspects, including the balancing of opposites.
00:49:42.360Well, 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.
00:49:57.600And 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.
00:50:06.420And conscience looks to me something like the voice of negative emotion.
00:50:10.480So, you can imagine that there's an instinctual force that pulls you forward, right?
00:50:14.660That's the manifestation of the burning bush, by the way.
00:50:18.960This thing that calls you, and then speaks more deeply as you investigate it.
00:50:23.220And then conscience is also highlighted multiple times in the Old Testament, especially with the prophet Elijah.
00:50:30.060Because Elijah is the prophet who replaces the God that's in the natural world, essentially, with the voice of conscience within, right?
00:50:38.300And 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.
00:51:16.820And, 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.
00:51:53.420So, you lay out the left as reductionist and algorithmic and often petulant and somewhat totalitarian.
00:52:02.660And you also associate it with reach and grip.
00:52:07.180And, like, well, so let me offer you something and you tell me what you think about this.
00:52:12.880Because 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.
00:52:33.980And there's not a lot of difference between overreach and pride.
00:52:37.140Pride, 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.
00:53:17.720And 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.
00:53:27.240And hence, you see these people who think, oh, we've worked out the answer to everything.
00:53:31.940We understand its structure and its meaning.
00:53:34.160And if there's a few things we haven't yet, we will do so.
00:53:36.560A few things are always the annoyance, right?
00:54:15.360Also 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.
00:54:29.560And that's part of, you can imagine that.
00:54:32.320So 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.
00:54:44.500Well, that comes down to the whole point about it being a servant.
00:54:47.960It's a good servant, but a very poor master.
00:55:01.560That's the Luciferian story, fundamentally.
00:55:03.900Right, and that seems to me to be exactly right.
00:55:06.200Yeah, and actually at the end of the master and his emissary, in the end of the final chapter, I bring in Paradise Lost.
00:55:14.160Because it seems to me to be the story of what has happened with the overreach of this intellect.
00:55:21.400And 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.
00:55:34.740Well, I think that's a consequence of the failure of the project, right?
00:55:40.160Because, well, you mentioned the resentment, and what happens, the resentment emerges in part because the theories fail.
00:55:48.840And 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.
00:55:58.760And so that's very troublesome, because who wants that?
00:56:02.100And so you can certainly understand why the resistance develops.
00:56:08.140It's evidence of failure that invalidates your theory.
00:56:11.900And so one route to rectifying that is to abandon your theory.
00:56:16.280But 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.
00:56:32.380The 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.
00:56:42.640And the question then is, what guides you in the realm of doubt?
00:56:46.180What is there that guides you in the realm of doubt?
00:56:49.340The 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.
00:56:56.960So if the intellect is the guide, you're lost.
00:56:59.460Yeah, but in cultures other than our own, we understand the importance of unknowing, that there is an unknowing which is the opposite of ignorance.
00:57:09.360Ignorance 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.
00:58:51.400Well, 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?
01:01:14.020Not only is it much bigger, but it's also capable of doing many, many things,
01:01:17.600like solving complex mathematical problems and coming to scientific insights.
01:01:21.340In 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.
01:02:54.980And, 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.
01:03:10.140But there is something of the divine in the human spirit, so, whatever you like to call it, I believe.
01:03:16.240And I also believe that, ultimately, whatever the ground of being is, it is conscious.
01:03:21.540So, in a more ungodly culture, we talk all the time about consciousness, and, of course, that's perfectly right.
01:03:29.420And there's a distinction there that is full of meaning.
01:03:32.500But I believe that, ultimately, consciousness and the divine ground of being cannot be separated, because I believe that…
01:03:53.900And that nothing is just a thing on its own.
01:03:56.540It only is what it is because of all the things that are its context and with which it is in relation.
01:04:02.280And that's something the right hemisphere understands, that the left hemisphere takes things out of context, abstracts them, generalizes them…
01:05:19.440But we live in a world in which nothing can be trusted anymore.
01:05:23.380And therefore, it all has to be specified centrally in some incredibly thin, jejun, abstract schema to which we're all supposed to conform.
01:05:32.560But in fact, nothing living ever does conform to it.
01:05:36.960But 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.
01:05:49.480In fact, I believe consciousness is throughout the cosmos.
01:05:52.040In fact, I believe the stuff of the cosmos is consciousness.
01:05:56.420The trouble is I'm saying so many things so fast here because we don't have a lot of time.
01:06:02.380But, I mean, I'm not alone in the world.
01:06:04.720Well, 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.
01:06:14.480And matter is a manifestation of consciousness in a particular way.
01:06:18.840It is, if you like, a phase of consciousness.
01:06:21.780And I'm not using phase in the temporal term, but in the sense that physicists say that water has phases.
01:06:46.420And 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.
01:07:06.020But it doesn't actually know it in advance.
01:07:10.260I 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?
01:07:35.740Well, 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.
01:07:48.200And spirals play a very big part in my ontology.
01:08:29.560So, 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.
01:08:52.340But 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.
01:09:10.260And 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.
01:09:23.980Because, 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.
01:09:31.980So, 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.
01:09:44.100And so, I see matter as not an opposition to consciousness, but as something that is a reciprocal aspect of consciousness.
01:09:53.600And you can't have matter without, and you can't have consciousness without the other.
01:09:56.540Let me ask you about intention as a moral act.
01:10:00.680Yeah, because I've been trying to work through the, what would you say, the formal flaw of the empirical presumption.
01:10:14.000And so, the empirical presumption is something like, we inform ourselves with the facts and we can orient ourselves with the facts.
01:10:19.940And 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.
01:10:32.460And so, you can't orient yourself by the facts, because the facts are an infinite chaos.
01:10:39.760And so, you have to prioritize the facts.
01:10:42.080And 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.
01:10:51.080Well, what I say is attention is a moral act, but I could say intention is a moral act as well.
01:11:07.620Well, and it's a moral act, because I think there's a technical reason for that.
01:11:12.920It'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.
01:11:27.560So, 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.
01:11:38.340So, 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.
01:11:50.240And so, that means the fact itself, the facts themselves make themselves manifest within the confines of a hierarchy of value.
01:12:00.560And 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.
01:12:10.820So, you don't start your scientific paper looking at the molecular functions of cancer with a description of why we should eradicate cancer.
01:12:19.260That's a given, but it's the given that structures your attention to begin with, and it's part of a moral enterprise.
01:12:25.920So, 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.
01:12:33.980And that seemed to be what you were talking about when you talked about attention as a moral act.
01:12:38.340So, I'd like you to elaborate on that.
01:13:07.280And the much cliched concept and probably misunderstood concept of mindfulness at least does prioritize not constantly seeking to verbalize, to judge,
01:13:22.180but actually just to be present for the first time.
01:13:24.800And, you know, the word representation.
01:13:27.620Do you think that that's an allowance for the implicit moral order to speak for itself rather than the imposition?
01:14:43.620And, 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.
01:14:54.620But its name in Norse, tell us, means the sloping rock.
01:15:00.860What 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.
01:15:13.160So, that was what that mountain was for them.
01:15:17.160But the Picts had been there for 1,000 years before that.
01:15:20.400And for them, they built their houses in the shelter of it.
01:15:23.360For them, it was their shelter and the home of the gods.
01:15:26.260And then in the 18th century, people came there with their sketchbooks because there's a beautiful, many-colored, many-textured form to paint.
01:15:35.080And then in the 19th century, geologists came there because it happens to be a spectacular example of columnar basalt formation.
01:15:43.760And to a speculator, therefore, it's dollars.
01:15:46.820And to a physicist, it's 99.99% empty space.
01:15:50.860And we don't know what the other 0.01% is.
01:15:53.420I just say that because which of these is the real mountain?
01:15:56.960Because we're obsessed with what is real.
01:15:58.760The 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.
01:16:07.460You go to it as a something, you see that something.
01:16:09.760And so we should all be questioning what we take to be the obvious all the time.
01:16:15.060And that should be the feature of an education to teach us the question.
01:16:19.660Because if not, we don't exercise morality.
01:16:23.240We reduce things to the simple way that are useful to us.
01:16:31.880And 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.
01:17:03.900I 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.
01:17:16.620So we have a crime-ridden population who have high levels of mental illness.
01:17:22.100And, of course, it's not all just due to the surroundings, the architecture and so on.
01:17:25.940But that's part of it because that also expresses an attitude which is present in the whole of the society.
01:17:31.920But it's also a moral act in another way that we should, as I say, be testing our perceptions against other possibilities.
01:17:42.140We should have an open mind about things.
01:17:44.340And 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.
01:17:57.640It opens to a possibility where the left hemisphere closes to a certainty.
01:18:01.920And 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.
01:18:21.780And instead we substitute stuff for me.
01:18:25.040And the more I can get and the richer I can become, the better I've succeeded in life.
01:18:30.900So, 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.
01:18:43.660So, it's actually training in a form of attention.
01:18:50.280So, 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.
01:19:04.760He says, you should love God with all your heart and your soul, and you should treat other people as if they're you, essentially.
01:19:17.700And 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?
01:19:39.380And it is viewed as a relational element.
01:19:41.480And so, that, that, what, so that the question, of course, emerges, what is it that's properly put in the highest place?
01:19:51.080And, and the Old Testament hypothesis is, well, it's an ultimate unity.
01:19:57.220And it's a unity that can be characterized in a multitude of ways, like the mountain that you described, right?
01:20:02.680So, for example, in the story of Abraham, God is presented as the voice that calls the unwilling to adventure, right?
01:20:12.400And, and, and, but more than that, it's very, it's fast, it's a fascinating thing to see.
01:20:16.360So, that's the first part, which is a very interesting equation, right?
01:20:19.360Which 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?
01:20:32.800And 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.
01:20:41.240So, it's that spiraling motion up, upward.
01:20:44.160But then, there's more, because, and this all is offered in the first paragraph of the opening of the story of Abraham.
01:20:49.680So, what God says to Abraham is, get out of your tent.
01:20:54.360It's time to leave your kin and your, and your comfort and to go out into the terrible world.
01:20:59.200And, 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.
01:21:12.500Then, and this is what's on offer, you'll be a blessing to yourself.
01:21:16.680Your name will resound among other men.
01:21:18.940You'll establish a nation and you'll be a blessing to everyone else.
01:21:22.680And 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.
01:21:36.640But that will unfold in a manner that produces this harmonious balance.
01:21:40.940It won't just be about you and it won't just be about other people.
01:21:44.380It'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.
01:21:54.360And then that's presented as isomorphic as the call of that spirit of development.
01:21:59.420So that's a, now the reason I brought that up is because we talked about the relationship between attention and the moral act.
01:22:06.480And if you, the question is to some degree, how do you get your attention in order?
01:22:13.800And the answer to that is something like, it's not the instrumental utilization of what's proximal for the purposes of narrow self-interest.
01:22:26.320You're aiming at something that's much more akin to the harmonious balance that you talked about and to this multiplicity of vision, right?
01:22:35.800And 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.
01:23:52.020There 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.
01:24:09.560And if you understand that attention is a moral act, which is a hell of a thing to say, right?
01:24:16.440And 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?
01:24:25.340And that's a very terrifying thing to understand.
01:24:27.380Because 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?
01:24:57.240I 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.
01:25:10.920Well, 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?
01:25:21.980Because 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,
01:25:32.700but 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.
01:25:41.340That's the problem, is that on its own, it doesn't understand what to do or where to go.
01:25:46.200It is instructed, if you like, in that by paying attention to what the right hemisphere is able to tell it.
01:25:53.140If it was a left hemisphere that habitually rendered itself opaque to the right, is it a worse tyrant in the aftermath of brain damage?
01:26:03.960I'm not sure that specific question has been addressed.
01:26:06.860Right, right, that's what I was wondering.
01:26:08.220Well, that's a very sophisticated question.
01:26:09.960But it would be odd if it were not the case.
01:27:06.300And 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
01:27:22.820and 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.
01:27:37.540And 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,
01:27:49.440he had to say that it's because men have forgotten God.
01:27:53.840I mean, that sounds a simple answer, but actually, it's a very deep one.
01:27:58.220And 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,
01:28:10.120although I incline enormously to, and I'm spoken to enormously deeply by the mythos of Christianity.
01:28:17.620It's extraordinary, the meaning of this story and the beauty of what it has created.
01:28:23.940And how do you align that with your studies of the relationship between the hemispheres, do you think?
01:28:29.900What's the relationship between those two things?
01:28:33.760Well, it would be a simplification to say that the left hemisphere doesn't contribute to what we call the spiritual,
01:28:41.420but it does so to things that I think are not necessarily the best part of a spiritual life by...
01:30:17.280So 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,
01:30:26.100namely the beauty, the goodness, and the truth of a certain dedication of our lives to something higher than ourselves.
01:30:34.700Without that, I think we're going to be lost.
01:30:36.860I think those things that you just described, that beauty, goodness, and truth, there's other virtues that you could put in that bin.
01:30:43.080There's something like the spirit of calling.
01:32:49.820It's not just a job that you get a pay packet for.
01:32:53.300And it's not just to carry out procedures laid down by the government.
01:32:57.260You need people who are both doctors and teachers and, you know, many other things too.
01:33:03.500But 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.
01:34:30.700But, 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.
01:34:46.960But the flow I'm talking about is that we really need to get back to seeing everything as in process.
01:34:52.940I mean, even the mountain behind my house is in process.
01:34:56.400It's actually a wave that's frozen, and it will carry on moving until eventually it crushes my house.
01:36:59.360And, 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.
01:37:06.140You know, Beckham is asked, how did he do this?
01:37:08.020He said, I don't know, I'm a footballer.
01:39:04.040It'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.
01:39:15.960So, 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.
01:39:37.960Well, look, one of the things is obviously psychiatrists work with people who are likely to harm themselves or kill themselves.
01:39:44.320And so, everybody has to fill out a risk assessment form, you see.
01:39:49.100And there's now evidence that shows that these risk assessment forms are perfectly useless.
01:39:53.460And 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.
01:41:03.740So, I'm gradually coming back to a more fulfilled life and fulfilling life.
01:41:14.960What I'm working on is I have an idea of finally writing a shorter book, which I think would reach more people.
01:41:22.440And 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.
01:41:34.420People 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.
01:41:40.780And so, I got a contract with Penguin Random House to do that.
01:41:44.280And after I'd been trying to do it a little while, I thought, I don't like doing this.
01:42:05.400So, 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.
01:42:13.600And that's, of course, what I tried to do in that book.
01:42:35.980And 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.
01:42:44.960You know, would it really be a lot better if it were half the length?
01:42:52.740And 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.
01:43:59.260And the thing that was quoted to me was apparently, and it may have general truth,
01:44:03.660that for every thousand words over a certain level, the sales will be predicted to be lower.
01:44:10.660But this hasn't happened with this book.
01:44:13.280I haven't been able to keep up with constantly publishing it.
01:44:16.820I mean, it's published by Perspectiva Press.
01:44:19.980I'm, I think, a board member of Perspectiva.
01:44:22.880It'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.
01:44:35.900And so, I think, see, people have been starved of it for so long.
01:44:40.320Because 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?
01:45:04.660But 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.
01:45:40.420You 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.
01:46:09.340But people like the challenge of something that's meaty, not just a soundbite.
01:46:13.900Yeah, well, it's also an accomplishment to work your way through it.
01:46:16.400And, you know, Kierkegaard, I read a great piece from Kierkegaard years ago.
01:46:20.840I used to teach it to my students all the time in the personality course.
01:46:23.840And he talked about his absolute lack of utility in terms of ever making anything easier and more efficient.
01:46:29.960He thought that instead he'd take the opposite tack and make things more difficult and challenging.
01:46:34.540Because 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.
01:46:41.040And I've been in constant discussion with people I've talked to within the Catholic Church, particularly with regard to that.
01:46:48.960It's like, well, why don't we have any people coming?
01:46:51.160Well, it's because you've made everything far too welcoming and easy.
01:48:22.680And for everybody watching and listening today, your attention and time is always much appreciated.
01:48:28.520And I'm going to continue to talk to Dr. McGill-Chris for half an hour on the Daily Wire side.
01:48:33.560We'll speak, I think, more autobiographically in that half an hour interview, which is generally the theme.
01:48:39.880And so you're welcome to join us there.
01:48:41.600And 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.
01:48:51.660And they've been a pleasure to work with and made all of these episodes more professional and more compelling.
01:49:00.640And thank you very much to the film crew today for helping out and making sure this could proceed.