Temporal Normality

Improbable blogging conditions this morning, and impossible tomorrow, especially given the nature of the subject. I need to think about this one. The Maestro must have SILENCE -- a silence that should resume once the boy officially graduates high school tomorrow and there are no visitors disturbing the peace. You know me:

I'm a quiet living man,
who prefers to spend the morning in the silence of his room,
who likes an atmosphere as restful as
an undiscovered tomb,
A pensive man am I, of philosophical joys,
who likes to meditate, contemplate,
far for humanity's mad inhuman noise,
A quiet living man....

Chapter 22, Time. Clearly, it is one of those fundamental *things*, like being, experience, space, or order, that cannot be thought away, because they are the very basis of there being anything to think about. Try thinking away "experience" and see how far you get.

A few posts back we spoke of how, in the case of a primordial complementarity, one side is nevertheless more fundamental, since it could account for the other side, while the other side could not account for it. Now I'm wondering if it also works the other way around.

In other words, if we find something that seems to be fundamental, it must have its complement without which it cannot be understood. In the case of time, its complement is eternity, and the traditional understanding of eternity is that it is not time everlasting but timelessness. 

I frankly don't like either option. Infinite time is obviously absurd, but timelessness is no bargain either. It is literally unthinkable, and I like to think that eternity and thought are compatible -- in other words, that it's a joyous cerebration.

We'll sort through some options later, but first let's see what McGilchrist has to say. He mentions something that reminds me of the early Christian councils that were more about excluding error than defining truth in a perfectly rigid way; or at least they gave some leeway to the latter, even while defining no-go interpretations.

"As in the approach to all deep questions," McGilchrist proposes "at least to see more clearly what it is we now believe that is unlikely to be the case."

What are some of time's no-go zones? Sounds silly, but there's nothing silly about 100 million dead due to Marx's idea of time and history. And his is far from the only one. 

How about the Aztec, who needed to slaughter thousands of victims in order to keep time rollin' along -- to feed the gods, keep the sun from dying, and ensure the continued existence of the world, in short, to stay on the right side of history?

McGilchrist also suggests that perhaps we can learn something about time by looking into what happens to it in cases of psychopathology, especially schizophrenia (which seems to be more an RH dysfunction) and depression (more of an LH problem). 

This implies that there must be something like Temporal Normality, something McGilchrist nowhere implies, but hey, why not? 

If we really want to widen out our discussion, we could always bring in Balthasar's five-volume Theo-Drama, which does indeed posit a kind of normative time -- a dramatic structure of history that comes to us directly from God. (https://www.amazon.com/Theo-Drama-Theological-Dramatic-Theory-Prologomena/dp/0898701856).

Balthasar shows how many of the trends of modern theology (e.g. “event”, “history”, “orthopraxy”, “dialogue”, “political theology”) point to an understanding of human and cosmic reality as a divine drama. 

This discussion would take us so far afield that we'd never finish the present opus. Remind me to come back to it.

Now I'm curious. Just a peek. 

The aim is to make the individual's short span of life coextensive with the whole span of the life of the world.

So, a person is a temporal fractal of the whole. I like that. 

Is time "a cathedral in dramatic form?" 

"Something has changed in salvation-time as it flows onward, something that makes it different from pre-Christian time." 

And here's an interesting question: "If the Creator gives his creature [temporal] freedom, does he not become dependent on him?"

But we haven't even finished a single page of McGilchrist!

Sunday.

Time Out for Oxygen!

Difference and sameness -- like the One and the Many -- "constantly interpenetrate one another and give life to one another." To which McGilchrist adds, always.

Pretty, pretty authoritative, and I couldn't agree more. The question is, how and why -- i.e., by virtue of what eternal Principle is this the case? 

Hmm: what is one and three, distinct and yet consubstantial, interpenetrating and intersubjective, e.g.,  I am in My Father, and you are in Me, and I am in you?

What could it be?

One problem I'm having with the book is its "mid-level metaphysics," so to speak, which is causing me a bit of sophication, since I am so accustomed to breathing the clearclean mountainair at the summit. Not that I am at the summit. Rather, that the air circulates downward if you know where the vents are.

In other words, I find that McGilchrist is making assertions that I agree are true, but not following them all the way up to the Principle(s) by virtue of which they are true. 

And often he's even taking an upside-down approach, and seemingly anchoring things in, say, physics, instead of the Reality above, even though he claims to be opposed to reductionism.

But just because physics and biology are much weirder than we had imagined -- and they are -- reductionism is still reductionism. One of the foundational texts of this unemployed hippy bum approach was The Tao of Physics, when we should be talking about the physics of the Tao:

The doctrines that explain the higher by means of the lower are appendices of a magician's rule book.

In other words, the material world is a reflection of the immaterial world, not vice versa. The former gives us hints of the latter -- as it must -- but that's different from trying to, for example, ground free will in the uncertainty principle, which is to not know what freedom is, precisely.  

Unlike the Science is Real crowd, I truly love science, but let's be honest,

Science cannot do more than draw up the inventory of our prison.

The inventory is larger and more full of surprises than we had imagined, but it cannot transcend its own assumptions and limits, for, self-evidently, 

That which is not a person is not finally anything.

Deal with it. You just have to accept the truth, regardless of how pleasant.

But I'm only up to p. 957. Perhaps we'll penetrate the toppermyst in chapter 27, Purpose, Life and the Nature of the Cosmos. Must be patient, I suppose. I don't want to be too critical, because he's certainly on the right (hemispheric) track. One just has to be mindful of various cautionary aphorisms, such as 

All truths converge upon one truth, but the routes have been barricaded.

And

The philosopher who adopts scientific notions has predetermined his conclusions.

For ultimately, 

The universe is important if it is appearance, and insignificant if it is reality.

Therefore, it is and always will be the case that

The man does not escape from his prison of paradoxes except by means of a vertical act of faith.

In other words, if pantheism is the case -- which McGilchrist appears to be saying -- then so what. It's just nihilsim by another name. It doesn't matter how weird or how big your cosmos,

The distances of the physical universe are those of a prison.

Again, the vents are in the ceiling:  

We cannot escape the triviality of existence through the doors, but rather through the roofs.

On p. 855 McGilchrist cites one of Blake's aphorisms: The eagle never lost so much time as when he submitted to learn of the crow.  

Agreed. Now, what do we mean by "eagle"?

The language of the great contemplatives is hand-to-hand combat with things that cannot be spoken.... Colliding in its flight with ineffable secrets, with unrevealed mysteries, it has the appearance of an eagle who arrives in regions where, even for it, there is no longer suitable air for breathing. Thoughts are lacking for it. Their intellect descends again, struggling against words, which fail, each in their own turn....

In this ascent..., all lights are shadows in comparison with the last light. The treasuries into which the great contemplative's gaze searches are forever inexhaustible; and eternity promises to their ever-renewed joy fresh springs that will never be exhausted (Ernest Hello).

The RH Child is Father to the LH Goat

Uniqueness is to Generality as One is to Many and Substance is to Form.

I would say Change my mind, but I haven't yet made up my mind. It just kind of popped out. At any rate, 

On the one hand, we need to see [a thing] as unique: nothing that exists is ever the same as anything else. Yet, one aspect of what it really is requires us to see where it fits into the context of everything else; and to see that we need generalities (McGilchrist). 

Take two coins, for example: one coin is not the other, but they are nevertheless both coins. So, what distinguishes them? A Thomist would say their accidents: this one is, say, worn and faded, that one shiny and sharp.  

As a child, the excitement lies in discovering that not everything is unique, but that there are general categories giving shape to the world: "Bunny!," "Doggie!" This gives pattern to experience (ibid.).

Hmm. I wonder if the excitement lies in the other direction for an old goat?

As adults we have become so used to this, that we have to make an effort in the opposite direction: the excitement comes only when we recover the uniqueness of what it is we contemplate (ibid.).

So, is this why the old goat meditates? 

when everything is familiar, time speeds up. When we are young all is new: not so in age. This may be another good reason for practicing mindfulness, which makes everything new once more (ibid.).

Well, we'll stipulate that something makes all things new. 

And now that I think about it, it's the novelty we're after. Not total novelty, because that way lies psychosis, but... a gentle flow, or something: hello, noumena! Remumble when? I do, but how to get back there? Give us this day our daily dawn, when

the real, experienced presence of the mountains and lakes as a child was overwhelming -- they were, in our terms, present "in their very essence" to him, awe-inspiring and unique; when as an adult he could see them only as re-presented, now become the essential Mountain and the essential Lake (ibid.).

The Substantial or Archetypal Mountain or Lake from which all other mountains and lakes are number two, or lower. Which makes you wonder if it was also like this for prelapsarian man, or when man as such was a young goat:

For the man of the golden age to climb a mountain was in truth to approach the Principle. In our day to climb a mountain -- and there is no longer a mountain that is the “center of the world” -- is to “conquer” its summit; the ascent is no longer a spiritual act but a profanation. Man, in his aspect of human animal, makes himself God. The gates of Heaven, mysteriously present in nature, close to him (Schuon).

Bad goat! 

Reminds me of a song:

When the child was a child
It didn't know it was a child
Everything for it was filled with life and all life was one
Saw the horizon without trying to reach it

I Gotta Be... or Maybe Become... Me!

We're into chapter 21, The One and the Many, and it is... my kind of chapter, for it prompted a few Can I buy some pot from you? moments. Let's see if I can remember where they were.

Here's the headline:

Everything is part of one whole, connected to every other part by a matter of degree. But everything is also absolutely unique [and] has "the most intense individuality."

This goes to the "central paradox of the one and the many," but I suspect we're going to discover that it's a foundational orthoparadox, i.e., always both. And that RH/LH are deeply implicated in this mysterious isness, going "to the core of what it means to be at all."

You know me: I'm thinking to myself, "What is always One and Three?," but let's not get ahead of our skis. Besides, we can't ski up the mountain.

Being or becoming? Which comes first? You know me: I reject the premise, because it's another orthoparadoxical complementarity. Okay then, which of the two is prior, or more fundamental, even though we never see them apart? 

McGilchrist seems to lean toward becoming, but I'm going to have to call a foul on that. 

We'll get into the reasons why later, but suffice it to say at this juncture that a universe of pure becoming would be unintelligible. As Thomas says, "The formal object of the intellect is being," and the soul of every judgment is to be: if nothing is, then nothing is known or knowable. 

But things are knowable, big time. Therefore isness is, and from our side of the deal we are aware of an "absolute immutability of the first principles of reason and of reality" (Garrigou-Lagrange). No amount of tenure will ever change this, so relax and enjoy the certitude. 

Having said this, we are nevertheless dealing with a deep orthoparadox, and we need to give becoming (and maniness) its due. 

Again, everything is like something (this being a metaphorical cosmos), or it would be unintelligible. On the other hand, take enough LSD and you see that nothing is like anything, i.e., utterly unique (!!!!!!!!). 

This also happens in psychosis, which can result in a catastrophic torrent of sheer novelty (????????): becoming with no being. Or sometimes neither, like an endless fall into a static black hole in the psyche (oooooooo).

Anyway,

To know that anything is unique requires understanding the ways in which it differs from something else it might have been: you are a unique human being, and the generality of your being a human being is still there, but hidden in the particularity (McGilchrist).

Think about the orthoparadox at the heart of humanness: a species of unique instances, when a truly unique instance is defined as something that belongs to no general category. 

How to squeer this absurcularity? Maybe it explains why we are unintelligible to ourselves: because we are unique. Yes, we are human beings, but that's just an abstract LH category. No one knows what it is like to be me, starting with me! Well, God, but let's save someOne for later.

Can I buy some pot from me?

We're raising a lot of points that take us far afield from McGilchrist. I could address them, but let's refocus on the chapter at hand. Oh, and we're running of time. I'll just end with this, and we'll resume tomorrow:

To see each thing as it really is requires a balancing act. On the one hand, we need to see it as unique: nothing that exists is ever the same as anything else. 

Yet one aspect of what really is requires us to see where it fits into the context of everything else; and to see that we need generalities. And to appreciate the relationship between uniqueness and generality means always to balance sameness and generality (McGilchrist).

For example, Juan and Manny are both illegals, but nevertheless, Juan is not Manny and Manny is not Juan. But why is this even my problem?

Absurcularity and Transpirality

We're now into Volume II of The Matter With Things, subtitled The Unforeseen Nature of Reality. As with the first volume we'll try to review one chapter a day, but that may not be possible, since this volume tackles modest subjects such as, oh, life, time, consciousness, and purpose. 

The first chapter, The Coincidentia Oppositorum -- that's coincidence of opposites for those of you living in Rio Linda -- is right in our karmic wheelhouse, being that we have written countless posts on the centrality of complementarity, in particular, of primordial complementarities such as time and eternity, absolute and infinite, male and female, form and substance, vertical and horizontal, et al.

This is somewhat of a continuation of the previous chapter, which pointed out how trivial or superficial truths may contradict one another, whereas the opposite of a deep truth may well be another deep truth. McGilchrist quotes Niels Bohr -- father of the complementarity principle -- to this effect:

It is the hallmark of any deep truth that its negation is also a deep truth. 

Or as we say, orthoparadox. 

Okay, but how do we avoid a vicious dualism at the heart of things? This riddle was solved for me by Charles Hartshorne, who essentially said that, in the case of a true complementarity, one of the two will nevertheless be more fundamental -- for example, vertical could give rise to horizontal, but not vice versa. Analogously, all the matter in the world will never add up to spirit. 

Male and Female? Interesting question. I don't want to spark a controversy, but there are those who would insist that Female must be implicitly behind it all, and I myself am partial to this view. 

It is explicitly expressed with the idea of Beyond-Being giving rise to Being, and more implicitly in certain esoteric connotations of Mary. At the very least, this complementarity will have to sneak into a sidedoor of your metaphysic.

I might add that threeness is another way of escaping from a two-timing impasse, and we'll no doubt return to this subject later.

But let's stay on track. Problem is, McGilchrist is once again preaching to the long-converted, so I find myself just nodding off in agreement, for example, "A tension between opposites is at the heart of all creativity," from Lennon-McCartney to Miles and Trane. 

This is new, but notice how it corresponds perfectly with what was said above about one complementarity being more fundamental than the other:

The right hemisphere can incorporate the left's take, but the left cannot incorporate that of the right. The mechanistic vision can come only from experience, even if it is an experience from which much has been excluded....

Likewise, we may begin with a 

description in terms of physics, but could never progress from that to the experiential tree; whereas we can begin with the experience [of the tree] and later incorporate within it the physics.

In short, "the experience of the tree can never emerge from the mechanistic vision," which is really just straight-up Thomisic realism, which always begins in the senses, from which concepts or essences are extracted. You can't proceed in the other direction; or Kant, rather, but that's another subject.

Each truth conceals another, opposing, truth, that becomes apparent as soon as we move from the abstract to a real world context.

Dávila expresses in compact RH Aphorisms what McGilchrist unfurls in prose, for example,

Any straight line leads to hell.

McGilchrist writes that

It was the painter and architect Friedensreich Hundertwasser's view that "the straight line leads to the downfall of mankind."

Granted, but he doesn't stop there. In case you missed the point, straight lines are "an absolute tyranny," "something cowardly," "the rotten foundation of our doomed civilization," "atheistic and immoral," "criminal sterility," "forbidden fruit," "the curse of our civilization," "stillborn," "an aesthetic void," a "desert of uniformity," "prefabricated," "impotent," etc.

Okay, okay. Makes a fellow want to start a petition in support of lines.  

But the deeper point is that it takes two points to make a line and three to make a circle, I guess. I wasn't good at geometry, but in any event, 

The circle represents both the finite and the eternal, since it has no end; it also represents that which moves and stays still.

I'm gonna object, because the circle is a kind of phony infinite from which we can only escape via the spiral. McGilchrist says as much, in that

linearity and circularity can co-exist, if what looks like a circle... is actually a spiral, like an endless coiled spring viewed down its axis.

More to the point, could the circle ever give rise to the spiral? NO! The mere circle is cowardly, tyrannical, sterile, criminal, a curse! Circles makes me want to vomit! 

What is Metaphor Like?

The last chapter of Volume I is Intuition, Imagination and the Unveiling of the World, and it's pretty much a continuation of the previous one on the cultural demise of RH intuition, one I'm pretty sure I survived. 

People sometimes ask about my plans, but I've never had one, perhaps because the RH is in charge, or maybe my LH could use some assertiveness training. 

In a way, I'm not very practical, but then again, it turns out that the snap decisions of the RH are often superior to the careful analysis of the LH. It's not as if my spontaneous nonplans have turned out badly. To the contrary, everything has turned out fine, even though I would hesitate to recommend this approach to others. Unless, like me, they just can't help it anyway. 

There's a lot of research in the previous chapter about how intuitions "are more often valid than not," and how we are "much better than chance" at judging things like age, sexual orientation, and political affiliation. It seems that gaydar is real. I know my guydar is unfailingly accurate at detecting when some guy is pretending to be a woman, just as all my Jewish friends and relatives have a highly developed goydar.

By the way, "stereotype accuracy is one of the largest and most replicable findings in social psychology," and stereotypes "have all been repeatedly shown to be remarkably reliable." Therefore (and this is something Thomas Sowell often discusses), "prejudices are not necessarily wrong. What is wrong is to be biased in any individual case by your prejudice." This latter is not especially difficult, rather, our capacity for this kind of detachment is "remarkably good."

Of course, this is not to excuse those MAGA deplorables who are much more prone to bias and discrimination.

Wrong. "Scientists are no less prone to bias than anyone else," and some research confirms your common sense belief "that people with more education are more likely to cling to ideological beliefs in the teeth of evidence." 

No! I shan't believe it! That the tenured live in a toxic bubble of ideological conformity? Never!

Back to the present chapter, 

The product of intuition is insight. It has been defined as "any sudden comprehension, realization, or problem solution that involves a reorganization of the elements of a person's mental representation of a stimulus, situation, or event to yield a non-obvious or non-dominant interpretation."

This is a subject I've been interested in since grad school, and two names stick out in particular, W.R. Bion and Michael Polanyi, each of whom describes this sudden reorganization of psychic elements from different angles. The vocabulary is different but the mechanism -- the underlying reality -- is the same, and I discussed it in detail in my ponderously titled dissertation mentioned yesterday (and in the Book).

But I don't want to revisit what I wrote 20 or 35 years ago, correct though it may be. Let's keep this discussion rolling forward. McGilchrist says something on p. 758 that goes to the coonological principle that metaphor isn't just a side dish, but the main course: this is a metaphorical cosmos, with all this implies. 

No, McGilchrist doesn't put it that way, but I will. He writes that metaphor

is fundamental to how we understand the world. It is only by seeing something as in some sense and however dimly "like" something else that we build knowledge, and insight consists in perceiving likeness in dissimilar things.

Now, I first encountered the Extreme Version of this idea when reading Stanley Jaki's Means to Message -- back in 2002, it was. But as soon as I read it, it only confirmed in me something I already knew to be deeply true. 

You have only to begin by asking yourself: in what kind of cosmos is metaphor even possible, and then you suddenly realize how central it is to everything, beginning with language itself, or rather, logos. Everything is like something, which is the very space between intelligence and intelligibility.

A note to myself in the margin says "Reality is first and foremost something capable of carrying a message between subjects." Nor does it take much intuition to leap from this to the Trinity. I would now say Of course this is a metaphorical cosmos, and the first metaphor is the Son, even though there was never a time this metaphor didn't exist.

Just a hunch. 

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.