Chapter eleven is the first of three chapters discussing truth from the perspective of science. These chapters are followed by truth as seen from other perspectives, namely, reason and intuition.
Check out the table of contents for this series of summaries. I continue to render interstitial commentaries in grey boxes with red text, so the reader can skip over and just focus on the chapter summary.
The author posits that in the West, most of us trust science to deliver the truth of the matter, as “science alone holds out the promise of stable knowledge on which we can rely to build our picture of the world“. He admits that it does have value, but it has inherent limitations and yet draws us in like moths to a flame. Here, he distinguishes between the discipline and practice of science and Scientism as it is practised by laypeople. Science understands its place and domain boundaries. Scientism is omnipotent with delusions of grandeur that will never be realised.
Some philosophically naĂŻve individuals become very exercised if they sense that the status of science as sole purveyor of truth is challenged
â Iain McGilchrist, The Matter with Things, chapter 10
Politicians who promote science as a bully pulpit prey on the public in a manner similar to bludgeoning them with religious notions.
Science is heavily dependent on the exercise of what the left hemisphere offers.
ibid.
The point the book makes is that like the turtles that go all the way down, science doesn’t have a grasp on what’s beyond the last turtle. Like trying to answer the toddler who can ask an infinite number of ‘why‘ questions, the scientist gets to a point of replying ‘that’s just the way things are’, or the equivalent of ‘it’s bedtime’.
Scientific models are simply extended metaphors. A challenge arises when a model seems to be a good fit and we forget about alternative possibilities getting locked into Maslow’s law of the instrument problem, where ‘to a man with a hammer, everything begins to look like a nail’. Moreover, the left hemisphere is fixated on instrumentation, so it’s always trying to presume a purpose behind everything. Nothing can just be.
This is likely where Scientism begins to trump science.
He quotes:
Dogmatism inevitably obscures the nature of truth.
â Alfred Whitehead
McGilchrist points out that a goal or promise of science is to be objective and take the subject out of the picture. Unfortunately, this is not possible as the necessity for metaphor ensures we cannot be extricated. Objectivity is legerdemain. We create a scenario and claim it to be objective, but there is always some subject even if unstated. He goes into length illuminating with historical characters.
The sciences do not try to explain, they hardly even try to interpret, they mainly make models ⊠The justification of such a mathematical construct is solely and precisely that it is expected to work.
â John von Neumann
In fact, science itself is predicated on assumptions that have not and can not be validated through science.
In conclusion, McGilchrists wants to emphasise ‘that just because what we rightly take to be scientific truths are not âobjectiveâ in the sense that nothing human, contingent and fallible enters into them, this does not mean they have no legitimate claim to be called true.’ ‘The scientific process cannot be free from assumptions, or values.’
Following this chapter are several pages containing dozens of plates of images.
George Harrison asked What Is Life? in a song, but he had a spiritual bent. The question is actually even more fundamental. Science has no settled meaning of what life is. Some posit that a virus is not life, and there is a multicellular organism discovered here on earth that requires no oxygen to survive. So when we are looking for signs of life on other planets, what is it that we are looking for exactly?
I spend a lot of time calling out weasel words, but we can’t even reliably define something we fundamentally are, which is alive. What is life? Forget about truth, justice, love, and freedom. These are abstract concepts, but not life. We live. We see lifeâexperience life. We are a subset of it, but how do we know we’ve accounted for the full domain? Could something non-living be intelligent?âhave intelligence?
It’s late and I am heading into a new year, AD 2023 BCE. And I was just thinking. If I am to believe Descartes, at least I’m alive parce que je donc, but I’ve got no answers in this realm.
I’ve been a longstanding fan of science. I’ve never been a fan of Scientismâą, which is the dogmatic belief that science is the gate to all knowledge and that the discipline is incorruptible. I’ve even complained in the past about the self-correcting aspect that has sometimes taken centuries and millennia.
In the case of the article that spawned this post, peer review has always felt a bit specious to me. Just getting picked to get into the review queue is political at the start, and few people are actually equipped to perform the review with any material degree of diligence.
Science being peer-reviewed was like a knee-jerk credibility play. Of course, this also reeked of the police department or CIA reviewing their own misdeeds. On the other hand, who else is going to review it? The problem is there is no downside for the shoddy reviewer. There might be three referees who review your work and provide commentaryâand so what if they miss some things?
As shoddy as soft sciences are, even hard sciences had reproducibility challengesâand that’s if the domain is reproducible. Models about climate change are not exactly suitable for laboratory reproduction.
Science is getting less and less credible these days. Besides being coopted by moneyed interests, you’ve got the politicos subverting it for their own purposes. Of course, the mismanagement and propagandising of the Covid debacle is still a fresh wound. And as we watch many of the conspiracy claims being shown to be correct and the official message shown to be wrong and intentionally disinformative, it’s hard not to become a jaded cynic. What’s a sceptic to do?
By fall, I don’t mean autumn except perhaps metaphorically speaking. The accompanying image illustrates a progression from the pre-Enlightenment reformation and the factors leading to the Modern Condition and increases in schizophrenia in people, societies, and enterprises.
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This image is essentially composited from a later chapter in Iain McGilchrist’s The Master and His Emissary. In it, he outlines a path that commences at the Reformation that led to Lutheranism and Protestantism and further to Calvinism (not separately depicted). Max Weber argued that Capitalism is inextricably linked to Calvinism and the workmanship ideal tradition.
McGilchrists argument is founded on the notion that Catholocism is a communally oriented belief system whilst Protestantism is focused on the individual and salvation through personal work. The essence of capitalism is the same.
Of course, history isn’t strictly linear. In fact, there are more elements than one could realistically account for, so we rely on a reduction. In concert with the Reformation but on a slight delay is the so-called Age of Enlightenment, the Age of Reason, which led not only to faith in science but then to the pathology of Scientism.
This Protestant-Scientismic nexus brought us to Capitalism and into the Industrial Revolution, where humans were devivified or devitalised, trading their souls to be pawns to earn a few shekels to survive. Capitalism and the Industrial Revolution led to Marxism, through Marx’s critique of Capitalism, but Marxism has the same fatal flaw as Capitalism inasmuch as it doesn’t view people as humans. It does afford them a slightly higher function as workers, but this still leaves humanity as a second-tier aspect and even historicity is elevated above as a sort of meta-trend or undercurrent.
From there, we transition to Modernity, which yields the modern condition and schizophrenics in one fell swoop. This is no coincidence.
Although I end this journey at Modernism, McGilchrist is also leery of the effects of post-modernism as well as philosophy itself as overly reductionist in its attempts to categorise and systematise, valuing signs and symbols over lived experience. His main complaint with postmodernism is that it moves from the objective perspective of Modernity to the subjective perspective, and so there remains no base foundation, which is the shared experience. I’m not sure I agree with his critique, but I’m not going to contemplate it here and now.
In the end, this journey and illustration are gross simplifications, but I still feel it provides valuable perspective. The challenge is that one can’t readily put the genie back into the bottle, and the question is where do we go from here, if not Modernism or Postmodernism. I shouldn’t even mention Metamodernism because that seems like an unlikely synthesis, as well-intentioned as it might be. McGilchrist gives examples of reversals in the trend toward left-hemisphere bias, notably the Romantic period, but that too was reversed, recommencing the current trajectory. My feeling is that if we continue down this dark path, we’ll reach a point of no return.
It seems to be that it’s growing at an increasing rate, like a snowball careening down a slope. It not only drives the left-dominant types further left because an analytical person would reinforce the belief that if only s/he and the world were more analytical things would be so much betterâeven in a world where net happiness is trending downwardâ, but it also forces this worldview on other cultures, effectively destroying them and assimilating them into the dark side, if I can borrow a Star Wars reference.
Epilogue
I wasn’t planning to share this storyâat least not now. In another forum, I responded to a statement, and I was admonished by Professor Stephen Hicks, author of the book of dubious scholarship, Explaining Postmodernism.
I responded to this query:
If youâre a single mother and have a son Iâd suggest putting him in a sport or martial arts to add some masculine energy to his life. Itâs not a replacement for the actual father but it can help instil structure and discipline into the core of his being.
â Julian Arsenio
“Perhaps this world needs less discipline and structure, not more,” was my response, to which Hicks replied.
The quotation is not about “the world.” It is about boys without fathers. Evaluate the quotation in its context.
â Stephen Hicks
“Disciplined boys create a disciplined world. Not a world I’d prefer to create or live in. We need more right-hemisphere people. Instead, we are being overwhelmed by left hemisphere types, leading to Capitalism and the denouement of humanity as it encroaches like cancer, devouring or corrupting all it touches.
“In the end, it is about the world, which from a left hemisphere perspective is a sum of its parts. Right-hemisphere thinkers know otherwise,” was my reply. He responded,
You seem to have difficulty focusing. From a quotation about fatherless boys you free associate to [sic] weird psychology and global apocalptic [sic] pessimism. Pointless.
â Stephen Hicks
“I’ll suggest that the opposite is true, and perhaps you need to focus less and appreciate the Gestalt. This was not free association. Rather, it is a logical connexion between the disposition of the people in the world and lived reality.
“Clearly, you are a left-hemisphere structured thinker. The world is literally littered with this cohort.
“I suggest broadening your worldview so as not to lose the woods for the trees. I recommend Dr Iain McGilchrist as an apt guide. Perhaps reading The Master and His Emissary and/or The Matter with Things would give you another perspective. #JustSaying”
And still, rather than addressing the issue of fatherless boys, you go off on tangents, this time psychologizing about people you’ve zero first-hand knowledge of.
â Stephen Hicks
Feel free to interpret this as you will. For me, his attempt to limit discussion to some notion he had in his head and his failure to see the woods for the trees, as I write, suggests that he is a left-brain thinker. Having watched some of his videos, whether lectures or interviews, this was already evident to me. This exchange is just another proof point.
I considered offering the perspective of Bruno Bettleheim’s importance of unstructured play, but as is evidenced above, he is not open to dialogue. His preference appears to be a monologue. This is the left hemisphere in action. This is an example of how insidious this convergent thinking is, and it makes me worry about what’s ahead in a world of people demanding more structure and discipline. Foucault’s Discipline and Surveillance comes to the forefront.
Most people have heard the term schizophrenia. Itâs a mental health pathology wherein people interpret reality abnormally. To oversimplify to make a point, in a ânormalâ brain, the left and right hemispheres operate together to regulate bodily functions and to interpret the world we live in. In brief, schizophrenia is a condition where the left cerebral hemisphere overly dominates the right. Some might be led to believe that schizophrenics interpret reality irrationally, but the opposite is true. Schizophrenics are hyperrational to a fault.
Schizophrenia has been on the rise this past half century or so, but this might just be a symptom of Modernity, as cultures are also experiencing a leftward shiftâa shift toward hyperrationality. Cultures have swung like a pendulum from left-hemisphere-dominance to right dominance and back through the ages, but we may be seeing an uncorrected swing further and further to the left, led by science, followed by commerce and politics, dangerously close to the territory of schizophrenia, if not already occupying this territory. Allow me to briefly summarise how the hemisphere function to help the reader understand what it means to be too far left or right.
Cerebral Bilateral Hemispheres
Most people experience the worldâwhat some otherwise known as realityâwith both cerebral hemispheres, and each hemisphere has a function. In a nutshell, the right hemisphere experiences reality holistically, which is to say that it views the world through a Gestalt lens. The right hemisphere is open and divergent. It is creativeâgenerative. It knows no categories or subdivisions. All is one and connected. I like to refer to this as Zen. Many people can relate to this Zen notion. The right hemisphere is a creative and empathetic centre that only knows the world as it is presentedâwithout words or naming. Intuition lives here. It distinguishes differences in the world in a manner similar to that of a preverbal child who can tell mum from a bowl of porridge without knowing the word for either. Children are right hemisphere creatures. As we mature toward adulthood, the function of the left hemisphere increases to offset the dominance of the right.
The left hemisphere is the sphere of intellect. Its function is to categorise, to create symbolsâwords, names, labels, icons, and so on. It doesnât know how to create, intuit, or empathise. In fact, it doesnât even experience the world as presented; it relies on re-presentation. To borrow from a computer analogy, when it experiences something in the world, it caches a symbol. Where the right hemisphere experiences a tree and just appreciates its âtreenessâ, and it doesnât know that itâs a tree by name. Itâs just another thing in the world. The left hemisphere, on the other hand, notices these things with âtreenessâ and categorises them as treesâor des arbres, ĂĄrboles, BĂ€ume, æš, ۯ۱۟ŰȘŰ§Ù , à€Șà„à€Ąà€Œ, or whatever. And it reduces the tree to an icon, so it can file it away for later retrieval to compare with other tree-like inputs.
The left hemisphere is where difference, the sense of self, and ego come from
The left hemisphere is where difference, the sense of self, and ego come from. Where the right hemisphere is open and divergent, the left hemisphere is closed and convergent. It is particularly egotistical, stubborn, and always thinks itâs right if I can anthropomorphise analogically. The left hemisphere knows no nuance, and it doesnât recognise connotation, metaphor, allegory, or allusion. Everything is literal.
The left hemisphere can use similes and understand that a man is like a tiger, but it takes the right hemisphere to know that a man is a tiger, has metaphorically embodied the tiger and assumed its form, say in the manner of indigenous Americans. Poetically, there is a difference between being a tiger and being like a tiger. The left will have none of this. The response to hearing âhe was a tigerâ would either result in âno he isnât, heâs a humanâ or âsomeone must be talking about a male tigerâ. The nuance would be lost.
At the risk of further digression, this is why a poem canât be dissected for meaningâthis despite so many valiant attempts by high school teachers and undergraduate professors. Dissecting a living poem is like dissecting a living animal. You might learn something, but at the risk of devitalisationâyouâve killed the subject. Itâs like having to explain a joke. If you have to explain it, it didnât work. You canât explain a work of art or a piece of music. The best you can do is to describe it. Although weâre likely familiar with the adage, âA picture is worth a thousand wordsâ, a thousand words is not enough to do more than summarise a picture. This sentiment is captured by Oscar Wilde when he wrote, âEducation is an admirable thing, but it is well to remember from time to time that nothing that is worth knowing can be taught.â Education is a left-brain function, that can be stuffed like a sausage, but no amount of education can make someone feel a work of art, music, or poetry. This can only be experienced and is apart from language.
A Tree is not a Tree
As already noted, schizophrenics are hyperrational. They are devoid of the empathy and intuition afforded by the right hemisphere. So, they fail to connect the parts to a constructed whole. They presume that a whole is constructed of parts. This is the mistake of Dr Frankenstein, that he could construct a man from parts, but all he could manage is to construct a monster.
In the experienced world, there are only whole objects as experienced by the right hemisphere. As humans, we break them down for easier storage and retrieval, but this is like lossy compression if I can risk losing some in technical lingo.
But a tree is not built from parts. Itâs just a tree. We can articulate that a tree has a trunk and roots and branches and leaves and seeds and blooms, but itâs just a tree. The rest we impose on it with artificially constructed symbol language. This is what post-modern painter Rene Magritte was communicating with the “Ceci n’est pas une pipe” inscription in his work The Treachery of ImagesâThis is not a pipe. He was not being cute or edgy or trying to be clever. He was making the point that the symbol is not the object.
In the manner that the image is not the pipe, itâs been said that to document a system is to make an inferior copy. The documented system is less optimal. This may feel counterintuitive. In fact, you may even argue that a documented system allows subsequent process participants to plug into the system to allow it to continue to operate into perpetuity. Whilst this is true, it comes at a cost. Iâll leave this here for you to ponder. The right hemisphere understands the difference. The document is not the process.
Getting Down to Business
If youâve been following along, you may have already noticed that the left hemisphere looks and sounds a lot like the business world. Everything is systematised, structured, and ordered. We have all sorts of symbols and jargon, processes, and procedures. Everything is literal. There is no room for metaphor. There is no room for empathy. HR instructs that there be empathy, but they might as well instruct everyone to speak Basque or Hopi. In fact, itâs worse because at least Basque and Hopi can be learnt.
Sadly, this leftward shift isnât limited to the world of commerce. Itâs affected science, politics, and entire cultures. Itâs caused these entities to abandon all that isnât rational as irrational. But empathy and intuition are irrational. Science says if you canât measure it and reproduce it, itâs not worth noting, but science is not the arbiter of the non-scientific realm. Business takes a similar position.
Politics of the Left (Hemisphere)
And politics creates categories: left and right, red and blue, black and white, men and women, gay and straight, and this and that. All of this is all left-hemisphere debate.
Categories and names are exclusive provinces of the left hemisphere. If you are hung up on an ideology, whether Democracy, Republicanism, Marxism, or Anarchism, youâre stuck in your left hemisphere. If you defend your positions with logic and words, youâre stuck in your left hemisphere. If you canât imagine an alternative, you are really stuck in the left. Iâll stop here.
Science and Scientism
How did we get here and come to this? Science was receptive to right hemisphere influence up until about the 1970s. Thatâs where Scientism began to take hold. Scientism is when faith in science becomes a religion. I feel that many scientists today are less likely to hold a belief in Scientism as a religious belief. Paradoxically, I think this is more apt to be a faith held by non-scientists. Unfortunately, this faith is exploited by politics as exemplified by the recent trust in science campaign perpetrated by politicians, which is to say non-scientists with their own agenda, whether they practised Scientism or not.
The problem is that the left hemisphere has an outsized ego. It thinks itâs always right. In practice, itâs right about half the time. Because of its reliance on stored data and a âbeliefâ that it doesnât need to fresh its data until itâs effectively overwhelmed and acquiesced. It fails to give enough weight to the experienced world, so that it shifts belief further and further left, which is to say further from reality as it is.
It trusts the symbol of the tree more than the tree itself. We may all be familiar with stories of cars driving down train tracks and off cliffs because the SAT-NAV user put more faith in their device than the world outside. This is the risk companies face as well, choosing to believe that the documented process is superior to the system in and of itself.
Getting on About?
You may be wondering what inspired me to write this and where I get my information. My realisation started in chapter 9 of The Matter with Things and was reinforced by this video interview by its author, Iain McGilchrist.
Actually, it started even before this with The Corporation, a Canadian documentary and companion book released in 2003. One of the points of The Corporation is to articulate the parallels between corporate behaviour relative to the definition of psychopathy as presented in The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, henceforth DSM. Per Wikipedia, the DSM âis a publication by the American Psychiatric Association for the classification of mental disorders using a common language and standard criteria and is the main book for the diagnosis and treatment of mental disorders in the United States and is considered one of the “Bibles” of psychiatryâ. Essentially, corporations ticked all the boxes.
Methodologically, this assertion is a bit weak, but it is at least sometimes entirely valid despite provoking an emotional trigger reaction. Nonetheless, this established corporations as pathological entities. But that is not my focus here. It simply tilled the soil for me to be more receptive to this topic. This topic is less about the legal fiction that is a corporation and more about the people embodied in it. From the height of the C-suite to the workaday staff, floor workers, warehouse workers, and the mailroom. Do they still have mailrooms? I digress.
I canât claim to know what it is to be schizophrenic or schizoaffective, but Iâve known enough people who have these diagnoses. My brother was one of those. Although I use these and other labels, I am not a fan of labels, generally, especially psychological labels, specifically this label. Autism is another nonsensical label. Both fall into the realm of medical syndromes, which for the uninitiated is the equivalent of your kitchen junk drawer. Itâs equivalent to the other choice when all others fail. I donât want to go off on a tangent from the start, so Iâll leave it that these categories are overly broad and reflect intellectual laziness. There is no single schizophrenia or autism. There are many, but the distinction is lost in the category. The push to create an autism spectrum for DSM obscures the problem, but it helps for insurance purposes. As the saying goes, follow the money and you can gain clues to the driving force behind why this happened. I suppose you can also label me a conspiracy theorist. If I learned one thing in my undergrad Sociology classes, itâs to eschew labels.
Almost finished
Given the length of this segment, I am not going to summarise it here, save to say that this leftward shift in business and culture doesnât have a good outlook. We are not only being replaced by machines, but we are also forced into becoming machines, and we arenât even questioning it. All we need to do is to become more analytic, right?
What I suggest is to watch the six-minute video of Dr Iain McGilchrist discussing this topic, and if you really want a deep dive, read The Matter with Things, an almost three-thousand-page tome, to fill in the details.
Postscript
Hereâs a music analogy to help to express why the whole is more important than the sum of the parts. If I want to learn to play a new piece, I will listen to the piece first. Depending on the length and genre, I may have to listen many times. In some cases, once or twice is enough, but letâs say this is at least somewhat complex and not some repetitive three-chord pop song. Iâll probably break the song into pieces or movementsâverse, chorus, bridge, and whateverâ, and then, Iâll learn each note and each pattern of notes, perhaps as musical phrases. Once I figure out the verse, I might either learn how the next verse differs or move on to the chorus and defer that verse-to-verse step. Iâll rinse and repeat until Iâve got through each of the sections. If Iâve had the luxury of hearing the piece, Iâm at an advantage as far as tone, timbre, and dynamics are concerned; otherwise, Iâd better hope these are all documented and that I interpret them in the manner they were intended. If the audience is familiar with a tune, theyâll notice the difference.
When I am practising, I need to get the mechanics down pat. All of what Iâve described thus far is left-hemisphere fare. Itâs translating the symbolic representation of notesâlike letters and words in writingâinto an utterance. In this case, it’s a musical utterance. But once I am ready to perform the piece, it needs to be performed through the right hemisphere or it will feel mechanical and stilted.
I used to earn my living as an audio recording engineer and producer. Most of the time I was working with unknown artists recording demo records and trying to get a record deal. For the uninitiated, that usually translated into not having a large recording budget. Occasionally, we want, say string partsâviolins, viola, cello, or whateverâbut we couldnât afford union players. Weâd hire music students from USC or UCLA. These players would be more than willing to play for cheap in exchange for something to add to their portfolios or experience chops.
Somebody would transcribe the musical notation, and weâd give it to the string player. Of course, it could be a keyboard or wind or reed part, but Iâll stick to strings. Part of music is the vibe. This is something that canât be captured in symbols. Revisiting Scientism and the left-hemisphere analogy, vibes canât be real because they canât be notated.
Almost invariably, if we got someone with Classical training, they could not get the vibe. The music was right in front of them. Weâd play it for them on piano, maybe on a synthesiser, but they couldnât get itâeven if they were playing along to a reference track just trying to double the synth part. They would hit every note for the specified duration and dynamic, but it might have as well been the equivalence of a player piano or music box. We could have played it on a synthesiser, but we might be seeking the nuance a real instrument would bring.
We never had the luxury of auditioning players or recording several players and grabbing the best parts. Thatâs for the bigger-budget artists who go through a half-dozen or more performers to get just the right one. When we got lucky, it was usually because we got someone from the jazz program. These cats seem to have a natural feel for vibe inaccessible to the classical performers.
In business, the classical performer is good enough, but for art, it wasnât. Business might appreciate the difference if it happens to get it, but it wonât seek it, and it wonât pay for it. A pet peeve of mine is a quip in business I heard oftenâdonât let perfection be the enemy of the good. This is obviously a left-hemisphere sentiment based on Voltaireâs statement. Besides, even from a left hemisphere perspective, reciting, âDonât let perfection be the enemy of the goodâ doesnât mean you shouldnât at least strive for good enough because I noticed that mark was missed often enough, too.
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 deniabilityâthey 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 entropyâthe 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.
âWe 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,â
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 choiceâconscious or otherwiseâ, 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.”
âWhat is completely new about this theory is that it suggests we donât perceive the world, make decisions, or perform actions directly. Instead, we do all these things unconsciously and thenâabout half a second laterâconsciously remember doing them.â
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.
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, itâs primarily a delegate. Letâs 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 intelligenceânot 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 itâs 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 â âcatching onâ, âmaking senseâ of things, or âfiguring outâ 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 heâll cover more in future chapters. Weâre witnessing a trade-off between creative thinkers for intelligent rote automatonsâthe 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 wouldnât 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 donât 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 Iâve long forgotten. In this introduction, the author had excelled at left hemisphere maths and got his bachelorâs and masterâs 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. Donât worry. Iâll get back to the summary presently. Gaussâ 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 secondsâ5050. 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 patientsâprioritising 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 itâs 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, itâs 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 youâd pick for your team. Of course, I wouldnât 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, Iâll bet youâre right. I hope youâll join me.
What are your thoughts on intelligence and the hemispheresâ split duties? Did anything surprise you? Was there anything of particular interest?
At heart, Iâm an Emotivist. Following Ayer, I donât believe that morals (and their brethren ethics) convey more than, âI like this, and I donât like that.â Stevensonâs Prescriptivist extension makes sense, too: âI think this is good, and so should you.â
It seems that Hilary Lawson and I share this perspective. He makes the further point, one Iâll surely adopt, that morals and ethics are effectively âdesignedâ to shut down argument and discussion. Itâs akin to the parent telling the kid, âBecause I said soââor âbecause itâs the right thing to doâ.
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Iâm a moral non-cognitivist, but people have difficulty enough grasping relativism and subjectivism, so Iâm only going to reference moral relativism here. As a moral relativist, right and wrong were both subjective and contextual. One personâs freedom fighter is another personâs terrorist. I wonât derail this with obvious examples. Once one adopts a position, they enjoy the luxury of turning off any critical thinking.
Iâll presume that morals predate religion and deities, but now that the thinking world has abandoned the notion of gods, theyâve replaced it with morals and ethicsâand nature, but thatâs a topic for another day. The faith-based world retains a notion of gods, but that is fraught with the same relativism of my god is right, and your god is wrong.
As Hilary notes, weâve transferred the authority, per Nietzsche, from gods to morals in and of themselves, so it again becomes a device for the unengaged. He notes, as I do, that some absolute Truth is a foolâs errand. Echoing Donald Hoffman, what we need is fitnessâwhat Lawson calls usefulnessâ, not Truth, which is inaccessible anywayâeven if it did exist, which of course it doesnât.
He cites the position Wittgenstein arrives at in his Tractatus. There is and can never be a place where languageâwords and symbolsâintersect with ârealityâ, so the best we can do is to talk about it in a third-person sort of way.
As I consider the works of McGilchrist, it feels like Lawson is establishing moral simplicity as a left hemisphere function. Seeing beyond this is a right hemisphere activity, so thatâs not promising. There seem to be few right-brain thinkers and then it comes to convincing the left-brain crowd. In a poor metaphor, the challenge is rather like trying to convey the maths of special relativity to the same crowd. They are going to tune out before they hear enough of the story. The left-brain is good at saying, âla la la la, la la, laâ.
Without getting too far off track, a major challenge is that systems of government and laws are facile left hemisphere-dominant activities. These are people in power and influential. Rhetoricians have right hemisphere dominance, but they understand that their power depends on defending the status quo that has elevated them to where they are. As Upton Sinclair said, â’It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it.â This holds true for women and non-binary others.
In closing, Lawson asserts that apart from comic book supervillains, people tend to do what they believe to be good, and yet all goods are not created equally, nor all bads. And in the manner that one personâs trash is anotherâs treasure, one personâs good is anotherâs bad.
This moral discourse is not benign. Itâs dangerous. I donât want to steep this in contemporary politics, but this is being propagandised in things like the Ukraine conflict or the Covid response. If youâre not with us, youâre against us. This is divisive and creates a rift. That governments are propagating this divide is even more disconcerting, especially when they unapologetically backtrack only a few months later in the wake of people suffering economic impacts, including getting fired, for opposing a position that has turned out to be wrong and that was being asserted in the name of science and yet with little empirical support. These people are politicians and not scientists but attempting to hide behind science like a human shield, it serves to erode trust in science. Trust in science is a separate topic, so Iâll leave it there.
I recommend watching the complete video of Hilary Lawson to gain his perspective and nuance. My point is only to underscore his positions and to say that I agree. What do you think about morals? Are they a device to assert power over others, or is there something more to it than this? If not moral, then what? Leave a comment.
Chapter 6 of The Matter with Things is titled Emotional and Social Intelligence, following the previous chapters, Attention, Perception, Judgment, and Apprehension. Chapter 7 is about cognitive intelligence.
The gist of chapter 6 is to convey the importance of emotional and social intelligence in forming a full picture of the world. Absent these, reality becomes increasingly tenuous to retain a grip on because the left hemisphere just doesnât have the emotional awareness to grasp the full picture.
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Content
At the start, this chapter reminds us that the right hemisphere not only constructs our sense of self, but it also facilitates the construction of other selves, which allows us to empathise with others. It also allows us to assess intent. And it goes deeper than this.
McGilchrist shares some anecdotes about schizophrenic patients with impaired right hemispheres who believe that nothing is real and that people are play-acting. In hospital, they perceive the ward to be a stage and the medical staff to be actors.
As if by a control knob, changes to the right hemisphere may create a diminished sense of reality as well as an intensified senseâof being hyperaware. This is not dissimilar to certain claims by some with heightened lucidity; however, the data do not permit a clear-cut conclusion. On a related note, the intensified sense may also increase emotional reactions, so one might be more prone to cryingâwhether tears of joy or sadness.
Recall that each hemisphere controls the body contralaterally, so the right hemisphere controls the left side of the bodyâhands and arms, eyes, and so on. And itâs deeper than this. For example, being the arbiter of empathy, the left hand (being controlled by the right hemisphere) is used for empathetic touch. Beyond humans, bottleneck dolphins tend to stroke other dolphins with their left flippers.
This affects humans and other animals with a sort of left-eye empathy that even affects how babies are held or otherwise attended to, preferring the left side of the body over the right.
Theory of mind (ToM), a topic in its own right, is a right hemisphere-dominant capability that allows us to empathise with another or to put ourselves into anotherâs shoes. This ability extends to other species like elephants, apes and dogs, whales and dolphins, crows and magpies, and goats and seals.
The left hemisphere is good at understanding the what of actions
The left hemisphere is good at understanding the what of actions, say picking up a cup or flicking a switch; itâs not so great at discerning the why. Recall in a previous chapter the case of the person with right hemisphere damage automatically picking up a pen or pencil but then not having anything particular in mind to write. The left hemisphere noticed the pen as a writing instrument and picked it up. Without the right hemisphere to provide the why, this person just kept accumulating writing implements.
This can be seen in children with autism. They recognise well enough that a person is doing somethingâperforming some actionâ, but they just canât understand why.
He tells us that âa huge body of evidence confirms that the right hemisphere is much superior to the left in receiving, interpreting, recalling or understanding anything that involves emotion.â
Iâll just share one example, and McGilchrist provides common responses from persons with both hemispheres intact as well as responses with right hemisphere deficits. For image b, a ânormalâ response is for the respondent to fill in the boyâs talk bubble with âBoy, sheâs cute.â A couple of right hemisphere deficit responses were âI wonder how big her allowance isâ and âLetâs arm-wrestleâ, obviously missing context.
The right hemisphere is responsible for understanding emotion, irony, jokes and humourâand the ability to tell the difference between jokes and lies. When told a joke and given an opportunity to fill in the punchline, the language of right hemisphere deficit patients âis often excessive and rambling; their comments are often off-colour and their humour is frequently inappropriate; they tend to focus on insignificant details or make tangential remarksâ. Moreover, when asked to reconvey a story, the right hemisphere deficit people produced an âabundance of embellishments’ to it.
One subject with right hemisphere resection asked, âhow do you feel?â responded âWith my handsâ
Other right hemisphere functions are the ability to grasp the semantic nuance and intonation of a speaker. One subject with right hemisphere resection asked, âHow do you feel?â He responded, âWith my hands,â but he wasnât joking.
Wrapping up this chapter, the right hemisphere tends to serve as the emotional centre, save for anger, which is a left hemisphere activity.
Perspective
In summary, the left brain is very focused. Damage to the right hemisphere mimics the responses of autistic and schizophrenic individuals who interpret inputs differently and without nuance. This nuance often contains emotional or empathetic content that is lost on this cohort.
I am left wondering if schizophrenia and autism are right hemisphere problems, as it were, or if I would be reading into things to arrive at this conclusion.
Having completed Emotional and Social Intelligence next up is a chapter on Cognitive Intelligence. I hope youâll join me.
What are your thoughts? What did you think of this chapter? Were there any surprises? Anything of particular interest?
Philosophics 