Iain McGilchrist on Quantum Mechanics, Teleology, and the Anthropic Principle
Part two of Jim Rutt’s conversation with Iain McGilchrist on The Matter with Things (2021). EP 154 covered neuropsychology and epistemology; EP 155 completes Part Three of the book — ‘What Then is True?’ — working through quantum mechanics, the emergence debate, teleology, and the anthropic principle. Rutt and McGilchrist hold opposing views on consciousness and reach productive stalemate on the multiverse.
Key ideas
- The measurement problem and consciousness. A minority of physicists hold that conscious observation is involved in quantum decoherence; McGilchrist endorses the view, Rutt maintains the majority position that it is a matter of size and probability, not mind. The debate cannot be settled experimentally; no quantum interpretation has been falsified over another.
- Consciousness cannot emerge from the unconscious. Emergence works when there is a lower-level property that partially anticipates the higher-level one — the fluidity of water follows from hydrogen-oxygen bonding. Consciousness has no ‘nascent’ precursor in unconscious matter. McGilchrist: invoking emergence here is “waving your hands and saying, ‘a miracle happens.’” Therefore consciousness is an ontological primitive, not a biological product.
- Teleology without a designer. Darwin and T.H. Huxley both used the word teleology to describe what evolution achieved. McGilchrist means not a predetermined plan but a tendency: the cosmos has potentia, a directional openness, without specifying which particular outcomes will be actualised. James Carse’s distinction — finite games (extrinsic goal terminates play) versus infinite games (the process is the purpose) — clarifies the difference.
- The anthropic principle: infinity is not an explanation. Positing infinitely many universes to explain fine-tuning is logically equivalent to invoking an engineering God — both are untestable and both shut down enquiry. McGilchrist prefers the view that the universe contains tendencies which tilt the scale toward certain outcomes without specifying them. Playing the ‘infinity card’ is ‘pressing the off button.’
- Hemisphere discrimination as philosophical method. Philosophical disputes that look unresolvable can be adjudicated by asking which framing is more likely to mislead in experience. The Achilles paradox shows that slicing space-time into discrete pieces produces false conclusions; experience corrects the left-hemisphere abstraction. The hemisphere framework provides a method for discriminating between competing metaphysical positions.
Detailed themes
Quantum mechanics and the nature of time
The episode opens in the wake of EP 154’s discussion of time continuity. Rutt: any discontinuity in space-time occurs at Planck-length scales — artefacts of measurement limits, not genuine discontinuity; David Tong (Cambridge) finds no positive evidence for discontinuity anywhere in the cosmos. On quantum interpretation: Rutt counts at least twelve live interpretations with zero experimental discrimination between them and cautions against choosing one to support a philosophical position. Both note Feynman’s dictum — ‘if you understand quantum mechanics, you don’t understand quantum mechanics’ — and Bohm’s suggested rename: ‘unquantum unmechanics.’ Deterministic chaos (billiard balls become unpredictable after eight collisions) and quantum randomness are related but distinct.
The consciousness debate
Rutt’s view (following Searle): consciousness is a specifically biological architecture — a subjective ‘movie’ in which the creature is the actor — that evolved at least twice. Intelligence and consciousness are distinct; E. coli is intelligent (follows glucose gradients) without being conscious. Self-driving cars may be very intelligent without any subjective state.
McGilchrist’s counter: single cells exhibit adaptive responses for which they could not have been programmed (the slime mould, which solves mazes and retains the memory even when a piece is severed). More fundamentally, emergence works when the lower level contains an anticipation of the higher: water’s fluidity follows from its molecular structure. Consciousness has no such precursor in unconscious matter — no ‘nascent consciousness,’ in William James’s phrase. Therefore invoking emergence for consciousness is a hand-wave.
McGilchrist does not dispute the intelligence/consciousness distinction but argues the animate/inanimate distinction is one of degree rather than kind, and that if the cosmos contains tendencies toward complexity, there is no principled level at which consciousness is introduced. He draws support from V.S. Ramachandran and Colin Blakemore’s Oxford Handbook of Science, which concedes consciousness may simply be an ontological primitive.
Purpose, teleology, and the deer
McGilchrist disentangles two confusions that dog the word teleology:
Extrinsic vs intrinsic purpose. In Carse’s terms: finite games have extrinsic purpose, a goal that terminates the game when reached. Infinite games — music, play, the being of a deer — have intrinsic purpose: the process is what the purpose is. Life exhibits the second kind; reducing it to gene propagation is to mistake the extrinsic for the intrinsic.
Designed vs tendential purpose. Teleology in McGilchrist’s sense requires no engineer. It requires only that the cosmos has tendencies which make certain kinds of outcome achievable without those outcomes being specified. A white-tailed deer is not a machine built to propagate genes; it ‘demonstrates one of the ways the verb to be can be inflected.’ It is, like a poem or a piece of music, ‘a phenomenon that is itself a fulfilment of something that is vital and beautiful and complex.’
Rutt notes the deer also has daily purposes (hunger, thirst, route-finding), evolutionary purposes (gene propagation), and something that escapes both frames — its play, its elegance. McGilchrist agrees that these are genuinely different levels of purpose, none of which exhausts what the animal is.
Jim Rutt’s own trajectory — a working-class reader drawn forward by books more than pushed toward carpentry — illustrates the pull-not-push structure of tendential purpose: ‘The books drew me on a completely different trajectory.’ McGilchrist: ‘That’s a lovely example of what I’m meaning.‘
The anthropic principle and the multiverse
The universe’s fundamental constants are extraordinarily fine-tuned: the weak nuclear force, gravitational constant, and electromagnetic constant must fall within narrow ranges for stars, chemistry, or life to be possible. Three responses:
- Weak anthropic principle: we find ourselves in a life-supporting universe because that is the only kind in which we could exist. Obviously true; resolves nothing.
- Strong anthropic principle: an external agent set the parameters intentionally.
- Multiverse: there are so many universes that by probability one works.
McGilchrist rejects the multiverse as ‘playing the infinity card’: ‘Once you start introducing this concept of infinity, statements about it mean nothing effectively… you haven’t really resolved the problem. You’ve just turned it into nonsense.’ He notes the logical equivalence to the engineering God — both posit untestable entities that shut down enquiry. His preferred framing: the cosmos contains tendencies which tilt the scale toward certain outcomes without determining them. Lee Smolin: the probability of a universe with stars is 1 in 10²²⁹; Eugene Koonin gives 1 in 10¹¹¹⁸ for an RNA transcription system. These numbers make the multiverse and the engineering God equally implausible — and the universe’s potentia equally mysterious and real.
John Polkinghorne’s observation: the universe is exactly the right size for there to be one planet on which life arose. The existence of life confirms potentia in the cosmos; it says nothing about ubiquity.
The Fermi paradox and potentia
Rutt asks his standard question: if the universe has potentia for consciousness, where is the other intelligence? McGilchrist is agnostic. Absence of detected intelligence does not prove absence — especially if sufficiently advanced beings stay put. The Fermi paradox does not follow from potentia because potentia does not mean ubiquity. The rest of the observable universe does not appear life-supporting; the fact that it happened here once confirms the cosmos allows it, not that it requires it everywhere.
Hemisphere discrimination
McGilchrist’s closing argument: for the first time in the history of philosophy, it is possible to discriminate between competing philosophical positions — not by finding a standpoint above both hemispheres, but by asking which approach is more likely to be overturned by experience. The test is which frame gets taken by surprise.
His example: the Achilles and tortoise paradox. By slicing space-time into discrete intervals, the left hemisphere reaches a false conclusion (Achilles cannot overtake the tortoise). Experience corrects it. The right hemisphere’s resistance to this slicing — its insistence on continuity — proves more veridical. The same test applies to the emergence debate, the teleology debate, and the consciousness debate: the framing that generates fewer surprises in experience is closer to the truth.
Cross-references
- Iain McGilchrist on Brain Lateralisation, Ways of Knowing, and the Nature of Consciousness — EP 154; companion episode covering neuropsychology and epistemology
- notes/Iain McGilchrist on The Matter With Things — combined notes on EP 154–155
- Iain McGilchrist on Attention, the Sacred, and Consciousness as Ontological Primitive — ToE conversation; overlapping territory on consciousness as ontological primitive and teleology
- Joscha Bach on Life, Intelligence, Consciousness, AI and the Future of Humans — contrasting computational account of consciousness; intelligence/consciousness distinction
- concepts/Panpsychism — McGilchrist’s metaphysical position; consciousness as ontological primitive
- concepts/Consciousness — the hard problem; McGilchrist alongside Searle, Dennett
Related books
- The Matter with Things — the two-volume work under discussion
- The Master and His Emissary — McGilchrist’s earlier work; mentioned in context