God, Cosmos, and Neurology

I suppose we ought to preface what follows with a description of The Matter With Things. As you can see, the author is one of those people who worries about the same sorts of things we do:

McGilchrist addresses some of the oldest and hardest questions humanity faces -- ones that, however, have a practical urgency for all of us today. Who are we? What is the world? How can we understand consciousness, matter, space and time? Is the cosmos without purpose or value? Can we really neglect the sacred and divine?

In doing so, he argues that we have become enslaved to an account of things dominated by the brain’s left hemisphere, one that blinds us to an awe-inspiring reality that is all around us, had we but eyes to see it. He suggests that in order to understand ourselves and the world we need science and intuition, reason and imagination, not just one or two; that they are in any case far from being in conflict; and that the brain’s right hemisphere plays the most important part in each. And he shows us how to recognize the "signature" of the left hemisphere in our thinking, so as to avoid making decisions that bring disaster in their wake.

Following the paths of cutting-edge neurology, philosophy and physics, he reveals how each leads us to a similar vision of the world, one that is both profound and beautiful -- and happens to be in line with the deepest traditions of human wisdom. It is a vision that returns the world to life, and us to a better way of living in it: one we must embrace if we are to survive.

Being that the book is over 1,500 pages and close to a hundred bucks in paperback, one wonders how many people will read it, or how many reviews it will garner. All we can say with certainty is that ours will be the lengthiest and most serious -- or wacky, depending -- review; or not so much a review as a dialogue and engagement.

Like me, you probably don't recall our multi-post discussion of his earlier book, The Master and the Emissary, about a decade ago. I remember writing about it, but I recall neither details nor bottom line. Sure, 1,500 is a lot of pages, but that is no doubt dwarfed by the number of pages we've cranked out here over the last ten years. Converted to text, it would no doubt be well over 10,000 pages. Who knows what's down there?

What do the existing reviewers say? This one from an Oxford dude sounds promising: 

It's very simple: this is one of the most important books ever published. And, yes, I do mean ever. It is a thrilling exposition of the nature of reality, and a devastating repudiation of the strident, banal orthodoxy that says it is childish and disreputable to believe that the world is alive with wonder and mystery.... 

McGilchrist's range is as vast as the subject -- which is everything -- demands. He is impeccably rigorous, fearlessly honest, and compellingly readable. Put everything else aside. Read this now to know what sort of creature you are and what sort of place you inhabit.

One reviewer calls it "the most important seminal work of philosophy in the broadest sense since the publication of Process and Reality by A.N. Whitehead in 1929," but another cautions us that McGilchrist is no Gagdad, for "there is nothing wacky or tendentious about this book." This is a potentially serious drawback, supposing reality turns out to be as wacky as I suspect it is. 

Surprisingly, there are even 70 reviews by regular folks. Let me see if I can quickly extract any helpful nuggets. Eh, most are too wordy, but only one of them gives less than four or five stars, it containing this brilliant passage accusing the author of failing to answer

A reasonable question, like one about existence of God -> so who created God?

In any event, if we can keep to the pace of reviewing one chapter per post, we could polish off this baby in 30 posts or so. But there's no way of predicting, since sometimes a single chapter can yield a one sentence (or less) review, while other times a single sentence provokes multiple posts.  

A note to myself in the margin -- and there's already an abundance of marginalia -- says for me to begin with this passage, so I will: 

Long before we had anything other than the most rudimentary knowledge of hemisphere difference, a number of philosophers -- Pascal, Spinoza, Kant, Goethe, Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, Bergson and Scheler among them -- were able to intuit that there are two fundamentally distinct ways in which we approach the world, what Bergson called "two different orders of reality." I would tentatively suggest that many of the great questions of philosophy in fact turn on which one you choose.

I appreciate the point, which comes down to, in my opinion, philosophies of being or of becoming. In my cosmos, these are complementary, neither reducible to the other except via our own (LH) power of abstraction. And again, of the two, being must be "prior" to becoming -- as Absolute is to Infinite -- even though the two are as eternally close as Father is to Son. 

Come to think of it, the Trinity itself only becomes impenetrable and impervious to logic if approached in a fully locked & loaded left-brain way. Although that characterization just popped into my head spontaneously, it is in fact locked -- or closed -- and loaded -- with ideological assumptions. But if the right brain were as facile with language as the left, it would say of the Trinity, Now you're talkin' my language!  

What is this wacky language? Before delving into it, let's first deal with the left. We're all familiar with the idea that the left cerebral hemisphere (LH) is more linear and linguistic, the right (RH) more holistic, imagistic, and context-bound. But that right there was a left-brained description of the right! 

I was wondering to myself what an RH description of the RH would be like. It would be like Finnegans Wake, literally. There are other ways it could be, but that book is like an RH dream of what it is like to dream with the RH. I will resist the temptation to veer any further in this wacky direction. 

On pp. 28-31 McGilchrist lists 20 different ways in which LH and RH asymmetry manifests, and let me highlight a few that stood out for me. The LH "deals preferentially with detail, the local, what is central and in the foreground, and easily grasped." 

Although he doesn't use the word, it makes me think the RH would therefore deal with the nonlocal, but in any event, this is very much like horizontal and vertical, respectively.

I would even say that a person who does not or cannot engage the vertical has an RH deficit. For similar reasons, the LH "largely fails to understand metaphor, myth, irony, tone of voice, jokes, humour more generally, and poetry, and tends to take things literally."

Which strongly suggests that the LH is a late-night comedian.

There is also evidence that the LH is very much ideological (my word) whereas the RH would be more open to ambiguity: "One could say that the LH is the hemisphere of theory, the RH that of experience" (or of map and territory, respectively).

The LH aims to narrow things down to a certainty, while the RH opens them up into possibility. The RH is able to sustain ambiguity and the holding together of of information that appears to have contrary implications...  

Very much like the analysis and synthesis that constitute the metabolism of experience. Note also the word I highlighted above, possibility. It makes me think that the ultimate categories of Absolute and Infinite (or All-Possibility) are reflected queerbelow in LH and RH. 

Which is enough for now.