There is a difference between “crystalized” and “fluid” intelligence, which are LH and RH specialties, respectively. We know from our Gödel that human intelligence can never be like a machine, and vice versa. As McGilchrist explains, a machine is capable of solving certain kinds of problems, but not “novel problem solving” requiring input from both hemispheres.
Gödel himself was not a conventionally religious person, rather a Platonist who believed the intellect capable of reaching the great Out Yonder transcending space and time. In the parlance of cosmotheandrism, this would constitute nothing less than the intellect ordered to the inexhastible and uncontainable O. Among other things, this latter is the “extreme reality” of which we may gain “at least partial glimpses” (Goldstein).
According to Gödel’s own Platonist understanding of his proof, it shows us that our minds, in knowing mathematics, are escaping the limitations of man-made systems, grasping the independent truths of abstract reality (ibid.).
Therefore, an unlimited LH reason places thoroughly irrational limits on intelligence as such, which is in principle unlimited and has access (a la Gödel) to what transcends mere reason. This applies to quantum physics no less than any other dimension of reality, which is perhaps why Richard Feynman says that no one understands it; or, supposing you do, it only means you don’t.
The RH is likewise more involved in creativity: it surpasses the LH in its “breadth of vision, the capacity to forge distant links, flexibility rather than rigidity, a willingness to respond to a changed, or changing, context, a tolerance of ambiguity, and an ability to work with knowledge that is, for the most part, inherently both imprecise and implicit” (McGilchrist). Thus, one cannot grasp cosmotheandrism or recover the Cosmic Area Rug without the aid of a lively right hemisphere.
Genuine creativity is not a common trait, as it involves the copresence of a number of other traits, which include high intelligence but also perseverance and unconventionality. None of these alone will guarantee creativity, but put them together and you might just have something. You will also need a modality or means of expression, but even then, mastery of the means is no guarantee of a creative outcome. Anyone can write or play an instrument, but there are never enough writers or musicians.
In the movement from preparation to incubation to illumination, we have a lot of control over the first two but pretty much none over the third. It is very much as if we can till the soil and plant the seeds, but the rest is up to… something: we can take care of the necessary conditions, but what is the sufficient condition that makes creativity happen? Certainly one must be open, but to what? If we knew, it wouldn’t be creative, rather, an AI algorithm, something a machine could do.
It brings to mind the great songwriter Johnny Mercer, whose father once asked him how it was possible for a man his age – 30 at the time – to have written over 500 songs, much less without playing an instrument or knowing anything about music theory. After pondering the question for a few moments Mercer responded, “Pop, to tell you the truth I simply get to thinking over the song, pondering over it in my mind and all of a sudden, I get in tune with the Infinite” (emphasis mine).
Mercer’s explanation is as adequate or inadequate as any other, except to say that it is the RH that tunes into the infinite source of lyrics and melodies. It seems that the creative person must latch on to the Infinite, even while acknowledging that we are always Mister In-Between — which is to say, between finitude and Infinitude. Otherwise Infinitude just laughs and runs away like a child at play. O is then behind a closed door marked “nevermore,” the LH having slammed it shut.
∞
Ask around and you will quickly discover that Even the most lucid writer spends a lot of time doing what he does not know how to do, and thus knowing things without knowing how we know them. This is because the LH isn’t clever enough to comprehend what the RH is up to over there.
Such a fine line between clever and stupid.
Yes, but any creative person does something analogous. Ask any songwriter where the songs come from, and they’ll be the first to say they have no idea.
Nowadays they come from AI.
True, but we’re speaking of deeply human songwriters, for example, Leonard Cohen, who said that “Poetry comes from a place that no one commands, that no one conquers…. if I knew where the good songs came from, I would go there more often.”
Speaking of whom, Tom Waits was once driving down the freeway when a striking melody popped into his head. He had no pen or tape recorder, so in frustration looked up at the sky and said, “Excuse me, can’t you see I’m driving? If you’re serious about this, come back later or go bother Leonard Cohen.” Similarly, Bob Dylan said “The songs are there. They’re like ghosts searchin’ for bodies. They’re lookin’ for someone to sing them... You just write down what you hear.”
Trolling the unknown for Like a Rolling Stone?
Exactly: “It’s like a ghost is writing a song like that,” said Dylan. “It gives you the song and it goes away.” Which is an honest account, because who can even say where thoughts and ideas come from? We could say “the unconscious,” but that’s just a word superimposed on a mystery.
Creative types also know there are active and passive sides to the process. The active side consists of mulling over a problem while feeding our heads with all the material related to it. This is analogous to planting the seeds which are then worked over in the subconscious mind until out pops the creative product or solution.
LH thinking is more convergent, as it seeks a single, unambiguous, and presumably correct answer, while RH divergent thinking is more free-floating, original, and surprising. Obviously creativity involves seeing connections, but paranoid and delusional people see connections too. In fact, it turns out that truly creative people often have relatives who are subject to severe mental illness, while they themselves are not, so it helps to be loosely hinged as opposed to being completely unhinged, like, say, Jim Morrison. He took literally Rambaud’s crack about the Poet making himself a seer “by a long, gigantic, and rational derangement of all the senses.”
How’d that work out?
Let’s just say with the end of all his elaborate plans.
∞
This matter of seeing connections goes back to the essential relationality of the Cosmos. McGilchrist suggests as much, in that “our world is what comes into being in the encounter between us and this whatever-it-is.” Moreover – and this is again key to the ultimacy of cosmotheandrism – “The relationship comes before the relata -- the ‘things’ that are supposed to be related. What we mean by the word ‘and’ is not just additive, but creative.”
The foundational role of relationship is so central to cosmotheandrism that it is worth belaboring for a moment. For example McGilchrist talks about “a loss of connexion between mind and world,” and with it, “the loss of betweenness.”
Now, betweenness is somewhat difficult to conceptualize, perhaps because the LH thinks of it as a kind of space between objects. But as we have said, betweenness is equally as real as that which it links (Axiom 4), assuming the link is not imaginary.
Another key point: “Only the right hemisphere is able to see that what seem to be opposites coexist and are necessary to one another -- indeed, that by stepping beyond mere opposition, and excluding neither, a new unity can be attained” (ibid.). That is a bingo, and it goes to any number of irreducible complementarities, from wave and particle in physics below to a relational Godhead above, and to everything in between. In short, Axiom 2.
