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

by Iain McGilchrist

Modernist painting is notable for its insistence on the flatness of the canvas.

To quote Bohr: ‘There is no quantum world. There is only an abstract quantum physical description. It is wrong to think that the task of physics is to find out how nature is. Physics concerns what we can say about nature.’

We can measure no aspect of a particle without in some fashion interacting with it, and that interaction changes the particle’s nature. This becomes dramatically obvious at the quantum level: for anything to be literally seen requires the object of our interest to be struck by a photon. That collision alters the system that is observed. With particles smaller than can be seen by light, we may use electromagnetic waves with much smaller wavelength, but such waves have inevitably greater energy, and interfering with a particle with a high energy beam changes the particle more radically.

He points to the fact that 40 years of efforts to simulate the Standard Model on a computer have so far failed. ‘To perform such a simulation, one must first take equations expressed in terms of continuous quantities and find a discrete formulation that is compatible with the bits of information in which computers trade … It remains one of the most important, yet rarely mentioned, open problems in theoretical physics’.86 This suggests not necessarily that the simulation could never be made, but more fascinatingly, that even if it could, it would involve translating the inherently continuous nature of reality into the inherently discrete nature of machine processes – a problem which might or might not prove intractable.

Photons, particles of light, have no mass: when, however, they split into an electron and a positron, matter and antimatter, they lose energy and gain mass. And when an electron and a positron recombine they lose mass once more, which becomes energy again in the form of light. Light gives rise to mass and the material world we see. Without light we could see nothing: without mass there would be nothing to see.

As Gleiser points out, photons are massless bundles of pure energy. Physics was thus proposing that something could exist without mass, that things could exist without being material. Since what exists defines physical reality, the new physics suggested that reality could be immaterial. Energy is more fundamental than mass, more essential.

The golden ratio φ (phi) 1: ~1.618 is asymmetrical, though universally recognised for its beauty. Fig. 55. Golden ratio It is also generative in a number of respects. Starting from a rectangle whose sides are in the ratio 1: ~1.618, adding a square produces another rectangle, also in the golden ratio, that includes the first. Or, moving in the opposite direction, within any ‘golden rectangle’ a square can be inscribed which produces another golden rectangle. And so ad infinitum.

According to one source, ‘our psychological reactions from moment to moment … are 99.44% automatic.’8 You don’t have to buy the precision to get the point. Only a tiny part of our psychological – our mental – life enters our full consciousness so as to form a subject of reflection, that of which we are aware we are aware.

In other words, a form of anthropomorphism operates in reverse: ‘doesn’t do what humans do with their consciousness, so can’t have it’. Sometimes I am asked, ‘surely you can’t think a mountain has awareness?’ I feel like replying, ‘but how would you expect a mountain to behave if it did have awareness?

The girl in ‘Midshipman Easy’ could not excuse the illegitimacy of her child by saying, ‘it was a very small one’. And consciousness, however small, is an illegitimate birth in any philosophy that starts without it, and yet professes to explain all facts by continuous evolution. If evolution is to work smoothly, consciousness in some shape must have been present at the very origin of things.

‘consciousness, like gravity, mass, and charge, may be one of the irreducible properties of the universe for which no further account is possible.’

Matter itself is an abstraction which no-one has ever seen: we have only seen elements of the world to which we attribute the quality, within our consciousness, of being material.

According to Bohr, ‘isolated material particles are abstractions, their properties being definable and observable only through their interaction with other systems.’45 Materialism derives the only thing we undeniably know, the concreteness of experience, from an unknown abstraction: matter.

All the sensible qualities of matter are due to forces, gravitative, cohesive, propulsive, chemical, electrical, or to motions (like heat, sound, light, etc), or ‘motive forces’. Matter itself, therefore, is left as the unknown and unknowable substratum of force … It is not required to explain the appearance of anything we can experience, and is merely a metaphysical fiction designed to provide forces with a vehicle.

A bacterium is more mechanical than a frog, and a DNA molecule is more mechanical than a bacterium. But twentieth-century physics has shown that further reductions in size have an opposite effect. If we divide a DNA molecule into its component atoms, the atoms behave less mechanically than the molecule. If we divide an atom into nucleus and electrons, the electrons are less mechanical than the atom.

Here is cell biologist Bruce Lipton: Each cell is an intelligent being that can survive on its own, as scientists demonstrate when they remove individual cells from the body and grow them in a culture … these smart cells are imbued with intent and purpose; they actively seek environments that support their survival while simultaneously avoiding toxic or hostile ones. Like humans, single cells analyse thousands of stimuli from the microenvironment they inhabit. Through the analysis of this data, cells select appropriate behavioural responses to ensure their survival. Single cells are also capable of learning through these environmental experiences and are able to create cellular memories, which they pass on to their offspring.131 It seems to me, given everything else we know, that the explanatory burden is on those who would have mindless mechanisms give rise to sentient beings to tell us how, why and at what point they do so.

Even though humans are made up of trillions of cells … there is not one ‘new’ function in our bodies that is not already expressed in the single cell. Virtually every eukaryote [cell that includes a nuclear membrane] possesses the functional equivalent of our nervous system, digestive system, respiratory system, excretory system, endocrine system, muscle and skeletal systems, circulatory system, integument (skin), reproductive system, and even a primitive immune system, which utilises a family of antibody-like ‘ubiquitin’ proteins.

Having been trained over a three-day period, the plants equally learnt to predict the light from the stream of air and turned appropriately towards whichever side, in their experience, would deliver light

Plants, they conclude, as many other plant biologists have done, ‘can actually think and remember.’

In the summer months, when the Douglas-fir needed more carbon, the birch sent more carbon to the fir; and at other times when the fir was still growing but the paper birch needed more carbon because it was leafless, the fir sent more carbon to the birch. The two species were in fact interdependent.

Douglas-fir ‘mother trees’ are able to distinguish between their own kin and a neighbouring stranger’s seedlings: Simard found that the mother trees colonized their kin with bigger mycorrhizal networks, sending them more carbon below ground. The mother trees also ‘reduced their own root competition to make room for their kids’,

I was shocked to learn from an anaesthetist during my medical training that human infants were operated on well into the 1980s without anaesthetics, because, unable to verbalise their pain, they were clearly not capable of feeling it.203 Their screams and cries were like those of animals, creakings of a machine. This practice was perpetuated, and given credence, by an influential paper by the psychologist Myrtle McGraw, published in 1941, which promoted the idea that infants do not experience pain.204 It was not until 1987 that the American Academy of Pediatrics issued a declaration that it was no longer ethical to perform surgery on preterm babies without anaesthetics;

A recent case report of a woman with multiple personality disorder is interesting. The woman exhibited a variety of dissociated personalities (‘alters’), some of which claimed to be blind. On EEG, the brain activity normally associated with sight was not present when a blind alter was ‘in control’, even though her eyes were open: when a sighted alter assumed control, the usual brain activity returned.

Nikola Tesla is said to have said: ‘My brain is only a receiver. In the universe there is a core from which we obtain knowledge, strength, inspiration. I have not penetrated into the secrets of this core, but I know that it exists.’ Of course, his hunch may be wrong, but it expresses a healthy scepticism about the idea that consciousness starts out in neurones.

Interestingly, suppression of the left medial frontal cortex has been found experimentally to increase significantly a subject’s ability to influence the numerical output of a random event generator. An arrow moving at random on the screen, as the output of the random number generator dictated, was influenced to make significantly more movements in the ‘contralesional’ direction, namely towards the right. The authors conclude: ‘The medial frontal lobes may act as a biological filter to inhibit psi [phenomena that are anomalous according to contemporary orthodoxy] through mechanisms related to self-awareness.’

There is also a phenomenon known as ‘terminal lucidity’, whereby, shortly before death, patients suffering from severe and sometimes incapacitating, psychiatric and neurological disorders, and who may be dull or unconscious, and have been so for years, exhibit an unexpected return of mental clarity and memory, with normal, or unusually enhanced, mental abilities, including considerable elevation of mood and unaccustomed spiritual expression. In about half of cases this happens in the last 24 hours of life, and in almost 90% within a week of death.

Most compelling is the evidence of people who report complex ‘near death’ experiences at a time when the EEG shows brain activity to be absent.262 People who are judged clinically dead and are resuscitated or revived after a brief interval with memories of what they have experienced, according to Bruce Greyson, who has studied the phenomenon, typically report exceptional mental clarity, vivid sensory imagery, a clear memory of their experience, and an experience more real than their everyday life; all of this occurring under conditions of drastically altered brain function under which the materialist model would say that consciousness is impossible … There’s a sense of the person’s thoughts being much faster and clearer than usual, and finally there was a life review or panoramic memory where their entire life seems to flash before them … Typical emotions reported during the NDE [near death experience] include an overwhelming sense of peace and well-being, a sense of cosmic unity or being one with everything, a feeling of complete joy and a sense of being loved unconditionally …

One of the things about NDE that interests me as a psychiatrist are the profound after-effects that people report, a consistent change in values that don’t fade over time. Near death experiencers report overwhelmingly that they’re ‘more spiritual’ after the experience, they have more compassion for others, and a greater desire to help others, a greater appreciation for life, and a stronger sense of meaning or purpose in life … An analysis of their medical records shows that mental functioning is significantly better in those people who come closest to death. Many NDErs experience a panoramic life review, not just visual images, but elaborate events, sometimes the entirety of that person’s life.

But if the material cosmos is an emanation or projection of a grounding consciousness it will as a matter of course have the necessary, apparently fine-tuned, conditions to come into existence; it will naturally have the qualities of order, beauty and complexity because it issues from a consciousness that, like us, is attuned to and gives rise to such elements; it will naturally produce conscious beings, and the conscious beings will naturally be able to speak its language, since they are generated by it.

The standard materialist position makes assumptions of its own, eg, that all is entirely random and meaningless; that nothing exists apart from matter; or that if consciousness exists, it comes about secondarily at some point in evolution out of something fundamentally alien to consciousness; that the order and beauty and ‘apparently’ purposive drive in things cannot be explained,

Attempts to explain it result in the extravagant postulate that there are an infinite number of universes, so that eventually one like this is bound to come about by chance. Occam wept.

This puts me in mind again of Nagel, speaking of theistic conceptions: To make the possibility of conscious life a consequence of the natural order created by God while ascribing its actuality to subsequent divine intervention would then seem an arbitrary complication.

the so-called binding problem: how the various modules of brain function result in a single sense of one experiencing self. If consciousness does not have to be ‘put together’ from modules in such a way as to result in a unified consciousness, but is instead permitted or moulded as a whole by the brain, the famously unsolved binding problem does not arise.

Einstein. ‘He experiences himself and his feelings as cut off from the rest – an optical illusion of his consciousness.’

Astrophysicist Paul Davies’s view similarly is that ‘there is for me powerful evidence that there is something going on behind it all. It seems as though somebody has fine-tuned nature’s numbers to make the Universe … the impression of design is overwhelming’.355 And for Einstein, the cosmos showed evidence of ‘an intelligence of such superiority that, compared with it, all the systematic thinking and acting of human beings is an utterly insignificant reflection’.

In fact, if the chances of getting a universe with stars are 10-229, only what is effectively an infinity of universes will do if it is life we want. 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. It is also intrinsically unverifiable, which means that it is a matter of faith.

Surely the conjecture that there is just one universe and its creator is infinitely simpler and easier to believe than that there are countless billions upon billions of worlds, constantly increasing in number and created by nobody. I can only marvel at the low state to which today’s philosophy of science has fallen.

Psychopaths – and this is surely fascinating in itself – lie quite gratuitously and needlessly, not just instrumentally, so as to achieve a purpose; it is almost as if they reverence the lie. They care nothing for truth; and they cannot love or trust. They also have severe right hemisphere dysfunction.

and finally the pessimistic view, shared only with a few, that neurotics are a rabble [Gesindel], good only to support us financially and to allow us to learn from their cases: psychoanalysis as a therapy may be worthless.

Then there is Karl Marx: what is one to say of this undoubtedly clever, but unattractive, self-obsessed tyrant? Certainly not that he loved his life’s professed project, the improvement of the lot of the proletariat. He described the peasants as ‘troglodytes’,18 the workers as ‘those asses’, ‘the rabble’, ‘the mob’: and his acolyte Engels wrote to him, clearly anticipating approval, that ‘the people are of no importance whatever’.

Not that all of the Western tradition demands that understanding should be based on a loss of connexion with its ‘object’. Thus Pascal: instead of saying, when speaking of human things, that one must know them before one can love them, which has become a proverb, the saints say on the contrary, speaking of divine things, that one must love them in order to know them, and that no one attains the truth except by means of love

Moreover, as they point out, morality is not just reducible to evolutionary utility. Many of our commonly accepted rules and intuitions include beliefs that have no obvious evolutionary explanation; for example, that we should look after our elderly parents

When we act intuitively we are most often gracious and generous – it is further reflection that makes us selfish and greedy.

Philosopher David Stove writes: There is a perennial human type to whom this belief [that no one ever acts intentionally except from motives of self-interest] is peculiarly and irresistibly congenial. It is almost never a woman. It is the kind of man who is deficient in generous or even disinterested impulses himself, and knows it, but keeps up his self-esteem by thinking that everyone else is really in the same case. He prides himself on having the perspicacity to realise, what most people disguise even from themselves, that everyone is selfish, and on having the uncommon candour not to conceal this unpleasant truth.

We now see all over the world examples of social groups and individuals attempting to do what they have worked out is the right thing in the abstract, and hence doing it for the wrong reason – with catastrophic results. In the words of Sartre, ‘evil is the systematic substitution of the abstract for the concrete’.92 From atheistic totalitarian regimes to religious extremists to ‘social justice warriors’, the perpetrators of callous crimes comfort themselves that they are acting out of noble motives, but are blind to their own inhumanity.

We could (and I believe should) add a third: the sense of reverence towards all life and towards the universe as a whole.

To take the most obvious example, the colours of flowers are more attractive to insects that will help them propagate. But what is it that attracts and why? There are many aspects of the beauty of the forms of plants and trees – their elegant, delicate or majestic shapes and forms – that go well beyond any such mechanism, are probably not apparent to the insect eye at all, and convey no additional advantage. So why are they so beautiful to humans, who do not share a common ancestor with insects? Why aren’t they a matter of indifference to us? The colours and forms, and the sweet scents, of plants are extraordinarily beautiful to humans, but having a sense of their beauty serves no utility, and may even, in the case of attractive poisonous plants, be fatally deceptive.

As Darwin says, Were the beautiful volute and cone shells of the Eocene epoch, and the gracefully sculptured ammonites of the Secondary period, created that man might ages afterwards admire them in his cabinet? Few objects are more beautiful than the minute siliceous cases of the diatomaceæ: were these created that they might be examined and admired under the higher powers of the microscope?

D.H. Lawrence wrote that ‘science has a mysterious hatred of beauty, because it doesn’t fit in the cause and effect chain’.

works of art are Gestalten, which the analytic, explicit, abstracting process of criticism fails to account for and destroys. ‘No one component of a film can have any meaning in isolation’, wrote the great film director Andrei Tarkovsky: ‘it is the film that is the work of art. And we can only talk about its components rather arbitrarily, dividing it up artificially for the sake of theoretical discussion.’