#103: The Divided Brain, Attention & Meaning - Iain McGilchrist

34:11And what happens when you're able to get rid of that domineering self and begin to experience a liberation, which shows you a whole other aspect of the world. And truth, you know, again, is reduced by the left hemisphere to what it can verbalize and understand. But things that either are paradoxical in nature, and as Niels Bohr said, the great physicist said, the test of a great truth is that its opposite is also a great truth. And he made a distinction there, an important one, between great truths and little truths. little truths like did I have milk in my coffee this morning clearly the opposite is not true but great truths their opposite has some truth in it and you have to remember the two of them at the moment we're very much of a mind like it's got to be like this it's got to be like that there isn't a place for the person like me who says well it depends we need both and we don't need too much of this and we need quite a bit of this but again not too much and so forth it's such fascinating and important work yeah i really i really appreciate what you're doing you you also talk about how attention is shaping the kind of world that is coming into being and that that's not just cognitive i think you said it's a moral act and that aligns a lot with a lot of the contemplative teachers i think it's very much um in the zeitgeist that your awareness is the kindest thing that you can give to someone so yeah is that is that aligning with what you were trying to say i wonder if you could speak a little bit to that absolutely yes um first of all to start sort of backwards almost although at the most important end your attention is is a gift and is in that sense a moral act so i don't think one could be a good psychiatrist i don't think you can actually be a good doctor if you don't know how to fully attend to the patient if you all the time appear to be following some sort of algorithm and more interested in getting your questions is answered than listening to what the patient has to say, you will not be a very efficient doctor or psychiatrist.

36:37And two people who I esteem from the early 20th century, both of them French, Louis Laval, who was a phenomenological philosopher, and Simone Weil, who was an amazing person almost a saintly figure they both said words to the effects of um attention is your your attention is the true gift of love it is love that you are giving so with that said what i mean by things actually change when you see them a certain way if you took a number of your people here to sky and you showed them this landscape that's around my house you could have I hope from them a sense that it is a beautiful and awe inspiring place that it would be terrible if you mined but somebody who was only interested in extracting resources and making money, would look at the mountain, which just happens to be a remarkable example of basaltic, columna basaltic formation, would see this as just dollars.

37:58And so for that person, it would no longer be a beautiful thing at all. It would be a useful thing. And what's the problem? We need more of this stone. Come on, we can all benefit and there'll be more jobs in the community, etc. And I know this is a big issue in Australia because of the phenomenal might of the Chinese in terms of their ability to buy land and exploit it. So there we go. So, I mean, I sometimes say about this mountain, it can mean many things. and its name, Talisker, in Norse means the sloping rock and that means that the Norsemen who did come down here a thousand years ago knew that it was an important landmark to avoid a shipwreck in the bay which has a lot of hidden rocks in it.

38:46So that's what that mountain was for them, it was a landmark. For the Picts who were already living here for thousands of years it was a sacred place, it was the home of the gods. for 18th century watercolourists it was a beautiful form to paint for 19th century geologists it was this columna basal you know and to a physicist it's 99.99 percent empty space and the other 0.01 percent well we really don't quite know what it is which of the important question to ask here is which is those is the real mountain and i would say each of them is perfectly real that each of them true about the mountain and they just take their turns depending on the attention you pay.

39:29So if you're desperate not to have a shipwreck it's a landmark. If you are living there and you see it as the home of the gods it's not just something pretty. If you've just come here on holiday to paint something gosh this is beautiful and so on. So it depends and a physicist is perfectly correct to describe it in that way it's just not a very helpful way to help us through most of our daily lives. So all of these are correct. They're none of them untrue. But the difference is a moral one, because it makes a difference to how we treat it and how we relate to it, and whether we allow ourselves to relate to, in this case, natural beauty, and indeed to the scientific beauty.

40:08I mean, there are many species of animals and birds and flowers and so So I'm not saying that you just have to sort of bliss out in front of it. I'm just suggesting that there are many ways of looking at things. And at the moment, our way of looking at things is, you know, I've given up listening to the news quite a long time ago. But when I did, I always heard everything being justified in terms of utility. So some absolutely devastating assault on nature was justified because we would get a lot of money and for 20 years there would be jobs. And then thereafter, that wonderful thing would never be there again and the people wouldn't have their jobs and so on.

40:50But this is the short term and emotionally, ethically, and I believe intellectually barren way of thinking about things that rules out all that is of importance. Then we're surprised that particularly young people being introduced into this way of looking at the world are having deep anxiety, having panic attacks, having deep gloom and depression, thinking of killing themselves. Because what on earth is the point in being there in this valueless, pointless world? So at the end of The Matter With Things, I spend three long chapters on what values are, what purpose is, and what is the sense of the sacred.

41:37And, you know, if you want, we can talk about those, but I'm in your hands, wherever you'd like to go next. yeah love to dive into that actually and also while we're on it if if somebody struggles with the sacred what would you recommend for them is there like a placeholder for somebody that maybe leans more in in that direction well i noticed that um if you ask at least in this godless country if you ask um people do they believe in god only about 10 percent of people say that they do if you ask them is there something beyond the purely material that is important 95 percent of them say there is and if you ask them what it was they probably say it's the feeling of something spiritual or it's the feeling of that there's something sacred about certain places they may have experienced or whatever it might be so in writing that chapter i didn't want to as we say, frighten the horses.

42:38I didn't want people who might be able to be brought to a position where they could see this wasn't an entirely irrational way of thinking, to be frightened off by that word God. Oh God, he's a God-botherer. He's a maniac. We're not going to read any more of that. What a pity, because he wrote such an interesting book up to that point. So what instead is, I try and build on ideas that I think most people can share, that there is a genuine question, which is not an answerable question, but acts as a placeholder. If you don't ask the question, then you forget that there's something there that's of interest.

43:24And one of the starting points is, what is the origin of all that exists. Now, I don't mean it's interesting to say, well, it all happened so many billion years ago when the universe exploded and so on. Because I'm not asking the question, what was before it? What was the cause of it temporally? I'm asking the question, why is there something rather than nothing, which seems to me the most essential philosophical question ever asked. And people of the Anglo-American analytic tradition who are very obsessed that only things that they can narrow down in language actually exist. Unfortunately, the most important existing things are exactly the things you can't narrow down in language.

44:09But they say, oh, well, it's just that it doesn't mean anything. But the trouble is that it does mean something. It's just that we can't answer what it is. And there is also, very importantly, a sense of something that most people experience and they may experience it, they may have experienced it once or twice in their life. They may, poor things, never have experienced it. But most people have experienced it quite often when they were in sometimes a wild and beautiful place or sometimes on hearing a certain piece of music or when a certain thing happened to them and it had a sense of deep, deep meaning that was not construable in terms of the only terms we've got.

44:57Well, is it useful? In what way? And why do you think it's any good? So certain things just have extraordinary value. And everyone who experiences it doesn't think it has a little bit of value. They think it has enormous value. So to ignore it is a great shame. And language is really the obstructing thing. Having to put a word to it is exactly what blocks the path to it, which is why, as you know, the Tao Te Ching begins with the words, the Tao that can be named is not the real Tao. Now, that's exactly what I'm getting at. So I don't think I introduced the word God until about 30 pages into that chapter.

45:41And even then I say, but what a lot of baggage that word brings with it that is unhelpful. And we're much better to jump to very few conclusions or none and begin to think about what is going on in this space. Just use that word. You can use any word you like, the sacred, the divine. People somehow find the divine easier, even though literally it's just, you know, saying the godlike. But, you know, it doesn't matter the word. The word is the least important thing. The thing is to have drawn attention to a space. And you see, the thing is that people say, but none of the things you say answer any questions.

46:23But there are some questions that are not open to that kind of an answer. But asking the question is the really important thing, which is why so many deeply spiritual texts are not asserting it's like this. They often are a little bit confusing to the literal-minded reader. They're going, how does that work? But actually helping you to edge out of that rather simple-minded way of thinking is very important. And don't forget that, again, to quote Niels Bohr, he said, we can really only understand physical reality using some such language as poetry. Now, what he didn't mean is that we should all write verses about subatomic particles.

47:13What he was saying is the language that we have with its meanings derived from everyday life is no longer suitable or purposeable for the understanding of physical reality. and we need to talk in terms of metaphors, which is what poems tend to do. Now, to the very, in my view, rather simple-minded literalist, the reductionist, materialist, a metaphor is just a lie. And you hear people say this, I mean, people who really ought to know better. They say, when people say it's a metaphor, I just substitute the word lie. Well, go back to philosophical school, mate. There are other kinds of truths than those that can be literally stated, and they're very important ones.

48:06Can you literally state when you say, my wife means everything to me, and somebody goes, oh, everything? What means everything? What does she mean, actually? I mean, you just can't go there. But it doesn't negate the expression of a feeling that is real, very, very real. And more than a feeling, it is not just a kind of transient, amusing, pleasurable feeling. It is a deep sense of something that is built up over a long period and through much experience. So there we go. Yeah, it's interesting what comes to mind, actually. There was a study on Zen Buddhist monks, but they also took Franciscan nuns and various other religious groups.

48:54and then they put them in fMRI scanners and and when they when they were meditating or they were um the the nuns were singing or chanting they couldn't actually tell the difference in the in the brain scan and there was seemingly no difference actually or very minimal difference when at a point where we could tell a difference and yeah i think that points to something unifying and all of these approaches there's a non-dual teacher i like how you you discussed the ground of being i was i was actually listening to his audio book uh lock kelly he's a a psychologist from new york that that trained with uh i think his teacher was delgo delgo kensei rinpoche and he does these what he calls glimpses throughout the book so there'll be like mini one minute two minute sort of meditations and i was doing it as i was walking and then he kind of points out something in your awareness and then for me the feeling of separation completely disappeared but to my complete surprise because i've never um i've never had that happen before and i've done a fair bit of meditation this was a different slightly different style but there was just complete feeling of interconnectedness with the world it was no it was almost difficult to think and i was walking along the street and as i saw a woman as soon as i looked at that this complete unconditional love came up like i've never felt i've never felt i realized i've never felt unconditional love before it always had some form of condition and then further to that it stayed for 24 hours i went to sleep i woke up it was still it was still it was probably slightly reduced but i would say probably the most beautiful 24 hours of my life and that would be a very good example of something that nobody could convincingly say to you well it it wasn't anything i didn't it didn't it wasn't real it was even though words failed to give you I mean you've done a good job of hinting towards some things ineffable yes and I mean what I draw attention to is that we're so conditioned to think that the world is made up of things that and that's one of the meanings of the title of the matter with things is there is a problem obviously we're all saying there is a problem at the moment.

51:29But one of those problems is because we think of the world as made up of things. Whereas if we saw with a different eye, with a different kind of attention, we would see that actually things are not ultimately divided and separate. They are connected. They need to be distinguished. But the difference between things being distinguishable and distinct and being separate or divided is incredibly important and it's one that we don't often enough make we think that if things are distinguished then as it were they're somehow sundered but no we need to keep both the connection and the difference and this is so fundamental to my philosophy that if there was one way in which i could sum it up it is in the expression that i often quote these days and excuse me if I repeat myself but Goethe says dividing the united uniting the divided is the whole business of nature and he goes on to liken it to the the two beats of the heart the systole and diastole and to the in-breath and the out-breath so he sees it as something that is embodied and it for me this is not only a good way of thinking of nature but of everything that i know in the cosmos that things are constantly being distinguished and separated if you like but then they are still part of a bigger whole and they're brought together again in another whole so it is this alternation of what we think of as parts but never really parts with the whole and and we you know what i say about parts is that they're just holes at another level so um a hole is made up of other holes that in this context we call parts but in another context we call them holes because they also will you know can be um if you like can be further analyzed but the important point is that these things are not fully distinct and so what you saw on that occasion to me was you were granted an insight into how things are which we are not normally granted because for practical reasons it seems to make sense that we see ourselves as different and there is reality to that so it's not losing either that we are unique and we are individual but we are also indivisibly part of one big whole This is the, oh gosh, it's just language doesn't help.

54:14But I know exactly the truth of what it is that I'm saying. Definitely, I agree. Language is our best tool, yet its bandwidth is extremely low. Extremely low, yes, yes, yes. But don't forget that it's largely grown up as a way of doing practical things. You know, we started by, at least there is a very strong school of thought, that we started by effectively singing, that singing is not a strange development out of language, but that language is a development of singing in which one makes more distinguishable sounds than one does by just intonation. And that's all in Chapter 3 of the Master and Xemistry.

55:09But that idea is that language was developed so that we, as a group, could get together and work together to do a certain act. You could talk about it and how you're going to divide the labour. In a world where we'd gone over Dunbar's number and we didn't just automatically, almost intuitively, know how to do things together. So it starts from the practical everyday. So most of our words refer to physical objects, and our abstract words are invariably words that have concrete roots. they are metaphorised on the basis of something concrete. So even the word abstract comes from the Latin words meaning to drag something away from its context.

56:02So, you know, that's why you can... Language is useful, but you can't expect that we have words for things that aren't of everyday utility, and we don't. Yes, that's so interesting. I think a lot of people are probably thinking at this point, okay, I'm definitely left hemisphere dominant. What sort of things do you do or what do you recommend for those people to start to move into more of a balanced state?

56:39Well, this is hard for me to say, but the only thing that I absolutely know has helped such people because they write to me is reading just the Master Master and his emissery. I mean, I have received countless messages from people saying, you somehow opened my eyes to something that I had never seen. And it makes perfect sense. But somehow I never knew what people meant when they talked about X and Y. But now I do. And I realize in retrospect that I've always been a very left hemisphere dominated person. But now I see things differently. and what you don't want to do is to wait until you have a left hemisphere stroke that's a rather drastic way of changing your outlook so some things that will obviously help are first of all to stop denying the existence or importance of things that you find hard to verbalize i mean that's following on from what we've said so there are things that you can only know what they are by experience and you can't learn them or understand them by not as it were going into it with a with a with an open mind so i mean the the obvious example is swimming it is no good sitting on the bank with with with a book and saying i'm learning how to swim before i get in the water because i don't want to get into water until i know how to swim actually you can only know how I've swum once you're in the water.

58:09And so for many experiences that at the moment make no sense for you, the worst thing is to say, well, they don't make any sense to me, so I'm not even going to keep an open mind about them. And opening your mind to the possibility that there might be something there is a good way of experiencing whether for you it does or doesn't. I can't say it does. But I think he's an unusual person who knows no poem that has ever really moved them, knows no piece of music that they think is unbelievably rich, deep, important, that knows no beautiful place. often it will be a church or a cathedral or a temple or whatever, but it might not be, or a particularly wonderful natural phenomenon that speaks to them and think, well, this is not something easy to verbalise, but I need to open myself a bit more to it.

59:15So how about setting aside a bit of time to listen to some poems being read or to listen to some music that others have enjoyed. And I've been rather bad at doing the music, but on my website I have put pieces of music. But the trouble is there are so many pieces of music that I think are outstanding that it's almost overwhelming trying to choose. And I must make a point of going back and putting some more up. But what I did do during the first year of lockdown was read every day for 365 days another poem. And they were all poems that I thought were good. I wouldn't have bothered with them otherwise.

1:00:01And, you know, again, you can see them. You don't have to become a member of my website. In fact, I think they're in the very large open access area of my website, mainly open access anyway. And I think they're on YouTube. So you could listen to them. I mean, if you go to them with the attitude, well, I never got anything out of poetry, so I'm not going to get it, then don't waste your time. But if you're prepared to go along and say, well, I just want to see how, you know, stop inhibiting it and just see if something does happen. And, you know, or going to a very good production of Shakespeare or something, I don't know.

1:00:43But the arts are one way. another way is to practice meditation as i'm sure you would agree um and my most commonly practiced meditation and meditation and practically the only one that i i do at all regularly is um although i have i did have a meditation teacher at one stage is simply mindfulness and mindfulness is both simple and deep so it sounds very simple it's just um stilling what in the eastern tradition is called monkey mind which is effectively the left posterior hemisphere or even the left anterior hemisphere and posterior hemisphere together talking and so verbalizing and having an opinion and having a view and judging if you can just stop all this unnecessary activity going on and just try and be present to it i mean of course you know all this and i imagine all your listeners do but what i'm really saying to anyone who's tuning in anew this is not something that is complex in concept it may take a little bit of practice to do it because we're so used to allowing our mind to say oh i don't like that or will that not stop or you know and and i get that as well and then you have to go no we're going to stop and start again um but what you're really doing is taking a step closer to a reality that you're not used to experiencing in that way and seeing what comes to you and if nothing then nothing but at least you tried and i think for most people, they do see a difference.

1:02:37They feel different. They feel more connected. They feel more peaceful. And, you know, it's a very good thing. The only thing is that if you do it in order to feel peaceful or to be more effective, then you're still in the left hemisphere of mindset. You need to do it just for its own sake, much as if you become religious because, oh the religious people will go to heaven and the religious people will be favored in this world and you know god will make them prosper and you know no if you go to god for what you can get then you have not gone to god and saint francis said about prayer that when we pray we should ask for nothing absolutely nothing because he thought that prayer was all thanksgiving and adoration and he was an amazingly wise man normally prayer which is really my my favorite activity that connects me with something deeper traditionally it's it's divided or conventionally it's divided into adoration, confession, thanksgiving and supplication, ACTS, acts.

1:03:59And when I was young, I thought supplication was really the point of prayer. Can I not be this? Can I not have help with that? And so on. But now I think that adoration is the most important thing. because it changes entirely your your attitude to the world it is no longer one that is in any way dependent on what happens to you and what comes out of it for you but is a sense of something wondrous and awe-inspiring and I think what we need to get back many many things but if I had to reduce it to perhaps three things, I think it would be a sense of awe or wonder in life and something that goes with it, which is a degree of humility, which is not the same as abasing yourself in some terrible way.

1:04:59It doesn't mean that you have to have poor self-esteem. In fact, not at all. It means that you realize that there's much beyond you and that you don't know all the answers and that other people may know things you don't and that certainly there are things in this world that we do not why would our brains why would our brains in 2025 have evolved to a point where they knew everything that is i mean if you believe that that's the most irrational thing you could possibly believe of course we're making mistakes all the time with our rational thinking we always have and although i'm a great advocate of science and depend on science both personally and professionally and i think that one of the problems nowadays is that science isn't adequately respected actually but one of my problems with science is when people say oh the science says no if you keep your mind open there will be different opinions about science and that is when it gets really really interesting because some of those will prove more useful in the long run than others that's how science develops if you don't hold that attitude then science fossilizes sclerosis whatever you like to say but it's no longer helping us understand anything so yeah there we are probably too long an answer but please come back at me that was wonderful and yeah it's interesting i i agree and any any of the best scientists i tend to speak to they're like they would present it as this is this is our best educated guess currently so absolutely you talked you mentioned briefly actually the left hemisphere stroke and i'm sure you're familiar with and probably know better than me uh the the story of jill uh balty taylor so how do the two um how do the two hemispheres shape our our sense of self like is it is it the the left hemisphere is tied to like a fixed separate ego completely or is there a spectrum is that shared and is the right hemisphere is that pointing to something like more relational i guess and very definitely yes in fact one of the differences between the ways the hemisphere look at the world, if I wanted to make a big generalization, is that the left hemisphere is less interested in relation.

1:07:28The right hemisphere sees that relations are all important and is much more empathic, incidentally, and better able to understand how another person feels in relation to them than the left hemisphere. It's just a fact. Metaphysically, I believe that relations are actually what the cosmos is made of it's not made of things that are then related it is made of relations that then from the web of relations produce things that we attend to and go oh look there's a crossing point in the web there's something there let's call it a something that's a thing so i think it's the other way around but the left hemisphere i think is more the home of the ego and I'm using here a distinction that was made by Carl Jung that he distinguished the self from the ego now there was an issue of the Journal of Consciousness Studies quite some years ago in which people were asked a few people were asked to contribute papers and I was one of those people and to engage in a dialogue with some spiritual leaders and um the point i wanted to make is that the idea of a self is by no means in itself bad um in fact people who have no secure sense of self are very unhappy very difficult to live with and are often suffering from mental illnesses that are quite hard to treat now there is no question that the buddha had a sense of self he knew that if he was hungry it was he who needed to eat not somebody else um if he needed to sleep and did sleep then it was he who slept not somebody else that if I came along and shot him it was he that died not somebody else so it we all have selves and unless we have a sense of that self part of the business of life is is getting a more realistic understanding of oneself a process that never really ends then that is good it is a self that is in relation very much to others and it is from its relations to others, that it gets its existence and it is to the others with which it is related that it gives of itself by just being that self.

1:10:09Whereas the ego is over and against others. And the way that Jung understands the difference is that the child begins with a problem which is to do with understanding that it is separate. because when an infant is born initially it feels that it is one with the mother and we we think that the child only in the first few months of life begins to understand that it is not actually the same as the mother and that when the mother does certain things and it may not be according to the wishes of the child and so forth but the point of good maternal care is to enable the infant to cross that barrier from being completely fused with the mother to being independent of the mother, but not abandoned by the mother.

1:11:05In other words, distinguished, but not separated. And her secure love and her attention are what enables that child to grow. Now, during infancy, there will be a balance of ego and self, But the ego will play a very big part. And what Jung thought, and I would agree with him, is that as we enter mature adulthood, the ego should fall into abeyance. It should no longer be important. And a good spiritual life is one in which the ego no longer has place. And it's that that I understand. I mean, that's ideal. I mean, very few of us eventually achieve a state in which there is no ego at all. But what I'm really saying is that that's, I think, what people mean when they, in the spiritual tradition, say the loss of self or deadness to the self or dying to oneself.

1:12:10I think it's not, obviously, it cannot mean that there is no self in another sense. Interestingly, when you feel your pain, you feel it in your right hemisphere and in your left hemisphere. But when you feel another person's pain, you feel it in the right hemisphere alone. So the same bit of the right hemisphere is active when you are in pain and you see someone else in pain. And you feel for them, as you say. that of course is a well-known phenomenon which became very topical about 15 years ago may not be so topical now of so-called mirror neurons which activate both when you do something and when you see somebody else do it and people were very interested because they hadn't realized that when you see something or imagine something rather than actually do it some of the same things are happening in your brain is when you do do it, which is an interesting thought.

1:13:16But it goes, I mean, the reason why I think it's become less a topic is that we now realise that a lot of the brain works in this way, not just so-called special mirror neurons. And particularly the right hemisphere is what I would say, is that the right hemisphere is the one that makes those bridges because it's just better adapted at moving outside of what it immediately experiences. experiences after all look if your evolutionary origin is that what you do is you're quick and dirty you don't ask difficult questions you don't wait and go well it could be something else you just go pounce and now you've got it because it's more effective than going hmm do i want it it's actually fair to it to grab it right now should i think you you'd starve so every creature needs a quite a bit of mental space, which is relatively unreflective, relatively unintelligent, relatively uncomplicated by moral imperatives, not particularly interested in values other than utility and power.

1:14:23And that is the left hemisphere. But God help us if we take that as our guide if we take its values and its goals as our guide then we won't last it's interesting actually i had a fairly difficult programming challenge today that i wasn't i didn't think i could actually solve it and i just dropped it with no intention of solving it and i went for a walk and then as i was walking the the solution came is that is that another way of of activating we hear a lot just go for a walk you have a problem go for a walk absolutely absolutely and most of my writing was done by alternating quite serious walks with writing um and um so i would often be mulling over something and i get to a point where i think i need to think a bit more about that and And I take myself off for a walk for an hour or two.

1:15:24And interestingly, I'm probably just deluding myself, but there is a particular cliff walk that I like, where I walk with the drop on my left going out, and with the drop on my right coming back. and when I'm walking out I feel no anxiety about it I feel as it were that I'm happy with it I'm in control with it when I walk back the other way I used to think in a jokey sort of way my left hemisphere is kind of weighing up can I just push him over because I don't like what he's writing um i i'm sure it's just a joke really but it is a is an observation um no but going for a walk is a very uh long-standing way of facilitating fluidity of thought because cognition is embodied cognition changes your body what you think and above all what you feel has direct immediate effects on the body and the state of your body has an impact on what and how you can think and feel so all of that is true and one of the things one needs to get is a sense of fluency and when one's sitting still the fluency is parked at least the physical fluency and so getting into a fluid motion is actually very helpful and and some people i know just find that if they're able to go and swim and swim for, you know, 20 minutes, actually that has the same effect.

1:17:14And you know that the school of philosophers founded by Aristotle was called the peripatetic school. You know, effectively they meant the ones that walked around.

1:17:27And, you know, there is a saying, and I'm not sure who, I can't remember anyway, who originated it, solvitur ambulando. It will be solved in the walking. At this stage in life, though, I'm rather fond of an old Chinese saying, which is, never stand up if you can sit down. Never sit down if you can... Never walk about if you can stand still. Never stand up if you can sit down, but lying down is best of all. My memory is not any good anymore. I don't agree with that I need to go for a walk what? you don't agree with that your memory is getting bad it's terrible it's impeccable I'm afraid it happens when you get into your 70s you you just start forgetting 50 names I'm surprised the walking that's very nice of you but I feel a good deal older than 70 a lot of the time.

1:18:34Anyway. It is interesting, the walking. It's like clockwork for me. It comes at about, I think, generally somewhere between 20 minutes and half an hour, I feel the sort of monkey mind, as you referenced earlier, start to sort of de-energize and then all of a sudden good ideas flow and I'll tend to be much more in the open awareness that you described. I think that's lovely and that chimes with my experience. But one of the things that I think is so important is that, let me repeat, that the left hemisphere jumps to conclusions. It is not the right hemisphere that is quick and dirty. It is the left, very definitely.

1:19:18Now, the problem is that when you're thinking through something deeply, you really do need to give it time to evolve. And one thing I can say all my life is that I have tried to give thoughts time to evolve without closing them down too quickly on something that can be put easily into words, which is, of course, what the left hemisphere wants. It wants you to crystallize your thinking, publish a paper, and now move on. And I've been very happy and privileged, in a way, in that I have been able all my life to avoid being on that particular treadmill. And so have allowed ideas that I could have closed down to something that wouldn't have helped at all if I'd allowed things to go that way earlier on.

1:20:12but instead I was able to not allow that talkative mind to say I've got it I've always said but really have you got it and argue against it a bit and I think what happens when you go for a walk especially if it's a walk that involves not just walking along a road but sort of walking in a landscape that you have to pay attention to a bit because of putting your feet in places and so that it distracts you enough from that mind where you're kind of, okay, I think I've got it. And then the other part of you that's deeper still is able to allow images, and it's often visual images that come that resolve the thing.

1:20:56Sometimes it might just be another meaning to a word or something like that. And that is really allowing the right hemisphere to come into it. And there's just so many, so many examples of great scientists and great mathematicians who, no doubt having done a lot of rather routine work, didn't resolve their problem or find their solution by just following logic, but by a kind of sudden insight when they were doing something completely other. So doing something completely other is very important. Yeah, it's so interesting that it does come at that time. And actually, I think what you're saying really helps to crystallize why that is happening.

1:21:42And it is because the left hemisphere is just constantly trying to jump to conclusions and not allowing really the intelligence of the right hemisphere to like creative problem solve. Yes. And it's much better at doing that. do you know that wonderful um saying of um t.s elliott's the the meaning of a poem is the meat that the burglar tosses to the dog while it burgles the house and i think that's so lovely because it expresses perfectly this idea of you know the the monkey mind going now what is the meaning of this and it's getting fixated on the meaning of the words well that frees up you know the dog is worrying its bone.

1:22:30And meanwhile, the poem burgles the house. In other words, it's speaking to your nonverbal mind. And that is so lovely. Not nonverbal, but more complexly verbal, because words can be seen as just tokens for things, which is how the left hemispheres them, and stringing them together into sentences is a matter of making causal change that work according to syntactic rules, but there is another meaning to words which is often hidden until a poem liberates them. So that is why when you take it out of the poem, you take the meaning out of the poem, it's just a nonsense, it's just a nothing, because those words have suddenly lost the resonances that came from the context of the other words.

1:23:18So every word is contextual and the context changes the meaning. it's really pointing to other ineffable i guess problems that you talk about the the hard problem of consciousness in the matter of things and yeah you challenged i think the idea that consciousness is just a product of matter and i think this is you addressed it beautifully and i'd love to discuss a little bit about what led you to this way of thinking. I don't know if you're familiar, if you've been following Anika Harris. She's been doing the docuseries Lights On, which, yeah, she's come to a very similar conclusion. I wasn't sure if you spoke to, actually.

1:24:08I haven't finished the docuseries, but your thinking, I think, aligns quite well. Yes. Well, I wonder what her husband thinks about that. but anyway he had her on the podcast yes yes discussing anything but I do wonder no I did read her earlier but I can't remember 10 years ago yes and I liked it I liked what she said why do I think what I think about consciousness well I mean I start really from the point that there are only three possible relationships between matter and consciousness either consciousness is emitted by matter or it is transmitted by matter or it is permitted by matter what do I mean by permitted I mean that matter plays a bigger role in what is happening in the consciousness than if it just transmitted and already made whatever so a radio set transmits but I don't think the brain is a transmitter in that sense I certainly don't think it's an emitter and I have many reasons for thinking that but the most cogent is that nobody without any exception and people have been trying for hundreds of years to work out how it is that consciousness comes out of matter if matter has no consciousness about it a very important caveat.

1:25:45If there is, then of course it doesn't have to emerge from matter because it's already there, in which case the problem is solved. But if you posit that matter is totally separate from consciousness and has nothing of consciousness in it, there is no way that by some sort of a miracle suddenly, oh, we've got consciousness. How did that happen? And just saying it comes out of complexity is a very unsuccessful gambit because, first of all, it doesn't explain why complexity should give rise to it. But also, as you probably know, there are four times as many neurons in the cerebellum, the ancient brain, which is much smaller than the cerebrum, the new brain, which we think of as our clever brain.

1:26:33the cerebellum has four times as many neurons in it as the cerebrum but it doesn't sustain consciousness and it's not that they're less well connected than they are in the cerebrum indeed some of the most highly proliferative neurons are purkinje neurons that only exist in the cerebellum so none of that makes any sense to me and also there are there are human beings with no effective brain at all, no cortex at any rate, just a midbrain, which sounds like more than it is. It's just the top of the brain stem. The spinal cord goes on and the last three segments of it have really effectively become the so-called midbrain.

1:27:27and well strictly speaking the upper one of the three is the midbrain but they have no nothing beyond the midbrain and yet they are conscious they're definitely conscious they have they can see things which is extraordinary because there's no visual cortex they can listen to music they can enjoy music they can have favorite tunes they can have moods of the people and yet they have none of the apparatus that we normally think is necessary to do any of these things it makes you think and then of course there are and these are controversial but there are and i've never experienced anything like it but there are accounts which i think it is i think it's unreasonably skeptical to dismiss them all of people who have experienced consciousness outside the body.

1:28:25And so there's a range of reasons for thinking that consciousness can't simply emanate from matter. If you can explain to me why I should believe that, then, you know, answer's on a postcard, but only on a postcard because I haven't got time to read anything bigger. So that's the position I adopt. And so what is the relationship between matter and consciousness? And to cut a very long story short, and that story is in Chapter 25 on matter and consciousness in the matter with things, and begins on the topic of space and matter, the previous chapter, chapter 24. But anyway, in that chapter, to rather spoil the story and just cut to the chase, and therefore not to, as it were, explain my working, I think that consciousness and matter are different phases of the same primal entity.

1:29:39So I think that consciousness, it makes no sense to say that consciousness can be created from anything else. So I take the view that it is what philosophers call an ontological primitive. That simply means that you can't get beyond behind it. It is just a given. And I think that it's in all of the cosmos. And I think all of the cosmos is in the field of consciousness. And that's not an irrational way of thinking about it. In fact, it helps quite a lot. But obviously there's an apparent problem, which is that matter and consciousness seem quite different from one another. Matter is resistant. I can't put my hand through the table, but my thinking I can take wherever I like.

1:30:33Matter persists. I can put something down, I can go for a walk, I can come back, it's still there. I can go to bed in the morning, it's still there, but not with my consciousness. My consciousness depends on my thinking constantly. So I think what I would say, and again, apologies for no doubt repeating myself for some people, but I think it is an important analogy. The analogy is with water, which is itself a very important subject, philosophically speaking. I have a section on, not an entire chapter, but I do have quite a long section on the properties of water. And of course, water has been considered to be very important in almost every religion and every philosophical tradition.

1:31:20It is, of course, at the basis of Taoism and it has figurative uses in many religions. so the thing about water is that it has as chemists say phases in one of them it's translucent it flows uh it moves around obstacles and it moves on um and that's one thing then there's ice which is opaque solid doesn't move unless given a whopping great push um and is mighty cold And then there is the water that is suspended in the atmosphere in the room where you're sitting and the room where I'm sitting, and without which we wouldn't be able to live. Now, which of these is, truly speaking, water? I mean, in a folksy way, I can say, well, water is the stuff that flows and is translucent, because that's what in everyday parlance we mean by water.

1:32:23But it does have other conditions, and in some parts of the world, they are more important than the flowing kind. And they are those other two phenomenological manifestations of water. So I see what matter does for consciousness as giving a degree of fixity to consciousness's creations. So consciousness is creative and the advent of matter or the role of matter in this relationship is to enable a degree of stability or permanence in the movement of consciousness. And that has good and bad aspects as stability does. It means that it's not changing and that's good, but that might be bad. But there it is, it has those qualities.

1:33:13And the other thing is that it provides a degree of resistance. And I can't explain terribly briefly why, but I consider resistance is essential to all creativity, that nothing comes into being without there being something that resists it. even if it's only in the sense that definition means the borders of something and for something to have a definition to be defined as a something requires that to be things that it is also not which is a kind of resistance but also that many things are created by the carving away of something and i sometimes talk about michelangelo in sculpture that he didn't put his david together but just threw away stone, and that resistance to the block produced the result.

1:33:59But it's also true of the river that passes my house, that it only is a river because the earth offers resistance to the movement of the water. If it didn't, there would just be, you know, water would just pool everywhere. And even the pools would, to be a pool, they require some resistance by matter. I have a section that goes into this a bit in the Master and His Emissary, how the boundaries of something are absolutely essential for its existence. Maybe you know that also is true of the soul or the spirit or whatever it is that we are dealing with when we're talking about this spiritual part of our nature, that it is something that can be distinguishable without being wholly divided from other things.

1:34:57Indeed, I believe it is very much interpenetrating with our material existence, which doesn't mean it necessarily depends on that material existence, but while we are alive, it is interpenetrated with it. And that is one of the ways in which we can, as Keats said, make our souls i mean an extraordinary thing he said you know the world is a veil of soul making he was 25 or something at the time he wrote those words not not older and that is such a brilliant insight that the soul is not just such mysterious invisible object that is stuffed inside you by the creator but is actually something that is part of you that is a very important part of whatever it is that we mean and are and that our role in life is to grow it and we have the choice we can grow it or we can ignore it and stunt it i've seen that you've been in communication with and collaborating with michael levin and i think yeah his work is extremely interesting and it seems to much so i think point in the same direction i wonder could you could you briefly describe some of i think you mentioned the the um the head being chopped off of the i think it was the planarian worms i get confused with a couple of his experiments but yeah if you could briefly take us into how that crosses over with your work yes well i don't i certainly wouldn't dare speak for mike levin and he is um a fascinating thinker uh and i believe we do see a lot of things similarly um i don't know how far he would go with me in terms of um the more overtly spiritual side of things i've no idea but one conclusion seems to be and i think what you're referring to is the fact that planarian worms and other creatures as long as they're simple enough can have their heads chopped off and they will regrow a head don't try this at home by the way, at least not on yourself or any friends it will regrow a head and the interesting thing is that the head will have the same memories that the original head had and this can be done hundreds of times effectively and the reason we know that is that like many creatures pretty much all creatures these plenarian worms can be trained to solve a maze to find a way through a maze by trial and error but they learn it and then if you took an entirely naive, so to speak, planarian that had never tried this, it would take it many, many goes to solve it and take it time.

1:38:07But the one with the regrown head can solve it right away. And the same thing can be done with a slime mold. A slime mold is so primitive, obviously it hasn't got any neurons at all. You can hardly get more primitive. But a slime mold can solve a maze. And if you cut a bit off the slime mold and put it in, any part of it will have the memory of how to solve the maze. So that sets you thinking. And even more interesting is that we used to think that, well, many things, we used to think that a cell couldn't think. but it is now not controversial to say that a single cell can solve a problem that looks awfully like thinking because it can take a step that will resolve a problem for which it has not been prepared by previous experience or by its genome.

1:39:07So this is a completely new problem, Crocs up, and the cell can sometimes in as little as four days change something about its metabolism that will resolve the problem. Now in case people think there's something fringe or odd or this wouldn't be normally agreed by biologists it was effectively this discovery in a different form by Barbara mcclintock that led to her receiving a nobel prize in the 1980s and um the evidence is clear that we don't have to wait for billions of years for trial and error to change the genome and no that doesn't work and eventually oh bingo it doesn't work like that so um there is directionality extraordinary directionality so that a variant that would have taken untold years to come up can come up when within as little as four days is the example i know for certain but it could be could be sooner than that and and another thing is um sorry while we're on it is that there is a gene which is an analogue of Pax 6, it's actually called Eyeless and if you take this gene out of Drosophila, the fruit fly not surprisingly the offspring have no eyes fine, if you keep on breeding them together the offspring still have no eyes but after 14 generations and fruit flies 14 generations is not very long the flies start to have eyes again although they haven't got the gene so what has happened is that a genetic something has happened in the history of the of the of the fly since this change to its genome that has enabled it to get beyond this block to development to what it knows it should be knows i mean i don't know what I mean by that nobody does but in some sense it's almost absurd not to use that word something about the organism is aware that it needs to go somewhere that is not where it's allowed to go now and that would explain Simon Conway Morris's amazing assertion that the the eye which is after all an extraordinary complex I mean there are different kinds of eyes as you know and different creatures but that it is a very complex problem for evolution to bring together there's so many things to create an eye and that this has happened 12 or 14 times separately over the history of evolution so it may be that that goal is something that we are drawn towards creatures are drawn towards perhaps by the existence of light i don't know but anyway there we go and 11 himself has manipulated embryos and now he's doing other things with with with neural tissue that evolves activities like a brain in a petri dish.

1:42:14He knows more about that than I do. But what he certainly has experience of is you can take a limb bud out of an amphibian embryo and you can shake it up in a test tube and put the randomly organized cells back and they create a new limb perfectly okay. And what's more, you can do that on the other side of the embryo so the instruction should have been for a right limb you can do that on the left and it will make a left limb now what is interesting about that particular point is that it suggests that there is an overall form i can i can't say it any more specifically than that what exactly what a field of form is we don't know but some sort of form field is helping guide the evolution of that embryo helping guide the the line of descent of drosophila whatever it is there's something that exists that is not just in the so-called code and when we'd finished the amazing task of um you know uh decoding so to speak the genome we realized that there was never going to be anything like enough by by a factor of several million um enough information there to be the source of all the information needed for, say, a tadpole to evolve into a frog, a four-dimensional problem, or even a human embryo to evolve into a human.

1:43:47I mean, it's one of those things that happens every day, but we don't know exactly how these forms are perpetuated. There is, of course, the work of Rupert Sheldrake, who I hope will live to see himself vindicated, Not everything, perhaps, that he believed about morphogenetic fields will turn out to be right, but that's true of every scientist. But my goodness, what foresight he had 40 years ago to imagine that something of the kind is necessary in biology. So I just want to pay tribute to him for that. yeah i appreciate that and agree is that what you is that what michael levin is because he talks a lot about the bioenergetic field and through manipulating that they can also affect future effects so less emphasis on dna is that is that going to be the same or a version of or something that might connect to a type of well as i say i i i really can't and won't speak for michael levin yeah we'll have to chat to him at some point

1:44:55definitely oh thank you so much i i look forward to seeing you and him working together more in in the future i've got the second video you put up with you two together up to watch but i haven't i haven't finished it yet so actually it's it's called um i didn't call it that but somebody i I think at Michael's end called it two. But in fact, it's about the seventh. We've done a whole lot.

1:45:25We did at least five, I think, earlier ones, him and myself and an AI technologist, Richard. sorry I don't mean any disrespect I can't remember his name and then I've done two with him on his own so that was the second of those and yes I hope that he will be willing to tolerate my attempts to understand what it is he's doing so there we are I'm sure he will we very much appreciate your work and yeah keep going I look forward to seeing your your future books or whatever else you want may i mention that i i i'm not sure how many more books i will ever write but for one reason or another mainly by accident i started sub stack about a month ago if anybody's interested and is watching this please join my sub stack and that's not um a mercenary uh request because um i'm i'm it's entirely free to everybody everything on my sub stack is if you're kind enough to contribute to me i very much appreciate it because it helps but you won't get anything different than if you just go go along as a free browser so because i think at this stage in life um getting the word out is more important to me than than money although unfortunately the world is so constructed that it comes in handy from time to time Indeed it does I'll link the sub stack below And if someone was Thank you With your books, would you still recommend that they go to The Master and His Emissary First or straight to No matter what things I don't know really, I mean The response to The Master and His Emissary Has been very good And it's shorter Well thank you so much and yeah it's been an incredible and a real pleasure i think you're doing amazing work and i look forward to thank you to uh to seeing you thank you very much josh for having me along thank you so much ian keep it up i really appreciate it bye-bye thank you so much for listening to the episode if you enjoyed it please if you could give us a like a subscribe and hit the notification bell.

1:48:00That would really help us out. Or just share this episode with a friend, share the course with a friend. Anything would go such a long way. Thank you so much and I hope to see you soon.