Cubism reminds us that we don’t see the world as it is. We see pieces, and we fill in the gaps. From the front, we can’t see the back. From the top, we can’t see the bottom.
Video: YouTube Video
The illusion that, if we can see something clearly, we see it as it really is, is hugely seductive. John Ruskin makes the point that clarity is bought at the price of limitation. He paints a scenario wherein we are asked to imagine viewing an open book and an embroidered handkerchief on a lawn. From a quarter mile away, the two are indistinguishable. Moving closer, we can see which is which, but we can neither read the book nor trace the embroidery. Closer still, we can read the text and trace the embroidery, but we can’t see the fibres of the paper or the threads of the kerchief. And we can’t simultaneously focus on both and see detail in each. Focusing on the book, we can look closer and see the watermark, the hills and dales in the paper’s surface. With a microscope, we can see more still, as infinitum.
But at which point do we see it clearly?
I’ve created a YouTube short. I have to admit that I dislike the format. Sixty seconds isn’t really enough time to convey a concept. There’s too much missing context, and no time to elaborate. Nonetheless, I was reading The Master and His Emissary and wanted to share a point. I don’t feel I succeeded. I posted it anyway, and here it is.
Life is an opportunistic parasite. It’s been speculated that life on Mars annihilated itself. This is almost a truism. In most models, there are only two options: life annihilates life or the inanimate environment intervenes. As regards anthropogenic climate change, occasionally, it’s both, though some are afforded a sense of plausible deniability—they get to throw their hands up into the air and proclaim that these things just happen to happen in cycles. It’s happened before; it’ll happen again. What can you do?
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“Besides, they threatened a new Ice Age in the 1970s, and now they’re warning about climate change? I’ll have none of it. Climate change is just another way for certain so-called green industries to fleece the public and abscond with government subsidies, but we’re wise to them.”
Dramatic Reanactment
Humans refer to life feeding off of other life as parasites, seeing no irony in fitting the same description. This is not a novel observation, but most prefer to ignore it. We proclaim that we are at the top of the food chain, except it’s a food web, and we’re not at the top. We’re a mediocre species on a unique but mediocre planet in a mediocre galaxy supported by a mediocre star, we call the sun, and so on. As the saying goes, “as above, so below”. Mediocre all the way down.
But life annihilates life. Of course, there is war and hate and intolerance and ignorance. These comprise the lion’s share. In fact, I’m not sure what one might add. We annihilate other life, and we annihilate ourselves. Sure, there’s age and disease and trauma and asteroid strikes, but most of these are beyond our control.
Annihilation is inevitable, whether on an individual micro-level or a macro-level. Annihilation is entropy—the Second Law of Thermodynamics. Earth is a macrocosm of Easter Island, driven to extinction through resource depletion. There are other ways to go. We’ve even got some locked and loaded.
I recently posted a YouTube Short video titled You Have No Free Will, but this is still debatable.
Video: You Have No Free Will
The premise of the belief in free-will is that human decisions are made approximately half a second before we are conscious of them, and then the conscious brain convinces itself that it just made a choice. This sounds pretty damning, but let’s step back for a moment.
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If you’ve been following this blog these past few months, you’ll be aware that I feel the question of free will is a pseudo-question hinging primarily on semantics. As well, there’s the causa sui argument that I’d like to ignore for the purpose of this post.
There remains a semantic issue. The free will argument is centred around the notion that a person or agent has control or agency over their choices. This means that how we define the agent matters.
In the study this references, the authors define the agent as having conscious awareness. Since this occurs after the decision is made, then the person must have had no agency. But I think an argument can be made that the earlier decision gateway is formed through prior experience. Applying computer metaphors, we can say that this pre-consciousness is like embedded hardware or read-only logic. It’s like autopilot.
In business, there are various decision management schemes. In particular, the conscious but slow version is for a person to be notified to approve or deny a request. But some decisions are automatic. If a purchase is over, say 50,000 then a manager needs to sign off on the request. But if the purchase is under 50,000, then the request is made automatically and then the manager is notified for later review if so desired.
I am not saying that I buy into this definition, but I think the argument could be made.
You might not know it by the number of posts discussing it, but I am not really concerned about whether or not free will really exists. I don’t lose any sleep over it. At the same time, I tend to react to it. Since I feel it’s a pseudo-problem where tweaking the definition slightly can flip the answer on its head, it’s just not worth the effort. On to better things.
“We knew that conscious processes were simply too slow to be actively involved in music, sports, and other activities where split-second reflexes are required. But if consciousness is not involved in such processes, then a better explanation of what consciousness does was needed,”
Andrew Budson, MD, professor of neurology, Boston University
Under this new theory, supported by recent studies, choices are made unconsciously and then we are made conscious of the choices after the fact. This tosses a spanner in the works of some proponents of free will. Some may still claim that it was uniquely ‘you’ who made this choice—conscious or otherwise—, but others may not be so fanciful.
“According to the researchers, this theory is important because it explains that all our decisions and actions are actually made unconsciously, although we fool ourselves into believing that we consciously made them.”
“What is completely new about this theory is that it suggests we don’t perceive the world, make decisions, or perform actions directly. Instead, we do all these things unconsciously and then—about half a second later—consciously remember doing them.”
Andrew Budson, MD, professor of neurology, Boston University
And here we are again with more evidence that we are not consciously responsible for our choices, and yet the conscience has such a fragile ego, it needs to think it does.
As I’ve been engaging in the works of Iain McGilchrist, several concepts remain unresolved in my head. One was unresolved even before I engaged with his work, but he touches on the topic with a strong opinion. In fact, I wrote about it recently.
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As a refresher, let’s re-establish that the right brain is the open experiential hemisphere and the left brain is the closed re-presentative hemisphere. Where the right diverges, the left converges. Where the right composes, the left decomposes.
The difference can be seen in the way the left brain views a person. Ostensibly, it not only sees a person as body parts—face, hands, torso, and whatever—, but it also sees these things as discrete slices of time. The right brain doesn’t see the parts. It only recognises the whole. Yes, it can discern you from me, but this is by a Gestalt heuristic that doesn’t ‘care’ about the details, per se. It just knows. Call it intuition.
When we experience something anew, the right hemisphere takes it in and signals the left hemisphere to categorise it and name it. This may be utilised by the right hemisphere at a later time.
From a practical perspective, on a day-to-day basis, it makes it more convenient to view these holistic concepts rather than elements. The challenge I am facing is that I know these to be constructions. McGilchrist seems to claim that we perceive them as they are and only then deconstruct them.
Regarding the image below, the right brain sees the S-shape and the left brain sees the 4s. I am oversimplifying, but the notion gets us where we need to be.
Schizophrenics will first see the 4s. If you registered the 4s first, don’t worry. There are other reasons why a person might see the 4s before the S, but as I said I am simplifying for discussion.
McGilchrist’s claim is that the S-ness is more important than the 4-ness, generally speaking. Even further, he asserts that the S is more real whilst the 4 is only part of the construction—that the elemental nature is less real. As always, I leave room for my own misunderstanding, but I think I’ve got it—precisely what the left hemisphere would say in its defence.
My contention is that the self, like the S, is a construct. We may perceive the S holistically, but without the notion of S, it’s just a shape. In fact, I could have rendered the 4s as gibberish, and Gestalt-driven apophenia would still have an opinion. We only have to look to the stars to note that we can render any number of constellations. Only there is no Archer or Taurus or Scorpion; there is no Little Dipper or Ursa Minor. These are wholly fabricated. My favourite is what has been named Orion in the West is The Giant in Arabic. Other examples connect stars identified in one culture’s constellation and configure it with different stars to create another constellation, obviously given a relevant name by and for the culture.
So why should I accept that the fabrication of the self or an identity is somehow real? How is this not apophenia? More importantly, why should I accept it as true or real or more real?
I feel that the point here may be more about balance. I am not a fan of the facile Greek notion of moderation, though this and the middle path seem to attract many eyes.
Image: Hemisphere Dominance Scale
The hemisphere dominance scale above represents the spectrum of possibilities of seeing the S or the 4s. It doesn’t account for blindness, the inability to see it, nor attention, having not noticed it. Each of these may have its own cognitive reason.
There are two key elements aside from if these are perceived. One is the relative speed of recognition; the other is the order in which they are perceived. One may be able to add proximity. I often use Pointillism analogies, and I feel it is appropriate here.
Georges Saurat: A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte
From a distance, Saurat renders the whole, but from a foot away, it’s pretty much colours and dots. Perhaps showing my age, but when I was younger and went to a cinema, I had the occasional bad fortune of having to sit in the front row. Although being hypervigilant to detail was not a problem, seeing the entire picture was. I recall tracking an object travelling left to right by turning my head. Of course, if anything else was supposed to come to my attention, it would have likely been missed.
In the end, we should see that, as with the Saurat, this whole is the sum of its parts, but in the world, we can and perhaps should see the forest before the trees.
I’ve decided to do something a bit different. In this, I read a selection from Polly Jean Harvey’s narrative poem, Orlam. The book offers a rather bilingual version of the poem, in both standard English and the Dorset dialect whence hails Ms Harvey.
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The piece I’ve selected is titled Overwehelem. I’m going to recite the Dorset rendition.
Voul village in a hag-ridden hollow.
All ways to it winding, all roads to it narrow.
Auverlooked bog, veiled in vog,
thirtover, undercreepen, rank with seepings;
Jeyes Fluid, slurry, zweat and pus,
anus greaze, squitters, jizz and blood
Breeder of asthma, common warts, ringworm.
Ward of ancient occupations;
ploughshares rusting in the brembles,
half-walls, smuggler's runs and ditches,
blackened heth stones, lured lullabies;
Mummy's going to smack you if you don't . . .
The crossroads a red hanging-post
to GOAT HILL, RANSHAM, OVERWELEM.
Three hoar-stones, one Golden Fleece
connected by a single Riddle.
Gramf'er blackthorn bent by wind.
Shabby mothers trying to die.
A haunted wood in the realm of an Eye.
A farm of hooks with a rout of Rawles.
a mother of sorrow, a faterous fiend,
a runstick son and his inward friend,
and a not-gurrel born amongst them:
fouling her fig in the forest,
honking a conk-load of creosote,
downing a dram of diazinon,
flaying a fleece-full of maggots,
gorging a gutful of entrails,
scrounching the scabs o' engripement,
hoarding the horrible heissens,
bearing the burden of wordle.
So there you have it. Overwhelem from PJ Harvey’s Orlam.
As I mentioned, the book presents the English side-to-side with the Dorset. As Dorset in the south of Britain is an English dialect, most of the words and form should be familiar. There are a few that are less obvious than others. If you’d like a translation, pick up the book or ask in the comments.
Words have inherent meaning. Unlike the common wisdom, the meaning of words is not arbitrary. Embedded in them is a relationship to the real-world experience. Or so Iain McGilchrist would have you believe. I’m afraid, I am not ready to buy into this assertion.
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In chapter three of The Master and His Emissary, McGilchrist informs the reader that Ferdinand de Saussure is wrong in articulating there are referents and references, symbols and symbolised, signifiers and signified, or in his native French, signifiant and signifié. This falls into the realm of symbols and symbolic language, the domain of the left hemisphere. If you’ve been following along with my summary of The Matter with Things, you’ll know that this is not a flatter. To call someone left-brained is to accuse them of being out of touch and wrong. They are narrow, myopic thinkers, always trying to reduce the world to maps and symbols, which is of course precisely what Saussure does.
Let’s turn back the clock to July 2022. It was about then I had been introduced to the work of McGilchrist. In Intuition Showdown, I wrote about my reluctance to engage with it. I could sense that psychology was going to stake a claim to have the real perspective on reality. I wasn’t wrong. And it gets worse.
Effectively, McGilchrist establishes the left hemisphere as the village idiot. It’s a useful idiot and a halfway reliable emissary, but it’s closer to Lenny than George or a less fortunate Forrest Gump. And now he tosses Saussure into the pile. Here’s the kicker: To defend someone who’s been given this scarlet letter, is to be relegated to this category by association. Your defence is an admission that you, too are a left hemisphere dolt.
Be that as it may, I am standing in solidarity with Saussure on this one. I should probably wait until I’ve read chapter five, as Iain informs, there is more on the topic of language to come. For one reason, McGilchrist’s assertion rests on a sketchy study. To be fair, I’ve not delved deeply into the topic nor have I read the original study or evaluated the methodology, but here is how Iain portrays it.
There is, however, plenty of evidence that the sounds of words are not arbitrary, but evocative, in a synaesthetic way, of the experience of the things they refer to. As has been repeatedly demonstrated, those with absolutely no knowledge of a language can nonetheless correctly guess which word – which of these supposedly arbitrary signs – goes with which object, in what has become known as the ‘kiki/bouba’ effect (‘kiki’ suggesting a spiky-shaped object, where ‘bouba’ suggests a softly rounded object). [ref] However much language may protest to the contrary, its origins lie in the body as a whole. And the existence of a close relationship between bodily gesture and verbal syntax implies that it is not just concrete nouns, the ‘thing-words’, but even the most apparently formal and logical elements of language, that originate in the body and emotion. The deep structure of syntax is founded on the fixed sequences of limb movement in running creatures.111 This supports evidence that I will examine in Chapter 5 that the very structures and content of thought itself exist in the body prior to their utterance in language.
Without becoming mired in the details of this kiki/bouba effect study, as a former statistician donning my statistician hat, I find this study to be suspect. Although there appears to be a general tendency for neurotypical people to identify the spiky shape as kiki and the curvy shape as bouba, it’s quite a stretch to then conclude that all symbolic language has a similar basis. Although most (but not all) cultures conform to pairing these shapes with these nonce words generally, it would be more meaningful to extend this to at least a dozen shapes to see if this persists. Even then, this doesn’t connect this concept to common vocabulary words, whether spoken or written.
I do believe that conceptual thought precedes articulated language. I just don’t believe that these conceptual notions materially shape the words chosen to represent them. Proto-Indo-European theories aside, there is too much language diversity to account for this progenerative hypothesis.
I may return convinced after reading chapter five, but I somehow doubt it unless there is a lot more empirical support. For now, this is one of several disagreements I have with McGilchrist, though I probably agree with ninety-odd per cent of his work. I’ll keep reading The Master and His Emissary as well as The Matter with Things. I recommend that you do as well.
Seeking an image to illustrate Saussure’s signified and signifier, I happened upon a nice summary of semiotics. I also found this extension of Saussure by Roland Barthes. If you visit the site, you’ll also discover how Charles Sanders Pierce envisaged it,
Photo: Connotative Level of Semiotics by Roland Barthes
Following Emotional and Social Intelligence and the rest, Chapter 7 of The Matter with Things is Cognitive Intelligence.
In the last chapter, we learned that Emotional and Social Intelligence are the provinces of the right hemisphere. In this chapter, we discover more of the same. Whilst the left hemisphere has its duties and functions, it’s primarily a delegate. Let’s jump right in.
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Under the old pseudoscientific mode of thinking, the left hemisphere was the logical side whilst the right hemisphere was creative. It turns out that this is not correct. At its core, intelligence is about understanding. Keep in mind that there are multiple kinds of intelligence—not referring to multiple intelligence theory, per se. Besides the emotional and social sort discussed at length in the last chapter, there is a sort of rote intelligence. This is where the left hemisphere excels. The left hemisphere is symbolic and algorithmic. It has facilitated the making of computers and other instruments that allow us to extend our intelligence, but these are not sources of intelligence. In a conceit to his previous book, The Master and His Emissary, McGilchrist notes that the left brain is effectively the emissary, the junior partner in the relationship, and not really even a partner as the right hemisphere seems to call all the shots when it’s intact.
He tells a story about a geneticist who declared to a biologist that the notion of intelligence was quite meaningless. The biologist retorted that he (the geneticist) was unintelligent, and the two never spoke again. Clearly, the notion is that whilst it may be ill-defined, it nonetheless contains meaning.
I share the working definition of intelligence that he shared, taken from the journal Intelligence and cited in the Wall Street Journal in 1994.
Intelligence is a very general mental capacity which, among other things, involves the ability to reason, plan, solve problems, think abstractly, comprehend complex ideas, learn quickly and learn from experience. It is not merely book learning, a narrow academic skill, or test taking smarts. Rather, it reflects a broader and deeper capability for comprehending our surroundings – ‘catching on’, ‘making sense’ of things, or ‘figuring out’ what to do.
As noted, there are several flavours of intelligence, even if they are attempted to be captured as G, general intelligence. This can be separated into crystallised intelligence (Gc) and fluid intelligence (Gf). Crystallised intelligence is more culturally bound than fluid intelligence and is more the domain of the left hemisphere. Generally, this is what IQ tests aim to measure.
Two criticisms of IQ tests are the cultural bias and the rote nature of the tests. As it happens, trends show that IQ is generally on the rise despite a feeling that people are getting dimmer. This may be because this rise represents the shift toward left hemisphere thinking, an alarming topic he’ll cover more in future chapters. We’re witnessing a trade-off between creative thinkers for intelligent rote automatons—the type of people more easily supplanted by computers and automation. Even as IQs are apparently increasing, undergraduate professors are complaining in higher numbers about how unprepared their incoming students are. I can add my experience anecdotally to this list. I recall chatting with a physics professor who complained that he had to devote some 20 per cent of his class time to teach students the same prerequisite maths, which meant that he had to cut this from his intended time to teach physics.
As a student, one of my physics teachers said he wouldn’t demerit much for maths errors because this was, after all, a physics course. Again, this was a reaction to many students not being prepared. They just had different approaches to handling the deficits. And don’t get me started on grade inflation.
The right hemisphere is the realm of fluid intelligence and is activated more in gifted persons. This affords creative problem-solving.
The right hemisphere is the realm of fluid intelligence and is activated more in gifted persons. This affords creative problem-solving.
Let me editorialise here in place. Sometimes we hear that this or that person is good at maths, but it turns out that this is not a simple declaration. A person who studies geometry, trigonometry, and calculus and can perform the functions may simply perform all of this rote activity in the left hemisphere. Because someone can do maths a few levels above us may feel like this person is good at maths, but this may not make this person actually good at maths.
A few years ago, I read the introduction to a book whose title I’ve long forgotten. In this introduction, the author had excelled at left hemisphere maths and got his bachelor’s and master’s degrees in mathematics. Whilst pondering whether to pursue a PhD, in a moment of self-reflection, he decided not to. He was an A student and the pride of his family, but he had to work hard at maths. Then he considered some of the other classmates who seemed to perform the tasks effortlessly. He could do maths, but they could think maths.
This reminds me of the story of a young Carl Gauss whilst he was still in elementary school. Don’t worry. I’ll get back to the summary presently. Gauss’ teacher was hoping to keep the students occupied, so he assigned them the task of summing the numbers 1 through 100.
Eight-year-old Gauss considered the problem. He noticed a pattern and worked out the answer in his head after a few seconds—5050. Gauss excelled at maths naturally. He noticed that pairing each ascending integer from 0 to 100 created values of 100; 1 and 99; 2 and 98, 3 and 97 … 49 and 51. There are 50 such groupings with a product of 5,000 and 50 left over, so 5,050. Easy Peezy.
And now we return to regularly scheduled programming.
Another interesting characteristic of the hemispheres is that the left hemisphere operates serially whilst the right hemisphere operates in parallel, metaphorically speaking, of course. The right hemisphere is the Gestalt operator, which is a problem as McGilchrist sees it given the leftward shift in the sciences, losing the woods for the trees. Moreover, as we are forced into the constraints of business and bureaucracies, we are forced into a left hemisphere perspective, which may create a vicious epigenetic cycle or a downward spiral.
Perspective
In summary, the right hemisphere not only contributes to the majority of emotional and social intelligence as discussed in the last chapter, but it is also the workhorse of cognitive power.
Before ending, I want to share one more elucidation. I was reading elsewhere about critical thinking, and an example given was an emergency room nurse triaging patients—prioritising the treatment of patients. I wholly disagree. This is algorithmic thinking, not critical thinking. It could easily be done by a computer. In fact, in the late 1980s, I was working with so-called expert systems, which were the AI hype of the day in wave 3.0. We are now in wave 4.0 and it is still hype. Only nowadays it’s deep learning, machine learning, visual recognition, edge computing, and robotic process automation. The only difference is that technology has driven costs down, so they are more accessible to more people and can be run on more powerful computers. For the uninitiated, there is no intelligence in artificial intelligence. So, it’s less artificial and more non-existent.
Yet again, I am left wondering what this left hemisphere is good for. It seems to do less than 20 per cent of the work and does half of that poorly. Not exactly someone you’d pick for your team. Of course, I wouldn’t want to sacrifice my left hemisphere, but still.
That about wraps up the chapter on Cognitive Intelligence. Next up is chapter eight on Creativity. If you think this will focus more on the right hemisphere, I’ll bet you’re right. I hope you’ll join me.
What are your thoughts on intelligence and the hemispheres’ split duties? Did anything surprise you? Was there anything of particular interest?
In English, bird brain is a pejorative. The top Google search result yields a definition of ‘an annoyingly stupid and shallow person.’ Nonetheless, bird brains and human brains have many similarities. They have structurally divided, bi-hemispheric brains and lateralisation of functions, just like us and most other vertebrates, but how they differ is more interesting.
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I’ve extracted the majority of information on this page from Iain McGilchrist’s publication The Master and His Emissary with a focus on birds.
Firstly, except for birds of prey—because they have forward-facing eyes—, birds don’t have stereoscopic vision. If you’ve ever noticed a pigeon or a chicken strutting about, they jerk their heads around. This is to render a better perspective of their immediate surroundings.
Recall that the left hemisphere is about contraction and closure. The right hemisphere is open and expansive.
For birds, there is a need to focus attention narrowly and with precision, for example, on a grain of corn. At the same time, there is a need for open attention to guard against a possible predator. But apart from the optical mechanisms involved, there is the cognitive need to focus attention, but it is an impossibility to focus on both simultaneously. There is a trade-off between close focus and wide focus. To do both is to do both poorly. The trade-off is to eat or be eaten, so this is a nontrivial conundrum.
Midjourney render of a pigeon portrait headshot
You can simulate this yourself. Out of doors or in a large-enough indoor space, hold a page at arms’ length and try to read the words on the page and keep the background in focus.
Returning to the birds and remembering that, like us, the left eye is controlled by the right hemisphere and the right eye is controlled by the left. You should suss out by now that this translates into the right eye for getting and feeding and the left eye for environmental vigilance.
Although they are better at detecting predators with the left eye, many types of birds show more alarm behaviour when viewing them with this eye. If they detect a predator with their right eye, they will also choose to re-examine it with their left eye to the extent that they will turn their head to make the visual connexion.
Like humans, chicks preferentially use the left eye (right hemisphere) for gathering social information.
Like humans, chicks preferentially use the left eye (right hemisphere) for gathering social information. They use this eye to differentiate familiar members of the species from one another and from those who are not familiar. Some species seem to operate opposite to this, but they are the exception.
One interesting bird of note is the wry-billed plover of New Zealand. With a beak that curves to the right, it favours the left hemisphere for focusing on feeding.
Wry Bill Plover
McGilchrist notes that “there is a strong right eye (left hemisphere) bias for tool manufacture in crows, even where using the right eye makes the task more difficult”.
Another feature in common between humans and birds is speech vocalisation as it were. In both cases, speech articulation is the domain of the left hemisphere.
“The right hemisphere in birds, as in humans, is associated with detailed discrimination and with topography; while the left hemisphere of many vertebrate animals, again as in humans, is specialised in categorisation of stimuli and fine control of motor response.”
The right hemisphere yields broad, vigilant attention, and it is involved in bonding in social animals.
In general terms, the left hemisphere yields narrow, focused attention, mainly for the purpose of getting and feeding. The right hemisphere yields broad, vigilant attention, and it is involved in bonding in social animals.
“The right hemisphere underwrites breadth and flexibility of attention, where the left hemisphere brings to bear focussed attention. This has the related consequence that the right hemisphere sees things whole, and in their context, where the left hemisphere sees things abstracted from context, and broken into parts, from which it then reconstructs a ‘whole’: something very different.”
Dall-e-2 render of an Impressionist oil painting of a pigeon eating corn
WordPress reminds me that I started blogging with them 16 years ago. It wasn’t on this blog. I’ve got a few. Most are no longer extant or maintained, though a few are, each topically differentiated. Philosophics first saw light on 1 January 2017 with its first post.
