Before continuing, let us recall our cosmotheandric situation: that this is truly One Cosmos, in the sense that everything is related to everything else. Nothing is radically separate, even though everything is distinct. Nothing whatsoever could be if it did not share both of these features, distinction and unity. Like the human body, the Cosmos is not just one and many, but one because many, and vice versa: an irreducible unity-in-diversity. Like openness, relationality is woven into the nature of things, on equal terms with the existence of the things related: reality is constituted of things-in-relation.
To put it another way, anything that can said to be one has the feature of interior relations. For example, our bodies can be divided and subdivided into various parts, but these are nevertheless interiorly related, not an aggregation of extrinsically related units. Such interior relations are not imaginary – just in our heads – rather, are constitutive of what the thing actually is. Thus, they may be termed onto-relations, since they are as real as that which they relate.
This also goes to our Axiom 11, in that ultimate reality is a complementary substance-in-relation, so anything that alludes to this makes the hairs on my RH stand up. For McGilchrist, “Reductionism envisages a universe of things -- and simply material things at that. How these things are related is viewed as a secondary matter.” But like us, McGilchrist suggests “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.”
This man is literally stealing your thoughts!
Yes, what Churchill called anticipatory plagiarism: taking my ideas without the courtesy of allowing me to first think of them. Although in reality I’ve been discussing them for decades, albeit without all the academic research McGilchrist marshals in support of his findings. Rather, my only tool is high intensity motherwit, and my only appeal is to common sense, because no one needs a study to study the reality of relation, since no study of any kind would be possible if it weren’t related to reality. Nor can any study prove the impossible or discredit the undeniable.
Now granted, McGilchrist might be tempted to file a restraining order to prevent us from using his ideas in support of cosmotheandrism.
Oh, please! I’ve got news for him: the Supreme Court has roundly rejected prior restraint!
Petey, this isn’t a First Amendment thing.
Fair use! Our basic freedoms! This affects all of us!
∞
McGilchrist also touches on the reality of Axiom 5, vertical hierarchy, at least implicitly. For ours is not a flat Cosmos. That is only the LH perspective, certainly not the RH view, much less ours. Vertical space is the very locus of meaning, intelligibility, and cosmic depth
McGilchrist says a few things that echo the views of our in-house theoretical biologist Robert Rosen, for example, that “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.” If this is the case, then “inanimacy is better regarded as the limit case of animacy,” which is precisely Rosen’s conclusion: that physics simply isn’t rich enough to account for the phenomenon of Life Itself. It also again calls to mind Whitehead’s comment about physics being the study of the smaller – and simpler – organisms.
The laws of physics couldn’t even author Wikipedia, much less the Encyclopedia Biologica.
The different ways in which LH and RH attend to and perceive the world are seen more vividly when one side becomes dysfunctional (for example, from a stroke or brain injury) and the other tries to compensate. Interestingly, the LH simply cannot do most of what the RH does, whereas the RH is much better able to compensate for a dysfunctional LH.
One might assume that delusions and misbeliefs are located in the RH, and that the LH is more Spock-like, i.e., objective and detached. Not so: it turns out that the great majority of delusional conditions are usually a consequence of left-hemispheric dysfunction, and that moreover “the degree to which this is the case is broadly proportional to the bizarre nature of the delusion involved.” More generally, “it is the judgments on reality made by the right hemisphere that are more reliable.” But this is because the RH is more grounded in reality, whereas the LH spins out abstract models of this reality. One might say that “the [LH] is an ‘interpreter,’ that misuses reason to confabulate -- make things up -- rather than admit it does not know what it is talking about, whereas the more tentative [RH] sticks to what it knows, and is closer to the truth.”
Likewise, the RH is more apt to seek out disconfirmation and counter-examples, whereas the LH may not notice when its model fails to predict or conform to reality. When the model eclipses empirical reality, it is because the LH is ignoring or bullying the RH. “My model, says the [LH], is better than your reality,” which brings to mind the ironic question posed by Jean-Baptiste Say: “That’s all well and good in practice, but how does it work in theory?” For “the [LH] adopts a theory, and then actually denies what doesn’t fit the theory. The evidence that this is the case is so extraordinary and compelling that we would not believe it if we had not already seen it. It will swear black is white” (McGilchrist).
Who hasn’t met someone who swears black is white? Here again, the phenomenon is obviously real, whether caused by neurology or neurosis or demonic possession. Speaking of which, if there is a neurological explanation for the latter, it would appear that the demons prefer to hide out in the LH.
There’s not enough space or time to detail all of the strange ways the LH swears black is white. McGilchrist cites a number of bizarre clinical syndromes, but what about in everyday reality? Could it really be that the hypertrophied LH is – pardon the crudity – an industrial strength bullshit generator? Well, “To put it crudely, the [RH] is our bullshit detector. It is better at avoiding nonsense when asked to believe it…” Conversely, “the [LH’s] job is to create a model and maintain it at all costs.”
The [LH] says “you shouldn’t be able to see that” -- and, as a result, you actually can’t: the [RH] says, “but it is there” -- and so you can. The point is that, despite your being perfectly able to see something, you can’t see it because of a theory that the [LH] has about it.
If this is the case, it would explain both ideological capture and something like “theological capture,” for example, a literalist reading of scripture that again forgets what religion is supposed to be about (much more on which in Book III). Either way, the LH has difficulty discerning fact from theory or even fiction, while being unaware of this lack of discernment.
More generally, the existence of magical thinking seems to cut both ways, implying that a literal materialism is as delusional as a literal religionism, since both are closed systems that ignore what is outside them. For which reason McGilchrist suggests that “the layman’s grounds for accepting the models propounded by the scientist are often no different from the young African villager’s grounds for accepting the models propounded by one of his elders.” In other words, it is possible to accept even science in an unscientific way, just as it is possible to be religious in a superstitious and ultimately irreligious way. One might say that idolatry is a universal temptation for both secular and religious alike. This happens the moment the fullness of reality is reduced to, or enclosed within, an -ism.
What about Cosmotheandrism?
Nice try, but that is actually the -ism to end all -isms, being that it is an open, dynamic, and relational engagement with O, a vector toward which we are ever striving but never reach, short of, say, the beatific vision, supposing such a vision exists. One might say that cosmotheandrism is about ultimacy ordered to the ultimate, but we need to put on our cosmotheandric trifocals in order to intuit and engage the latter.
For McGilchrist, what we call magical thinking may simply be an exaggerated version of our innate ability to spot patterns and make connections, which renders us easily duped by our own projections, and if there is any reader out there who has not been taken in by a projection, I’d like to meet him. Yes, we need to creatively engage with reality, but too much can lead to magical thinking and conspiracy theories, while too little can turn the Cosmos into a machine and us into robots.
Candace Owens and B.F. Skinner, respectively.
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