If I Knew What I Was Doing, I’d Do It More Often

There is a difference between “crystalized” and “fluid” intelligence, which are LH and RH specialties, respectively. We know from our Gödel that human intelligence can never be like a machine, and vice versa. As McGilchrist explains, a machine is capable of solving certain kinds of problems, but not “novel problem solving” requiring input from both hemispheres.

Gödel himself was not a conventionally religious person, rather a Platonist who believed the intellect capable of reaching the great Out Yonder transcending space and time. In the parlance of cosmotheandrism, this would constitute nothing less than the intellect ordered to the inexhastible and uncontainable O. Among other things, this latter is the “extreme reality” of which we may gain “at least partial glimpses” (Goldstein).

According to Gödel’s own Platonist understanding of his proof, it shows us that our minds, in knowing mathematics, are escaping the limitations of man-made systems, grasping the independent truths of abstract reality (ibid.).

Therefore, an unlimited LH reason places thoroughly irrational limits on intelligence as such, which is in principle unlimited and has access (a la Gödel) to what transcends mere reason. This applies to quantum physics no less than any other dimension of reality, which is perhaps why Richard Feynman says that no one understands it; or, supposing you do, it only means you don’t.

The RH is likewise more involved in creativity: it surpasses the LH in its “breadth of vision, the capacity to forge distant links, flexibility rather than rigidity, a willingness to respond to a changed, or changing, context, a tolerance of ambiguity, and an ability to work with knowledge that is, for the most part, inherently both imprecise and implicit” (McGilchrist). Thus, one cannot grasp cosmotheandrism or recover the Cosmic Area Rug without the aid of a lively right hemisphere.

Genuine creativity is not a common trait, as it involves the copresence of a number of other traits, which include high intelligence but also perseverance and unconventionality. None of these alone will guarantee creativity, but put them together and you might just have something. You will also need a modality or means of expression, but even then, mastery of the means is no guarantee of a creative outcome. Anyone can write or play an instrument, but there are never enough writers or musicians.

In the movement from preparation to incubation to illumination, we have a lot of control over the first two but pretty much none over the third. It is very much as if we can till the soil and plant the seeds, but the rest is up to… something: we can take care of the necessary conditions, but what is the sufficient condition that makes creativity happen? Certainly one must be open, but to what? If we knew, it wouldn’t be creative, rather, an AI algorithm, something a machine could do.

It brings to mind the great songwriter Johnny Mercer, whose father once asked him how it was possible for a man his age – 30 at the time – to have written over 500 songs, much less without playing an instrument or knowing anything about music theory. After pondering the question for a few moments Mercer responded, “Pop, to tell you the truth I simply get to thinking over the song, pondering over it in my mind and all of a sudden, I get in tune with the Infinite” (emphasis mine).

Mercer’s explanation is as adequate or inadequate as any other, except to say that it is the RH that tunes into the infinite source of lyrics and melodies. It seems that the creative person must latch on to the Infinite, even while acknowledging that we are always Mister In-Between — which is to say, between finitude and Infinitude. Otherwise Infinitude just laughs and runs away like a child at play. O is then behind a closed door marked “nevermore,” the LH having slammed it shut.

∞

Ask around and you will quickly discover that Even the most lucid writer spends a lot of time doing what he does not know how to do, and thus knowing things without knowing how we know them. This is because the LH isn’t clever enough to comprehend what the RH is up to over there.

Such a fine line between clever and stupid.

Yes, but any creative person does something analogous. Ask any songwriter where the songs come from, and they’ll be the first to say they have no idea.

Nowadays they come from AI.

True, but we’re speaking of deeply human songwriters, for example, Leonard Cohen, who said that “Poetry comes from a place that no one commands, that no one conquers…. if I knew where the good songs came from, I would go there more often.”

Speaking of whom, Tom Waits was once driving down the freeway when a striking melody popped into his head. He had no pen or tape recorder, so in frustration looked up at the sky and said, “Excuse me, can’t you see I’m driving? If you’re serious about this, come back later or go bother Leonard Cohen.” Similarly, Bob Dylan said “The songs are there. They’re like ghosts searchin’ for bodies. They’re lookin’ for someone to sing them... You just write down what you hear.”

Trolling the unknown for Like a Rolling Stone?

Exactly: “It’s like a ghost is writing a song like that,” said Dylan. “It gives you the song and it goes away.” Which is an honest account, because who can even say where thoughts and ideas come from? We could say “the unconscious,” but that’s just a word superimposed on a mystery.

Creative types also know there are active and passive sides to the process. The active side consists of mulling over a problem while feeding our heads with all the material related to it. This is analogous to planting the seeds which are then worked over in the subconscious mind until out pops the creative product or solution.

LH thinking is more convergent, as it seeks a single, unambiguous, and presumably correct answer, while RH divergent thinking is more free-floating, original, and surprising. Obviously creativity involves seeing connections, but paranoid and delusional people see connections too. In fact, it turns out that truly creative people often have relatives who are subject to severe mental illness, while they themselves are not, so it helps to be loosely hinged as opposed to being completely unhinged, like, say, Jim Morrison. He took literally Rambaud’s crack about the Poet making himself a seer “by a long, gigantic, and rational derangement of all the senses.”

How’d that work out?

Let’s just say with the end of all his elaborate plans.

∞

This matter of seeing connections goes back to the essential relationality of the Cosmos. McGilchrist suggests as much, in that “our world is what comes into being in the encounter between us and this whatever-it-is.” Moreover – and this is again key to the ultimacy of cosmotheandrism – “The relationship comes before the relata -- the ‘things’ that are supposed to be related. What we mean by the word ‘and’ is not just additive, but creative.”

The foundational role of relationship is so central to cosmotheandrism that it is worth belaboring for a moment. For example McGilchrist talks about “a loss of connexion between mind and world,” and with it, “the loss of betweenness.”

Now, betweenness is somewhat difficult to conceptualize, perhaps because the LH thinks of it as a kind of space between objects. But as we have said, betweenness is equally as real as that which it links (Axiom 4), assuming the link is not imaginary.

Another key point: “Only the right hemisphere is able to see that what seem to be opposites coexist and are necessary to one another -- indeed, that by stepping beyond mere opposition, and excluding neither, a new unity can be attained” (ibid.). That is a bingo, and it goes to any number of irreducible complementarities, from wave and particle in physics below to a relational Godhead above, and to everything in between. In short, Axiom 2.

You Have the Right to Silence the Left Brain

Since the RH is implicated in creativity, one might suspect that LH damage would result in an unhinged imagination. However, it doesn’t work that way at all. Schizophrenia, for example, correlates with a hyperactive LH and hypoactive RH, the latter again anchoring us in the real world. Rather, it is the LH that is more prone to spinning abstractions and dwelling in them instead of reality.

Living in the comfort and safety of one’s own delusions.

Except to say that people often prefer to live in painful and persecutory delusions — or even neuroses — that are easily disprovable, at least to those of us living outside the delusion. Speaking as a clinical psychologist, a neurosis is often less painful than the reality it is designed to avoid: it is a defense mechanism against a painful or unpleasant reality. For example, it is much easier to blame a conspiracy for one’s failings than to acknowledge responsibility for one’s own failure. Frankly, this is Psychology 101.

Here again, this suggests that the RH must specialize in transcendence, since it is able to view LH antics from “above” and apply the brakes to them. But at the same time, it is more immanent than the LH, in the sense that the latter specializes in abstractions and maps of the world which may obscure the world itself. Once the mind is entrapped in its own ideology, it becomes difficult to recognize anything outside it, and it will use resources from within the erroneous system to attempt to plug holes and prop it up.

Like doubling down on a hard 12 in blackjack.

Or splitting 10s. Truly, in philosophy you need to know when to hold ‘em and when to fold ‘em. A wise but unknown fella’ by the name of Jules Lequier – we’ll hear more from him in Book III – said that “We are all children of error. Most of the time we only escape our errors by means of other errors.” In other words, supposing we begin our philosophy with a Big Error, it will require a multitude of subsequent small errors in order to continue propping it up.

For example, McGilchrist touches on the aggressive misosophy (my characterization) of deconstruction, whereby language is reduced to a closed system in which words are only about other words rather than reality. But as discussed in Book I, language is analogous to money, since both are symbols for an underlying reality. Both language and money must ultimately be fungible to the First Bank of Reality.

The LH gives us a representation of reality, not reality itself. It is reality once removed, which is not unimportant: just because a map isn’t the territory, it hardly means maps are worthless. Rather, as they say, all models are wrong, but some are useful. But just as you can’t live in a map, nor can you eat money or substitute a college diploma for a brain. In the Wizard of Oz, the Scarecrow actually possessed the thing itself which the conferral of a diploma only signified, whereas nowadays we confer the symbol as if it signifies the thing itself, i.e., intelligence.

Credentialed ignorati?

Yes, the left-hemispheric Dunning-Krugery discussed previously. Back in graduate school one of the requirements — not that I didn’t need it — was to undergo a course of psychoanalytic therapy, partly in order to discover just how neurotic we actually are beneath our clueless self-confidence. On one occasion while on the couch freely associating about this and that, my analyst surprised me with a question: “Do you know what you’re doing right now? “I don’t know. Complaining about my mother?” “No,” he responded. “You’re relaxing the left brain and allowing the right brain to speak.”

These days, in order to keep the mind limber, I meditate every day for half an hour. What am I actually doing during this verticalisthenic exercise? Among other things, it seems I am lulling the LH into the background so the RH can come to the fore. McGilchrist describes how activation of RH indeed results in heightened awareness and a deepened sense of reality. One hopes, at any rate.

Height and depth. The measures of transcendence.

The theologian Hans Balthasar writes of “the annihilation of the depth dimension of being” resulting from “The formula ‘A is nothing other than,’” because if something is only what it is, it is thereby less than what it is. Rather, reality has a surprising depth dimension, which is precisely how we know it is – and we are – real, as per Polanyi above. The real Cosmos is full of surprises, whereas a superimposed ideology preemptively tames them. If being weren’t always already beyond being, life would frankly be a snooze, for When things appear to us to be just what they seem, they soon seem to be even less. We can never actually get to the bottom of reality, because it is bottomless.

And topless.

Moreover, bottomless because topless, or in other words, open at both ends. Back in the 1980s there was a famous newspaper headline: Headless Body in Topless Bar. We too become headless if the Cosmos isn’t topless, because we are thereby enclosed in an LH immanence we can never escape. In reality science is interminable. Supposing it terminates in matter, this is just another attempt to enclose being in ideology. Being is intelligible, but inexhaustibly so, unless one prematurely encloses it in an anti-Gödelian system.

McGilchrist highlights the centrality of intersubjectivity, which goes to the relational interiority of our Axiom 4. This too is very much an RH specialty, for it doesn’t matter how big our brains are if we aren’t intersubjective, which is to say, members of one another, so to speak. Or so to communicate. Absent this there is no way for culture to exist, or anything beyond the atomistic individual. Intersubjectivity is the interior-to-interior linking or mutual indwelling of subjects. Without it we’d all be more like billiard balls or even Kardashians.

As discussed previously, the neurological foundation of intersubjectivity develops in infancy, forged in the mother-infant dyad. Schore explains how the right brain develops prior to the left, such that this intersubjectivity results from a right-to-right brain attunement between mother and infant. But this same attunement is precisely what allows us to tune into other subjects throughout the lifespan. Likewise, an effective psychotherapist specializes in this kind of attunement, which the psychoanalyst Theodore Reik called “listening with the third ear,” when in reality one is listening for right brain clues embedded in the patient’s left-brain speech.

Pickin’ up bad vibrations?

It often comes down to that.

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.