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.

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.