On Seeing the Forest for the Tree of Life

Just a short one because I woke up late, if you call this "awake." 

Chapter 2 of The Matter With Things (discussed yesterday) was about attention, while chapter 3 moves on to perception. 

The chapters highlight the very different ways which LH and RH attend to and perceive the world, differences that vividly come to the fore when one side becomes dysfunctional and the other tries to compensate. 

Interestingly, the LH simply cannot do most of what the RH does, whereas the RH can better compensate for a dysfunctional LH. 

For one thing, as alluded to in yesterday's post, the LH seems to have a kind of arrogant, constitutional Dunning-Krugery that makes it not know or care about the perceptions (both internal and external) and layers of meaning it is missing out on. 

There's a circularity involved, in that we perceive what is external to us, but at the same time, project concepts onto to the world which shape what we perceive.

You could even say the former are Realists, the latter Kantians, but it seems to me that these are always complementary, and even why we have the two hemispheres. The trick is to maintain openness to the world and not end up confined to one's map or model of the world.

On the one hand,

Perception is the act whereby we reach out from our cage of mental constructs to taste, smell, touch, hear and see the living world.

A strict realist would eliminate the cage part, and simply say that the senses register sensations from the external world. Thomistic psychology affirms that an entirely different part of the mind ("common sense") synthesizes them into an object that is, while another extracts the intelligible concept from the object and makes a judgment on what it is.

Of note, that last act of the mind is completely abstract and immaterial. For example, the concept of a circle or tree or dog is completely independent of any particular circle or tree or dog that we can perceive. This is sufficient proof of the immateriality of the soul, since material objects cannot extract essences from themselves, one part observing and seeing into the essence of the other.

Thus far there has been no mention of common sense realism in the book, but he properly notes that

strange as it may sound, nothing that we think, nothing that we name, nothing that we find in our dictionary, can ever be heard, or perceived (Müller, in McGilchrist).  

That's a bingo, but how and why is it a bingo? We won't find the answer in neurology qua neurology, being that it can only assume but never account for the immateriality of the human subject. 

Here's an equally consequential bingo, one that slips right past the continuity of natural selection. 

McGilchrist notes that "something new" emerges with human beings, an "ability to use symbols" that "is advanced out of all recognition by language" and "which gives us a virtually inexhaustible way of mapping the world, to which perception is, to all extents and purposes, irrelevant" -- for example, vis a vis mathematics. 

I would eliminate the qualifier "virtually" and just say inexhaustible, full stop. In my view, this is mirror of the divine principle of Infinitude or All Possibility, a leap which no amount of genetic shuffling could make, because the leap is at once from material to immaterial, immanence to transcendence, existence to essence, finitude to infinitude, etc. It would be a rudimentary category error to say that the former terms could somehow become the latter.

Of course, this is no problem at all if we turn the cosmos bright-side up, then the bottom-up discontinuity of the world is a function of the top down continuity, which is very much an RH view of the cosmos, maybe even the ultimate RH view. 

Come to think of it, there's a passage back in the introduction that touches on this, in response to the notion that his focus on the LH/RH distinction artificially dichotomizes the world. He points out that there are valid and invalid dichotomies, or some "that have no basis," others that "it would be a mistake to pretend don't exist," and some that are in between.

Me, I like the RH idea that reality is a tree with its roots aloft, it's branches and leaves below. I'm going to go out on a limb and say that the unity of the tree is real, but that the limb I'm sitting on is also real, in that a limb is not a root or a flower. 

The LH is good at noticing leaves, and even aphids living on the leaves, while the RH is better at seeing the tree, and neither party is wrong so long as it stays in its lane and the traffic flows in both directions. In this cosmos there's more than enough room for the concrete trees, the abstract forest, and the real Tree of Life.