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

by Iain McGilchrist

as Niels Bohr recognised, whereas trivial truths manifestly exclude their opposites, the most profound truths do not.

Motion, then, is not an unusual departure from stasis, but stasis an unachievable imaginary state, which in reality can be approached only as an asymptote.

The explicit is not more fully real than the implicit. It is merely the limit case of the implicit, with much of its vital meaning sheared off: narrowed down and ‘finalised’. The literal is not more real than the metaphorical: it is merely the limit case of the metaphorical, in which the wealth of meaning is collapsed into a 1:1 correspondence for a useful, temporary, purpose.

order is not a special case of randomness, but randomness merely the limit case of order, which is the universal norm. Indeed, true randomness is a theoretical construct that does not exist.

complexity is the norm, and simplicity represents a special case of complexity, achieved by cleaving off and disregarding almost all of the vast reality that surrounds whatever it is we are for the moment modelling as simple (simplicity is a feature of our model, not of the reality that is modelled).

Potential is not simply all the things that never happened, a ghostly penumbra around the actual. The actual is the limit case of the potential, which is equally real; the one into which it collapses out of the many, as the particle is the collapse of a quantum field. (The particle is not more real than the field, rather it is a special case of the field, in which its field-like characteristics are at a minimum.) Similarly, the wholly determinate, were it to exist, which it does not, would be the limit case of the indeterminate.

Two important truths, then: science cannot tell us everything; but what science can tell us is pure gold.