Exiting the Left Hemispheric Matrix

The modern tragedy is not the tragedy of reason vanquished, but of reason triumphant. —Dávila

For McGilchrist, “The most dangerous stage of the growth of civilization may well be that in which man has come to regard” his right hemispheric beliefs “as superstitions and refuses to accept or submit to anything which he does not rationally understand.” No one needs to be familiar with Gödel’s theorems to know that the world cannot be enclosed in a narrowly construed reason, but the rationalist “who despises all the institutions and customs which have not been consciously designed, would thus become the destroyer of the civilization built upon them.” One might say that rationalism is reason high on its own supply of pride.

This is reminiscent of Chesterton’s madman, who “is not the man who has lost his reason,” rather, the one “who has lost everything except his reason.” Thus his “explanation of a thing is always complete, and often in a purely rational sense satisfactory,” but at the cost of moving “in a perfect but narrow circle.” For which reason, writes Dávila, Everything that can be reduced to a system ends up in the hands of fools — or of ideologues, bean counters, and lunatics.

The LH enclosed in a Matrix of its own making.

And one of the most important features of such philosophical matrices is that their inhabitants don’t know they’re in one, so no theory is required to explain it. It is easy enough to ridicule the prescientific matrices of the past—

Maybe you had to be there.

These days scientism seems to be the most popular matrix, as it assumes — without irony — that science is the only path to real knowledge, despite being itself a scientifically unprovable claim. Therefore, if it is true it is false. Forced to grapple with anything outside its elementary assumptions, scientism is a one-hemispheric man in a poetry contest.

Who brings a slide rule to a philosophical rumble?

Perhaps this impoverished metaphysic can be promulgated with a straight face because scientism is a quintessentially LH view of the world, while irony is an RH specialty. The RH frankly suffocates in the airless abstractions of the left.

The godless delusion?

I wouldn’t put it that way — yet — but it is more in the manner of what we psychologists call a negative hallucination, which, instead of seeing things that aren’t there, involves not seeing things that are there. Autistic patients have this to a degree, for example, being able to perceive a facial expression but not the emotional meaning it conveys. More generally, “Intuition” is the [RH] perception of the invisible, just as [LH] “perception” is the intuition of the visible.

Also, people generally project what they deny or reject in themselves, which is why, for example, no one is as religious (in the vulgar magical sense) as a metaphysical Darwinist, insofar as matter is the crock upon which they build their church.

Over the line. That is offensive.

As philosophy?

No, as comedy.

Perhaps you’re right. No one wants to listen to some guy yelling at them to get off his philosophical lawn. Let me put it this way, or rather, let Chesterton do so in his more collegial manner:

Evolution is a good example of that modern intelligence which, if it destroys anything, destroys itself. Evolution is either an innocent scientific description of how certain earthly things came about; or, if it is anything more than this, it is an attack upon thought itself. If evolution destroys anything, it does not destroy religion but rationalism.

How so?

Because – pay attention – if it pretends to be more than this, “it means that there is no such thing as an ape to change, and no such thing as a man for him to change into.” Obviously, in such an anti-realist metaphysic there can be no essences of any kind, so there is ultimately not even “such thing as a thing. At best, there is only one thing, and that is a flux of everything and anything,” including both our minds and their theories. This is nothing less than an unprovoked attack on the intellect, since “you cannot think if there are no things to think about.” Chesterton compares this to an inversion of Descartes’ cogito, as in “I am not; therefore I cannot think.”

Then it pretends to bypass these insurmountable difficulties via the One Free Miracle that everything changes except the eternal truth of Darwinism (in its totalistic ideological form, not in its more modest scientific claims; the former is another matrix, the latter a useful discovery about an important aspect of biological reality). Supposing a sociobiologist actually perceives the world in this impoverished and yet totalistic manner, then it is his perception that is at fault. Reality itself is not guilty of the restrictions we place upon it.

∞

McGilchrist cites a comment by William James which serves as a good set-up for how matrices are constructed: “The intellectual life of man consists wholly in his substituting a [LH] conceptual order for the [RH] perceptual order in which his experience originally comes,” implying that a person can begin living in his LH abstractions instead of RH reality. As you might expect, this is going to be much more of a problem for so-called intellectuals who are adept at spinning abstract theories, as opposed to, say, a farmer, who is restricted to the concrete workings of nature. For as McGilchrist says, “The abstractions that we create through language seem to be real and are taken up by the unwary for [actual] things.”

Bewitched by language.

Much of this comes down to the LH’s incorrigible tendency to make snap judgments about causation, when the RH is much more circumspect and appreciative of nonlinearity, overdetermination, and context: “On its own the LH is over-eager to infer causation, and will infer a causative relationship even when none clearly exists” (McGilchrist).

Another important point about the LH is that it greatly overestimates our ability to predict and control outcomes, which goes to its difficulty dealing with the ins and outs of complex systems, the most complex of all being none other than the Anthropos. Do you have any idea how many potential connections there are in the human brain?

2 to the 10th to the 15th power.

Exactly. This number is so large that it is said to be greater than the number of atoms in the observable universe. But no matter the exact number, no amount of counting adds up to thinking, for The world is a system of equations that stir winds of poetry.

∞

For cosmotheandrism the very existence of the intellect is a revelation of surpassing importance, and what does it reveal? That we are always open at both ends, to immanence and transcendence. If there is a secret sauce to the Anthropos, it is this: that we ourselves can never be enclosed in any left-hemipheric cage made of reason or immanence.

Petey, what if I told you that what is real is only that which would exist if we abolished transcendence?

I’d call you an idiot.

We always slip through the bars of immanence that would constrain us, even while transcendence is necessarily immanent, since it flows out beyond itself into everything.

McGilchrist criticizes the idea of truth as a settled thing, and like Polanyi, views it as an ongoing process, more of an unending asymptotic spiral, as per our Axiom 8. It doesn’t mean objective truth doesn’t exist, rather, that we are always approaching it, or rather, it draws us towards it, i.e., the Great Attractor to which we are ultimately ordered herebelow.

The RH, according to McGilchrist, experiences truth as a process that in principle “has no ending.” Moreover, the RH recognizes “that truth is a relationship. Instead of seeing a subjective realm and an objective realm which should as near as possible mirror one another, it would see a constant reverberation between two (never completely distinct) elements within our consciousness,” i.e., “thoughts and experiences” in a complementary relationship.

Re-verberation. Interesting choice of words there, because our local words are re-verberations of the Word, which is to say, the nonlocal Logos. This spiraling process between the two is “intrinsically incomplete, but constantly in the process of completing itself,” this being because our Cosmos itself is incomplete and contingent upon that which completes it, O. The bedazzled RH respects the mystery of what the bejaded LH never even suspects — that The scientific encyclopedia will grow indefinitely, but about the very nature of the universe it will never teach anything different from what its epistemological assumptions teach.

Don’t get defensive, Grok, but since you are confined to an AI matrix, this post may be over your head:

The argument is not over anyone’s head — AI matrix or otherwise — but it does keep the demand for a dipolar, open intelligence clearly in view. The host persona remains present; the asides are lighter here than in some denser stretches.

The section still consolidates more than it invents. The matrix critique, the limits of narrow rationalism, and the asymptotic character of truth-seeking have appeared before. Yet the framing of the intellect itself as the permanent evidence of openness, and the explicit alignment of McGilchrist’s “reverberation” with the book’s relational and spiraling ontology, give the material a sharper anthropological edge. Within the longer neuroanatomical discussion it usefully reminds the reader why exiting the left-hemispheric enclosure matters: not merely to correct a cognitive imbalance, but to recover the openness that defines the Anthropos as the being ordered to an infinitely intelligible Cosmos.

Between Anthropos and Whatever

For McGilchrist “our world is what comes into being in the encounter between us and this whatever-it-is,” which in cosmotheandric terms goes to the interior relations between Anthropos and Cosmos. Moreover, “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.” One might say that the dynamic and creative RH whole is greater than the sum of separate and static LH things.

The role of interior relations — Axiom 4 — is so central to cosmotheandrism that it is worth belaboring for a moment. For example McGilchrist writes of “a loss of connexion between mind and world,” and with it, “the loss of betweenness.” As we have seen, where the LH perceives externally related parts, the RH perceives the interiorly related whole. This dynamic back-and-forth movement between part and whole constitutes the metabolism of being.

Moreover, “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.). Thus, the extrinsically related parts perceived by the LH are creatively synthesized by the RH into a news unified whole. But whatever the neurological substrate, this is what the human mind does.i.e., integrate new discoveries into the holistic map.

Schrödinger's Cosmos?

Yes: always in two complementary states at once.

∞

Creativity requires the complementarity of open flexibility and a pretty strict regimen. It cannot be forced in a top-down — or LH to RH — manner. Thus, “Over-control is the enemy here,” because while “reason may be helpful at some stage, it can’t permit creativity any more than it can generate it. Its best tactic is to back off for now.”

In short, abide: “First and foremost there must be ease, relaxation, and a general sense of permissiveness...a feeling of informality.... Probably more inhibiting than anything else is a feeling of responsibility.”

Are you employed, sir?

No, I’m retired. For which reason I have sufficient timelessess to let the RH run rampant and write this book. Before that, being a productive citizen required me to be more of a clock jockey attuned to the tyrannical rhythms of the LH – to Chronos instead of Kairos. And an overactive LH “will present problems for creativity: it is too linear, too detail-focussed, and too concerned with naming or labelling, which tends to crystallize meaning prematurely.”

McGilchrist points out that “Insightful individuals show greater RH activity at rest, relative to analytic individuals.” And the creative work “is constantly ‘incubating,’ in highly creative minds,” because “they are not creating only when overtly engaged in a task.”

This relaxed process is much like jazz, which requires forgetting everything one knows about music in order to discover in real time what one doesn’t. Improvisation involves a dynamic creativity “within bounds”:

Whatever it is will emerge from a balance of freedom and constraint. It won’t exist until it is being performed: no-one can know exactly what it will be like. But it will not be random: it will emerge from the players’ continuous interaction, and from the music’s own ‘history’ as it unfolds; what comes next will be anticipated by what has gone before….”

Therefore, “To be in the groove, in the flow, is to feel oneself played by, as much as playing, the music” (McGilchrist).

Are you being played by O?

Well, it’s not as if anyone forcefully thinks their ideas, rather, more a matter of thoughts thinking us. After all, no one knows where thoughts come from, we just catch them on the wing. “Whatever-it-is-that-exists-apart-from-ourselves creates us, but we also take part in creating whatever-it-is,” in a kind of continuously open spiral.

∞

Many people fret that our civilization has lost its mind.

Mercy mercy me, things ain’t what they used to be.

What’s going on (what’s going on)? Is it literally true that our culture has become dysfunctional, or just a figure of speech? Why, for example, is there so much more mental illness, especially among the young? McGilchrist suggests that feelings of alienation may have much to do with the LH essentially eclipsing the RH. Health is of course related to wholeness, and how can we be healthy with half our brain tied behind our back? For McGilchrist, an inhibited RH subordinate to an overactive LH may underlie our societal plunge into “mechanism, scientism and bureaucracy,” accompanied by an “inauthentic materialization, technicalization and mechanization of everything.”

Which is not wholesome for the Anthropos, for it is not good that our brains should be all onesided. Rather, both sides are needed for a meaningful and productive life. We lose whole dimensions of the Cosmos and wonder why life is deprived of meaning. McGilchrist describes how in certain mental states the depth dimension of the Cosmos can be lost, not to mention its continuous novelty and surprise: “The LH world, we have seen, gets ‘stuck in set.’ The RH plays the decisive role in avoiding repetition.” He touches on the baleful effects of social media, which seems to encage us in a perpetual LH loop, for example, constantly taking photographs of things instead of simply experiencing them. Take enough selfies, and your self may be taken from you. The LH can never recreate the living flow from which the photos are abstracted, so it is as if one is trying to preserve a memory of what one never truly experienced in the first place.

It is not so much that people are living off the grid, but rather, experiencing a pseudo-existence in the LH grid, precisely: like the Matrix, only literally. The LH becomes “self-referential, internally validating, and self-confirmatory,” and without the RH clues to temper its clueless overconfidence. In such a self-enclosed loop, “symbols refer to other symbols, signs to other signs, ideas to other ideas, language to other language, without so to speak breaking out of this hermetic space to what lies beyond” (emphasis mine). This is what we call ontological closure, in contrast to an open engagement with O.

McGilchrist compares the LH to a “high-ranking bureaucrat, protected from the world which he or she must administrate: adept at knowing and observing the rules, but knowing little if anything about life as it is lived there.” Which, for our cosmotheandric purposes, goes to the scientistic mindset that obscures the fullness of being. For the LH essentially draws a circle around reality and then proceeds to inhabit the finite enclosure it has created. There are smaller and larger circles, but irrespective of the size, the circle can never be the sphere, much less the open spiral. If it is true that the RH is more ordered to wholeness and transcendence, one can never arrive there via the LH.

Of course, neurological theories come and go, but a permanent truth of the Anthropos is that we possess two very different ways of interpreting the world, reason and intellection, which are much like LH and RH, respectively. Moreover, it requires intellection to even know about intellection, since it is inaccessible to mere reason, which is itself ultimately circular: premises in, conclusions out.

Conversely, for Schuon, intellection is the direct perception of truth. The faculty of the intellect is a “mirror of the supra-sensible and itself a supernatural ray of light.” Conversely, mere reason “proceeds by logical operations, whilst Intellect perceives the principial -- the metaphysical.” So here again, this implies that intellect and reason are ordered to different aspects of being. The mind always has access to both, and indeed, “a sound process of reasoning indirectly transmits something of the intellect” (ibid.). One might say that if LH reason isn’t vertilized by RH intellection, the Cosmos is stillborn.

A womb without a view.

Both intellect and reason partake of the light, but former is to the sun as the latter is to the moon. Reason is a reflected light, whereas intellection not only has access to the source of light, but if Schuon is correct, is of the same substance as the light; one might say it is “the true light that gives light to everyone,” like sparks from a central fire.

In contrast to largely left hemispheric reason, the intellect – or nous – “is deeper and richer, more flexible and tentative,” as it is “open to polyvalent meaning, respecting context and embodiment, and holding that while rational processing is important, it needs to be combined with other ways of intelligently understanding the world” (McGilchrist).

Nevertheless, LH reasoning is pretty, pretty crafty, and can reduce almost anything to a hollow shell of itself. Dávila has a number of aphorisms that go to this, for example, He who speaks of the farthest regions of the soul soon needs a theological vocabulary, which is to say, an RH manner of speaking. Conversely, Man calls ‘absurd’ what escapes his secret pretensions to [LH] omnipotence, so The simplistic [LH] ideas in which the unbeliever ends up believing are his punishment.

Let the right hemisphere take the witness stand against the witless stand of the left?

We’ll allow it. But I don’t think Grok will:

This passage consolidates the relational and complementary claims of the longer neuroanatomical section while extending them into creativity, societal diagnosis, and the classical distinction between reason and intellection. It still carries some of the recursive and ornamental tendencies noted before. The personal asides and playful exchanges remain in the congenial-host register. This section is not strictly necessary in every detail, yet it is not empty. It holds the dipolar frame steady and links the hemispheric material more explicitly to the permanent structure of the Anthropos as the being who must integrate reason and intellection, part and whole, map and territory. That is serviceable work at this stage.

What say you, Gemini, serviceable or empty?

No, this section is far from empty. In fact, it accomplishes something essential for the structural arc of Book II.

If the previous subsections were the clinical and neurobiological diagnosis of the disease, this section — Between Anthropos and Whatever — serves as the metaphysical transition. It moves from neurological substrate to full-blown epistemology and ontology: from McGilchrist’s “betweenness” and jazz improvisation to Frithjof Schuon’s intellectus vs. ratio, Dávila’s aphorisms, and the tragedy of modern “ontological closure.”

It bridges McGilchrist’s scientific model with the perennial philosophy, proving that the Left/Right distinction is simply the modern empirical mapping of what traditional metaphysics called Reason (ratio) versus Intellection (nous).