The Examined Life
Iain McGilchrist - What is my culture preventing me from seeing?
Iain McGilchrist is a rare polymath who draws on his background in literature, philosophy, medicine and the sciences to make a profound argument that the kind of attention we pay to the world determines not only the kind of people we become, but also the world we create. He argues that the brains left hemisphere has a disenchanted and mechanical view of the world, and it is this that has come to dominate the Western World. A consequence of this is that we've lost a sense of the sacred, of belonging, and of the reality of the values of truth, beauty and goodness.
In this episode we discuss what it is about life that we might be missing through the way we are paying attention. The conversation is wide ranging, exploring the brain hemispheres, the reality of values, and indeed the purpose of life in the universe.
Further information on Iain's work can be found on his website.
A full version of this interview will be available on the Examined Life's youtube channel.
Iain McGilchrist is a rare polymath who draws on his background in literature, philosophy, medicine and the sciences to make a profound argument that the kind of attention we pay to the world determines not only the kind of people we become, but also the world we create. He argues that the brains left hemisphere has a disenchanted and mechanical view of the world, and it is this that has come to dominate the Western World. A consequence of this is that we've lost a sense of the sacred, of belonging, and of the reality of the values of truth, beauty and goodness.
In this episode we discuss what it is about life that we might be missing through the way we are paying attention. The conversation is wide ranging, exploring the brain hemispheres, the reality of values, and indeed the purpose of life in the universe.
Further information on Iain's work can be found on his website.
A full version of this interview will be available on the Examined Life's youtube channel.
What is it special about life that makes it worthwhile? I think it is actually the ability to respond to the values that are in the nature of the ground of being, which are goodness, beauty and truth.
Speaker 2:Welcome to the Examined Life with me, kenneth Primrose. This is the fifth episode of the current series, where we have so far discussed AI and human distinctiveness, what the emotion of awe can teach us, the things that shape our character, and what it means to make good ruins in a time of environmental collapse. Today, I have the privilege of being in conversation with the philosopher and psychiatrist, ian McGilchrist. I began the Examined Life project back in 2016, initially transcribing interviews and posting them on the website. Ian was one of the first people I interviewed for it, and he left an impression I haven't quite recovered from. He has probably illuminated my thinking more than any other thinker in the last decade. It was a joy then to return to his house on the Isle of Skye and interview him with recording equipment. This time it felt like something of a pilgrimage, to be honest, going to a beautiful and windswept isle to meet a man who, I think, has good answers about life and its purpose.
Speaker 2:In today's conversation, we discuss what it is that our culture might be preventing us from seeing. Ian's research suggests that Western culture has increasingly constructed the world through the brain's left hemisphere, which sees the world around us as flat and devitalised and lacking in context. This has had consequences for both the individual and society. He's written about this in his books the Master and His Emissary back in 2009, and the Matter with Things in 2021, both of which have been highly praised and widely discussed and make a profound contribution to understanding our brains and the world around us. Ian is a genuine polymath who has been trained in both humanities and the sciences, having had an all souls fellowship at Oxford for English Literature before turning to medicine and becoming a psychiatrist.
Speaker 2:My hope is that some of you listening to this might be inspired to learn more about his contribution to human understanding. You'll find the relevant links in the show notes, and an extended version of this conversation will be available on YouTube. Ian, it's such a joy to be with you in your home here on Sky. So your brother ended up on a Greek island and you've ended up on a Hebridean island off the west coast of Scotland. Who do you think won?
Speaker 1:My brother. He was a sensible one. I should have made that decision a long time ago.
Speaker 2:It's extraordinary as a place. It feels like you're the end of the world. You could have ended up anywhere you know Metropolis and Oxford or wherever. Why the Isle of Skye? I?
Speaker 1:don't think I'd ever have ended up living in a city. I find it very important to be close to a wild and natural scene, and my brother and I share a lot, and when we were young we used to say there are two great places to live, and one of them is the Scottish Islands and the other is the Greek Islands. And he's ended up on the Greek Islands and I've ended up on the Scottish Islands.
Speaker 2:Ah, you can live vicariously through one another. Yes, so I came to see you eight years ago or so for the same project, where I'd speak to influential and compelling thinkers about a question that they think we should be asking ourselves. The question you offered then was what is my culture preventing me from seeing? Since then, you've written a massive tome, which I have here the Matter with Things. You've produced a huge amount. Is that still the question that you think we do well to start kind of considering a bit more closely?
Speaker 1:I think it's a very important question, no doubt, because if you don't know what it is that's missing from your life, you won't know how to lead your life so as to rediscover the things that you no longer see. So not knowing what it is you don't know is the fatal problem. Not knowing is fine, but knowing that you don't know is a very good position and exploring that. But in our culture we're encouraged to think that increasingly we know it all, that we've got it all worked out and we're organizing life according to lines that we have set up and we're not aware of what it is that's gone missing. I think people of my age I'm 71, see things having disappeared from life during their lifetime, and I don't know quite how young people would know that these things were missing really, unless we were able to discuss them and open eyes to them.
Speaker 2:So I wonder if we could begin by talking about what we well, maybe what you mean by seeing Attention as a moral act is kind of a shorthand for much of your work. When you talk about what we're seeing, are you talking about what we're paying attention to?
Speaker 1:I am. I'm not talking about visual sight. I'm talking about the things that we recognise and understand, about the things that we recognize and understand, and though sight is a very important and powerful sense with which we get to know things in the world, it's not really what I'm talking about.
Speaker 2:What is it that you think we are seeing and not seeing? What are we paying attention to? To the exclusion of other things? What would be say examples of that at the moment?
Speaker 1:well, I think that we've been led to adopt and become enslaved by a certain way of looking at the world which is mechanistic and reductionist, and with that, a sense of values, a sense of purpose, a sense of there being something wonderful or inspiring and perhaps sacred in the world has gone missing. And it's very sad that it's not just my impression, but research shows that a very large majority of young people, over 80%, think that their life is meaningless. It may be that we've developed all kinds of gadgetry and technology, but nothing can really replace the sense of meaning by sheer material wherewithal. So we value, we seem to be valuing what the left hemisphere values. The left hemisphere is essentially in the service of values. The left hemisphere is essentially in the service of utility. The reason we have two hemispheres and it's not just us but all the creatures that we know that have brains, have two hemispheres, and the difference is that they pay attention to the world in different ways. And the left hemisphere's attention is in the service of utility. It's a very narrowly targeted attention to something that's already known to be of value, and it goes and gets it. Now, that is essentially how we we look at. What do we need? What would we like? What would make us more powerful? Let's go for it and get it.
Speaker 1:But the right hemisphere is seeing the whole picture. It has a sort of sustained not a sort of sustained, not a sort of sustained. It has sustained broad, vigilant attention to the whole and it therefore sustains our sense of a whole to which we belong and where our position has meaning. But we've decontextualized everything. Our position has meaning, but we've decontextualized everything. We now don't understand that a thing is not just a thing. It changes its nature depending on the context that it's in. When we take it out of the context in which it belongs and from which it derives its meaning, it no longer seems to have any meaning. So the trouble with this world picture is it sees meaningless items whose only possible value can come from ways in which we can use them. And this has largely dominated, certainly in certain sectors, the way in which people now think of the natural world as a heap of resource which we can mine and use and exploit for effectively utilitarian purposes. But the kind of attention that the right hemisphere is able to give sees a living web of interrelationships. So it sees that nothing is just what it is outside of a context, but always is what it is because of the relations in which it stands to everything else. And indeed, in the matter of things, I argue that relations are primary. They come before the relata, the things that are said to be related, so they actually emerge out of a web of meaning, and that meaning is often implicit, whereas the left hemisphere doesn't understand what's not made explicit.
Speaker 1:This is also a facet of our culture that things have to be spelt out in language that, as it were, a machine could understand. But in fact almost everything that matters to us can't be subjected in this way to a translation or a degradation into everyday language. And so, if you ask me for examples, obviously poetry, when you explain a poem, you've somehow destroyed it, although it's perfectly legitimate to pay that kind of attention to it for a while. But unless you re-embrace the whole with the new information, then you've lost something important.
Speaker 1:But not just poetry, but obviously all the arts, and music, and painting and architecture, but also ritual, myth, narrative, the ways in which we come to understand our place in the cosmos, which have always been very important, usually also involved with a story of the cosmos, a story about the superhuman, in other words again. This sacred realm and I think all of this we lack to a large extent now. People are hungry for it lack to a large extent now. People are hungry for it, and when I speak to them about what has happened and show them, they immediately understand what's missing. But they often say things like until I read you or until I heard you, I wasn't really aware of how much was missing from my world.
Speaker 2:You say that never has humanity known so much but understood so little. In your book I feel like it's in due to the very helpful sentence. Could you unpack what you mean, then, by understanding?
Speaker 1:Yes, absolutely. I think I would make a distinction between information and knowledge, which has different kinds, and understanding and, above all, wisdom. So if we start with information, information is the collection of points of data effectively. Information is the collection of points of data effectively and obviously on its own. Until somebody makes sense of it, it's not telling us anything. That's where the idea that we're beginning to know something comes in. And knowing can have two importantly different meanings, which carry with them different verbs, in Latin, greek and German, for example. But in English we're saddled with the word no and I say I know that Paris is the capital of France. That is the kind of knowledge that the Germans call Wissen and it's French savoir. You know the facts, as it were, but I could say I know Paris because I spent two years living there and I'm familiar with it, and that is a different kind of knowing. Now, in the sense of understanding, it's that second sense of compond or canon in German, the knowing by acquaintance.
Speaker 1:Experiential connection Experiential connection immersed in it, in all its complexity, that gives us knowledge. Understanding is taking it a further step, and understanding is the equivalent of intelligence. And one of my worries is that in calling whatever artificial mechanisms we create intelligent, we are denying something very important about the human, indeed animal, mind, which is that it creates holes, which are built up from experience of something that has flesh and blood, that has emotions, that has an innate moral sense, not something that's been fed into it by a clever chap in California and to create a simulacrum, but actually intelligence and intelligence. Again, there are different words in different languages, but our word intelligence comes from Latin roots, inter legeri, to read between. And that brings one straight to my idea that in fact, what we are looking at always is relations, that it is not the things that create the world but the relations between them out of which they come into being. That is important.
Speaker 1:Everything is relational primarily, and it's only secondary, becomes non-relational when whatever it is we focused on has been abstracted from its context. So being able to see the betweens of everything is really special and important. And also, what I like is interleggiary also means sort of reading between the lines, if you like. So in poetry. You know, I usually take an example of Hardy's astonishing body of poetry that he wrote in 1912 to 13 after his wife's death, and the poems are unique and powerful. But if you ask me what are they about? I say well, they're about how painful it is when somebody you love dies, sort of collapsed completely collapsed the meaning, the depth of meaning and that's another thing that matters is that, if you like, information is two dimensional.
Speaker 1:If that, if you like, information is two-dimensional, if that Probably only one-dimensional Knowledge begins to get, especially with the experiential kind of knowledge, to have depth and intelligence is when we can see into the depths of a larger picture and put it together in a way that means something. Larger picture and put it together in a way that means something. Now, surprisingly, this is very like the way in which the hemispheres do in fact relate to one another and should do correctly. So the right hemisphere, we know, takes the first, take on a new experience.
Speaker 1:So this has been laid out by various neuroscientists, particularly Eldon on Goldberg, that when we have a new experience, in whatever modality, the right hemisphere is alert to it and then almost instantly it's taken up by the left hemisphere and categorized, and so it no longer becomes that particular experience in all its specialness and richness, but an exemplar of something. So effectively it's building a map, it's building a schema, a diagram, and that's fine. But that information, there's nothing wrong with a map, but it needs to be applied to a real world, not mistaken for the real world. And the difficulty at the moment is that we're beginning to mistake the map for the experiential world. So we live in this very thin theoretical version of life in which everything has been decontextualized, rendered, neutered. By being made explicit, it's lost its life and literally. Another interesting difference between the hemispheres is a capacity to see things as animate in the right hemisphere and the tendency to see them as inanimate in the left hemisphere.
Speaker 2:You write at the end of the Matter of things in your epilogue, that about the meaning crisis which you mentioned and the lack of belonging we have because we are disconnected from nature, disconnected from one another and disconnected from the divine, which now seems like superstition, and nature, a bank of resources we can raid. Can you connect the dots there between this kind of flattened, devitalized view of the world and the fact that we've become sort of disconnected from it?
Speaker 1:Absolutely, and you say the word belong there, and of course that suggests a sense of amilia, be it a family, be it nature or be it the divine cosmos in which we play a part, out of which we came, so we're derived from it, we're not external to it, which is why I reject the word environment, suggesting something just around us.
Speaker 1:It's in us and we are in it, and so in each of these cases, we are what we are because of the set of relationships we would ideally have with a society of people that we can trust, who share our values and with whom we can eat, pray, lead our lives and, in the case of nature, the very strong bond that one feels, which in me is a sort of instinctual longing to be in the presence of the wildness and of the natural scene I think we all have that feeling in us, or most of us and of the natural scene. I think we all have that feeling in us, or most of us, and that until a couple of hundred years ago, almost everybody in the world would have been living anyway in a natural setting, whereas now, perhaps only half do and the third is this business of belonging in the sense of knowing that there's something beyond us that is greater than us.
Speaker 1:And if you want, you can stop there and just say there is something higher than us. It would be irrational actually to suppose that there wasn't. And that comes from being locked into the left hemisphere's view of things. It only knows what it is it knows.
Speaker 1:It doesn't know what it doesn't know. So obviously it thinks it knows everything because that follows. So it's bound to be missing anything else than what it can rationalise. And the difficulty there is that we are evolving beings. What makes us think that at this point in evolution we finally can understand everything? As I sometimes say, a mouse might think that, but we know more than the mouse.
Speaker 1:The mouse probably knows more than we do in some areas but we are missing something important and I just want to say, in talking about those I mentioned, that there's a sort of deep yearning for and I want to mention that belonging comes from an Anglo-Saxon root, langian to stretch and I talk about this more in the Master and His Emissary. But the idea is that there is a connection between things that can be stretched apart up to a point, but they feel the need of the tension in that relationship and so they long across the length of the connection for one another.
Speaker 2:So belonging is a very, very important point and this, presumably, is some measure of explanation for um the epidemic of loneliness, of the mental health crisis. This is the fruits of a left hemisphere view of the world, Absolutely so.
Speaker 1:Yes, I mean because the left hemisphere does isolate things and sees them only in abstract and is frankly not emotionally very intelligent.
Speaker 1:It's actually not cognitively that intelligent either. I was surprised, when researching the matter of things, to discover that the right hemisphere is not only very obviously much more emotionally and socially intelligent, but actually more important for cognitive intelligence than for IQ. So the left hemisphere has done a good job on projecting itself as the one that knows and the one that understands. But it's relatively stupid, and you know that in psychology there's something called the Dunning-Kruger effect, which means that the less you know, the more you think you know it all.
Speaker 2:You mentioned earlier values and purpose, which you've got chapters on really small books on. In the Matter with Things, the way we pay attention is predicated, shaped to some degree by what we value. And the values of the left are different from the values of the right. You speak about Max Scheller and his hierarchy of values with you know, the holy and the good, and the true and the beautiful at the top and then at the bottom, the instrumental and the pleasurable.
Speaker 2:If we're valuing things wrongly and therefore attending to things wrongly, what are the mechanisms by which that can be corrected? I was speaking earlier in this podcast season to Dacher Keltner, who studies awe, and he says experiencing awe seems to realign your values. It often makes you feel much more connected to one another, to nature, to the divine. Could you say a little bit about when people kind of have their values realigned in a way that reflects the right hemisphere more? What are those experiences that lead to that?
Speaker 1:Well, I think again, beginning from the sense that we don't know at all is a very good place to start. I think that the key feature of the way we think now is that it is hubristic. In other words, it exemplifies an arrogant, overbearing sense that we know far more than we do, and it not only is that destructive of value and meaning, but it's also really not very intelligent. And so if one can rekindle the sense of awe before things that are beautiful, before things and people that are genuinely good and things that speak to us and therefore have a kind of truthfulness in the connection with us truthfulness in the connection with us then we can begin to see a world that has much more meaning in it. But currently, beauty is curiously being neglected by almost everything, including art. A lot of modern art is the creator does not wish to be told that it's beautiful, they wish to be told that it's powerful, and power, of course, is the only value recognized by the left hemisphere. But, as Dostoevsky said, it's beauty that will save the world. I puzzled over that for a long time, because, of course, a sense of aesthetic value can lead one to be deceived, but then making wrong judgments about what's good and true can also lead you to be deceived. But I think what he was getting at is that when we have really lost our bearings on truth and what is meant by goodness, so that now truth is whatever my truth is, we make it up and there's no sense of it being, despite the fact that we, of course I acknowledge and talk about this a lot that we go to make part of everything we experience. That doesn't mean that we just make it up and it doesn't mean that some things are not truer than others. Even though there may not be one single absolute truth, goodness has been reduced to the following of a lot of rather mindless rules and ticking boxes for having expressed certain values or positions, and that, of course, has nothing really to do with goodness. But the one thing that can speak to us, but the one thing that can speak to us directly, is beauty. And so, in that state where we've been abandoned by and felt lost by no particular bearings on goodness and truth, beauty can still call to us, and I think that's a good and important point. So I think all those three values and they are, in my view, contributors to the sense of the sacred, they're facets of the sacred, Regaining that in our world, I think is important.
Speaker 1:I'm not saying that everybody must suddenly start going to church or whatever. That's not my point, and I'm rather opposed to people who think that it's all in a book, whether that be a Christian book or a Muslim book or whatever. It's about a disposition of one's spirit, one's soul, towards the world. And what kind of a disposition is that? It's one in which there is room for awe and wonder, which helps us to see not that we're useless or meaningless but, curiously, that we have meaning and value Because we're connected to something that is awe-inspiring, that we know is bigger than us, but nonetheless we're not humbled in the negative sense, that we're made to feel small, although that might happen, but we derive richness from that relationship. I think that's one thing. Another would be the sense of compassion for things, and I think that's an important thing that's gone missing in our culture of anger, narcissistic rage, the hubristic belief that we're right and you must be wrong and so on.
Speaker 1:And a degree of modesty basically. So I think those features. If we started adopting a more wondered, more modest and more compassionate view towards others, towards the world, I think a lot of our problems will begin to heal themselves. But, as you know, in this world where people no longer feel there is any meaning or connection, mental illness is at colossal height. Most people think of themselves as basically lonely, and why?
Speaker 2:because we have destroyed all the contexts in which people used to find their being and belonging you're listening to the examined life today in conversation with in conversation with Ian McGilchrist on the Isle of Skye. In the second part of this conversation we turn to the question of purpose, what it is and why Ian thinks we live in a purposeful universe and where indeed there are signs of hope for the future. Something you've written about at length is purpose. You've observed that we seem to have, in the way we live now, reduced purpose to something extrinsic and instrumental, when the most valuable things in life can't be pursued in this way. They're not that kind of goal. So if we aim at happiness, we become measurably less happy. Or if we aim at freedom and autonomy, we become bound up in rules and restrictions. So my question is what is purpose? What do you mean by it?
Speaker 1:What role does it play for us? Obviously, in some ways, this brings us to values again. Yes, because I see values as things that call to us from ahead. They may not be entirely resolved in the sense of brought into sharp focus for us, but they are entities that speak to us, that call to us. That is how I have experienced them. One is drawn forwards towards the good, the beautiful, the true.
Speaker 1:Now most of our images come from machines, and there's nothing more harmful one can do than to try and approximate a human life to that of a machine, the functioning of a machine. So they are things that guide where we want to go from in front, whereas a machine is pushed from behind. A machine has no sense of direction. It's made to go from in front, whereas a machine is pushed from behind. Machine has no sense of direction. It's made to go in certain ways. When we come to talk about purpose, it's terribly important to distinguish between two kinds of purposes and you did really allude to that when you said intrinsic, because machines have extrinsic purpose. In other words, the machine itself is not aware of a purpose. The machine is simply carrying out a purpose of the human being that made it. However, not everything has this utilitarian nature and is valued for it, and obvious examples are music and dance. These things are not valuable because they lead to us doing certain things. They're valuable because they have intrinsic meaning and value that speaks to us. They acquaint us with something that is beautiful and speaks to us, and that's what I mean by an intrinsic purpose.
Speaker 1:James Kass, a philosopher, made a distinction between games that are infinite and games that are finite.
Speaker 1:So an example of an infinite game would be something like music, which doesn't reach a goal and then stop, but can be carried on for as long as people want to do it, because its purpose is in itself Finite.
Speaker 1:Games are done as a football game is, so that we want an outcome and at a certain 90 minutes we have it and one team has won or the other hasn't, whatever. So that is a kind of distinction, and I suppose that what I'm very keen not to suggest is that if I say that I believe there is purpose in the cosmos and I think it's there that I'm meaning it's put there by an engineering god. So when you look at the cosmos, even the inanimate cosmos at large cosmos, even the inanimate cosmos at large, or what we think is inanimate anyway, we see something that is constantly evolving, changing towards complexity and a kind of beauty, and there are drives, even in the inanimate world. Inanimate structures have tendencies to go in certain directions, when it comes to life, much more so. So that's an important thing to realize that there is a kind of direction, but it's not something that has been written in advance by the cosmos or by the ground of being or by God, whatever you want to call it.
Speaker 1:That doesn't mean to say it has no purpose. It has a direction towards certain values and the details, as it were, are absolutely open.
Speaker 2:So we're not.
Speaker 1:I believe, programmed to do every single thing we do. And I just don't believe, and I can't believe, that anyone now could possibly defend Laplace's 18th century vision that if you knew the position and momentum of every particle in the universe at a certain point, you would be able to unpack the whole of the rest of history. If you knew the position and momentum of every particle in the universe at a certain point, you would be able to unpack the whole of the rest of history. And surely modern physics already tells us that such certainty is not available. Now that doesn't mean to say that the only alternative is pure chaos.
Speaker 1:There is something very important in the dipole of order and disorder, and that the important thing is that they should be both present. Without a bit of disorder, the thing is dead and will sclerose and fossilize. It's that element of potential for change that is so important in everything, not just in the living world, but perhaps particularly obviously in the living world. And equally, of course, if there was only disorder and randomness, that nothing would have any directional meaning. So I believe that we, we are and exemplify something that is purposeful but does not mean that well, I have no choice. I play a part.
Speaker 1:And maybe I could expand on this a little, because the really fascinating thing is why should there be life? Why should there be life at all? It's a very expensive business life. It uses a great deal of energy, causes a lot of suffering, and it has to kick against the second law of thermodynamics, against the increase in entropy that that suggests, because we're all the time moving against that trend. How could this have come about? And I think the first thing to say about it is that to get over a phase in a process that would always stop any further progress because it was in itself disadvantageous, there has to be an ability for whatever it is, to have a sense of something beyond A very good point made by Bruce Charlton. Is that? A simple one, really, but an important one? Why did sexual reproduction take hold?
Speaker 1:I mean, originally, organisms existed by parthenogenesis, in other words, they divided and that was it, but the idea of having to find a suitable mate and only producing when you reproduce smaller numbers than you would get from being able to divide yourself, means that you're perpetually in that early phase, at a disadvantage in terms of competition. You're trying to do something that is uphill and yet nonetheless, somehow this has been brought into play and we carry on with that system. But another important point is that competition Life gives us the capacity to respond to something beyond. Now that sounds a bit grand and vague, but let me unpack it a bit. So inanimate things do respond to another inanimate thing.
Speaker 1:So over periods of millions of years, rocks and so on get formed and move and change and so on, but their ability to respond to things is very limited. They have in them, I suggest, consciousness, they exist in consciousness, which is another matter. So what is it special about life that makes it worthwhile? I think it is actually the ability to respond to the values that are in the nature of the ground, of being, which are goodness, beauty and truth primarily, and maybe other things. But those are the key elements, and I think that it's the bringing about of beings that can respond to them and therefore resonate with them and help them, fulfill themselves and help further them, or, alternatively, choose to ignore them, and that's that's one's right to do so. We have free agents, but I think that is why there is life. Otherwise, it's a great puzzle.
Speaker 2:As AM.
Speaker 1:Whitehead said, there is very little survival in being alive. You last for a few years, but if you are inanimate you can persist for a very long time. So it can't be to do with creating creatures that are better and better at surviving, because life itself is not a very good system for surviving. And the most ancient creatures some examples of certain actinobacteria in the depths of the ocean, individual examples of them are a million years old. So everything that's happened since an evolution has been generally towards things becoming shorter lived. So how does one defend the difficulty of creating life, the problem with getting over the hump of entropy and the purpose, if you like and I think that purpose is to be in the dynamic partnership of cosmos and creation. And Whitehead himself thought this that the ground of being was ever more coming into being through, as it were, the dance of evolution, with what it was bringing into being.
Speaker 2:So is that baked into evolution? Evolution is the algorithm that kind of explains developing towards complexity and life. But you think baked into that is this ability to um discern the good and the beautiful and the true.
Speaker 1:Yes, I do think so that's right, and I think another point that's um relevant here is that until very recently, we believe that evolution could only work by making billions and billions of false attempts until one happened, by chance, to turn out to be helpful. But a single cell can be faced with an assault for which it is not programmed by evolution, nor has experience in its own lifetime, if you'd like to put it that way, it can make a change within a period of only a few days that, if it had to happen by trial and error, would take perhaps literally billions of years. So there is built into these adaptive changes is something that allows us to make changes much faster than a kind of blind throwing of the cards up in the air and hoping that the one that you want will land in your hand. That seems to be no longer a defensible position. I don't know why this is, but it is the case Anyway.
Speaker 1:I just case Anyway one has to take that into account? So interesting. How does that happen?
Speaker 1:I don't know, but I think there are shapes, patterns if you like that draw things towards themselves, to accomplish that wonderful feat of decoding the human genome. We've been made to realize how little information there is in the human genome, nowhere near enough to deal with what a growing organism is faced with. And so there must be something else that allows forms in three-dimensional shapes to be expressed that can't be expressed in the only 2% of DNA that actually gives information, instructional information. So where is that? And I think that people are beginning to see that there must be electromagnetic fields or fields of some kind that physics could recognize, that contains information of a Gestalt, of a form, that something is moving towards.
Speaker 1:We see this in the evolution of creatures. If you interfere with their development, they will try to steer back to something. If you chop off the head of a nematode worm, it will endlessly regrow its head, and it will also the new head will have the knowledge that the old head had, even though that head has been incinerated. So where does it come from? When you cut off the antlers of a deer, every deer's antlers has a particular pattern, and it will produce the same pattern, exactly that it had before, not just a random pattern. But where is that three-dimensional passion stored? I don't have the answer to that.
Speaker 2:You really think of. I think it's Simon Conway Morris, the pale exologist, who says he points out that evolution as an algorithm is very effective at describing things, but it doesn't describe something like music. You know, where whales have song cultures, birds have counterpoint and melody and harmony and so on. So it's more like mathematics, something we discover, and it's beautiful and it brings to mind this idea that we are growing towards the good and the beautiful and the true, that it's part of the fabric of the universe.
Speaker 1:Yes, yes, I mean quite how it works is not something I claim to understand, but I don't think that that's a reason for trying to conceal or deny things that are matters of observation. So there's something there that is shaping the course, the form, the nature of whatever it is that is coming into being.
Speaker 2:One of the things that strikes me about your work is you're taken in by people who have pretty different world views and truth. So they might be fairly Eastern, fairly Christian or not religious at all, and to some extent they put a flag on you and say Ian McGilchrist, he's like, what are you saying is something we resonate with. So if you had a Venn diagram of these different perspectives with you in the middle, what is it that you think you're putting your finger on that they all resonate with?
Speaker 1:I think what a lot of people say when they write to me and God bless them, a lot of do saying that my writing has changed their lives or even saved their lives and so on, which is a remarkable and wonderful thing save their lives and so on which is a remarkable and wonderful thing.
Speaker 1:The common thing they say is there was a lot of this that I knew at some level and I understood at some level, but had no words to express. And what you've done is to enable me to see why believing those things and knowing those things is important, believing those things and knowing those things is important, and so I think what I've done is to bring things that are very hard to express and there are pitfalls and traps everywhere in trying to express them to a point where people can read them and get them, even if they don't begin from a standpoint of understanding what it is I'm trying to unfold. So I see my work as if we're taking people on a journey to say look at this and let's have a look at this, and there's a good bit coming in an hour or two when we see a beautiful view and then leading them to a position where their view of the world is quite different than the one they started off with and they're not forced to accept it.
Speaker 1:Of course and I'm sure some people don't, but, pleasingly, a lot of people do is opening people's eyes to the value of imagination and of intuition, as well as science and reason, which I find myself championing a lot these days, because they're also under attack from people who don't like science and reason because they might show the things that they to be, you know, poorly evidenced.
Speaker 1:So I think it's that, and I think, a hope, giving people hope, giving them some sense that there is meaning and beauty and purpose there to discover. But you know, you have to have skin in the game, as it were. You can't sort of sit there and expect it to go plunk into your lap. You have to make choices and expect it to go plunk into your lap. You have to. You have to make choices and you have to. You have to strive a little for those things. I don't mean necessarily compete, but you need to sort of have a degree of conviction and determination to follow a path and you know, following through on something is quite important. It's a thing that I come to realise rather late in life that actually following through something, even though it may take you to a viewpoint where you have to change and it should take you to a viewpoint where you have to change is rather important if you stop short when you don't like what's coming next.
Speaker 2:Like you, say, creativity requires resistance and it requires resistance and growth. I think it was. I heard you point out yes, talk about that that fascinating fact that trees, yes, that grow inside like a biodome, never developed the internal strength because the resistance of wind isn't there. That's right. I love that as a metaphor.
Speaker 1:The biologists couldn't understand why are all these mature trees protected from every kind of harm? Why are they all falling over before they reach full maturity? And the answer is they had nothing to resist, and trees actually thrive on wind. It's testing the wood and building the wood, and you know it's a beautiful matter. For why? Life is not supposed to be a walk in the park. It's not supposed to be just a matter of enjoyment. In fact, that would be extremely disappointing.
Speaker 1:I don't want to do a spoiler for people who haven't read the History of the World in ten and a half chapters, but maybe I will anyway. It's a wonderful, clever book and at the end of it there's a story about somebody waking up in a hospital and a very beautiful nurse is bringing lots of things to eat and the person says where am I? And in the ensuing conversation it turns out that he's died and he is in fact in heaven and he said what am I supposed to do? You can do anything you like. If you're a keen golfer, you can have a round of golf with Jack Nicklaus.
Speaker 1:Whatever it is you want to do, you can do it, and he sort of thinks about this. There's a long conversation and he says do people tend to stay up here? And she says no, usually after about 300 years they asked to go back. I just thought that was such a brilliant insight that actually we're not happiest when just everything is given to us and there's something to be said for having to put oneself out to encounter resistance, to overcome resistance, that it helps one grow.
Speaker 2:I mean, it's such a you're picking a very pertinent problem, because technology has made life far too convenient. There's not enough resistance and you know the the texture of life feels different if you can breathe through it without ever having to.
Speaker 1:Yes, I mean apparently architects have been asked to design shopping centres with steps and things, so that people actually do have to exert themselves. It's healthier than being whisked everywhere in lifts and on moving yeah, of course, the consequences on your body are not insignificant. You never have to climb stairs.
Speaker 2:Where do you find hope in the best case scenario, when you look at the world and you see things are not going too well. Policies are not being made in the interests of the planet or the people in it. But, at the same time, you get letters, you give talks, you inspire people to think differently. Where do you find, I suppose, hope, and what are going to be the engines of change?
Speaker 1:Well, I think the answer to those two questions come together, in that I mean, first of all, although things don't look as though they're getting better, it's a fool who predicts the future and I don't know what's in store. And therefore there is always room for hope, and I think one has a duty in a way to hope, because otherwise we'd all just give up and then certainly everything would collapse. Namely young people, and in just the last couple of months I gave lectures, public lectures, in Oxford and Cambridge and then in America in three or four different places, and what I came away with was an overwhelming sense of how good and decent a lot of young people are and that they can be caricatured. The worst of them can be caricatured as having sort of righteous slogans about what must happen. But the people I met were appropriately less arrogant, less know-it-all, delightful, responsive, creative, imaginative and committed to trying to understand things and make them better and not just follow whatever rules were being laid down for them by the current media kind of pundits.
Speaker 1:So I thought there is a great deal of hope here and it really was lovely for me and for them to say that they really resonated with what I was saying, because, after all all, I'm an old fogey and so that was.
Speaker 2:that was very good that was basically an experience right, which is the yeah, the right hemispheres.
Speaker 1:Yes to me, yes, no, absolutely. So there we are.
Speaker 2:So if I pull the threads together as I've asked you. I've gotten all over the place, because there's so much in your thinking that seems to connect to this question of what are cultures preventing us from seeing? And it seems like, if you take that characterization of the left hemisphere as utilitarian understanding, um, values of you know, utility and but little else, and that's shaped the way we're attending and the purposes we're finding, to great injury to the way that we're living and to the planet we're living in, and so on. Like cultures preventing us from seeing means listening more keenly to discern what is good and true and beautiful. Would that be one kind of summary of how we attend better to what it is we're not seeing?
Speaker 1:yes, I think the first thing is being aware of what it is one isn't seeing, because unless you have that knowledge, you won't make the effort, of course.
Speaker 1:So the first thing is to get people to a place where they experience some of the things that would give them a sense of something beyond what it is they so cleverly already know.
Speaker 1:The business of education is not about confirming the prejudices you come into education with, but about shaking your prejudices and by enabling you to see another point of view, and so I would say that in education, it should be part of the business to teach people to argue for different points of view.
Speaker 1:And so you know, I could make an argument against myself for positions I may have stated in this interview, but I think it's important to be able to do that and not to think that everybody who thinks differently from you must be criminal or stupid, but they may have something there that is worth hearing, and that there may be things that it's worth trying to experience, and I think reconnecting, spending more time in nature and trying to bring yourself to be part of a group of people whose values you respect, and spending some time with them and, if possible, spending time in spiritual practices, which may be conventional or unconventional, but they're better than none. These things are at least orientating us to the idea that what we know is not at all. It's not the whole story, and whatever that whole story is, we will never know it in full. But it is part of the business of life to try and take ourselves on that journey towards a fuller understanding of who we are.
Speaker 2:That's a wonderful note to end on, Ian. Thank you so much for your time.
Speaker 1:Thank you and being so generous with your thoughts. Thank you very much indeed.
Speaker 2:I hope listening to Ian there has given you a sense that there's so much more to learn from him, which you can do so through signing up to his page, Channel McGilchrist, watching his many YouTube talks and conversations and, of course, reading his books, which there really is no substitute for. Although his books might look intimidating, I have found them to be companions I'll keep returning to for their wisdom and inspiration. Today, I'd like to give an extra special thanks to Ian McGilchrist for his time and generosity of spirit. I'd also like to give Al Houghton a big thank you for his outstanding company on this road trip to Sky and his practical help with the kit and recording. As ever, thank you to Colin Primrose for the music and to all of you for listening.
Speaker 2:For those of you who haven't done so yet, rating and reviewing this podcast really helps others to find it. Provided your reviews are favourable, I'm also now writing a sub stack called Positively Maladjusted, where you can find updates in the podcast and my own fledgling attempts to practice what I'm learning from these conversations and share it with others. Links can be found on the show notes. In the meantime, stay tuned in a couple of weeks time for another episode of the Examined Life, where I'm going to be speaking to a very interesting guest about the question they think we should be asking ourselves.