Iain McGilchrist on Brain Lateralisation, Ways of Knowing, and the Nature of Consciousness

Iain

We’re not all born gifted with a taste for whiskey, you know.

Iain

Yep.

Iain

Good, good.

Iain

Thanks very much, Jim.

Iain

I’m glad to hear somebody emulating Goebbels. Not many people of our age who do emulate Goebbels these days.

Iain

Yeah, sure. I mean, those listeners who speak either French or German will know that in French, there’s a distinction between savoir, to know the facts about something, and connaître which I have an acquaintance with them. And a similar distinction that’s made in German, between wissen as we are to know, technically, you know that Paris is the capital of France. Whereas I only know Paris in the sense of kennen, when I’ve been there, perhaps lived there a little while. So there’s quite a distinction between knowing something in the abstract as a matter of rapport and knowing something through embodied experience in the way that you know your friends, the great works of arts and so on. That’s the distinction. And the fact that we don’t make that distinction in English rather oddly means that I find quite often that philosophers waste a bit of time on getting to the point about what knowing really means.

Iain

Yes. Yes. Well, for those of you who don’t spend your time gazing at brains, they look rather like a walnut. They’re kind of wrinkly and they’re in two parts with a divide in between the hemispheres. And in fact, only 2% of neurons actually cross the structure at the base of the hemispheres called corpus callosum, which is the principal band of communication, not the only one, but by very long way, the principal band of communication. What’s intriguing is that these hemispheres are separate at all. I mean, if the computing power is a function of connections and the brain is full of these connections, why have a whopping great divide down the middle, which has been accentuated, not diminished by evolution? Why the hemisphere is asymmetrical? The brain is, but the skull isn’t and the world that they’re looking at doesn’t have any kind of regular asymmetry of that kind.

Iain

And this question arises. Why is quite a lot of the traffic between the hemispheres inhibitory? Saying, you keep out of this, I’m dealing with it. And when I first got interested in all these, hemispheres were a very dodgy topic for any serious scientist to get involved with because it had gone into popular psychology and into the popular mind that there was something bogus about this. And that’s simply based on the fact that it was a great deal of excitement in the sixties and seventies of the last century, when people began doing something called a split brain operation for the treatment of intractable epilepsy. And this divides that band of fibers I mentioned called the corpus callosum. And it then became possible for the first time to test, interview and find out more about one hemisphere at a time. And from that came certain very large and gross generalizations, almost all of which are wrong.

Iain

I sometimes, when I’m lecturing, put up a slide from the internet, which has got about 20 of these, and there’s only one that is correct, and I offer a free pizza to anyone who can spot it. But anyway, the point is most of what you’ve heard up till now, unless you’ve read my work, you might as well put out of your mind because most of the stuff about hemispheres is wrong, but just because we got it wrong, doesn’t mean to say that the problem goes away. Why is that this structure and what are the differences? And maybe that’s the point at which I hand back to you, Jim, would you want me to carry on and talk about what those differences are?

Iain

Yes. It’s possibly worth just mentioning briefly that I have an answer to the question why there are these two hemispheres that operate, can operate and sustain a complete picture of the world separately. And that’s because all living creatures we’ve looked at will have anything like a brain, even just a neural network. And the most ancient is a sea creature called nematostella vectensis. It’s 700 million years old and it already has an asymmetrical neural network, which is described as the origin of the brain of higher animals.

Iain

So what is this about? I think in brief, it’s about needing to pay two kinds of attention to the world at the same time. One is this very highly focused attention to a detail, very precise already kind of conceived as important because I want to get that seed. I want to catch that rabbit. I want to pick up that twig to build a nest, whatever it is. It’s in the service of manipulating the world, using it, utilizing it, but not necessarily any good for understanding it. At the same time, the right hemisphere is keeping a completely different kind of attention open, which is sustained, vigilant to the whole picture. And these compliment one another. And if you only had the narrow focused attention, you wouldn’t survive because while you were getting your lunch, you become somebody else’s. You’ve got to have a picture of the whole scene.

Iain

Now this leads in a logical way to a whole host of differences. For instance, the left hemisphere tends to see isolated elements, isolated fragments, whereas the right hemisphere tends to see a picture in which everything ultimately is connected and nothing is seen out of its context, whereas the left hemisphere of you being very narrow sheers off the context. And that’s terribly important because of context is what makes a thing, what it is. And then there are some differences in the sense that the left hemisphere is aiming to catch something, to capture it. It takes like a snapshot that is kind of very, very thin in space and time.

Iain

Whereas the right hemisphere is seeing a flowing picture, which is moving all the time and changing. Then there is the fact that the right hemisphere understands implicit information. Implicit, meaning body language, reading the face, metaphors, sense of humor, puns, irony, all the kind of stuff that a computer wouldn’t get. Whereas the left hemisphere is like a very efficient computer that has a good lexicon and some rules of grammar for creating sentences. Broadly speaking, if something is complex, the right hemisphere needs to be called in to take a look at it. And there’s another difference, which is that the right hemisphere tends to see things that are animate as animate. And indeed we think that it can see things as animate, even if we wouldn’t normally class them as animate. Whereas the left hemisphere seems to prefer machines, tools and things that are inanimate. And even if they’re not in our experience, they will become so in the left hemisphere’s view.

Iain

And I’ll just say one more, there are a number of others, but just say one more because this is so, so important. And at first glance or the first hearing, it may not strike the listener as such. It’s that there’s a difference between the map and the world that is mapped. There’s a difference between a theory about reality and what you actually learn about it from the full panoply of experience.

Iain

And this is a distinction that is sustained here between the hemispheres. The right hemisphere, presences the world to use a term of Heidegger’s. But what it means is basically that the world, the phenomenological world, that we know, that we experience comes into being for us first in the take of the right hemisphere, the left hemisphere almost immediately starts to categorize it, to abstract it, to take it in, put it into a box, put it into a pigeon hole, and it’s already become not what it was, but a representative of something much smaller. It’s become diagrammatic. And this business about having a map is terribly important. I mean, maps are very, very useful. Don’t get me wrong, but you would be a bit of an idiot if you mistook the map for the place that is mapped and tried to live in the map. To cut a long story short, I believe that’s where we’re at.

Iain

I would think so on two grounds, one is that it is generally true that orientation in space is much better performed in the right hemisphere, having a sense of where things are in the real world around. And because it requires as you just demonstrated the collation of a whole lot of intuitively perceived information, the only thing I would disagree with, I’m not sure you actually meant to say this or did say it, but the idea that as it were the prey and the predator are all well served by the left hemisphere. They’re not. The left hemisphere is looking for prey. The right hemisphere is looking out for that predator. While the left hemisphere is saying, yes, this stuff is edible get on and eat it. The right hemisphere is saying, but what’s that over there in the grass?

Iain

Yeah.

Iain

Exactly. And just while we’re on that, you mentioned that they do this, turn their heads. It’s rather a nice detail that we’ve looked at birds and animals and more often than would happen by chance. They turn so that they’re left hemisphere is engaged with prey and their right hemisphere is engaged with looking at a predator. They’ll sometimes move their heads right round in a way that doesn’t look natural at the time in order to make the hemisphere connection.

Iain

Yes. Well the very simple way of looking at it is the left hemisphere is looking to manipulate something. It needs to have something that it knows, first of all, it’s familiar with and it knows it needs, and it knows that it is an example of that thing that it wants. And in all those respects, it prioritizes certain knowledge as it were non ambiguous knowledge. It doesn’t want both hand. It wants an either-or, whereas the right hemisphere is the one which it first takes in any new experience.

Iain

This has been researched by Elkhonon Goldberg over many, many years. And it doesn’t really matter what that new experience is, whether it’s a new piece of music or a new idea or a new object. It’s first taken in, if you like, by the right hemisphere. And then when the left hemisphere sees, I think I know what that is. Then it puts it into a category.

Iain

And at that moment, the vivid presence and the whole gestalt, as you refer to it, the whole sort of picture that is more than the sum of its parts gets lost. And it gets substituted by a breakdown and analysis and a disembodiment. It’s become an idea of what it was rather than the thing itself. This has certain interesting and important consequences that the left hemisphere would rather jump to a conclusion than be a bit patient because the information is not at all clear. It tends to rush in and make a judgment and then be very, very unwilling to shift. Whereas the right hemisphere is much more able to see, well, yes, it does look like that, but it could be something else. So it’s a much finer, more discriminatory perceiver.

Iain

In terms of the expiration of knowledge, I mean, I’m essentially an academic. One of the devastating things that’s happened is that people have scored on how much they publish. And this has a number of bad effects as you can imagine. But one of them is that they’re force to jump to conclusion early on in an exploratory process and pressure is put on them to have a result. Whereas actually being able to hold that open and not collapse, the ambiguity will allow a much richer picture to develop. That’s all I wanted to say.

Iain

Yes, there are many asymmetries, but that’s an interesting one isn’t it? It’s really extreme optimism. The left hemisphere is way out, whereas the right hemisphere is mildly more pessimistic than it needs to be. There’s a test called the Wada test in which you can isolate one hemisphere for a few minutes at a time by injecting sodium amytal into the carotid artery. And in this circumstance, sometimes people have to undergo in order to have brain surgery. Some enterprising psychologists gave the subject of a personality inventory to fill out about themselves and gave the same one to friends and relatives to fill in and see whether they tallied. And in the case of the right hemisphere, there was a bit of a tally, but it turned out that the person had an unnecessarily kind of poor view of themselves. But the left hemisphere is full of BS.

Iain

It thinks it’s the most gifted thing on the planet. And it has a very great respect for certain intellect and its insight, which is not warranted by the fact. And one little detail just to hammer this one home. When somebody’s had a right hemisphere stroke, they’re just dependent on their left hemisphere. The left side of their body may be paralyzed, but they will actually deny that it’s paralyzed. You ask them if they have any problem using it and you can see that it’s paralyzed. They say, “No, no,” you say “Well, move it then”. And they go, “There,” and nobody sees anything move, but they just don’t shift from that position. Cause that’s unfortunate when you are faced with, as we are now with all sorts of big crises, wicked problems, because if you are just ridiculously optimistic then you won’t take the necessary action in time.

Iain

Yes. Well, it is fascinating and the term opponent processes belongs to Sir Charles Sherrington, who’s a very distinguished physiologist at the end of the 19th century. And he pointed out that in many cases where you want to have fine discrimination, it’s much better to have the balance of two opposing forces. One way of thinking about this is that you want to paint something that is very, very delicate and get precise movements to the brush, rather than just leave your hand free to do it. It’s probably better to push the hand slightly with the other hand. And there’s a kind of much finer control possible by using the two opposing forces. In any case that we have these, they’ve evolved to compliment one another, but there is a problem in their relationship because the left hemisphere knows very much less. It’s much more limited in its understanding. And like people who know very much less, it thinks it knows everything. Whereas the right hemisphere, knowing far more doubts that it knows everything.

Iain

So there is a dynamic here, which you can imagine in human terms between an arrogant faculty, that is nothing like as good as it thinks it is. And another faculty that is wise that can look after the two of them. And one important difference is that the right hemisphere realizes that it needs what the left hemisphere can offer, but it appears that the left hemisphere has no inkling of what the right hemisphere is up to and is not interested in finding out.

Iain

There is that dynamic and it’s something that’s reflected, as I discovered in writing this last book. Discovered only in the last decade. That across the world in many mythologies, there is a story of two brothers or an emperor and a general and so on. In the story that is told, one of them is good and sees a lot. And as long as the other party is willing to be guided by the one that sees more, then things work well. But when it becomes peremptory, arrogant, thinks it knows everything, then big trouble happens. Most of the mythologies suggest that the kingdom or whatever it is that’s in question will fall apart. That’s just an inkling of that topic that you raise.

Iain

Well, I like your idea of the curse of attention, because it’s also the curse of attention is that we get distracted to these little points and run around. Well, like you, I think attention is fundamentally important and it is the most profound difference between the two hemispheres from which the rest follows. And I say attention changes the world. If you pay attention in one way, you see a certain kind of world. If you pay attention in a different way, you see a completely different one that has different qualities. So attention changes the world and makes it what it is for us. But it also makes us what we are, the people who are doing the attending. So if you regularly attend in a very cold detached and rather cynical way, you become that kind of a person and insights you’d have had from another attention that come to you.

Iain

So, like all these things, it’s a [inaudible 00:27:59] process. It’s a two-way thing in. You said earlier on, the cyclical relationship, all these things have this kind of cyclical relationship, I believe. And what happens is that it changes things like time and space, which I come to talk about in the last part of the book. But it makes differences to the everyday world, how we see things, whether we see their unique qualities, whether we just see their general qualities and whether we feel we have a relationship with this thing or whether we don’t. We feel we are totally detached observing it, all these changes depend on the nature of attention. And the first big chapter in part one is devoted to this question of differences in attention in space and time as well.

Iain

Jim, I’d just… I’d like to comment, Jim, if I may. Yeah. One easy sort of way to about it is that depth in space, that three dimensional quality. Depth in time, the sense of something that’s not just instantaneous, but actually has continuity. And depth in emotion, not just superficial irritable reactions, but actually a deep feeling. These are all dependent on the right hemisphere and when the right hemisphere is damaged or not functioning right, then you get shallowness of the sense of space, of the sense of time and of emotion.

Iain

Yes, well, as I say, the frontal cortex of each hemisphere, has the effect of inhibiting, first of all, its own posterior cortex. So the left frontal lobes inhibit things that are going on in the left posterior cortex and the right has the same pattern. And this is again, a kind of opponent processor. There are a number of these in the brain top versus bottom, left versus right and front versus back. So that the posterior parts of the brain may be driving a certain way. And the frontal lobes are saying, “No, hang on, we need a bit of distance here. Let’s think about this.” So that’s very important for, as you say, right action in the world. What’s intriguing is that the right hemisphere is both better at for example, having useful intuitions, emotional awareness and inhibiting them when required. So people often think of the right hemisphere because all the pop psychologists as a kind of let it all hang out, man hemisphere. But it’s actually not at all.

Iain

It’s the one that is with watching out and saying, “This may not be the case at all. Hang on, we’re going to inhibit this because it’s not that kind of let it all hang out one.” The left hemisphere, interestingly, in terms of emotions, it is sometimes portrayed as, this rather boring hemisphere. I mean, it’s got no personality, but at least it’s reliable. Well, this is completely wrong. First of all, it does have some kind of a personality, as I’ve suggested. It does have emotions and the emotion that lateralizes most strongly is anger. And it lateralizes to the left hemisphere and it’s not reliable. It’s in fact extremely unreliable. So when you are thinking of right action in the world, and I would share that very much, Jim, as you know from reading the book, I side very much with the pragmatist tradition of philosophy, particularly in America, [inaudible 00:32:56] first, William James, John Dew, so forth.

Iain

So yes, getting it right, depends on this ability to inhibit things. And it also allows us to have that distance that I was talking about before, what I call necessary distance. If you’re trying to assess something, say it’s a picture, you can be so close to it or to a book that you can’t read it, or you can be so far away that you don’t really see it. There is a perfect distance that allows you to see enough, to be able to take in the whole picture. And the frontal lobes are what allow us more than pretty much any other creatures of even more than lonely, great apes, but they can do this just stand back and be able to take those broader views.

Iain

Yeah. Well, reductionism is useful for finding out what the parts of something are… And it is modeled on the idea of a machine, we make machines. And so there is an assumption that maybe everything that exists around is put together in that sort of way, but it isn’t. And often when you take the things apart, you lose entirely the sense of what they are. I mean, very obvious example is a piece of music. If you take it apart, you find it’s made of notes. Well, oh, good. We’re getting somewhere. What is a note? Well, it’s a musical sound. Ah, so that sound, what does it mean? Precisely nothing. And if I put another one with it, that also means precisely nothing. Wait a moment. After about 38,000 of these, I’ve got some wonderful symphony. How did that happen? And the answer is that it’s all in the relations that were taken out in order to get to the parts.

Iain

So my view is, and it may sound, I hope it sounds paradoxical, but I do argue for it in the last part of the book. And I’m backed up there by certain physicists, that relations are actually prior to the things that are related. The things that are related only become what they are in and through the relationships that they belong to. In other words, the context makes them what they are. So reductionism is good if you just want to intervene in a mechanism and make a change. And very often that is indeed what we want to do. It is how we have useful impact on the world. But it’s a mistake to go from there to saying that we understand it just because we can intervene in a very, very complex system, which is so manifold and recursive, that it can’t be made into a linear system at all.

Iain

Just because we can freeze a little section of that and see a little chain of causation and go, “Wow, I can intervene in there and bingo, I’ve got a result.” You can do that, but you can’t build from that little success to the idea that tells me how the whole thing has its being. It doesn’t.

Iain

Yeah. I would definitely agree with that. Not sure about the dancer and the dancer. I’m a follower of process philosophy. The most famous person in that sphere is [inaudible 00:38:27] Whitehead. And I effectively believe that what we see as things which implies somehow that they’re contained and perhaps rather static and forgiven or push is a mistake. If we see it that way, because what they really are all processes. I sometimes give the example of the mountain behind my house, which looks very solid, a very great big lump and a thing. But actually if you had a time lapse camera going back 13 billion years, you would see that it’s part of a wave that still hasn’t finished its motion. So yeah, this business of freezing things, exerting little tiny parts. And yes, it can tell you something about the little bit you’re looking at, but it can’t tell you about the bigger picture. And I sometimes quote Yates saying, “How can we tell the dancer from the dance? Because in a way, we are what we do, we become what our actions and interactions in the world make us”.

Iain

Yeah. I mean, that’s absolutely right. And of course my point is not that thinking of things as objects in daily life is necessarily wrong from a pragmatic point of view. I’m really making a philosophical point that actually when you come to look at them, that they’re better understood as processes, some very slow processes, some much more rapid processes. But it stops one from making elementary mistakes, like seeing them as sharply defined and distinct from the environment that they thrive in. So I think we don’t really disagree about that.

Iain

Well, yes, it is a big topic. Chapter 12 of the book is about biology and the ways in which the machine model doesn’t reflect the nature of what we’re looking at. And there I look at about eight different ways in which an organism is not really like a machine and we are of course, very complex organisms. So yeah, it’s… What would you like me to say about it? I don’t really.

Iain

Yes.

Iain

Yeah. But it is… No I’ve written about it quite a lot. Yeah. I mean, machines are essentially far simpler than we are. Aren’t any machines that are nearly as complex as we are. They tend to be closed systems. They tend to be close to the point of equilibrium. Whereas things in nature don’t have defined borders. They’re in complex interrelationship with the environment, with everything around them. They are usually maintained far from a point of equilibrium. They can’t be switched on and switched off in the way a machine can and hope to still exist. If I switch off anybody, that’s it. They’re dead. They’re finished. They can’t come back again, but the machine can be started up again and so forth. So there’s a lot of these differences and they don’t come into being in the way the machine… A machine is put together for a purpose by us.

Iain

We are not as far as we know for a specific purpose of some other being, which doesn’t mean that we don’t have purpose. That’s a separate argument. We’d have to talk about that at some point. But so we are different in that respect. And yeah, we’re not put together like that. And we can’t be treated like that. When a human being or an organism of any kind is growing, it’s not sort of first made by a force that puts bits together. The whole thing is differentiating all the time that is growing as an organism is developing things like the heart, the liver, the spleen or whatever are not sort of put together. They emerge seamlessly out of the hole that is growing all the time. And a machine, it doesn’t write its own code at the same time that it’s being made.

Iain

Whereas organisms appear to do this, which is really a very remarkable fact. The often quoted idea that somehow [inaudible 00:44:49] idea, basically, that we are the lumbering robots controlled by these machines that are genes for their own purpose, but molecular boil, she doesn’t show that at all. As I report in that book. In fact, it shows that the cell tends to use and draw on the genome as a supply, a store of supplies as it can call on… In circumstances. It may never have been as a program to understand, but nonetheless reacts to intelligently.

Iain

Yes. The purpose of the whole book is to arrive at some understanding of who we are. And because I think nowadays we have no clue. We image ourselves as these strange, machine [inaudible 00:46:47], which we’re not. So we have to have some idea about how we come towards ideas that are truer than others. And I’m not suggesting that there is one simple truth, but we wouldn’t be able to do anything or say anything unless we believe that certain things were truer than others. So how do we get that? You are referring to two important strands in the thinking about what is truth. The purpose of the chapter in which I discuss them is to suggest that there’s a difference between the left hemisphere’s idea of truth and the right hemisphere idea of truth. But in any case to come to your question, correspondence truth is the idea that the propositions that we make or have the thoughts, beliefs that we have a kind of version of the world, they reflect the world so that we’ve got a model to be able to work on.

Iain

Whereas, coherence theory says it’s not about correspondence in a one to one way. It’s more about do these various aspects of what we believe to be true, make a coherent whole? And I don’t think that either of these is right and I quote Anthony Quinton saying that probably truth will turn out to be an amalgam of these points of view. But I think we can also, using the hemisphere approach, see a certain difference, which is that the left hemisphere is again viewing the world, the cosmos as made of things of stuff, bits here and there. Whereas the right hemisphere is likely to prioritize relationships. This is what it is always seeing in both the human and the non human world. And so it’s interested in the relationships that come and go between the observer and the thing that’s observed. And the idea of this is not truth as a thing or correctness, which is lies in a way behind all the left hemisphere versions of how we get it truth, including the coherence theory and the correspondence theory.

Iain

It’s not so much like that as a clearing a way of error. So it’s working [inaudible 00:49:00] or it’s working in the way that science actually works, which is to clear a way mistakes. Science never says this is true. It just says, this doesn’t look true on the basis of what we know now. And that leaves you with something else that you can work with. So that chapter’s really designed to show that the idea of truth as a process. It’s a never ending journey of a [inaudible 00:49:25] kind in which our consciousness and the consciousness of what is around us come into alignment. And this doesn’t really have the same features as a world of things that are in principle knowable, even if we can’t actually know them too well.

Iain

That’s right. And I oppose to that, the idea of truth is [unconcealing 00:51:05] in other words, clearing away so that we see the picture ever more clearly, rather as a sculptor makes a statue, not by putting together an arm, a leg ahead, and a torso, but by actually clearing away the stone, that makes the thing stand out. And as you remember, I talk in one of the chapters about logical paradox, which again, we could talk for two hours about those. They’re so fascinating. But the paradox that you can’t find the right moment when something that is static begins to move means that motion must be an illusion. This was a conclusion arrived at by [inaudible 00:51:45]. And to some extent, believed by Plato. We don’t know, but I mean, he sometimes talks like that. Because it’s moving now, but it was completely static before.

Iain

There must be a moment where it suddenly started to be moving. And there must… Because a tadpole doesn’t look like a frog. And at the beginning of the protest tadpole at the end of it’s a frog. There must be a moment which before that it was a tadpole. And after that it was a frog, but of course there is no such. That’s a left hemisphere demand for clean cut boundaries and absolute and certain knowledge.

Iain

Yes, yes. And how incredibly inefficient it is, how [inaudible 00:52:59] and angry baking it is. How it wastes time and resources, things that used to be done so quickly and cheaply on the say so of somebody now involves the waste of my time, your time, a bureaucrat’s time while they work through all these forms and box ticking and all the rest. And at the end of the day, you come up with an answer that’s less good than it would’ve been. If you’d allowed a human being to use their judgments. So there we go.

Iain

Yes. Well, as you say, they are obviously an important part of how we come to decisions, and they get better as you get older, as you might expect, since they’re derived from experience. But they’re only one aspect of what I would call intuition. I think I rather arbitrarily talk about, I don’t know, oh, half a dozen, or seven or eight types of intuition, of which one is heuristics.

Iain

And the thing that amuses me is that there’s an economist called Markovich, I think, who probably got a Nobel Prize for whatever it was he worked out, which was a massively complex formula for how to make a right decision about investing. But when he retired and came to invest his money, he followed an ancient Judaic principle of putting a third in property, a third in possessions and a third in the bank, which is a heuristic.

Iain

What I want to emphasize is that there’s more to intuition than that. And there’s some marvelous, I think, information that came to me, unbidden, from people who read my book. One is a person who looks after cross country motorcyclists, who are doing 200 miles an hour, not in a stadium.

Iain

And a man who’s a tipster for horses who roped me after reading The Master and His Emissary, and we had a very interesting conversation. I won’t go into all of that. But what I’m really saying is there are lots of different strands to the way in which we come to find judgment. And in a way, an explicit judgment that’s worked out in serial sentences narrows down that range of perhaps eight or a dozen different things that we are weighing up, quite subtly, out the glare of consciousness, and reduces to some one thing that we’re going to say in this sentence. So, it’s been argued by some very distinguished theorists and others that we would be well advised to ask people who have important decisions to make, not to use the sort of procedures that are now enjoined on them. But in fact, to use their intuition.

Iain

Well, I can’t do that. Partly because my memory is terrible and I can’t remember at all. But it’s worth saying to readers who won’t have seen my book that I talk about four different ways in which most people would say, we get some sort of handle on what’s true and it’s opposite. And one is obviously science and another is reason. And then there’s intuition and imagination.

Iain

And what I suggest, to cut a very long story short, is that we need each of these, not just one, as is often, or perhaps two. We need to bring as many as possible into play in answering any question. Not all of them will always be appropriate to every topic, but mostly we can bring together at least three of these to produce better decisions. And I try to show that is the case, that when we do, as you say, there’s a lot of experimental data there. That when people simply follow algorithms and logical procedures, they make poorer decisions.

Iain

So, perhaps I ought to say a little bit about the imagination, because that is something that most people, I think, misunderstand because of the way it’s talked about in our culture. Imagination has been reduced to the level of pure fantasy, and so the idea that imagination helps us to get nearer the truth, to most people, would seem paradoxical. Probably, imagination is how we escape from truth, but it isn’t at all. That’s what fantasy is.

Iain

But imagination is the faculty whereby we can actually see the world afresh, without the veil of all the thoughts and accretions that we have added to it by our abstract thinking getting in the way. And so, we have to reimagine things in order for them to be alive again, for them to understand their true nature.

Iain

This is a point, really, which is absolutely central to the thought of Colleridge and Wordsworth. And it’s the difference between as, as it were, knowing there’s a picturesque scene here. Yes, it’s a mountain. It’s a lake. It’s a waterfall. And actually being in the presence of it and suddenly, for the first time, realizing the powerful nature. There’s an encounter.

Iain

And very important to my whole philosophy is the idea of encounters. The special kinds of encounters that we have with reality. They’re not propositions. What makes them different is dispositions, how we dispose our attention. And I claim that belief is, in fact, a matter, not of propositions that we have to sign up to, absurd ideas that we have to think are probably right six times before breakfast. But instead, a matter of a disposition that we hold towards the world. So, yeah, that’s probably as much as I can say about that at the moment.

Iain

No, no, completely right. That’s an administration of my point that the most important thing in science is the intuition that is better served by the right hemisphere. It doesn’t mean to say that all that work a day plotting doesn’t have to be done. Somebody’s got to do it, and that is part of the process. But it must always be in service to something greater than itself.

Iain

This is really the point I was making earlier about, as long as the right hemisphere is, as it were, superintending the process and the left hemisphere is serving its goals, its ends, that’s fine. But when the left hemisphere thinks it knows it all, then things start going wrong. And George Gaylord Simpson, who you know is a very important figure in the genesis of what’s called a modern synthesis, said, in fact, very few discoveries in science, and I can think of hardly any were made by the scientific method at all. And that scientists don’t mainly use the scientific method. A point was also made by Conrad Lawrence.

Iain

In fact, it is a largely intuitive thing in which one’s testing out one’s intuitions against empirical evidence. But I take a lot of examples from above all mathematicians and also from scientists. I mean, Einstein being one extremely famous example of how the discoveries are made in this intuitive way. And they often can’t explain why they’re right until months later, when they’ve done a lot of pencil and paperwork.

Iain

You’re basically making the central point of my philosophy, which is a both and, not an either or. The left hemisphere thinks, “Well, which is it then? Is it intuition or is it this serial analysis?” And the answer is that we need both, but we need them to be in a certain sort of relationship, one to the other. And it’s not a matter of doing away with either, but the trouble is that the way we think nowadays, we tend to downplay the importance of whatever can’t be followed by an algorithm or a computer, or whatever it might be.

Iain

In fact, intuitions can be mistaken. Of course they can. So can arriving at a solution simply by pure logic. There is a name for people who use only logic to arrive at their conclusions. It’s schizophrenia. And those are people who haven’t lost their reason, but they have lost thing but their reason and have to arrive at the strangest conclusions from evidence that puzzles them, without any counterbalance from intuitive understanding, which the rest of us have from experience. So, each way, as I say, has its strengths and its weaknesses, science reason, intuition and imagination. It’s just determining what they are. That’s what I try to lay out in that part two of the book.

Iain

Hm. Hm. That’s much more of a theme from The Master and His Emissary, isn’t it? Yes. Well, what can I say? There’s a chapter on each in The The Master and His Emissary. The Renaissance was an era in which I see the best of what the left hemisphere contribute and the best of what the right hemisphere can contribute, working together, in the way that I’ve described. We need both of these. And it produced amazing riches in art, in music, in literature, in philosophy, in the sciences, all the sciences. In law making, across the board.

Iain

If I’d been alive at the time of the Enlightenment, I would undoubtedly have been entirely a paid up supporter of it. I think, in retrospect, what has happened is that the idea that certain things can be more or less ruled out because we can see something different. We can see something more logical has taken over our understanding too great an extent, so that everything that doesn’t really fit with a reductionist logic is not given the time of day.

Iain

That is the problem with it. And in retrospect, one can see problems with the Enlightenment, the hubris of it, essentially. The, “We know it all and we can make it all right,” which I think is very worrying. And I imagine one of the things we will disagree about is the optimism and enthusiasm of people who think they can create a new, better world. I think there are great dangers to that. And most of the absolutely atrocious crimes on humanity have been carried out by people who wanted to create a different society that they said would be better and fairer and all the rest. So, it’s Stalin and it’s Mao and it’s Pol Pot, and so on. But we don’t need to go there at all.

Iain

Wonderful. Jim, what’s happening? I hope to find something on which we disagree, but it doesn’t seem we do cause I’m completely in support of what you’ve just said.

Iain

Well, let’s have [crosstalk 01:10:00]

Iain

Oh, but he was a polymath wasn’t he? I mean, he contributed to so many things. Did you know, one fun thing about CS Pierce is that he must have had relatively independent use of his hemispheres because he’s, reportedly, was able to write a problem with his left hand and the same time, right the answer to it with his right hand.

Iain

Yeah. No, I profoundly believe that. And it ties up with Nassim Nicholas Talib’s concept of anti-fragility. This edge of what is ordered and disordered. And it comes out, many times, in physics and in other places. But it seems to me a truth about living, that if a society sticks too much to the same and what is known, it fossilizes. But if it doesn’t have an active and working tradition, which is the only way in which you can innovate. Traditions don’t fossilize things. They are the current in which you can go on to produce new things, which are coherent with what you know from the past. Not just random ideas that have no context. So, we need both the shift and we need movement, and we need a degree of break on that movement. And it’s there, that I think is the creative part. Yeah.

Iain

Well, I’m no fan of woo woo, as you say. My view is that the best position on this was adopted by Heroclitus, where I quote at the beginning of a chapter call, the one and the many, I think. And that follows a chapter called The Coincidence of Opposites. So, you can see, I’m not a great fan of just block-like unity thinking.

Iain

The drive of the cosmos seems, to me, to be differentiation, the kind of multiplying of differences, which is fabulous, but within a unity that is not destroyed by that process. So, you can have the one and the other, and that’s exactly the point I make when I say, “And one as many. So now what?”

Iain

Yeah, I think there’s a different, isn’t there, in what one’s doing, as to what is important information. For example, if I’m building a garage, I don’t need to take into account the curvature of the earth, but if I’m going on a voyage by sea, I do need to take into account the curvature of the earth. Now, I would say that, if your aim is to make a decision about a business in the boardroom, or what you’re going to have for dinner, then the fact that, as it were, some of my atoms are joy riding in your workshop, it really doesn’t come into it. But if your purpose is, instead, to come at some understanding of what, ultimately, is, then it becomes interesting again.

Iain

Well, I’d say it’s a new name for common sense, but common sense is very rare nowadays. It’s not encouraged at all for people to have common sense.

Iain

Oh, absolutely. Yeah.

Iain

Yes, I think when has to distinguish between, again, the limitations of auditory apparatus and cortex, and what we think is actually the case. Of course, it’s a very difficult thing to talk about, and one can’t be adamant, and I have no desire to be adamant about any of these things. But my reading of the physicists, and I quote a number there, but particularly David Tong, who’s professor of physics at Cambridge, that there is no evidence for discontinuity. All the evidences for continuity. And the idea of discontinuity comes from the left hemisphere’s way of putting things together from the parts.

Iain

Now, you say it doesn’t make any difference, but philosophically it makes all the difference. Whether you are dealing with a concatenation of discreet objects, like a train and its carriages, or whether you are dealing with something like a river, in which there are no distinct slices at all. It is a seamless flow. This makes an enormous difference because, when we start thinking in this analytic way, we are back to the left hemisphere’s problem, that things start to look mechanical. Can we treat this as, actually, this is a thing. This is a slice, and it’s separate from that. But importantly, I think for its meaning, including its human meaning, it’s just not discontinuous.

Iain

No, no, that’s fair.

Iain

There is no evidence for that, I’m not a physicist, but as far as my reading of the physicists go, though. As you know, I am very …

Iain

As my reading of the physicist go though, as you know I am very fond of and admiring of the work of Lee Smolin. I think that it’s an important distinction.

Iain

Come on.

Iain

Well, as you know, I talk about the idea that if consciousness just evolved out of something that was unconscious completely unconscious, it would have to have done so at least three times. I cite that precise evidence you’ve just discussed. But to me, there is a problem about the idea of consciousness arising out of something that has no consciousness at all. It’s not like any other example of evolution that we could name. And it seems to be not susceptible to this black boxing idea that really emerged in how on earth can consciousness emerge out of something that has no consciousness. You can see how consciousness can evolve to different levels and different kinds. But to me, there is a logical problem with the idea that consciousness actually just arose spontaneously out of unconscious matter. I believe as a lot of philosophers now do believe in the West and have always believed in other places, but it’s now hit the mainstream of Anglo-American analytic philosophy, I believe in panpsychism.

Iain

So I believe this is not a peculiar thing it’s, I do think it’s remarkable. I don’t think it’s dull and pedestrian in the way that you sort of implied. I think it’s the most, all inspiring thing about our existence. And it’s also the most certain thing about our existence. The one thing we cannot say we don’t know is consciousness because we each have direct experience of it and we couldn’t even talk about it or deny it without consciousness. So, that’s clear. On the Élan vital, I mean, of course I don’t, I think that’s an idea that’s been misunderstood and I certainly wouldn’t back the idea that something tincture is added in to make life, but you see then I don’t think that there is a hard and fast difference between animacy and inanimacy.

Iain

Very early on in the book, I say that many of the things that we think of as normal, and then there are departures from it should be seen the other way around. So for example, the Newtonian universe, basically things are static unless they’re given a push. Whereas my belief is that things are essentially in motion and that stasis, which can’t actually be completely achieved is the limit case of motion. There are many others, but just to get back to the point about life, I think that inanimacy is the limit case of animacy in which inanimacy is reduced to the completely vestigial, but the same principles that work for life, organization of various kinds and the drives of them, it applied to the inanimate world as well. It’s just that what happens in the animate world happens billions of times faster than it does in the inanimate world and seems to be more responsive so that it doesn’t just plot onwards, it kind of sees something and responds to it.

Iain

Those are the distinctions. I would say that characterize life is that it does what the universe does faster than inanimacy. And it does it in a more seeing way or a more responsive way, so that there’s a kind of proper dialogue as it were between the creature and the rest of whatever there is. So I don’t think we do agree on that, no, but as you know, that’s a long chapter. I mean, it’s length of a short book, so there’s an awful lot in it. I do deal with all the sort of things that you would say, which is, I mean, you are aspirating in a very common position. I’m not least bit surprised, but it involves promissory materialism that things that we can’t actually explain, but will be explained sooner, as long as we do a few more experiments. I don’t hold that one.

Iain

Yes, probably 12.

Iain

You’ve talked about how evolution works, but you haven’t in any sense addressed my problem about how consciousness can in any case arise out of something that is utterly unconscious, and you haven’t addressed the idea of how life can arise out or something that doesn’t live. Although that’s a much easier thing to argue than it is to argue how consciousness comes out of something that has no consciousness. I don’t dispute your point about darkness and diet and all that.

Iain

But this still leaves us with the question. These creature has consciousness. It’s able to do these things. And there are plenty of biologists who say single cells are conscious. It makes complete sense to me, single celled organisms. One of the most remarkable things that I quote in the book is slime molds. Slime molds can escape from their petri dishes. If less, the lids are bated down. They can solve mazes. And if you cut the slime mold up, which has absolutely no, it’s just a cellular blob, the parts of the blob will remember how to solve the maze that they solved when they were one single blob. I mean, it’s a very interesting and odd finding.

Iain

I have no idea how you come to have that certainty. How can you tell from looking at the outside of something amazingly, we thought until the 1970s that neonatal babies had no consciousness and they were operated on widely generally in fact without anesthetics. And it was only in the ’70s that guidance was given that on the whole neonate should be given an anesthetic. So I am … Decisions about what’s going on inside another creature need to be open rather than closed down in that way. And of course, if you define consciousness in a certain rather limited way, then you can deny it, of course, because that’s a definitional problem, as you said, but if it’s the ability for example, to solve a problem in an intelligent way, the organism can’t be sort of programmed for, then there’s a very reasonable chance that it has a kind of consciousness.

Iain

So I don’t think you’re doing justice to the evidence or the… obviously you don’t agree with my arguments, but as I say, I can’t make any… There are no completely knockdown arguments on either side. So we just have to agree to disagree about that one.

Iain

No, it’s not just definitional

Iain

Well.

Iain

Well, there are two things to say about that. One is that this whole idea, in my view, an absolutely classic left hemisphere misunderstanding that consciousness is something going on inside a self filled sort of hermetically sealed box as sort of how homunculus watching a film. That’s exactly what’s wrong with the left hemisphere is misunderstanding of what consciousness is. As you know, I argue from much earlier in the book that when we perceive things, we do actually perceive something outside of ourselves.

Iain

And that perception exists, we don’t know quite where in the space, but it’s not necessary if you confine it to a kind of sealed room, which we imagine inside the head, so whether sea algae is watching a movie or not, well, I frankly doubt it very much, but Barbara McClintock got a Nobel prize in the 1980s for her work on exactly single celled organisms. And she points out that they can make intelligent decisions that they can’t be programmed for that would never have happened to them in the natural world, but they can be artificially put upon them and inflicted on them in a lab. So this is very extraordinary. And I think anybody who says, well, they just don’t have intelligence is going further than any information warrants.

Iain

Well, intelligence can’t be different from understanding because in fact that’s what the word means in its roots. And intelligence is something that implies an understanding and that’s really all she’s saying is something understands that it needs to do a certain thing. It doesn’t react in the blind way that a programed system would. That is the entire point of it. And I think that if you say, well, they have intelligence but they don’t have consciousness then you are now saying that things can behave intelligently without having any kind of consciousness. And I don’t know how you know that either.

Iain

Well, yes, it’s this. No sane person thinks that we can finally decide whether another entity has consciousness, because we would have to be that entity inside that entity as it were to know. So it’s merely a question of which theory helps explain more and is more consistent with what we know. And I think as we come to understand more and more about the intelligent behavior of plants, of single celled organisms and so on, that the onus is on those who say there is no consciousness here to, I mean, you can’t be finally decided because as I say, unless somebody could get inside of another creature or another organism, we can’t answer this. But for my money, the argument I put forward is more constant with what we know. And there’s a lot in that chapters. I say it’s nearly 100 pages long.

Iain

Well, I don’t mean anything very different from what most people would think of as values, though it might surprise some people that in a kind of attempt to understand what there is in the cosmos, I would include along with space, time consciousness matter and so on. I would include values. But philosophers who have a completely different approach from me have also argued. For example, Derek Parfit who’s very much in the Anglo-American analytic tradition has argued that values must be on some logical primitives. So what we take to be good, what we take to be beautiful, what we take to be true, over time and different places may change. It doesn’t change quite as much as people argue who want to suggest that we make it all up, but they do change. Sure, but it’s not that as it were goodness, beauty and truth can be made to come into existence.

Iain

They have to, as it were exists rather than the where did I suggest that consciousness has to exist. They are elements of our consciousness of our response to the world. And I said that one of the things that distinguishes life is its ability to respond. And perhaps the most important thing is its ability to respond to this value that we call goodness, this value, we call truth, this value we call beauty. And I suggest there is a problem for people who don’t believe that there is any kind of meaning in sense of value in the universe at all, because they still behave as reductionist scientists as though they believe that truth is important.

Iain

They might say, well, yes fairy stories about them being Santa Claus or whatever is very nice and very comforting, but it’s not true. And it’s my much more important to be true, but where do they get this idea of the importance of truth from. If they don’t see it as an intrinsically very important thing that has its own meaning and importance and the same can be said about beauty and goodness.

Iain

Yes. I don’t think, I don’t know what the word was now that you used of a few minutes ago that they were random chosen or sort of…

Iain

Arbitrary.

Iain

I’m glad because I thought you said you agreed with that. That’s great because I certainly don’t think that no.

Iain

Not quite, I mean the moon could be made of cheese, but it isn’t.

Iain

Well thank you very much. Perhaps I could just say it may be 2000 pages on Kindle. In fact, I think it’s nearly 3000 on Kindle, but the actual printed book is only about 1600 pages. So it’s big but not so big. And 200 pages of that is the bibliography. Because when you’re saying something new, you have to really chapter and verse everything. So I have.

Iain

I was very lucky to have entirely by chance the work of, I guess the leading typographer now in the world, he’s 75 Robert Bringhurst, he’s kind of… I’ve talked to one publisher about my venture and I say that I’ve got this great typographer. And he said, who is he? And I said, Robert Bringhurst. And he went, “Robert Bringhurst!” And he literally fell on his knees on this zoom call. Anyway, he did the typo.

Iain

And-

Iain

But the aesthetic decisions were made. The rest of the aesthetic decisions were made by me and by me with Robert. So I’m glad I’ve contributed something beautiful even if people don’t agree.

Iain

Oh, thanks, Jim. I’m ready for another whack at it, as you say.

Iain

There’s something wrong with your bottle. I think, Jim, I’m afraid.

Iain

That has been voted the best whiskey in the world. So if you don’t like that, I can’t help.

Iain

Yes, you are right in one sense that when we’re dealing with daily life, we don’t have to be thinking about whether there is continuity or not. I’m really making a point about the way we think about time. But it’s also true that as I understand from, say, David Tong, who’s a professor of physics at Cambridge here, that there is no evidence for discontinuity anywhere in the cosmos, neither in time nor in space and that Planck lengths are an artifact of ability to measure things.

Iain

Well, I take randomness to be an asymptotic element that we can only approach ever nearer to, but never actually to achieve, that order is the principle that is visible everywhere and that true randomness is not a reality. Although degrees of chaos, degrees of disorder are very, very important to the functioning of almost anything that we can think of, especially of life.

Iain

Well, I think one has to differentiate between unpredictability and randomness. They’re not equivalent, obviously. As I say, systems rely on a degree of something that gets close to randomness of disorder, as well as order. The systems are fragile if they don’t have that disorder available within them.

Iain

Well, yes, but again, I’m not sure whether we’re talking about exactly the same thing because unpredictability, intrinsic unpredictability is not necessarily the same as complete randomness. So, an example I rather like of unpredictability at the non-quantum level is it’s a point that sometimes made, that, yes, okay, at enormously reduced level, you can find unpredictability in a chain of reactions. You can also do so at the everyday level. I quote in the book or paper by a couple of physicists saying that even at the level of the physical billiard ball, which is often brought up as the metaphor for causality since the 18th century, that the movement of the billiard balls on the table become fundamentally unpredictable after a certain number of collisions and I thought, “Well, yes, okay, maybe, but you’re going to say it’s millions or billions of collisions, but in fact it’s eight.”

Iain

Yeah. Fundamental to this conversation, I guess, is the fact that I’m not a physicist. So, in talking about these matters, and if we’re going to talk about the nature of reality, you can’t really avoid it. I have run whatever I’ve written past physicists that I know who contacted me after reading The Master and His Emissary saying, “This is incredibly important for our work.” I was a bit surprised. I didn’t really expect to get that reaction, but I have. And so, before I say anything about these things in writing, I get them vetted as it were by physicists who know more than I do.

Iain

Of course, there is. Yeah.

Iain

You mentioned Lee Smolin and he’s one of the people that I rely on most heavily in physics.

Iain

There we go.

Iain

Well, to reiterate, Jim, and it may be a problem for this particular podcast, so I’m not a physicist. My book doesn’t depend on physics. It’s just that the conclusions I’ve come to through neuroscience and philosophy are born out by certain fairly strong strands in philosophy. It was really drawing attention to that more than anything that I meant to do in the chapters on time and space, which do obviously involve physics. But yeah, I mean, I don’t know how minor it is. You may be measuring these things more accurately than I do, but my impression is that it’s not a controversial position, that consciousness is involved with matter and that changing one’s attention, moving one’s consciousness at it, where it can also produce changes in whatever is observed. I like to think of the distinction as being perhaps not between quantum and classical, but simply the matter of the collapse of a field into a measurable point for the purposes of whatever’s happening at the time, but that collapse is less substantive than the field out of which it comes.

Iain

Completely.

Iain

No, that’s very, very clear. Richard Feynman said words to the effect of, “If you understand quantum mechanics, you don’t understand quantum mechanics.” That partly explains the extraordinary range of views held by physicists. You’re completely right. Also, quantum mechanics is a bit of misnomer. As David Bohm suggested, it could better be called unquantum unmechanics. So, the field is not one in which one can find certainties, which is rather nice loop back at a matter level.

Iain

Well, consciousness is one of the hardest things in existence to define. It’s something we all know well because we are in it, but quite what it is is another matter. So, inevitably, in this sort of an area where one is dealing with the fundamental building blocks of reality, it’s very hard to be sure of anything and there’s just a range of opinions about it, I guess. My own view is that consciousness can’t evolve out of unconsciousness, that it’s inconceivable that something that is wholly unconscious can give rise to consciousness. This leads to a problem of how it originates. You find, as I think I mentioned, even in the Oxford Handbook of Science, where the editors V.S. Ramachandran and Colin Blakemore, two very mainstream neuroscientists, say that we may just have to accept that consciousness is an ontological primitive, that it is something that exists and it is part of the constitution of the cosmos. You can’t get behind it and find it coming out of anything at all.

Iain

Yes. In relation to those mechanisms, I accept that the aggregate is probably not conscious, not in any way that we would recognize by comparison with our own consciousness. But when you talk about unpredictability and the ability to respond to it, I think, again, one needs to distinguish between two things. One is that this particular situation could not have been predicted and the other is that any situation like this could have been predicted. So, it may well be true that it’s constantly reacting to things, to sets of circumstances that can’t in themselves be predicted, but that doesn’t mean that it’s essentially making up a response that is intelligent to the situation. It is simply using some form of schematized behavior, which comes into action when some particular set of circumstances is not predictable.

Iain

I’m trying to make a distinction between this and the ability of organisms to, under certain extraordinary circumstances, which they can be artificially subjected to in a laboratory, making an intelligent response to it, for which they couldn’t be in any sense program, not for that or not for anything like it. So that’s a different phenomenon. And I think that organisms, even single cells have intelligence.

Iain

Yeah.

Iain

But what about the-

Iain

Sorry.

Iain

What about a situation in which an organism, however primitive, retains memory and learns from experience, including experiences for which there is no way that it could have been prepared or programmed? Even more striking than E. coli, which is relatively complex is a slime mold. A slime mold can solve a maze. If you take a piece of the slime mold and break it off, get rid of the rest, the piece will have a memory of how to solve the maze. That’s extraordinary to me.

Iain

Yeah.

Iain

No, I agree that memory is not peculiar to a living organism, but the fact that a slime mold, you can cut a piece off and it will have the memory suggests it’s somewhat different from a car, where you wouldn’t expect one of the doors or the wheels to have the memory that the whole thing has because it has to have that coherent system with which it’s programmed, but the cell doesn’t have any such system that with which it’s programmed. As you know, DNA contains very little information.

Iain

Yes, it’s sometimes formulated as the difference between a complicated system and a complex system.

Iain

Well, it’s just very difficult to see how you can make an argument that consciousness emerges from biochemistry, which I think you were suggesting. It just doesn’t seem to me that it’s got much power to convince how. Nobody has the slightest idea how that could happen, which is why the view that it’s an ontological primitive avoids that problem effectively by.

Iain

It is a different argument, but it also includes the idea that consciousness emerges. I think using the word emerge in those circumstance is a way of saying, “And now a miracle happens.”

Iain

Yes. There are, of course, complex systems in the inanimate world, as well as the living world. So I don’t actually make a hard and fast distinction between the inanimate and the animate. I think that the animate is a difference of degree, a massive difference of degree, but still a difference of degree rather than a difference of kind. What is it a difference of degree in? Well, first of all, speed of development. So things that would take billions of years might, in the case of a living organism, take a second or less. So, it speeds things up. It speeds what develops within the system up. The other thing I think is that it increases the responsive nature of whatever it is that emerges. Inanimate substances are much less responsive to the circumstances than living ones are.

Iain

So those are the two important distinctions in my mind between animacy and inanimacy, but there isn’t really a hard line, which makes it easier for me to argue that consciousness is not confined to living things, but is a constituent of the cosmos. It may be manifested in entirely different ways in different parts. It may be virtually absent in very much of the universe, but it can’t be something that emerged out of matter unless, like me, you take matter to be a complex thing that is absolutely unknown, like consciousness. I mean, a lot of physicists say it’s a mistake for biologists to imagine they can explain consciousness by saying, “Well, it emerges from matter.” That’s a hangover from about a hundred years ago when people thought they understood matter directly and could model consciousness on something that emerged from it. But no, physicists are as much as at loss to tell us what matter is as to tell us what consciousness is.

Iain

No.

Iain

Yes. You’ll probably remember that in chapter 27, I have a section called scale matters, in which I deal with precisely the problem of why we make mistakes when we don’t realize that scale does matter. I talk a bit about the very interesting to me series of Mike Abramowitz, which also depends on the idea of differences of scale, but while there are… Obviously, we know what we mean by an emergent property. For example, the fluid and slippery notion of water can be said to emerge from the structure of hydrogen and oxygen as formed together to make water molecules. So that’s an example of where emergence is proper to speak of, because there is a property at the lower level in view of which, and in view of which alone, it is enough to be able to that some higher level of complexity that there will be appreciation of a certain characteristic, but the emergence can’t be used when there is no such element.

Iain

This is the problem with consciousness, that there is no sort of little bit of consciousness or foreshadowing of consciousness, or as William James says, nascent consciousness. It doesn’t have a meaning, so we can’t really use this argument, unless all we’re doing is blackboxing a difficult area, and as I say, waving our hands and going, “A miracle happens here.”

Iain

Well, the bit that I agree with there, you will not be surprised to learn, is that I believe frogs are conscious. Certainly, I believe that certain plants are conscious. Perhaps all plants are conscious, in fact. So, it is not a problem about that, but I don’t buy the metaphor of the computer screen and I don’t buy the comparison with the emergence of the eye. The problem with the emergence of eye is a different problem, I think. Simon Conway Morris suggests that it’s probably emerged 12 times separately. It is a remarkable fact that helped the worst time for what needed to happen to come together to make an eye, to make an eye, but it’s not as though the ability to create an eye is a piece of magic when compared with of what it’s actually emerged from, whereas consciousness, I keep saying, is a different phenomenon altogether.

Iain

It’s not just very complex like an eye or complicated like an eye, but it is something that is that its essence is foreign to unconscious whatever. So unconsciousness or the lack of consciousness can’t be remedied by saying that you can get two consciousness out of it, whereas you can say that an eye came out of various components that you can imagine at a simple level, just becoming more and more complex, as you suggest. So, I don’t think they are parallel arguments.

Iain

Yeah. Well, what can I say briefly about this? I think that one of the things one needs to clear out of the way is the idea of purpose as a predetermined plan, that some engineering force, possibly God or something of the kind, makes it happen and that’s certainly not what I mean. In fact, the idea of a predictable control system oiled and set in motion by an engineer is exactly the way in which I believe the left hemisphere would think about it because this is its great skill, is putting things together for utility. So it tends to think everything is like that, including living organisms, which I argue earlier in the book that they’re not.

Iain

So, what can we say about purpose? I think it’s almost absurd to be reduced to the state of having to say a turtle comes ashore and lay its eggs rather than a turtle comes ashore to lay its eggs, which is the sort of problem you get into if you deny any kind of purpose. I think that an enormous number of biologists accept that there is purpose. They don’t want to say so in public in case they’re accused of bringing in an engineering God, but that doesn’t have to happen at all. There needs only to be a tendency in the universe, and there are tendencies, I think, towards greater complexity, towards beauty that are… And just a further, the business of life itself that hard to understand, unless you some idea of a purpose.

Iain

Perhaps I could just gloss purpose in relation to a game. So, James Carse has a distinction between finite games and infinite games. A finite game is a game that’s played because there is a goal to this game, which is as it were to pot all the billiard balls and win. But there are other games in life which are absolutely not pointless or purposeless, but don’t have any interior purpose. What is the purpose of playing music? What is the purpose of a play? It’s not something external that it has utilitarian value in reaching. It’s that the process itself is the purpose and the continuing of it infinitely would be a fulfillment to that purpose. So it’s quite different from the finite situation in which you’re closing down on one particular outcome.

Iain

Yes, which is similar really to what I’m saying because the infinite games have intrinsic purpose, whereas the finite games have extrinsic purpose. They have a goal that’s definable. The purpose of the system is only fulfilled once it reaches that particular goal, whereas many purposes are not of that nature. They don’t have to have reached a certain point or certain goal, but their purpose lies within them. When you come to think of animals, I think this is rather important, because the tendency is to think that somehow the purpose of living is to pass on life. Well, it depends how you think of that. If you think of life as a celebratory entity that we don’t understand, that we are part of and wish to continue being in and to continue making, then yes, but not in the sense that it’s purpose of life is to propagate your genes by copulation. This is to reduce things to enormous absurd level.

Iain

Oh, yes, you did.

Iain

Well, that’s definitely part of it. I believe there are different levels of purpose. In one sense you can say a daily purpose might be to get food and no longer be hungry, but that is not to exhaust the purposes of an animal. It seems unsatisfactory to say that the purpose of the animal is just to make other animals like itself. It seems more that there must be something purposeful about being a deer, that it demonstrates one of the ways in which the verb to be can be inflected. It creates a much richer idea of what it means to be, and that seems to me close to the purpose of an animal, that the lioness is not just killing and eating, which is certainly a daily purpose, and not just producing more lioness cubs or lion cubs, but actually just being the lion is the purpose of a lion.

Iain

Well, obviously not a utilitarian purpose, and that’s why I begin by differentiating intrinsic purposes from manipulation that reaches a certain goal at a lower level and at a utilitarian level and as an external extrinsic purpose. So, there seems to be something about the way evolution works, that it’s not just about creating a creature that can last longer, has better survival power, because there are, for example, actinobacteria at the bottom of the sea. Single examples of which may be a million years old. Human beings do rather poorly in this competition because we live through only 70 years old. Trees can live to be a thousand years old. But as you get more complex, you find that actually the survival value of the individual and even its ability to propagate many examples of itself may be diminishing. So it seems to me that the idea of fitness must encourage us to think in terms of something other than mere mathematically calculable survival.

Iain

No.

Iain

Well, the definition you came up with is what you get for going to the Catholic dictionary.

Iain

But I quote from Darwin himself as saying that what people had realized in his work and what most important was that he reconciled morphology with teleology, and that was also the argument of T.H. Huxley, Darwin’s so-called bulldog. What I think Darwin meant was exactly what I’m trying to convey, which is not a deterministic thing that there is a purpose in the sense of to make something that we know in advance what it is and we know why we’re making it, but that there is a tendency for certain outcomes to be achievable, which can’t be achieved without a movement in a certain direction, and by taking steps to be in a certain place or a certain space, certain things might happen, but you can’t in any way specify when or what they might be.

Iain

I mean, I’ll give the example of somebody who wants to marry. You can’t just purpose to marry and go out and find somebody and do it, but you can put yourself in the way of finding somebody to marry or you can make your life such that you certainly never will find anyone to marry. So, in that sense, there is a purpose, but it’s not a purpose that is anything more than a desire of the person and you cannot specify how exactly to achieve it or when or where it will be achieved if it is achieved.

Iain

Yeah.

Iain

Yes. I mean, it would be an overarching purpose, so it couldn’t be summed up in a certain sentence in the way that… Well, it might be able to be summed up in a sentence, but it would have a very broad reference because we are not here talking about a specific outcome of an event. We’re talking about a general drive. In you, there was obviously a drive to knowledge and understanding because that seems to be how you spent your life. As we remember, we are exactly the same age, so that’s good news for both of us, but what you saw was that there was another way of achieving this. And so, you were drawn forward by that concept of a purpose. I think a distinction I’d like to make is between a purpose, which is mechanically produced from behind, in which steps propel you like a mechanism into a certain state, and a purpose that draws you in front, so an ideal or a tendency that draws you towards the circumstances to be fulfilled.

Iain

Yeah, that’s lovely. Yeah.

Iain

Yes. Yes. That’s a lovely example of what I’m meaning, that you don’t take certain steps in a narrowly determined way, but you see a goal towards which you are drawn and that’s the meaning in which I would use the concept of teleology. There is something that draws us forward as a form that is attractive. We know that there are in physics form fields that are attractive, so why there shouldn’t be in relation to biology? I wouldn’t know.

Iain

Well, I’d be repeating myself really, but what I’m drawing attention to is that animals and humans and plants and so on don’t just in order to anything in the sense of there is a scheme here and they must follow certain path, but that they fulfill something, which is in itself an end, a goal, a purpose, and therefore could be seen teleologically, which is a purpose of the wider field of life, and ultimately wider than that, of the nature of the cosmos, because the cosmos is such that life can emerge from it. There is no two ways about that.

Iain

Whatever it is, it is a fascinating thing that out of this cosmos that some people think is completely pointless, completely purposeless, random, chaotic, fragmentary and so on, that out of this cosmos can come something as amazing as Bach’s St. Matthew Passion. I mean, there’s no questioning the fact that it has emerged from it. So then we have which qualities in that thing can emerge. But to come back to your deer, the deer is in a way like a poem or like a piece of music. It is a phenomenon that is itself a fulfillment of something that is vital and beautiful and complex.

Iain

Yep.

Iain

What it very definitely doesn’t mean is that the cosmos had in it any kind of idea of a white deer or an extrinsic purpose to create a white deer. It’s not like that. I keep coming back to the idea that our left hemisphere dominated way of thinking images everything in the end as a machine produced by a machine maker, even if the machine maker is certainly not a God. So, for example, Richard Dawkins calls himself a Paleyite, but a Paleyite without a God, but it’s that Paleyiteness that matters to me because really what that is saying is this thing must have been designed in some way. I’m not saying it was designed directly. I’m just saying that the possibility of something was not ruled out.

Iain

So there is a negative potential or a negative possibility, which is that such a thing is not ruled out by existence, but it’s not ruled in either. So what actually exists is something that couldn’t be precisely foreseen. I don’t believe that however much we examine the state of the universe at some point in the past, we could have predicted the white-tailed deer or you, Jim. So, I think that these are things that exemplify the potential within the cosmos. I think this idea of potential is very interesting because we make an assumption that only what is actualized has value, whereas I think that potential has extraordinary value, maybe even more value than what is actualized.

Iain

Well, he might be right. Since it’s an experiment we can’t carry out, I don’t know. But as you know, my broad conclusion is in agreement with that, that no one particular outcome could be predicted, however, that nothing like is a further step. We’ve seen that certain things seem to be so important that they do evolve, the eye being a perfect example, because if it can be evolve 12 times separately, there seems to be something important about an eye and it probably would come up again if we replayed the tape of evolution or set things back 3.5 billion years and started it over again. I’d put some money on whatever evolved having eyes.

Iain

No, definitely.

Iain

Yes.

Iain

Yeah, that’s perfectly possible. As I say, it’s when we can’t confirm or deny really. But yes, on your point that things may get less complex, something that seems to me rather interesting is that domesticated animals have smaller brains than their wild counterparts. You put that together with the fact that modern Homo sapiens has a smaller brain than Homo heidelbergensis had. There may be something about living in this protected way that we do, which actually decreases neuronal complexity and perhaps our intelligence.

Iain

Yep. Yep. Yep.

Iain

Well, I would come back to I don’t find the solution that have to be an infinite number of universe is very intellectually satisfying, is really saying, “Search me. I have no idea. Let’s just do it a billion infinite number of times,” because an infinite number is such that the universe would have to be created, not only this universe, but this universe exactly an infinite number of times and so on. Once you start introducing this concept of infinity statements about it mean nothing effectively. So you haven’t really resolved the problem. You’ve just turned it into nonsense. I think I quote there that there are, I think, 10 to the 80 subatomic particles in the observable universe, but Lee Smolin says that just to get to a universe with stars is one chance in 10 to the 229.

Iain

I quote Eugene Koonin, again, a mainstream scientist who makes the point that to get to a transcription system such as RNA is a chance of one in 10 to the 1,118, which is a completely unimaginable number. What one’s really doing is throwing one’s hands up in despair and saying, “I can’t explain this, so it must be that there is an infinite number of universes.” But another way of looking at it is that the universe is such that it has tendencies, which as it were put their hands in the scale and makes certain outcomes more common. That doesn’t have to be any conventionally imagined God, like an old man with a beard fiddling with a computer, but it might be that however this universe comes into being, and nobody knows that and nobody ever will, it contains within it the potential for these things to happen.

Iain

Doesn’t go away.

Iain

Exactly. I mean, that problem doesn’t go away. In the book, I also make some comments about the ways in which our theories about how things happen for a neuropsychiatrist mimic various conditions the human brain can find itself in. So I deal with the many worlds’ idea that whenever there is an action, the universe splits in two and two different outcomes become possible. But of course, this is another example of something that means nothing because if every single time any action took place… First of all, what is an action? Is it the movement of an atomic particle? And if so, how many universes have to be created at that moment to accommodate all the possible outcomes? You are back at effectively infinity. So, it’s not logically or rationally or intellectually satisfying as an answer, but it does look awfully like something that happens to people when they have right hemisphere damage, which is they start to see things exactly like that.

Iain

Patients report things like, “I have an idea that there was a moment when I either clean my teeth or I don’t, and in one universe I do and in another, I don’t.” This is not a philosopher. This is actually, I think, a schizophrenic patient. Schizophrenic subjects have a very similar phenomenological world to those who have right hemisphere damage. That to me is interesting because earlier on in the book, I’ve suggested throughout the whole of part one that whatever measure you look at for the ability to give us the radical information that we can rely on in our interactions with the world, the right hemisphere is superior to the left, very largely so.

Iain

Maybe that’s the case. To predict which way physics is going would be a foolish thing for anyone to try and that there is no way that most of these enormously speculative theories can be either validated or invalidated, certainly not during our lifetime. But I think I would support your idea of rejecting an argument that requires infinity because it does actually stop us from reasoning. I suppose the reason we do think about these things is to see which outcomes would be more reasonable. I think if you suppose ones that require infinity or already throwing up your hands and saying, “I really don’t like pursuing this and I’m going to go away,” which isn’t fair enough, but don’t think you’ve said anything profound. You haven’t. You’ve just said, “I’m going to play the infinity card.” Of course, nobody can argue way or the other with that. It’s just like sort of-

Iain

… pressing the off button, really.

Iain

Exactly.

Iain

It is logically equivalent.

Iain

Well, yes. First of all, the fact that we don’t see it is not necessarily, of course, an argument that it doesn’t exist, especially if the universe is very large and the people are intelligent enough to stay put where they are. I don’t know. Then there are, of course, people who would say just as an incidental comment that they have met these creatures. I mean, of course, I rather doubt it, but there you are. Now, the important point is that for the universe to be as it were propitious to life doesn’t mean that it has to be propitious to life everywhere. In fact, the size of the universe is sometimes used by people to suggest that life was hardly something that could be in potentia or could have been in any way predicted because there’s the rest of the universe as far as we know it, and of course we don’t know much about it, looks very different and doesn’t look as though it does support life.

Iain

But the point that was made by John Polkinghorne is that the universe is exactly the right size for there to be one planet on which life could arise, because after all, we are talking about an enormous number of things happening to come together. So the fact that there is a place where there is life confirms that there is that in potentia in the cosmos, but it doesn’t have anything really to say about other aliens or there may or may not be. I have no idea.

Iain

Well, as you know, I don’t believe that consciousness is necessarily confined to life. I think it’s a building block of the cosmos. But generally speaking, I agree with you. There is no way to answer these questions and they form a harmless way for people to pass their time. I prefer to do cryptic crosswords myself, but we can’t get the final answer to any of these questions. But what I hope in the book is to show tendencies in the way we think and how we can, for the first time in the history of philosophy, find two different ways of thinking about something and not just go, “Well, people have argued this and they’ve argued that, and there’s no way to resolve it. That’s just the way it is.”

Iain

When we’re dealing with most of the problems of philosophy that aren’t concerned with something like the exact nature and state of the cosmos, you can actually discriminate. You can say, “Look, this argument is typical of how the left hemisphere would guide our thinking. This argument is more like the way the right hemisphere would guide our thinking. We can see that the way that the right hemisphere guides the thinking is more veridical than the other.” This doesn’t involve us having a third hemisphere or something from which to judge the first two. It’s quite simple.

Iain

The test is following which path are we more likely to be taken by surprise, by experience. So for example, I have a whole chapter on paradox, as you probably know, and take a very famous paradox, the Achilles and the tortoise paradox, in which by breaking down a space and time to slices, the tortoise can convince itself that Achilles can never catch up with him, nevermind overtake him, which is very amusing way of thinking of time and space. But what it actually demonstrates is that cutting it up into slices leads you to false conclusions, like that Achilles can’t overtake the tortoise. If you go around the world thinking like that, you’re going to be very, very sadly mistaken.