The Matter With Things: Our Brains, Our Delusions and the Unmaking of the World

by Iain McGilchrist

The key point is that the ground of consciousness has given rise to something other than itself wholly out of itself, that is nonetheless not wholly determined by the ground of consciousness.

It is not that consciousness is fragmentary and must be integrated if there are to be individual beings; it’s that consciousness is integral and must somehow be divided if there are to be individual beings.

‘A human being is a part, limited in time and space, of the whole that we call the Universe’, wrote Einstein. ‘He experiences himself and his feelings as cut off from the rest – an optical illusion of his consciousness.’

Suppose that I am right and that everything is ultimately part of one consciousness, that individual consciousnesses are never wholly separate from the whole – much as vortices in the stream, or waves in the sea, are visible, measurable and truly distinguishable, but not separate, from the body of water in which they arise – then the individual correctly perceives a self, but a self that is connected to the whole: wholly a self, and wholly part of the whole.

On the one hand, there is the tendency which tries to reduce the complexity of phenomena to the existence of simple elements indivisible, and capable of being counted; a tendency whose analysis of Reality seeks to reduce it to a dust-cloud of individuals. On the other hand, there is the tendency, based on our intuitive notion of Time and Space, which observes the universal interaction of things and regards every attempt to disengage definite individual entities from the flux of natural phenomena as artificial …

Reality is always coming into being. A true presencing of something, not just a re-presentation.

Treating the empirical time scale of the evolution theoretically as infinity they have then an easy game, apparently to avoid the concept of purposiveness.

In an infinite number of universes, by definition, everything that can happen must happen, over and over again: problem solved! But just to invoke infinity as the ‘explanation’ of anything – because whatever it is you can imagine must happen repeatedly in infinity – is not only not a cogent explanation, it is not an explanation at all.

Deity or not, ‘we cannot observe any of the properties of a multiverse … as they have no causal effect on our universe … The hypothesis that a multiverse actually exists will always be untestable,’

Scientists proposed the multiverse as a way of resolving deep issues about the nature of existence, but the proposal leaves the ultimate issues unresolved.

It is not the case that a quantum system is actually in one or other of the possible states, and it’s just that we cannot know which; the system is in some sense permitted to be in all states at once. This leads to the problem of where all the other states go when the wave function collapses.

this direct experience which is never adequately communicable in words is the only knowledge we ever fully have. That is our one and only true, unadulterated, direct and immediate form of knowledge of the world, wholly possessed, uniquely ours. People who are rich in that are rich in lived life. But the very putting of it into words translates it into something of the second order, something derived, watered down, abstracted, generalised, publicly shareable.

Life vastly enhances the degree of responsiveness of, to and within the world.

But it is not we who originate the possibility of truth, or goodness, or the beauty of the cosmos. We help fulfil them (or not).

I see value as intrinsic to the universe; and the possibility of appreciating and responding to value – therefore fulfilling its potential – as one reason for the cosmos having evolved life.5 Indeed, life could be seen as the very process of the cosmic consciousness continually both discovering and furthering its beauty, truth, and goodness; both contemplating and (not separately but in the same indivisible act) bringing them further into being: a process.

Values evoke a response in us and call us to some end. They are what give meaning to life: such things as beauty, goodness, truth – and purpose.

The main claim is that value, whether it is truth, goodness or beauty, is not, as our culture has come to regard it, an ‘add-on’, a human invention, some sort of extra that is not intrinsic to the nature of the cosmos, but is, rather, itself constitutive of the cosmos and is discovered by, and disclosed in, the encounter of life (and not just human life) with whatever it is that exists.

Contemporary science seems to me governed by one overarching value, and an unquestioned assumption that governs how that value is interpreted. The value is, of course, truth: a value that is essential, timeless, and of the highest importance.

My view, as laid out earlier in the book, is that truth (cf troth) is an act; one of trust in, or faithfulness towards, whatever is. It characterises the proper relationship between consciousness and the world.

Values are not just validated by the outcomes they achieve: they are inseparable from our deepest emotional experience.

There will be truth when we are no longer around to see it, but there will be no falsehood: the lie shall rot. It takes a human to lie.

Truth is not a thing to be possessed, however immaterial, but a path to follow, a process. ‘It is not the possession of truth’, according to Max Planck, ‘but the success which attends the seeking after it, that enriches the seeker and brings happiness to him’.

There is a sense in which an open affection for its object is as much a requirement for a deep understanding, as it is a product of it.

True understanding in other words already presupposes a connexion, rather than being the prerequisite of such a connexion.

As I have already pointed out, the modern notion of belief as propositional is not what is intended here: belief is not holding a proposition, but a disposition, an openness to trust, in order that one may experience, and therefore know. Conviction will come, if it comes at all, from experience – never from trading propositions: this is credo as cor do (‘I give my heart’).

That is how we have learned to love all things that we now love. In the end we are always rewarded for our good will, our patience, fairmindedness, and gentleness with what is strange; gradually it sheds its veil and turns out to be a new and indescribable beauty.

It is not that Scheler thinks there is no place for detached analysis in certain kinds of knowledge. Clearly there is. His point is that this cannot be the first stage, but must be a subsequent stage, of acquiring knowledge, not the ground of the process.

Certain affective responses at least, such as whether we are attracted to something or not, occur before any cognitive processes: this is a phenomenon known as the primacy of affect.

Affect may too readily be equated with emotion. 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. The point is that for the world to ‘presence’ to us we already have to have adopted a disposition of our consciousness toward it, and the disposition determines the value, including the situation in which we preclude it having value. Such a stance is already value-driven.

For the left hemisphere, value is something we invent; which is separate from and, as it were, painted onto the world; and whose function is utility. For the right hemisphere, on the other hand, value is something intrinsic to the cosmos; which is disclosed and responded to in a pre-cognitive take on the Gestalt; and is not, other than incidentally, in service of anything else.

As one research group points out, however, the widespread assumption in academic philosophy departments that utilitarianism is the appropriate framework by which to evaluate moral judgment and that individuals who endorse non-utilitarian solutions to moral dilemmas are committing an error, is a curious one. It leads to the ‘counterintuitive conclusion that those individuals who are least prone to moral errors also possess a set of psychological characteristics that many would consider prototypically immoral.’

In a number of experiments examining moral responses, those that were designated utilitarian were often driven, ‘not by concern for the greater good, but by a calculating, egoist, and broadly amoral outlook’, and ‘were strongly associated with … primary psychopathy, rational egoism, and a lenient attitude toward clear moral transgressions’.

The goodness or badness of what I do to you hangs on many things not involved in the calculus of thought experiments: what, for example, it does to me as a spiritual, emotional, cognitive, and physical whole, to be the perpetrator (for example, brutal treatment of animals also brutalises us), and what happens to the world at large in which we are inevitably embedded (a world in which doctors can’t be trusted not to cannibalise you for spare parts) – neither of which considerations can be ultimately isolated from one another or from the impact on the victim.

One reason that most people tend to look askance at utilitarian views of morality is that things are intrinsically uncertain in this world – something the right hemisphere is much better at understanding and accepting – and, on something so important as the ethics of killing, it is better to be guided by an intuition than to attempt to make a calculus.

As this suggests, the kind of thought experiments that seem to challenge our intuitions are not without their problems. First of all, in most thought experiments, the situation is unrealistically circumscribed, and taken out of context. What people say on a survey or in a seminar is not necessarily what they actually do when faced with the real-life experience.

Moral judgments are made by human intuitions that include everything we know from experience, and on an understanding of what would really be involved in the cases we are asked to respond to: we can’t just ‘exclude’ certain factors or ‘fix’ others at will.

The right hemisphere sees human individuals as existing over time, not just at a moment in time, beings therefore who have a past and a future held together by a coherent narrative on which significant actions could have an indelible impact.

In other words, if you ask me to demonstrate why it is wrong to torture children for fun, the fault is not mine if every answer I give leads you to a further calculation, and a further question, so that consequently no answer can ever satisfy you.59 The fault lies in the mind that posed the question.

The calculus of pain and pleasure not only fails us as a guide to goodness, but is in itself morally wrong as a way to approach the situation.

A moral act is the expression of a moral being. It is not just about, or even mainly about, an outcome. What we call a morally good action is not a thing, but the result of the disposition of a morally good being towards the world.

Utilitarianism tends to lead to the overvaluing of individualistic pleasure and individualistic determination, otherwise known as autonomy.

Empty feelings of elation, such as are experienced in hypomanic episodes or with the help of alcohol or drugs, do not produce enduring happiness but more often its opposite.

Ideally, hedonic happiness should be matched by eudaimonic well-being.

It is no coincidence that happiness is about the present moment, independent of other moments, whereas meaning links events across time, thus integrating past, present, and future.

We need both, not just one, and they are not, once again, of symmetrical importance.

‘After all these years,’ Baumeister commented, ‘my recommendation is this: forget about self-esteem and concentrate more on self-control and self-discipline.

A better approach, Baumeister and his team have concluded, would be to boost self-esteem as a reward for ethical behaviour and worthy achievements.

There is a false antinomy between personal fulfilment and the fulfilment of others: we constitute society and society constitutes us. In a healthy society, the needs of self and others are as much as possible harmonised, and neither should be allowed to tyrannise the other.

Most social codes embody what are known as deontological principles, that is, ideas concerning duty and obligation (the word ‘deontology’ is derived from the Greek word for duty, δέον, not from the Latin word for God, deus).

animals is too complex to fit the mechanistic scheme of behaviourists. Animals in social groups are not constantly fighting for supremacy, but expend a great deal of energy in making sure that the group as a whole is peaceful and successful.