The materialist delusion

 

Iain McGilchrist is a British psychiatrist whose ideas have a family likeness with those of Rupert Sheldrake and Alfred North Whitehead. Indeed, he even calls himself a panentheist! The man covers a lot of ground in the clip above, taped at the UnHerd club in London. UnHerd is a media outlet rightly or wrongly characterized as “conservative” by Wikipedia, and seems to have a vaguely “alternative” orientation. McGilchrist does make implicit attacks on wokeness at several points during his presentation, which perhaps makes him a conservative by some standards. He is also pro-religious, although his exact religious affiliation is never spelled out. He does have a strong sympathy for Buddhism. The audience at the club strikes me as surprisingly multi-ethnic. One of the persons asking the speaker questions have a distinct Swedish accent!  

McGilchrist begins his presentation by discussing the differences between the right and left brain hemispheres. The short story is that the left brain is extremely narrow, focused, reductionist and “abstract”. It sees the world divided into small segments and have strong tendencies to black-and-white thinking. The right brain, by contrast, is more holistic and acts as the “Devil´s advocate”. It understands that the world is a complex system of relations.

An interesting point made by the lecturer is that women are better than men at some *left* brain functions, including language skills. In general, women´s brains are more “balanced”, with a larger overlap between right and left hemispheres when it comes to functioning. By contrast, men have a sharper division between the functions associated with each hemisphere. While most women have relatively similar brains, the differences between various male brains are much larger. From an evolutionary viewpoint, men are more dispensable than women (since they don´t have to take part in the child-rearing process), but precisely for that reason, evolution can experiment more with their brains. McGilchrist doesn´t say it out loud, but I get the impression that he believes geniuses are mostly male for the reasons mentioned.

Ideally, the left brain functions should serve the right brain, but this doesn´t always happen, and it is here that McGilchrist´s ideas about brain science seamlessly morph into Kulturkritik. Every civilization starts out with the right brain in command, but as it matures and later declines, left brain functions come to the fore. This is connected to the bureaucratization, overspecialization and scientism typical of civilizations in the later phases of their development. Community, religion and spirituality are connected to the right brain, which at least implies that atheism is left brain (abstract, narrow, reductionist). McGilchrist also makes a distinction between “reason” and “reasonable”, the former being the current faulty paradigm. I´m not sure if I follow him here, since many woke ideas (such as transgenderism) sound irrational. His point seems to be that schizophrenics are intensely logical, but that this logic when disconnected from a broader context becomes pathological (the “logic” of a pattern-seeking paranoiac who doesn´t see the big picture). It still sounds like a long shot...

McGilchrist is a pessimist in the sense that he doesn´t believe that modern Western civilization will survive. But then, most civilizations only last for a couple of centuries anyway, so why should our be any exception? The solution, such as it is, is to create small communities in which people can yet again become authentic and “right brain”.

The most interesting part of the presentation concerns spirituality. McGilchrist claims that one can “disconnect” one of the brain halves during scientific experiments. When only the left brain is functioning, the test subjects see even animate things as mechanism. Conversely, when only the right brain is functioning, the subjects experience even inanimate things as alive! For instance, the sun is experienced as a living being?! This obviously opens up a lot of other questions germane to spirituality and mysticism. As already mentioned, McGilchrist is pro-religious or perhaps “pro-spiritual” and clearly regards the mystical-spiritual dimension as real in some sense. He is positive towards mindfulness meditation. The idea that one brain hemisphere is “spiritual” or even “animistic” raises the question of what exactly happens during meditation or mystical states. Can certain forms of meditation somehow bypass the left brain? Perhaps unsurprisingly, the speaker is a panpsychist and regards consciousness as an “ontological primitive”. Indeed, he is a kind of “objective idealist” in the sense that he regards matter as a phase of consciousness (just as, say, water vapor is a phase of water). He further makes the intriguing point that humans have a lot of neurons the purpose of which is to *inhibit* the connections between the two brain halves. Indeed, humans have more such inhibitors than other animals. This makes me wonder what would happen if some form of meditation can put the inhibitors to sleep…

Very interesting content!