More on this book
Community
Kindle Notes & Highlights
Money takes its value (at the ‘bottom’ end) from some real, possibly living, things – somebody’s cows or chickens, somewhere – and it only really has value as and when it is translated back into real goods or services – food, clothes, belongings, car repairs – in the realm of daily life (at the ‘top’ end).
Just as, in the case of writing, pictures preceded the alphabet, metaphor (insofar as it designated relations and not objects) was the first word in spoken language, and only after losing its original colour could it become a literal sign.
The point of metaphor is to bring together the whole of one thing with the whole of another, so that each is looked at in a different light.
man must listen to an echo of himself before he may hear or know himself.
Conceptual metaphor is what makes most abstract thought possible.
Any one thing can be understood only in terms of another thing, and ultimately that must come down to a something that is experienced, outside the system of signs (i.e. by the body).
Hence the importance of understanding ones body, th bottom of the metaphorical process of understanding, as the mutual transmission between tenor and vehicle means any misunderstanding or misperception can be transferred also.
e.g. If one mispercieves the process of anger the compares anger to fire, they may miss the fuel elements of the metaphor and pursue only the role of entinguishing said fire. I.e. One can extinguish a fire but if the fuel remains the fire will inevitably return.
Metaphor embodies thought and places it in a living context. These three areas of difference between the hemispheres – metaphor, context and the body – are all interpenetrated one with another.
For the left hemisphere, consequently, language can come to seem cut off from the world, to be itself the reality; and reality, for its part, comes to seem made up of bits strung together, as the words are strung together by syntax.
The child (often autistic) who demands ptescription to the letter rather than the spirit of a rule
Music is a holistic medium, ‘multimodal’ as Mithen puts it, not limited to a distinct modality of experience.
Thus, what man sees with his eye and feels by touch can also become soundable.
Language as onomatopeia: another type of metaphor
‘kiki/bouba’ effect (‘kiki’ suggesting a spiky-shaped object, where ‘bouba’ suggests a softly rounded object).
Reason is evolutionary, in that abstract reason builds on and makes use of forms of perceptual and motor inference present in ‘lower’ animals … Reason is thus not an essence that separates us from other animals; rather, it places us on a continuum with them.112
But it can also be driven by a feeling of attraction which results, by a process that remains mysterious, in our apprehending the whole and trying to feel what that must be like from the inside – by so to speak ‘inhabiting’ the other person.
One percieves an ideal and attemps to embody it and, if successful, make it ones own.
Evidently in language but also other foms of socialised behaviours.
Skills are embodied, and therefore largely intuitive: they resist the process of explicit rule following.
Human singing is unique: no other creature begins to synchronise the rhythm, or blend the pitch, of its utterances with that of its fellows, in the way that human singing instinctively does. It is not, like birdsong, individualistic in intention and competitive in nature
Instead of looking, according to the manner of the left hemisphere, for utility, we should consider, according to the manner of the right hemisphere, that finally, through intersubjective imitation and experience, humankind has escaped from something worse even than Kant’s ‘cheerless gloom of chance’: the cheerless gloom of necessity.
Think of children's tales nd characters and the joy of nonsense poetry
when we engage in what, for a myriad complex and subtle reasons, has meaning and importance for us, we are happier, endorphins merely being part of the final common pathway for happiness at the neurochemical level
It’s all very well having a virtual world, but first and foremost one has to carry on inhabiting the real world of experience, where one’s ability to manipulate can be put to effect. Man’s success has been not just in manipulating the environment, as the ‘tool-making animal’, but in creating close-knit societies, the basis of civilisation.
general the right hemisphere matures first, though in the second year of life the left hemisphere overtakes it, with the laying down of the speech and language areas;132 but there is also evidence that the right hemisphere then continues developing after the left hemisphere has matured, with the more sophisticated emotional and prosodic elements of language developing in the fifth and sixth years of life.133
Where the left hemisphere’s relationship with the world is one of reaching out to grasp, and therefore to use, it, the right hemisphere’s appears to be one of reaching out – just that.
The other tendency was centripetal, rather than centrifugal: towards the sense of the connectedness of things, before reflection isolates them, and therefore towards engagement with the world, towards a relationship of ‘betweenness’ with whatever lies outside the self.
there are needs, drives or tendencies, which, while equally fundamental, are also fundamentally incompatible: an essentially divisive drive to acquisition, power and manipulation, based on competition, which sets individual against individual, in the service of unitary survival; and an essentially cohesive drive towards co-operation, synergy and mutual benefit, based on collaboration, in the service of the survival of the group.
Whilt quite different, compare to concpet of aversion and craving. I.e. Dimensionaly different manners of drawing apart or together respectively.
Difference can be creative: harmony (and counterpoint) is an example. Here differences cohere to make something greater than either or any of the constituents alone; which is why it would be a mistake to see the divisive tendency as purely negative.
there are at all levels forces that tend to coherence and unification, and forces that tend to incoherence and separation. The tension between them seems to be an inalienable condition of existence, regardless of the level at which one contemplates it.
Michael Trimble’s recent The Soul in the Brain: The Cerebral Basis of Language, Art, and Belief,
Doubts about the extent of rationalism, the belief that reason alone can yield all truth, do not make one anti-rational: to decry reason itself is utter folly.
language and reason are the children of both hemispheres, not one alone. The work of the left hemisphere needs to be integrated with that of the right hemisphere,
In the third chapter I suggested that the hemispheres were not just randomly assorted ‘databanks’, but had coherent and possibly irreconcilable sets of values, imaged in the left hemisphere’s control of manipulation through the right hand, and the evolution of language out of music, with language coming to reside largely in the left hemisphere, and music largely in the right.
It is not just that what we find determines the nature of the attention we accord to it, but that the attention we pay to anything also determines what it is we find.
The metphor of the man being cut with a knife and the emotive change that occures, or difference's identified in, the distinctions of surgeon or thug as wielder.
Attention is a moral act: it creates, brings aspects of things into being, but in doing so makes others recede.
Attention has consequences.
The photographer of the child being hungrily eyed by a carroon bird is traumatised by his actions, the result of his attentional frame of photojournalist. What should he have done between, shoo the bird and adopt and rear the child as his own? The first is obviously only temporarily effective, the second no less obviously and exponentially pocked with moral dilemma.
We are transmitters, not originators.
Unfortunately, according to this position, one of the hands in Escher’s picture must come first.
Obviously the answer is a third hand came forst: doesn't this once more suggests the conceptual jump of higher dimensions?
The rectangle & circle are to the hands in the picture as the cylinder is to the hand of the artist. Consider then what higher dimension is belied by the confusion of Origination and Reception resolved here as Transmission?
these dichotomies may depend on a certain, naturally dichotomising, ‘either/or’, view of the world, and may cease to be problematic in the world delivered by the right hemisphere, where what appears to the left hemisphere to be divided is unified, where concepts are not separate from experience, and where the grounding role of ‘betweenness’ in constituting reality is apparent.
Role of the Default Mode Network across the hemispheres and location, and the effect of psychedelics .
‘There is no doubt that our body is a moulded river.’)
right-hemisphere failure again: misunderstanding of context, lack of humour, lack of flexibility, insistence on the certainty obtained by rules.
Challenges to dicussion ofany kind as it aludes to an incapacity to allow two thoughts to share a singl mental space
There is always an escape route from the hall of mirrors, if one looks hard enough.
Any system reliant on axioms reqiures another system to confirm those axioms.
paradox is – not that there must be problems in applying this kind of logic to the real world – but that the real world isn’t the way we think it is because logic says so.
In the Middle Ages it was acknowledged in the distinction between the world seen as natura naturans, nature ‘naturing’, doing what nature does, a process ever evolving, and to that degree unknowable, and natura naturata, nature ‘natured’, a something completed, perfect (which always implies past tense, an arrest of the flow of time), static, knowable.
‘the more we understand individual things, the more we understand God’.
division versus cohesion.
Everything that we know can be known only from an individual point of view, or under one or another aspect of its existence, never in totality or perfection.
Equally what we come to know consists not of things, but of relationships, each apparently separate entity qualifying the others to which it is related.
The affordances: known, unknown or hidden and otherwise or false
We cannot take refuge in fantasies of either omnipotence or impotence. The difficult truth is less grand: that there is a something apart from ourselves, which we can influence to some degree. And the evidence is that how we do so matters.
neglect of context is the greatest single disaster which philosophic thinking can incur.
The same problem is encounte by the scientist when encountering phenomenon whilst cpntrolling for singular variables. What if there are variables that resist the method? E.g. Psychedelic research and plant psychology
To see the organism in nature, the nervous system in the organism, the brain in the nervous system, the cortex in the brain is the answer to the problems which haunt philosophy. And when thus seen they will be seen to be in, not as marbles are in a box but as events are in history, in a moving, growing, never finished process.
Not where it comes from but what it leads to is to decide.
Morally speaking : the motivation for and the effect of action.
A good thing done for bad reason is still a good thing and a bad thing done for good reasons is still a bad thing.
that there was an objective reality, but that it was constituted by what he called intersubjectivity. This comes about through shared experience, which is made possible for us by our embodied existence alongside other embodied individuals.
I.e. The repeatabilty requirment for the findings in experiment according to the scientific method.
if the same effects can not be observed by multiple experimenters, it is no longer consider an objective finding but rather it has been corrupted by the bias of one or both subjectivotoes of the experimenters. This is the challenge encounered in psychodelic research and the key to primary school level science; the capacity to adequately control variables in order that intersubjective awareness of findings can be established.
the importance of context: things only are what they are because they find themselves in the surroundings in which they find themselves, and are connected to whatever it is that they are connected to.
Bhuddist emptiness: universal interdependence, there is no-thing without all-thing.
The world arises from a circular process that circles and searches its origins, more like a picture that comes into focus all at once, than a linear address to a target:
