The Master and His Emissary: The Divided Brain and the Making of the Western World

by Iain McGilchrist

it is the fact of gaze normally being an empathic process that makes the detached stare so destructive.

My eye for me is a certain power of making contact with things, and not a screen on which they are projected

But even then the objectification of each by the other’s gaze is felt as unbearable only because it takes the place of a possible communication.

How we see the world alters not just others, but who we are. We need to be careful what we spend our time attending to, and in what way.

Follows are examples of experiments in priming responses for ourselves. I.e. Suggestion regarding the power/existance of freewill and our power to effect change in our own patterns that pretend to be free will.

pointing just results in the cat looking at your finger. A dog, however, will understand that you are engaged by an interest that lies in a certain direction and its own gaze is empathically entrained in the same direction.

It is therefore problematic for science and often philosophy that an abstruse and abstracted language, and an alienating vision, are seen as the proper and only approach to truth.

In a scientific paper, one may not say ‘I saw it happen’, but ‘the phenomenon was observed’. In Japan, however, science students, who ‘observe’ phenomena, do so with quite a different meaning, and in quite a different spirit, from their Western counterparts. The word kansatsu, which is translated as ‘observe’, is closer to the meaning of the word ‘gaze’, which we use only when we are in a state of rapt attention in which we lose ourselves, and feel connected to the other. The syllable kan in kansatsu contains the nuance that the one who gazes comes to feel a ‘one-body-ness’ with the object of gaze.

The role of language in clarifying or obscurng the interelated nature of observation.

‘Knowledge’ and ‘truth’ I have discussed – again there are two versions: one purporting to be impersonal, static, complete, a thing, and the other personal, provisional, a matter of degree, a journey.

One cannot believe in nothing and thus avoid belief altogether, simply because one cannot have no disposition towards the world, that being in itself a disposition.

all knowledge, particularly scientific knowledge, is no more than an acting ‘as if’ certain models were, for the time being, true.

‘family resemblances’, which associate individuals without there necessarily being any one defining feature that all members of the group have in common.

The brothers Smith who have different shared features but are recognisably part of the family 'Smith'

categorising something leads only to loss of the essential difference.

De la Mettrie’s Ghost Chris Nunn

A book to read

they are derived from experience, but are not encompassed by it; they have affective meaning for us, and are not simply abstractions; their structure, as Nunn points out, has much in common with narrative; they cannot be derived from or converted into rules or procedures.

In their presence we experience a pull, a force of attraction, a longing, which leads us towards something beyond our own conscious experience, and which Jung saw as derived from the broader experience of humankind.

movement has always been used for two distinct aims: the attainment of tangible values in all kinds of work, and the approach to intangible values in prayer and worship’.

Picking up the screw driver or making the sign of the cross. Bending down to pick up a child or bowing in supplication. The sacred and the mundane also concievbly tue symbolic and practical. (With the obvious clineal nature of diferentiating one from the other: shaking hands with someone serves both symbolic and practical purposes.

One is emptied of meaning by being constantly re-presented; the other is enriched in meaning by being constantly present – lived with, and actively incorporated into ‘my’ life.

awakening the mind’s attention from the lethargy of custom,

consequence of the film of familiarity and selfish solicitude we have eyes, yet see not, ears that hear not, and hearts that neither feel nor understand.

there is a wise passivity that enables things to come about less by what is done than by what is not done, that opens up possibility where activity closes it down.

Consider the illusions of triangles formed from disconnected lines

The world of the left hemisphere, dependent on denotative language and abstraction, yields clarity and power to manipulate things that are known, fixed, static, isolated, decontextualised, explicit, disembodied, general in nature, but ultimately lifeless. The right hemisphere, by contrast, yields a world of individual, changing, evolving, interconnected, implicit, incarnate, living beings within the context of the lived world, but in the nature of things never fully graspable, always imperfectly known – and to this world it exists in a relationship of care.

Summaryof hemispheric differences of HOW

its less engaged stance might be a clue that it is more trustworthy. However, the fact that disengaged attention is in some cases psychopathic tells us that the question has meaning for the value, including the moral value, of the world we experience.

The metaphoric angels and devils of our nature may similarly revolve around these axis of relaibity and psychothopy. I.e. Both can delude us cruelly in their own right whilst ostensibly acting to protect or guide us earnestly.

Straight lines, such as the horizon, are curved if one takes a longer view, and space itself is curved – so that the rectilinearity of the left hemisphere is a bit like the flat-Earther’s view: ‘that’s the way it looks here and now’.

Perception is deception. One must include the frame to make sense of that found within the frame. (This is not a pipe.) i.e. The talking head on the screen can gain or lose authority based on the democracy of access to the screen. It it a Jacobs ladder of re-framing: endless.

Aristotle wrote that ‘it is owing to their wonder that men both now begin, and at first began, to philosophize.’

‘Philosophy begins and ends with wondering – profound wondering.’

Metaphorical meaning is in every sense prior to abstraction and explicitness. The very words tell one this: one cannot draw something away (Latin, abs- away, trahere pull), unless there is something to draw it away from. One cannot unfold something and make it explicit (Latin, ex- out, plicare fold), unless it is already folded. The roots of explicitness lie in the implicit. As Lichtenberg said, ‘Most of our expressions are metaphorical – the philosophy of our forefathers lies hidden in them.’

When a metaphor actually lives in the mind it can generate new thoughts or understanding – it is cognitively real and active, not just a dead historical remnant of a once live metaphor, a cliché.

Consider perhaps the role played by koans on eliciting insight: certainly not explicit in their pointing and many attemts are made to male their meaning clearer in the way we explan a metaphor to a child or foreigner.

Knowing, in the sense of seeing clearly, is always seeing ‘as’ a something already known, and therefore not present but re-presented.

Consider the sensation of someone else explicitly stating a thought or feeling on has but has been unable to articulate even slightly abstracting it from the ambiguous uous sense or obtuse undersanding to the precise and acute.

Context is that ‘something’ (in reality nothing less than a world) in which whatever is seen inheres, and in which its being lies, and in reference to which alone it can be understood, lying both beyond and around it.

Consider the end of the three body problem and the expanse and detail of infinity as it was transmuted from three dimensions to two.

clarity is bought at the price of limitation:

Clarity, it seems, describes not a degree of perception, but a type of knowledge. To know something clearly is to know it partially only, and to know it, rather than to experience it, in a certain way.

Consider the headless way experiment of zooming in and out. What am 'I' a molecule in my body that will be traded out in the next few months or the universe or solar system or globe when considered from a fr enough vantage point? It depends on the point of relationship or context.

Descartes was concerned with vision as an instrument of clear, sharply defined knowledge of each thing in isolation

Consider in the context of meditation and how one's practice starts from the point of distinction or precise 'notation', possibly from habit, before expanding to embrace a broader perception. I.e. The stone as object and the stone as shades of input within an encompassing whole

Metaphoric meaning depends on this semi-transparency, this being-seen-and-not-being-seen.

Again; a sense of the awareness (conciousness and its content?) during mindfulness

Depth, as opposed to distance from a surface, never implies detachment. Depth brings us into a relationship, whatever the distance involved, with the other, and allows us to ‘feel across’ the intervening space. It situates us in the same world as the other.

we neither allow our eye simply to rest on the pure thing in front of us, a canvas measuring such and such, with so and so patches of blue, green and brown on it, nor do we see straight through it, as though ignorant that we are looking at a painting, and imagining we look through a window.

A interesting metaphor in itself for preception of the aparent duality of reality / Reality (the socalled objective subjective split that are fundmetally intertwind)

We make an intuitive assessment of the whole before any cognitive processes come into play, though they will, no doubt, later be used to ‘explain’, and justify, our choice.

Emotions are certainly part of affect, but are only part of it. Something much broader is implied: a way of attending to the world (or not attending to it), a way of relating to the world (or not relating to it), a stance, a disposition, towards the world – ultimately a ‘way of being’ in the world.

As Nietzsche wrote, ‘thoughts are the shadows of our feelings—always darker, emptier, simpler’.

Feeling came, and comes, first, and reason emerged from it: ‘emotion has taught mankind to reason’,

How does this connect with the hypothesis that emotions are formed through narrative. I.e. The narrative distinguishing a stranger or a son swearing at a man.

He also sees them, as William James did, as an interpretation of bodily ‘data’: in fact he even states that ‘regular feeling comes from a “readout” of the body changes’.

Julian Jaynes, The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind,

Adam Zeman is admirably concise in doing so.46 He distinguishes three principal meanings of the term consciousness: (1) consciousness as waking state: ‘after a lucid interval, the injured soldier lapsed into unconsciousness’; (2) consciousness as experience: ‘I became conscious of a feeling of dread, and an overpowering smell of burning rubber’; (3) consciousness as mind: ‘I am conscious that I may be straining your patience’ – in which case, unlike the previous example, one is not reporting on experience as such, but on something one bears in awareness even if not actually thinking about it and experiencing the consequences of such a thought at the time.

Freud wrote of non-verbal, imagistic thinking that it ‘is, therefore, only a very incomplete form of becoming conscious. In some way, too, it stands nearer to unconscious processes than does thinking in words, and it is unquestionably older than the latter both ontogenetically and phylogenetically.’

(Note the significance of the metaphor. Meaning does not originate with an interpreter – all one can hope for from the interpreter is that in his or her hands the true meaning is not actually lost.)

Why should ‘we’ not be our unconscious, as well as our conscious, selves? Libet’s experiment does not tell us that we do not choose to initiate an action: it just tells us that we have to widen our concept of who ‘we’ are to include our unconscious selves.

‘We respond to gestures with an extreme alertness and, one might almost say, in accordance with an elaborate and secret code that is written nowhere, known by none, and understood by all.’

those who do not make gestures tend to give more ‘segmented’ sequences of information than global descriptions.

restricting hand movement limits the content and fluency of speech,

it got time sequences wrong and conflated episodes that were separate in the story because they looked similar (in other words, it categorised them, and therefore put them together, even though in the lived world their meaning was destroyed by being taken out of narrative sequence).

When asked if the conclusion is true, the intact individual displays a common sense reaction: ‘I agree it seems to suggest so, but I know in fact it’s wrong.’ The right hemisphere dismisses the false premises and deductions as absurd. But the left hemisphere sticks to the false conclusion, replying calmly to the effect that ‘that’s what it says here.’