Read the full transcript of Dr. Iain McGilchrist’s keynote titled “The Mystery of Consciousness” on August 2, 2024, at the stunning Kinross House Estate in Scotland.
Listen to the audio version here:
TRANSCRIPT:
ELIZABETH: It’s now my great pleasure and my true honor to introduce you to our keynote speaker this year, Dr. Iain McGilchrist. Ian is perhaps most well-known for his international best-selling book, “The Master and His Emissary,” published in 2009, and his more recent two-volume book, “The Matter with Things,” published in 2021. He’s an avid writer and speaker and has given many popular talks and interviews, especially over the past few years.
He’s known for what he calls his hemisphere theory of the brain and how this impacts the way we attend to each other and the world. Dr. McGilchrist started in the humanities as a literature scholar at Oxford University. He then came to the sciences, first as a medic, then a psychiatrist, and a neuroscientist researcher, and now a philosopher as well.
He writes with the ability to integrate both science and the humanities and is informed deeply by human experience within the context of his love for literature and poetry and from working clinically with patients. His books are extremely rich, filled with scholarly research and a sense of the poetic. Dr. McGilchrist is from Scotland, from the Isle of Skye.
Skye is known for double rainbows, a misty, enchanted climate, slanted rain, apparently, and colorful mountains. So it’s really wonderful to have you speak to us today from Scotland. And I feel like your keynote is welcoming us as we welcome you to the symposium. So thank you so much.
DR. IAIN MCGILCHRIST: Thank you very much. Well, good morning. And I see that the timing has slipped by about 20 minutes. I’m not going to be able to make it up, I’m afraid.
I make up plenty. But we’ll see how we go. There’s nothing that induces epistemic humility more than the knowledge that it’s only me that is between you and a cup of coffee. So I will do what I can.
The Meaning of Consciousness
But what could it mean to speak of turning my attention onto my own consciousness? This is surely the queerest thing that could be. And there’s only one person who could have said that, Wittgenstein. I do love him.
And rather famously, the psychologist Stuart Sutherland wrote in the International Dictionary of Psychology, “Consciousness is a fascinating but elusive phenomenon. It is impossible to specify what it is, what it does, or why it evolved. Nothing worth reading has been written on it.” So, undeterred, but with a renewed sense of humility about what we can understand here, I’m going to give you a few reflections on consciousness.
The first hurdle, really, is the meaning of the word consciousness. So just a few. I’m going to be very cursory. I’m not going to give you any background to why I reach the conclusions I reach, because there just isn’t time and I’ve written about it at great length.
But I’m just going to give you a world view. So the meanings of the word consciousness. Is it what a corpse doesn’t have? Is it what someone in a coma doesn’t have?
Is it what someone who is asleep doesn’t have? Or is it what somebody who’s distracted doesn’t have? So, you take something in, but you are not conscious, we say, of what it is, which means really a kind of focused, self-aware attention, which is a special kind of consciousness. So what I’m going to suggest is that the word experiential covers all the activities that go on for each of us, as we say, unconsciously and pre-consciously, as well as consciously, but couldn’t go on without what is conventionally referred to as subjectivity or inwardness of some kind, which I submit there isn’t in a corpse.
The Conscious and the Unconscious
The conscious and the unconscious, we often think of them like the conscious is the living room in which we live and that somewhere in the basement there’s an enormous area of darkness, which is that unconscious, and sometimes things pop up, as it were, almost from the tank below into consciousness. Oh, hello. But this is not really a very good image at all. The better image is that of a stage.
So on a stage there’s a spotlight, and where the spotlight falls, that’s where your attention is. But it doesn’t mean that the rest of the stage has disappeared. It’s just not illuminated at the moment. And this is kind of important because I will eventually come to talk a little bit about the difference between the kind of attention paid by either hemisphere, one of them, the left hemisphere, paying this focused spotlight on something that it’s noses of interest and the other taking in all the rest.
Now the extent of the unconscious is something that most people are not aware of. They think it’s probably there in all of us, but it’s a very kind of subsidiary role. Well, first of all, in terms of its size, it has been estimated, I love the precision of this, that 99.44% of all that is in our psychology is unconscious. And you don’t have to buy the accuracy of this percentage to get the point that most of everything is actually unconscious.
And that’s not a reason to worry. It’s not inferior, you’re unconscious. I discriminate, I reason, make judgments, find things beautiful, solve problems, take decisions, weigh possible outcomes, imagine possibilities, exercise acquired skills, fall in love, and struggle to balance competing desires and moral values all the time without being reflexively aware of it. Note that these are not just calculations, but rely on my whole embodied being, my experience, my history, my memory, my feelings, my thoughts, my personality, even, dare I say it, my soul, psyche, in the broadest sense.
Wolfgang Pauli said, “There is a psyche long before there is consciousness,” and what he means by consciousness there is self-aware consciousness.
He was writing at the beginning of the 20th century about the time that the last cavalry charges were made. They’re like cavalry charges in a battle, they’re strictly limited in number, they require fresh horses and must only be made at decisive moments. And the rather underrated but excellent late 19th century Oxford philosopher F. C. S. Schiller says that “It is only when the guidance of life by habit, instinct and impulse breaks down that we become conscious.” William James, another of my heroes, “It is a general principle in psychology that consciousness deserts all processes where it can no longer be abused.” In fact, progress is not towards becoming more conscious, but by allowing most of what goes on in one’s life to inhabit the realm of what we call the unconscious.
And so this is true of people with great skills like surgeons, pilots, chess players. They realise something when they act, but they cannot necessarily explain afterwards how it was that they decided this was what needed to be done. So when I’m conscious of something, it means more often than not that there’s something wrong or that I’m becoming a philosopher. Might amount to the same thing.
Reconciling Matter and Consciousness
How to reconcile matter and consciousness, of course, is one of the big questions. And again, to cut hundreds of pages short, there are basically, I think, five options. Either you can deny consciousness, one of the silliest positions ever adopted by a thinking human being, some of them actually occupying chairs at non-negligible universities. Or you can deny matter, which I’m rather reluctant to do.
It’s such an obvious part of all our experiences. These are cheating. These are saying, this is difficult, I’m going to solve it at a stroke by simply denying something and it shouldn’t be given too much credence or any. Thirdly, they could be both in existence but totally distinct, a sort of parody Cartesian view.
Fourthly, they could exist but are exactly the same. Or fifthly, the position that I would prefer, they’re distinct phenomena reflecting different aspects of a nonetheless indivisible reality. Now, what about the place where, for most of us, matter and consciousness meet, namely the brain? I’m not going to bore on about the brain very much today.
But there are really three possibilities about how consciousness can relate to the brain. Either the brain can emit it, or it can transmit it, or it can permit it. The idea that it could emit it has been one of the most unsuccessful ideas in the history of science. Nobody has the slightest clue how consciousness can emerge from matter if matter has nothing whatever to do with consciousness.
And it comes from the rather naive belief that matter is simple. So we’ll deduce what consciousness is from something at least we understand, matter. But as physicists will tell you, the more they explore the world of physics, the less obvious matter becomes and it’s at least as problematic as consciousness. So I think the best way to think of it is something that permits consciousness.
Now, transmitting is a rather simple idea like a radio set, but permitting brings in the notion that our brains sculpt consciousness. The consciousness is there. What comes through as our consciousness is something that our brains have helped to form, to shape, to sculpt in the way that a… Well, William James gives this lovely image of his voice.
So he has a voice, because breath comes out of his lungs, but he wouldn’t have a voice if it weren’t that there was an obstruction in the way which filters the possible sounds. That’s the larynx. And I believe this is the way in which things are created. For example, Michelangelo didn’t put his David together from a limb and another limb and a torso and a head.
He spent years and years throwing away stone and at the end of it there was the finished David. Now, another possible gambit is emergence. And I want to suggest in brief, all this I’m saying I’m afraid I’m doing very much in shorthand, so if it lacks subtlety, forgive me. I think emergence is a fudge, because it’s still a hard severance unless consciousness was there all along, in which case it’s not emergence.
Galen Strawson, another philosopher I admire and follow, on emergence, “For any feature Y of anything that is currently considered to be emergent from X, there must be something about X and X alone in virtue of which Y emerges and which is sufficient for Y.” In a sense, it is not like the familiar trope of H2O and water. If you understand enough about electrical bonds in atoms, you can deduce the qualities that appear at the phenomenological level that we call water. But there’s no feature of matter as conventionally conceived that explains how it could possibly, on its own, give rise to consciousness.
Those words are Galen Strawson’s. It’s been put about, again, I’m sorry, this is very much a cook’s tour, very rapid. It’s been put about that maybe it comes out of complexity. This sounds good because the word complexity immediately suggests something profound is going on here.
But I believe this is a magic trick. So, there is a bit complicated, and then they become complex, which is different. And then, at a certain moment, a miracle arises and we’ve got consciousness. Out of complexity?
I don’t think so. Another problem with complexity is that if it’s to do with masses of interconnections, you probably know that 80% of the neurons in your brain are in the cerebellum, this ancient part of the brain, which when I was in medical school, we hardly knew what it did. It was something to do with balance, we thought, and coordination. But it has much more.
It enters into the realm of the mental and all aspects of our being. But it doesn’t sustain consciousness. The 20% that we think of as our brain, the cerebrum, does seem to sustain consciousness, but it’s less complex in the cerebellum, and it has fewer neurons. And you might say, well, maybe the neurons in the cerebellum are rather simple, they don’t make lots of connections.
Wrong. The most complex cells in the brain are the Purkinje cells, massively ramified cells. And so I’m afraid I’m not an advocate of this position. And of course, if there is a miracle in which consciousness arises out of matter that has nothing to do with consciousness, I make that point, because for it to emerge, there has to be a point at which something new is happening.
It can’t have been there all along, according to this kind of thinking. This is a miracle that doesn’t happen just once, but it happens millions of times every day, when an embryo becomes a living person. This is an extraordinary miracle, and it’s not a way of thinking that I would encourage. In any case, we have consciousness.
Is Consciousness Prior to Matter?
So is the priority of consciousness over matter? There’s certainly an argument that this is so. We know about the experiential directly from experience. Well, we assume the non-experiential only indirectly, again, from experience.
In fact, there’s something like a reverse anthropomorphic effect. You know, anthropomorphism, it sort of looks a bit like a human, so let’s analogise it with the human. But in this case, there’s a sort of reverse thing, which doesn’t seem out there to be doing things that we associate with consciousness, that can’t have much to do with consciousness. Similarly, it cannot be denied that matter is something disclosed to me by my mind.
I do not know that mind is something disclosed to me by matter. It might be, or it might not. And, spoiler alert, I don’t think it is dependent on matter. Paradoxically, matter itself is an abstraction, which no one has ever seen.
The Nature of Matter and Consciousness
We’ve only seen elements of the world, the experiential world, to which we attribute the quality within our experience of being material. It both substitutes an idea for an experience, which is a kind of event, and in doing so produces something static, no longer in process, no longer an experience. Now, a thing. And I wrote a long book called “The Matter with Things,” which can be read several different ways, but one of them is that I think the idea of things as a basis of existence is highly problematic.
Materialism derives the only thing we undeniably know, the concreteness of experience, from an unknown abstraction, matter. According to Niels Bohr, “isolated material particles are abstractions, their properties being definable and observable only through their interaction with other systems.” Nonetheless, we mustn’t dismiss matter. I think it’s rather important, don’t you?
Phases of Existence
I suggest that these are phases of the same underlying entity. And I’m using the word phase not in its temporal sense, but in the sense that physicists and chemists use the word phase to mean another expression. So, in the case of water, there is water. In another phase, it is ice.
In another phase, it is the tons of water vapor that are in this room. We can’t see them, but without them, we’d die. So, it doesn’t cut much ice that matter and consciousness don’t look alike or behave similarly. Neither do water and ice, or the tons of water vapor in this room.
The Interplay of Mind and Matter
We have to give up a conception of matter that excludes consciousness and a conception of consciousness that precludes matter, even though we may be able to conceive them distinctly only one at a time. Mass and energy are interconvertible. That’s what E equals mc squared means. The brain is a manifestation as mass. The mind, a manifestation as energy.
So, what I want to say is there’s nothing merely physical about the physical. I often say materialists are not people who overvalue matter. They’re people who undervalue matter. Matter is extraordinary, and we don’t really understand it at all. And get this, if they are right, and there is nothing in the universe except meaningless matter bumping into itself in a chaotic way, it’s rather extraordinary stuff because after a certain length of time it produces Bach’s St. John Passion. That’s rather special for something that is random and has no meaning and has nothing to do with the conscious.
Consciousness as Fundamental
So, I suggest that consciousness is and possibly the ontological primitive. In other words, that which beyond or behind which we cannot go. And on this topic, I could name many, many physicists. In my book, I probably quote about 30 of them.
Let’s just take these two remarks as standing for many, many others. So, Erwin Schrödinger: “Consciousness cannot be accounted for in physical terms. But consciousness is absolutely fundamental. It cannot be accounted for in terms of anything else.” Max Planck was famously asked whether he thought consciousness could be explained in terms of matter and its laws. “No,” he replied. “I regard consciousness as fundamental. I regard matter as derivative from consciousness. We cannot get behind consciousness. Everything that we talk about, everything that we regard as existing postulates consciousness.”
Traditional Wisdom and Modern Science
And of course, I do need to point out to you and it’s already been referred to by Simon. This is in keeping with the wisdom traditions of East and West. The old traditions of wisdom before they got drummed out by the cleverness of the scientific revolution and its simplifications. Our modern deception on this topic is because of our bewitchment with our cleverness in making machines. So we seem to understand the machine because we created it, we put it together, and we therefore think that everything has been put together in the way that the machine has. But this is a simple-minded jump which should be resisted.
Panpsychism and Universal Consciousness
So, what do I think? I think panpsychism. And there is evidence – I wish I had time to discuss it but I don’t – for consciousness in all life down to the simplest single cell organism. There’s a lot of evidence of this from people like James Shapiro, from Mike Levin and beyond. There is evidence for consciousness in all life in plants as I was talking last night with my dinner companion. This is a burgeoning area. But also there is a sense in which nothing is devoid of consciousness.
Well, there are various ways of understanding this and it’s been in the West as well as profoundly in the East something that has a good history including the all-time greatest philosopher – don’t let them tell you that Plato and Aristotle are greater – Heraclitus and Empedocles and in some senses Thales as well. Spinoza, Leibniz, Herder, Schopenhauer – it’s present in all of these and in the Eastern wisdom traditions and in some North American native traditions and no doubt other indigenous traditions around the world.
Understanding Consciousness in Reality
The part that is played by consciousness in reality is interesting and there are different ways of understanding it. One way is to think that consciousness is just in everything so particles have consciousness even subatomic particles have consciousness and I’m not here to deny that possibility that may very well be right. And certainly I don’t really make a hard distinction between non-life and life. There is a vast and important distinction but it is almost a difference in extent rather than an absolute difference in kind.
What do I mean by that? I mean that matter shows organization, it shows responsiveness to the environment, it is changing and forming but its ability to be responsive is billion-fold smaller than that of the simplest living being. So there is something in the cosmos that life enables us to respond to and this idea of response, relation, responsiveness reverberation, responsibilities that we have for the things that we bring into being through our attention – this is part of the way that consciousness works in relation to reality.
The Role of Attention and Consciousness
Now attention is the fundamental difference between the two cerebral hemispheres. I’ll say a little bit about that in a moment but attention is a moral act as I say and attention changes the world. If you attend to it in a certain way you see certain things, if you attend in another way you see quite different things and therefore attention helps our consciousness helps to bring into existence the experiential world which is the only world that we can ever know.
Indeed arguably all that exists is relation. So I don’t like the idea that consciousness is either out there simply and that the world that is real is somehow in a simple objective way out there. There is definitely something out there and there is something in here and there is a connection between what’s in here and what’s out there. Words were referred to as “what the mind half perceives half creates” – that is the way in which I think we should understand conscious experience.
The Brain’s Hemispheric Division
So let me just talk about the hemispheres very briefly. So first of all, why is the brain divided? It’s a slightly odd thing, isn’t it? The brain is very powerful because it makes connections and it seems like an obvious design flaw to have a whopping great divide right down the middle of the brain. Why wouldn’t it have been better if it had all been one neuronal mass?
For those of you who don’t look at brains everyday, this unhappy looking chap – not surprising because he’s had the top of his skull taken off – and there you see the two hemispheres with the left hemisphere drawn aside a bit so that you can see the corpus callosum in the base of the brain there that connects the two hemispheres. And why is the brain asymmetric? I won’t go into this picture but just take it from me the brain is profoundly asymmetric. Why is it asymmetric? Not only in its anatomy but in its physiology and in just about everything that we can measure down to the preponderance of neurotransmitters in the two hemispheres and so on. Why is it asymmetrical? If it just needed more room, why didn’t it just symmetrically expand?
And thirdly, why is the corpus callosum – this band of fibers at the base of the brain that connects them – why is it getting smaller with evolution not larger? And why is much of its function inhibitory? So yes, excitatory neurons glutamatergic neurons are involved but they, for the majority of cases, are on GABAergic neurons which are inhibitory. So the overall message of transmission between one hemisphere and another is of course positive to bring it into the equation if you like but it’s also to tell it to keep out of it for now. There’s something interesting about the division between these hemispheres it simply can’t be dismissed and I’ve written about this, I’m afraid at very great length most recently in this book.
The Purpose of Hemispheric Division
But why should this be relevant? Well it comes back to this idea of attention changing the world. Why we have two hemispheres – the best bet, and I don’t know of anyone who’s challenged this or come up with a better theory – is that every creature needs to solve a conundrum which is very easy in Castle in 2024, which is how to eat and stay alive. Now for most of history, living beings have had to focus on something, to target it to get it, and they know already what it is, that’s why they want it to eat it, to use it, to manipulate it and so they focus on it and get it.
But that arc of attention is probably no more than about three degrees which leaves the rest of everything uncovered, and that is the job of the right hemisphere, to take in the whole picture. And rather than think of the right hemisphere as being a specialization, the right hemisphere is really the norm, set against a highly specialized and unusual kind of attention. The grabbing and getting the apprehending attention of the left hemisphere – the grounding attention is the comprehending holding together attention of the right hemisphere. And importantly the right hemisphere understands and values and uses what the left hemisphere knows, but the left hemisphere seems less willing to and simply can’t actually understand what the right hemisphere’s importance is.
Understanding Hemispheric Tendencies
So it’s a bit like the so-called Dunning-Kruger effect you may have heard of in psychology: the more you know, the more you understand how little you know, but unfortunately when you know very little you think you know it all. So there are these dipoles of attention. Why are they relevant? Because attention changes the world.
Now on the left in each of these dipoles – I don’t know if you can see them, I hope – is the left hemisphere’s tendency and on the right is the right hemisphere’s tendency. So remember the left hemisphere’s tendency is to go for something with which it is familiar, that it already knows it needs and wants. For it to grab it and get it, it needs to be fixed and certain because of its narrow arc of attention. It tends to see the parts and thinks that a whole is composed of its parts. It can only see what is explicit. It tends to abstract things from their context. Of course, it generalizes and has little room for things that don’t fit into a category. It quantifies things rather than being interested in their qualities or differences. It tends to lump together in fact and it produces a world which is literally inanimate compared with the right hemisphere’s world.
The Left Hemisphere’s Limitations
It has an undue optimism which is based on the fact that it knows very little, sees very little and anticipates very little. And this is so extreme that patients who have a right hemisphere stroke and are therefore reliant on the left hemisphere, they may have a half of the body which is completely paralyzed but they will deny that there’s anything wrong with it. And if you ask them to move it, they say “No, it didn’t move.” If you bring their arm round in front of them and say “Move that,” they say “It’s not my arm, that belongs to somebody over there” or “It belongs to you, doctor.” It’s completely delusional.
I’m not the only person who’s said that. I can quote at least three other neuropsychological researchers who have said the left hemisphere on its own is frankly delusional. And in the book I look at some fascinating syndromes, about 25 of them in neuropsychiatry which involve delusion and every one of them is commoner after damage to the right hemisphere than after damage to the left. And in some cases it only happens after damage to the right hemisphere, not the left.
Representation versus Presence
And last of all – and it looks very boring but it’s terribly important – is the difference between representation and presence. With this kind of attention operating, phenomenology subtended by the left hemisphere is a representation which literally means something that is no longer present. It’s presented again after the fact when it isn’t present, and a representation is very different from that which is present to you.
So for example, this world is present to you but a map of it is a very thin two-dimensional schema that leaves out almost everything in the world. That is a representation – it’s made of isolated things. The things, moreover, are already familiar predetermined, fixed bits, i.e., fragments that are decontextualized disembodied, meaningless abstract, generic in nature non-unique and infinitely reproducible and quantifiable.
Whereas I’ll come to the right hemisphere, none of these things is true in the right hemisphere. It effectively produces a world that is mechanistic and inanimate and when people have damage to the right hemisphere – and you can suppress using a technique called transcranial magnetic stimulation – you can suppress the right hemisphere experimentally for say 20 minutes and when this happens people see things that they would normally consider animate like their wife or husband or whatever it might be, as a thing as possibly an automaton or a zombie and envy philosophers who love zombies and automaton.
The Hemispheres and Consciousness
But if you do the opposite experiment and enhance the right hemisphere and suppress the left, people see things that they would normally think of as inanimate, like the sun as a living presence that moves and gives light and warmth. And in this left hemisphere world, the future is a fantasy that’s under our control, and all will be well because we’ll be able to solve all the problems we’re just now creating.
Philosophy and Wisdom
Philosophy is an interesting subject, isn’t it? I think it was Weisman, who was Wittgenstein’s pupil and professor of logic at Oxford, who said that “philosophy is largely a matter of solving problems created by philosophy.” In other words, it’s a kind of healing for the pathology induced by a certain kind of philosophizing. Don’t get me wrong, I think philosophy is wonderful in the sense that the word means a love of wisdom. A lot of what goes on in university faculties called philosophy is not entirely a love of wisdom.
I was just giving a keynote at the Australasian Association for Philosophy, which covers Australia, New Zealand, and Southeast Asia, and I was mystified by some of the abstracts from some of the other talks. I mean, one of them began with an old problem: “I have a lump of clay. I make a statue. Have I now got one thing or two?” I think, gosh, fancy wasting your life on questions like this created by the way you’re talking and thinking.
Right Hemisphere Phenomenology
So what is right hemisphere phenomenology like? Well, nothing is entirely certain in this world, but it’s not random. It’s not chaotic. It is not entirely unpredictable, but it is orderly, and it’s that bridge between the orderly and the disorderly that is really, really important for creativity. All in this world is ultimately interconnected; nothing is fixed, but all is flowing and in process. What exists are wholes; in fact, the parts are an artifact of left hemisphere attention because everything is a whole at a certain level of attention, and wholes are in this sense nested. What is at one level a part is at another level a whole, and vice versa.
Meaning is implicit. Now, almost everything that matters to us and makes life worth living is to do with the implicit. Once you lose, as we are in danger of doing in society as it is now, a respectful understanding of the implicit and have to make everything explicit so we can have laws and algorithms, we’ve just destroyed the things that make life worth living – like love, like nature, like music, architecture, art, poetry, metaphor, myth, sex, our understanding of ourselves and the cosmos. This cannot be rendered explicit, and yet without it, our lives are meaningless, and a lot of people I know, because I’m a psychiatrist, are very troubled at the moment by the fact that they’re told they live in a meaningless random world. Don’t let them get away with it.
Balance of Hemispheres
So what I think is that both of these ways of attending have their uses. Don’t get me wrong, there’s nothing wrong with the left hemisphere, as I sometimes say it’s my second favorite hemisphere, and as long as it knows its place, it’s marvelous. The trouble is it’s arrogant, and there are stories throughout indigenous cultures around the world, and particularly in the Orient, in the I Ching, in the Vedanta, in the Secret of the Golden Flower – there are stories that point to this idea that I call the master and the emissary. There is a subsidiary functionary that is very valuable and was appointed by the master, but because it knows less, thinks it knows more, and that is where the ruin starts.
Now we live in a world in which we’ve stopped attending to everything the right hemisphere tells us, and we’ve prioritized only what can be made explicit and linear in the left hemisphere fashion.
Objectivity and Understanding
Objectivity, while not strictly speaking achievable, is nonetheless an honorable aim. What one is trying to do is avoid the pitfalls of a single particular viewpoint, and I think sharing different viewpoints, as many as possible, is a wise move if you’re trying to understand something. But you can’t understand it in a way that doesn’t involve understanding, by definition. So we can’t remove ourselves from this picture.
Our choices are not either being lost in subjectivity or lost in a world of objectivity. A distinction which is important doesn’t mean severance. Please remember this, because so many problems now come from the fact that because we’ve made a distinction, we think we’ve made a severance, but we haven’t.
The Unity of Being
The unity of things is constantly, beautifully ramifying into individual being, but that ramification into ever newly created inwardness and expression of it outwardness in the whole does nothing to threaten the integration of the whole – it actually enhances the meaning of the whole. When a flower unfolds (I should have put a beautiful GIF of this happening, of a flower sort of unfolding and you know all that comes out, the petals open, there’s all the stamen and the rest of it), that hasn’t threatened the flower – that has fulfilled the flower. When it was a tight bud, it had that potential. Now the potential is fulfilled, and all of life has that kind of structure, I would like to suggest.
We midwife the world into existence. It’s not that we make reality up – heaven forbid, that’s a kind of postmodern delusion – nor is it that reality is simply out there for the recording as though we were Geiger counters or cameras, we’re just receiving data. No, we midwife being into existence, and this is a reciprocal process – we are changed, and it is changed.
Presence and Being
In this, I want to refer to Goethe who said that “all things in existence, if rightly considered, evoke in one the organ of perception whereby they can be realized.” I find that very – it chimes with my experience, I think it’s a point worth mentioning. And what all this implies is that there is a ‘present-thing’, to use a Heideggerian-ism. “Anwesen” in German was a verb until Heidegger came along and made it a noun, and ‘presence’ is our noun, and Heideggerians in English have used the term ‘present-thing’ because something being present sounds a bit passive. It’s there, yes, but when it presences, it comes into being for you, and that is a process that involves you in nourishing it, midwifing it as I say, into being.
This is contrary to many views. So there are people whose philosophy I quite like who nonetheless can’t break out literally from the padded cell of the mind. They see us as walled in to a windowless cell in which we create fantasies for ourselves that we call reality but have nothing to do with reality. Now of course they’re not the full story of reality, but they are part of reality, and everybody’s version of these things will be different, but it doesn’t make them all false – it means that they’re different aspects of truth.
Matter and Consciousness
So why do we have matter and why consciousness? In other words, why these different forms of consciousness? Well, one is to do with the coincidence of opposites, and oh gosh, I wish I could talk about this – I have a whole chapter on it in “The Matter with Things.” But the pre-Socratics knew about this, Eastern philosophers have always known about it, but since we were told that the thing and its opposite can’t be true, we’ve been misled in my view.
There are certain senses at the everyday level, of course, in which they can’t be true – either I had milk in my coffee at breakfast this morning or I didn’t. It’s not a question of both being possible. But as Niels Bohr pointed out, the higher, the deeper one goes, the more it is true that the thing and its opposite are true. And you know, simple expressions of this are the way up is the way down, which is literally the case depending on how you look at it, which direction you look at it. But these coexistence of opposites is really important, and in as much as you can call matter and consciousness for our purposes opposed, they simultaneously interact with one another and create something.
So I’m hoping I can make this work. This is a sculpture in an art gallery in Switzerland. Yes, I kind of like that.
The Creative Universe
The first thing about this universe is that it is creative. That we can know without going anywhere that people might go, “ooh yes, woo woo,” but it is a creative universe – that’s what’s happening. It’s just constantly producing new forms and it’s organic, not mechanical. In other words, it’s complex in a way that is not fully predictable and cannot be reduced to a linear sequence.
Almost everything that exists in nature has this quality. You can pick out, if you go focus on a detail in a very complex scheme in which there are re-entrant loops and all the rest, you can find a place where A leads to B and you can intervene there and you go, “see, it’s a machine” – but that’s the wrong conclusion to draw. It’s a complex system that has little parts in it that are linear and which we can manipulate.
The Three Elements of Creation
Necessary to creation are three things that matter gives us, and none of them by contemporary norms are typical of creativity. The first is constraint – so our mind can go anywhere, but matter constrains the possibilities for us. That is very important when you’re creating. Secondly, it offers resistance, which is not the same as constraint, so resistance is facilitatory, not just negative as we say.
For example, what is friction? Friction is what stops motion, isn’t it? We all know that we learned that at school. It’s also what starts motion, by the way. Without friction, I would be unable to move from this spot, so it has dual qualities in that way, and resistance is important for anything coming into being. It needs to force its way against something, and this is how in a way the image of the Michelangelo sculpture or whatever it is, it comes into being because of the degree of resistance offered by matter.
And another is permanence. So of course nothing is permanent, but what is material has that little bit more permanence. My words now disappear instantly, but this screen may still be here tomorrow because it’s material. And this is like whirlpools in a stream, and I’m borrowing here very much from Schelling, who is, I think, becoming much more a figure that philosophers were prepared to talk about, who really was the most extraordinary genius at a very young age – he had insights into things that have changed the way we think.
Whirlpools are in the stream, but they’re not in the stream in the way that a ball is in the stream or a fish is in the stream even. They are the stream for the time that they’re there, and they can be photographed, they can be measured, they have power to move things, and they are forces to be reckoned with. And after a while, eventually they will move on, and they arise spontaneously from the flow once again.
The Power of Filtering and Creation
The image of sculpture or the filter – Shelley’s wonderful line that “life is the dome of many-colored glass that stains the white radiance of eternity.” In other words, the filtering that happens with the stained glass that produces all the manifest original elements in our world, and it’s like the air passing through the vocal cords, as James said.
The Brain’s Development
What is interesting is that the brain becomes more powerful by shedding neurons and pruning connections. It may astonish you to know that by the time a baby is born, it has shed 70% of its neurons – not to 70% of its neurons, it has shed 70% of its neurons, and it goes on shedding, pruning, sorting and creating. And it’s through actually doing that process of resistance that it produces something that has a degree of permanence.
The primary function of the corpus callosum is to inhibit. Probably the single most important function of the frontal lobes is to inhibit – the frontal lobes inhibit the posterior cortex of the same hemisphere. That is what they exist to do, and that is profoundly creative. It enables us to stand back from experience and not just be swamped by it, but be able to look at it and see things that if we were too close to it, we wouldn’t be able to. It’s like reading a book – too close to it you can’t read it, too far away you can’t read it, but the frontal lobes mediate for us the necessary distance from what exists. And it may interest you to know that the human brain has proportionately more inhibitory neurons than that of any other species.
Flow and Creation
Creation is differentiation, and for Bergson, another underrated but very important philosopher in my humble opinion, creation is inhibition. And he thought that the brain was in fact an inhibitory organism and that it banished – it wasn’t that it stored memories, it banished the possibility of retrieving certain memories, and that when the brain is damaged, sometimes they re-emerge.
And flow is relations only. Here are – it looks like a network, doesn’t it, with interconnected elements – and all flow has a quality of singularity, unity and differentiation. So these images are all taken in a straight-sided channel in which water at a steady pace is put through the channel, and in that rectilinear model, rods again of rectangular cross-section are dropped into the flow, and look what comes out of it that could never have been predicted from the rectilinearity is this extraordinary beauty in which these sort of shapes when you magnify are present.
And eventually you get something like this, and there are photographs of this from the air happening in – I know one of them happening off Baja California. Anyway, here we are, it’s called the Karman Vortex Street, and it is simply produced by an obstacle. Leonardo saw this; he painted a picture of an old man with his stick in the water and saw these fascinating patterns that emerged from it.
So where do brains come into it? They provide resistance. They are not strictly necessary, as I say many creatures have consciousness without a brain, and there are phenomena such as terminal lucidity in which people just before they die and having been more or less incapable of thinking suddenly achieve, as the brain fails, insight, the ability to see things, talk about them in an animated way after not perhaps speaking for a year or two, and then they die.
The Case of Hydrocephalus and Consciousness
And then there’s the very interesting case of hydrocephalus. I quote in the book a chap who had a first-class degree in mathematics from Leeds and an IQ of 127, and almost no cerebral cortex – the space in the skull was almost entirely filled with fluid. Hydrocephalus is another thing in which a child is born that has no brain basically; it stops at the brain stem, and yet somehow these children are able to see things, to recognize people, to behave and react appropriately, to have favorite toys, to enjoy music.
Please don’t ask me how. What I want to open to is the wonders in all shared humility before what exists. I don’t know the answers to these things. I think you should suspect anyone who says they know the answers to these problems, which is not to say we shouldn’t continue to try to find them.
Consciousness and Matter
The idea that consciousness interacts with matter, which was an insuperable problem in the 17th century, is no longer insuperable since matter is already intrinsically a field that acts at a distance and interacts with consciousness. Take gravity, electromagnetic forces – it’s not incomprehensible that such fields of force in consciousness affect matter, and it would perhaps be harder to account for if they didn’t. In any case, it’s not disputed that observation changes the nature of matter, and not just in some incidental fashion.
Nor, by the way, is quantum mechanics only something that applies to the very, very tiny or the very, very large – it happens all the way through. Just as the surface of the earth is round (we know that), and everywhere you stand it seems to be flat, but as you go out from that, you realize that the illusion of flatness is because of your point of view.
Mind-Body Connection
Changes brought in the mind have material effects. It’s not just brain and the body but the mind and the body. The placebo effect, which is still not properly understood, hypnosis that can cure a skin condition, CBT which can alter your thought processes and change the chemistry of the brain.
So that reminds us that while brains may not be absolutely essential, bodies are. In the words of Lakoff and Johnson: “As embodied imaginative creatures, we never were separated or divorced from reality in the first place. What has always made science possible is our embodiment, not our transcendence of it, and our imagination, not our avoidance of it.”
Life and Consciousness
Why consciousness, since we could do everything we can without having consciousness? And why life? Well, I’ve already said I think consciousness is the ontological primitive. As Whitehead said, “The secret of persistence is never to have been alive.” Psyche is in everything; life enables a certain evolution of psyche. So psyche is everywhere, but what life adds is the evolution of consciousness.
In life, it is much more obvious that it is directed to a purpose, that it involves complexity, and that it involves values like beauty and goodness and truth – eventually in the human and to some extent even in aids. It’s the basis whereby we have imagination, which is the creative faculty, and which, by the way, is not something that science does not avail itself of.
Scientific Discovery and Values
Most of the great discoveries by mathematicians and scientists were made by an imaginative insight, an “aha” moment, which correlates precisely with the activity in the right superior temporal sulcus and gyrus and in the right amygdala. And there is an attraction to value. I believe we’re not just propelled mechanically, hydraulically as we used to believe in the 19th century from behind, but we are drawn from in front by attractors. Those attractors are the sense of a direction to a purpose.
We may not be able to articulate it – you can see animals, even microscopic ones under the microscope, exploring and appearing to take tendencies that will further their existence, but also by values. So we are attracted by what is good, what is beautiful, and what is true, and this means that there is a relation between the ground of being and the cosmos.
The Ground of Being
This ground of being – what can we say about it? It is self-organizing, it is self-propagating, it is endlessly creative, and it’s on the borders of order and chaos – order without determinism (sorry Sapolsky) and fractal in nature. There are fractal holes; when you go down in them, you find more of the same structure, and the holes are greater than the parts.
Now if you add in to creative drive, purpose and value and wonder the word God, I don’t mind them the slightest. There are parallels between panentheism and my understanding of panpsychism. Panentheism is not pantheism in which everything is lumped together and that’s God. Panentheism is that whatever God is, is more than that, and all that exists, exists in God, and God is in everything that exists.
Understanding Panpsychism
My understanding of panpsychism is not that it is a summation of small sizes, which leads to the so-called combination problem. I believe this is a result of thinking in a partitioning way, but actually the field of consciousness is one and doesn’t need to be put together. It’s just that it looks like it because consciousness is not only the field in which we operate but is in everything.
Evolution of Consciousness
I’m getting to the end – a cup of coffee is coming, I promise. Julian Huxley said, “Man is that part of reality in which and through which the cosmic process has become conscious and has begun to comprehend itself.” Pierre Teilhard de Chardin said, “Man discovers that he is nothing else than evolution become conscious of itself.” Thomas Nagel said, “Each of our lives is a part of the lengthy process of the universe gradually waking up and becoming aware of itself.”
Quantum Critic David Bohm said, “There is no need to regard the observer as basically separate from what he sees, nor to reduce him to an epiphenomenon of the objective process.” More broadly, one could say that through the human being, the universe has created a mirror to observe itself.
The Cosmic Dance
So there are four independent voices that suggest what Whitehead says in his philosophy – that God, whatever it is, the ground of being and the cosmos are co-creating. They’re evolving in a dance together and understanding themselves as they come more and more into being. Rowan Williams doesn’t like that because it suggests that God is not perfect at the start, but it’s actually possible to square these positions – I won’t go into that.
Personal and Universal Consciousness
So is consciousness then wholly personal? No, a thousand times no! It’s like James’ image of islands in the ocean that are all rooted at the base of the sea. It’s like the forest in which there is an unseen tangle of roots of communication that knows no end between these creatures.
The creative cosmos is us – we are nature, we come out of nature and return to her, which is why I abominate the word ‘environment,’ which suggests a technical thing that surrounds us – but it isn’t, it’s in us and we are in it. Environment’s the sort of thing you might have a department of one day, but we have an unforeseen and unfathomable gift to be here.
Our Role and Response
It’s our resonance, our reverberative existence, our response-ability to use the time we have here. What is our role while we’re here as persons? Now people say, “How can it matter what I do? I’m so small, the universe is so big.” That is a left hemisphere way of thinking about ‘let’s get the magnitude and then we know the worth and the value.’ But actually, when you say ‘my love for my loved one is as broad as the heavens, as deep as the ocean’ – how big is that? We know these things have value in another sense, and by responding to what is, we help to create and evolve the good, the beautiful, and the true.
Final Words
So my final words are taken from Gerard Manley Hopkins, a famous poem – just the first eight lines:
“As kingfishers catch fire, dragonflies draw flame;
As tumbled over rim in roundy wells stones ring;
Like each tucked string tells, each hung bell’s bow swung
Finds tongue to fling out broad its name;
Each mortal thing does one thing and the same:
Deals out that being indoors each one dwells;
Selves — goes itself; myself it speaks and spells,
Crying ‘What I do is me: for that I came.'”
Thank you.
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