Iain McGilchrist on Brain Lateralisation, Ways of Knowing, and the Nature of Consciousness
A two-part conversation between Jim Rutt and Iain McGilchrist on McGilchrist’s two-volume work The Matter with Things: Our Brains, Our Delusions and the Unmaking of the World (2022, ~1,200 pages in print). EP 154 covers neuropsychology and epistemology; EP 155 (April 18, 2022) covers quantum mechanics, consciousness, teleology, and the metaphysics of purpose.
Part 1: https://www.jimruttshow.com/iain-mcgilchrist/ Part 2: https://www.jimruttshow.com/iain-mcgilchrist-2/
Key ideas
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Hemisphere attention is the organising principle. The brain’s two hemispheres are not a popular myth of ‘creative right / logical left’ but two fundamentally different modes of attention: the left hemisphere maintains narrow, focused, certainty-seeking, context-stripping attention suited to manipulation; the right maintains broad, vigilant, context-retaining, ambiguity-tolerating attention suited to understanding. Most of what the pop-science canon says about hemispheres is wrong; what McGilchrist argues, backed by clinical neuroimaging and hundreds of studies, is subtler and more consequential.
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Presencing vs. re-presenting. The right hemisphere presences the world — brings it into vivid, contextual being. The left re-presents it — substitutes an abstract map for the territory, which it then mistakes for the thing. Western modernity, McGilchrist argues, has handed control to the left hemisphere, producing an era of reductive certainty, bureaucratic abstraction, and what he calls the meta-crisis.
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Correspondence vs. coherence truth. The left hemisphere favours correspondence theory (a proposition matches a fact); the right understands coherence and embodied knowing. McGilchrist draws on the French/German distinction between savoir (propositional knowledge) and connaître/kennen (acquaintance) — the poverty of English’s single word ‘know’ is diagnostic of the left-brain dominance he diagnoses in Anglophone thought.
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Consciousness cannot emerge from the unconscious. McGilchrist defends consciousness as an ontological primitive — foundational to the cosmos rather than a late biological product. He finds support in Ramachandran and Blakemore’s Oxford Handbook of Science, which concedes the point. Jim Rutt takes the Searle view (consciousness as a biological phenomenon that evolved); their sustained disagreement is the episode’s sharpest exchange.
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Reductionism mistakes the map for the territory. Relations are prior to the things related; context makes a thing what it is. Taking a piece of music apart into notes finds nothing — the music lives in the relations that reductionism strips out. Organisms are not machines: they are open systems far from equilibrium, self-differentiated rather than assembled, whose ‘code’ (DNA) is a supply store called upon by the cell, not a blueprint.
Detailed themes
Neuropsychology
McGilchrist’s case rests on the architecture of cross-inhibition. The two hemispheres operate as opponent processors (Sherrington’s term): each inhibits the other, enabling precision through balanced opposition. The left knows far less but thinks it knows everything; the right knows far more and doubts that it does. Evolutionary evidence goes back to nematostella vectensis (700 million years), the oldest creature with a neural network, whose asymmetry already exhibits the dual-attention pattern.
Clinical evidence: in Wada tests (sodium amytal injected into one carotid artery to isolate a hemisphere), the left hemisphere fills personality inventories with unjustified self-congratulation; the right is mildly self-critical and accurate. Patients with right-hemisphere strokes deny the paralysis of their left side — anosognosia, not deception.
The presencing / re-presenting axis: the right hemisphere first receives any new experience; once the left recognises it and categorises it, the vivid gestalt is replaced by a diagrammatic representation. Goldberg’s research on novelty confirms this. The cultural consequence: academia’s publish-or-perish incentive forces premature closure, destroying the right-hemisphere patience needed to hold ambiguity productively.
Epistemology
Truth has two hemispheric signatures:
- Left: correspondence theory — propositions that accurately map facts, held with brittle certainty
- Right: coherence theory, embodied knowing, heuristics, intuition, imagination
The chapter on reductionism argues that complexity science (which Jim Rutt represents via the Santa Fe Institute) converges with McGilchrist’s position: what is interesting in the world lives in relations and emergences, not decomposed parts. Whitehead’s process philosophy — reality as flows not things, the ‘mountain’ as a wave still in motion — is McGilchrist’s preferred frame.
Consciousness and metaphysics
The EP 155 exchange on consciousness distinguishes:
- Rutt / Searle: consciousness is a specific biological architecture for generating subjective experience; intelligence and consciousness are distinct; E. coli is intelligent but not conscious; self-driving cars may be intelligent without being conscious
- McGilchrist / panpsychism: consciousness can’t emerge from unconscious matter (‘nobody has the slightest idea how that could happen’); it is an ontological primitive; single cells exhibit proto-intelligence that suggests experience is foundational
On quantum mechanics, McGilchrist argues the measurement problem implicates consciousness in field collapse; Rutt contends that ~85% of physicists reject this and that most of the foundational disputes have no experimental resolution. Both agree that quantum mechanics is widely misappropriated at human scales.
On teleology: McGilchrist distinguishes intrinsic from extrinsic purpose and argues life exhibits directional tendency — not predetermined design but genuine orientation. He uses Carse’s finite vs. infinite games as a metaphor: life is an infinite game, not a mechanism headed for a specified output.
Cross-references
- Joscha Bach on Life, Intelligence, Consciousness, AI and the Future of Humans — parallel treatment of consciousness; Bach’s computational models contrast sharply with McGilchrist’s panpsychism
- Roman Yampolskiy on AI Uncontrollability and p(doom) — overlapping questions about the limits of intelligence and the seat of mind
- Sara Walker on the Physics of Life, Time, Complexity and Aliens — assembly theory; convergence with McGilchrist on life’s irreducibility to chemistry
- Joel David Hamkins on Infinity, Gödel Incompleteness and the Mathematical Multiverse — mathematical foundations and limits of formal systems; adjacent to epistemology chapter
- concepts/Hemisphere Lateralisation — McGilchrist’s core framework
- concepts/Panpsychism — his metaphysical position
Related books
- The Matter with Things — the book under discussion (2 vols., 2021)
- The Master and His Emissary — McGilchrist’s earlier work, mentioned throughout