I’m deeply grateful for this conversation; I only wish I could have been one of the (too) few present!

That painting/mosaic is stunning.

Thank you for making this rich conversation accessible. Greetings from Germany

THANK YOU Sir and Sir 💕💞💐💖💐 🕊️

Enlightening and important. Thank you :)

One might say that the left hemisphere wants more than its fair share and the right hemisphere wants more to share fair.

12:06 someone open that bottle for Ian please 😂

Thank you! Such an enlightening conversation and resonates deeply . 🙏

It was mentioned there had been discussion with NT wright. Is there any public recording or information? That really would be great to hear

A perfect confluence of themes ☺️

What does he teach that you don’t agree with?

Why is Iain McGilchrist popping up everywhere now? His book was only useful insofar the clinical cases it presented, his entire methodology is flawed otherwise; The left hemisphere which he constantly characterizes as is "Western" (whatever that means) is specifically what is activated during meditation, in particular with lomg-term meditators. In addition, it is the Right hemisphere, not the left which is associated with depression. Whatever original contribution in the book of his is not even worth considering. A nick murray fan.

Why is Iain McGilchrist popping up everywhere now? His book was only useful insofar the clinical cases it presented, his entire methodology is flawed otherwise. Whatever original contribution in the book of his is not even worth considering. A nick murray fan.

I see Iain continues to attend only "conversations" where he's cushioned in complacency. That interviewer is just your average yes-man. Will McGilchrist ever be grilled by someone actually trained in the history of science and philosophy who doesn't lap all his spiel uncritically?

@bobdillaber1195

11 күн бұрын

Well now, maybe we will all be so lucky as to have you in a discussion with him so you can show all of us how and where he is wrong. Why wait for someone else to confront him? Tell us yourself where and why he is misguided.

@KL0098

8 күн бұрын

@@bobdillaber1195 Hello. Since you’ve asked in a clear spirit of wanting to know more, I’m happy to oblige you with a few notes. I’ll begin by pointing out that McGilchrist likes to play the victim too much. He claims at 03:20 that hemisphere theory was supposedly debunked 40 or 30 years ago: in 2024 that’d put the timeline at 1994 or 1984, so around the time McGilchrist started studying neuroscience. He uses this timeline to give the impression that his first book on the topic (2009) came out and debunked the debunkers with fresh data. But up until the '90s the hemisphere theory was actually taken seriously, since it had the scientific backing of Roger Sperry, Nobel Prize winner in 1981. It’d be very strange if, as per McGilchrist’s timeline, a scientific discovery that had been awarded such a top prize were already being dismissed wholesale by the entire medical/scientific community just three years later in 1984. So it's arguable that McGilchrist started his studies in an environment that actually encouraged his view of hemisphere differences; he was, thus, going along with the current instead of rowing against it. It was actually a few years AFTER his book came out that new evidence arose to contest this deeply-held view: "An Evaluation of the Left-Brain vs. Right-Brain Hypothesis with Resting State Functional Connectivity Magnetic Resonance Imaging" journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0071275 To my knowledge, McGilchrist has consistently failed to address these findings; indeed, I believe his follow-up, “The Matter With Things” (2021) merely repackaged the science from his 2009 book, without taking into stride new evidence that runs contrary to what he wants to believe. Let’s move on. At 03:50 he tries to distance his theory from the simplifications of the past: he argues he’s not REALLY going along with the pop version that attributes specialized features to each hemisphere, as if each hemisphere were reducible to bullet points; no, his theory is subtler, deeper. He claims the difference is actually in regards to "attention". Personally I fail to see how this impacts the conclusions he extracts from either version. Furthermore, it’s also at this point that the fuzziness of language enters his view. "Attention" is a vague, neutral activity that McGilchrist glorifies; but a serial killer attends to his victims: he rummages in their trash, learns their routines, discovers their weaknesses, so he can better kill them. Why not celebrate the serial killer's lifestyle when it's so dependent on attention? McGilchrist’s rendering of attention as a purely positive activity is reductive, the opposite of what he claims to stand for. We need to discuss what SORT of attention is beneficial; otherwise we’re falling in the same mistake he imputes scientists, that of seeing science as a force solely for good; nobody has believed that since at least World War when science was used to increase the death toll to unthinkable millions; let alone after Nagasaki and Hiroshima. It’s because I’m skeptic about science that I’m also skeptic about the awesome properties of a vagueness like “attention”. But in every video and podcast of his that I've seen he engages in this reductionism, even as he claims not to want to reduce the hemispheres to bullet points. For a thinker who's striving for holism, he's constantly defaulting to binaries and antinomies. A serious interviewer would pick up such muddy thinking and ask "Iain" to clarify what he means by such an unclear word as “attention”, but "Iain" is merely talking to an empty machine programmed to make his life as comfy as possible. There’s also the irony that his critique of a society overrun by scientism is very dependent on scientific claims. His claim at 04:30 that there are two ways of "attending" to the world, which he claims is a discovery he owes to neuroscience, is an old that predates “neuroscience” by centuries. Although his science presumes to be based on “findings” that go back to the 1960s when Roger Sperry did split-brain research that uncovered specific functions in each hemisphere, his opinions as separated from the science go at least back to the late 18c: by then there were thinkers pointing out and bemoaning the divide between Sciences and the Humanities and the dominance of the former. This history has been made by such historians as Basil Willey (“The Seventeenth Century Background”, 1934, “The Eighteenth-Century Background”, 1939) and Jacob Opper (“Science and the Arts: A Study in Relationships from 1600-1900”, 1973) and in part by Morris Kline (“Mathematics in Western Culture”, 1953), and also by Lorraine Daston ("Fear & loathing of the imagination in science", 1998: direct.mit.edu/daed/article-pdf/134/4/16/1828999/001152605774431473.pdf) Awareness of a qualitative divide between the Science and the Humanities was acknowledged by Giambattista Vico in “The New Science” (1725), if you care to check Jeroen Bouterse and Bart Karstens’ concise article on this subject: “A Diversity of Divisions: Tracing the History of the Demarcation between the Sciences and the Humanities, www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/full/10.1086/681995 It also has precedents in Wilhelm Dilthey, Max Weber (in his Vocation Lectures), C. P. Snow (of the "Two Cultures" fame). Since Vico there has been a bevy of critics of the Enlightenment, the people another historian, this time Isaiah Berlin, would argue compose the “Counter-Enlightenment”: it’s a diffuse, vague, disjointed, unorganized, haphazard group of such people (this isn’t an exhaustive list) as William Blake, Johann Hamann, Soren Kierkegaard. Henri Bergson, Alfred North Whitehead, most of the Romantic poets, most of the Symbolist poets, many Modernist poets like Fernando Pessoa, Ezra Pound, TS Eliot and W. B. Yeats, the Beat poets, Helena Blavatsky, Rudolf Steiner, Dion Fortune, Arthur Machen, G. K. Chesterton, Austin Osman Spare, Aleister Crowley, Gerald Gardner and the wiccans, Rene Guenon and the Traditionalists, the rocket engineer-cum-occultist Jack Parsons, Arthur Edward Waite, MacGregor Mathers (founder of the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn and, by coincidence or not, husband of Mona Mathers, the sister of Henri Bergson), Teilhard de Chardin and his disciple Marshall McLuhan, Jacques Maritain, Owen Barfield and his buddy CS Lewis, George Steiner, Carl Jung, Martin Heidegger, Mary Midgley, Roberto Calasso, Kathleen Raine and Brian Keeble, Colin Wilson, Leonard Shlain (whose "The Alphabet Versus the Goddess: The Conflict Between Word and Image" posits McGilchrist’s views practically unchanged; ironically, McGilchrist has dismissed Shlain), Roger Scruton; and even such a self-declared rationalist as Bertrand Russell wrote as early as 1928 against the overreach of science in matters science’s not equipped to handle. All of them in their own way expressed the view that something had gone wrong with the West after the Enlightenment had given science such a proponent role in society, and actively worked to undo the “consequences”. Strangely enough, they all managed to arrive at exactly the same opinion McGilchrist has been espousing since 2009 (“The Master and His Emissary: The Divided Brain and the Making of the Western World”) without requiring any hard, scientific data as regards brain hemisphere differences and imbalance.

@KL0098

8 күн бұрын

It’s safe to argue, then, that McGilchrist’s “discoveries” as regards the brain hemispheres are utterly irrelevant to his personal views about a moral and cultural “decadence” caused by the dominance of “reason” or “the scientific outlook” on our daily lives. McGilchrist wasn’t even a pioneer among the “decadence” crowd in using the split-brain theory to criticize Western society and the retreat of the sacred. You need only read an interesting book from 1978 co-authored by Pierre Babin and Marshall McLuhan to find an earlier example. (“Autre homme, autre chrétien à l'age électronique” was never fully translated into English, but the conversational chapters between Babin and McLuhan are available in McLuhan’s “The Medium and the Light: Reflections on Religion”) His proclamations, then, are merely opinions, very personal, very debatable opinions, which he, knowing just how datable they are, felt the need to make criticism-proof by building a fence of “science” around them. That’s ironic coming from a thinker who deplores the insinuation of science in all aspects of life. When we realize that, with or without neuroscience, McGilchrist is simply repeating counter-Enlightenment views from previous centuries, it becomes clear that he isn’t so much concerned with making scientific discoveries as endorsing a very personal view. That opinion is one typical of the Counter-Enlightenment: namely that, because of the loss of religion, or God, or the sense of the sacred; or that because of what Max Weber has called the “disenchantment” of society, the West has grown morally and culturally decadent. In that sense, he’s no different than past thinkers who, without the benefit of split-brain theory, arrived at the same stern judgement of the secular West. If you want to read McGilchrist before McGilchrist, you need only open a book by Rene Guenon and his fascist disciple Julius Evola, or by Jacques Barzun, George Steiner, Kathleen Raine or Roger Scruton, all proud bewailers of “cultural decadence” who never shoved split-brain theory into their catastrophic screeds. They all diagnosed a deep-seated malaise in the West and to different degrees proposed spirituality as a way of making our society sane again. (“The Sane Society” was, of course, the title of a book by Erich Fromm, another Western decadence promotor). Basically, McGilchrist is the latest in what Ernst Gelsner derided as "the re-enchantment industry" (1975), an intellectual undercurrent within Modernity that rejects Modernity. This undercurrent is mainly composed of self-help gurus, mystics (Eastern or otherwise) and New Age masters who promise (in exchange for their books and seminars and webinars) to give lost souls the tools to cope with the horrible, ugly modern world. McGilchrist belongs less to the scientific community than to the world of Carlos Castenada, Marilyn Ferguson and Rhonda Byrne. If these names are alien to you, replace them with Jordan Peterson and Jonathan Pageau. McGilchrist isn't positing anything new; his originality is to clothe an ancient anti-modernity prejudice in a new field of science: neuroscience. Often the enemies of Modernity have paradoxically had to use the language of science to be persuasive. Bergson used "science-y" language like "automatism" and “time” and “space” to criticize modern individuals whom he deemed to behave like automata. Teilhard de Chardin, who was a trained scientist besides a Jesuit, couched his belief in a spiritual evolution towards God in a science-sounding concept called the “noosphere”. Marshall McLuhan, a rabid Catholic very influenced by Chardin, sprinkled his pseudoscientific theory of the "noosphere" throughout his media studies: McLuhan's covert belief was that TV had the potential to usher mankind in a new age of religiosity - I'm not kidding! McGilchrist is just the latest theist who uses science to sell anti-science to a secular viewership that ironically won't believe anything unless it sounds scientific. Why neuroscience? Let me speculate: in the 1950s gene science made major discoveries; Watson and Crick were awarded the Nobel in 1962 for their DNA discovery; there followed the gene science pop version that we are determined by our genes; the apotheosis of this view was Richard Dawkins' The Selfish Gene (1976), a scientist much contested by a great British philosopher called Mary Midgley, whose “Science and Poetry” bears more than a passing similarity to McGilchrist’s views. Such views as Dawkins’ had tremendous implications: if the dominant scientific worldview is biologically dictated by genes, it's game over for critics pining for a reversion to pre-Enlightenment values, since genes can't be changed on order. However, neuroscience seems more manipulable; it operates on the level of that vague thing called "consciousness", and like every self-help guru will tell you (for a price), you can change your brain! As such, behind McGilchrist’s “science” hides the belief that if the state of culture/society lies in the dominance of one hemisphere over another, AND if that dominance changed over time, THEN it's just possible to invert the process. Hence his constant plea that we must keep the always maligned left hemisphere servant to the right hemisphere. How exactly that is accomplishable he never explains. This, of course, is predicated on the assumption that the hemispheres were working differently before the 1700s when the Enlightenment ruined everything. However, he has zero evidence to claim that brains were different 300 years ago. Data for "brain dominance" comes from MRI scanning, a technology that didn't exist before the 1970s. So we can't compare our brains to the brains of pre-1700 people. McGilchrist is merely going on a hunch, a feeling, a bias that brains worked differently back then. He strongly wants that to be true, so he cherry-picks his history to reinvent a past where only the “benefits” of the LH were on display: to do so he has to ignore that before the Enlightenment Europeans persecuted each other on behalf of the “true” religion, minorities such as women and non-whites had no rights, lepers and madmen were ostracized from society, something as innocuous as a man sodomizing a woman (with consent) was a public offense, imperialism was rampant, and intellectual curiosity wasn’t allowed to step outside the limits of Church dogma. Furthermore, I could point out that using MRI scans to make extraordinary claims about us is itself the kind of reductionism McGilchrist is so vocal against. The philosopher Roger Scruton, who was on McGilchrist’s side for he also thought that everything had started going wrong with the Enlightenment, would have been aghast at all this "evidence" culled from brain scans. Let me quote Scruton: "Neuro-nonsense occurs when people take on board the supposed discoveries of neuroscience - all these brain images that tell us, for instance, that we’ve discovered now exactly what love is, it’s this little bit in the hippocampus, so we have no need to question what the meaning of these things is. But these images have no meaning, any more than a chemical reaction in a test-tube has a meaning. All kinds of nonsense come into being as a result of this, the nonsense being essentially what happens when our own human nature is confiscated from us by science or pseudosciences which claim to explain us without really going into the question of what we are." (Roger Scruton, The Soul of the World) www.theguardian.com/books/2014/aug/15/roger-scruton-notes-on-nonsense-richard-dawkins-original-sin-islamism-and-more You can read more of Scruton's take on neuroscience here: www.thenewatlantis.com/publications/my-brain-and-i Finally, I could remark along with Jacques Barzun (in “The Use and Abuse of Art”, 1973) that it’s mere idealism to believe that there was a golden age when people weren’t materialistic. This is a weighty point made by another believer in Western decadence who actually wrote a 800-page book called “From Dawn to Decadence: 500 Years of Western Cultural Life”. As you can see, even among decadence theory proponents there’s a lot of bickering.

@KL0098

8 күн бұрын

What all these supposed differences between LH and RH amount to is a smokescreen for a personal opinion that doesn’t have a basis on hard data. To say that the West is “decadent” is a meaningless statement because we’d need to define what “decadence” even is. Then we’d need a large consensus on what behaviors compose decadence. I see Jonathan Pageau advocate that we’re decadent because we’ve moved away from Christianity; that’s weird, in the 1700s Edward Gibbons argued that the Roman Empire had fallen because Christianity had introduced decadence into its institutions. So what is it? Is Christianity the bulwark against decadence or its fosterer? The cliché is true: morality is in the eye of the beholder. For a Christian, euthanasia and abortion are signs of moral decadence; for me it’s an achievement with regards to personal freedom. For a conservative patriot, studying the ugly things our ancestors did is a sign of moral decadence (besides wokism or “cultural Marxism”), whereas for me it’s merely the outcome of disinterested historical curiosity: it’s not the historian’s fault if in the course of his research he learns that King Leopold II was chopping off Congolese’s hands: www.aa.com.tr/en/africa/belgian-colonial-atrocities-still-haunt-congolese/2499958#:~:text=Rubber%20quota&text=He%20added%20that%20the%20hands,Congo%20from%20King%20Leopold%20II. or that American colonists gave Native Americans smallpox-infected blankets to kill them: www.history.com/news/colonists-native-americans-smallpox-blankets As they say, facts don’t care about your feelings. In my view, then, McGilchrist isn’t really a benevolent, disinterested scientist who discovered something; he’s a cultural warrior with an agenda who under the guise of the scientist wants to push specific political views. To arrive at that he must malign modernity non-stop, even though our in our day and age crime has gone down, life expectancy has gone up, child mortality was drastically reduced in comparison to the 19th century, poverty affects less than 1 billion people, there are fewer wars and people are freer to pursuit harmless interests provided they don’t bother others. These are all quantifiable, measurable indicators of progress that fly in the face of the “decadence” thesis; but since McGilchrist and his predecessors can’t refute them, they come up with wooly-minded complaints about how the loss of the sacred is making us autistic and schizophrenic. It reminds me of Frederich Hayek, the champion of neoliberalism, who, faced with the fact that the welfare state hadn’t led Scandinavia into fascism as he had predicted it would, to save face he, Hayek, muttered that, yes, well, that may be so, but deep down, very secretly, the Scandinavians are very unhappy people. If you say so, Freddy… I also question McGilchrist’s view of history since the 18c as a linear march towards more reductionism, more objectivism, more scientism. From 06:00 onwards he makes his usual distinctions between left and right hemispheres, and as always he's just stating opinions and making uninformed claims. For instance, to him, the LH (which he equates with science) has destroyed the unique in favor of the general. But such historians of science as Lorraine Daston and Peter Galison would disagree: their book, "Objectivity", actually shows that early scientists valued the exceptional, the freak, the sport of nature, the rare, the bizarre, over the regular and general; it is true that as methodology changed scientists for a while did favor the piecemeal, general, impersonal approach that we associate with an "objective" outlook, but Daston and Galison also show that by the 1940s scientists were replacing reductionism with a "system" outlook that strove to understand natural phenomena not in isolation but interconnectedly. You need but read, say, Marek Kukula's "The Intimate Universe" (2015) to see this approach at work. McGilchrist's view of how scientists work is out of date by nearly a century. Also, he mischaracterizes scientists when he claims they kill the sense of enchantment and wonder and beauty. That was the view of such Romantics as Keats. But actually many authors of pop science books emphasize the wonder of science. Bertrand Russell wrote that “The true spirit of delight, the exaltation, the sense of being more than Man, which is the touchstone of the highest excellence, is to be found in mathematics as surely as poetry.” Dawkins’ book “Unweaving the Rainbow: Science, Delusion and the Appetite for Wonder” is a direct reply to those who say science is indifferent or hostile to wonder. Many a mathematician will say that they see beauty in equations; in fact, Sabine Hossenfelder has written “Lost in Math: How Beauty Leads Physics Astray” because she believes the cult of beauty among physicists is the reason why there hasn’t been a major breakthrough in physics in over half a century. Again, McGilchrist is out of the loop. McGilchrist’s claims about the better hemisphere, the RH, also contradict him: "The right hemisphere has a vigilant attention to whatever there is without any kind of preconception". In it "there are no things that are finally certain. Everything is provisional. We have degrees of certainty about them. They're never actually static as they are in the left." These are strange claims to make about the dominant hemisphere before the Age of Reason and Science. First of all, if you want a period in history where concepts were static and certain, try Christianity. Christians were so certain their God was the TRUE one, they decimated the pagan religions of Europe. They were so certain of their dogmas, they burnt heretics and atheists. They were so certain, Europe was engulfed in 200 years of religious wars between Catholics and Protestant from the 1600 to the 1800s. When McGilchrist advocates for more uncertainty, provisionality, mutability, he seems to be advocating skepticism, a pagan philosophy which was actually rediscovered in the 1400s (you can read about it in Richard Popkin's “The History of Scepticism”). Irony of ironies, it was skepticism (or Pyrrhonism) that gradually undermined Christianity for the next 300 years. The rediscovery of skepticism was a major step in the rise of science, which set about questioning everything that was taken for granted. The geocentric view gave way to the heliocentric view; Galileo showed that the Earth moved. Certainties is what Newton destroyed. Then Einstein destroyed our certainties about Newton. And so on to our days. What is certain in our time? Everything's changing every moment; that's actually a major complaint of ordinary people: everything seems a bit chaotic, nothing's stable. History since the Enlightenment has had in spades the things McGilchrist most claims to love, yet he complains that they were only available when Europe was under a police theocracy that hindered any change, social, scientific or economic. If McGilchrist really were committed to uncertainty, provisionality, mutability, he’d be thankful to the rise of the scientific outlook, since the former weren’t possible without he latter. McGilchrist thinks that the LH is very bad at irony, at getting jokes. Do you think the Inquisition was fond of jokes? What great comic theatre or poems do you know from the heydays of Christianity? A student of Elizabethan theater knows well that England in the 16c century was rife with debates about whether or not plays should be allowed since they corrupted morals; it goes without saying that the best plays from that time - Marlow, Shakespeare - were the work of laymen (even if they were believers) and not clergymen. Irreverent authors were regularly burned and their books put on the Index. Friar Rabelais wrote his comic masterpiece under pseudonym because he didn’t want to lose his cozy university job. Voltaire, the great satirist, was hated by Christians because of his barbs at their religion. For a man who supposedly loves literature and studied it, McGilchrist is very shoddy at its history if he thinks comic literature and the comical in culture in general have dwindled since the days of the autos-de-fé. Then McGilchrist argues that the LH sucks at empathy. Really? Before the 1700s our ancestors burned witches and heretics; since then we leave people who disagree with our views alone; we've given our opponents rights like freedom of speech, that’s why there are wiccans in the open nowadays. We've become tolerant. Along the way, the West also abolished slavery, which the Christian Church was okay with for a long time. Our ancestors locked up madmen in inhumane conditions and sentenced lepers to subhuman isolation; since then treatment of such people has become more humane. Those were achievements of the Enlightenment, as any historian will point out. In your opinion, is slave abolition and tolerating the views of our opponents signs of empathy or not? Or do you maintain that we're crueler, selfishier now? I'm genuinely interested in your opinion. The irony is that McGilchrist is too blind to see he actually lives in the world he pines for: our society is safer, more tolerant, more cooperative, more welcoming of minorities; there is an army of wonder-struck non-fiction writers full of curiosity for the most niche topics; rigid structures like gender and the nuclear family are giving way to looser categories. Yet he constantly fears and bemoans our daily-changing modern world; he clearly wishes society had stopped in the 1600s or thereabouts; he loves static ideas and concepts. He's the one who puts hemispheres in boxes, assigns them fixed features and reimagines history and society as a sort of civil war between them, when clearly they’ve collaborated in making a fairer, kinder world than it ever was in recorded history.

@KL0098

8 күн бұрын

To sum it up: Iain McGilchrist's recourse to neuroscience is useless; what it purports to “explain” has been voiced by hundreds of thinkers before him who didn’t need split-brain theory to make the exact points that we live in a technocratic world where the rational, scientific outlook is dominant. He's just attempting to ground his view on a semblance of science to be more persuasive. Personally, as a Humanities guy who devours books on a variety of topics outside my formal training, I’m very wary of people who defend generalization over specialization. I’m very skeptical that generalists ever know a single topic in-depth. I’m reminded of George Steiner, who pretended to be a generalist, the last of the Renaissance men, comfortable in a hundred different fields, from literature to the hard sciences. Well, this famous generalist who claimed to be fluent in Russian once made a breathtaking analysis of the use of definite articles in Dostoyevsky’s novels. Virtuosic stuff! There’s just one problem: Russian doesn’t have definite or indefinite articles. One scholar, in the spirit that Humanities people are humbler than smug scientists, pointed this out to Steiner. Do you think he retracted his wrong-headed essay or that he appended a warning note to it? Nope, it's still out there, making its wrong claims on a spurious knowledge of Russian: “While he admits making errors, critics accuse him of complacency. According to Jay Keyser, professor emeritus of linguistics at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Steiner was told at a seminar in the 1970s that, while he had written at length on Dostoevsky's use of the definite article, there was no such thing in Russian. "It was as though a fly had landed on his shoulder," says Keyser. "A criticism that should have been devastating made no impact.” www.theguardian.com/books/2001/mar/17/arts.highereducation Thank God for the humanities! They have so much to teach the STEM people! Without them how would we raise people to be capable of recognizing their errors, to thank corrections, to show intellectual humility, to accept they don't know everything, to doubt their own legend? Yep let’s all go read more poetry and save the world! Anyway, do you need more of my commentary or have 5700 words shown you to a satisfying degree why Iain McGilchrist is "misguided", as you've nicely put it?