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.