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

by Iain McGilchrist

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. 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. And the whole is shot through with purpose (a notion, by the way, that has nothing to do with some sort of engineering God), and endlessly creative, not pointless and passive. This cosmos is one from which we are never separate, but out of which we arise, in which we dwell, and to which, finally, we return.

science cannot tell us everything; but what science can tell us is pure gold.

the form of a whole that cannot be reduced to parts without the loss of something essential to its nature.

Attention changes the world. How you attend to it changes what it is you find there. What you find then governs the kind of attention you will think it appropriate to pay in the future. And so it is that the world you recognise (which will not be exactly the same as my world) is ‘firmed up’ – and brought into being.

Intelligence is a very general mental capacity which, among other things, involves the ability to reason, plan, solve problems, think abstractly, comprehend complex ideas, learn quickly and learn from experience. It is not merely book learning, a narrow academic skill, or test taking smarts. Rather, it reflects a broader and deeper capability for comprehending our surroundings – ‘catching on’, ‘making sense’ of things, or ‘figuring out’ what to do.

all the really valuable things in life defy pursuit, but come unbidden when we are looking elsewhere.

Preconceptions hamper the generation of solutions since they easily turn into constraints. 27 Consequently, one of the ways to encourage flexibility is the relaxation of self-imposed constraints.28 And, most importantly, the adoption of the stance of someone who does not know, and is prepared to listen. Those who are creative do not know their outcomes in advance, even though some idea of a purposive goal may exist.

Truth is a noun only to God; to men, truth is really best known as an adverb, ‘truly’. —Rabbi Jacob Agus

Truth, this thing, would be conceived of as existing in the realm of subjectivity (in the mind) as a suitable representation of something conceived of as existing in a realm of objectivity (outside the mind). From this point of view, the way to approach truth would be to start with a secure set of facts, and then work upwards by rules of logic, to a series of other facts, putting one secured item on top of another, to build the pyramid of (represented) truth. In principle, this truth would be impersonal, something that could be transmitted, as it stands, directly to another; timeless and unchanging – and independent therefore of context; ultimately single, in that if the path is rigorously followed, everyone should reach the same conclusion; and ultimately perfect, precise and certain – theoretically attainable goals that are not yet achieved, so the argument would go, only because we have not yet concluded our deliberations. Note the words ‘representation’, ‘fact’, ‘perfect’, ‘precise’, ‘certain’, ‘concluded’. What do these words have in common? They all suggest a process that has now stopped. Something that was. Motion, time, flow are replaced by stasis, eternity and fixity.

We now tend to think of truth as a matter of propositions. The word ‘truth’ in its origin indicates not a proposition, but a disposition. ‘True’ (cf German treu, faithful) is related to ‘trust,’ and is fundamentally a matter of what one believes to be the case. Truth and trust (belief) go together.

"What is truth", Pontius Pilate asked. "Sanctify them through thy truth: thy word is truth." Just a few chapters earlier, John identified Jesus as the Logos of God, the Word of God. If the Word is truth, then the truth was standing in front of Pilate. Pilate couldn't see the truth because he lacked the proper disposition. For him, truth was a matter of facts and propositional logic. Truth was fixed and unchanging, something unknowable in this changeable world. In Greek philosophy, Logos was divine reason, or the mind of God. The Logos is involved with the ordering of the world, with providing it with its form and meaning. The Jewish philosopher Philo of Alexandria wrote that the Logos was an intermediate divine being (a demiurge.) This split the difference between the God who single, whole (incapable of being described by attributes), entire, and incapable of change -- and the cosmos whose defining attribute is change. If truth is a disposition rather than a proposition, and if God is the ultimate truth, what does this mean? Perhaps it means that our propositions about who God is and what God is like are wrong. We are using human language and concepts to describe the God who is beyond both language and thought.

The Latin word verum (true) is cognate with a Sanskrit word meaning to choose or believe: like one’s loved one, the one in whom one chooses to believe and place one’s trust, to whom one is ‘true’. We used to speak of plighting one’s ‘troth’ (an older form of the word ‘truth’). And we still speak of two surfaces that ‘marry’ well as being ‘true’. They meet and therefore are ‘meet’; they fit and therefore are ‘fit’. It is a matter of fit – and fidelity.

two thousand years of insistence, in the West, on the idea of truth as single, timeless and correct has demonstrated only how multiple, contingent and fallible it seems to be, since it has notably failed to coerce the wisdom of philosophers to any one point of view. The ambition of being able finally to demonstrate truth to someone incapable of seeing, or determined not to see, what one means is a complete waste of time. Why should truth have a coercive quality?12 Truth might be more a matter of something to which we are drawn freely as it were ‘from in front’ – attracted – rather than compelled inevitably ‘from behind’ – pushed. Very little that we take for granted as most essential to life – love, energy, matter, consciousness – can be convincingly argued about, or even described, without becoming ultimately self-referential. You have to experience it to know it: all we can do is point.

This correlates to the idea of the transcendentals, a.k.a., properties of being. These are usually listed as truth, being, unity, and goodness. Some aesthetes add beauty to the list. These amount to first principles, as nothing precedes them. Ontologically, the transcendentals are convertable into each other, and are therefore one (or describe The One.) The One is the source of all things; therefore, all beings have a contingent existence, and the trancendentals are common to all contingent beings. Contingent beings are drawn towards the transcendentals, like a moth to a flame. Beings go astray due to a lack of knowledge; they see imperfectly, and seek after falsities that obscure the transcendentals.

truth may rarely be pure and never simple, but it sure as hell exists – even if one sign that we were certainly deluded would be certainty that we were in possession of it. Uncertainty here is not a sign of failure, but lies deep in the nature of what we are trying to grasp. Truth is uncertain not because it is empty, but because it is full – rich, complex, manifold. (This is related to what I believe to be the mistaken assumption that because we cannot pin down the ‘meaning’ of the world in which we live, it has no meaning: I will argue that this experience comes not from there being no meaning, but from there being a plenitude of meaning, beyond simple articulation.) Some postmodernists leap from the uncertainty of truth to its non-existence, but this assertion is open to the obvious rebuttal that it is a truth statement, which asserts that the assertion that ‘there is no truth’ is truer than its opposite, that ‘truth exists’. If we seriously doubted the existence of truth, none of us would get out of bed in the morning, because there would be no point in preferring any one course of action to any other. There’d certainly be no point in writing, or reading, a book. No philosopher that ever lived, whatever his professed creed, behaved as if there were no truth.

If we place the emphasis on truth as a relationship, which is where we started, rather than as a ‘thing’, certain aspects become apparent. In a relationship, both parties count, and the relationship isn’t a separate ‘thing’, but contains both parties that constitute it. It doesn’t lie in one or the other alone. This means that it is necessarily lived; changing and contextual. But it is none the less real for that: on the contrary,

it is maximally real precisely because of that. It is also something deeply rooted in experience. It doesn’t matter what the theory dictates, if it doesn’t ‘answer’ in practice. The proof of the pudding is in the eating.

the world does not confirm our modern Western ‘take’ on it. It doesn’t respond, or correspond, to our fantasies. Yet we behave as though our theories about reality were more important than what experience keeps telling us.

Newtonian mechanics is at one level incompatible with quantum mechanics. It does useful work at the level of day-to-day reality, but at the subatomic level, or at the cosmological level, it no longer applies. But it is not that quantum mechanics applies only at the extremes of magnitude, and Newtonian mechanics, which contradicts it, applies only in the bit in the middle where we normally focus. That would be like saying the earth is curved elsewhere, but flat wherever we happen to be. It’s always curved: just for everyday purposes it looks flat, and we don’t need to take the curve into account. Similarly, quantum mechanics applies across the whole field; Newtonian mechanics is just a handy approximation that can be overlaid on quantum mechanics for practical purposes, provided it is restricted to the day-to-day level. It won’t help us understand the underlying reality – in fact it misleads us there. But it has its own, prodigious, usefulness. Note that it is the precision of Newtonian mechanics that makes it a less good fit, while the intrinsically less precise quantum mechanics is more accurate.

Thus a good society is not one in which individuality is lost, but one in which it is fulfilled; yet, at the same time, that individuality must not be a threat to the cohesion of the society. There is such a thing as tyranny of individuals over society, as well as society over individuals.

What has to be negotiated by every child that matures successfully into a human adult is the separation from his or her early state of fusion with the mother, to one in which he or she is aware of being a distinct person, separate from the mother, yet without the close connexion with her being lost; and, through her, connexion with the rest of the experienced world. This is not a matter of a change of quantity (more or less connexion), but a change of quality in the connexion: equally (arguably more) connected, but now in a different way.

An argument is said to be valid if its logical structure, as here, is correct. It is only said to be sound if both the structure and the premisses are correct,

Human knowledge can only be more or less true – though, to be absolutely clear, this does nothing whatever to diminish the importance of truth. What we know cannot escape the fact that it is human knowledge; and we could fully know the qualities and limitations of that only by getting outside it, and having something else to compare it with – which is a logical impossibility.

Any statement about anything is always both an inclusion and an exclusion, its meaning derived both from what is said and what is not: choices are always involved.

Advocates of different scientific theories clash because they see the same sense-data differently and use the same words to refer to what are in fact distinct conceptions: competing theories lead to differing observations as much as differing observations lead to competing theories.

‘To many working scientists’, writes philosopher Bryan Magee, science seems very obviously to suggest an ultimate explanation, namely a materialist one; but a materialist view of total reality is a metaphysics, not a scientific theory. There is no possibility whatever of scientifically proving, or disproving, it.

An element of faith is necessarily involved in the scientific process. That is in no way to the discredit of science, since all paths to knowledge whatever have to involve assumptions built into the model, as well as certain axioms, ‘truths’ that cannot be proven, but are taken for granted.

In contrast to terms such as ‘theories’ and ‘laws’ which radiate some sense of absolute truth, the term ‘pattern’ is more subtle, less committed, less definitive, more open to modification. Even Newton’s laws, those pertaining to gravity and motion, have had to undergo revision following Einstein’s revolutionary insights. If we keep in mind that every hypothesis, theory, or law is ultimately just a pattern, the day that theory or law is modified or revoked will be less surprising, less disconcerting.

A further questionable assumption is that there is nothing purposive about the cosmos: something which we cannot know, requires the making of further assumptions, and in the end fits the findings no better than – arguably not as well as – the assumption of purpose

Since one cannot become aware of what it is one is not aware of, the fact that a system or model works for certain purposes indicates only that – that it works – and no more.

According to the myth, scientific knowledge arises from the rigorous, logically sequential unfolding of whatever follows securely from predictable procedures by calculation according to fixed laws. But this myth utterly fails to do justice to what the work of science actually involves.

All knowledge whatsoever is contextual and contingent. The observer inevitably alters what is observed.

Structure is the static element we illegitimately extrapolate from the flow of time. Individual organisms, and the evolutionary process in which they inhere, are extended in time – not a sequence of timeless structures, without extension, that replace one another. Structure is function once time has been excluded; function is structure once included in time.

there are far more proteins coded for by DNA than there are genes to make them: what those genes make depends on the context and what is required in it. We saw that epigenetic ‘dials’ can create 2,000 or more variations of proteins from the same gene blueprint.120 That the same genes can take on a number of roles provides a form of ‘belt and braces’ provision, ensuring that processes necessary to survival are preserved.

Genes are not things, not ‘batons’ to be handed on in the relay race of life. There is no such thing as Dawkins’s ruthlessly selfish gene, determined to pass on its lineage unscathed, in the process dominating and exploiting that poor, blind robotic vehicle, the organism, to which it belongs. ‘As genomes evolve, new genes are born and older genes may adopt novel functions, fuse, or disappear altogether,’ writes systems biologist Adrian Verster.125 Genes are malleable processes, subservient to the needs of the organism in which they happen for the time being to inhere.

Ultimately, even what we conceive to be the ‘solid’ parts of cells are actually flows. The living cell is mainly fluid, principally water. Even surfaces, cell membranes, the cytoskeleton, and the various fibre systems, that look relatively solid, are ‘subject to more or less continuous dissolution and reconstitution.’

Lower levels of an organism are not straightforwardly explanatory of the higher levels. Microscopic findings do not predict macroscopic outcomes, nor vice versa.

The expected conventional terminology of mechanics here seems awkward, and with good reason. For, if ‘mechanics’ are dramatically changed in ways we do not understand – and I have no doubt that they are – in what sense are they still mechanics? If the ‘mechanical design principles’ are ‘fundamentally new’, and have no ‘known analogue in non-living physical systems’, surely the comparison of organisms with machines (still implicit in the language with which, I quite understand, the researchers must write their paper if they wish to get it published) is self-confuting.

Evolution is a physical, embodied process, not reducible to pieces of data. Organisms flow down the ages by reproduction and by evolution, literally mingling bodies – their forms – at a moment in time and from generation to generation, something no machine does: every embodied reproduction is evolution in action, and every evolutionary advance is an embodied reproduction. Offspring of organisms, from single cell to homo sapiens, are not separately engineered from new material externally, but emerge as new whole forms from the material forms of the bodies of their parents. The flow is embodied and seamless.

A machine has clear boundaries; a natural system does not. The machine model involves being able to identify viably distinct, stable things as parts, and a viably distinct, stable thing – the machine – as the product of their combination. Processes, by contrast, can overlap in a way that ‘things’ typically do not. Processes ‘have boundaries that are fuzzy or indeterminate’,

Even if computers can be brought to a point where they make apparently autonomous decisions, they can do so only because the capacity for them to do so depends on previous acts of human intelligence and human will. The ‘parts’ of an organism that are claimed to account for emerging phenomena lack adequate explanatory power, since the way in which those parts act when and where they do, and even their continued existence, cannot be understood without invoking the process they are supposed to explain, and, in something of an infinite regress, the processes to which, in turn, that process leads. A machine’s functioning is linear, whereas the process of living things is of entities that mutually co-arise.

Allowing in the notion of purpose may seem ‘dreadful’ to most orthodox biologists clinging to the machine model, but of course that model itself does not dispense with the issue of purpose: it merely tries to brush it under the carpet. Every machine we know of is designed by an intelligent mind that is external to the machine, conceives the design before building it, and creates it for his own utility, a purpose that is extrinsic to the machine itself. Even a machine that makes another machine does so only because an intelligent mind that is external to both machines programmed, and purposed, the first to make the second. The machine is an embodiment in the external world of human will (whose residence is largely the left hemisphere) to some purpose, and the trail of causation inevitably returns, ultimately, to that source.

Whether something is considered static or flowing is only a matter of scale. Both in time and in space. If we stand on the mountains, instead of looking at them afar off, we see that, at the level of the stone and earth and dust beneath our feet, the mountains are changing and flowing to some extent all the time; go on down to the level of the atom and beyond, and we find that all is, once again, wholly a matter of flux. Stasis is just an illusion of observational scale, both spatial and temporal.

In a well-known formulation, ‘you don’t see something until you have the right metaphor to perceive it’.

It is all too understandable that scientists don’t want to think philosophically about what their research tells us. But they can’t avoid it. And because they can’t avoid it, but too often don’t think about it, they impose a default, naïve form of materialism on anyone who will listen. It seems to be assumed that, just because someone is a good astrophysicist or evolutionary biologist, that fact in itself qualifies him or her to lay down the law on subjects such as the existence or otherwise of a God.

in the end, science is not about producing data so much as thinking, to which the acquisition of data can be only a prelude or addendum. This seems sometimes to be forgotten.

‘There are almost never technical solutions to social problems.’

No ‘-ism’ that is already parti pris can offer a ‘rich and ordered landscape’, because the mind that gives rise to it is closed, disregards the whole tapestry of reality in favour of just one strand, and inevitably needs to disparage those points of view it doesn’t share. The rich view, by contrast, will draw from a number of standpoints and achieve a balanced synthesis.

Even the rules by which logic operates, such as the ‘law of non-contradiction’ (that contradictory statements cannot both be true in the same sense at the same time) and ‘the law of the excluded middle’ (that for any proposition, either it, or its negation, must be true), have to be taken on the recommendation of intuition – and such intuition may be only partially reliable. These are choices, not laws: outside of courts there are no laws, only regularities. And these so-called laws of Aristotle were not intended as a description of how humans actually do think, but to suggest how a totally rational entity might think.

If it is truth we are after, why do we choose the evidence that confirms our bias? Why does experiment show that providing people with reasons to change their minds often makes their position more entrenched?

The representation of reason given by retrospective analysis is bound to be only a partial account of the true reasoning process,

Of course one does not need to rely on abstruse mathematics to see the limitations of reason. Anyone who understands poetry, drama, ritual, narrative, music, painting, architecture, or the sheer beauty and majesty of the natural world – or for that matter has ever fallen in love – can see that ultimate meaning will always lie beyond what reason can conceive or everyday language express.