436. What Your Left Brain Won’t Tell Your Right Brain | Dr. Iain McGilchrist
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Hello, everyone. I had the opportunity today to meet in person with Dr. Ian McGilchrist. I've spoken with Dr. McGilchrist a couple of times, a couple of times in person and also on my podcast by Zoom. And

We're here in Georgia today, and we happen to be in the same place at the same time, so we thought we'd sit down and conduct a lengthy investigation into the similarities in our thought and the differences and to see where we could get. And that's what we're inviting you to partake in. I wanted to talk to

Dr. Miguel Cris, because we share an interest in neuropsychology, particularly in hemispheric specialization. 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

and holistic in some sense, right? Hemisphere, I'm very interested in how that maps onto conceptualizations of the Luciferian intellect, which are pervasive in mythology. That's one of the things we discuss. We discuss also the surprising relationship between attention and morality, because Dr. Midgill-Christ believes, as I do, and I think this is more than a belief. I actually think it's an established fact that attention is

is a valuing process. 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. That we see the world through a structure of values, and we attend to those things that we value. 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, and that's a very interesting and terrifying thing to understand. So we talk about all that, and so welcome to the discussion.

Dr. McGilchrist, you spent a lot of time thinking about hemispheric specialization, and that's an understatement. 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. And Richard Dawkins said something very interesting about biological organisms. He said they have to be a model of the environment in order to function in the environment. Sure. Well,

we have a, there's a duality of hemispheric specialization, and that implies a kind of ontological duality, essentially. And so, let's start with what you make of that. 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. Yeah, yeah. Well, the first thing I'd say is about the word duality, which suggests, in the way we often use it, a kind of duality.

And that's not what I'm talking about. And people say, oh, you're creating a duality. But I'm not creating a duality. Nature has given us a duality. It's making sense of what it is for. And it's about, as so many things are, about both division and union. It's about connection and distinction. So it's not an absolute thing, and it's also importantly important

mediated by the corpus callosum in human beings. The two hemispheres are connected by this body of fibers at the base of the brain, of course, called the corpus callosum. And this is a mammalian invention. That's fascinating in itself because all the neural networks we know that led up to the mammalian brain have this bi-hemispherical, at least separated or distinguished network. But there's only this band of fibers when you get to mammals,

So birds, for example, have no corpus callosum. And so that's intriguing in itself. It's not like somehow the thing is getting...

more separated. In fact, it's getting slightly less separate. But here's the kicker. Much of the purpose of the corpus callosum is to stop the other hemisphere interfering. Now, that's one of the things you ask why I got interested. When I learned that in medical school, I thought that's fascinating for a start. Also, I then discovered that the corpus callosum is, funnily enough, not keeping up in size with the expansion of our brains.

So it's not true that somehow we're trying to weld these things together more. We need just enough connection to pass essential information between the hemispheres and enough connection to enable them to...

inhibit the contralateral hemisphere. Yeah, well, it's easy to fall prey to the delusion that more connection is better. Absolutely. No, and this is actually a problem that we're facing as we wire ourselves together on the net. Yeah. Because the problem is, is that

You can communicate what's necessary when you're all wired together, but you can really communicate what isn't necessary incredibly quickly as well. I know. Right. So you have the problem of the signal being subsumed by the noise. Exactly. Right, right. And I first came across this when I was working at Johns Hopkins in the early 90s doing neuroimaging on asymmetry in the brain.

And the head of the department, the great guy, came in and said, you know, the thing is we need to be communicating more. And having arrived there from England, I felt that I was being flooded with unnecessary information. Right, right. And I thought, no, actually, we need to be communicating less, which is an odd thing for me to say because one of my war cries, if you like, is that we've become –

Everybody's in a silo and we have no respect for and no actual candidates for candidates

seeing the overall picture. But if we don't see the overall picture, it's no good having brilliant specialists in a pit somewhere separate from other people. So we do need to draw things together. But once again, it's not all or nothing. It's this question of how you filter it so that it makes sense. And indeed, on the word filter, I take the view that the brain is, in fact, a filter. It doesn't emit anything.

consciousness and nobody could ever suggest, nobody's got anywhere near suggesting how the brain can evade it. I don't think it exactly transmits it, but I think it permits it and also therefore filters what it finds. And that process of negational filtering is part of creativity, isn't it? You know, when Michelangelo made a statue of

David. He didn't make an arm and then a leg and so on. He just had a block of stone. And for several years, all he did was throw away stone. And then at the end of it, there is this David. So in...

I was reviewing your book again last night in preparation for this podcast, 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, and I really liked L. Conan Goldberg's work. So do I. Yeah, so that's a commonality, and he was very interested in the

antithesis between novelty and routinization. And that seems to be a theme that permeates your work as well. Correct me if I've got any of this wrong, but you're looking at the right hemisphere, at least in part, as something that produces a quick and dirty overall picture, for example, of a new room when you walk into it. You get a gestalt of it, 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. And that brings up all sorts of interesting philosophical questions too, like the distinction between part and a whole. Because every part is made up of smaller parts, right? And so what constitutes... How do you understand the relationship between perception of the part and the whole and hemispheric function? Well, you raise it

a range of things there that differentiate them. First the idea of what is new and what is familiar, and then the idea of the part and the whole. 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. But that is not the case.

When we jump to conclusions, it is the left hemisphere that is quick and dirty. It's always wanting to...

get what it is. Now, I need to know for certain, is it this or is it that? Whereas the right hemisphere is allowing things to be open and saying, well, it could be that, or it could be something else. Now, the problem is that when you want to grab a detail, you can't afford to be hesitant for too long. You've got to kind of pounce on that mouse or pick up that seed or whatever it is. And so the left hemisphere being essentially in service of our ability to grab things and

does tend to simplify very, very much compared with the right hemisphere. So I definitely appreciate the word Gestalt. The right hemisphere is the one that sees Gestalten, that is to say, holes which...

cannot be reduced to their parts without loss. I wish we had a proper word for that in English, but perhaps the word is hole, because holes are of this nature. 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, effectively.

Yeah, so there's always that paradoxical interplay between unity and multiplicity at every level of perception. At every level of perception. And that is another theme of mine, the business of mediating unity and multiplicity, because, of course, we need both. And we need diversification, but we also need to have it so that it doesn't threaten the integration of the whole. 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

of something that is in folded, so the implicit becoming explicit. But at another level that now seems explicit, it's implicit for something else, it's constantly unfolding. That's like the blooming of the flower. It's like the blooming of a flower in that as it opens out,

Something new is coming about, but it's not, and it's a diversification within, but it's not threatening the integrity of the whole. 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. It is that idea of the implicit unfolding. That is exactly right. And I think flowers are the image with which we anchor this truth. Yeah, right, right. So, yes, but it's not so as to be...

the integrity of the whole, but in fact to fulfill it, to fulfill its potential. But the parts and the whole, you wanted me to say something about. Well, let me just say something about newness and familiarity and then about parts and whole. So it's not, I mean, Goldberg is exactly right, and that's something I importantly learned from him. But it's not just in the way that a lot of people would think newness is

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. That's what the left hemisphere does almost immediately. And when we're young, the great thing is we see commonalities. We see a child learning, and it goes

Because it's got that concept. And it's not just a one-off. There are other birds. And they go, doggy. In fact, it's a cat. But they've got the idea there's a four-legged thing. 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. We've lost its power. Yeah, well, you replace the perception with the category. And there's efficiency in that. There's efficiency. But there's a loss of quality. There's a huge loss. And this is what Wordsworth was talking about. Right. 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. It was present. But...

Laterally, he couldn't help thinking, oh yes, it's a picturesque landscape, it's Ullswater or whatever it is. And it's so hard for us now to get beyond what is effectively the map back to the real palpable living presence. So, okay, so let me run something by you. It's a vision that I've been developing or that's been developing within me about how we come to complex knowledge.

So, and it's a vision of hierarchical mapping. And I think it probably maps on the movement from the right hemisphere to the left. So you tell me what you think about this. All right. So the first thing,

So imagine a tree, all right? I imagine the tree with the trunk of fire, and I imagine the tree emerging from the head of God. That was part of this vision, by the way. We'll leave that in the background for the time being. Okay, so up the trunk, there's a disk, and that disk is the realm of patterns in the world.

And so what we perceive are patterns in the world, and we perceive functional patterns as obstacles or tools. It's something like that. But the patterns are in the world. So that's the logos of the cosmos, you might say. And then the second tier is the behavioral mapping of that. So

Of course, if we're walking across hills and dales, the path of our navigation maps the trajectory of the landscape. And as we interact with each other, we modify our behavior to take the reality of other people into account. And as we maneuver together in groups, we adapt ourselves to the reality of the environment that we're traversing. And so the behavioral realm contains a compressed representation of the, let's say, the underlying patterns of

material reality yeah all right so that's that's the that's both adaptation and representation because we can act out things we understand right and and that's the that would be equivalent to procedural memory in the memory literature right like the knowledge of how to ride a bike for example or how to ski i'll come back okay okay what next strata it's imagination so

See, one of the things I was trying to crack is how dreams can contain more information than the dreamer understands. Right? Like a work of fiction can be susceptible to analysis because the work of fiction contains more information even than the fiction author intended. It's partly because it contains representations of behavior. Okay, 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. And so in our dreams, we have images of action and those images of action represent social mores and the world. But then there's a further level of abstraction. That would be the linguistic level.

And what the linguistic level seems to me to do is to compress the imaginative level, which has compressed the behavioral level, which has in some ways compressed the material level. And I'm wondering if that move from novelty to routinization parallels that, right? So it's...

So we first grip things in this sort of Piagetian sense, behaviorally. Then we can imagine that, right? So we've got, I mean, in dramatic, using images per se, and then we further compress that. 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, 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. So, okay, so that's a lot of information. I understand that, but I'm... Ever heard of a data broker? They're the middlemen collecting and selling all those digital footprints you leave online. They can stitch together detailed profiles which include your browsing history, online searches, and location data.

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and is immediately grasped by the right hemisphere, which is better in touch with the unconscious than the left. 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. But I think this is more or less a function of the frontal lobes of both hemispheres, that they enable us to stand back enough to get, as it were, the bird's eye view of the landscape.

But the abstraction, I'd like to separate that out because I think that's what the left hemisphere really specializes in, is abstracting. And when you abstract, you are left really with something like a skeleton. You're left with a diagram, a theory, a map that doesn't have all the embodied knowledge. But the thing is that we imagine, or a lot of people imagine,

they have this image in their mind, the unconscious is a tank somewhere down there underneath, but we're living in this conscious realm. And occasionally things pop up and so on. But actually, the bit of our consciousness

cognitive function of which we are aware is less than half a percent and it's been estimated at 99.44% of cognition is we're unaware of. Of course the specificity of that is only amusing to me but then it drives home the point that most of everything we know is

is extraordinarily fertile in a way that our abstracted thinking can't be. Because it's always got to simplify. It's always got to state this in preference to that. Whereas in the unconscious realm, nothing has to be sacrificed in that way because things are drawn together. And I believe our intuitions are much richer than our reasoning on the basis of them.

So we need to reason on the basis of them. We need to validate them or not, perfectly correct. 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. But they're not. They fulfill one another, importantly, you know. 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. And it's a very delusional one. It's encouraging people to disattend to something incredibly important. Now, of course, the intuition can be wrong, but so can just a line of reasoning lead you to the wrong place. So the other thing that struck me when I was reviewing your book last night was something like

You talked about the left hemisphere's proclivity to fabricate. 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 rules?

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? And so there's obvious utility in that if the principles are correct. But there's very little difference between that and a delusion if the first principles are incorrect. Absolutely. Right. And so that's really at the basis of a condition like paranoid schizophrenia. Because they'll have a set of principles and they can endlessly spin off explanatory theories and they're credible.

but they're wrong. They're wrong. Yeah, seriously wrong. Which illuminates perfectly, you did my work for me there, in unpacking how reason can lead you to the wrong place. Because as Chesterton said, a madman is not somebody who's lost his reason. He's lost everything but his reason. Right, right, right. That's especially true for a condition like paranoid schizophrenia. It is, it is, absolutely. And Eugène 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. 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 hypo-functioning right hemisphere. And so, yes,

The business was... Hypo or malfunctioning. Sorry? Hypo or malfunctioning.

Both. Both. Okay. Fine. 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. It's more interested in internal consistency.

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. 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. 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. You need to be allowed to accept new information, and it's the right hemisphere that's far, far better at that. So I read some analysis of network function that says

describe the dichotomy between the left and the right hemisphere as something like the paradox between consistency and comprehensiveness. Those are two, right, right. So the left hemisphere is very much concerned with internal consistency. Internal consistency of a model. Well, and it's interesting to see that so that confabulation is over-reasoning from a set of

finite finite principles that are erroneous let's say yes yes right and there's very interesting overlap between that and something like ideological reduction and totalitarian certainty that certainly is right right right well so so let's let's let's let's take an example of that you tell me what you think about this okay so well i've been trying to get down to the bottom of of of the

algorithms that drive the culture war. So imagine this. 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. Cain is a victim in his own eyes, and he becomes very bitter and resentful about it. And

I think that's actually the story that underlies Marxism. And so it's an algorithmic story, and the algorithm is something like there's a dimension of comparison

there's on that dimension of comparison, there's those who have and those who do not have. And so that's a hyper simplification to begin with. 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. So it's a victim victimizer narrative. Okay. So now there's real algorithmic advantages to that theory because to some degree, there's some truth in it because some people who have took it,

And every dimension of comparison where there's a differentiation in, let's say, ownership or privilege, can be corrupted by power. And so if you have that algorithm, you can explain a lot with it. And it has another advantage, which is what would you say is an additional benefit of the algorithm, which is once you've decided that you can construe every social relationship as an oppressor-oppressed story,

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. But there's another advantage too, which is that all you have to do is identify with those who are oppressed and your moral. 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. Yes.

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. It radically simplifies. 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

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Right. So, experience is at an all-time low in terms of its value. We just tend 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.

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 overregulate. 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. And for heaven's sake, life is so complicated. And in the third part of The Matter With Things,

Can I talk about the structure of the matter? Yes, absolutely. Yeah, yeah. So this was the book that came out in November 21, my latest work, and I'm sure my last long book. And in it, I wanted to use hemisphere theory to talk about

what it is that we can trust. What can we actually know to any degree to be true? 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. Otherwise, if we didn't, all of us believe that, there would be no reason for saying or doing anything. Everything would be chaos. Everything would be chaos. So we all implicitly... There has to be a hierarchy. There has to be a hierarchy. So I just wanted to

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. 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? And since neuroscience,

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. It's demonstrated every day by accidents of nature, tumors,

injuries, and so forth. 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. I mean, go do your homework. I've been doing it for 30 years. And one of the things I wanted to do in the book was demonstrate the extent of what we know about this. And I think there's about 6,000 references to the literature.

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. 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.

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, 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. 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.

So the left hemisphere apprehends, the right hemisphere comprehends. And so I look at the various portals that I would say through which we get information about the world, attention primarily, which is so much more important than people think. I mean, it is 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.

You develop habits of thought that limit you to seeing only certain aspects of reality through the way in which you attend. So I call attention a moral act, yeah, because it both creates the world and creates you. 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. 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. 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. It is veridical where the left is not. The left is unreliable. And this is, of course, one of the...

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. It's not. It's highly emotional. Anger of all emotions lateralizes most strongly to the left hemisphere. And it is the characteristic. Dismissal...

Self-belief, contempt, anger. Willful blindness. Willful blindness, of course, because that comes into this business we were talking about of confabulation, of turning, when you don't know something, you make up something that fits in with your theory. And you disattend to things that you don't want to know. So that's really in...

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.

And people say, "How do you know that?" Because you've only got your left and right hemisphere to go on. But the way I would put it is this: if you followed what the left hemisphere tells you, you'd be caught out by reality all the time. Whereas if you followed what the right hemisphere tells us, you'd largely not find yourself caught out by the experience of living. So it's a better guide.

Then I say, okay, 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 and those that are more congruent with the right hemisphere's way of thinking. And up till now, all we've been able to do is say, well, some philosophers say this and some philosophers say that.

take your pick. But I don't think that's right. 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. But a lot of, and has a

The advantage of bringing their own genes together. The advantage of bringing them together, which the right hemisphere will do. 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. The right hemisphere is inclusive. The left hemisphere is exclusive. And so it believes in an either-or world, but it is as much a both-and world, and

And we need both of these types of thinking. As I sometimes say, we don't need either, either, or, or, both, and. We need both either, or, and, both, and thinking. And the right hemisphere is able to do this. So I'll do the second part, which is epistemology, very, very quickly. So I say, what are the sort of things in which people would place their confidence for finding some truth? I think most people would say science. I think most people would say reason.

I think some people would say intuition, but increasingly few. And some would say imagination, although most people nowadays no longer understand what is meant by imagination. They think it's fancy, but it isn't. So I look at the claims of each one of these to have something to do with truth. And truth itself is a concept that can be seen either from a left hemisphere or right hemisphere point of view. What I mean by that is the left hemisphere is used to transmitting

tracking something and getting it. So it imagines truth is at the end of a path that has a sequence of steps. And if you take these in the right order, you will end up with truth. Whereas the right hemisphere sees that true actually comes from a root which means faithful. It means being faithful to what you experience.

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, the resonance between the attending consciousness and whatever it is that is external to it.

or appears to be external to it. 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, and each on its own is not a sufficient guide. 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

in which science simply can't answer questions. I mean, that's sort of criticism of science. I find myself defending science all the time against people who want to turn it into a free-for-all. You know, they want to demonize science if it doesn't fit with their narrative of what truth is. And that is where science ends, you know. And there are lots of important questions, and you and I would immediately think of the realm of the spirit, and not even the spirit

the conventionally spiritual in the sense of what we associate with religious life, but even love. 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. And yet, according to science, it's not real. But, excuse me, love is probably the realest thing that we ever experience. So, overall, I say we need all of these. And then, in the part three of the book, it's

What is that? And I begin with the coincidence of opposites. Now, when you consider that we've been talking about making things cohere and that we exclude things that don't fit,

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. 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.

So you think freedom is good, and it is. You increase that freedom and you get anarchy. And what happens in anarchy, well, not only do a lot of people get hurt and killed, but the response is tyranny. So, I mean, it's just one very obvious example. In fact, all opposites work like this. That's the serpent that eats its own tail.

So the first chapter is on the coincidence of opposites and how important this perception is. And nowadays we don't see this. We think that if something is good, just more and more of it is good and whatever is excluded by it must be bad. 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. And we exclude from possibility that there might be good in some of the things that we've demonized.

So, you know, this whole idea of rationalizing everything down and creating... Is that a vision of idealist harmony? Is what I'm thinking of it. Well, you see, the word idealism worries me slightly, depending on, of course, what you mean.

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Well, you were talking, 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. I was thinking about that in terms of musical harmony, because I think music portrays precisely that. It does. Okay, okay. That's what I was trying to clarify. And it's Heraclitus' tension that's in the bow string, or in the string of the lyre. And if there isn't tension, a pulling in opposite directions,

The left hemisphere thinks that's a waste of energy. Two things pulling opposite, just stop pulling. But then the string goes slack and no music and no arrow. So we need that tension all the time between the opposites, not alternating between them, but holding them together. 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? Is it this or is it that? And no

No wise person can answer that question for the left hemisphere. And then I go on to talk about the one and the many, which is very, very important. And again, Heraclitus says, "It is wise, listening not to me but to the Logos, to agree that all is one." But because of the way the Greek is structured, it can also mean one is everything.

And that's lovely. And then the next chapter is on flow because I find that this is actually, I never anticipated this. 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. And one of them was the importance of flow, the perception that everything flows is not trivial.

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. But, you know, everything is modeled on the machine. 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. And one or two go back longer.

Nothing is mechanical in that sense. 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. So machine the externalization of the left hemisphere? Absolutely. Okay, fine. And I would say AI is the final... Frontier. Yeah, the final triumph of the left hemisphere. Well, hopefully not the final one. Well, that's it. I guess we're going to find out. We're going to find out. Okay. 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. And it stultifies imagination, it gets in the way of creativity, it slows us down, it's hugely costly, and it vilifies all kinds of people who don't fit into the slots, the categories that it's developed.

Anyway, and then I go on and look at, you know, time, 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. 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 same. Well, it's hard to write a scientific paper without a purpose.

Yes, and no one ever talks about that. It's like, okay, there's no purpose. It's, well, you had a purpose when you wrote the paper. I'm trying to think who it was who said it's amusing watching a science demonstrate purposefully that there is no purpose. Yes, right, right, right. But I think it's very, very important, and I think increasingly that values...

are the thing we should be thinking about. I don't think they're things that we make up to comfort ourselves. I don't think we paint them on the walls of our cell to cheer us up without any contact with reality. No, I believe they are places in which we contact reality. And I'd even go so far as to say, but this would take us a while to unpack, but might be worth going there, is I believe that life...

Why is the life at all? It's very costly and it kicks against entropy. And why did it arise? 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. Life brings with it precariousness.

expense of energy and so forth. And indeed, as it becomes suffering, suffering as it complicates. So I don't know whether actinobacteria at the base of the ocean actually suffer. They may do, but it's,

Single examples of them can live to half a million years. So being able, after all this evolution, to live 70 years is hardly a triumph for survival. It's about something else, which is the ability to respond to a cosmos that is in itself beautiful, good, and true. I mean, to understand what one means by that would take us a while. That's why I was building that hierarchical tree, by the way, for exactly that purpose. That's fine. I mean, the hierarchy I prefer.

is Max Scheler's hierarchy of values. Well, I would definitely want to delve into that as well, because you talked about two things, well, a number of things that I want to bring up. Intention as moral act is something I definitely want to concentrate on. Is there more that you want to add to the compression of the book?

Well, there's always more I could, of course, but I've sketched it out, really. 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. We've looked at the philosophy and seen where it can lead us. Now use that information to examine the cosmos. And what did we find? At the very start of it, we find the coincidence of opposites.

Yin and yang and so on. This is in every other culture than our own. 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. You know, when the Israelites crossed the desert, they're led by a pillar of fire and a pillar of cloud.

Right, right. It's the coincidence of opposites. That's right. I thought of that. Oh, yes. It's a major league revelation now. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, yeah. That's brilliant. 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. There's an interplay, right? And that is very much similar to the Taoist idea of yin and yang. I think they're the same idea, actually. I think so, too. So that's portrayed as the spirit of God himself that guides the Israelites through the desert. Are you interested in the Kabbalah?

Not only peripherally, because I don't know much about it. So why did you ask? 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 of key ideas in the Kabbalah. And they were like a, you know, blinding light. They really were. I thought, good heavens, this is so deep and true. And, of course, ultimately it's not true.

irreconcilable with Christianity. But it has an emphasis on certain aspects, including the balancing of opposites. That is very... 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...

God is presented continually as the interplay between calling and conscience. 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. And conscience looks to me something like the voice of negative emotion.

So you can imagine that there's an instinctual force that pulls you forward, right? That's the manifestation of the burning bush, by the way. That's what that represents, right? This thing that calls you and then speaks more deeply as you investigate it. And then conscience is also highlighted multiple times in the Old Testament, especially with the prophet Elijah, right? Because Elijah is the prophet who replaces the God that's in the natural world, essentially, with the voice of conscience within. Yeah.

Right. And so then there's an interplay there constantly in the Old Testament between that, what calls you forward and what keeps you on the straight and narrow path. Yes. So, and it's a play. And in Kabbalah, there is a structure in which there are two sides, as it were. And one is chesed, which is a creative, constantly outgoing and

if you like, right hemisphere orientated. But that's not a very good, actually, parallel. But then there's Guevara, which is this constraining element. And we need them both. 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. But it's not at all. It's not only much more

in touch with deeper emotions rather than superficial social emotions.

But it is also the locus of emotional control comes from the right hemisphere, not from the left. So these parallels can be misleading. Right, right, right. All dichotomies are not necessarily the same dichotomy. They are not. They are not. Very important. Okay, so let me ask you. So you lay out the left as reductionist and algorithmic and pessimistic.

often petulant and somewhat totalitarian, and you also associate it with reach and grip. And like, well, so let me offer you something, and you tell me what you think about this, 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. Hmm.

So let me give you an example. You tell me what you think about this. Well, the sin that the snake entices Eve and Adam into in the Garden of Eden is overreach. Right. And there's not a lot of difference between overreach and 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. And resentment. Right, okay, and why, and resentment. Why have you, the snake, why have you been told you can't eat it? Yes, yes, yes. You can eat it. How does that map onto your understanding of the left hemisphere with regard to resentment in particular?

Well, I think it's to do with hubris, really. Yeah, that's equivalent to overreach.

It thinks it's got it all. And hence you see these people who think, oh, we've worked out the answer to everything. We understand its structure and its meaning. And if there's a few things we haven't yet, we will do something. Yeah, those few things are always the annoyance, right? The stumbling blocks. Yeah. But of course, there's a...

There are many more than a few, but because of the constrained view, they only see a few things that they don't know. They don't see everything else outside the blinkers. You know, I love, and it's still so true, William James' remark that our knowledge is a drop and our ignorance is an ocean. I mean, this is true.

And we've stopped seeing this, and we're far too arrogant. A bit of humility would be a good thing. But Lucifer is the expression of pride, of resentment. What was intellectual pride specifically? Intellectual pride. Yeah, resentment, overreach. Resenting this other power. 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 and to deny. And that's part of, you can imagine that. 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. Well, that comes down to the whole point about it being a servant. It's a good servant, but a very poor master. Right, right. Well, that's the intellect in a nutshell. Well, that's what Einstein also said. So, it is the intellect in a nutshell. It is a useful servant, but it should never be the end point. It doesn't have wisdom. Well, it's the worst possible master.

That's the Luciferian story fundamentally. Right. And that seems to me to be exactly right. Yeah. And actually at the end of The Master and His Amnesty,

In the end of the final chapter, I bring in Paradise Lost because it seems to me to be the story of what has happened with the overreach of this intellect. 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. Okay.

Well, I think that's a consequence of the failure of the project, right? Because, well, you mentioned the resentment. And what happens, the resentment emerges in part because the theories fail. 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. And so that's very troublesome because who wants that?

And so it's, you can certainly understand why the resistance develops. You know, it's evidence of failure. It's evidence of failure that invalidates your theory. And so one root failure

to rectifying that is to abandon your theory, 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. Well, yeah, yeah, but it's a bit of a rough interregnum. It's a rough interregnum. Yes, well, that's, yes, yes. And you need faith. 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 and the question then is what guides you in the realm of doubt what it what is there that guides you in the realm of doubt the 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 so if the intellect is the guide you're lost 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. 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 everything. Sarcaic nature. Sarcaic nature. Anachronistic. Yeah. Yeah. So...

Certain kind of unknowing is really, really important step towards wisdom. And so it's very helpful not to be certain. But the left hemisphere cannot live with this. The right hemisphere is perfectly okay with an uncertainty because it realizes that all the time it's calibrating things 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.

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So do you think that that's a shift of vision in some ways? I mean, you talk about hemispheric specialization for different forms of vision. So imagine that your target vanishes and your theory collapses. Well, you could be lost or you could switch to a different kind of attention, right? And that other attention is information gathering. So, you know, the Egyptians, so in the Egyptian cosmology,

They have a god of the state, Osiris. And so he's like the characterization of an administrative theory. That's a reasonable way of thinking about it. And he becomes willfully blind, and he's overthrown by Seth, who's essentially Satan, who's essentially the Luciferian intellect. That's how that story works. And

Seth rules then, rules the kingdom, and the kingdom is destroyed in consequence. And so that's the overthrow of the rightful king by the evil brother of the king. Very, very common motif. It is. Universal, I'd almost say. And it's because theories age and decay, and they're abetted in their age and decay by the willful blindness of their adherents. That's a universal story. Mircea Eliade documented that in multiple, multiple cultures. And so the...

When the state collapses, uncertainty arises. That's Isis in the Egyptian cosmology. So she's the goddess of the underworld, or the unconscious. That's another way of thinking about it. And she makes herself pregnant with the remnants of Osiris after he collapses. And she gives birth to Horus.

Now, Horus is the eye. See, this is the thing about the Egyptians is they didn't worship the intellect. They associated the Luciferian intellect with the force that destroys the blind state, right? They associated their redemptive God with the open eye. And it seems to me that it's something like the preference for information gathering attention.

You know, because if your theory collapses, you can pay attention. But it's a special kind of attention, right? It's the attention that's predicated on humility. Because now you know you don't know, and maybe that's associated with this unknowing that you described. I think so. Okay, so elaborate on that idea of unknowing. You know, I don't know enough about Egyptian mythology, although it's something I've read a little into. Well, it's the eye at the top of the pyramid as well. Well, that's it, you see. And so I think it's a very ambivalent image.

Because one thing that happens, and one day I want to write a book, I've got all the material, I've been gathering it for a lifetime, of paintings and images by psychotic subjects.

And people with schizophrenia tend to paint disembodied eyes, just an eye in the picture or something like that. And I think this represents the tyranny of the intellect that is overlooking everything all the time. Yeah, right. That's like the eye of Sauron in Lord of the Rings. Exactly. Although I've never read it, but I know the idea. Uh-huh.

What was I saying? The eye, you said represents a tyranny. The tyranny of the intellect, which doesn't allow anymore the darkness, the fertile darkness in which...

Something much greater than the intellect that is within us can work, which is largely the unconscious mind. And we have the idea that the unconscious mind is somehow inferior to the conscious mind. But it's not. Not only is it much bigger, but it's also capable of doing many, many things like solving complex mathematical problems and coming to scientific insight. 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 the gestalt. Flashes of intuition, yeah. So in our unconscious minds, we resolve problems, we compromise with things, we fall in love, we appreciate a painting. All these things, they happen to us when we're not necessarily studying them.

And they grow in us. Now, when you put the eye of the intellect over everything, it's almost like that all-seeing eye of the panopticon, you know, this tyrannical idea of an institution in which everything can be seen from a central point. Yeah. And this is very much associated with the Enlightenment, as is the pyramid with the eye, I think. I mean, I...

I'm not an American, so I wouldn't like to hold forth about what it means on your money. But the thing is that both pyramids, actually, but much more disembodied eyes are the kind of things that... Well, that's a dark eye as a substitute for the proper eye, right? Because the totalitarian... So the question is... Not the eye of God, but... Right, right, exactly, exactly, exactly. 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 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. And it has to monitor everything because it can't trust anything. That's the world where we are. It's the substitute of the Eye of the State for the Eye of God. It's something like that. Yes, absolutely. 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. But there is something of the divine in the human spirit, soul, whatever you like to call it, I believe. And I also believe that ultimately, whatever the ground of being is, it is conscious. So in a more ungodly culture, we talk all the time about consciousness. And of course, that's perfectly right.

And there's a distinction there that is full of meaning. But I believe that ultimately consciousness and the divine ground of being cannot be separated because I believe that... What led you to that conclusion? Well, a lot of things, really. One is that I believe that everything is relational. Let me just state that for a start. And that nothing is just a thing on its own. It only is what it is because of all the things that...

its context and with which it is in relation. And that's something the right hemisphere understands, but the left hemisphere takes things out of context, abstracts them, generalizes them, and isolates them and loses their living uniqueness. So let me just say, so I believe that everything is relational.

And I believe that God, the ground of being, ends off, whatever you'd like to call it, is relational. And I think the reason there is a creation is that this, whatever it is, needs something to love. And it needs something to be related to.

Well, that's definitely the insistence in the Old Testament. I know. Because the relationship, the proper relationship between man and God in the Old Testament is covenantal. Yeah. It's a relationship. Exactly. Right, right, right. But love is in any case a relationship. And I would see the covenant as not a legalistic thing, but as a matter of faith. That, you know, we undervalue fidelity in our culture. That if you have...

Another musical term. Yes. If you trust in people, if you believe in them, as we say...

then faithfulness to them is involved in that. I mean, of course, that faith may be betrayed and it may not work, and so... Still your best bet. Still your best bet. But we live in a world in which nothing can be trusted anymore. And therefore, it all has to be specified centrally in some incredibly thin, abstrac schema to which we're all supposed to conform. But in fact, nothing living ever does conform to it. So it's a thoroughly going disaster.

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. In fact, I believe consciousness is throughout the cosmos. In fact, I believe the stuff of the cosmos is consciousness.

I mean, the trouble is I'm saying so many things so fast here because we don't have a lot of time. But people say, "What? Why?" But I mean, I'm not alone in the world. After all, this has been the belief of many of the wisdom traditions of East and West, is that consciousness is the stuff the universe is made of.

And matter is a manifestation of consciousness in a particular way. It is, if you like, a phase of consciousness. And I'm not using phase in the temporal term, but in the sense that physicists say that water has phases, ice.

water vapor in the air. And so people may say, well, matter doesn't look like and behave like consciousness, but excuse me, ice doesn't look like and behave like water. 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, but water is what they all are. 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

and create something ever more beautiful, ever more complex that is within its potential to produce. But it doesn't actually know it in advance. That's the play. I love the fact that you say, and I think you're quoting the Torah, you know, what does a being that's omnipresent and omniscient lack? Limitation. Yeah. And so I think that is why...

we mustn't get, or maybe we should go to the problem of evil, but anyway. So you asked me why do I see God like this? Because

That's Jacob's Ladder, that upward play. I know. 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. And spirals play a very big part in my ontology. So both in physics... Yeah, well, spirals return to the same place except transformed, transformed upward. And therefore, what they do is they combine...

a linear process with a circular process. A circular process is just static. It's just static. A linear process is thin, but a spiraling process that is constantly evolving is the best of both, if you like. And although Eliot said, you know, we arrive back at the place we started from and know it for the first time, I say, not quite. We come back to a place very close to where we started from, but one step higher on. Well, that's what the knowing is. That's what the knowing is. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So, just to finish...

try to unconsciousness 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. So they think distance? No, surely closeness. Resistance? No, surely facility. 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. They don't fall into a toxic fusion. 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 closeness.

and something that will create a degree of permanence. 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. 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.

And so I see matter as not an opposition to consciousness, but as something that is a reciprocal aspect of consciousness. You can't have matter without, and you can't have consciousness without the other. Let me ask you about intention as a moral act. Yeah, because I've been trying to work through the, what would you say, the formal flaw of the empirical presumption.

And so the empirical presumption is something like, we inform ourselves with the facts and we can orient ourselves with the facts. 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. And so you can't orient yourself by the facts because the facts are an infinite chaos. And so you have to prioritize the facts.

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. Well, what I say is attention is a moral act, but I could say intention is a moral act as well. So let's go with attention. I like that better. And that is what I should have noted in the note. Right. Attention is a moral act. Right. Okay. Okay. Okay. Well, and it's a moral act because attention

I think there's a technical reason for that. 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. 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.

At least momentarily. 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.

And so that means the fact itself, the facts themselves make themselves manifest within the confines of a hierarchy of value. It has to be that way. 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. So you don't start your...

scientific paper looking at the molecular functions of cancer with a description of why we should eradicate cancer. That's a given, but it's the given that structures your attention to begin with. And it's part of a moral enterprise. 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 it, from attention itself. And that seemed to be what you were talking about when you talked about attention as a moral act. So I'd like you to elaborate on that and tell me how you understand that.

Yes, I mean first of all, I wouldn't say that we only attend to the things that are our goal at the time. That is a way of attending. But there is another kind of attention one can practice which is not an instrumental hierarchy but is attention to things in themselves, in their own right. And this takes practice.

the much cliched concept and probably misunderstood concept of mindfulness

at least does prioritize not constantly seeking to verbalize, to judge, but actually just to be present for the first time. And, you know, the word representation... Do you think that that's an allowance for the implicit moral order to speak for itself rather than the imposition? Is it something like that? I think that's possibly. I was going to come on to the moral bit, but, yeah, sorry. So...

Where were we? You were talking about the other kind of attention. Yes. So there are different kinds of attention and one can practice them. And some of them are more generous than others. And there's a certain kind of attention which is the attention of a predator, effectively. Yeah. Which is a stare in which you're fixing something because you know what it is you want. But...

Of course, that will enable you more likely than not to achieve that particular target. But you don't know about the 999 other things that it's stopping you from doing and seeing. So the type of attention you pay governs what it is you find.

There's a hell of a statement. But it's very important. Yeah, that's for sure. So the way in which we attend changes what we find, changes, therefore, what we look for in future. Because if that confirms the type of attention, then we think, well, that type of attention works. I'll generalize that type of attention. So if you are the predatory psychopath, then you think, well, that worked. So let's just carry on with that. 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. But its name in Norse, Talasgeir, means the sloping rock. And that tells you something. What it means is that for the Norsemen that came there a thousand 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.

So that was what that mountain was for them. But the Picts had been there for a thousand years before that. And for them, they built their houses in the shelter of it. For them, it was their shelter and the home of the gods. And then in the 18th century, people came there with their sketchbooks because there's a beautiful, many-colored, many-textured form to paint.

And then in the 19th century, geologists came there because it happens to be a spectacular example of columnar basalt formation. And to a speculator, therefore, it's dollars. And to a physicist, it's 99.99% empty space. And we don't know what the other 0.01% is. I just say that because which of these is the real mountain? Because we're obsessed with what is real. The answer is every single one of those is a real mountain.

facet of the mountain that is brought out by the kind of attention that's paid to it. You go to it as a something, you see that something. And so we should all be questioning what we take to be the obvious all the time. And that should be the feature of an education to teach us to question. Because if not, we don't exercise morality. We reduce things to the simple way that are useful to us

Narrowly useful. Narrowly useful, 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. Right. And my God, how impoverished. Narrow use. How impoverished the soul of such a person must be. So in that sense, sorry, you asked about the moral thing. So I just think it is a moral problem.

probably two ways. One is in the sense I've elaborated that it literally changes what's there. We change the world. 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. That's that unidimensional utility. So we have a

we have a crime-ridden population who have high levels of mental illness. And of course, it's not all just due to the surroundings, the architecture and so on. But that's part of it, because that also expresses an attitude which is present in the whole of the society. But it's also a moral act in another way that we should, as I say,

be testing our perceptions against other possibilities. We should have an open mind about things. 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. It finds truth by closing down. But the right hemisphere finds truth by opening up. It does the exact opposite thing. It opens to a possibility where the left hemisphere closes to a certainty. And we've lost, amongst many, many other things that the right hemisphere offers us, the sense of the spiritual world,

True emotional depth, the convivial nature of a society, our fellowship with nature, and our closeness to a spiritual realm. Relationship. All of it relational. And instead we substitute stuff for me. And the more I can get and the richer I can become, the better I've succeeded in life.

So, it looks to me like 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, lecturing about it. So, it's actually training in a form of attention. 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. 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. Relational. Right, it's relational. Yeah, well, both of those are relational, right? Exactly. Both of those. Exactly. And the emphasis there is something like the hypothesis that God,

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. And it is viewed as a relational element. And so that what, so that the question of course emerges here.

What is it that's properly put in the highest place? And the Old Testament hypothesis is, well, it's an ultimate unity. That's the monotheistic hypothesis. And it's a unity that can be characterized in a multitude of ways, like the mountain that you described. So, for example, in the story of Abraham, God is presented as the voice that calls the unwilling to adventure. Right.

Right. But more than that, it's a fascinating thing to see. So that's the first part, which is a very interesting equation, right? 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? 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. So it's that spiraling motion up upward. But then there's more because, and this all is offered in the first paragraph of the opening of the story of Abraham. So what God says to Abraham is, get out of your tent. You've been there 75 years. It's time to leave your kin and your comfort and to go out into the terrible world. 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, then, and this is what's on offer, you'll be a blessing to yourself, your name will resound among other men, you'll establish a nation,

and you'll be a blessing to everyone else. 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, but that will unfold in a manner that produces this harmonious balance. It won't just be about you, and it won't just be about other people. 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. And then that's presented as isomorphic as the call of that spirit of development.

So that's a, now the reason I brought that up is because we talked about the relationship between attention and the moral act. And if you, the question is to some degree, how do you get your attention in order? And the answer to that is something like, it's not the instrumental utilization of what's proximal for attention.

the purposes of narrow self-interest. That's a bad technique. 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? This balanced multiplicity of vision. And it seems to me that

So, and there's other characterizations too that I think are in keeping with the hypothesizing that you're laying forward. So, you talked about intuition. So, the God that makes itself manifest to Noah is the God of intuition, right? Because God speaks to Noah as intuition. So, Noah is presented as a wise man who's oriented himself properly for his time and place. And he gets an intuition that

society has become so unstable that a catastrophe is ensuing. And that's a form of intuition. And that's presented as the same spirit that calls Abraham to adventure. It's the same spirit that punishes the totalitarian certainties of the builders of the Tower of Babel as well, right? You know, they're engineers, say.

the builders of the Tower of Babel and their descendants of Cain. They're resentful technological worshippers who embody the spirit of the Luciferian intellect, right? And they build a totalitarian state. That's what the Tower of Babel is, right? It's a spiraling upward structure dedicated to the wrong pinnacle of attention. It's something like that.

So there's a playoff, 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. And if you understand that attention is a moral act, which is a hell of a thing to say, right? That's a very, very deep statement.

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? And that's a very terrifying thing to understand, 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? So what are you working? Okay, let me see what else have I got here. We talked about pride is overreach. Oh, do you know if there's any research pertaining to individual differences between

in the rigidity of the left hemisphere post-damage? Well, yes, there is. I mean, a lot of it's...

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if you mean, that when they have damage to the right hemisphere, they become more obstinate. 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? Right?

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, 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. That's the problem, is that on its own it doesn't understand what to do or where to go. It is instructed, if you like, in that by paying attention to what the right hemisphere is able to tell it.

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? I'm not sure that specific question has been asked. Right, right. That's what I was wondering. Well, that's a very sophisticated question. But it would be odd if it were not the case. Right. Because, of course, nobody is...

the left hemisphere person or the right hemisphere person simply. There is always an interplay unless there is a hemispherectomy or damage to one hemisphere or the other.

Right, well, and obviously each person's left hemisphere is socialized and trained. Yes. And so it could easily be, it seems to me that a theme that runs through your work is something like, also something like the increased pathologization of the left hemisphere by a certain kind of, let's say, narrowly technical or instrumental training. Right, and so something distorts its balance. Yeah. Yeah.

And the religious enterprise, at least in part, is obviously an attempt to restore something like balance, but it's certainly something like the attempt to restore the proper target of attention. Yeah, that's right. And I think...

I think I'd say, and I'm probably not alone in thinking this, that actually it's no good us solving the problems that we know we face to do with degradation of the natural world 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. And I keep coming back to Thornton Itzin's words that if he had to account for the horrors of the last hundred years of Russian life,

whatever, he had to say that it's because men have forgotten God. I mean, that sounds a simple answer, but actually it's a very deep one, 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, although I incline enormously to and I'm spoken to enormously deeply by the mythos of Christianity. It's extraordinary, the meaning of this story and the beauty of what it has created. And how do you align that with your studies of the relationship between the hemispheres, do you think?

What's the relationship between those two things? Well, it would be a simplification to say that the left hemisphere doesn't contribute to what we call the spiritual. But it does so to things that I think are not necessarily the best part of a spiritual life. It's codification, for example. It's rendering of the spirit into dogma. Yes, and I think it's...

It's envisioning of what we're doing when we are partaking in a spiritual life as a way of subtly securing power. That we'll be the chosen ones and we'll be able to sort everything out because God is on our side. And of course, well, you know more about this Old Testament story than I do. But I'm not certainly saying that any spirit of criticism for Judaism I have heard.

profound respect for Judaism. But I'm just saying, I think that the left hemisphere's contributions to spirituality are not the ones we're most interested in, which are the ability to maintain

a sense of opposites without closing down on something that we already know. Because God is always something that we never completely know. I mean, if you completely knew God, then that's not God that you know. Even Augustine said that. Right. God is that which continually escapes the nets in which it's put. Yes, yes, that's right, yes. And he bluntly said, if you understand God, then it's not God you understand. So,

And that's something the left hemisphere is not happy with. It's not happy when it hasn't got a full grasp of the situation because it's dedicated to control. I mean, that's what it's there for. There's nothing wrong with that as long as it's in the service of something that seems more... As long as it's not put in the highest place. Exactly. 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, namely the beauty, the goodness and the truth of a certain dedication of our lives to...

to something higher than ourselves. Without that, I think we're going to be lost. I think those things that you just described, that beauty, goodness, and truth, there's other virtues that you could put in that bin. There's something like the spirit of calling. Yes. Right? So you could imagine, and this is maybe a way of reconciling in some ways the left and the right hemisphere view. So when Moses encounters the burning bush, something calls to him, and it's something that's specific to him. Yes.

When that happens in each individual's life, it's something specific to them. So whatever interests you is going to make itself manifest in accordance with your character, right? So it's going to be particularized, but you could imagine that there's a spirit that underlies all calling. And you can tell that because once, I mean, you can have a calling that occupies you for your whole life, but you can also have a calling or micro-callings that transmute, right? Something inspires you,

something produces incentive-reward activation. It pulls you forward to the destination, and then the calling transmutes, and then the calling transmutes again. But you could imagine that there's something behind the set of all possible callings that's like the spirit of calling, and that's the thing that should be attended to. If you're going to put something in the proper place,

highest place, it's not going to be the specifics of anything that grips your attention. It's going to be something like the spirit of thought which grips your attention as such. And that's a much more abstract conceptualization. Yes, 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. And so it seamlessly changes. It doesn't wait for a change and then change stepwise.

It is constantly refining itself and other things are speaking to one. That's my experience.

And I think we've degraded many things in life by capitalizing them. 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. And it's not, you know, it's not… A relational calling. It's a relational calling. And it is…

It is a calling to aid other human beings who are suffering. And teaching is a calling. It's not just a job that you get a pay packet for. And it's not just to carry out procedures laid down by the government. You need people who are both doctors and teachers and, you know, many other things too, but those specifically speak to me, and of course clergy, that are not just fulfilling a role in a hierarchy, right?

but are in a way guided by something that is

a great deal of knowledge, but also something spiritual. Well, tell me about that flow. Okay, so let's investigate that for a minute, that notion of flow. I mean, there's the Csikszentmihalyi flow, which is something like immersion in the moment, right? But the flow that you're talking about maybe has something... That's not that. No, you're talking about... Okay. How would you conceptualize the relationship between your notion of flow and play? Never really thought about that one. Um...

I mean, play incidentally needs to be, to a large extent, intuitive, not simply the following of rules. And it's responsive to the demands of the moment, right? It's responsive. In a dancing way. So it's extremely responsive. But, I mean, it's more obvious in things like dance or in music, but it's also there in life. It's in everything that we do, that if we are in...

in sync with or attentive to the flow that is called the Tao or whatever, then things naturally do follow that. I liked your thing that when you meet obstacles everywhere, you might ask yourself, am I really on the right path? Right, right, right. But I mean, Csikszentmihalyi's idea of flow is an important one, which is about being present in the moment, which is...

which is part of the right hemisphere's way of attending and being. But the flow I'm talking about is that we really need to get back to seeing everything as in process. I mean even the mountain behind my house is in process, it's actually a wave that's frozen and it will carry on moving until it eventually crushes my house but I think I'll see it out. But the

It's that that I'm getting at. Because it's a very toxic idea that things are made up of compartmentalized ideas. And getting away from that to seeing the way in which things are flowing. That's a mechanical idea. It's a mechanistic, exactly, idea. And you do see that in schizophrenic delusion, too, right? You absolutely do. Yeah, the delusion of mechanism. That's it. Oh, absolutely.

the delusion of mechanism and the delusion that time is made out of instance. Like now, now, now, now, sometimes they describe it like this and they can't put them together to find the flow anymore. And their movements also become more machine-like. They find it difficult to know how to act naturally. And so, and I believe that is because over-dominance of the left hand is for the expense of the right.

But there's one way in which we can bring together the Chit-Mihai notion of flow with the idea of flow and time. Because time seems to be passing by when you are standing on the border of the stream with a clipboard and a stopwatch, and you can see things moving down it. 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.

And so as far as you're concerned, you are completely in the flow. And if you like, there is no time. 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. There is, of course, time. Time is not abolished by the fact that you don't notice it. You don't notice it because you're in a less... Self-conscious. Less self-conscious. Less self-conscious. Well, that's kind of what I was pointing to with regards to play as well. Yes, yes. So it looks to me like...

possibly you could conceptualize play as concordance with that flow. Yes. It's something like that. It's very dynamic, right? Because if you're playing, you have to be very attentive to what the moment is calling for. Absolutely. 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.

You know, Beckham is asked, how did he do this? He said, I don't know, I'm a footballer. Yeah, yeah, right. And, you know, when that pilot landed his plane on the Hudson River, he was asked how he did it. He said, I don't know, I'm a pilot. And surgeons do this instantaneously. They respond to something, which if they had to think, now, what do I do here? I look up rule number. No, they just do it. And as much as possible, as we get into that process,

we build that realm of the intuitional, the better we are, the more skilled we are. Right, right. Well, that's what, yeah. And of course, there's an attack on skill now, so that skilled professionals are made to follow algorithms. Yeah. And the work of- That's part of that all-seeing eye of the state. Yes, yes. That's right, we have to document every move you make, because otherwise you can't be trusted. That's it. But in the learning of a skill,

at the early stages having

an algorithm to follow is actually beneficial. Right, right. But when you get to the last couple of stages approaching expertise, it becomes an impediment. The obstacle, yes, yes, right. Something that needs to be sacrificed. And so what we do in our society is make absolutely sure that we can never have excellent people anymore. We can only have semi-meronic people who follow rule books. We have ruling out excellence and imposing mediocrity because everything is

everything militates against excellence now. That instrumental use of attention is for something like immediate grip. Yes. That's fair, yeah. And you might say, well, what's wrong with immediate grip? And the answer is it doesn't take everything into account. No, it doesn't. Right, right. And you might be reaching out for the wrong thing or overreaching. Yes, and also the gripping may not be exactly what's needed. So the art of things like Tai Chi and so on and meditation

Jiu-jitsu is like that. Well, jiu-jitsu and so on. It's about sometimes moving with something rather than grasping or holding, but actually learning how to move in an instinctual way that uses the flow rather than tries to oppose it. 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. Yes, right. But you enforce mediocrity. You enforce mediocrity and...

You do not stop them being disasters. Absolutely not. Yeah, but you get planned disasters. You get algorithmically predictable disasters. One of the things is, obviously, psychiatrists work with people who are likely to harm themselves or kill themselves. And so everybody has to fill out a risk assessment form, you see. And there's now evidence that shows that these risk assessment forms are perfectly useless now.

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.

And indeed... Or you can also give them all sorts of ideas with your risk assessment. You can, you can. Although I don't think that's so bad. But I think that the feeling that you're not really attending to them, that busy feeling in your form, is not in itself good. And, you know, my... Especially if they're feeling a little alienated, for example. Exactly. So my...

risk assessment instrument was an in fact untrained nurse who had 40 years of experience on the ward and she just said I don't like the look of Mrs. Sensei and I just there's something about her that I'm concerned about and if you were intelligent you took that seriously so what are you working on now

Well, I'm working on myself. How's that going? Disaster. I got very tired writing The Matter With Things. The last three years particularly were completely manic and I somewhat burnt out. So I'm gradually coming back to a more fulfilled life and fulfilling life. Yeah.

What I'm working on is I have an idea of finally writing a shorter book, which I think would reach more people. 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 Ambassadory. People said, this is a great book, The Master and His Ambassadory, but you need to write something about half the length that will be more accessible. And so I got a contract with Penguin Random House to do that.

And after I'd been trying to do it a little while, I thought, "I don't like doing this. This is not what I want to do at all. What's in it for me to say crudely things that I'd said more subtly at length?"

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. Sounds like a left hemisphere problem. It's a left hemisphere problem. 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.

And that's, of course, what I tried to do in that book. And he said, that's fine. We trust our authors. Go away and do it. I said, it'd be longer. He said, that's all right, too. And then I turned up with a manuscript that was four times the length of the contracted book.

And he didn't throw a fit, but he didn't say anything for five months. And then he said, yeah, we want to publish it, it's great, but it's got to be half the length. 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. Would it really be a lot better if it were half the length? Not one of them said it would be. They said you'd lose so much because it's so dense, there's so much in it.

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. How's it done? It's done very well. And how do you account for that? I think people are hungry for something that really speaks to them. Right, right. So they wanted length and difficulty. They do, in a way. Yes, I think that's right. There's so many problems with the...

the so-called elite, mainly left-wing intellectuals, frankly, they're patronizing and they think that people are stupid. And, you know, I have a colleague who makes wonderful films. And shallow, stupid and shallow. Shallow. And I have a colleague who makes wonderful films, David Malone, and I've been in two of them.

and he makes them independently. And then the BBC go, yeah, okay, well, he'd been to the BBC earlier. No, no, they won't get it. He makes the film, then they want it. And every time it's the same. They never seem to learn. Of course, they're stuck in set in that left-handed film where, no, the rules are we don't... And the thing that was quoted to me was apparently, and it may have general truth, that for every...

every thousand words over a certain level, the sales will be predicted to be lower. Mm-hmm.

But this hasn't happened with this book. I haven't been able to keep up with constantly publishing it. I mean, it's published by Perspectiva Press. I'm, I think, a board member of Perspectiva. 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 are meaty intellectually. And so...

I think, you see, people have been starved of it for so long. Because every time these films by David go out, they get five-star reviews in the papers. And people say, why can't we have more of this? Well, he can tell you why. Because idiots run the kind of gatekeeping of these things. Mm-hmm.

We need people to relax about that. Stop trying to over control. They literally have algorithms. Oh, we had something on spirituality there. We can't have another one until, you know, whatever. Well, I don't know about that. 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. I want to keep people with me. Yeah, well, I think that's part of what accounts for the popularity too, right? I think so. Yeah, it's an exploration rather than an insistence. It's not an insistence. And, you know, that's terribly important. 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 i said relax you know because one thing that you learn as a as a doctor and especially as a psychiatrist and just by living is there are plenty of people that you can never you can never get to see certain things and that's their problem actually i mean you you're not put on the world to get everyone to see things you you do what you can and i'm doing just what i

can and I'm thoroughly delighted by the very warm response and the sales you know yeah it's quite the miracle all right yeah it is actually yeah definitely it is the big book but people like the challenge of something that's meaty not just a soundbite yeah well it's also an accomplishment to work your way through it and you know Kierkegaard I read a great piece from Kierkegaard years ago I used to

teach it to my students all the time in the personality course and talked about his absolute lack of utility in terms of ever making anything easier and more efficient he thought that instead he'd take the opposite tack and make things more difficult and challenging 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 and i've been in constant discussion with uh

with people I've talked to within the Catholic Church, particularly with regard to the out of sleep. Well, why don't we have any people coming? Well, it's because you've made everything far too welcoming and easy. Yes, facile. And the problem is this. They go, oh, well, they won't really get it, you know. So we must do away with the Latin mass. We must do away with ritual. We must do away with the core beliefs we have and say, well, basically anything goes and make it more like being at home in the sitting room. But

The reason you go to church is not to be at home in the sitting room. You can do that by doing nothing. But they want to be introduced to something that speaks of the transcendent. And now you can only get this, I believe, in the Orthodox Church. It's the one Christian church, Russian and Greek, that has not sort of sold out, really. But once you start having motorbikes and whatever in the church, it's not. You know, in Canterbury Cathedral, they put on a rave.

Colored lights and people dancing and all that. Did they have a golden calf on the altar? Just curious. Just curious. Because that would have been perfectly apropos. It would have been. Yes, yes. And also extremely hilarious in a very, very dark way. I know, I know. Well, very good talking to you, sir. Thank you.

Thank you for walking through your book and a variety of associated ideas, including the ones I was inflicting on you. No, they're very good, and I love being with you. I think it's much better than being on the ends of things thousands of miles apart. Yeah, well, there's a lot of things to keep track of in our conversations. So if the channel narrows, it gets more difficult. Yeah, yeah. Well, it's very good to talk to you. And for guests, thank you very much. Thank you very much. And for everybody watching and listening today,

Your attention and time is always much appreciated. And I'm going to continue to talk to Dr. McGill-Chris for half an hour on the Daily Wire side. We'll speak, I think, more autobiographically in that half an hour interview, which is generally the theme. And so you're welcome to join us there 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 active activity.

And they've been a pleasure to work with and made all of these episodes more professional and more compelling. And thank you very much to the film crew today for helping out and making sure this could proceed. And thanks again, Ian. It was very good to talk to you, as it always is. Thank you.

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