I am still reading THE MASTER AND HIS EMISSARY as it's a weighty tome. However, I love listening to Iain speak as he is so eloquent. He's got me listening to poetry too for the first time as I never had a chance to go to University when younger as I had to work instead. Alas. Never too late to learn though! I personally feel the Right Brain is way way way beyond the left. I was brought up in a Left-Brain way in England and only now, at 60 and on my 2nd Saturn Return, I am coming far more into the auspices of that more developed right brain way of seeing and feeling and it feels like such a nice release from the constipation the left brain produces. I fear for this world and hope everyone reads Iain's books before it's too late which it rather seems it is. Like Iain I am a hopeful pessimist. Actually I am unwaveringly an Optimist but that happened once I had let go of needing to be anything other than HERE and appreciative of everything I have around me. Thanks Iain! Please do more interviews on different things for us. I find studying what you say such a joy. x
I went straight back to the beginning after I finished it! We are similar in age and experience - I missed university too - but poetry has been one of the ways that has connected me to my emotional side - i feel very left brainish alot - I have a strange brain that lacks a 'mind's eye' and have always been fascinated by trying to learn more about how it works. There is a fabulous book by Will Sieghart called the Poetry Pharmacy which suggests a poem for different moments in life, and has a short explanation against each one. What is really interesting is how poetry always alerted me to paying attention - when I was 15 I was reading T. S Eliot, and not understanding a word but loving the experience. Dr Iain explains that a bit.
Fascinating! Looking up into a deep & intricately connected cosmos (of which we are an integral part), instead of just consistently looking down on matters and dividing them endlessly, is the essence of insightful thinking. Where endless analysis retreats inward and further downward into complete disconnectedness, insight gazes up with ever-expanding lenses that privilege the connections holding everything together, connections without which the whole would not exist.
TMAHE has been a desert island book ever since I had the excitement of reading it. A decade of living inside your view of the hemispheres confirms it for me. I could never estimate the effect it's had on me and how much I appreciate you, Iain. Looking forward to read this next one ... and hopefully to watching the global bureaucrat be put back in his bloody box over the next few years. It's a fight of cosmic proportions 💛🌻🙏
Brilliant assessment. Indeed, the mountainside is approaching extremely fast. Two thoughts: “The least of things with a meaning is worth more in life than the greatest of things without it.” and “Earth's the right place for love. I don't know where it's likely to go better.”
I spent two days watching kids who'd scored highly on IQ tests do civil service fast track tests. A good two thirds of them were prize idiots. They could infer - the left hemisphere thing - but they were stupid beyond all description the instant they had to discuss anything of this world. (An airplane of a type made to one plan in multiple locations has crashed. Do you order the grounding of all of the planes? You'd think it was a question of, "Can we assume the fault is common to some, or all?" Dear God: the conversation.
Dr. McGilchrist, I think your work is very important. I believe your Theory of mind along with Penrose & Hameroff theory of Microtubules combined with theories of complexity are the ones going in the right direction. I still struggle with a universe that is determistic, freewill and meaning.
Metamorphoses of the Spirit: Breaking Bad Habits (full essay available in my Thinkspot profile) "My soul is wrought to sing of forms transformed to bodies new and strange! Immortal Gods inspire my heart, for ye have changed yourselves and all things you have changed! Oh lead my song in smooth and measured strains, from olden days when earth began to this completed time!" - Ovid, Metamorphoses Upon hearing the word "evolution", we think of Darwin and picture a process of monkey turning into man. We envision the DNA double-helix, entities called "genes", and fossils which show a morphological progression from simple to more complex organisms. What we always leave out, though, is the progression of interior forms which must have also occurred. That is, the morphology of our conscious experiences including feelings, perceptions and thoughts. We generally assume these interior forms have only changed quantitatively rather than qualitatively. Our concern in this essay is to challenge such an assumption by exploring the evolution of psyche (Spirit), which we will now refer to as the Spirit's metamorphosis. After Descartes' divided mind from matter (inner from outer), and Kant divided noumenal Reality from phenomenal conscious experience, our interiority has rapidly morphed into a black hole of experience; our interior forms are seemingly trapped beneath an event horizon beyond which no empirical tools can explore. It is thought that such forms remain purely "subjective" as opposed to "objective", and the former has become nearly synonymous with "unreliable" and "unpredictable". We assume the subjective cannot be measured and studied in any rigorous manner, because our conscious experiences occur within our personal bubbles which are, in turn, isolated from everyone else's personal bubbles. It is my aim in this essay to outline an argument calling into question this "common sense" of the modern era. Other more intelligent and qualified thinkers have written entire books about such arguments, so what I do here can only be considered a pointer to those more comprehensive works. It is merely an attempt to restart a conversation. We will begin with consideration of some 20th century psychology, because, as Nietzsche keenly observed, "psychology [should] once more be recognized as the queen of the sciences... for psychology is once more the path to the fundamental problems." There was one psychologist in particular who was intimately familiar with the metamorphoses of Spirit - Jean Piaget. “What we see changes what we know. What we know changes what we see.” ― Jean Piaget, The Language and Thought of the Child (1923) Piaget identified that infants below a certain age (about 4-7 months) do not recognize the existence of objects once they disappear from the infant's view, i.e. there is no "object permanence". Put another way, those infants do not distinguish themselves as subjects from objects and therefore do not have any clear sense of an "ego" or "self" who is experiencing the objects. Without such a distinction, there is no accessible memory created of prior experiences. The infant's own psychic processes are thoroughly enmeshed within the surrounding world. When perception of an object ceases to exist, so does the object itself. Piaget labeled this stage the "sensorimotor" stage. An entrenched materialist will no doubt object to the above summary and claim the transition to "object permanence" does not indicate a qualitatively different mode of experience, but rather the infant's limited cognitive development. What is key to remember is that the materialist must make such an attribution to the phenomenon. That is dictated a priori by their materialist assumptions. Yet, if we are simply taking the phenomenal process as we find it, without any metaphysical assumptions, then it becomes obvious we are dealing with a qualitative transformation. The infant's conscious experiences become qualitatively different when the subject-object distinction arises and sharpens for them. We should keep that in mind as we journey further.
So, I learned a lot of these lessons really really hard. I started taking apart radios like they were Lego blocks when I was around 7 years old, and they've sort of never stopped being Lego blocks to me. I do a lot of really dangerous stuff with electricity without giving it much of a second thought, and in spite of the fact that I've never been especially afraid to die instantly of over a thousand volts it hasn't happened yet. I can literally make art from dead wood, a dead microwave, and 110 volts out of a wall. And I could get paid money for it on the internet, but I already know how to do it.
I use both a Windows computer (left hemisphere,) and a Mac laptop (right hemisphere) at the same time. I use a USB port hub connected to the best keyboard I could find that still sounds like a typewriter, and the best mouse to use without moving a hand, and I can only use those tools on one of the computers at a time. I haven't bought a computer for myself since 2015, I can build one from parts, and I could use more than I do but I don't.
Having used THE MASTER & HIS EMISSARY along with the Polyvagal Theory mapping of the structure & function of my nervous system, to better understand the habit-formed nature of my life's evolution. I can't help asking the question, is the left-brain question "who we are" a product of unquestioned habit that keeps us mired in the functional illusion, inherent in our early life adaptation to language? And from a right-brain perspective of cosmic oneness, would the question "what we are" be more conducive to rebuilding our innate sentient nature? Plato suggests that floating back down the river of forgetfulness is conducive to the metempsyhcosis experience that scripture calls the 'transfiguration?' As alluded to in Socrates questioning of our need of 'conversion' in the presence of the Sun? The 'pariousia' of orthodox Christianity?
I agree that the essence of Christianity is essentially Platonism, but I think William Blake was the first person to translate the principles of human existence to humans who think like Wizards in a way that makes any sense to me, and the Good Doctor here is the runner up. People who think this deeply usually live on the outskirts of whatever society they exist in, and I think it's because they say shit that makes too much sense.
Sir this 2 hemisphere are create problem for me bcoz both are i cant able to control partially work ,sometimes both hemisphere work together And on that time 2 thought i have and confused not able to focus in one work and heat my head
The model is dualistic and therefore unbalanced. We just dont know, well actually we do, but we prefer to distract ourselves. We need to be aware of fallacy. This is confused...happy to speak through this through ChanelMcgilchrist.com. The 'third hemisphere' is the balanace between the two.
If you take two circles & overlap them you not only get the left side, & the right side, you also get the overlap, you also get the whole "thing"! So in terms of set theory you have A or B, A intersect B, A U B. Science isn't divorced from Philosophy, even Lawrence Krauss who states that Science doesn't need Philosophy, adopts the default Philosophy of Physicalism!
![Rick Roderick on The Masters of Suspicion [full length]](http://i.ytimg.com/vi/4wetwETy4u0/mqdefault.jpg)
I am still reading THE MASTER AND HIS EMISSARY as it's a weighty tome. However, I love listening to Iain speak as he is so eloquent. He's got me listening to poetry too for the first time as I never had a chance to go to University when younger as I had to work instead. Alas. Never too late to learn though! I personally feel the Right Brain is way way way beyond the left. I was brought up in a Left-Brain way in England and only now, at 60 and on my 2nd Saturn Return, I am coming far more into the auspices of that more developed right brain way of seeing and feeling and it feels like such a nice release from the constipation the left brain produces. I fear for this world and hope everyone reads Iain's books before it's too late which it rather seems it is. Like Iain I am a hopeful pessimist. Actually I am unwaveringly an Optimist but that happened once I had let go of needing to be anything other than HERE and appreciative of everything I have around me. Thanks Iain! Please do more interviews on different things for us. I find studying what you say such a joy. x
I went straight back to the beginning after I finished it! We are similar in age and experience - I missed university too - but poetry has been one of the ways that has connected me to my emotional side - i feel very left brainish alot - I have a strange brain that lacks a 'mind's eye' and have always been fascinated by trying to learn more about how it works. There is a fabulous book by Will Sieghart called the Poetry Pharmacy which suggests a poem for different moments in life, and has a short explanation against each one. What is really interesting is how poetry always alerted me to paying attention - when I was 15 I was reading T. S Eliot, and not understanding a word but loving the experience. Dr Iain explains that a bit.
You both have probably heard of Jill Bolte Taylor by now? I haven't read the book yet myself but will eventually.
Just finished Master and His Emissary this morning! LOVED IT!
how long did it take you, i've been reading it for 3 months and im on page 85 lol
@@taddypatty7923 also on audible...
Fascinating! Looking up into a deep & intricately connected cosmos (of which we are an integral part), instead of just consistently looking down on matters and dividing them endlessly, is the essence of insightful thinking.
Where endless analysis retreats inward and further downward into complete disconnectedness, insight gazes up with ever-expanding lenses that privilege the connections holding everything together, connections without which the whole would not exist.
TMAHE has been a desert island book ever since I had the excitement of reading it. A decade of living inside your view of the hemispheres confirms it for me. I could never estimate the effect it's had on me and how much I appreciate you, Iain. Looking forward to read this next one ... and hopefully to watching the global bureaucrat be put back in his bloody box over the next few years. It's a fight of cosmic proportions 💛🌻🙏
it is indeed. I too feel that this is an important book..if only it would be read by a global audience!
Right, I must finally read this book
@@Gallowglass7 yes, you must :)
Brilliant assessment.
Indeed, the mountainside is approaching extremely fast. Two thoughts: “The least of things with a meaning is worth more in life than the greatest of things without it.” and “Earth's the right place for love. I don't know where it's likely to go better.”
I believe that Robert Frost so eloquently made that clear: Earth's the place for love. Can't name the poem right now, tho.
I feel that Dr Iain , with his 'Master" and "Matter" books has given us some vast vistas to contemplate. Great work thank you.
Thank you, Dr McGilchrist; very helpful!
Thanks for your work!
I spent two days watching kids who'd scored highly on IQ tests do civil service fast track tests. A good two thirds of them were prize idiots. They could infer - the left hemisphere thing - but they were stupid beyond all description the instant they had to discuss anything of this world. (An airplane of a type made to one plan in multiple locations has crashed. Do you order the grounding of all of the planes? You'd think it was a question of, "Can we assume the fault is common to some, or all?" Dear God: the conversation.
Dr. McGilchrist, I think your work is very important. I believe your Theory of mind along with Penrose & Hameroff theory of Microtubules combined with theories of complexity are the ones going in the right direction. I still struggle with a universe that is determistic, freewill and meaning.
Metamorphoses of the Spirit: Breaking Bad Habits (full essay available in my Thinkspot profile)
"My soul is wrought to sing of forms transformed
to bodies new and strange! Immortal Gods
inspire my heart, for ye have changed yourselves
and all things you have changed! Oh lead my song
in smooth and measured strains, from olden days
when earth began to this completed time!"
- Ovid, Metamorphoses
Upon hearing the word "evolution", we think of Darwin and picture a process of monkey turning into man. We envision the DNA double-helix, entities called "genes", and fossils which show a morphological progression from simple to more complex organisms. What we always leave out, though, is the progression of interior forms which must have also occurred. That is, the morphology of our conscious experiences including feelings, perceptions and thoughts. We generally assume these interior forms have only changed quantitatively rather than qualitatively. Our concern in this essay is to challenge such an assumption by exploring the evolution of psyche (Spirit), which we will now refer to as the Spirit's metamorphosis.
After Descartes' divided mind from matter (inner from outer), and Kant divided noumenal Reality from phenomenal conscious experience, our interiority has rapidly morphed into a black hole of experience; our interior forms are seemingly trapped beneath an event horizon beyond which no empirical tools can explore. It is thought that such forms remain purely "subjective" as opposed to "objective", and the former has become nearly synonymous with "unreliable" and "unpredictable". We assume the subjective cannot be measured and studied in any rigorous manner, because our conscious experiences occur within our personal bubbles which are, in turn, isolated from everyone else's personal bubbles.
It is my aim in this essay to outline an argument calling into question this "common sense" of the modern era. Other more intelligent and qualified thinkers have written entire books about such arguments, so what I do here can only be considered a pointer to those more comprehensive works. It is merely an attempt to restart a conversation. We will begin with consideration of some 20th century psychology, because, as Nietzsche keenly observed, "psychology [should] once more be recognized as the queen of the sciences... for psychology is once more the path to the fundamental problems." There was one psychologist in particular who was intimately familiar with the metamorphoses of Spirit - Jean Piaget.
“What we see changes what we know. What we know changes what we see.”
― Jean Piaget, The Language and Thought of the Child (1923)
Piaget identified that infants below a certain age (about 4-7 months) do not recognize the existence of objects once they disappear from the infant's view, i.e. there is no "object permanence". Put another way, those infants do not distinguish themselves as subjects from objects and therefore do not have any clear sense of an "ego" or "self" who is experiencing the objects. Without such a distinction, there is no accessible memory created of prior experiences. The infant's own psychic processes are thoroughly enmeshed within the surrounding world. When perception of an object ceases to exist, so does the object itself. Piaget labeled this stage the "sensorimotor" stage.
An entrenched materialist will no doubt object to the above summary and claim the transition to "object permanence" does not indicate a qualitatively different mode of experience, but rather the infant's limited cognitive development. What is key to remember is that the materialist must make such an attribution to the phenomenon. That is dictated a priori by their materialist assumptions. Yet, if we are simply taking the phenomenal process as we find it, without any metaphysical assumptions, then it becomes obvious we are dealing with a qualitative transformation. The infant's conscious experiences become qualitatively different when the subject-object distinction arises and sharpens for them. We should keep that in mind as we journey further.
So wonderful! Thank You!
Look up and help others do the same.. somehow. 🙏
this is enlightening me
*The universe looks more and more like a great thought rather than a great machine.*
~ Sir James Jeans, The Mysterious Universe
... just listening to your post about David Foster Wallace - and it really moved me. I totally understand your words. I felt very similarly.....
@@annecorr Thank you.
Sounds too abstract, at least the mechanist tries to study the interacting variables that act on one another.
So, I learned a lot of these lessons really really hard. I started taking apart radios like they were Lego blocks when I was around 7 years old, and they've sort of never stopped being Lego blocks to me.
I do a lot of really dangerous stuff with electricity without giving it much of a second thought, and in spite of the fact that I've never been especially afraid to die instantly of over a thousand volts it hasn't happened yet. I can literally make art from dead wood, a dead microwave, and 110 volts out of a wall. And I could get paid money for it on the internet, but I already know how to do it.
I use both a Windows computer (left hemisphere,) and a Mac laptop (right hemisphere) at the same time. I use a USB port hub connected to the best keyboard I could find that still sounds like a typewriter, and the best mouse to use without moving a hand, and I can only use those tools on one of the computers at a time. I haven't bought a computer for myself since 2015, I can build one from parts, and I could use more than I do but I don't.
Having used THE MASTER & HIS EMISSARY along with the Polyvagal Theory mapping of the structure & function of my nervous system, to better understand the habit-formed nature of my life's evolution. I can't help asking the question, is the left-brain question "who we are" a product of unquestioned habit that keeps us mired in the functional illusion, inherent in our early life adaptation to language? And from a right-brain perspective of cosmic oneness, would the question "what we are" be more conducive to rebuilding our innate sentient nature? Plato suggests that floating back down the river of forgetfulness is conducive to the metempsyhcosis experience that scripture calls the 'transfiguration?' As alluded to in Socrates questioning of our need of 'conversion' in the presence of the Sun? The 'pariousia' of orthodox Christianity?
I agree that the essence of Christianity is essentially Platonism, but I think William Blake was the first person to translate the principles of human existence to humans who think like Wizards in a way that makes any sense to me, and the Good Doctor here is the runner up. People who think this deeply usually live on the outskirts of whatever society they exist in, and I think it's because they say shit that makes too much sense.
Sir this 2 hemisphere are create problem for me bcoz both are i cant able to control partially work ,sometimes both hemisphere work together
And on that time 2 thought i have and confused not able to focus in one work and heat my head
Bravo!
The model is dualistic and therefore unbalanced. We just dont know, well actually we do, but we prefer to distract ourselves.
We need to be aware of fallacy.
This is confused...happy to speak through this through ChanelMcgilchrist.com.
The 'third hemisphere' is the balanace between the two.
If you take two circles & overlap them you not only get the left side, & the right side, you also get the overlap, you also get the whole "thing"! So in terms of set theory you have A or B, A intersect B, A U B.
Science isn't divorced from Philosophy, even Lawrence Krauss who states that Science doesn't need Philosophy, adopts the default Philosophy of Physicalism!
I spy a copy of the Selected Letters of Philip Larkin just to the right of his head... :)
Indeed.. haha
Why are you spewing mechanistic neuroscience?