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.

The Last Temptation of Bob, AKA Normality

In the chapter I'm currently reading, Science's Claims on Truth, the limitations of McGilchrist's approach become more apparent. You might say that while his neurology is cutting edge, his philosophizing -- thus far anyway -- is going to be pretty familiar to anyone who has thought seriously about the limits of science. In short, he gives us a conventional critique of scientism. 

Again, when you're accustomed to someone like Schuon, anything less is like a declension from a higher to a lower dimension of reality. 

For example, in the chapter before this (What is Truth?) McGilchrist lists the usual paths to truth, including science, reason, intuition, and imagination. But he left out the most important one: intellection, which is the direct perception of truth. The intellect is a "mirror of the supra-sensible and itself a supernatural ray of light" (Schuon). 

Mere reason "perceives the general and proceeds by logical operations, whilst Intellect perceives the principial -- the metaphysical." However, in our yuga of stupidity,

the intellect is atrophied to the point of being reduced to a mere virtuality, although doubtless there is no watertight partition between it and the reason, for a sound process of reasoning indirectly transmits something of the intellect (Schuon).

Also left off McGilchrist's list is revelation, which, according to Schuon, is a "an objective and transcendent Intellection," whereas "Pure Intellection is a subjective and immanent Revelation." 

Although I agree with Schuon, it is a pretty woo woo opinion, so I certainly don't blame McGilchrist for having more conventional views. Nor do I want to criticize him for what he is not trying to say, do, or be. Analogously, I love Thomas Sowell, and it would be stupid to blame him for not being Thomas Aquinas.

McGilchrist criticizes the idea of truth as a settled thing, and prefers to view it as an ongoing process, more of an unending asymptotic approach. It very much reminds me of Voegelin's bottom line, that our Quest has no external "object," but is reality itself becoming luminous for its movement from the ineffable, through the Cosmos, to the ineffable. That's also pretty woo woo, but it sounds about right to me.

In one of his books, Schuon says something to the effect that the divine manifests as truth or presence, and McGilchrist says something pretty similar vis-a-vis the LH and RH, respectively. 

Again, for the LH, truth will be an abstract map or model, a re-presentation, while the presentation -- the presence itself -- is in the RH:

The single most profound difference between the hemispheres... is the distinction between the experience of something as it "presences" to us in the RH, and as it is "re-presented" to us in the left. 

Now, "presence" is an ambiguous word. For example, when the teacher would call my name in the morning I would say "present," even though I was subjectively absent. Somewhere else. We've all had the experience of people being with us but not truly present, and we can even detect the same thing, in, for example, music. 

We can even be absent from ourselves, which is the worst.

Last night I was listening to a singer who was really present, and then there's the matter of "stage presence." What is that?  Whatever it is, it is obvious, and known in some kind of direct manner analogous to how intellection works. 

McGilchrist asks why we don't "have a verb to describe the experience of an encounter with reality that strikes us at once as of fundamental importance?" Instead, we have this equivocal and ambiguous word, "presence." But

To "presence" is not the same as to "be present," which is too finished and inert, leaving little place for whatever is there to play an active part in the encounter; or worse, to "be presented," which is passive, and gets dangerously near to "being re-presented." 

Whatever this Presence turns out to be, it clearly isn't something perceived by the LH. Problem is, the LH only knows what it knows, and, like scientism, will pretty much deny the existence of what it does not and cannot know. What would the LH say about the presence of the sacred? That you're lying or hallucinating, I guess.

Or, it might say what an autistic person says about facial expressions: eh, seen one, seen 'em all. 

Here's a sobering thought: "Presencing is what the world does less of as we grow older." Is this inevitable? Or in-eve-ate-apple? Is there something we can do to arrest or reverse the process? If only we could somehow be born again, or be as children or something.... 

Note also that it cannot be the world that does less presencing, since it doesn't change. Rather, something in us hardens and crystalizes, or freezes or dries up, or loses its sense of flowing engagement, its living dialectic with the real presence of the Real Presence. Something must be able to reach us from outside ourselves, or we're done.

How do we go from dead men walking to dead men waking?!

McGilchrist recalls Wordsworth's famous gag about how those annoying shades of the prison-house begin to close upon the growing boy, and boy, I hate it when that happens. It's something I've spent my whole life trying to avoid, even back when I didn't know a thing about poetry and hadn't a punny to my gnome. In other words, it is something from which I instinctively recoiled, as from Grim Death itself. Save me from the LH monster!

If that's what it was.  

Here's another thing: if everyone you know is living in the conventional LH grid, but you're some bohemian living way out in the bewilderness of the RH, how do you avoid feeling like you're the weirdo? 

I still get occasional attacks of this nature -- like The Last Temptation of Bob, or something. Perceptive readers will know it's happening when Bob has one of his periodic tantrums about having few readers and no impact. A perfectly wasted life!

At any rate, in addition to presence, two other important principles or realities to bear in mind are relationship and betweenness, but I guess we'll deal with those tomorrow.

Related: I've only skimmed it, but an article about how the presence of beauty can be a more powerful argument than any mere re-preesentation of reason (https://www.thecatholicthing.org/2023/05/13/how-the-apostles-spoke-of-the-beauty-of-christ/?utm_source=The+Catholic+Thing+Daily&utm_campaign=32e8a8b343-EMAIL_CAMPAIGN_2018_12_07_01_02_COPY_01&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_769a14e16a-32e8a8b343-244304881&mc_cid=32e8a8b343&mc_eid=c604663a22).

What Have We Unlearned?

As we come to the conclusion of Part One, what have we learned? First, that hemispheric differences "are stark in every area relevant to making sense of the world," and that -- this I wouldn't have guessed -- "the LH is, compared with the RH, unreliable in just about every way that matters."

McGilchrist compares the LH to a (perhaps basement-dwelling, ice cream-licking)

high-ranking bureaucrat, protected from the world which he or she must administrate: adept at knowing and observing the rules, but knowing little if anything about life as it is lived there.

I remember the first time I was thrown in with a live patient. I had my LH theories, but as I became more confident, I pretty much tossed them out. 

In this regard, I was very much influenced by a fellow named W.R. Bion, who, now that I think about it, was all about not conflating the map with the territory. If I'm not careful this could easily descend into a whole post, so I'll try to find a suitable passage and move on.

Bion considers that stereotypes, the therapist's fantasies of omnipotence, and this tendency to cling to theoretical a priori knowledge are the analyst's chief reactions in the face of the something new and unknown that appears in every analytic session.

Essentially, you want to avoid premature closure of the epistemological field by superimposing a superficial LH answer to tamp down the anxiety of not knowing.

But not knowing (or unKnowing) is good. Every morning I wake up not knowing and following where it leads. As we know, the more we want to find out, the more we must fuck around in the cosmos (https://www.youtube.com/shorts/EYEDD2l0YUw). I didn't make up the rules.

I suppose the main thing I'm discovering is that the progressive Matrix is the result of a detached and isolated LH. 

A commenter to yesterday's post mentions that conservatives typically accuse progressives of being plunged into a world of feelings, while we are the rational, logical, and empirical ones. There's still truth in this, only now with a twist, for the irrational things the left gets so hysterical about are lodged in the LH. We'll have much more to say about this as we proceed.

To repeat a passage from a couple of posts back,

When you are out of touch with reality you will easily embrace a delusion, and equally put in doubt the most basic elements of existence [like whether you are a boy or girl]. 

If this reminds you of the mindset of the present day materialist science and the socio-political debate, we should not be particularly surprised, since they show all the signs of attending with the LH (McGilchrist). 

Which in turn reminds me of an observation by Russell Kirk that conservatism can never be an ideology, rather, the absence of ideology. This doesn't mean there are no conservative ideologues, only that they betray conservatism by reducing it to an LH formula.  

I'm just flipping around a book called The Essential Russell Kirk, and there is this eloquent description of what amounts to an RH grounded life:

Our life is an apprenticeship to the truth that around every circle another can be drawn; that there is no end in nature, but every end is a beginning... and under every deep a lower deep opens. 

Straight-up Gödel.

Thaaat's right, Petey.  

For [Kirk], schism of the soul and schism of the community have a distinctly mutual relationship...

And perhaps these schisms are grounded in one between the hemispheres.

The decline of moral habit produces, in its first stage, a rigid and exalted moralism; and in its second, an immoralism raised to the level of doctrine; sooner or later, it invariably gives birth to the lowest level of immorality.

And here we are: an unstable combination of "rigid and exalted" LH moralism and utterly immoral anarchy unleashed at the border, in our cities, and in the judicial system.

In an essay called The Idea of Conservatism, Kirk lays out principles that clearly reflect an RH<-->LH harmony, such as the existence of "a transcendent moral order, to which we ought to try to conform the ways of society." Let's just say the isolated LH in principle has no direct knowledge of the transcendent order to which we are always dialectically ordered.

 End of Part One. 

Second Look at Witch Trials?

If you saw the CNN townhall last night, the Nasty Woman who hosted it is the perfect image of LH tyranny imposing its ideological grid over the world. It's like an alarm went off in her head every time Trump strayed from it. She makes Michelle Obama look fun.

Men who do this are grating enough, but when a woman does it... Frankly, it reminds me of the book we discussed a few months back, Witches, Feminism, and the Fall of the West. 

I don't have time enough this morning to dive back down that rabbit hole, but I may review it later today in light of hemispheric differences. Something about these primordial Karens was perceived as toxic to society. Who knows, maybe it was a hyper-aggressive LH.

It also reminds me of a Steven Wright joke: If a man speaks in the forest and no women are present, is he wrong? 

To reset where we are in The Matter With Things, we're wrapping up the final chapter of Part One, The Hemispheres and the Means to Truth, and about to get into Part Two, The Hemispheres and the Paths to Truth. The title of the first chapter of Part Two asks the little question, What is Truth?

But first we need to finish up the chapter on what severe mental illness can tell us about hemispheric differences.

One more bit of housekeeping: a reader emailed me to let me know he's enjoying our deep dive into the book, adding that McGilchrist "appears to be an important contemporary thinker -- mind you, he’s no Schuon or Dávila, but he certainly helps pave the way to a higher metaphysical perspective for those who are called to go deeper."

I couldn't agree more. Later it will fall upon me -- since no one else can be bothered -- to attempt to reconcile McGilchrist with perennial philosophy and religion, and I do notice a kind of psychic declension that occurs when he discusses philosophy per se. It's as if it takes place in a lower dimension, using the tools available to him. 

This is not a criticism. But unless anchored in a higher principle, philosophy will be subject to the same limitations of any manmade ideology. Philosophy cannot transcend philosophy except by means of something "exterior" to it. Grace takes many forms, including intellectual. 

It is this x-factor that separates an Aquinas or Schuon from any purely secular philosopher. And this difference can be perceived experientially -- as if it is an RH phenomenon, only cranked up to 11.

Then again, Schuon or Aquinas or Dávila alway write about the latter with the most lucid language conceivable, which implies that the LH too must also be cranked to 11. It's easy enough to have all sorts of RH intuitions but write about them in a flabby, imprecise, or deepakish way, just as it's easy to posit an LH ideology with maximum precision. 

Of the latter, it reminds me of a story McGilchrist tells of a museum curator who informs visitors that a particular dinosaur is exactly nine million and six years old. When asked how he knows this, the curator replies that the dinosaur was nine million years old when he began working there six years ago. 

Yesterday we alluded to the LH matrix to which people are more susceptible than ever, especially those who are exposed to higher education:

The world becomes self-enclosed in such a way that symbols refer to other symbols, signs to other signs, ideas to other ideas, language to other language, without so to speak breaking out of this hermetic space to what lies beyond (emphasis mine).

But enough about the Nasty Woman on CNN.

Note the italicized passage: that is exactly what I was referring to above when I said that Philosophy cannot transcend philosophy except by means of something "exterior" to it. 

It also goes to what we said about the limitations of LH language divorced from RH experience: "words can lose their purchase on reality and begin simply to refer endlessly to one another," to such an extent that you may even find yourself confined to a postmodern humanities department, totally detached from reality.

Every once in awhile McGilchrist touches on the centrality of relation, which is when he comes close to the One Cosmos view. For example he 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 concepts. But in my view, betweenness is as real, or more real, than what it links. Not to get ahead of ourselves, but this is what is seen when we put on our trinitarian spooktacles.   

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.

That's a bingo, and it goes to all sorts of primordial complementarities, from wave and particle in physics, to one and three in the Godhead, to LH and RH in between.

McGilchrist mostly avoids politics, at least explicitly. But the chapter ends with this little nugget: "once the theoretical mind is untethered" and no longer grounded in the real (RH) world "there is simply no basis for discriminating truth from untruth." 

For example, we might see "belief systems driven by the irrationality of identity politics, which lead subjects to doubt everything except the validity of a bizarre conclusion which they feel driven to accept," while never doubting their own belligerent LH certitudes.

But enough about that nasty woman on CNN.

Red Pilling the Right Hemisphere

Have you ever become depressed and exiled from the bonus dimensions of the cosmos?

In McGilchrist's discussion of what mental illness can tell us, there's a subsection called The World is Once More Flat, describing how in certain mental states there can be "a dimension missing, the one that gives depth" in both time and space. It's definitely happened to me, which is how I know it exists. It becomes conspicuous in its absence. 

It is also possible for our world to become stale, losing the sense of continuous novelty. I recall being overwhelmed by this feeling in high school, at which point I vowed to myself that I would never have a job that bore any resemblance to its rigid and repetitive structure. But it probably wasn't high school per se, just the mental state I was in.

McGilchrist describes one patient "who saw the future as a repetition of the past. It is already tired, generic, categorized, drained of life." "The LH world, we have seen, gets 'stuck in set.' The RH plays the decisive role in avoiding repetition." 

Difficult to know what was going on in my brain back then, partly because there was so little going on. I was just adrift in the culture, without much sense of agency. Life just happened. I went on to college not because I knew what I wanted to do, but because I had no idea.

It makes me wonder if I was just floating in the RH without any kind of LH map. I think I was pretty much overwhelmed and mystified by the world, but trying to pretend I wasn't by just doing the things other adultolescents do. 

The mystification part wasn't bad, or rather, it cut both ways. At least it was never boring or predictable, which occurs if the LH is inhibiting the RH too much. Maybe I was just swimming in the RH creek without an LH paddle. So hard to know.

As alluded to above, I was just adrift in the culture, but this was before the culture had become as sick as it is today. In today's world, I don't know that I would have survived. We hear about the epidemic of mental illness in teens, but perhaps it's because the number of vulnerable individuals hasn't changed, rather, they're just immersed in a culture that makes it so much more difficult to cope. 

McGilchrist touches on this on p. 363, and I'm sure he'll have more to say later. He talks about the baleful effects of social media, which seems to put people in a perpetual LH loop, for example, constantly taking pictures of things instead of simply experiencing the things. 

He cites one patient who got a bit carried away, and began taking photographs every 30 seconds. He now has more than a million, but the LH can never recreate the living flow from which they were abstracted:

Freezing kills time. Our age is one of re-presentation.... But research shows that photographs actually erode memories. The effect of taking photos is that they substitute for memories.... the photos tend to crowd out memory of all else. And time is sliced.

Again, perhaps people at the extreme can tell us something about this hemispheric shift. He cites a certain savant who attended a Shakespeare play and calculated that the actors had uttered 12,445 words and taken 5,202 dance steps. 

He wasn't wrong. But it reminds me of a "reverse-Polanyi," so to speak, in which what is supposed to be tacit becomes explicit. Meaning is always discovered in the other direction, via implicit awareness of the particulars in order to be focally aware of what they are pointing to. And getting back to what was said in paragraph one, I have definitely experienced moods in which this focal awareness collapses and the world flattens. 

I was about to say that it's like becoming a lower animal, but it can't be like that, because animals must be immersed in a world of constant instinctual meaning. Humans can lose this spontaneous meaning, but how? Later on he speculates that this doesn't happen to animals because

both hemispheres still maintain their groundedness in the pre-conceptual world. Because of the "virtuality" that has necessarily followed the LH's primary preoccupation with the world of symbols..., we are particularly vulnerable to anything that impairs the RH, since it is our mainstay in reality.

Which is precisely the problem in our disordered culture: "The LH's world is now an increasingly virtual world. It no longer even pretends to yield a faithful portrait of reality. For that it depends on the RH":

When you are out of touch with reality you will easily embrace a delusion, and equally put in doubt the most basic elements of existence. If this reminds you of the mindset of the present day materialist science and the socio-political debate, we should not be particularly surprised. 

It's not so much that people are living off the grid, but rather, experiencing a pseudo-existence in the LH grid, precisely. 

Like the matrix, only literally: the LH becomes

self-referential, internally validating, and self-confirmatory. The serious problem for humanity is that the LH is prone to see the world this way and to "go it alone." Not knowing what it doesn't know, it tends to be overconfident it is right.

So I guess the question is, RH pill or LH pill? 

Abnormal Normality & Normal Abnormality

This last chapter of Part One of The Matter With Things is on the subject of what severe mental illness -- e.g., schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, autism -- can tell us about about the brain. I've mentioned before that in such illnesses we can vividly see processes that are subtly at work in everyday neurotics. 

We're all crazy, or rather, the way I learned it -- and I haven't thought about this for decades -- there's a kind of complementarity between psychotic and non-psychotic minds (for example, dreams are rooted in a different kind of logic that would qualify as crazy if it ruled the day). 

But "psychotic" isn't the best way to put it, because it implies madness when the complementarity is normal. It only becomes abnormal in a state of imbalance. 

Looked at this way, it's even possible to be "too normal," i.e., cut off from one's kooky side. Back in the 1990s I read an article by Christopher Bollas that actually proposed something called "Normotic Personality Disorder," for people who are too blandly normal: squares, baby. Let's see if I can dig it out.

Can't find it, but I was surprised to discover that there's actually a wikipedia entry for normopathy: it involves  

the pathological pursuit of  comformity and societal acceptance at the expense of individuality.... Normopathy is difficult to diagnose because normopaths are integrated in society. 

Bollas, who called it normotic illness, considered it an obsession with fitting into society at the cost of the person's own personality.... 

Normopaths perform best given a strict protocol to follow. They constantly seek outside validation. The normopath may ask a friend what they think about a new song, dress, or hairstyle before forming an opinion. Normopaths look to others to inform them how to think or believe.

The concept of normopathy parallels Winnicott's idea of the false self, which is formed in response to the demands of the external environment rather than from within.

Here are some of the proposed diagnostic criteria: 

--Anxiety of examining one’s psyche with diminished curiosity about inner life.

--Hyper-rationality in dealing with others and an intense focus on factual data to seek reassurance.... For the normopath, human feelings are troublemakers that require “formulaic structuring in order to be controllable.”

 --Loss of connection between feeling and speech. 

--Horizontal thinking, the inability to prioritize and create relative values and meaning. 

In this context, it seems to me that individuation is freedom lived, and freedom is individuality actualized. Conversely, in our regime of identity politics, "A person loses his individuality and becomes typical of a certain class of people."

And all of this sounds very much like a hyperactive LH or hypoactive RH. Again, as mentioned in yesterday's post, the concepts are familiar, regardless of where they are situated in the brain. 

For example, we know that language is mainly in the LH, but knowing this tells us nothing about Shakespeare, plus we can know all about Shakespeare's works without knowing about his left brain. Likewise, E = mc² irrespective of what part of the brain came up with it.  

In any event, it seems that mental illness can be conceptualized as a hemispheric imbalance, which necessarily "changes what we find in the world." And looking at these imbalances "sheds light on normal experience, revealing its ordinary and therefore overlooked structure." 

Illness "allows us to observe normal human behavior and cognition via their pathological counterpart." I suppose this is similar to how the injuries of war taught us so much -- albeit the hard way -- about anatomy and emergency medicine.  

In parts of this chapter McGilchrist touches on the question of why our civilization has lost its mind, attributing it to the LH essentially eclipsing the RH (there will presumably be much more on this subject in parts two & three). He mentions a prophetic book that was published 30 years ago called Madness and Modernism: Insanity in Light of Modern Art, Literature, and Thought, documenting how

people with schizophrenia bore a close resemblance to phenomena not just found in, but at the core of, modernism.... 

Sass not only "illustrates his thesis in detail, across numerous domains," but shows how many of these modern luminaries were frankly on the "schizo-autistic spectrum." 

This seems to be a hint of things to come later in the book: that a hypertrophied LH and atrophied RH may underlie our societal plunge into "mechanism, scientism and bureaucracy," accompanied by an "inauthentic materialization, technicalization and mechanization of everything."

The LH Narrative is superimposed on all of this, but again, I don't think we have to know anything about neurology to see this. The Narrative functions as a pseudo-whole that is a pathological compensation for the absence of a true integrating synthesis of reality. It is less a blobby swamp than a rigid grid.

There's also an implicit recognition of how identity politics furnishes the disordered person with a faux "wholeness" to help organize the fragmented self into something manageable. For the majority of left wing activists, the activism is but a defense against unmetabolized, unrecognized, and projected parts of the self.  

It starts at the top, with our class of credentialed idiots who live in the map and not the world, where words only refer to other words, and where abstractions are "more real than actualities.... the triumph of theory over embodied experience." These resonate 

with academic trends in the humanities, with scientism, and even with the world-picture of the average Western citizen.

"In all forms of dialogue today," it "often feels as if one is talking to a machine." 

You're not a machine. You get the point.