My Exalted View From Nowhere

Chapter 2 of The Matter With Things is mostly about the fascinating and horrible things that will be the matter with you, depending on whether your stroke is in the left or the right cerebral hemisphere. Thus, it mostly aggravated my hypochondria. 

On the other hand, because hypochondria is probably located in the RH, a stroke on that side of the brain would presumably cure it. 

In general, the LH doesn't know what it doesn't know, nor does it care. Indeed, it seems that the LH is in a permanent state of advanced Dunning-Kruger.  

The whole discussion reminds me of asking people if they'd rather be blind or deaf. The former would be no picnic, but the latter isolates one from the human matrix. Likewise, an LH without an RH is more machine-like than human. 

There's a summary at the end of the chapter: knocking out the RH "makes coherent wholes dissolve, and brings things to a standstill: reality leaches out." And the LH

seems to lack appreciation, not just of motion, but of emotion; it relatively lacks emotional depth, or concern, tending to be irritable or facetious, especially when challenged. It tends to disown problems, and pass the responsibility to others; 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.

It is also quite confident it is right. 

So, it's a bit like an autistic person with Dunning-Kruger. 

Frankly it's like scientism, but it shares features of any ideology, except that our most pernicious contemporary ideologies are anchored in unbridled and incontinent feeling -- for example, transgender ideology in particular, but leftism more generally. How does that work? Certainly it helps to have a brain-damaged president, but he's just an effect, not the cause of anything. 

We don't want to fall into our own form of neurological reductionism. We have to remember that it's persons who have bilateral hemispheres, not vice versa, and that mother nature is a mad scientist (Kramer). 

Therefore, even absent a stroke or tumor, all sorts of weird and incoherent LH/RH combinations are possible, and with no awareness by the person promulgating it of how weird and incoherent it is. 

Have you ever seen Rachel Maddow? Like the stroke victim without a functioning RH, she's krazy konfident. But I've also read that she is prone to severe depressive episodes, which may well be the revenge of the RH.

Which goes back to a subject we've discussed in the past, which is the degree to which any worldview is but a compensatory superstructure over a cauldron of unresolved issues. Nietzsche had it right when he said something to the effect that most philosophies are but unwitting confessional autobiographies. Certainly it was true of his philosophy. 

But any philosophy -- self-evidently -- can only philosophize about that of which it is aware, and again, the LH only knows what it knows and doesn't know or care about what it doesn't. Probably the last word in this would be logical positivism, which, like the Oozlum bird, vanishes up its own ass(umptions).

From my exalted view from nowhere, standing outside the cosmos, it seems obvious to me that LH and RH are active and living complementarities that only exist because together they reflect the nature of things. But we'll see. 1,400 pages to go.

And if you think I'm joking about my E.V.F.N., there's simply no way around this vis-a-vis any philosophy. In the most abstract sense, it's really just another way of affirming that the Absolute exists and that we are ordered to it. Even the stupidest and most deranged philosophy conceivable either makes this claim or it can make no claim at all. 

We're up to chapter 3, but I want to go back and tie up any loose ends, or at least revisit a few passages that poked one of my hemispheres. So far the whole thing is interesting, engaging, and well written; I can't possibly cite every provocative nugget of insight, so I'll try to limit myself to a few big ones.

One key point is made on p. 6, where McGilchrist discusses the ontological reality and importance of relation. Remember, my EVFN maintains that ultimate reality is substance-in-relation, so anything that alludes to this makes my RH stand up:

Reductionism envisages a universe of things -- and simply material things at that. How these things are related is viewed as a secondary matter. However, I suggest 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.

And although McGilchrist only suggests this, it is confirmed by my EVFN.

In addition to the ontological reality of relation, McGilchrist also touches on the reality of hierarchy, at least implicitly. This is not a flat cosmos. That's only the LH perspective, certainly not the RH view, much less Bob's EVFN.

Lastly, there are a few passages that absolutely echo the views of our in-house theoretical biologist Robert Rosen, for example, "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." 

And although it may sound wacky to say "inanimacy is better regarded as the limit case of animacy" (McGilchrist), that is precisely what is seen from the EVFN.