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

by Iain McGilchrist

Our Brains, Our Delusions and the Unmaking of the World

I believe we have systematically misunderstood the nature of reality, and chosen to ignore, or silence, the minority of voices that have intuited as much and consistently maintained that this is the case.

We have been seriously misled, I believe, because we have depended on that aspect of our brains that is most adept at manipulating the world in order to bend it to our purposes. The brain is, importantly, divided into two hemispheres: you could say, to sum up a vastly complex matter in a phrase, that the brain’s left hemisphere is designed to help us ap-prehend – and thus manipulate – the world; the right hemisphere to com-prehend it – see it all for what it is.

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?’

Philosophy is engaged in weighing evidence so as to decide between conflicting ways of understanding the world, each of which has something to be said for it. This is why philosophy never ends. But what if, among the evidence, there were some way of recognising a particular take on the world as – not just floating in a contextual void, but rather – the predictable result of paying a quite particular kind of attention to the world?

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.