Whit Blauvelt
Forum Replies Created
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Yeah, Rosen’s great. Coincidentally I’m reading neuroscientist Christof Koch’s latest, Then I Am Myself the World, which doesn’t cite Rosen at all, but comes to parallel conclusions on just the issues you mention. Basically, to Koch (and Tononi’s integrated information theory, in which Koch collaborates) consciousness is primary, and objective things are secondary. Hmm, where have we heard that before?
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Hi Shannon,
How does this, for you, tie into the hemispheric hypothesis? Too often public outcry is just another instance of outrage stoked for the sake of making us all anxious, and diverting us from more substantial issues.
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Hi Anthony,
Nice poetry. Thanks.
Being open to what’s before us involves not just passive perception of what simply is, but also active imagination as to what might be, and what we might do to achieve the best of that. Some better prospects happen when we just let things be; others happen when we pursue them intensely. Many need not simply individual action to achieve, but require coordination across larger groups. That larger coordination involves inspiration and leadership. Even coordination within ones own actions benefits from care in arranging them.
When I was first reading McGilchrist I had a day job. So I’d finish work, and then be free for reading, listening to music, walking in the woods … switching what per the hypothesis is LH focus during work to a RH focus afterwards. Then I retired, looking forward to a further RH tilt in my attitude. I do like retirement! But it’s become apparent, at least in my case, that each perspective, LH and RH, is more valuable when we swing between them over a day, rather than keep a lean to one or the other as a more static attitude and, yes, discipline.
As for social leadership, we have gurus like McGilchrist and his associates, and then of course we have politicians who may be so largely disappointing us, whatever better futures we can foresee if we as society but applied ourselves. But I don’t know as we can do better without leaders, even though I love Dylan’s line “Don’t follow leaders / And watch the parking meters.” If the bad folks have leaders, and the good folks attempt to go without our own (by whatever definition of “good” you like), which group wins?
Best,
Whit
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Clifford, That’s a brilliant question — the economic deployment of consciousness, and the productive viability of different modes in different environments.
Something that Laura Otis in her book, Rethinking Thought, brings up is that Broca’s area (one of the LH modules long associated with language) has been shown in recent research also to be involved in sequencing which isn’t of language.
In terms of the question you bring up here, hunting and gathering isn’t just a matter of focus on the objects sought, but on the paths to where they can be found. Paths are inherently sequential in our traverse. Language also takes paths.
Basic agriculture also depends on paths — paths which just like hunting and gathering are relative to the path of the seasons. But as hunting or gathering or farming scale up to larger groups of people, where the leaders need to be skilled at finding the paths in the world, other members of the group become more concerned with following the paths as given them in the leaders’ words.
So it may not just be LH/RH balance being affected here, but the balance of use of Broca’s area, and the question of whether the individual is the master chef, working directly and largely beyond language, or the helpers, strictly charged with following the verbal recipes — and with anticipating what the boss will say in extending those recipes, even beyond what’s yet been said.
“Just following orders,” of course, can exemplify the worst of humanity. And yet, we do want recipes — even recipes for correcting the imbalance McGilchrist points to.
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The Mensch article is excellent. I don’t know Levinas at all. The issue of projection or prospection is nicely discussed with a more America accent in Homo Prospectus (https://www.amazon.com/Homo-Prospectus-Martin-P-Seligman/dp/0199374473 ). There’s also Max Velmans’ work on projection, for a British voice. What Heidegger seems to be missing, by Mensch’s account, is the whole awareness of presence, in which the projected prospects of self are not accepted as constituting self such as Heidegger mistakes them for. In is only by being in presence, temporally, that we have prospects to project ourselves in and thus find ourselves reflected there. At least, that’s where Tallis ends up. What should I read of Levinas?
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Hi Gary,
Thanks for the reading suggestions. As for the focus on time, I’m just finishing Raymond Tallis’s Of Time and Lamentation. His conclusion is very much focused on time, and on the artificiality of our parsing the world into objects. It’s a shame he and McGilchrist are antagonists, with such an overlap of insights. But then, Tallis is also far more logical in style and structure than McGilchrist — although no where near so much as Fichte.
Part of my puzzlement in this territory is with the notion that our modern cultures have strayed from Romanticism, since my own circles have largely not. But then, I studied with Allen Ginsberg, who was entirely Blakean in his orientation. I also studied with Paul Grice, whose focus on intentionality dovetails nicely with Tallis’s. I learned mushroom hunting from Paul Stamets, a fellow student then. Subsequently I was in the Seattle generation from which grunge emerged (the best of which is quite Romantic), then in the initial waves turning formerly quite parts of Brooklyn bohemian, subsequently decamping to small town Vermont — a largely Romantic state for centuries. My friends who haven’t been artists have been art critics, art historians, art handlers, art restorers … and a few writers and crafts people.
I just read an entirely wonderful book, Rethinking Thought, by Laura Otis, who like McGilchrist straddles neuroscience, which she got her masters in, and literature, which she currently teaches alongside being a successful novelist. The book is based on her interviews with creative people, about the modalities of thinking in which they do their work — high-end function rather than the examples of dysfunction Iain focuses on. There are many different ways to do well, in terms of working in verbal, visual, spatial and other modes, and their translations and combinations. She does not care for the common (i.e. pre-McGilchrist) characterization of the LH as “bully” and the RH as the visual-spatial superior. She also focuses on how the visual and spatial intelligences are, per recent research, not the same, with spatial intelligence (like language) somewhat based in Broca’s area. She argues that those who make the most creative contributions often achieve them through developing whichever modalities come to them with the most difficulty.
The question I’ve just submitted for Iain is: “Is it possible to shift the origin of the introspective gaze from one hemisphere to the other? Can one look alternately from the point of view of the master, or of the emissary? Or, if they each somewhat independently persist with their own point of view, is there some superior, third point of view which may integrate them, or may be achieved as the realization of their best harmonization?
“Then, might the seat of will, as the point of origin of consciously-mediated action, also shift between hemispheres?”
I suspect the answers to each of these is “Yes.” Also, Fichte’s “formal freedom” is a clue.
Best,
Whit
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Hi Luke,
A pertinent question: What should the prediction be based on the McGilchrist hypothesis? From my current perspective, of having read his books slowly and carefully, but having finished The Matter some months ago (and gone on to some similarly dense reading equally related to the core of my own interests that drew me to Iain’s speculations — variations in how we can use language in thought), I’m uncertain the degree to which he intends his claims regarding neuroscience and those regarding psychological enculturation to dovetail literally, as compared to just metaphorically.
There is certainly a way of reading him as making simply the claim that the spread of ideas, memes, framings and the like within a culture or civilization can hinder the optimal use of brains/minds. In other words, if we get our philosophy right, our mental well-being and productivity can improve. And to the extent we get our philosophy wrong, the results in mental function can resemble certain varieties of brain damage, in particular those associated with schizophrenic presentations.
If we are to take his hypothesis as being more in this metaphoric realm — as compared to some literal claim about widespread organic brain damage — then the ability of surgeons to remove major parts of already-malfunctioning brains without specifically producing schizophrenic symptoms might be somewhat beside the point.
In the paper you point to, this sentence stands out to me, “Brain injury that lead to hemispheric epilepsy occurred before 10 years of age in 41 (87%) patients.” In other words, the organic trouble had begun while most of the patients were quite young, when brain development is still quite plastic in its distribution of functions between the hemispheres. What Iain’s concerned with is the way that specific functions integrate, where those functions on average are distributed some to the left, some to the right hemisphere. It’s likely enough that in the cases covered in this paper, those functions were already consolidated to one side — the one which survived the surgery. As this is possible, even likely, should the results speak to McGilchrist’s hypothesis at all?
Whit
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Where the LH use of language is narrative, stories about what we’re doing, and the chat programs are good at predicting what might be said next based on statistics of what’s been said before in responses to similar prompts or questions, the RH use of language is poetry, more explicit use of the metaphors which anchor the meaning of all language.
The Matter with Things gives us a grand story in the first volume, and some resonant poetry in the second. Yet after the thesis and antithesis there’s not yet a third volume, a synthesis. If we’re going to survive the onslaught of computer-generated narratives now, more poetics is called for — but also some yet unaccomplished synthesis, where the two hemispheres, the two hands, craft futures worthy of our their capacities at their best.
How, then, may we go forward both to enhance poetics, and bring our two sides into a transcendent embrace?
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Hi Shannon, Apologies for late reply. I’m not an art historian, but for some years lived with one, who gave me a copy of Svetlana Alpers’ The Art of Describing: Dutch Art in the Seventeenth Century. Alpers presents a fascinating thesis which holds up well, that most European art follows the Italian model, where the art illustrates the narratives, and is secondary to the language of those stories. Golden Age Dutch art, by contrast, regards language as secondary to the visual. In our context here, we might ask whether Dutch culture (at least in the 17th century) had a different hemispheric balance than the Italian.
Of course, the Dutch of that time, as the premier navigators of the oceans, also had an intense spatial awareness. Witness the maps on the walls in Vermeer’s paintings — windows with light streaming in from the spaces outside — and the production of globes of both the Earth and the heavens.
Your account of spatial understanding of grocery needs is fascinating. Teasing out just what spatial intelligence is, especially in light of the recent realization from neuroscience that it’s not identical to visual … well it’s an active puzzle for me, especially as my own conceptions are more spatial than visual, or at least more abstractions than photo-like imagery.
Jackendoff places the spatial closer to the lived body than the verbal-conceptual, helping guide our actions in this spatial world. I’m currently working through an unfortunately poorly-written book by a trio of undistinguished professors, Spatial Intelligence: Why it Matters from Birth through the Lifespan, which despite the poor writing (and being printed in an impossibly tiny font by Routledge) has the virtue of exploring how spatial intelligence is generally neglected in both theory and education. Jackendoff suggests we’re generally less conscious of the spatial than the conceptual, yet it’s of equivalent importance in our mental architecture.
I’m currently trying to tease out the different affordances of spatial self-understanding as compared to verbal-conceptual self-understanding. I’m suspecting that what’s variously known as “the ego problem,” as well as McGilchrist’s “hemispheric problem,” stem from failure to bring the verbo-conceptual into full spatial contextualization, in a culture which follows Descartes’ faulty intuition that res cogitans is best conceptualized as without (spatial) extension.
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Hi Shannon,
Appreciate your engagement here! I’ve been bouncing around through a stack of Jackendoff’s books. His recognition of the spatial interests me as I’ve long been focused on the relation of path with opinion. There’s a binary in pop psychology (and in formal psychology until quite recently, for instance in Baddeley’s writing on “working memory”) between verbal and visuo-spatial thought, with verbal of course seen as LH and visuo-spatial as RH. But it turns out, as Laura Otis goes into in some depth in her book, Rethinking Thought, that the visual and spatial are as much separate capacities as the verbal is from either. And Broca’s Area in the LH is as crucial for spatial intelligence as it is for aspects of language. Jackendoff had worked out from linguistic evidence that spatial thought is a separate capacity, even ahead of neuroscience’s discovery of this.
A mention by Jackendoff led me to finally read sociologist Erving Goffman’s book, Frame Analysis. Goffman doesn’t write of spatial paths in so many words (indeed the book is from 1973), but brilliantly examines the structure and the stagings of our verbal presentations, emphasizing that they are far less about “information” than about, if I may roughly paraphrase him, relating the paths we have taken, and present ourselves as taking, and especially the quite-varied “I” as teller and subject of our stories.
A crude reading of McGilchrist suggests there are two “I”s, one quite verbal but blind, one more perceptive but mute, rather along the lines of a true self masked by a false persona. This is seductive (certainly to me), but may be an example of, as it’s said, there being a solution to every complex problem which is simple … and wrong. Nor should I suggest McGilchrist intends to promote that reductive conclusion. Rather, we might ask from McGilchrist’s marshaled evidence how to bring language back into the subtle service of “the master.”
In that, looking to experts in aspects of language, Jackendoff and Goffman among them (along with the cognitive linguists in Lakoff’s circle) may take us farther on the trail which McGilchrist has blazed. While we note how deeply Iain despises the Anglo-American analytic philosophers’ emphasis on language; neither Jackendoff nor Goffman (nor Lakoff) are in that tradition.
So do we want to stop with McGilchrist, just accepting him as if a guru who has attained a full enlightenment, or do we want to go farther, taking him as a scientist and philosopher who has opened a broad horizon for further — and somewhat urgent — exploration?
For my own focus, it’s largely on implications and methods for bringing the spatial more into the mix, which is not quite the same as “visual thinking” in (art historian) Rudolph Arnheim’s framing; but then he didn’t separate the visual from the spatial, as it now appears a fuller analysis requires.
Whit
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Hi Gary,
One more clarification: I’m no Descartes scholar, but Galen Strawson, who is, makes a strong argument that by “cognito” Descartes meant all of our sentience, not just the narrow use of the word “think” to mean “inner speech” — which is how I’d interpreted it (well, interpreted the English translation of Descartes) before reading Strawson, who quite convinced me otherwise with a number of examples from Descartes’ usage of the Latin “cognito.”
McGilchrist, provocatively, directly attacks Descartes for questioning whether other minds are also sentient, saying that’s an attitude also of some schizophrenics. I’ve always taken the other minds problem to be silly too, so welcomed that take down. But it makes a difference if we’re question whether there are other sentient beings, or whether instead there are just others with linguistic routines — as the latter leads to the absurd claim that AI can be (maybe already is) conscious, whereas the former strongly suggests that, if language is not the key to being a conscious, sentient being, but merely one tool we, as such beings, use, that AI is no more likely to become conscious than our hammers and saws.
Best,
Whit -
Gary,
A quick, thorough answer. Thanks! Yes to all that, in terms of Jung — and even Freud, who in The Ego and the Id is explicit about identifying ego with what can be brought into linguistic representation. So it could be that to be Jungian (and, as he did, skip the term “ego”) about McGilchrist we can have the RH be the “self” and the LH be, perhaps, the “persona” (although complicated by the whole “shadow” discussion). But this opens to further questions.
Where Freud had a view that consciousness just is controlled by what can cross the threshold from the unconscious into linguistic representation, Jung certainly did not. There’s a lot of current research showing that most people — especially those outside of academic professions — typically and frequently experience awareness and ideas which, while very much conscious, are not in words.
This does not mean such folks are especially saner than those of us who are quite constantly verbal among our thoughts, but it also means Freud was, in the larger picture, wrong. So what I mean here is the feeling of having a center, a self, consciously aware, planning, acting. The Sperry examples show we can have two, after surgery. But that by no means shows we have two, when the brain is whole. So it’s in this context that I pose my questions above.
Best,
Whit
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Footnote to that:
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A recent national poll of those calling themselves “evangelicals” in the US showed that half of them never go to church or read the Bible. It’s basically a way of declaring themselves Trumpists while draping their shoulders with sheep hides. Strangely, McGilchrist is going to one of their strongholds, Hillsdale College (https://channelmcgilchrist.com/lecture-and-seminar-to-hillsdale-college-usa/), whose administration was deeply complicit in Trump’s attempt to override the vote (https://www.nytimes.com/2024/01/08/magazine/hillsdale-2020-election.html). Doubtless there are also some honest scholars there, and students who are better than the institution’s leadership, worthy of Iain’s insights.
channelmcgilchrist.com
Lecture and seminar to Hillsdale College, USA
Lecture and seminar to Hillsdale College, USA
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Impressive speakers there. The option of virtual attendance is a boon.