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

by Iain McGilchrist

Meanwhile, compounding the problem, we take the success we have in manipulating it as proof that we understand it. But that is a logical error: to exert power over something requires us only to know what happens when we pull the levers, press the button, or utter the spell.

That we control a thing doesnt mean we understand it. Believing otherwise is falling into the fallacy of the sorcerer's apprentice.

But as the great physicist Erwin Schrödinger put it in Science & Humanism, it seems plain and self-evident, yet it needs to be said: the isolated knowledge obtained by a group of specialists in a narrow field has in itself no value whatsoever, but only in its synthesis with all the rest of knowledge and only inasmuch as it really contributes in this synthesis toward answering the demand, τίνες δὲ ἡμεῖς; ‘Who are we?’ 3

Yes! A better translation will be "Who then are we?" That is who are we in light of what we have disvovered?

Seventy years on from Schrödinger’s pronouncement, specialisation makes it even harder to expect more than a tiny handful of scientists and philosophers to be in a position to venture into a genuinely new understanding of their (in reality) common enterprise, one that has the potential hugely to enrich both parties.

And not just between scientists and philosophers but between scientists and scientists. We know a lot in isolated pockets but we do not synthesize that knowledge across disciplines or even specializations often enough.

Reductionism can mean a number of things, but here I mean quite simply the outlook that assumes that the only way to understand the nature of anything we experience is by looking at the parts of which it appears to be made, and building up from there. By contrast I believe that the whole is never the same as the sum of its ‘parts’, and that, except in the case of machines, there are in fact no ‘parts’ as such, but that they are an artefact of a certain way of looking at the world. For this reason it is every bit as true that what we call the parts can be understood only by understanding the whole to which they belong. And with the reductionist outlook goes determinism, the belief that if we knew enough about the position and momentum of every particle in the universe we could predict everything that happens from here on in, including your every thought, desire and belief.

Not everything can be reduced to its parts. In fact, contrary to the spirit of reductionism, in certain things, the whole can properly be said to be prior to its parts if such things never existed as isolated parts. Certain things grow, not by assembly of parts, but by an internal drive to fructify and become its telos.

Reductionism envisages a universe of things – and simply material things at that. How these things are related is viewed as a secondary matter. However, I suggest that relationships are primary, more foundational than the things related: that the relationships don’t just ‘connect’ pre-existing things, but modify what we mean by the ‘things’, which in turn modify everything else they are in relationship with. That is because what we are dealing with are, ultimately, relations, events, processes; ‘things’ is a useful shorthand for those elements, congealed in the flow of experience, that emerge secondarily from, and attract our attention in, a primary web of interconnexions. I have nothing against things, provided we don’t see them as primary.

Values, relations, and ways of seeing are as important as things.

Straight lines, in as much as they can be said to exist at all, do so as the limit case of curves, which constitute all the lines in nature (even space and the paths travelled in it are curved). Linearity is the limit case of nonlinearity, and can be approximated only by taking ever narrower views of an infinitely complex picture. The discontinuous, in as much as it can be said to exist at all, is the limit case of the continuous, which is the norm. Total independence is an imaginary construct, the limit case of interdependence, which is universal.

Every animal, in order to survive, has to solve a conundrum: how to eat without being eaten. It has to pay precisely focussed, narrow-beam attention that is already committed to whatever is of interest to it, so as to exploit the world for food and shelter. Put at its simplest, a bird must be able to distinguish a seed from the background of gravel on which it lies, and pick it up swiftly and accurately; similarly, with a twig to build a nest.

Attention is not just another ‘cognitive function’: it is, as I say, the disposition adopted by one’s consciousness towards the world. Absent, present, detached, engaged, alienated, empathic, broad or narrow, sustained or piecemeal, it therefore has the power to alter whatever it meets. Since our consciousness plays some part in what comes into being, the play of attention can both create and destroy, but it never leaves its object unchanged. So how you attend to something – or don’t attend to it – matters a very great deal. By paying a certain kind of attention, you can humanise or dehumanise, cherish or strip of all value. By a kind of alienating, fragmenting and focal attention, you can reduce humanity – or art, sex, humour, or religion – to nothing. You can so alienate yourself from a poem that you stop seeing the poem at all, and instead come to see in its place just theories, messages and formal tropes; stop hearing the music and hear only tonalities and harmonic shifts; stop seeing the person and see only mechanisms – all because of the plane of attention. More than that, when such a state of affairs comes about, you are no longer aware that there is a problem at all. For you do not see what it is you cannot see.

Good point

It is not that language and rational thought here are not valuable: they are. But they are there to be struggled with, and finally, having been found wanting, let go. The struggle was not wasted effort. In Hegel’s metaphor, the beauty of the bud is sacrificed, necessary as it was, once the flower comes into being; and still more the flower must be sacrificed once the fruit comes into being; yet each has its place, and all were valuable, as part of the greater creation as a whole. So words have their place, but only up to the borders with God.