The following is a rough transcript which has not been revised by The Jim Rutt Show or Iain McGilchrist. Please check with us before using any quotations from this transcript. Thank you.
Jim: This episode is one of a series I’m doing on the worldviews of thinkers and doers. The premise is simple. I want to map how they actually see the universe and their place in it — not just dig into their latest book or project, but explore the scaffolding underneath. Enjoy this opportunity to look backstage at the minds of some of my favorite people.
It’s been a while since I’ve nudged our listeners to give us a five-star rating on your podcast app, but fresh ratings help us grow our audience, which helps us to continue to attract our excellent guests. Even better, if you have the time, a short review helps even more. Thanks. Now onto our show.
Today’s guest is Iain McGilchrist. Iain is a psychiatrist, philosopher, and literary scholar, best known for his influential work on the divided brain and how it shapes culture and meaning. He is perhaps best known for his two books, *The Master and His Emissary* and the two-volume *The Matter with Things*. Iain is currently Chancellor of Ralston College and continues to write and speak worldwide on neuroscience, philosophy, and the nature of reality. He and I also share an interest in good single-malt Scotches.
Iain: Thank you very much, Jim. It is lovely to be back with you. And don’t forget to specify Talisker as the important one.
Jim: Talisker 18. Iain turned me on to that. I tried Talisker 10 and went, “bleh” — tastes like a cross between turpentine and seawater. But Talisker 18, man, that is a delicious dram, I will say.
For those who want to go deeper into Iain’s work, he and I did a two-episode set, EP 154 and 155, on his thousand-plus-page magnum opus, *The Matter with Things*. Or, of course, read the book so that the McGilchrist children can have shoes. Alright. Let me start where I usually start on this Worldviews series: you woke up this morning, and after a few seconds, there was someone named Iain McGilchrist who reentered the world. What is this person who woke up, and what is the nature of the world that you woke up in? How long do you want me to talk for on that one?
As long as you want. Open-ended.
Iain: Good question. And it invites discussion of two principal questions. One is, what does it mean to be a conscious being, and how does that conscious being relate to the cosmos at large? They are interconnected, obviously, and so let us begin by talking about consciousness. What is it? It is impossible to describe in words because it is the basis of everything that we describe, and it is the only thing that we know absolutely certainly from experience — which is why it tickles me that presumably reasonably intelligent people still exist who go around denying the existence of consciousness. But never mind. Let us leave them aside.
So, consciousness — yes. We know what that is. But what is matter? A lot of physicists have made the point that people want to be able to reduce consciousness to matter. It is not something they will ever succeed in doing, I would say. But they want to do that because they think that matter is at least something we understand. And physicists are very clear about the fact that matter is something very strange indeed. The more they know about it, the stranger it gets. So it is not something that is transparently obvious. But the one thing you can say is that matter is something that we know because we have consciousness. It is something that crops up in consciousness. Whether consciousness is somehow due to our being material beings — well, we can talk about that. But the one thing that is very clear is that matter is something we know because of consciousness, in consciousness, and through consciousness.
I actually hold that matter is a phase of consciousness, and when I use the word “phase,” I do not mean a temporal phase. I mean a phase in the sense that physicists and chemists talk about the phases of a substance like water. In one of those phases, water is transparent and flows easily across your hand — very familiar. But in another phase, it is not transparent. It is opaque, extraordinarily hard, and it will not move until you shove it. And in another phase, it is suspended in the room you are in, Jim, and in the room I am in — tons of it — and if it were not for that, we would not be here. So water is mysteriously different in different phases, and I think consciousness has different phases.
What is the point of matter? Why should consciousness ever take the form of matter? I think, to cut a long story short, matter provides two things that consciousness on its own does not seem to have. One is — and it may surprise people to learn that this is incredibly important for creativity — resistance. Nothing, I believe, comes into being without resistance. We live in a world in which it seems obvious that resistance is something we ought to try and do away with, but in fact I do not think there would be much of a life, or of anything happening, if it were not for resistance. The other is persistence. In my mind, I can go wherever I like, and my thoughts, once they are finished, disappear. But, absent a disaster or a hurricane, this table I am sitting at will be here tomorrow morning. So matter has those qualities which help the cosmos differentiate.
I think the purpose — the point, the direction, the trajectory of the cosmos — is into a differentiation that never threatens its integral nature. And that differentiation, once it is there, becomes reintegrated and then unfolds again into a new differentiation. In saying this, I am very much in line with a whole string of philosophers and physicists. I think particularly of Goethe, who said the whole business of nature is dividing the united and uniting the divided. And David Bohm, the physicist and philosopher, believed that the cosmos was originally implicate — everything was enfolded — and that it was in the process of explicating, unfolding, and showing itself, but that it went through phases in which that unfoldedness then became reenfolded and so on.
So that is a little bit about what I think about consciousness and matter. Now I am a conscious material being — I believe you are too, Jim. When I wake up in the morning, my consciousness becomes the kind of focal consciousness that we are aware of. Consciousness has a number of meanings. One is what you do not have when you are on the operating table. Another is what you do not have, I imagine, when you are dead — unless you believe that the spirit carries on, and perfectly reasonable, intelligent people do believe that, and in a sort of way I believe that too.
What the consciousness we are talking about is the bit that is in our focus. I am aware of the things that my consciousness is focused on. But my consciousness is also taking in many other things that I am not aware of — what we call the unconscious — and it is still very much part of me, part of my thinking, part of what helps make me the person I am and informs the decisions I make. And then we could come to the question of what the relationship is between my consciousness and a more broad field of consciousness.
First of all, I am what Whitehead called a pan-experientialist. In other words, I believe that everything in the cosmos, in some form, experiences. And that is not as irrational as it sounds. In my view, it is actually the most reasonable alternative. Nobody has found any way that is remotely convincing, after hundreds of years of attempt, to explain how consciousness comes out of lumpen matter — if matter has nothing to do with consciousness. But I think that matter must have something innately to do with consciousness. Otherwise, we are just talking about a magic trick. And so everywhere there is a field of consciousness, and everything that exists exists within consciousness and consciousness within it.
So why do I have a limited, circumscribed consciousness? Why do I have my experience of what I feel is mine and not what you feel is yours? I think the answer is that — going back to my thesis that everything is unfolding into differentiatedness, but is never actually completely severed from everything else, as it does not impair the integrity of the whole — we are like a whirlpool in a stream that is not in the stream in the way a ball would be, but because the whirlpool is the stream, for that moment, where it is. It is perfectly real. You can photograph it. You can measure it. It has the power to move stones. But the water flows through it and on and away, and eventually the whirlpool itself will also dissipate. And I think we are rather like that — diffusely connected, but with an entity that is bounded.
Another useful metaphor, and then I will stop, is that of a cell, which has an irregular boundary. The cell membrane has outpouchings in it. And you can imagine situating a conscious entity inside the cytoplasm within an outpouching. It would look all around and think it was enclosed on all sides — and in a certain sense, it was. But actually, if it looked toward the root, the foot of the outpouching, it would see that it was in connection with the cytoplasm of the whole cell. So there are a few thoughts. Pick them apart.
Jim: Ah, very interesting. I love what I would call the reference to Heraclitus with the stream and the whirlpool. I often use the whirlpool analogy on the nature of human life and death — that a whirlpool is a little formation of negative entropy, just as life is. Life is a far more intricate one, and it lasts for a while. And then when the cycles that hold it together dissipate, the structure of negative entropy dissipates and our chemistry goes back into the ground to be recycled in some other fashion. So I found both of those analogies quite interesting.
On the idea of resistance, I am going to suggest a related way to look at that. Alicia Juarrero, who has been on the show and whose books I read a fair bit — a philosopher of emergence, among other things — she frames her emergence around constraints. The upper layers of an emergent being or structure or system are essentially pruned by constraints that have been built up by the actual lower-level functions of the pieces that are emergent. And you need something like resistance to have constraint. So I would say your perspective on resistance is closely related to the idea of constraint, and those are actually quite interesting together.
I was curious whether your ideas about what you might call panpsychism are related to Philip Goff’s ideas — he is a philosopher of consciousness who will be on our show next month, and we are going to talk about panpsychism. He argues that even fundamental particles, quarks, have consciousness.
Those are some of my major reactions. Then the question, pushing a little further — you can address all of them — is to take this idea of consciousness in a single membrane, a cell, and ask how that scales up to something like the consciousness in a biological person. So it is a lot of different things. Hit the ones you want to hit.
Iain: Well, first of all, I am delighted to hear you are having Philip on the show. He is a friend of mine, and we have talked together in person in public. We do very largely see a similar picture. Emergence is a very important aspect of the philosophy that I hold. If I can pompously say so, I am a process philosopher — I am in the stream of history of Whitehead and others. And those analogies of the whirlpool and so on are timeless. They are there, yes, in Heraclitus, and they are there in Schelling in the early nineteenth century, of whom I am particularly fond. So all those threads are right.
Now, how does the resistance scale up? I think the very important point to make is that whatever is going on in a cell is not related to what is going on in the whole person by addition or summation of lots of little cells doing those things. I do not hold that anything in the universe is simply additive. It is more to do with fields of relationship that alter the nature of the parts within them, and those parts take part in a whole that has certain characteristics. I am fond of using the German word Gestalt because we do not have a proper word for this — it refers to a whole that is not just the sum of its parts. The things that truly exist have this Gestalt nature, and they can be seen as nested.
I do not know if you or your listeners have ever seen a rather fabulous clip available on the Internet, which starts from outer space and comes in eventually to the Earth, then goes in eventually to a town, then to a park where there is a couple sitting on the grass, and goes right down into the grass and then further and further down. So these levels of scale are nested in that way. They do not get added together. They just depend on a different place of observation, a different point of view. And that is not as trivial as it sounds, since I believe that the way in which we pay attention to the world changes what we find. I am quite well known for the view that attention changes the world.
And it is not unlike a fractal image — in fact, what I just described is a kind of fractal image, except that in a fractal image, you see the same pattern at every stage as you go down. And it could be argued that you do also see that, broadly philosophically, at all levels from the very largest to the very smallest.
Jim: Very interesting. And I would say not far from my own views. I call it, with a few other people, emergent naturalism. One of the most well-known proponents is Larry Cahoone, who has been on the show — he is a philosopher of emergence. And my original mentor in complexity science, when I retired from business and decided to become a complexitarian, Harold Morowitz, wrote a book called *The Emergence of Everything* in which he talks about 28 nested emergences from the Big Bang — his last one being spirituality, but including things like economics and society. Quite interesting.
And I do think you hit on all the key parts — that these things are wholes that transcend their components. The example I give is: take my hefty carcass and pour all the chemicals broken down into a 55-gallon drum. It is extremely unlikely those chemicals are going to jump out of the barrel, walk down the street, and buy a six-pack of beer on a hot summer day. But me — I am quite likely to do that. It is just a fundamentally different level of operation that the raw chemicals in the barrel cannot even conceptualize. Even if they have some panpsychic consciousness of some sort, it is very low level. It is not going to consider that it wants a beer and can walk down the street. So I think those things are all quite congruent in how we think about the world.
Iain: I discovered a retired physicist called Abramowitz — Mike Abramowitz, I am trying to think back a few years — who makes an interesting point about the difference between what he calls “architective form” and what he calls “continuous or connective form.” In any case, this idea that there can be, at different phases, a play between two things that are needed: one is a structure that is discontinuous, and one is a structure in which those discontinuities are overridden. And I think you can find that at all levels of description. But what intrigues me is that some physicists state quite clearly that although there are things described like the Planck length — which is supposed to be a discontinuous building block of both time and space — in fact, continuity overrides that. I am here piggybacking on the work of David Tong, who is professor of physics at Cambridge. And he says, pretty uncompromisingly, that he sees no evidence for discontinuity. The cosmos is continuous.
Jim: That is an open question. This is an area I study fairly closely. Whether the Planck range is a real granularity, or whether it is all continuous and the Planck phenomena is an artifact of our mathematics — I would say that is unknown and unlikely to be known for a very long time. Because the distance from, let us say, a quark to the Planck length is greater in orders of magnitude than from the quark to the whole universe. So the Planck length is very, very far down.
I am going to remain agnostic on whether the universe is continuous or not at that level. What was the physicist’s name — Tong? T-O-N-G? I will have to take a look at what his argument is. It sounds like he is quite emphatic that it is continuous. I would say that is not a majority view at this time.
Iain: If you have a handy copy of *The Matter with Things*, you can search for Tong. And I give, as you would expect, all the references.
Jim: I do have my Kindle version up somewhere. Let me ask another question. We have been talking about consciousness, and this is an area I do some work in. I am the chairman emeritus of the California Institute for Machine Consciousness, which has gotten me back into thinking about consciousness in a very functionalist and detailed fashion. And one of the things I have found in talking to many consciousness scientists is that there is, I believe, an unfortunate tendency to be overly human-centered in our thinking and our examples. What is your thought about the differences, if any, between the consciousness of a human and a chimp or a dog?
Iain: Well, I think they have very much in common. In fact, if they only had speech — which is not an intrinsic necessity for consciousness — we would probably find that there was much greater similarity than we think. Certainly, chimps and humans not only share a very large percentage of DNA, but they also show pretty much all the aspects of consciousness that we are familiar with. Obviously, you cannot exhibit without speech an understanding of spirit or soul or whatever you like to call it. But failing that, they can exhibit value-laden behavior. They will behave in ways that show they have empathy.
Some horrible experiments — which I do not think would get approval now, but were done back in the 1950s and 1960s — put a chimpanzee in a cage next to another of his species, and the only way he could get food was by shocking the chimpanzee in the other cage. As soon as he realized what was happening, he would rather starve himself for days than give this shock to the other chimpanzee. Dogs are notoriously affectionate and often self-denying in a similar way when they think something is at stake, and will rescue members of their own species at risk of their own lives. Many animals will actually rescue even a creature of another species — so it is not just a kin-related thing.
I think their consciousness is probably remarkably like ours. And some staggering things are known about the consciousness of corvids — probably the most intelligent group of birds. Some of them can do mathematical calculations at the same level as a nine-year-old human child. They can remember a single face after one exposure, a couple of years later, and know the right behavior to adopt in response to that face. So you can keep adding more and more of these elements. But I think —
Jim: — and I think it is wrong to deny consciousness to any living creature. I often use that as an example when someone throws out some comment about consciousness. I will say, “Is that true for a dog?” And they stop and think about it and go, “Oh, yeah.” It is a really interesting little probe question, because there are some attributes of our consciousnesses which are different, and you hit on probably the biggest one, which is language. We have conscious contents floating around in our brain — images, sounds, smells, whatever — that are part of our sensorium. I would argue dogs and chimps have a sensorium similar to ours, probably all the way back to amphibians, with lesser and lesser detail. And once we become humans, words become part of our sensorium, at least at the intersection between words and thought. Of course, that is still a fraught field for philosophers. What is the difference between human thought and human language? That is probably the principal difference, as far as I can tell.
Iain: It is. And having language is instrumentally incredibly useful and a big advance — but it can also present an obstacle. We sometimes feel that unless we have been able to express something in language satisfactorily, we have not understood it or it does not exist. And I am skeptical about that. I think there are many things — probably the most important things — that defy any more than a perfunctory expression in language, and that their meaning and nature goes far beyond anything that can be so circumscribed.
Jim: I like John Vervaeke’s formulation and his four P’s. Two of them are at either end: propositional and participatory. Propositional might be somebody’s clinical write-up of what sex is like or how it works. The other is the actual thing itself. And the actual thing itself is vastly higher-dimensional than any write-up might be. If we overly fixate on the propositional, we are missing most of what makes life interesting.
Iain: Indeed. And two things there, really. One is participatory — I think that is essential to my view of the world. Everything that we experience, we are part of what happens, and something other than us is part of what happens. Those two elements participate together in absolutely everything. And the fact that we take part in it does not make it less real. It, in fact, ensures that it is real. And here we are both thinking, I imagine, of John Archibald Wheeler’s expression that this is a participatory universe.
But on the Vervaeke point — I make another point which I think is parallel but illuminates something slightly different, which is the difference between what can be explicit and what is implicit. By making something explicit, our left-hemispheric understanding of the world says we have gotten closer to it and made it clearer. Whereas the right hemisphere would say that by making it fully explicit, we have denatured it and actually moved further away from what it really is. Examples would be all the things that really matter to us. You have mentioned one — sex — but also love and friendship, religious faith, poetry, music, architecture, art, myth, ritual, and narrative. All these things can have a hatchet job done on them by trying to reduce them to a formula in words that is decontextualized, and it always is an act of diminution or destruction, I am afraid.
Jim: And of course you are quite famous for your work on how the left brain and the right brain parse the world — and you alluded to it in passing. Even though I said we were not going to go into your works and artifacts, I am going to do it anyway. Maybe give us a couple of minutes on how the left and right hemispheres, in your view, parse the world — and particularly how they have come to parse the world in the modern world in a way that may be suboptimal.
Iain: The things that used to be said about hemisphere differences are wrong — that is the first point. But there clearly are hemisphere differences. The first puzzle for me in training as a doctor was: why is the brain divided at all? It would surely be more beneficial for it to have connections across everywhere. Its power is in the number of connections it can make, so why decrease them? Why are the two hemispheres asymmetrical, both functionally and structurally? And why is the corpus callosum — the rather tenuous band of fibers at the base of these two hemispheres, which conducts impulses from one hemisphere to the other — why is it so much concerned with inhibition? A lot of its activity, probably the majority of it, is saying, “This is what is going on, and I am dealing with it. Do not get involved.” All those questions got me interested in what these differences really were.
They are not what people used to say. They got them wrong, partly because they asked the machine question — what does each hemisphere do? — because that is what interests you in a machine. But they are not machines. They are parts of a person. And what interests human beings about things is: how do they approach this? In what way do they deal with it? What approach do they adopt? Because that will change what is found.
The two hemispheres attend to the world in different ways. This has an evolutionary basis, because every creature has to be able to focus narrowly on a single, simple object — usually to eat or to manipulate in some way — in order to get purchase on the world. All creatures need to focus on food. Their attention has to be very pinpointed on a particular thing that is already known and familiar. But if you only pay that kind of attention, you soon become someone else’s lunch while getting your own, because you do not see the predator. You do not see your mate. You do not see your kin. So difficult is this for one neuronal mass to do at the same time that the answer was to split the work. One half of the brain — principally the left half — does the utilitarian thing of grabbing and classifying things, and that is really its only value. Whereas the right hemisphere does everything else. It is seeing the whole picture.
This gives rise experientially to two different kinds of world. The left hemisphere’s world is made up of bits that are familiar, known, useful, easily identified — and it sees these things as decontextualized, abstract, and generic in nature. Whereas the right hemisphere sees a world in which nothing is ever completely fixed and known, in which everything is interconnected with everything else ultimately, and in which what actually surrounds the focus of your interest makes a big difference. The context is very important. And the implicit — as I mentioned — is something the right hemisphere understands, but the left does not. The right hemisphere understands jokes. It understands metaphor. It understands stories and myths. The left hemisphere takes everything with a sort of deadly literal kind of thinking, such as a computer would make of it if you fed in the English dictionary and a guide to syntax.
These are very different worlds. The left hemisphere’s world is mechanical, can be reduced to its parts without loss, and is effectively inanimate — and I mean that literally. When people have damage to the right hemisphere, they take living beings, people, their wives or husbands, to be machines or zombies of some kind. Whereas with the left hemisphere inactivated and only the right hemisphere operating, they may go the other way and, for example, see the sun as obviously a living object — it gives out a great deal of warmth, it encourages life, it moves across the heavens, and so forth.
A couple of other things to finish off. One is that the left hemisphere is an inveterate optimist, and the right hemisphere is more of a realist. And the left hemisphere is concerned only with representations, whereas the right hemisphere sees the real thing. To the left hemisphere, whatever it is, presences — it really is there, coming into being. Whereas the left hemisphere deals with representations, which is a funny word because it means “present again after it is no longer actually present.” We now live so much in that world that I believe we are living in a sort of false imitation of the world — a plan, a map, a schema, a diagram, a theory about things — rather than what our experience brings to us in a live way.
And I think what I see around me is the effects of the dominance of this left-hemisphere view. It is interesting that the left-hemisphere view is actually deficient. In the old days, it seemed like the left hemisphere was the wise one, the one you ought to put your money on. But we now know it is very much the other way around. The right hemisphere not only attends to more of the world, but actually perceives things in all modalities better than the left hemisphere. It makes better judgments. The left hemisphere tends to become deluded very rapidly, whereas the right hemisphere is much more grounded in reality. The left hemisphere is less intelligent — not just emotionally and socially, which has long been known, but cognitively as well. IQ is much more dependent on the right hemisphere.
So, all in all, living in a world dominated by the relatively unintelligent left hemisphere is not a very good plan. This may explain why we seem to be going to hell in a handcart right now, because we believe that the hemisphere that tells us how to become rich and powerful is the one to listen to. But if we really want to increase our power, we have to — very, very quickly, and we cannot do this quickly — increase our wisdom. Because otherwise, what we are doing is putting machine guns in the hands of toddlers.
Jim: Indeed. We are driving over a cliff in a system that has no brakes, basically. And I have found this diagnosis quite useful. So let us take a movement from here — which is actually not too discontinuous — back to our theme of worldviews. In your perspective, what is the relationship between our brains, our consciousnesses — both hemispheres — and actual reality? This is an old question, of course, but I would love to get your perspective on it.
Iain: First of all, I resist either a naive idealist or naive realist explanation. The naive idealist model holds that effectively what we experience is just made up by us — as if whatever exists apart from us played very little part in it. And the naive realist position is the other extreme: that there just is a reality out there, independent of our seeking it or observing it, and that our job is to register it in the most detached way in order to get a handle on it. I deal with both of those rather quickly in *The Matter with Things*. I do not hold either of them.
What do I hold? I hold that everything we know is an encounter. Every entity, every experience, every feeling — everything — is an encounter between whatever is in me and capable of awareness, and whatever is outside of me and capable of being perceived, received, attended to. This might be compatible with the position of Donald Hoffman. He and I had a conversation — a very amicable one, reasonably recently, which is up on the Internet. And I think we do slightly differ. He tends to suggest — more than suggest, he actually uses this analogy — that we are as if in a cell with no access to the world except through dials, and we are reading off from the dials, and these dials give rise to our experience. As though nothing in the real world could be at all like what we experience — it just has a purely structural, data-driven relationship.
Now, of course, how we see things depends on who we are and the circumstances and so on. So I am not suggesting that whatever we see is the fullness of reality. But it is at least in touch with reality. It is partial knowledge of reality — partial not in the sense that it only goes partway to reality and then has to stop because there is a great big wall, but partial in the sense that it is the bit of reality that I can see, the bit of reality you can see. And Whitehead made a very good point: though science can tell us that when we see a sunset we see light with a certain wavelength being emitted, and all the rest — science is not entitled to say that the experience of the sunset, the redness of it, all that it means to us, is not real.
Jim: I would strongly agree with that. What is real? Whatever is in the universe is real. So a sense of redness is real. Now we cannot yet explain it — the famous hard problem — but it must be real because it is in the universe. In my view, it is part of the machinery of how we interpret the universe. There is a universe out there — in my view. But then there is our processed perception, which produces our model of what is in the universe. And I am a strong believer that evolution is the most powerful force in the history of emergences since life began. Our representations must not be terrible, because there is clearly going to be a reproductive advantage to having your perceptions of reality be good enough. So there is a reason that seeing red is useful, and it is probably not too far away from reality.
And I still remember my first thinking about this problem, in second grade, when I asked our teacher: “Is your way of seeing red the same as my seeing red?” She basically just said, “Shut up, kid.” But I never forgot the question.
Iain: That is right. The only thing I would add before we move on is that we do have to take into account that we can be mistaken. So some perceptions are more real than others. I have spent a lot of my life consorting with people whose way of thinking about the world is pretty mistaken. So it is not that all our perceptions are right or all our intuitions are right or all our reasoning is right. We can be deceived by anything. So that has to be put into the mix. Some things are more real than others, I think.
Jim: Certainly. For instance, some of the classic optical illusions — the perceptions and mental models of things we see are real, but they are not congruent representations of closer physical reality. The famous dots that suddenly appear on a grid, even though there are no dots there. Are the dots real? The dots are real inside your perceptive scheme. But if someone takes a picture of the grid and shows it to somebody else, there are not any dots. So yes — these are all deep and interesting questions. But let us move on. We could spend two hours just talking about that one topic.
Let us move to another component that I think is an interesting probe on Whitehead and friends. For almost all of us, except serious artists, we are — I think — obligate objectifiers. When we look at the world, deep in our unconscious, the world is created as objects. We do not see just a raster of colors and dots and stuff, even though that is what is actually in our retina. It is presented to us as that door behind me, your head, your glasses — not only that, it is really hard for us to not see the world as objects, as some great artists can do. But mostly the world is presented to us by our conscious cognition as objects. And further, the objects typically have parts. When I look at your face as an object on the screen, I see eyes, nose, mouth, chin, et cetera, and we tend to produce relatively similar ways of deconstructing objects. So talk to me a little bit about what objects are as we perceive them, and how they relate, if at all, to reality.
Iain: Well, I would not wish to deny objects their reality. Of course, they are a way of seeing the world — a world constituted by objects. But I hold that prior to things, prior to objects, are relations. I argue that the relations come first, and that you cannot actually know what a thing is until you see what it is in relation to. It takes its nature from its relations to other things. And so initially there is a network, and I see things as what stand forward against that field. We see a field of vision, a field of stimuli, and so on. And out of that field, certain things seem to almost immediately come clear to us — partly by a degree of creativity on our part, through which we recognize how they do that.
At a purely perceptual level, it is not difficult to see what we mean by things. But at a deeper philosophical level, I think it becomes problematic. My understanding of physics is that what is depends on the relationships held between particles, however small you want to go. If you go down to a much lower level of observation — or rather higher magnification — you will find that relationships are what create what is there. I like this image that derives from the Vedanta, and forgive me if I have mentioned it before, but I like it very much. There is an Indian god called Indra, and Indra casts a net over the universe. A net is just many filaments, many connectors that simply connect, and nothing comes about until they cross. And where they cross, there is suspended a jewel at each crossing point, and in each jewel, all the other jewels in the net are reflected or visible. I like that because it brings together a number of elements about my vision of reality.
Jim: Now, a relationship, to be interesting, is probably in most cases dynamic. Even quarks move around with respect to each other. Things happen in electron orbitals. The relationships are probably never static. And when you introduce movement, two related questions come forth: movement relative to what, and movement caused how. I would call those the question of time and the question of causality. What are your thoughts on those two minor, uninteresting topics?
Iain: Well, how long do we have? But I think I can be relatively succinct about it. You are right that nothing exists that is not in motion. And the difficulty with doing away with either time or space is that motion becomes impossible — but motion is the primary thing that we find in the cosmos. Motion of what?
I am drawn to the view of Lee Smolin, who wrote a book called, I think, *The Rebirth of Time*, in which he argues that, although a number of his colleagues like to say that time is an illusion, time is probably the one thing about which you can say it just cannot be an illusion. And for time to go in the other direction would make a nonsense of most mathematics and physics. We need to have this idea of causality to make sense of the world.
However, once you come to causality itself rather than time, you need more sophisticated models of causality than simply linear ones. This is really the difference between a machine and an organism. An organism is very much harder to predict than a machine because the elements in it are not clearly defined. They are interacting with one another sometimes in ten thousand ways in a second, and all those paths interact with one another, so that an organism is not just practically impossible to predict but is intrinsically impossible to predict.
Jim: We actually had Lee Smolin on in one of my very first episodes — EP 5 — and the title was something like “Time Is Real, Space Is an Illusion.” We got into Lee’s concepts of time a fair bit. And it has become one of my interested topics recently. I had Sarah Walker and Lee Cronin on where we talked about their assembly theory, and one of their key moves is to attack the so-called block universe. A lot of physicists argue that most physics is time-reversible, and so time must be fake — that it all exists simultaneously. But I go back to my emergentist perspective, and Sarah and Lee have formalized this with respect to chemistry: there are certain things that cannot happen unless a long period of time has gone by. For instance, the emergence of life, the emergence of very large organic molecules. So how could it all exist at the same time? It makes no sense.
And so I have come to accept the Smolin perspective that something like synchronous time, at some level, must exist — maybe even below Einsteinian relativistic time. He believes there is a fixed clock to the universe. I am not sure I will go that far, but it is certainly a key question when we ask about worldview: how does one think about time?
Iain: I think that even God cannot do away with time. There is a book called something like that, I believe. It is a very important element of one’s picture — this idea of things evolving and becoming. And what are evolving and becoming if there is no time? They do not make any sense. For what it is worth, I take the view of what is called the growing block. Not a block universe and not a slice universe — there is a block, and it is constantly expanding, and where we are is always on the edge of this expanding sphere.
Jim: I can accept that, I suppose, though of course it implies the possibility of backward travel in time, which then leads us to killing our great-grandfather and all that sort of stuff. But it can just be a block that grows, not one that shrinks — so there we are. I will have to look into that. Alright. Let us move on to another very important topic in how each of us confronts the world. To you, where do values come from — the basis for ethics and right behavior?
Iain: Absolutely spot-on question. When I wrote *The Matter with Things*, the structure is: part one, neuropsychology — how does the brain shape our reality? Part two, epistemology — how do we make progress toward whatever is true? And I reckon it is through science, reason, imagination, and intuition. And in the last part of the book, with what we have gathered from the first part, what does the cosmos look like? I knew there would be chapters on things like the coincidence of opposites, and time, and flow, and space and matter and consciousness. I did not know that I was going to have two separate chapters on values and purpose — and another on the sense of the sacred, which is of course another value.
I consider values to be at the core of our misery at the moment. We have disengaged from values. We have mistaken the nature of values. We think they are simply our preferences, whereas I believe there is no way in which values can be derived from a valueless cosmos. It is slightly like the idea that consciousness is an ontological primitive. Without there being values, things that can be valued cannot exist — and we are the valuers. I think the higher animals also value things and appreciate beauty in certain ways, and they have an idea of goodness as well. So these things are fundamental.
Now there needs to be a distinction between value and values. Values may be what we in 2026 happen to value in Western Europe or America or wherever. That is another question from whether there is value at the start of things — and there is, in my view. I think they are ontological primitives. And one of the ways of explaining the existence of life, which is a bit of a conundrum, is that in order to value, there need to be these fabulously energy-consuming, extravagant creatures who are capable of responding, reciprocating, resonating with what is in the cosmic origin. Part of that is the evolution — the literal unfolding outwards of value.
I take the view that what is going on — the ground of being, whatever you like to call it and whatever its nature — is exploring its own nature by precipitating out into actuality parts of a field of potential. And to do that, it needs something other that can respond to it. I believe we are in that reciprocal role. People can call it God, or they can call it logos, or li, or whatever they want. But whatever it is, living creatures — particularly and extravagantly, mostly human beings — are capable of returning and increasing those values, or, if they choose to, diminishing and destroying them. So that is what we are here for, in my view. It is not a small point.
Jim: Not at all. This gets to another classic big worldview question. Does the universe have a teleology — a place that it is going? And is the emergence of something that is able to perceive value part of a teleology, or is it a frozen accident that just happened?
Iain: No. I think there is such a thing as teleology, but one needs to make an important distinction. People rightly dislike the idea of a teleology that involves determinism — so that there is a foreknown goal, and all along, things just move toward that goal. That would be no more interesting than letting go of a toy train on a track where it automatically runs down and goes to the buffers. I do not think that is the nature of the cosmos. I do not think the telos is in that sense fixed. It is not a known location. It is instead a lure from in front that conscious beings and valuing beings such as ourselves can be attracted by, toward something. But what actually happens in the end is not just unknown because we do not yet know enough — it is intrinsically unknowable.
So my vision of a telos does not involve a God who is an engineer who has already fixed the outcome. But he has, as it were, created a landscape which will mean that things will tend to flow in a certain direction. Here I am referring to Conrad Hal Waddington’s idea of what he called “creodes” — that there is a landscape that has folds in it, and water falls on the landscape at random, and yet has general tendencies built into the landscape to flow down certain channels we call streams, then rivers, and into the sea.
Jim: That is an interesting analogy. I am very agnostic about the teleology question, but we will perhaps find out one day. That is certainly an attractive version of the tale. Now, you mentioned before that we can either go with value or go against value. One might think of sin perhaps as going against value — and that is not an insane formulation. Where do you think we are today as a civilization with respect to going with value or going against value?
Iain: Well, I think we radically misunderstand who we are and what we are doing here, what the world is, and what our lives are about. I do not think we have the faintest idea. And of course it is very good that we should not have dogmatically fixed ideas, but it is not good for anybody or anything for us to be drifting around in a hopeless daze not knowing what to think.
So I think there are elements in our thought that are counterproductive. Some of them are very obvious — things like egotism. Me, me, me. Egotism neither leads to personal happiness nor to the happiness and high functioning of a society. We need to be more aware of our relationships to one another and more embedded in them. We know there are three things that make for a fulfilled human life — and there is a vast literature on this, a lot of which I detail at the end of *The Matter with Things*.
They are: our relationships to a coherent social group — a sense of belonging to people you can trust, who share your values, who will help you and you help them, with whom you may eat together and pray together and so forth. That is enormously grounding. It is very good for the health of the psyche, the health of the body, and importantly, of a civilization. The second is a sense of belonging in nature — not being surrounded by something called “the environment,” which seems like a detached entity, but by nature, which we come out of. We are born out of nature — which is, after all, what the word “nature” really means — and we go back into nature. The third thing we have lost is a sense of belonging in the cosmos, because we think it is all just stuff bumping into other stuff without any meaning or directional purpose. My reason for writing *The Matter with Things* was to take the reader through a persuasive, scientifically based, and rational argument that that vision is extraordinarily unlikely — that we are missing important elements in the picture. And as a result, we are committing suicide — as a society, as a civilization. There is a very high risk that society will collapse either as a result of things we have done to the natural world, or because of the advent of AI. And I am afraid I put my money even more on AI than on the frightful things we have done to the environment. The world could eventually recover from that, but I do not think it can ever recover from AI.
Jim: And I would put another one out there, from the work I do in the Game B field, which is the breakdown of our collective sense-making. You know, I often point out that in 1965, when I was old enough to understand the world a little bit — I was 12 in 1965 —
Iain: You are the same age as me. Both born in ’53, I think.
Jim: That is right. Yep. At that time, less than 50 percent of adult Americans had high school educations and nine percent had four-year college degrees. And yet our politics was not too insane in 1965. Today, we have 85 or 90 percent supposedly with high school diplomas, 35 percent with four-year college degrees, and — at least from my perspective — our politics is utterly insane. Both sides, so called, both completely disconnected from reality, both involved in driving us over the cliff. And how could this be? We have all these ways to communicate. Every known thing is on the Internet. I often think back: when I was 12 in 1965, I would have loved to have access to Google Scholar. Holy moly. And yet we cannot think at all, it appears. So a breakdown of collective sense-making may actually be the thing that bites us before either climate change or AI — though AI is coming on pretty fast.
Iain: Well, you might say that a breakdown in collective sense-making and shared values is why we have those major crises. And I wholly agree with that. What it illustrates is that information has nothing whatever to do with intelligence or wisdom. I make distinctions between information, different kinds of knowing, understanding, and wisdom. And we do not even reach first base. We have information, but we cannot take it anywhere useful, it seems.
When you look at the level of discourse in politics and in public, the caliber of people who are our politicians, and look back 50 or 100 years and see the way in which politicians spoke and debated with one another — they were not saints, and people can be corrupt, but that is not my point. My point is that things were going on at a far higher intellectual level. And the worst thing now is any attempt to communicate on a serious matter in social media. It will just be — in a very left-hemisphere way, of course, because what the left hemisphere wants is: it is either this or it is that. It cannot entertain the idea that it might be both, or either, or that it depends on context. No — you are just wrong, and you are a Nazi, or whatever. The level of discourse is below what I think a five- or six-year-old would be capable of managing in a civilized conversation. It is incredible.
Jim: When we talk about the people, I often make the example — being an American, I am obsessed with the founders and the founding. In 1789, when the Constitution came into effect, the population of the United States was 3,500,000. And our leaders were people like George Washington, John Adams, Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, Alexander Hamilton, Benjamin Franklin, George Mason, the Morrises. Absolutely first-class people. And now we have Donald Trump and Marjorie Taylor Greene. What the hell? And we have 330,000,000 people to select from.
Iain: A hundred times as many. I learned recently a saying of John Adams that struck me very forcibly as wise. He said: we have this system we call democracy, and we have great hopes of it, but it will not survive if people do not maintain moral probity. And that sounds terribly old-fashioned, but those old-fashioned figures had wisdom and insight, and we need that moral probity back again.
Jim: Alright. I think that is a good place to wrap it up. Iain McGilchrist, thank you very much for a wonderfully interesting, in-depth exploration of your worldviews.
Iain: Thank you very much, Jim, for putting up with it.
Jim: It really was great. You can come back anytime.
Iain: Great pleasure.