#69 Iain McGilchrist - The Mind is More Than a Machine
Update: 2024-05-266
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Iain McGilchrist is a psychiatrist, writer, and former Oxford literary scholar. McGilchrist came to prominence after the publication of his book The Master and His Emissary, subtitled The Divided Brain and the Making of the Western World.
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Transcript
00:00:00
Ian McGulgerous, welcome to the show.
00:00:02
Thank you very much, Alex, delighted to be here.
00:00:06
Why is the brain separated into two physical hemispheres?
00:00:12
It's a basic and very good and important question.
00:00:18
And it's not really discussed very much, but we know that all the brains
00:00:23
that we've ever looked at are divided in this way. So it's not a human thing only.
00:00:29
And there are three important oddities. One is that it's divided at all
00:00:35
since the power of the brain is to do with making connections.
00:00:41
Secondly, that it's asymmetrical, which is very odd because
00:00:46
there's no reason for it to be asymmetrical. If you just needed more space,
00:00:49
you could just produce more space symmetrically, you'd think.
00:00:53
And the third is that there is a band of fibres at the base of the brain.
00:00:58
But first of all, this is a new thing. It only started in mammals.
00:01:03
amphibians, reptiles, frogs, have brains, birds have brains that don't have
00:01:08
even this body of fibres called the corpus callosum.
00:01:12
And what's more, a lot of the import of the traffic across the corpus callosum in humans
00:01:18
is inhibitory. So its final effect is to suppress a contralateral
00:01:27
homologue. In other words, a bit of the other hemisphere
00:01:30
that would be its partner, if you like. So these were questions that I thought
00:01:35
were interesting and were in part a reason why I started to go into this area.
00:01:40
And I suppose the first thing I have to say is that most people who don't know
00:01:45
about the recent developments and particularly about my work on hemispheres
00:01:52
think that they've heard long ago was exploded. It was a mis, a popular
00:02:01
piece of psychology that had no basis in fact. And this is sort of
00:02:08
slightly right and mainly very, very wrong. The slight bit of right is that
00:02:13
the questions were good. Why are the hemispheres separated? How are they different?
00:02:18
It's just that we didn't get the right answers at the time. And when
00:02:22
people start asking questions in science, they didn't expect to find the right answers
00:02:26
immediately. They expect to have to do further thought, further
00:02:30
gathering of data and to be able to come up with something that actually does
00:02:33
fit the realities. And the answer is, if you like, to cut
00:02:40
to the chase, that all creatures in order to survive have to do a remarkable
00:02:44
feat, which is to pay attention to something that they need to get and at the
00:02:49
same time look out so that they're not themselves got.
00:02:53
And for this, you need two types of attention. And these types of attention are
00:02:57
so different that they require neuronal masses, each of which can
00:03:01
sustain conscious attention independently. One of them is going to pay very
00:03:07
targeted attention, very narrow beam attention, so something that it wants to
00:03:12
get, that it knows is important, usually food, or eventually something like
00:03:16
a trick to build a nest or get something to use as a tool.
00:03:24
And that is the left hemisphere's attention, narrow,
00:03:28
fragmentary, piecemeal attention. But at the same time, the brain has to be able to
00:03:36
look out for predators, but also for kin, for your mate, your offspring, and so on,
00:03:43
so that while you're busy in surviving by getting stuff to eat,
00:03:47
you're also looking out for the whole picture. And that has evolved in the right
00:03:52
hemisphere. And so effectively, the right hemisphere is looking out for
00:03:56
everything else, for the big picture of the world, while the left hemisphere is
00:04:00
concentrating on a detail that it already knows at once.
00:04:05
And this has important consequences because the way we attend to things
00:04:10
changes what it is. We find that changes what comes to our attention.
00:04:15
And the summary of what we find is that the two halves of the brain sustain
00:04:22
two different versions of reality. It used to be said that one
00:04:26
did reason and language and the other did pictures and emotions and so on,
00:04:30
but all that is wrong. We know that both hemispheres are involved in everything.
00:04:35
But that doesn't mean that there's nothing there. That doesn't mean we've met a dead end.
00:04:40
It's that we were asking the question in a slightly wrong way,
00:04:42
which was, what do they do these hemispheres? As though they were machines.
00:04:46
It's the question you ask of a machine. But in fact, they're part of a person.
00:04:50
And there's an important question to ask about anything to do with
00:04:55
living beings and human beings is how, in what way, with what reason, with what
00:05:01
purpose are we doing, what we're doing, why are we attending and in what way are we
00:05:05
attending. And so in the left hemisphere, there is
00:05:09
built up a phenomenological world which is composed rather of discrete
00:05:16
fragmentary pieces that are decontextualized,
00:05:19
static so that they can be easily frozen and picked up rapidly
00:05:24
and effectively inanimate. And everything that it understands is
00:05:30
clear, explicit, cut and dried. It's a seed, it's a rabbit, it's whatever,
00:05:36
it's my lunch, I need to get it. Whereas the right hemisphere is very much more subtle.
00:05:41
It's looking out for everything else. It sees that nothing is ever ultimately
00:05:45
completely devoid of connections with everything, really, everything else.
00:05:51
That things are always in motion. They're never actually finally static.
00:05:56
They're also never wholly certain, they may carry a certain degree of conviction,
00:06:01
but they're not black and white and cut and dried and the way the left hemisphere
00:06:05
makes them. The left hemisphere really understands what's explicit and the right
00:06:10
hemisphere understands what is implicit. And that's a very big thing because
00:06:15
all things that really matter to us most need in a way to remain implicit
00:06:20
because they're reduced by the process of bringing them into
00:06:23
prosaic every day language. And effectively this is an animate world. So those are
00:06:28
the two different worlds and you could put it this way. The left hemisphere
00:06:33
creates a map, a diagram, a theoretical structure of the world, which is
00:06:37
very thin, very sparse, very jujune, devoid of complexity, devoid of
00:06:43
really anything that makes the thing live. But it has the schema. And the right
00:06:47
hemisphere, meanwhile, is seeing the whole complex picture
00:06:51
in all its ramifications and its beauty. And it's the world that the left
00:07:00
hemisphere is mapping. So that's a good enough place to start really.
00:07:05
A map in the left brain and in the right brain, the thing that is mapped.
00:07:11
The world that is mapped. The world that is mapped. So we've essentially got here
00:07:16
two brains. And the thing that I find fascinating reading
00:07:21
the master in his emissary, which is an extraordinary volume. I sort of
00:07:28
only got a little bit into it and was already thinking this is
00:07:33
kind of blowing my mind or my mind, I suppose I should say.
00:07:38
One thing that caught my attention is that
00:07:42
this isn't something that people might think that, well, there are sort of two brains
00:07:46
right now that are doing different tasks, super specialized. But if we evolve,
00:07:50
if we evolve further, they'll probably sort of merge into one big brain.
00:07:54
It seems like evolution is selecting for this asymmetrical brain separation.
00:07:59
And as you've already said, the corpus colosum or colosum that connects the two
00:08:05
does more to inhibit communication between them than it does to facilitate it.
00:08:10
I mean, that's an extraordinary finding that the connector between the two parts of our brain
00:08:15
is purposefully trying to stop them from communicating. And that this is something that
00:08:20
is evolutionarily selected for. I thought that was absolutely incredible.
00:08:24
And I suppose what you're suggesting here is that the reason for this is because
00:08:29
what if they were to communicate too much, then maybe one would get in the way of the other?
00:08:35
Yes, there needs to be a necessary balance between separation and
00:08:39
togetherness, if you like. And funnily enough, nature in general
00:08:46
works with competition and cooperation. One of the myths that really needs to be revised
00:08:53
is the idea that evolution is all about competition and that we are somehow competitive
00:08:58
apes. There's no doubt that competition plays a very important role in evolution.
00:09:05
But actually, those species that are really thrived have been those that have learnt
00:09:10
to co-operate and collaborate. So, in fact, the situation is the same in the brain.
00:09:15
Everywhere in nature there is, and this was an insight that Gerta had in the 18th century,
00:09:21
that in nature, all that is unified is being divided and what is divided is being unified.
00:09:28
I think that it doesn't perhaps sound very important, but it is actually a crucial insight.
00:09:35
And hence the hemisphere's need to work together, but part of the way of working together
00:09:41
is to not to get in one another's way and try to compete to do the same task.
00:09:45
I sometimes say in order to carry out a successful operation, there needs to be a surgeon
00:09:51
and there needs to be a scrub nurse as a minimum.
00:09:54
And without the scrub nurse, the operation would be extremely difficult without the surgeon
00:10:00
impossible. But it doesn't make sense for the scrub nurse to make the incision.
00:10:04
The scrub nurse needs to do the job of the scrub nurse and the surgeon needs to do the job of the
00:10:10
surgeon. So, that's the way it is. What I would say is you're completely right to say that
00:10:18
the tendency of evolution is not towards homogenization, but towards preserving this distinction.
00:10:26
And I just want to comment on your remark, which I know was in a way just a relatively
00:10:33
off-the-cuff one, about two minds. I think the reality is that our mind is at least our conscious
00:10:43
mind is not aware of this division. Our unconscious mind is at some level bringing this information
00:10:51
from the two hemispheres together in a way that we should not be aware of. If we were aware of it,
00:10:57
it would hinder us. So, nature has taken care that all this is done at a level which is probably
00:11:04
in the mid-brain, which is the head of the brainstem.
00:11:09
I mean, yeah, inevitably when you learn about this distinction between the different hemispheres,
00:11:15
especially when you learn that the left hemisphere governs the right eye and the right hemisphere
00:11:20
governs the left eye, you inevitably start closing an eye, looking around the world and seeing
00:11:26
if maybe am I seeing things a bit differently? Am I noticing narrative more and objects more
00:11:33
in this eye? I'm not really sure. Obviously, it's a bit ridiculous because that's not how it works,
00:11:38
but that just speaks to the fact that yes, this is something that is not a conscious phenomenon.
00:11:44
Yeah, I don't want to be annoying and chippin, but I have to say that actually it doesn't work
00:11:53
like that in humans. So, in humans, the left visual field of both the left and right
00:11:59
eye goes to the right hemisphere and the right field of both the left and right eye goes to the left
00:12:06
hemisphere. In many animals, they have eyes on the sides of their head, and there is almost literally
00:12:13
just a straight crossover. But because humans have eyes on the front of their head,
00:12:17
partly because we evolved from apes that needed to be able to judge distances of branches ahead,
00:12:24
they needed to be able to do this, you know, by, by a focal way of seeing things.
00:12:36
And so, it's not quite true. It is true that the right ear feeds pretty much the left hemisphere
00:12:43
and the left ear to the right. That's probably why it wasn't really working for me when I was
00:12:48
switching that before. Has that got something to do with the fact that the ears are literally on
00:12:54
the side of the skull in a way that in many birds, for example, the eyes are on the side of the skull?
00:12:58
It's like the position of the organ that changes its relation to the brain. It does, yes.
00:13:04
And I was wondering if you could tell us, I mean, you list a few in the book. I'm not sure how many you
00:13:12
could think of at the top of your head, but examples of so in birds, for example, with that eyes
00:13:19
on opposite sides of their head and governed by different hemispheres, seemingly being able to
00:13:24
perceive the world differently through different eyes. So, for example, if I'm not mistaken, at least
00:13:28
some birds will be better at spotting predators with one eye rather than the other. A new hypothesis
00:13:34
that this is because of the fact that they're seeing the predator in an eye that is more apt to
00:13:39
looking out for predators, right? Yes, you can actually see birds turning their head in a way which
00:13:46
would be abnormal for the situation. If there's a predator that's in the wrong visual field,
00:13:53
they will turn so that it's in the visual field, the left visual field, that comes to the right eye,
00:14:00
because the right eye, the left eye, to the right brain, the right hemisphere is the hemispheres
00:14:07
is looking out for the predator. And the experiments have been done in lizards in which one eye was
00:14:14
experimentally taped over, and the predator was produced. And obviously, when it's the
00:14:20
right eye that's been taped over, which feeds to the left hemisphere, they look through the
00:14:29
the untape's eye. But when it's the left eye that has been taped over, which is the eye through which
00:14:38
they would normally inspect a predator, they turn their heads to try and look through the taped
00:14:44
over eye. They try to look through it because that is their habit. So, I just say that because it
00:14:51
illustrates very clearly that there are these differences. They're not 100 percent differences,
00:14:57
nothing in biology ever is, but there's a statistically highly significant difference between the
00:15:02
use in a bird of its left and its right eye. We'll get back to Ian McGilchrist in just a second,
00:15:07
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00:16:21
back to Ian McGilchrist. So you've given a sketch of what the different
00:16:25
hemisphere's do, and I know it's quite tricky to pin it down exactly, and like you say, they're both
00:16:30
involved in everything. But if you had to sum up, you say that it used to be the case that people
00:16:36
would think left brain is like, I don't know, reason, rationality, language, maybe, and the right
00:16:45
brain is like art, music, poetry, and that's misleading. It seems like you're saying,
00:16:51
could you give us maybe three better words on each side of the brain to try to approximate
00:16:56
what it is that these these hemispheres are responsible for? Well, I think the point is,
00:17:02
if I was to answer your question outright, I mean one pairing would be the left hemisphere is
00:17:10
in a way only aware or only interested in what can be made unambiguous and explicit,
00:17:19
whereas the right hemisphere is capable of sustaining things that are on the surface of them,
00:17:27
of them, perhaps opposite, but that coexist and need one another, and are perhaps at the same time
00:17:33
in different ways present in the situation. It's also much better at understanding the implicit.
00:17:38
So there was some truth in what you just said, but let me try and separate it out.
00:17:45
So as I said, the difficulty with the way we used to think was about what they were doing,
00:17:52
so reason, language, pictures, emotions. But in each of those cases, I can very clearly
00:17:59
explain that, for example, language, some of it is very much a part of the left hemisphere,
00:18:07
and what is very, very largely true is that speech, the articulation of speech is in almost everybody
00:18:16
in the left hemisphere. But that's not the whole of language, and the most important part of understanding
00:18:23
language actually is supplied by the right hemisphere. So the left hemisphere is a little bit like
00:18:28
a computer that's been given the Oxford English dictionary and a book of rules of syntax,
00:18:35
and it's trying to decode the message, whereas the right hemisphere sees that the meaning of this
00:18:42
is something that is not being stated, that is quite different. I mean, a very, very simple everyday
00:18:47
example is, if you're speaking in an auditorium and you say, it's very hot in here. The left hemisphere
00:19:00
is saying, he's pointing out that on a hot day in a room with a lot of people is getting warm,
00:19:06
no prizes for that. But the right hemisphere understands what he's really saying is, could you switch
00:19:12
on the air conditioning or open a window? So the implicit meaning is what the right hemisphere
00:19:17
understands, only the explicit, the left hemisphere. And when you think about it, so much of what is
00:19:24
truly important in language, even in everyday language, is metaphorical in nature, sometimes ironic,
00:19:32
oblique, it may be as important what is not being said as what is being said,
00:19:37
poetry, in fact, is something the right hemisphere is much better at than the left,
00:19:43
and that's because its linguistic capabilities are different from those of the left.
00:19:48
The left is to do with narrowing down on the certainty. In fact, if you wanted to make another
00:19:52
difference between the left and right that is global, the left hemisphere's whole
00:19:56
result that, if you like, is to try to narrow down to a certainty. Whereas the
00:20:03
result that, through the right hemisphere, is to open up to a possibility. So it's always saying,
00:20:08
yes, but it might not be that. Rather than a chandra, and calls the right hemisphere, the devil's
00:20:12
advocate, because it's seeing other possibilities here. So that's true of language, it's true
00:20:20
reason too. So some kinds of reasoning are better done by the left hemisphere, but when you get beyond
00:20:27
the carrying out of wrote procedures, often the right hemisphere is better able to understand the
00:20:33
meaning of a calculation. So the left hemisphere is better at times tables, partly because they're all
00:20:40
recited and ingested in that way in childhood, and it follows rules and procedures. It's very good
00:20:46
at that. It is in fact a bureaucrat. It was appointed as the emissary, the one that would go about and
00:20:54
be a high functioning bureaucrat for the master, the master of the one that sees the whole picture. So
00:20:59
this is true of reason and language just as much as anything else. And to come to emotions,
00:21:04
the most lateralized of all emotions is anger, and it lateralizes to the left hemisphere.
00:21:12
The left hemisphere is not a cool customer. It is not without emotions. It tends to have more self-centred
00:21:19
self-righteous emotions and more social emotions, but the deeper ones like empathy and melancholy,
00:21:25
and so on are more appreciated by the right hemisphere. And so on, I could go on, but what I'm really
00:21:31
pointing out is it's the mode in which you're thinking about whatever it is. We'll tell you which
00:21:36
hemisphere is more important, not the actual sphere of activity, of human activity.
00:21:44
Yeah. What I'm interested in, I suppose, is what this means for us, because we've got these
00:21:56
two different hemispheres, sort of governing different ways of being in the world. Like you say,
00:22:02
it's not so much a different way of thinking about the world, but different ways of being in the world.
00:22:06
It's just a different way to react. I mean, you often see people have discussions with each other,
00:22:11
and it feels like they just don't understand where each other are coming from. And the terminology
00:22:16
of saying one is being too left brain and one is being too right brain can be very helpful there.
00:22:20
It's kind of like if you see Jordan Peterson and Richard Dawkins have a conversation about God
00:22:25
and religion. And Peterson is talking about narrative and how things are truer than true,
00:22:32
and that it's kind of fiction, but it's a special kind of fiction. And then Richard Dawkins being like,
00:22:37
I want to know if you put a camera in, you know, if you put a camera in front of the two,
00:22:45
would you see a man walk out of it? Like did it literally happen? And it's extraordinary. I mean,
00:22:50
it seems more understandable to me that Richard Dawkins is baffled by Jordan Peterson being asked,
00:22:56
did the exodus story happen? And Peterson responds, it's still happening. That's his response. Quite,
00:23:02
quite baffling. But it seems equally baffling to Jordan Peterson. When somebody asks him,
00:23:08
you know, do you think it actually happened? Like literally, do you think that a man rose from the dead?
00:23:14
Do you think that Jesus was born of a version? And he's like, I don't even know how to begin
00:23:17
answering that question. I don't have the requisite understanding of the terms that you're using.
00:23:24
That seems absolutely baffling. Do you think that that is sort of a conflict like that,
00:23:29
something like a battle between left brain thinking and right brain thinking?
00:23:33
Well, I rather resist these rather simple ways of using the terms, but I can't entirely
00:23:45
disagree with you. I think that ultimately when you start unpacking the way in which the right
00:23:51
and the left hemisphere see the world, you can see that there are such differences. I mean, in many
00:23:58
ways, Richard Dawkins is a scientific reductionist. He's a reductionist materialist. I hope I'm not
00:24:11
doing him an injustice in saying that. But I think he therefore misunderstands the meaning of many things.
00:24:18
And one of them is that when it comes to certain things like, for example, consciousness,
00:24:29
the ability to grasp it, to pin it down, to say what it is and where it arises. This is almost
00:24:38
the wrong way to approach it, because it's not a thing like that. It's not another thing in the
00:24:44
world, alongside the things that consciousness allows us to be aware of. And God is not a thing
00:24:51
in the world, in the way that a rock or a stone or a tree is a thing in the world, or at least we,
00:24:57
I would begin to want to qualify that as well, but these purposes, let's say a bicycle is a thing
00:25:07
in the world, but God is not a very complicated machine. He's not a very complicated anything
00:25:13
of the kind that we know. And so to try to approach God in that way is going to produce
00:25:22
no insight into what people mean. And you have to be very arrogant or a very confident person to say,
00:25:31
well, all these people who think that they understand something, that I can't see, they're just wrong,
00:25:37
because I can't see it. Another way of looking at it would be, well, maybe I need to revise my thoughts
00:25:45
about what is true. And I know this sounds like sort of hedging one's bets, but is the truth that can
00:25:58
be stated in words that is true to what human nature is. So is human nature another something that
00:26:08
can be written down in a scientific text, and that pins down and exhausts what a human being is.
00:26:16
Now human beings we now exist and we all have experience of them. But in order to convey the
00:26:24
realities of what a human being is encounters and is capable of, you'd have to turn to art,
00:26:32
you'd have to turn to the works of Shakespeare, you'd have to turn to narratives, you'd turn to stories
00:26:38
to great myths which explain our relationship to a divine realm or to the cosmos or to one another.
00:26:50
If you don't have, and I think some people are just born without the capacity to feel what it is
00:26:56
that art tells us, what poetry tells us, what music tells us, what rituals tell us, what narratives tell us.
00:27:03
Then you won't understand why you're missing a very great deal because you're trying to make it all
00:27:09
fit into a very, onto a pro-crusty and bed. You're trying to cut off everything that doesn't
00:27:15
fit into this one way of looking at things. And to make this clear, in the ancient world,
00:27:25
in the ancient Greek world, and these people were by no means fools or, I mean they were the first
00:27:32
scientists in the modern sense. So Dawkins should hold them in great respect, and they did make extraordinary
00:27:39
scientific advances. But they didn't think that these advances would tell them the answers to the
00:27:44
big questions like what is a human being, what does consciousness mean, where is it, who has it,
00:27:51
what is the divine, what do we mean when we talk about the sacred, which almost everybody
00:27:56
experiences and finds a need to talk about the sacred, even if they don't use the term God,
00:28:05
it doesn't really matter. And so in this ancient Greek world there were two
00:28:10
conceptions of truth, mythos, or mythos as it would be in originally, and logos. And mythos is
00:28:19
given as the word myth, and logos is given as the word logic. But they believe that the big truths,
00:28:24
the really deep truths, the great truths, could only be encompassed by poetry, by narrative,
00:28:34
by what falls in the realm of myth. And that logic was the sort of thing that a lawyer would do in a
00:28:41
courtroom to settle a dispute and decide how much money was owed by one person to another. So it
00:28:47
operated on a much more trivial realm. Now you can say I'm only interested in that trivial realm
00:28:53
in which things can be measured and demonstrated by a photograph and so forth. But do you believe in love?
00:28:59
Do you think that love is real? If you don't think it's real, I pity you because it's the most staggering
00:29:05
experience in life. And it has many forms. And as the love one has a logic love for a partner,
00:29:13
there is the love one has for nature, there is for those of us who sense something greater and divine,
00:29:20
there is the love one has for that. But love cannot be demonstrated in laboratory, it cannot be
00:29:27
manipulated, it can't be measured in any way. Does that make it unreal? Not at all. So I feel this is just a
00:29:35
huge discrepancy between a very narrow idea of what truth is and a broader one. And if you'll
00:29:45
permit me, I just want to say something about truth there that there are two, well there are many
00:29:53
ways of course to think about what truth is and many types of theory and philosophy about how to
00:29:58
how to think of truth. But two that are very important because they're quite different and we can
00:30:02
recognize them are truth as correctness which is really this closing down on a precise
00:30:09
form of words or measurement that encompasses what it is that we are looking at. There's something
00:30:16
out there which is the truth and I'm going to take steps which lead me in a linear fashion towards
00:30:22
that truth and I get closer and closer to that truth which is an entity somewhere. And the other
00:30:28
is that truth is a process of discovery, of unveiling and when I say discovery I mean literally
00:30:34
uncovering, uncovering the appreciations that have come between us and a deeper truth that is not
00:30:41
discernible by the everyday eye of reason. The everyday eye of reason is very valuable. I very
00:30:49
much respect reason and science and they've served me well for many many years and you know
00:30:56
I worry that nowadays in fact both of them are coming under a shack and people are discrediting
00:31:04
science unless it fits with the narrative of what they would like politically to think it's true
00:31:08
that people are discarding reason they don't find that it leads to the place they want to go.
00:31:16
And I'm not detaching them I'm just saying they have limitations. Intuition has limitations
00:31:23
too but it also has great powers to put us in touch with things that science alone won't take us
00:31:28
to and they need much of science was actually solved not by the scientific method but by a process
00:31:35
of intuitive approach towards a Gestalt, a shape, a form which gave the answer to a mathematician
00:31:41
or to a scientist. An imagination is also a very important tool and it seems to me that what
00:31:47
Dawkins is saying I don't say he has no imagination I don't know him that well but he wants to say that
00:31:53
what imagination reveals to him is not true but that's because he's got an idea I suspect that
00:31:58
imagination is something that takes you away from reality. It's what I would call fantasy whereas
00:32:07
as was known to the great philosophers of the late 18th and early 19th century,
00:32:12
imagination was the way in which one felt one's way into the true reality of something other than
00:32:17
oneself and without imagination one couldn't reach it. So where have we gone wrong here then because
00:32:25
the kind of Dawkins-esque approach of the primacy of I suppose in a way left brain thinking
00:32:35
seems to be dominant and I think you said in the past and recently that the world is sort of
00:32:43
becoming a bit left brain dominant or is a bit left brain dominant in a way that maybe it once
00:32:49
didn't use to be and I'm interested for two reasons that the first is sort of like you know
00:32:56
when I say how does that happen I don't just mean what are the social conditions that make people
00:33:01
think this way but how is it that the brain starts acting differently is it like this mind that
00:33:07
connects the two hemispheres just sort of starts ignoring one side are we able to train the mind
00:33:12
into sort of residing more in the right brain or the left brain that seems very strange if you have
00:33:16
one brain that is all connected and communicating with each other how could it even be the case that
00:33:20
people would just sort of switch one of them off in a lot of these conversations.
00:33:26
Well because they're not I mean you're thinking in terms of an alternative this is on
00:33:34
letters off or whatever whereas what I'm talking about is is a spectrum if you like so it's more like
00:33:41
it's not like a switch that's on and off of one or the other it's more like a slider in which
00:33:46
you know one hemisphere can be more attended to or it can be more in use in our attention to the
00:33:53
world than the other and I think that what has happened is that it's not so much that our brains
00:34:01
are any different I mean of course they're always different and they're evolving slowly over time
00:34:07
as everything evolves so it is true that our brains are probably subtly different from those of
00:34:15
a key and Greeks you know but but if you put them into a scanner which if you did the thought
00:34:23
experiments and put them into a scanner you wouldn't expect to see their brains very different
00:34:27
from ours so it's not that the brain itself is the the key here it's how the brain is being used.
00:34:33
I think the way to think of it is rather like if you bought a new radio and you listen to a
00:34:38
couple of stations that you're favourites after a while you begin to listen only to one I think
00:34:44
that's more the way it is and I should emphasize that I don't think that the great
00:34:49
changes in in in cultural history that I map out in the second half of the the master's
00:34:58
emissary in which I look at the west from the time of the ancient Greeks through to the present day
00:35:03
I look at the sort of great changes in moments of change in the history of ideas and in the rise
00:35:10
and falls of of the the Greek the Roman and if you like that the modern civilization and
00:35:21
I'm not saying that the brain causes these changes but what I'm saying that the causes of changes
00:35:28
may be many many things they may be economic they may be environmental changes they may be wars they
00:35:34
may be political upheavals they may be many things that cause people to change the way in which they
00:35:43
they live or think but inevitably their thinking is if you like molded by the brain through which it is
00:35:54
brought to be articulated and so it is it's perfectly coherent to talk of a period during which
00:36:04
you can say that most of the phenomena of that culture appear to be expressive of a more left
00:36:11
hemisphere dominated take on the world or a more right hemisphere take and and that's really all
00:36:18
the time I'm saying when I'm talking about these things and I do to come back to your earlier point
00:36:23
I do definitely think that at the moment it's quite extraordinary how how much this left hemisphere
00:36:30
take dominates and that we are not any longer apparently aware of all the richness the beauty
00:36:38
the complexity the meaning that the right hemisphere gives to life so we think that we live in a world
00:36:44
in which is constituted by random lumps of senseless matter bumping into one another and none of
00:36:50
it has any purpose meaning or direction or any beauty for that matter so I'd strongly differ from
00:36:58
that point of view but it's also you've said that the the hemispheres are not two different ways of
00:37:05
thinking about the world the different ways of being in the world it's like no one is more legitimate
00:37:09
than the other they're not they're not sort of competing hypotheses or something they're just both
00:37:15
ways of approaching the world and so when somebody says yeah well when I observe the material world
00:37:22
and I see atoms and I see them bumping into each other and I don't observe anything else
00:37:27
are they making a mistake there I mean the way you just described it sort of parodying this this
00:37:33
person who says you know there's nothing I mean earlier you were talking about somebody who
00:37:38
doesn't doesn't have meaning or love because all they see is sort of materialism and and I guess
00:37:46
you know there's a sense in which I agree with you I saw someone put it like you know do you
00:37:50
kiss your mother with that world view like do you really sort of believe that do you live like that
00:37:56
maybe not but are they like making a mistake well I think a very simple point which can be
00:38:02
made in a sentence as do you think love is real if you do think love is real then you have to accept
00:38:08
that something that we don't know where it is we we we don't know what it is we we we don't
00:38:15
we can't measure it in the lab we can't manipulate it in the lab we can't see it or photograph it
00:38:22
we don't have a dial or a meter which will respond to it we can find but this is a very erroneous
00:38:29
way of thinking you can find a kind of different you can find it something that you presume is
00:38:40
a proxy for love and but mistaking things for the proxies that can be measured is a fundamental
00:38:48
a very basic error of thinking but as you say the difference between the hemispheres is not just
00:38:54
in ways of thinking it's in ways of being which includes thinking and feeling and behaving and
00:39:00
and um a way of approaching the world a way of attending to it a way of being in it in other words it
00:39:12
affects every aspect of your life it doesn't just stop with an articulation of a few
00:39:19
paragraphs of of rather simple propositions it it's a whole way of being and a civilization can
00:39:27
adopt a way of being and a way of thinking which it's hardly aware of as you know peculiar because
00:39:35
it's forgotten the alternatives and that this can be very destructive and I believe that's the
00:39:40
world we live in now where I think a lot of people are simply no longer aware of what
00:39:46
what the world can offer because we've we've disengaged ourselves from all the way to them which
00:39:53
we used to be made aware of it I mean number one living in close proximity to the natural world
00:39:59
which until very recently almost everybody in the world did uh living in a culture which has evolved
00:40:05
over time and has evolved in such a way as to help stabilize that culture so that it can live in harmony
00:40:11
with its environment so that it can understand its experiences um worship of a divine or sacred realm
00:40:20
these are all the ways in which we can be reminded of things of a bigger more complex than we are
00:40:26
and and we've lost a sense of wonder before the world we've lost a sense of modesty about what it
00:40:32
is we can know in other words we've become arrogant and simplistic in our thinking and the
00:40:39
result of this has been known since time immemorial it's what Greek tragedy was about the hubris of
00:40:45
the hero somebody who had the potential to be great but because he overreached himself and didn't
00:40:51
know what it was he didn't know he brought everything down on his head and and that is what we are now
00:40:57
living out time afraid we're destroying society we're destroying the planet um and we're destroying
00:41:04
ourselves I want to talk about how we might go about fixing that uh shortly but first I do want to
00:41:12
I suppose push back on this idea I mean you said that the the position can be summed up in a
00:41:18
single question do you believe in love and I think a lot of my listeners will say it sort of depends
00:41:23
on what you mean um because I experienced this thing love you know at least sometimes and
00:41:32
a lot of people are satisfied to say that this is an emergent property of atoms bumping into each
00:41:42
other and it's an interesting one and a fascinating one and one that we still have a lot to learn
00:41:46
about but can essentially be understood by reducing it to its material parts that is a very left
00:41:53
brain way of thinking about what love is and and a lot of people are simply satisfied to say well
00:41:58
that's what love is it's a bit cynical it's maybe a bit depressing it's maybe not sort of
00:42:03
how you behave but then people are constantly exercising self delusion all the time and that this is
00:42:11
this is what love is I mean what would you say to somebody who who says that I'd say a lot of things
00:42:17
I mean first and most trivially of course people believe that if they're being cynical they're
00:42:23
being more intelligent unfortunately all the psychological research shows that people who are
00:42:30
cynical are less intelligent really people who's yes who I quoted in the matter with things
00:42:37
the matter of things took my thinking very very much further than what is in the master of this
00:42:44
emissary into these these realms particularly but I just say that trivially just so don't pride
00:42:50
yourself on being cynical but I say it's simple minded because you know it's promissory materialism
00:43:00
we can't tell you how the feeling you have for your partner your your loved one emerges from
00:43:07
colliding atoms but we're just going to say so because we're going to stick to our dog but that's
00:43:12
stupid that's the kind of thing that people who have no flexibility no imagination do they say oh
00:43:18
it's all going to be atoms bumping into how do they know that where did they derive that is that
00:43:23
really science let's go to physics let's go to the physics of atoms we now know that atoms are
00:43:29
nothing light little billion balls bumping into one another that we thought we thought we now know
00:43:35
that the basis of matter is interchangeable with energy first of all matter is interchangeable
00:43:42
with energy if that's what e equals mc squared means and and what exists and we call the basis of matter
00:43:52
is probabilistic form fields and those things that we use to call particles have no
00:43:58
existence in the sense of like little tiny balls you know straight out of school you might go
00:44:06
around thinking so forget all that spend a little time of creating yourself with what physicists
00:44:11
actually say so physicists are much more in my experience philosophically sophisticated than
00:44:18
biologists biologists have been subjected to a really thoroughly uninteresting unethical
00:44:31
intellectually barren way of thinking which physics jettisoned over a hundred years ago
00:44:39
and i'm very relieved to say that biologists are beginning to realize they've got to jettisoners
00:44:44
as well so just in the last ten to fifteen years there have been enormous steps forward in biology
00:44:50
in which we now realize that organisms living things are nothing like machines and that the
00:44:56
machine model is an extraordinarily dangerous model to reply it can help you solve small problems
00:45:04
in the complex just i don't know how much to go into this but can't tell me how how humans are not
00:45:11
like computers yeah i want to get into it i think it's interesting well how how what do you mean when
00:45:15
you say the idea that you like the machines or computers is totally wrong well first of all you
00:45:23
can switch the computer off and and come back ten years later and switch it on it will probably work
00:45:28
you can't do that with a living organism i mean it's a simple point it's an important one
00:45:33
yeah machine machines can't themselves in the process of making themselves right the instructions
00:45:42
that are the instructions to make themselves a machine can be made by another machine if the
00:45:47
instructions are put into that machine the first machine it can make a second machine
00:45:52
but there is no machine that in it's coming into being it is capable of
00:46:01
planning its own existence i mean i know that in the genome that was going to be the the blueprint
00:46:08
there's almost no information i mean there's it's so vanishingly small it can't conceivably
00:46:14
gives the information of even quite simple things we look at i mean look at look at
00:46:21
an emittered worm you can cut its head off and it will re regrow a new head and in that head it will
00:46:29
have the memories that the old head had where do those memories from yes i mean i don't know where
00:46:35
to go there's just so many things to say here and the human brain in utero develops on average
00:46:46
4,000 new neurons every second 4,000 new neurons every second and when you look at the brain and you
00:46:55
realize how complex it is constructed how important it is that different neurons are in the area saying
00:47:02
where is the map for that it's certainly not in the genome and you know a machine can't love a
00:47:11
machine can't feel or a machine can't feel emotions a machine hasn't got a body a machine can't
00:47:19
know it's going to die it can't project a delighted future it has no memory it has data banks
00:47:25
but it doesn't have memory which implies a consciousness a machine is completely different from an
00:47:30
organism and what what is really essential to this but will sound rather superficial not too
00:47:40
superficial but kind of like well i don't really get that but is the difference between a complex
00:47:46
system and a complicated system so a complicated system is one of which you just keep adding modules
00:47:52
and so for example a fighter jet engine and the whole jet plane is a very complicated system
00:48:01
but it's not a complex system a complex system is a system in which there are
00:48:06
whole ranges of processes going on that interact with one another in ways that we can hardly
00:48:14
describe in which bits of one cascade will then link into another cascade and we couldn't plan
00:48:21
this even for one second in a single cell organism we couldn't map it there are in that single cell
00:48:28
in a second millions of interactive processes going on including feedback loops so the processor
00:48:35
is coming out of one of these processes feeding into another process it is nothing like a machine
00:48:40
machines are not like this machines on the parts of machines are not changing as a machine is
00:48:46
moving that are organisms parts are changing rebuilding and reconfiguring all the time so
00:48:51
if i might say so a living being in a machine are almost as different in fact i can't think of
00:48:59
any two more different things in the entire cosmos and what's more i would say that there is
00:49:03
nothing in the cosmos that is like a machine except a few million lumps of metal that we created
00:49:11
in the last few centuries so nothing in the universe is mechanical we know from physicists that the
00:49:19
inanimate universe is not mechanical and at last biologists are waking up to the very much more
00:49:25
obvious point that organisms life are not is not mechanical either so you know as i say i hardly
00:49:35
know where this is definitely not just a case because the thing about like biology evolutionary
00:49:44
biology is that given the the amazing span of time just unfathomable amount of time that there's
00:49:51
been for evolution to work on organisms and given sort of how evolutionary pressures will just like
00:49:58
perfectly curate absolutely everything the most minute details the most incredible detail
00:50:04
it is possible to for this to to evolve on a naturalistic framework at least that's what the
00:50:10
naturalist will say is it definitely not the case and i mean i i think you're going to say yes but
00:50:17
i i want to make sure that the difference is you're describing here you know the inability of a
00:50:23
machine to to create more machines without sort of exterior input that kind of thing it the
00:50:32
inability of a machine to develop something like the business because somebody could reply well
00:50:38
i can make a machine that i can leave alone and i can program it will make more machines that's
00:50:44
not the point the point is no one machine can write its own program in the process of coming into
00:50:51
being right and it's and what i'm asking is that's that's definitely a distinction of principle that's
00:50:59
not just a case of like you know machines being a couple of hundred years old as you say and biological
00:51:07
organisms being literally billions of years old and so so having much more time to to you know develop
00:51:14
complexity and and abilities that machines haven't sort of been able to to muster yet instead in
00:51:19
otherwise i'm trying to preempt what somebody listening to this might say an objection which is that
00:51:24
yeah of course machines are totally different from from organisms but you know give machines
00:51:29
four billion years to to sort of evolve and communicate with each other an artificial general
00:51:35
intelligence and all of this kind of stuff and eventually you'll end up with something they're
00:51:37
just like an organism well there's at the two separate points yet is it legitimate to make an
00:51:44
organism more comprehensible you think by comparing it to a machine the machine it's the only
00:51:53
machine to be known have and the answer is definitely no so the other point you're making is a
00:52:00
quite separate one which is again a promissory run i mean nobody knows what in millions of years
00:52:05
there won't be machines in millions of years because we will have destroyed ourselves on the planet
00:52:11
but um but let's just suppose that machines could evolve it's really a bit of a cheat to say
00:52:17
i say now that if they're given millions of years they will come to this because
00:52:23
we didn't life didn't start in in in machines at all you know people say oh well they could become
00:52:29
conscious but how do we know that they could become conscious where where does that
00:52:33
where does that idea itself come from i mean the other thing that's quite quite interesting
00:52:39
just because people say nonsense um evolution is completely un um has no purpose
00:52:49
and and i'm not going into intelligent design i'm not saying i'm talking about intelligent design
00:52:55
i'm referring to things that we do actually know so what we know and Barbara McLean talk
00:53:01
one of Nobel Prize is in the 80s i think of the last century for her discovery that cells can
00:53:10
first of all a part of a cell can respond to another remote part of the cell in an intelligent
00:53:18
way when that cell needs something from that other part of the cell in ways that we don't understand
00:53:24
but it can also very rapidly invent a way of dealing with a threat that it has neither been prepared
00:53:32
for by its genes or by its heredity or by its own experience so in other words it is intelligent
00:53:41
i say that you know a good criterion of intelligence is if this organism can see a new way
00:53:50
of tackling a problem very quickly that it has not been prepared for in any way there is no
00:53:57
antecedent for it so you find that for example a particular change needs to happen in an organism
00:54:08
a metabolic change needs to happen very rapidly and it's not one that it has any known mechanism
00:54:14
for achieving sometimes within as little as two or three days it would have made a change
00:54:20
that helps that organism persist in being and it doesn't have to wait for the two billion years
00:54:27
that that change would have taken to happen randomly so biologists are realizing that very little
00:54:34
is random in that way there needs to be a degree of order and a degree of disorder
00:54:41
not so that there's chaos but so there is flexibility in the system and it's that flexibility
00:54:48
that comes from repairing you know we started talking earlier about parings of division and union
00:54:54
but another important pairing is order and a degree of disorder something that's too ordered
00:55:01
can't be responsive and reflective something that's too chaotic can't be it needs to have this
00:55:06
completely extraordinary capacity to be largely ordered but capable of completely new turns
00:55:12
and that is what life gives us and that's what organisms are like circling back to this point
00:55:19
about consciousness that you mentioned a moment ago you you said you know machines becoming conscious
00:55:26
how could we know that that's possible and I just wanted to check would you go as far as to say
00:55:32
not just that we have no way to know that machines could one day be conscious do you think that
00:55:38
you'd be more confident in saying that machines cannot become conscious if you don't
00:55:44
I'm saying are you saying that like in other words is it just we have no reason to think they could
00:55:48
become conscious or is it actually we have reason to think that they will never become conscious
00:55:51
because of course this is like the debate around artificial intelligence at the moment that
00:55:57
that and I suppose the sort of ethical implications of it but but in terms of the sort of philosophical
00:56:01
implications this is the debate about what ag is yes I think that nobody can ever be a hundred percent
00:56:12
certain of anything actually there is literally no certainty in the cosmos we know that
00:56:20
so I can't completely with certainty the left hemisphere would like me to say well you
00:56:24
you must say it certainly can or it certainly can't I just this is a question that I really haven't
00:56:30
got enough information to answer and I don't think any living person has enough information to answer
00:56:36
I want to say that the touring test is in my view a really rather silly idea I mean it doesn't
00:56:43
prove anything it just says I can't tell whether this is a real for the sake of listeners the
00:56:51
touring test is the a proposed idea of how to tell if a computer has consciousness and it's
00:56:58
something like a test as to whether or not it's possible to tell whether or not you're talking to
00:57:05
a computer like if you're speaking to something and you don't know if it's a computer or a person
00:57:09
than if in fact you are speaking to a computer that's an indication of consciousness that's right
00:57:14
and it was it was an idea proposed by Turing who's a sort of brilliant man
00:57:18
who was really in at the very beginnings of computers but it's not it's not a good test of anything
00:57:26
I mean because I'm sure after all what what the computer is is a mimic and you can make it mimic
00:57:34
anything in the 18th century they had speaking heads they were very clunky and they were made of bronze
00:57:40
and all that sort of thing and really all we've done is make these much much more sophisticated
00:57:46
but they're still there's still machines that are made to mimic and be parasitic on human minds and
00:57:52
human intelligences so I can't rule out I don't propose to rule out anything but I think it let me
00:58:00
put it this way I think it would be first of all impossible to prove one way or the other and
00:58:06
secondly enormously unlikely because there are no complex entities that we know other than
00:58:15
the ones that that are in organisms that have this capacity so this takes it on to the question
00:58:28
of the relationship between consciousness and matter which I'm happy to go to if you want because
00:58:34
I would like to but but but perhaps before that there's another thing you mentioned which is that
00:58:38
you said I'm not doing intelligent design here I'm not talking about God given the nature of my
00:58:43
channel we're very interested in religion and philosophy of religion I have to ask the question
00:58:47
does this not all point when when you talk about sort of non-randomness and complexity and the
00:58:53
impossibility of biological matter just sort of springing up out of nowhere randomly by chance
00:59:00
it sort of sounds a lot like many conversations I've had with theists and you know I'm not going to
00:59:08
ask you if you don't want to say it's in many ways a personal question whether you personally
00:59:10
believe in God but do you think that this is pointing to some kind of intelligent design?
00:59:14
Well to answer your difficult question I think the answer is yes but of course rather like all
00:59:22
the difficult questions the comes the writer it does depend what you mean and what I don't mean by God
00:59:30
is a an engineer in the sky and it's that kind of idea of intelligent design that I would not accept
00:59:39
in fact I think that's a very left hemispheric idea it's the left hemispheres wave
00:59:44
of flattering itself is to say well yes of course it could be a god it really has a kind of
00:59:51
intelligence we have and simply is applying it on a large scale to a cosmic machine
00:59:56
what instead I'm suggesting is that the ground of being which is another way of saying
01:00:04
the god that that is the the source of being in the cosmos is not chaotic is not random
01:00:15
that is beautiful and has purpose in other it has direction when you look at the cosmos I mean one
01:00:24
thing you can say is that the movement is both inanimate and animate in it certainly seem to
01:00:30
to have direction to them they don't they don't just go in any old direction they do tend to have
01:00:37
consistent tendencies and those consistent tendencies are if you like either attractions which I
01:00:46
prefer to the idea of drives but it may be more compressible if you say those are drives in the
01:00:51
cosmos but they might also be the response to attractive forces in the cosmos that lead things
01:00:57
into certain directions and shapes but exactly what they are is not determined so it is both an
01:01:03
open system and one that is not devoid of meaning or direction and if your idea of intelligent
01:01:13
design were compatible with that then I would say okay well maybe we're talking about the same thing
01:01:20
but unfortunately a lot of intelligent design and I'm not sure it's true of all of it but I think a
01:01:25
lot of it and what gives it a bad name is the idea that there is a cosmic engineer who is fiddling
01:01:31
the numbers if you think but I think what has happened is that the universe has been created so that
01:01:36
it makes it makes use intelligently of the possibilities that are open so the future is not
01:01:45
foreclosed but it doesn't mean that it could be random it has directions exactly what they will
01:01:52
lead to I don't think even the divine source knows I argue strongly that if there is a god that God
01:01:57
is not omniscient and not omnipotent but is also not omniscient and not omnipotent what do I mean by
01:02:05
that if you think of these things in a very left hemispheric way the omniscience would mean that God
01:02:12
knows everything that ever has been ever will be and all the possibilities and therefore there is
01:02:19
the future is known everything is closed and the whole business of that leading out our lives
01:02:23
is really a sorry charade because we have no freedom and as we were the cosmos is not achieving anything
01:02:30
creative it's just unfolding something that's already there and omnipotence can be of a similar kind
01:02:37
that it means that God can just do anything can make you know two equal five or whatever I don't
01:02:42
believe that God is of this nature but I don't think that you can say well God is not omniscient or
01:02:49
not omnipotent you can only say he's not not omnipotent and not omnipotent and what I'm getting at here
01:02:58
is that those terms don't really apply it's like if you ask people is God green and I say well no
01:03:04
no God does not green but you know he's not not green either I mean it's just it's the wrong kind
01:03:10
of yeah it's like asking if God is even and and it's like no he's not even yes but he's not odd either
01:03:16
you know it's just like the wrong terminology I mean famously Thomas Aquinas is famed for pointing out
01:03:24
that all religious languages and a logical that is God is not omnipotent God is not loving God is
01:03:32
not powerful God is none of these things because these are human terms just to sort of approximate
01:03:36
the kind of thing that God might be like and maybe the only way that we really have
01:03:42
the authority to use these as analogies is because we have like scripture using these terms so we know
01:03:47
they must be accurate at some level but we have to keep in mind that God is not any of these things
01:03:52
these are just essentially metaphors so I think I understand what you're saying there although it does
01:03:58
sound you know when you when you first start talking in those terms well it's not that he's omnipotent
01:04:04
is that he's not not omnipotent people are probably going to be a bit sort of befuddled by that
01:04:08
but if I'm understanding you correctly you're you're you're meaning something a bit like that?
01:04:12
I am saying meaning exactly something like that I'm meaning that you're asking a question
01:04:19
which is the question you could ask of something that is already a creation a machine or an object
01:04:28
but God is not a machine or an object God is the the terms as it were on which there can be
01:04:34
anything so God is not God is not the the first cause in the sense of a first actor who temporarily
01:04:42
started a process but God is the the prime cause in the sense that the without which there can be
01:04:50
nothing you know so the the basis on which there can be something and the questions you can ask
01:04:56
of that are different questions that I mean we we came there earlier when talking about Dawkins
01:05:01
but of course this is right and this is a point that is I mean no doubt some people will think well
01:05:06
that's just a sort of get out clause and so on but I can't help people like that because you you've
01:05:12
got to actually broaden your mind to see that there are different ways of knowing things there are
01:05:16
different kinds of truth and you know you you can either accept that or not and in a way you have
01:05:21
to live with your choice about whether you would do accept that or not but I would recommend opening
01:05:26
your mind and reading more philosophy and and seeing that there's more going on than just mechanical
01:05:33
certifiable facts that can be put into a textbook and verified by an experiment so and
01:05:40
but I do think it's a very important point you've raised because it's very very difficult one to
01:05:48
articulate as everything to do with God is as soon as you start saying something you can be misunderstood
01:05:54
but my point is that that God is my idea of of of God and the first thing one has to say is one's
01:06:04
bound to be ignorant in talking about these things including people who say there isn't one I mean
01:06:09
it's just one of those areas and my idea my my hunts my intuition what speaks to me is the idea
01:06:19
of a cause a God a an ontological cause a source of being the grounded being that as I say neither
01:06:33
has determined everything but nor is completely absent he's not that sort of
01:06:41
God that has you know disappeared off somewhere and there's not not at the least but interested
01:06:47
I believe that God is himself in evolution I'm an evolutionary a process philosopher if I'm a
01:06:55
solution at all I'm a process the illusion so I believe that the divine essence is in process all the
01:07:03
time and and some people like Ron Williams to whom I've often talked doesn't like this he agrees
01:07:11
with me about one was everything I think I can say that that I have written on these topics
01:07:17
but he he's very cautious about even not about even about process theology and I can see why because
01:07:25
he wants to be able to say that God is single and perfect and I don't see why it should not be
01:07:32
possible for a God to to have manifestations in both realms if Christianity is true it strength is
01:07:40
to be able to say that God can be both transcendent and imminent in his creation I think that is an
01:07:47
extraordinary powerful idea that is best expressed through the Christian mythos and I use the word
01:07:53
mythos without any you know sense that I'm talking about something true or not true I'm just saying
01:08:00
it is a very powerful mythos and may very well be true but if that's the case then God can be
01:08:05
both in one sense that transcendent being that is beyond and beyond all change and knows everything
01:08:13
and so on but the God that interests me is the God that is in communion with this world and is in
01:08:19
fact changing in response to it so whitehead they and whitehead had this this vision that that the
01:08:27
divine cause and the creation we're evolving in tandem responding to one another and I actually
01:08:33
believe that the reason there is life at all is to have something that can respond to that divine
01:08:39
source of being because again as whitehead pointed out the the business of life is a puzzle first
01:08:51
of all it acts against the second or thermodynamics and kicks against entropy it's enormously
01:09:00
expensive in terms of energy it produces creatures that don't really last very long and as whitehead said
01:09:06
if you really want to last for a long time the secret is never to have been alive mountains last
01:09:12
for millions of years but living things only last for a short while so why is the life at all
01:09:19
and I think the answer is that life speeds up and enormously magnifies the process of response
01:09:27
so if you like the inanimate world is very limited in the responses it can make it when
01:09:34
when a rock is eroded by water it is in a way responding to that water and so forth but this is
01:09:40
life goes to a whole other level what life produces is creatures that can
01:09:45
respond almost infinitely faster and respond to many more things that are in consciousness
01:09:56
so I believe that this ground of being is conscious and that all things that we call material are
01:10:04
manifestations of consciousness that that is not quite the same as pan-psychism in the sense that
01:10:11
I believe that a rock has consciousness if it does and I couldn't rule it out
01:10:19
anymore than I can rule out that one day in the future a machine might become conscious or I doubt
01:10:28
it and I can't rule out that a rock has consciousness but that's not my meaning my meaning is
01:10:34
that all things are in consciousness this is like a distinction between pantheism and pan-enthyrism
01:10:43
so pan- pan-enthyrism pan-enthyrism is simply the idea that God is simply the sum of everything
01:10:48
but pan-enthyrism as I imagine you know is the belief that God is in everything and that everything
01:10:55
is in God and my belief about consciousness is like that I don't believe that consciousness is just
01:11:00
as it were literally in you know a teaspoon or something at least if it is not the consciousness
01:11:08
I can recognize but I believe that all the things that we encounter in our consciousness are
01:11:14
manifestations of consciousness and matter is one way in which consciousness can manifest
01:11:20
it's a it's a far cry from
01:11:24
the way that people will have been talking about God at a popular level you know 10, 20 years ago
01:11:31
at the height of new atheism and their debates with evangelicals that was all very I suppose
01:11:37
left-brained it was all syllogisms it was all debates about premises and and technicalities and
01:11:45
fallacies this is like a totally different approach to the question which makes it difficult like
01:11:50
suppose that we were sort of pitted in some kind of debate about God's existence and I'm the
01:11:55
atheist and I'm here to criticize what you've just said there's there's this kind of so it would
01:11:59
be a very difficult thing to do because what you're doing is sort of telling a telling a story about
01:12:06
the the nature of human beings rather than sort of making a syllogized argument and I think that
01:12:12
that's an approach to the question which I've begun to find much more interesting and you've said
01:12:19
a moment ago you know you encourage people read a bit of philosophy and try to sort of open their
01:12:24
mind a bit I would like to see or I'd like to hear some advice on exactly how that can be done
01:12:30
and the reason that I ask is because I mean you said before some people are seemingly just
01:12:35
born with an inability to I don't know appreciate painting and art and poetry and for what is worth
01:12:42
I think that I at least used to be one of those people and this is why I find I think this is why I'm
01:12:46
particularly interested in this just yesterday I was I was taking part in an event where we were
01:12:52
discussing and debating the revival of Christianity and whether we're about to see a big revival of
01:12:57
Christianity and I'm sort of skeptical of this the the statistics show the opposite but you know
01:13:04
that it's never as as simple as that with with like religious demographics but the thing that I've
01:13:09
been talking about recently a lot is is this abandon abandoning of the propositional way of thinking
01:13:15
that narrative and and and poetry and that kind of way of thinking is sort of making a bit of a
01:13:20
comeback and people beginning to realize that that's not actually how we interact with the world we
01:13:24
don't tend to interact with the world through through syllogism and my own self I'm thinking about how
01:13:31
you know 10 years ago or so I really wanted to understand poetry for example I try reading poetry
01:13:38
because the people that I loved would always reference poems and you know I'd look at
01:13:42
what it said and then I'd have to look up who the person was what they were writing about what does
01:13:47
the poem mean how does and eventually I'd be like okay no I can see why that's why that's useful
01:13:52
and every now and again there was a line that I understood and I was like yeah okay that's really
01:13:55
powerful and so I'd use it in a in a talk or I'd use it to illustrate a point or something like that it
01:14:00
quite a functional relationship to to to something like poetry which is probably deeply
01:14:06
inappropriate and at some point something shifted where now I think I I have this appreciation for
01:14:13
I won't say understanding of but appreciation for poetry and now I can go to an art gallery
01:14:18
and not be bored out of my mind and I'm not quite sure when that happened or how that happened
01:14:24
one hypothesis I have is I've spoken a few times now on the channel about how I had some experiences
01:14:30
on psychedelic drugs and the thing that psychedelic drugs are famous for doing is just like blowing open
01:14:36
not just you know what you think about the world but the way you think about the world and
01:14:41
I wanted to ask you whether you think something like a psychedelic experience could be responsible
01:14:47
for like an unlocking of a right brain way of thinking or perhaps if you're very right brain and
01:14:53
unlocking of a left way of thinking and after that or as well as that what what what else could
01:15:00
somebody use as a tool to do that unlocking because you said you know read more philosophy for
01:15:04
example but I think it's impossible to read a continental philosophy and sort of find it useful
01:15:09
if you don't already have a bit of a sort of a right brain engagement you know
01:15:17
yes um I mean I I want to show for the moment I will come back to but I've got nothing
01:15:24
interesting to say about it's psychedelics I I think they're overhypes and I'm I'm rather cautious
01:15:30
about them and so I don't know I mean I can't deny that some people tell me they've had experiences
01:15:38
that have altered their spiritual sense and if they say so I'm not contradicting about I'm just
01:15:44
I don't find it a very interesting way to to this conversation to do it partly because I can't
01:15:48
contribute anything to it I don't have negative experiences of these things and I really mean
01:15:52
negative I I'm not really tried them but when I have tried them they've been either very unpleasant
01:15:58
or or simply haven't worked at all mainly they never work on me I mean I've had everything
01:16:03
including intravenous cats in me and I've eaten mushrooms I've had cakes of none of this touches me
01:16:09
but what matters to me is really imaginative experience which I've had very much
01:16:16
all my life in response to nature to begin with and then very much poetry and music and art and
01:16:22
and so on but I want to just go back earlier to where you were saying you know you were sort of
01:16:32
setting up this atheist who would only talk in syllogisms and and then you said but you know
01:16:39
you say that it it they'll be suspicious of you if we can't produce them but let me just point out
01:16:45
I tried to point out about what can be studied in the lab syllogisms have their limitations
01:16:52
syllogisms can lead you to only certain kinds of conclusions that kind of logic is based on certain
01:17:00
presuppositions there's nothing wrong with that it's not a weakness it's the conditions on which
01:17:05
you can carry out these processes the mistake is to think that this can answer all our questions
01:17:10
so what has happened to an Anglo-American analytical philosophy what I call triple A philosophy
01:17:17
is it's disappeared up its own fundament it's become more and more petty it's become
01:17:23
less and less in touch with any of the really important questions and all the great philosophy
01:17:29
of the last hundred years has been in other traditions in the pragmatists particularly people like
01:17:35
cs purse william james I mean I defy anyone to tell me that they weren't insightful and highly
01:17:40
intelligent people and then I think that not everything that comes out of the phenomenal logical
01:17:47
tradition but not everything that comes out of any tradition particularly the purely analytical one
01:17:53
is worth listening to and bitgenstein and and other philosophers in were trained in the analytical
01:18:03
tradition eventually found that they had to go beyond it beyond it. High to go studied Aquinas
01:18:09
and then decided that actually in order to understand the deep things in being you had to go beyond
01:18:15
it and Aquinas himself who was certainly the greatest systematic philosopher since the classical
01:18:21
era and himself had had had an experience one day in which he said I have seen something which
01:18:29
is so great and so important that all that I have written I think by then he'd written 33 enormous
01:18:35
volumes of philosophical attempts to come at the nature of God all that I have written is but as
01:18:42
chaff or straw. So when you get that you sort of if you don't think okay there are certain things
01:18:54
that cannot be approached in this way but let me take it take it just a bit further because I don't
01:18:58
want people to get away with the idea that there's something soft going on here in a dismissive way
01:19:03
and this is to do with something you said about the only way you can approach God is metaphorical
01:19:10
and I think that is that is true up to point. I'm not even sure you can do that. I think the only way
01:19:20
you can you can speak in prose about God is by saying things that God is not in other words following
01:19:26
the so-called via negative or the apophatic path towards truth and interestingly science is like
01:19:34
this science can never assert a truth it can only say that certain alternatives look to it to be
01:19:39
untrue on the basis of the evidence so far. So it's not such a different process but neither is
01:19:45
metaphor. Metaphor is behind all our language including very much the language of philosophy of
01:19:53
mainstream analytical philosophy and of science so as I sometimes point out even the words like abstract
01:20:01
and immaterial are themselves entirely metaphorical the word abstract comes from Latin roots meaning
01:20:06
to be dragged away from somewhere in other words taken out of its context and physically dragged
01:20:11
somewhere else that is what it comes from immaterial comes from the root originally Marta meaning mother
01:20:18
and going on from there to mean wood and as a symbol of things that are material and so forth.
01:20:25
So all our thinking we couldn't get to first base without metaphors all our thinking is based on
01:20:32
metaphor and you probably know that is a highly recognized and respected stream in mainstream
01:20:41
philosophy and I'm talking to people like Lekhoff and Johnson here and if you do know enough about
01:20:51
mainstream philosophy you see that the really great names here often trespass out outside of it and
01:20:58
went into other realms and what you get is a massive sophistication of philosophy after can't
01:21:06
you get I mean there were others of course but after him you get people who are
01:21:12
sometimes inappropriately called the German idealist philosophers and so forth and then you get into
01:21:19
an era in which people's philosophy including that of Schopenhauer and Nietzsche at times and so on
01:21:25
is capable of tackling things that this very arid we must have it clear now is it this or is it that
01:21:33
will never never reach you see is the insistence on clarity and I think you should be as clear
01:21:39
as the subject matter allows but no clearer than that and if you try to make it clearer you are now
01:21:46
moving into error you're moving away from truth towards philosophy and the really big questions are
01:21:53
of this nature that they can't be clarified in that way and they can't be made consistent with
01:21:58
the law of the excluded middle at all started with of course Aristotle and it has had an
01:22:05
unfortunate effect that people people are unwilling to see that a thing in its opposite may often
01:22:12
obtain I mean you can say the law of the law of the excluded middle is that any proposition P
01:22:20
must be true or false it can't be both it can't be neither yes and and and I'm I'm
01:22:28
saying that sometimes not only can it be neither but it might be both and and here again we have
01:22:35
to say the stuff that deals with the everyday is not a good way of dealing with the rarefied
01:22:40
area we we're going into of consciousness of God and the same thought I mean let me quote
01:22:48
quote Niels Bohr I mean inaccurately but I mean at least the gist of what he was saying was that
01:22:54
a thing and it's opposite may very well be true and he had the the Yen Yang symbol that tied you to
01:23:03
on his coat of arms when he was innobled by the Norwegian I think it was the Norwegian I was a Danish
01:23:09
government I can't remember but in any case he said that a thing in its contrary are often true
01:23:20
but this is not true of the trivial so you know for example if I had coffee this morning either I
01:23:26
had milking it or he didn't there's no sense in saying well it it's not really one or the other
01:23:31
but when you get to the realm of the things we're talking about they are manifest more by contradiction
01:23:37
than by simple statements where the country is obviously wrong so does that mean that it's
01:23:44
inappropriate to approach those questions at all with sort of an empirical material
01:23:52
worldly approach that is the approach of the new atheists of the Richard Dawkins who say
01:23:58
and as opposed they agreed with you that of course there's a sense in which religion as a subject
01:24:04
God as a being is a is a being of of the right brain of the right hemisphere is is a being of
01:24:10
of narrative and story and these are the kind of things that can be true of false at the same time
01:24:15
but however you know the question of I don't know causation in the universe or the question of
01:24:21
the question of specific claims about Jesus dying on a cross being born of a version though these
01:24:28
are these are scientific questions that can be answered with specificity and and empiricism it
01:24:35
like is it is it totally inappropriate to discuss this subject of religion with the with the sort of
01:24:40
left brain approach well you have to understand the way in which I don't want to repeat myself we
01:24:50
haven't got time to repeat myself but this this distinction between mythos and as you see the
01:24:57
mythos is not what we mean by myth is a lie a mythos may contain truth and when one talks about
01:25:04
God being born in this way in suffering and dying there is a truth in that which I don't which is not
01:25:11
equal by any other story any other revelation any other idea about the nature of the creation
01:25:21
of the nature of the cosmos that I know and people understand things in different ways and that's
01:25:30
not just so it's all untrue no it may be very true actually that that God does suffer I I don't know
01:25:39
I can't limit this being and I can't limit this being and say he couldn't actually be in I think
01:25:45
there's something divine in all of us and indeed Christ himself thought that there was
01:25:49
the sayings of Christ are very difficult to arrive at because it was all written down a long time
01:25:55
after the facts and so on but I would I would sort of say about the story I can't rule out that very
01:26:04
odd things do seem to happen at times that the laws the ordinary laws of the way things are are not
01:26:11
necessarily universal in experience and it's I couldn't rule out that somebody who had indeed
01:26:18
been dead could in fact come back to life we don't really know what happens when people die actually
01:26:25
and people can be brain dead and have completely flat EEG traces for considerable periods
01:26:31
and come back and not only come back but come back with memories of what happened during that period
01:26:36
now you know you can argue about this and the people who have been never convinced and the people
01:26:41
who will um whose conviction cannot be shaken as in most of these things I tend to be a skeptic
01:26:49
amongst believers and a believer among skeptics I I tend to think that it's important to bear
01:26:54
post possibilities in mind and not necessarily to have to collapse into one or the other that's the
01:27:00
left hemisphere again I mean it's got to be a very narrow simple truth like this it's got to be this
01:27:04
if it's a camera there and so I don't know I'm not saying that that camera might not have recorded
01:27:10
I just don't know and frankly I don't I don't care because the truth of this mythos is what is
01:27:16
enacted in in extraordinary services of worship in rituals in ceremonies that are ancient and are
01:27:28
that bring one into contact with something laugh at it who may that is profoundly real and important
01:27:36
so what are we to make of that we should set aside these very simple minded almost adolescent ideas
01:27:43
that it's got to this it got to that and they need to know as I get out of there I realize that
01:27:48
there are fewer and fewer assertances and there are very few assertances in science one way of
01:27:53
describing science is the is the pursuit of knowledge is forever mistaken it's always being
01:27:59
superseded by better knowledge and so knowledge is always a process and knowledge of the spiritual is
01:28:06
a kind of process and I think you can only hope to get somewhere if you engage in it with
01:28:13
a mind that is not closed so you know in clever people go ha ha ha you your
01:28:20
mind can be so even your brain can fall out yeah yeah yeah but actually everybody needs to have
01:28:25
a pretty open mind about things that they're not so clever that they can close their minds so that's
01:28:31
really all I'm saying is that there is almost nothing of which we can be certain we I'm not
01:28:39
interested in certainty anymore I'm interested in the shape of things that speaks to me of real
01:28:44
and there are many things that speak to me of real the friendships that I've had the love I
01:28:51
have experienced the the beauty of the natural world the astonishing richness of what science has
01:29:01
revealed to me about the scale and the size of the universe about the the miracle of biology
01:29:08
all these things are things we cannot grasp fully and we need to we need to get back to a place
01:29:14
where we have more modesty and humility about what the human brain can do it would be it's irrational
01:29:22
this is my point it's irrational to suppose that we can rationally achieve answers to the big
01:29:29
questions that there's a completely irrational assumption it's a leap of faith but not an accurate one
01:29:35
in my view not a good move we need to get back to a degree of humility we are evolving creatures
01:29:42
if we evolve for millions of years from now we could be capable of all kinds of things and
01:29:47
no things we can't know now why suppose that at this moment I Richard Dawkins or whoever
01:29:52
may be can know the answer to all these questions at least potentially I mean and he may be very
01:29:57
willing to say there's an infinite number of things I don't know the answer to but I'm not prepared
01:30:03
to accept that you know I can't find them by doing science and following a logical path I mean what's
01:30:09
interesting is that most scientific discoveries were simply not made by the scientific method anyway
01:30:14
they were made by imaginative leaves and I discussed a lot of these both mathematical and scientific
01:30:22
discoveries in the matter with things so perhaps so at the end of the day I just I just want to make
01:30:29
it very clear that there is nothing smart there is nothing clever about being dogmatic about these
01:30:35
things and I'm not pleading for a kind of inherently wishy-washy position as I say I believe in being
01:30:47
lucid and clear people sometimes say to me you're writing is very clear you make very difficult
01:30:54
ideas accessible to which I say thank you it costs me enormous pains and a great deal of time to
01:30:59
do that I believe in trying to make my thinking as clear as I can I haven't done a good job today
01:31:05
I'm sorry I'm just speaking off the cuff and my mind's not at the right place but but I do do that
01:31:11
and I don't value lucidity and clarity but only as far as they can be applied to the question
01:31:18
that there is there and what is clarity what is seeing something clearly I say in in the
01:31:24
the matter is in the master and you know as a rustic point it out I see a white square on on the lawn
01:31:36
and from a distance I think it's a handkerchief and I go close and I see it's a book and I look close
01:31:42
through the pages of the book and they I see that there's a sort of rich substance like this with
01:31:50
black smears on it as far I get a microscope I got an electron microscope I go down deeper and deeper
01:31:55
which is the true thing that I saw which was the clearly seen thing seeing clearly is only a function
01:32:03
of the degree of resolution that you are choosing to apply to the situation I'm sorry Alex I'm
01:32:11
I'm I'm gaffing but I feel you're touching on important things and I don't want to give the wrong
01:32:15
impression yeah no it's it's it's wonderful it's a I really I love that analogy you've just given
01:32:21
at the end there I suppose the only thing I want to ask in closing here then is for somebody
01:32:27
I think a lot of my listeners will be hopefully receptive to what you're saying but perhaps
01:32:32
feeling like they they've they've inherited this left brain world and this left brain tradition and
01:32:38
this analytic philosophy and this idea that anytime you talk about narrative or poetry or anything
01:32:43
like that is so it's all kind of a bit wishy-washy as I said a moment ago there's an extent to which
01:32:49
you can just advise those people to well try try try reading some non analytic philosophy but I think
01:32:53
if the brain isn't already sort of primed to to to to get out of that then that's not going to be
01:33:00
very useful so what I wanted to ask you in closing is what advice you would have practically speaking
01:33:05
for people who feel listening to this that gosh I must be incredibly left brain because a lot of
01:33:10
this seems a bit inaccessible to me but I'd love to be able to to to start engaging with that
01:33:15
and what can you do to to train your brain to to unlock that more right right brain way of thinking
01:33:20
well I suppose a useful thing to tell people is that I get constantly messages from readers of many
01:33:30
kinds of course but but one quite common one is I always have been looking back on it a very
01:33:38
left hemisphere person I didn't realize why people valued certain things but after reading you
01:33:44
you've opened my eyes to something I now kind of suddenly aware of things that I hadn't understood
01:33:50
and as a result my life is richer my partner is happier with me I seem to be doing better at work
01:33:57
and so on so I never thought that I was doing you know that kind of work by writing these books but
01:34:04
I think the first thing is to see what it is you're missing you can't know something until you have some
01:34:08
idea of what it is that you're missing but what I try to do in my writing is open people's eyes to
01:34:13
what it is that they have lost because they believe me they have lost an enormous amount the kind of
01:34:19
ways in which people talk the limited kind of visions they have of the world are so sad these days
01:34:25
is they rule out all the greatness that humanity has actually achieved we're so full of
01:34:30
fragmentation of ourselves which is entirely merited for things we've done in destroying this beautiful
01:34:35
world we've inherited but I'm not one of those people who throws away you know that humanity is
01:34:41
is just bad no humanity is only capable of great harm because it's also capable of great good
01:34:46
so you've never lost the capacity to recover that sense I think there is a way though that you're
01:34:56
right when you say you need to have an intuition of something before you can begin to you wouldn't
01:35:01
really get very far with the phenomenological philosophers if you didn't already understand
01:35:05
something that they were getting at but I think that most people who read philosophy of an open
01:35:09
mind haven't a sense of this is all very well but there are whole areas of experience that's just
01:35:15
not being touched on here you know the outbreak of the the second world war the three greatest
01:35:21
philosophers in the world we're talking about an entirely imaginary situation to do with with
01:35:29
imaginary numbers when civilization was crumbling and that's probably not the way to do philosophy
01:35:35
I think there I think the first thing therefore is openness of mind and I don't want I know you want
01:35:42
you to give a kind of six point plan but that's extremely left hemisphere thing to do and you know
01:35:48
do the following things and your right hemisphere will spring interaction and so I'm very wary of
01:35:54
saying them but I mean if you bring it down to the really kind of every day I think we need to think
01:36:01
differently about how we educate people I think we need to reverse the idea that what's important is
01:36:07
that day job in the city making money and that going to Covent Garden in the evening and listening
01:36:12
to moatsize is just a bit of nice relaxation the Covent Garden moatsize is probably the nearest
01:36:18
chance you'll get to see something that's real and important and the days you spend you know
01:36:26
whatever the price of water has Cooper on the strip lighting is not going to be the one that will
01:36:31
give you access to anything truthful or enrich your life except in the sense of making you richer
01:36:38
monetary what people crave is spiritual richness and they've been trained to drive it out of their
01:36:45
lives they've been trained to think that religious thinking is childish or foolish in some way
01:36:52
I cannot tell you how wrong I think that to be and most of the very clever people I know
01:37:00
very open to that realm I think we've been divorced against our will from the natural world and
01:37:08
spending more time in nature not looking at your phone not measuring your steps but actually
01:37:15
being quiet being receptive and that would take me to the idea of practicing something like
01:37:23
meditation particularly mindfulness meditation because mindfulness is
01:37:30
as close as you can go to deliberately sitting down and saying I'm going to still my left hemisphere the
01:37:36
one that does all the talking the conceptualizing the judge in the schema-tizing the rationalizing
01:37:42
and instead I'm going to for the first time try to clear away like cleaning the windows
01:37:47
from the beauty of the world and see what is there and be present to it and allow it to become
01:37:53
present to me for the first time because I believe as I say that everything is relational
01:37:59
that everything comes into existence out of an encounter and that encounter is between my consciousness
01:38:05
and whatever it else that else that is that exists out there and I can't get outside my consciousness
01:38:11
everything we know everything we believe everything a decision is made by our consciousness
01:38:16
and so at the end of the day we need to be rather careful about how we dispose our consciousness and
01:38:23
what we allow it to bring into being for us and that is a reality so you change the world by
01:38:30
attending to it in a different way and you change yourself so by a certain kind of ruthless
01:38:36
equititive detach merciless attention to the world you turn yourself into a person that is not
01:38:43
a very nice person to know and you deprive yourself of access to all the rich deep and beautiful
01:38:50
things that can nourish a soul and don't laugh at the idea of a soul I have a thing on the internet
01:38:57
whatever happened to the soul which is a talk I gave at the RSA very shortly after publishing the
01:39:03
the master's emissary and I suggest that you know there is room not only for a word like soul
01:39:14
in the vocabulary but when we take that word out of a vocabulary we miss a whole range of things it
01:39:20
can't be substituted for by mind or heart or whatever so questioning the ways you think is a very
01:39:29
good practice as well and I believe it should be taught in schools that people should be taught
01:39:34
okay argue this case now argue the opposite case in brief I think that is what an education
01:39:41
should teach you and the people who are most dogmatic and most angry and environment on the internet are
01:39:49
people who have it's never occurred to them that the other person is anything other than stupid because
01:39:54
they don't believe the way they do so practice a bit of compassion and practice humility and practice
01:40:03
a sense of wonder before the real world bringing it into your presence and your
01:40:10
attention you're being into its presence and I can't tell you what will happen do it and find out
01:40:16
that's the only way in McGilgrist thanks for coming on the show it's been it's been a fascinating one
01:40:22
thank you
01:40:25
(soft music)
He gets a bit grumpy, doesn't he.