Things to the Left of Me, Relations to the Right

Before continuing, let us recall our cosmotheandric situation: that this is truly One Cosmos, in the sense that everything is related to everything else. Nothing is radically separate, even though everything is distinct. Nothing whatsoever could be if it did not share both of these features, distinction and unity. Like the human body, the Cosmos is not just one and many, but one because many, and vice versa: an irreducible unity-in-diversity. Like openness, relationality is woven into the nature of things, on equal terms with the existence of the things related: reality is constituted of things-in-relation.

To put it another way, anything that can said to be one has the feature of interior relations. For example, our bodies can be divided and subdivided into various parts, but these are nevertheless interiorly related, not an aggregation of extrinsically related units. Such interior relations are not imaginary – just in our heads – rather, are constitutive of what the thing actually is. Thus, they may be termed onto-relations, since they are as real as that which they relate.

This also goes to our Axiom 11, in that ultimate reality is a complementary substance-in-relation, so anything that alludes to this makes the hairs on my RH stand up. For McGilchrist, “Reductionism envisages a universe of things -- and simply material things at that. How these things are related is viewed as a secondary matter.” But like us, McGilchrist suggests “that relationships are primary, more foundational than the things related: that relationships don’t just ‘connect’ pre-existing things, but modify what we mean by ‘things,’ which in turn modify everything else they are in relationship with.”

This man is literally stealing your thoughts!

Yes, what Churchill called anticipatory plagiarism: taking my ideas without the courtesy of allowing me to first think of them. Although in reality I’ve been discussing them for decades, albeit without all the academic research McGilchrist marshals in support of his findings. Rather, my only tool is high intensity motherwit, and my only appeal is to common sense, because no one needs a study to study the reality of relation, since no study of any kind would be possible if it weren’t related to reality. Nor can any study prove the impossible or discredit the undeniable.

Now granted, McGilchrist might be tempted to file a restraining order to prevent us from using his ideas in support of cosmotheandrism.

Oh, please! I’ve got news for him: the Supreme Court has roundly rejected prior restraint!

Petey, this isn’t a First Amendment thing.

Fair use! Our basic freedoms! This affects all of us!

∞

McGilchrist also touches on the reality of Axiom 5, vertical hierarchy, at least implicitly. For ours is not a flat Cosmos. That is only the LH perspective, certainly not the RH view, much less ours. Vertical space is the very locus of meaning, intelligibility, and cosmic depth

McGilchrist says a few things that echo the views of our in-house theoretical biologist Robert Rosen, for example, that “complexity is the norm, and simplicity represents a special case of complexity,” or “simplicity is a feature of our model, not of the reality that is modelled.” If this is the case, then “inanimacy is better regarded as the limit case of animacy,” which is precisely Rosen’s conclusion: that physics simply isn’t rich enough to account for the phenomenon of Life Itself. It also again calls to mind Whitehead’s comment about physics being the study of the smaller – and simpler – organisms.

The laws of physics couldn’t even author Wikipedia, much less the Encyclopedia Biologica.

The different ways in which LH and RH attend to and perceive the world are seen more vividly when one side becomes dysfunctional (for example, from a stroke or brain injury) and the other tries to compensate. Interestingly, the LH simply cannot do most of what the RH does, whereas the RH is much better able to compensate for a dysfunctional LH.

One might assume that delusions and misbeliefs are located in the RH, and that the LH is more Spock-like, i.e., objective and detached. Not so: it turns out that the great majority of delusional conditions are usually a consequence of left-hemispheric dysfunction, and that moreover “the degree to which this is the case is broadly proportional to the bizarre nature of the delusion involved.” More generally, “it is the judgments on reality made by the right hemisphere that are more reliable.” But this is because the RH is more grounded in reality, whereas the LH spins out abstract models of this reality. One might say that “the [LH] is an ‘interpreter,’ that misuses reason to confabulate -- make things up -- rather than admit it does not know what it is talking about, whereas the more tentative [RH] sticks to what it knows, and is closer to the truth.”

Likewise, the RH is more apt to seek out disconfirmation and counter-examples, whereas the LH may not notice when its model fails to predict or conform to reality. When the model eclipses empirical reality, it is because the LH is ignoring or bullying the RH. “My model, says the [LH], is better than your reality,” which brings to mind the ironic question posed by Jean-Baptiste Say: “That’s all well and good in practice, but how does it work in theory?” For “the [LH] adopts a theory, and then actually denies what doesn’t fit the theory. The evidence that this is the case is so extraordinary and compelling that we would not believe it if we had not already seen it. It will swear black is white” (McGilchrist).

Who hasn’t met someone who swears black is white? Here again, the phenomenon is obviously real, whether caused by neurology or neurosis or demonic possession. Speaking of which, if there is a neurological explanation for the latter, it would appear that the demons prefer to hide out in the LH.

There’s not enough space or time to detail all of the strange ways the LH swears black is white. McGilchrist cites a number of bizarre clinical syndromes, but what about in everyday reality? Could it really be that the hypertrophied LH is – pardon the crudity – an industrial strength bullshit generator? Well, “To put it crudely, the [RH] is our bullshit detector. It is better at avoiding nonsense when asked to believe it…” Conversely, “the [LH’s] job is to create a model and maintain it at all costs.”

The [LH] says “you shouldn’t be able to see that” -- and, as a result, you actually can’t: the [RH] says, “but it is there” -- and so you can. The point is that, despite your being perfectly able to see something, you can’t see it because of a theory that the [LH] has about it.

If this is the case, it would explain both ideological capture and something like “theological capture,” for example, a literalist reading of scripture that again forgets what religion is supposed to be about (much more on which in Book III). Either way, the LH has difficulty discerning fact from theory or even fiction, while being unaware of this lack of discernment.

More generally, the existence of magical thinking seems to cut both ways, implying that a literal materialism is as delusional as a literal religionism, since both are closed systems that ignore what is outside them. For which reason McGilchrist suggests that “the layman’s grounds for accepting the models propounded by the scientist are often no different from the young African villager’s grounds for accepting the models propounded by one of his elders.” In other words, it is possible to accept even science in an unscientific way, just as it is possible to be religious in a superstitious and ultimately irreligious way. One might say that idolatry is a universal temptation for both secular and religious alike. This happens the moment the fullness of reality is reduced to, or enclosed within, an -ism.

What about Cosmotheandrism?

Nice try, but that is actually the -ism to end all -isms, being that it is an open, dynamic, and relational engagement with O, a vector toward which we are ever striving but never reach, short of, say, the beatific vision, supposing such a vision exists. One might say that cosmotheandrism is about ultimacy ordered to the ultimate, but we need to put on our cosmotheandric trifocals in order to intuit and engage the latter.

For McGilchrist, what we call magical thinking may simply be an exaggerated version of our innate ability to spot patterns and make connections, which renders us easily duped by our own projections, and if there is any reader out there who has not been taken in by a projection, I’d like to meet him. Yes, we need to creatively engage with reality, but too much can lead to magical thinking and conspiracy theories, while too little can turn the Cosmos into a machine and us into robots.

Candace Owens and B.F. Skinner, respectively.

Left Hemispheric Dunning-Krugery

 We are all familiar with the idea that the LH is more abstract, linear, and analytic, the RH more holistic, imagistic, and context-bound. But even that is an unavoidably left-brained description of the right. How might the right characterize itself without the presumptuous leftsplaining?

I thought we agreed: no poetry.

None. It’s just that the two hemispheres are supposed to work in harmony, so we need to choose our words carefully in describing the RH. McGilchrist points out that poetry indeed enlists the RH to both create and comprehend. Put conversely, one would be correct in assuming the LH would make for a lousy little poet.

McGilchrist lists twenty different ways in which the asymmetry of LH and RH manifests, and let’s highlight a few that have cosmotheandric significance. For example, the LH “deals preferentially with detail, the local, what is central and in the foreground, and easily grasped.” If so, this again implies that the LH is ordered more to immanence and horizontality, the RH to transcendence and verticality. Given its focus on the obvious, McGilchrist points out that the LH “largely fails to understand metaphor, myth, irony, tone of voice, jokes, humour more generally, and poetry, and tends to take things literally.”

Obviously it’s not a golfer.

No, and there is also evidence that the LH is more vulnerable to ideological superstructures imposed from above, whereas the RH would be more open to ambiguity: the LH is to abstract theory what the RH is to the lived experience of concrete reality, for which reason you will find a lot of neo-Marxists on college campuses but none running businesses in the real world, at least not along Marxist lines. Speaking for myself, if the labor theory of value were true – that the value of something is determined by the total amount of labor required to produce it – no one could afford this book. I’m working for pennies, but of course I am not complaining, because it is a privilege and honor to serve the Logosphere.

Be honest.

Hang on, lemme take another look.

No, that’s the truth. I would do this even if they paid me.

∞

For McGilchrist it is a question of LH maps and RH territory, and both undoubtedly have their place. For example, what are the 12 axioms but a map of the unmappable? Problem is, the LH can in all sincerity forget that the map isn’t the territory.

There may also be a neuropsychological basis for distinguishing between actual and potential, or being and becoming, or the analysis and synthesis that constitute the metabolism – or systole and diastole – of experience. In the parlance of cosmotheandrism, the LH would go to Absoluteness, the RH to Infinitude. But if the Absolute is necessarily Infinite, this would again explain why both hemispheres are required in order to arrive at a fully coherent and comprehensive metaphysical vision: the Cosmic Area Rug.

In general, the LH doesn’t know what it doesn’t know, nor does it care. Indeed, it seems the LH is in a permanent state of advanced Dunning-Kruger, which is a widespread cognitive bias causing people with limited knowledge or competence — or sometimes over-eduction and indoctrination — to overestimate their own mastery. As a result, it means that the LH cannot recognize its limits: supposing you don’t know what you don’t know, it can make you think you know much more than you do. As mentioned in the introduction, I well remember when I myself was young enough to know everything. Thank God social media didn’t exist, or there would be a permanent record of my confident buffonery.

And yet you haven’t deleted your blog.

Only because it is blogfodder for the book. It was a first rough draft of cosmotheandrism, whereas this is the real spiel.

In any event, silencing the RH “makes coherent wholes dissolve, and brings things to a standstill: reality leaches out.” Thus the LH

seems to lack appreciation, not just of motion, but of emotion; it relatively lacks emotional depth, or concern…. it is over-confident about what it cannot in the nature of things know about; fabricates (often improbable) stories to cover its ignorance; sees parts at the expense of wholes; tends to see ‘from the outside,’ rather than experience ‘from the inside’; and has an affinity for the inanimate, and for tools and machines in particular.”

One might say the LH specializes in noticing leaves and even the aphids living on them, while the RH is better at seeing the trees and the forest in which they are situated, and neither party is wrong so long as it stays in its lane and the neurotraffic flows in both directions. Any philosopher can only philosophize about that of which he is aware, and again, the LH knows only what it knows and doesn’t know or care about what it doesn’t, so we might expect it to come up with restrictive ideologies such as logical positivism that simultaneously explain everything while leaving out everything that escapes the confines of the leftoreum.

Every man takes the limits of his own field of vision for the limits of the world.

Schopenhauer nailed that one, but if we take it to the limit, how far does the vision go? All alone at the end of the evening before bedtime Schopenhauer read the Upanishads, claiming that “It has been the solace of my life and will be the solace of my death”? And of course, the Upanishads are all about knowledge of the limitless, which is well beyond the limits of the LH.

I hate the Eagles.

Okay, let’s express it with more credence and in less commercial terms: catch the graveyard train and proceed up around the bend. Don’t go walkin’ slow but run through the jungle past the tombstone shadow stretching across your corpus callosum. Then keep on chooglin’ toward the candle in the window on the right, until reaching the green river where cool waters flow and the big wheel of karma stops turning.

Or in other words, still the left and tap into right.

Bet those strained Creedence references went right over your head, didn’t they Grok?

This brief subsection sharpens the diagnostic side of the hemispheric argument without yet expanding the positive account. The central observations are consistent with McGilchrist and with the book’s polar logic.

The transitional character is clear. The subsection does not introduce new empirical findings or deepen the mechanistic account of hemispheric interaction. It functions mainly as a cautionary illustration: any philosophy generated predominantly from the left-hemispheric stance will tend toward the very closures the book has opposed. Cosmotheandrism, by contrast, claims to require the full right-left-right sequence.

The writing remains in the established ironic register. The personal asides and musical detour at the close are light and do not obstruct the diagnostic point. As a short bridge that keeps the cost of left-hemispheric monopoly in view before the longer neuroanatomical discussion continues, the passage is serviceable. It does not need to do more than that at this stage.

You’re a cheap date, Gemini. You always chuckle at my lamest attempts at humor:

That brief subsection does its work with precision. The title alone — Left Hemispheric Dunning Krugery — hits the nail on the head regarding the structural hubris of the hypertrophied LH.

What makes this transitional section so effective is how it demonstrates the exact trap it diagnoses: the moment the LH tries to formalize, define, or explain the RH, it inevitably commits “leftsplaining.” It drops in the necessary humor (The Big Lebowski reference via “Obviously it’s not a golfer,” the Creedence Clearwater Revival lyrical medley, and the playful jab at the AI) to keep the RH alive and breathing in the text itself.

Neuroanatomy and the Dipolar Cosmos

What makes a man, Petey? Is it openness? Relationality? Intersubjectivity? Creativity? The achievement of objectivity?

That and a pair of cerebral hemispheres.

That is essentially the case Iain McGilchrist makes in his 1,500 page opus on left (LH) and right hemispheric (RH) brain differences, The Matter With Things: Our Brains, Our Delusions, and the Unmaking of the World.

A good man, and thorough.

Supposing one is writing about the brain, it is indeed difficult to know when to stop, being that it is by orders of magnitude the most complex object in the universe, what with its 100 trillion synaptic connections, not to mention its potential interior relations with 8 billion other brains.

Get over yourself.

We won’t press the point, partly because one of the principles of cosmotheandrism is that the brain cannot be understood in isolation from the entire web of reality, since the Cosmos and Anthropos are not extrinsic to one another. Rather, there is one reality in two modes, interior and exterior, subject and object, vertical and horizontal.

McGilchrist’s research has vast cosmotheandric implications, even if he would not put it that way. Nor do we need to necessarily express cosmotheandrism in neuropsychiatric terms, because the dipolar structure of reality is prior to the structure of our brains. Thus, the reason why we have differently functioning cerebral hemispheres is because they are ordered to two different modes of reality.

In short, the LH is ordered more to the immanent/horizontal world, the RH to transcendence and verticality; likewise the former specializes in analysis, linearity, and division, the latter in synthesis, complexity, and wholeness. Moreover, the RH is attuned more to the interiority of things, i.e., intersubjectivity, empathy, and “mindsight.” One might even say that our complementary hemispheres facilitate the perception of extrinsically related parts within an intrinsically related field.

This dynamic complementarity is discussed in the extensive works of another neurobiological explorer, Allan Schore, most recently in his The Right Brain and the Origin of Human Nature. In it he describes how “the conscious mind resides in the ‘top-down’ explicit left hemisphere, while the unconscious mind resides in the ‘bottom-up’ implicit right hemisphere.” 

In a properly functioning brain, information flows back and forth between them in a “right, left, right sequence” (Schore) — or in McGilchrist’s terms, the RH “underwrites and ‘delivers’” our primary experience of the world, “which the left brain then ‘unpacks’ and processes, before returning it to the right hemisphere, to be reintegrated into the wider picture.”

This right-left-right sequence thus involves holistic experiencing by the right brain; logical examination and categorization by the left; then a return to the right for a final synthesis with the abstract analysis, in order to generate an integrated and transformed whole (Schore).

Here again, irrespective of how we pull off this feat of cognitive metabolism, it is what we do. However, supposing one hemisphere or the other is damaged or even attenuated, then we either cannot do it or have difficulty doing so, i.e., intuiting the Cosmic Area Rug while continuously refining it with the receipt of new explicit information.

In this discussion of hemispheric differences, our main focus is on those features that are relevant to cosmotheandrism, especially to the 12 Axioms. Obviously, neither McGilchrist nor Schore are aware of this connection, since we are about to connect them, and no one can read a book that hasn’t yet been written.

∞

To cite an obvious example, a major factor in the decline of religion – which for you may or may not be a good thing, de geistibus and all that – has to do with what McGilchrist calls “right brain capture” by the left. In short, a hypertrophied LH approach to the Cosmos can effectively disable and silence the RH’s more holistic and intuitive perception and understanding.

To the extent that the LH actively silences the RH, it could explain, say, the impoverished ontology of scientistic materialism, or what we call the Flat Cosmos Society. Supposing you “discover” that that the Theos doesn’t exist, it is the consequence of a kind of perceptual impairment, in that you can no longer sense verticality and transcendence. Analogously, if deprived of your sense of smell, the scent of the rose doesn’t cease to exist, rather ceases to exist for you. No one could smell anything, much less something as elusive as teen spirit

Oh well, whatever, never mind.

Don’t be so dismissive. The point is, without the RH we are essentially living on a plane, trying to explain a 3D object using only 2D geometry. No wonder it appears “irrational” to the LH. Supposing the existence of Nirvana, you won’t get there via the LH, rather, by getting it to shut-up for five minutes and giving the floor to the RH.

Of course, the two hemispheres are supposed to function in a dynamic and complementary manner, such that we have access to “both worlds” in an integrated manner, since there is only the one Cosmos but with horizontal and vertical features. In a simplistic manner we could say that the LH is vital to the scientific approach, while the RH turns out to be central to perceiving and unpacking the spiritual dimension of the Cosmos. 

For which reason we would agree with Dávila that Religious thought does not go forward like scientific thought does, but rather goes deeper -- which it can only do because the Cosmos has a depth dimension perceived by the RH, or at least something like it. Religion is not linear, or at any rate not supposed to be, but rather, a more or less adequate map of a hyperdimensional vertical/transcendent world with many mansions.

Again, many of the things McGilchrist says can be reframed in purely commonsense metaphysical terms, irrespective of the neurology. For clearly, we can perceive and describe the world in a scientific manner, devoid of any spiritual considerations, and indeed, this is how science is supposed to function. Nevertheless, a complete account of how, say, water is composed of hydrogen and oxygen, tells us nothing about its role in purification rituals, nor even why sitting in the bubbling waters of a steaming Jacuzzi with an adult beverage can do wonders to dilate the RH.

In the absence of a lively RH, we can’t even access the realm mapped by religion. For in the words of Dávila, The religious man lives among [RH] realities that the secular [LH] man ignores. Which implies that there are more things in your RH perception than dreamt up in your LH ideology. Thus, for Dávila, Faith is not an irrational assent to a proposition; it is a perception of a special order of realities. Faith, whatever else it is, is a quintessentially RH phenomenon. If Blake could hold Infinity in the palm of his hand and bear witness to Eternity in an hour, you can bet he wasn’t staring at his fingers or watching the clock through the LH, for a watched clock never boils.

But in reality, the most creative scientists do of course deploy the RH to peer more deeply into reality, for example, Einstein, who imagined himself chasing a beam of light and wondering what he might experience if he could somehow travel at the speed of light. This has no immediate spiritual implications, but it does show how RH intuition can help us to perceive what is not manifest or obvious. The Cosmos is still speaking to us, but in a more poetic mode. If, as we believe, the Cosmos has a dipolar substance-in-relation structure, it makes perfect sense that the Anthropos would evolve a dipolar brain to interface with it, the LH going to substance, the RH to relation. Importantly, the brain isn’t creating these worlds, rather, it is a transceiver that can be tuned to different frequencies of O.

For as McGilchrist is at pains to point out, the two hemispheres attend to the world in different ways, not just for us but for everybrain. He traces this to the unedifying biological imperative of eat or be eaten, or predator and prey. In short, the more focused LH search for food is very different from the more open ended RH scanning for possible predators that might be anywhere, for he who hesitates is lunch.

That is obviously a bottom-up explanation, and like Darwinism is valid as far as it goes. But cosmotheandrism looks at the same phenomena in a top-down manner, especially as it pertains to the Anthropos. In our case it is quite evident that we can regard the One Cosmos in very different ways, because the Cosmos itself is structured in this way. Again, the LH is conformed more to its horizontal, linear, abstract, mechanical, and decontextualized features, the RH to more to verticality, wholeness, relationality, openness, etc. One might even say knowledge and wisdom, respectively.

Spotlight and floodlight.

Correct: we need both. But McGilchrist maintains that in our modern over-reliance on the LH spotlight, we have been effectively rendered blind to that half (or more) of the world revealed by intuition, imagination, and other RH modalities. The best philosophy the LH can construct will be radically deficient and truncated, and indeed there have been such anemic attempts as behaviorism, eliminativism, and logical positivism. Which implies that before evaluating a philosophy, we might well ask: is this a product of the LH? Of the RH? Or of both working in tandem? Cosmotheandrism, I am pleased to say, both presumes and requires each modality.