Leftoholics Anonymous

I guess the issue I have with these recent chapters is that I'm pretty sure I'm already doing what McGilchrist advocates (integration of the LH and RH) and avoiding what he criticizes (over-reliance on the LH). Therefore, the advice and criticism seem a bit obvious to me -- for example, the

false belief that we must transcend the human in order to approach truth is both in itself irrational, and leads, as I suggested, to exaggerated claims for the truths of science and to a narrow sense of reason that equally misleads.

No worries. I'm a person who believes that the substance-in-relation of personhood is the ultimate category, and that we are the image and likeness of the metacosmic Person(s). So, I'm not only avoiding what he criticizes, but probably going way beyond the recommended dose of RH fairy dust. 

It almost sounds like he's a recovering LH trying to help other LH people by taking baby steps toward RH retrieval and recovery: Leftoholics Anonymous?

I once wrote a post about that, but it was about -wings and not -brains per se. Actually, it was called Apparatchiks Anonymous, and I'll bet it's not even funny, being that political cosmody ages poorly. Here's the 12-step Program:

1. We admitted we were powerless over the intoxicating dreams of socialism, and that our lives and governments had become unmanageable.

2. Came to believe that a power far greater than our own omnipotent egoic fantasies of total control could restore us to true liberalism.

3. Made a decision to turn our will and our lives over to the Source and Guarantor of our liberty.

4. Made a searching and fearless moral inventory of the well-intentioned failures and frank evils of socialism.

5. Admitted to the Creator of our Liberty, to ourselves, and in a live phone call to C-SPAN, the exact nature of socialism’s wrongs.

6. Were entirely ready to have the Creator of Our Liberty undo our college education and remove all these defects of ideology.

7. Humbly asked Him to cancel our subscription to the NY Times.

8. Made a list of all races, genders, and classes our government programs had harmed, and became willing to make amends by ignoring their constant whining, and preferably laughing at them.

9. Made direct amends to such people by realizing we have nothing to apologize for.

10. Continued to take a personal inventory, and when we were again tempted to abuse ideology for the purposes of blotting out reality, just got drunk instead.

11. Sought to improve our conscious contact with the Source of our Liberty through prayer, meditation, and listening to Rush Limbaugh.

12. Having had a spiritual awakening as the result of these steps, we tried to carry this message to other leftists, even if it meant being denied tenure, disinvited to dinner parties, unfriended, and generally slimed by our intellectual inferiors.

Now, one new thing we are learning is that ideology is indeed firmly lodged in the LH, so it certainly seems that recovering from leftism (or from any other ideology) means undoing or escaping or transcending LH capture and confinement, and paying attention to the RH for a change. But

By definition, psychologists belong to a class of people who generally like taking things apart to see how they work, and therefore intuitively dislike the idea that results can be had without working explicitly through logical steps.

Oh really? Not this psychologist, for truly truly, I am at the other extreme, in that I like to put things together to see how they work, i.e., integrate and synthesize. It's just how I'm built. 

For example, the portentous title of my doctoral dissertation -- which, in a way, I've never stopped writing -- was Psychoanalysis, Postmodern Physics, and The Emerging Paradigm of Evolution: Toward a Rapprochement of Mind and Nature. 

In the dissertation I was literally trying to integrate everything, only my everything was smaller back then than it is today. You could say the Book was another stab at it, and that the blog consists of 4,000 additional stabs. 

Which just goes back to the point that I'm already doing what McGilchrist advocates, only overdoing it.

He describes an ideal that would involve a kind of movement from RH --> LH --> RH, and here again, I'm pretty sure this is what I do, and never stop doing, like a nonlocal ascending spiral or something. He quotes Jonas Salk, who said

when I have an intuition about something, I send it over to the reason department. Then after I've checked it out in the reason department, I send it back to the intuition department to make sure it's still all right.

Same. 

But why do they hate us? Maybe because intuition is

a threat to a world-picture based on administration, adherence to ordained procedures, the power of technology, and belief in the superiority of abstract mentation over embodied being. And to the reductionist, the power of intuition is also a threat that must be "debunked."

Well, debunk this. No RH justice, no LH peace!

Complements Will Get You Everywhere

Our next chapter is called Logical Paradox, and there is much in it that goes to what we call orthoparadox, which the Aphorist describes better than I can: 

For the Christian the truth is in tension between certain contrary propositions.

Thus, 

Theology has no function in resolving the conflict, but in showing its necessity.

I just googled meself, and it looks like I have actually addressed this subject head on in the past:

The etymology of paradox is para + doxos, i.e., contrary to thinking, or thoughts that seem to run counter to one another. Ortho-paradox borrows from it and from ortho-doxy, the latter meaning "correct opinion."

Orthoparadox must be distinguished from mere paradox, which implies a problem in the data or in the thinker, something that can eventually be overcome, e.g. a false assumption or naive expectation or hidden variable.

This is not a new idea, but rather, very old. "Orthoparadox" is just a neologism for a paleoconcept.

For example, over half a millennium ago Nicholas of Cusa wrote of his discovery that God is "girded about with the coincidence of contradictories." He calls this the "wall of paradise" beyond which God resides: "Thus, it is on the other side of coincidence of contraries that you [God] will be able to be seen and nowhere on this side."

Now, I could autogoogle all day long, but then we'd never finish The Matter With Things, and we're close to the end of Volume 1, so let's bear down. With luck we can dive into Volume 2 by Monday or so. 

I'll bet you can already guess that the LH doesn't deal well with paradox, for it "is seen by the analytic mind as a sign of error somewhere," instead of the threshold of a deeper truth. For "in the deep (though clearly not the superficial) structure of reality opposite truths do actually coincide, and we must therefore accept both" (McGilchrist).

I would say that this is what defines an orthoparadox, precisely: that seemingly contradictory truths are in fact complementary. Most famously there is the complementarity principle of physics, whereby the quantum world consists of particles and/or waves, depending upon how you look at it. 

And not to bohr you, but as I've said many times, physics is the way it is because reality (beginning with God) is the way it is, not vice versa. The world begins and ends in orthoparadoxical complementarity. 

Note that this only applies to Deep Truths, not to "everyday truths." The latter is the world of Aristotelian logic, Newtonian physics, and good old mansplaining. Does this imply that the world of orthoparadox is "feminine," so to speak? I suspect it is, but that's an awfully big subject. 

On p. 642 McGilchrist touches on an Extremely Important Point, the idea of "degrees of truth." The LH has a preference for dichotomous, black and white thinking, and will have difficulty appreciating that something can be true on one level but false on another. 

At some point we will return to this subject, because a key to metaphysics is understanding the hierarchical structure of reality, from the Absolute on down. The only alternative is some version of flatland reductionism that can literally never get off (or spiral out of) the goround.

A lot of this chapter deals with famous paradoxes that don't interest me. For example, I don't really care what Zeno says, because I prefer to believe my own eyes rather than his clever logic. 

Later in the chapter McGilchrist touches on another Extremely Important Point, the "spiraling" nature of reality. Combine this with the previous Important Point about hierarchy, and you've really got something. With the open spiral,

there is always another level to which one can go to ask a question that transcends the frame of reference. This difference of spatial depth, even if the space is a cognitive one, differentiates the two hemispheres.

This leads to the next chapter, Intuition's Claims on Truth, but for me it is preaching to the coonverted. No one has to tell me to give intuition a try. It's pretty much my default setting. Although I don't call it "intuition." I don't know that I have a name for it, since it's just me, and I can't step outside of myself. At least not completely.  

McGilchrist notes that "experts can rarely articulate how they are able to do what they do," and this is certainly true of any decent clinical psychologist. The most important skill of psychotherapy -- a kind of spontaneous RH intuitive empathic resonance -- cannot be taught, only refined and reflected upon. In many ways it is a curse -- me being so fucking sensitive and all.

Well, that was fast. The next -- and penultimate -- chapter is called The Untimely Demise of Intuition, but we'll leave it for tomorrow.

Never Send a Human To Do a Machine's Job

The last few chapters have been somewhat conventional, but this next one -- called Reason's Progeny -- had me repeatedly muttering to myself, The matrix! He's talking about the mechanics of the matrix! On the one hand, it seems simplistic, but on the other hand, there isn't one. I don't know of a better explanation.

One of the most important features of the matrix is that inhabitants don't know they're in it, so no theory is required to explain anything. Certainly it is much easier to see matrices of the past and of other cultures. 

However, another key feature of the progressive matrix is that "all matrices are of equal value," so to speak. In other words, multiculturalism is really "multi-matrixism" or something.

It's a long chapter, so I'm just going to flip away and pause at anything that stands out.

Here's a quote from 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.  

Boom: the person starts living in his LH concepts instead of RH experience. As you might expect, this is going to be much more of a problem for so-called intellectuals. It is why most Marxists are on college campuses, and why there are no deconstructionist farmers. Radical movements are always top-down affairs.

Without a doubt one of the weirdest features of the progressive matrix is the obsession with sex -- not only that it is possible to change sexes, but that the state must get involved in the genital mutilation of children. 

I'm a psychologist, and I call this prima facie evidence of madness. But the people who perceive this as mad are the ones punished by the matrix. We're all supposed to pretend we don't see a man pretending to be a woman.

As McGilchrist says, "The abstractions that we create through language seem to be real and are taken up by the unwary for things." 

This would explain the left's ceaseless manipulation of language. I'm thinking in particular of the "euphemistic treadmill," whereby words must constantly be changed as reality and experience catch up to them (e.g., from "disabled" to "differently abled"). 

But sometimes the reverse happens, and the left refuses to change words when the reality has changed. Most notably, they still call themselves "liberal" when they have long since been the opposite. Likewise "diversity," "science is real," "black lives matter," etc.

Much of this comes down to the left hemisphere's incorrigible tendency to make snap judgments about causation, when the RH is much more circumspect and appreciative of nonlinearity, overdetermination, and context. 

For example, we now know that the genome isn't linear at all, in that sometimes many genes contribute to a single trait, while other times a single gene affects many traits. Everything's entangled, much like the cosmos itself (i.e., nonlocality). 

And this is indeed Hayek's main lesson vis-a-vis both economics and culture more generally. This whole post could easily plunge down that rabbit hole. Just read the three volume Law, Legislation and Liberty, one of our foundational tomes (https://www.amazon.com/Law-Legislation-Liberty-statement-principles/dp/0415522293/ref=sr_1_4?crid=1NZ78JUVK55RW&keywords=Hayek+Law+Legislation&qid=1684430590&s=books&sprefix=hayek+law+legislation%2Cstripbooks%2C140&sr=1-4).

On its own the LH is over-eager to infer causation, and will infer a causative relationship even when none clearly exists (McGilchrist).  

Can you say Russia Collusion? How about White Supremacy? J-6 Insurrection? Fine Nazis? 

Note that the matrix has become adept at feeding these narratives of false causation to the masses via the media. Therefore, the people running the matrix are technically outside the matrix. 

It reminds me of an aphorism to the effect that The mob always loses. The mob bosses always win. 

I've said this before in different terms, but some members at the top of the managerial class know it's all bullshit, while the great majority have no idea they're being manipulated. Ask the average journalist about global warming, or gender dysphoria, or corrupt elections, or criminality and race, and she literally knows nothing. 

Another important point about the LH is that it greatly overestimates our ability to predict and control outcomes, which again goes back to complex systems and to Hayek. 

It's why the War On Poverty has been going on for 60 years, with no exit strategy in sight. Or, just hand over more money to teachers, and this will cure our dysfunctional educational system! Or make gas $6 a gallon in California, and the world's temperature will decrease! Can't you feel it?

Perhaps I should emphasize that all of the opinions above are mine. I don't want to get McGilchrist in trouble. But here he sounds just like Thomas Sowell:

The problems for the rational mind begin with defining goals. Aims are complex and not infrequently incommensurable -- even incompatible, if we are entirely honest.

For which reason Sowell emphasizes that there are no solutions, only tradeoffs. But the left never tells us what we are trading -- nor do we ever get the thing for which we traded. But the managerial class always ends up with more power over us. It's as if none of us is safe from all this damn progress.

You hear that Mr. Anderson? That is the sound of inevitability.

What Contains Everything But Can Never Be Contained?

The nous or intellectus makes its first appearance on p. 548. In contrast to largely left hemispheric reason, it

is deeper and richer, more flexible and tentative, more modest, aware of the impossibility of certainty, 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).

These may be a nice things to have, but clearly not what Schuon means by the intellect: for him it involves rather

a contemplativity which in no way enters into the rational capacity, the latter being logical rather than contemplative; it is contemplative power, receptivity in respect of the Uncreated Light, the opening of the Eye of the Heart, which distinguishes transcendent intelligence from reason.

It is also 

a receptive faculty and not a productive power: it does not “create,” it receives and transmits; it is a mirror reflecting reality in a manner that is adequate and therefore effective. 

I suspect the pure metaphysics of the intellect may share a distant analogy to LH and RH, in that it requires the complementary practice of a concrete religion: 

Remove the passional element from the soul and the intelligence -- remove “the rust from the mirror” or “from the heart” -- and the Intellect will be released; it will reveal from within what religion reveals from without.

BUT

This release is strictly impossible -- we must insist upon it -- without the co-operation of a religion, an orthodoxy, a traditional esoterism with all that this implies.

I myself would probably be happy to diddle around in my head all day if not for this insistence. Instead, I submit to an orthodox tradition to complement and incarnate my abstract diddling. 

Now that I think about it, perhaps it's a good practice to plunge into an ambiance that can in no way be subject to LH capture. The LH is pretty, pretty crafty, and can reduce almost anything to a kind of bogus understanding. 

We haven't cited Davila in awhile, but there are many aphorisms touching on this from various angles. Think about it:

He who speaks of the farthest regions of the soul soon needs a [non-LH] theological vocabulary.

The simplistic [LH] ideas in which the unbeliever ends up believing are his punishment.

Nothing attracts me as much in Christianity as the marvelous insolence of its [non-LH] doctrines. 

Man calls "absurd" what escapes his secret pretensions to [LH] omnipotence.

He who does not believe in God can at least have the decency of not believing in himself. [Wait, you put your faith in who?]

The Church's function is not to adapt Christianity to the world, nor even to adapt the world to Christianity; her function is to maintain a counterworld to the [LH] world.

Faith is not an irrational assent to a [LH] proposition; it is perception of a special order of realities.

Truth is a person. [Try containing that with the LH!]

Christ is the truth. What is said about Him are mere [LH] approximations to the truth.

Again, it is totally irrational to try to reduce the world to LH reason. On p. 567, McGilchrist brings in our pal Hayek to make the point:

The most dangerous stage of the growth of civilization may well be that in which man has come to regard all these beliefs as superstitions and refuses to accept or submit to anything which he does not rationally understand. 

The rationalist whose reason is not sufficient to teach him those limitations of the powers of conscious reason, and who despises all the institutions and customs which have not been consciously designed, would thus become the destroyer of the civilization built upon them.

And in the next post we will demonstrate -- we must insist upon it -- that the Progressive Matrix, destroyer of civilization, is built with bars of (mere) LH rationality, devoid of contact with a reality it can never know via its own resources.

Wholeness, Interiority, Relation, and Other Big Reasons

This next chapter is called The Science of Life: A Study in Left Hemisphere Capture, and while I don't know that the LH is responsible, I certainly agree that biological complexity is not its forte. 

I made my own little stab at this problem in chapter 2 of my book, relying in particular on the thought of theoretical biologist Robert Rosen and a few others such as Michael Polanyi, Hans Jonas, and A.N. Whitehead. 

There's nothing in this chapter that surpasses Rosen's analysis, and in fact, he makes a cameo on p, 476: a living system is not best understood "by likening it to the inanimate," but rather,

the inanimate is best seen, as biophysicist Robert Rosen eloquently explained, as a limit case of the animate. That discussion will have to wait for now.

Since Rosen is returning later for an encore, I suppose I'll have more to say when he hits the stage. 

There's no further mention of him in this chapter, except to say that professional biologists are loathe to acknowledge so much as a whisper "of there being something special about living beings" -- as if life is just a statistically unlikely arrangement of matter. I'm only a psychologist, but this sounds to me like a case of institutional autism. 

I think we could solve a lot of problems by simply distinguishing biology from the philosophy of biology, or "meta-biology." Analogously, you don't expect the guy who repairs your watch to give a discourse on the nature of time. Piano tuners aren't known to be great composers, and your vet can't tell you if dogs go to heaven.

It isn't so much that biologists want to reduce biology to physics (or in Rosen't formulation, semantics to syntax), but to an outmoded physics: biology has -- with prominent exceptions such as Rosen -- 

been stuck in a mid-Victorian mechanistic vision that physics abandoned over a hundred years ago.

But such a model is incompatible "with the phenomena it is trying to explain." Is it because the LH projects its inanimate model on an irreducibly complex, organismic reality? If so, stop doing that. It's annoying. Or, if you must do it, please confine yourself to the lab. Don't pretend you're qualified to generalize your little model and discourse on the nature of reality.

Teleology is also against the law in biology, even if its rejection results in an incoherent cosmos, which is a testament to the fervency of their faith. 

Likewise, "Top-down causation is not supposed to happen in the reductionist model," even though saying it can't happen is making it happen, i.e., freely conveying meaning from mind to mind. 

Lots of stuff about the inconceivable complexity of organisms: "There are an estimated 37.2 trillion cells in the human body. Each one of these cells performs many millions of complex reactions every second" within "complex feedback systems with other cells."

This is so far beyond any capacity to even imagine it that it is as if the mind shuts down and defaults to its simplistic LH model. It also reminds me of something Schuon says about how infinitude stretches in both directions, and how it is a downright mercy that we can't conceive it:

Man is situated, spatially speaking, between the "infinitely big" and the "infinitely small".... If we feel minute in stellar space, it is solely because what is big is more accessible to us than what is small and thus rapidly escapes our senses. 

As for the mercy part, I can't find it. All I remember is that you don't really want to see what goes on down there -- it's like seeing yourself without any skin, and very close up. Ew. 

In living systems "everything does everything to everything." That's a good way to put it, and it is obviously quite different from any machine characterized by linear causation and external relations. A machine has no interiority, but as we will no doubt have occasion to discuss later, interiority is not something added to the cosmos, but rather, an "ontological primitive." 

There is some discussion of the "wholeness" of life, which is something I also latched onto in my book. It's a mysterious property, but, like interiority, one of those ontological primitives. 

I would go so far as to see this anchored in a trinitarian metaphysic, but that's getting way ahead of ourselves. It's enough to say at this juncture that life is the way it is because the Godhead is the way it is (not to attribute this latter opinion to McGilchrist, who is apparently a naughty pantheist, but we'll have to spank him for this error later).

But he does say that "Relationships are prior to relata," and there's a Big Reason for this. He also says that the things related are defined by their relationship (as opposed, say, to their substance), which goes to the same Big Reason. 

McGilchrist also quotes a passage that goes to the cosmic area rug:

Think of the universe as fabric woven on a loom. The warp threads are the laws of motion -- rigid, and invariant, the weft, the emergent random strands that weave within the ordered warp. Together order and randomness from a creative whole.

Now, that's wrong, but it isn't bad, because at least this guy is thinking outside the box. The rug is actually woven from Absolute and Infinite, nor does wholeness "emerge" from them, because again, it is prior, an ontological primitive. Still, it's nice to see someone at least talk about the rug. 

McGilchrist also touches on future causation, which is another one of those things that cannot not be in a fully functioning cosmos, but that's enough for this morning.

A Model, a Map, and a Metaphor Walk into a Bar

Despite yesterday's thankless effort, I'm still several chapters ahead of you all, when the original plan was to keep the chapter-to-post ratio at 1:1. 

Fortunately, I don't think these chapters will require nearly as much yada yada on my part, since the first involves a conventional debunking of scientism, the next a critique of reductionistic biology, and the third an expose of the problems of institutional science, for example, the crisis of replication and the scam of peer review; important subjects, no doubt, but not exactly falling under the purview of my vast cosmic responsibilities. I'm happy to delegate such busywork to others.

It's one thing to critique scientific materialism, another thing entirely to see directly the reality it obscures. Any curious and intellectually honest person can do the former, but the latter involves some spiritual qualifications. 

Perhaps Schuon's best book on the subject is Logic & Transcendence, in which he pretty much destroys any and all isms once and for all. It's one of those few books I read at least once a year, not so much to refresh my memory as to test my eyesight. 

Again, Schuon sees and describes the principial world that is eclipsed by such things as bonehead scientism. Nevertheless, the latter is relentless and pervasive, so it helps to read something that not only razes it to the ground but provides a panoramic view of what lies behind it -- like a beautiful forest behind an ugly urban skyline.

However, in a certain way, I suppose we could say that this involves a transition from left to right hemisphere, so long as we don't reduce it to that; the RH may be necessary but could never be a sufficient condition for what is seen and known via the intellect, otherwise we are in the absurd position of reducing God -- or truth, or beauty, virtue, transcendence, unity, et al -- to a neurological location in the head. 

As I've mentioned before, we have an LH and RH because reality is the way it is, not vice versa.

Analogously we have two eyes because they reveal a third dimension that cannot be appreciated by one eye alone. Likewise, we have two ears so as to perceive the 3D stereo image revealed by a bitchin' sound system. If one speaker is broken you'll still hear the music, but its dimensional presence -- its depth -- will collapse. 

True, but now I'm remembering how exciting the Beatles' new single sounded out of a tinny mono speaker from the AM radio in our Ford Country Squire station wagon in 1966. Does this tell us anything important about reality? Come to think of it, I also remember this demonstration album my father had, showing the magic of stereo -- for example, a jet airplane taking off from left to right.

But that 3D image was far less magical than the Beatles in 2D. In fact, it wasn't magical at all, just a kind of parlor trick. And now I'm wondering how much of the technology that surrounds us is just a kind of distracting substitute magic. What does it matter if we have 13.2 Dolby Atmos home theater if the movies are all crap?

In chapter 11, Science's Claims on Truth, McGilchrist alludes to the idea that knowledge and understanding are by no means synonymous, and I suppose all the LH knowledge in the world won't add up to an RH understanding of things, no? You can have two, or five, or twelve speakers, but mono will still be mono. 

We're getting far afield, and I don't know if there's a fruitful analogy buried in here, but there's a relatively new technology called "digital extraction" that can take a mono recording that never existed in stereo, and create a multichannel stereo mix. I guess it reminds me of what Schuon does with those old mono religions -- dusts them off and extracts all the metaphysical information buried in them. 

Now, speaking of metaphor, 

All understanding depends on metaphor. What we mean when we say we understand something is that we see it is like something else of which we are already prepared to say "I understand that"..... It's metaphors all the way down.

For example, science works with models, and what is a model but an "extended metaphor"? Gosh, back in grad school I remember learning about all sorts of different models of the mind. But how can you even model something that is wholly immaterial, nonlocal, immeasurable, transcendent, etc.? 

The only accurate model would be the thing itself, but we don't even have any idea what the thing -- consciousness -- is. I eventually came to believe that bestwecando is observe the ever-evolving space between O and (¶), or pay attention to that luminous movement from the ineffable to the ineffable.

Here's a good crack: "The price of metaphor is eternal vigilance." 

Which is very Gödelian when you think about it, because it's like saying the price of completeness is eternal inconsistence, the price of consistence is eternal incompleteness, or the price of any manmade model is transcendence of the model. 

The price of any knowledge of any kind is that it is not Absolute, only a reflection of the Absolute (otherwise it wouldn't be knowledge). 

I'll end this wooly post with a comment at the end of the chapter:

One gets the suspicion that 18 or so years of formal schooling in the sciences may ablate the right hemisphere.

Happy Mother-Infant Transitional Space Day

I slept late and wasn't going to post, but since my progress in the book is starting to run ahead of the posts, perhaps a short one to catch up with myself. 

We're discussing a chapter called What is Truth?, and at the end of yesterday's post alluded to the importance of relation and betweenness. 

The RH, according to McGilchrist, would experience truth "as a process, one that... in principle"

has no ending. More importantly, it would see 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 -- thoughts and experiences -- whereby they answered, or co-responded to, one another....

"This ever better accord, or attunement would be the evolving truth. It would be intrinsically incomplete, but constantly in the process of completing itself."

This is sound as far as it goes, but as we've discussed in the past, there is a deeper principle in which all of this is necessarily anchored, this being the principle of creation (as explicated by Thomistic metaphysics). 

Because of this principle, our cosmos is infinitely intelligible; we can know endless things about everything, but can never know everything about a single thing.  

I suppose I first encountered a shadow of this idea in a seemingly unlikely place, studying psychoanalysis in grad school. There I learned of Winnicott's concept of the "transitional," or "potential" space between mother and infant, which ultimately scales up to the intersubjective T-space between us all, even to the space where culture takes place.

I just did a search for "Winnicott's transitional space," but too many items come up. Here's a helpful image, though -- notice that what we call "reality" occurs in the space between internal and external, or subjective and objective worlds:

Of course, this should not be seen as some excuse for for the cancer of relativism, which McGilchrist rejects entirely: "Some postmodernists leap from the uncertainty of truth to its nonexistence," but of course, they are asses. 

For me, the principle of creation resolves this relativistic sophistry-masquerading-as-paradox, because rational creatures bear the same relationship to the creative principle as does relativity to absolute. 

(Note also that the T-space is the space of creative engagement with the world, and I'll bet this somehow mirrors the trinitarian creative space of the Creator himself, more on which maybe later. It just popped out of my head, but I don't know if I can back it up.)

Now, we can only know about the relative because we partake of the absolute, just as we can only know about subjective illusions because of objectivity, or necessity because of freedom.   

In conclusion (of this chapter), 

let me say that both views currently on offer in so much public debate today -- naïve positivism and naïve deconstructionism -- are typical left hemisphere fictions.... Each is an ill-concealed power-grab, completely lacking in subtlety, and devoid of any sense of our true connection to the world. 

What is missing from these distortions of tenure is the betweenness "that is only understood properly by the right hemisphere." 

But this "is emphatically not an invitation to promulgate your latest theory based on some political ideology," so don't get any ideas. "That brings an end to truth, and hence to civilized discourse: indeed, an end to civilization." 

In case you haven't noticed.