Whit Blauvelt
Forum Replies Created
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Mike,
A further thought on what you have as “one’s inner ideolect (phonemic imagery as well as non-verbal narrative)”: Russell Hurlburt’s research an UNLV, where subjects describe their inner experience at random times denoted by beepers they carry, presents the claim that many people experience “unsymbolized thinking” (see https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S1053810008000524), beyond any “narrative” instantiated in symbolic strings.
This might raise the issue of whether the gist of thought consists essentially of imagery of any sort (phonemic included), or whether “symbolized thinking” is essentially translation of gist, whose core medium is non-narrative. Granted, we of any intellectual bent make quite a constant habit of translation — if such it is — and as Hurlburt notes most philosophers have great trouble imagining unsymbolized thought to be even possible.
Many mystic traditions claim great wisdom in silence. Might that “silence” be full of unsymbolized thought? Further, might it be more accessible from a right hemisphere perspective?
Whit
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Hi Mike,
Yes, what you say is very much my own experience. I am wondering whether what we might call “McGilchrist’s syndrome” — the approximation of a schizophrenic mentality under cultural influences — may follow from specific shifts in encultured framings of “inner speech.” Freud of course, in The Ego and the Id, has his diagram of the left hemisphere wearing as a hat it’s facility with speech, which in his view establishes it as the seat of the ego.
The notion that we should control ourselves with, or are controlled by, the “inner voice” goes back at least to Augustine. Yet there’s an absurdity in that notion, a positing of a homunculus, which was suspect long before Ryle. As an ancient Chinese philosopher said, “No self in self!” The corollary of this is “No other in self.” The framing in which one is either talking to or listening to oneself is unnecessary for verbally-enhanced consideration, which can generally be as well done in imagining prospective speech, rather than viewing it as present in some special way more real than the presence of, say, an imagined dragon.
But the difference is we aren’t likely to view ourselves as under command of an imagined dragon, while we do often (in our current culture) view ourselves as if our will were resident in Freud’s hat of speech, nested atop the left hemisphere.
Whit
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How best can broad focus include language? As Whitman said, “I am large. I contain multitudes.” Must the multitudes be silent to be included in our larger scope? Or is the very speaking, the diversity of voicings, the very chorus which the RH, at its best, orchestrates and resonates with?
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Hi Andrei,
Recently retired from several decades of being a sysadmin, which I went sideways into after no formal computer education. My education back in the 70s was in the psychology and sociology of consciousness, followed by becoming a philosophy grad school dropout — philosophy at the time wasn’t ready for the questions that still fascinate me.
Krishnamurti impressed me greatly as a teen. He was raised to be a guru by the Theosophists, but early on dissolved the Order of the Eastern Star, which they’d set up with him as leader, explaining his frustration that nobody was getting it, and that the whole cultish setup was more an obstacle than furtherance.
I particularly like Krishnamurti’s view of “discipline” as openness to learning from attention, akin to an academic “discipline,” rather than a strictness of self-control where one “disciplines” oneself.
Whit
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To me, the Nature paper supports McGilchrist’s thesis that scientists today don’t know how to write. They authors define “eigenmodes,” but apparently assume that their use of “geometry” needs no specifics. It’s long known there are various waves in the brain, both EM and chemical. There’s plenty of mystery in how to relate these to the various classes of neural cells, and their connections. There have also long been suggestions of a close relation between music and consciousness. So there’s much these authors may speak to.
But there also are many ways to define a brain’s geometries. In the Conversation article they skip any definition. If there’s definition in the Nature article, is it obscured somewhere in the mathematics? I don’t find it in the English part of the text. Publication in Nature is significant, but of what here?
One place to look would be if the geometric differences between the hemispheres correspond to each be differently resonant, in the sense (EM? of what frequencies?) that these authors find significant. If so, are such resonances cause, or mere correlation?
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Wow, great reply. I’ll accept your broad use of the “narrative” metaphor. For the contrary argument against consciousness as narrativity, I much like Galen Strawson’s work — but what he’s objecting to looks to be a narrower connotation for the term, focused on our public languages.
Where you speak of the poles of egoic self as matter as seen as fundamentally real, yes our culture (at least as I find it in myself) elides identity with the world. Robert Hunter’s challenge to “remember that you are the eyes of the world” was about as counter to our dominant culture as can be. The various “spiritual” traditions that would have us be off elsewhere in prayer or meditation, rather than fully present in our senses in this one, would have consciousness off in its own reservation, heaven elsewhere, never at hand.
Okay, so I’m looking at a tree — richly metaphorical (“true” and “tree” are said to share a root). To even see it as a tree is prospective. Would it be fair to call the anticipation of “treeness” in the perception a “narrative” as in your use? All the things I can imagine of a tree — which make it true that I’m seeing a tree (that I might climb it, that I can cut wood from it, that it will produce seeds….) — can be formed into stories. So there’s at least implicitly potential narrativity in the recognition of anything; and recognition does seem essential to consciousness, even if it’s just a meditator’s recognition of a “pure conscious event,” as you point out.
In his books, McGilchrist shows appreciation for certain strands of art, of (German) philosophy, of music, and older Christian ceremony. But what speaks louder to some of us is his taking residence on the Isle of Skye. Many sages have pursued the sublime in nature, their stories say. McGilchrist certainly shares the fear that our culture has turned too far from nature, so will see it destroyed, as this summer’s weather presages. But his diagnosis of our cultural drift, and signs of decline, leaves open the question of whether there’s more direct and specific treatment which might be invented for this, or whether the best we might do is “building an ark for the anthropocene,” as the Blue Aeroplanes sing.
What is the range of potentially curative formulas here, if such exist at all? Can we further sharpen the diagnosis, even beyond Iain’s magesterial work, to better find such formulations? Might it have something to do with moving ourselves beyond the conventions of the “I-narrative” (ego) and the “thing-narrative” (dead matter)? How might we center in, rather than just fleetingly obtain, an “eyes of the world” perspective, and the narratives which flower from that tree?
Whit
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Hi Don,
“Cognitively penetrable” means being able to be conscious of the hypothesized switching capability. So it’s not just being able to intentionally shift towards the RH perspective, but being aware of ones intentionality in shifting between the two, in both directions. There are tasks were we’ve the best traction if focused on them in LH, emissary fashion. To some large extent, this shift occurs unconsciously. But can it be more conscious? Again, this is not about simply becoming more RH, or being conscious more from the RH perspective, but about being conscious from a third perspective as it were, from the perspective of the claimed salience network — the “transmission” of mind in the sense of an automobile’s manual transmission. Can we learn to become consciously, intentionally nimble in switching between hemispheres, as it were, in both directions, from a third vantage at least partially transcendent of both?
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What particularly fascinates me is the issue of whether the switch between “LH” and “RH” orientation, or alternately “default mode” and “task mode” orientation, is cognitively penetrable, and to what degree. Various approaches to meditation and mindfulness seem to show that it is to some degree. If so, then the overall diagnosis which McGilchrist makes of current culture — that we are too many of us too much of the time shifted into “LH” (making a task of working in the world of parts) — calls for efforts to shift back to a “RH” mode which we might recognize as daydreaming.
McGilchrist mentions that RH activity more often correlates with depressed feelings, which seems much the same as the well-known finding that the default mode does. From the images in this article, it also appears the default mode correlates with more RH activity — although both default and task mode are spread across both.
The switch — the salience network in the model the article outlines — surely operates largely unconsciously, and shapes our consciousness. At the same time, we can shape ourselves. So, can a consciousness stuck in task mode (or the LH) learn to undertake the task of more often switching to the default mode, and if stuck depressively in the default mode for too long, learn to switch back to task? Is this how to get the master and emissary into harmony?
We’ve generally got an overworked culture which fears idleness, particularly in America. This does all seem to fit.
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Charles,
(Reading and replying here after posting a reply below.) Appreciate the background on your position. I don’t recall where McGilchrist makes mathematical claims; doesn’t he say he has little background in math? As for your claim about his grasp of science, where do you see him as going wrong?
If he favors Catholics and dismisses Puritans, that’s natural enough for many from Scotland. What does that has to do with his grasp of science? He does argues against religious myths being judged by science’s standards, perhaps making a clearer case there than Stephen Jay Gould did with his “nonoverlapping magisteria.” I hope we can agree Gould was a decent scientist.
Part of what fascinates me in James’s Pluralistic Universe is the case he makes against the New England Transcendentalists’ stance regarding the Absolute — the radical holism which as you point out goes back to Goethe, and the German philosophers they were all reading. I appreciate James’s taking that on all the more as I’ve been a holist since a teenager myself, in the light of which I’ve found McGilchrist’s extensive quotations of the Germans, who I’ve barely read, often making points I long ago came to on my own. It seems James wants to pull back about half-way from the transcendentalist position, to where there are many finite gods rather than one God Absolute. James says he worships a finite god, and believes that the god of the Bible, for whom he even allows the Absolute may be the “enemy.” A strange claim, to be sure.
If it be at all true, it could explain how the larger portion of American protestant evangelicals are so comfortable with the obvious evil in their Trumpianism — that they are following a real, finite god, who is largely evil. As you pointed out earlier, this was also a claim of the Gnostic Christians. The Catholics on our Supreme Court may too be enthralled to that demon, as evidenced by the crookedness of their logic and disdain for personal ethics. Would we best go back to the Athenians’ many gods, none purely good nor evil?
For myself though, I agree with the German philosophers’ claim of a fundamental free creativity to the universe, in which we participate. James, too, is clear this is better than traditional dualism. Our myths may be better when polytheistic — which for those Catholics invested in saints, is much the case. Meanwhile James’ points about the shortcomings in logical consistency the transcendentalists’ absolutist holistic views are, as roughed out in the Pluralistic lectures, beyond the level of the current debates in the journals of consciousness and philosophy I read, highly worthy of renewed attention.
Still, if theology be one area, and science another, where do you see McGilchrist’s science going astray?
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Charles,
You didn’t answer even one of my questions. As you should know, IQ tests (a) measure a narrow range of largely LH skills, (b) are considered by the people who construct them to become highly inaccurate above about 150. I owe you one for prompting me to read James’s Pluralistic Universe. And I’ll be curious to see what you make of The Dawn of Everything.
What will make me happier with our discussion here is if you’ll specifically address questions about implications and applications of McGilchrist’s hemispheric hypothesis. While I’m more than half-British by ancestry, those ancestors mostly left four centuries ago. They were neither aristocrats, nor cared for them. I don’t get your point about Burke, although we could certainly discuss Oakeshott‘s Burke-influenced arguments, which dovetail nicely with the hemispheric hypothesis.
Please spare us your self-regard, though. Our world has far too many people who, having demonstrated intelligence in one area or enterprise, consider themselves more expert than all the experts across virtually every field. Having found one object they can take down into parts and reassemble profitably, they believe they can equally-powerfully apply the same method everywhere, to everything. As I read it, that’s the core of The Matter with Things. That’s how our civilization tilts into madness.
But again please, can we discuss McGilchrist’s ideas here, and only bring in our own to the degree we can connect them with the issues he has raised? The Soviet Union’s collapse was in some part because the radical loss of cultural memory in the revolution which founded it rendered its foundations unstable — the same problem Burke diagnosed in the French Revolution. Not all conservatism is authoritarian. The Whigs Burke consorted with strongly believed in “ancient English liberties”; and largely supported the American Revolution. Burke and Thomas Paine were friends. Histories and societies are complicated.
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When you accuse Biden of having “fascist filth puppet masters,” that’s flaming.
When you cite one instance of McGilchrist looking (to you) afraid, citing research showing greater sensitivity to fear correlating with conservatism, it’s not a reasonable inference about McGilchrist’s politics. Everyone, of every political stance, has fear at times. A deeply fearful person will not go before an audience and ask them to doubt the worth of what many of them devote their labors to. That takes courage.
What do you fear of McGilchrist? Does the hemispheric hypothesis, if it becomes popular, put us at risk for the authoritarian turn so evident in Russia, Hungary, India, Florida and Texas? If so, how? There have been many advances in understanding whose down sides only become evident later. The internal combustion engine, plastics, the internet, all display dangers now which were overlooked in the beginning, despite their real contributions. What would a society in which the hemispheric hypothesis became common sense wisdom look like?
McGilchrist openly dislikes much modern architecture — sharing King Charles’s taste there. Personally, I like much of the modern. But I would not point to London as a good example of it, nor to most recent American suburban development. What with the RH being better at empathy and beauty both, and the autism of, for example, Ron DeSantis being on the spectrum whose farther end is the schizophrenia McGilchrist is expert on, isn’t DeSantis’s attempt to make his followers fear the beauty of drag queens precisely the sort of pro-fascist tilt that a less autistic society would preclude?
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Charles, Heidegger was at least, per his students including Hannah Arendt, a good teacher, with some core ideas they were able to develop further, without becoming nazis thereby. His inseparability of subject and object, in regarding the self, is straight from Fichte. “Dasein” as the term for that is perhaps better than Fichte’s “X”. That said, I’ve never been motivated to read Heidegger.
Intelligent people can be seduced by fascism. There are several current American billionaires who clearly have been. We might want to look at the psychopathology there, perhaps furthered by an analysis of how Heidegger took such an evil path. But I doubt our modern American fascists are Heideggerian. Their influence is more from Austrian economics, if you look at what they read and recommend when they aren’t just engaging in flame wars to try to prove that they’re “men”.
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Now several chapters into James’ A Pluralistic Universe. Amazon has it in paperback for $5, from a publisher in Britain but printed in the US. The pages could use better margins; otherwise it’s a great bargain, easier reading than the online scan of the original. James is excellent on how the limitations of language, especially in the definition of terms, have led to some terrible mistakes in philosophy. He’s also, as always, brilliant in demonstrating how to nonetheless use language clearly. And he does so in presenting a truly radical thesis, beyond both dualism and pantheism, while clear on the limitations of materialism — which his thesis is decidedly not.
Now, as to how James’s view might help us achieve a less brutal society … Charles have you suggestions?
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Charles,
It’s not that I don’t get your metaphor. Nor do I doubt there are gangsters in the world, in your broad sense. Nor do I dismiss the seriousness of their challenge to civilization. My difference from you is in seeing some regions of the Earth, and of our societies, as civilized beyond such bullying regimes. Your very use of profanity here, however, is bullying. That’s okay. I’ve seen worse.
As The Dawn of Everything documents, there have been both egalitarian and authoritarian societies since … well, the dawn of human societies. Each also often defines itself as not being the other. What are virtues in the one’s view of the world are vices in the other’s. There have also been better and worse versions of each — by any definition of virtue.
Being of egalitarian leanings myself, I have to observe that there are a lot of us around. As I’ve many ancestors who fought in the American Revolution, at least one great grandfather who fought in the Civil War (for the North), and a father and his brothers who fought in WWII … and all of my extant relatives aside from my conspiracy-laden kid brother being both good and egalitarian, I reject your claim that every bit of human society is corrupted by gangsterism. Not even every part of the Republican Party is. Van Galbraith wasn’t. When I worked for the Washington State Secretary of State, who was Republican, he wasn’t. I’ve met each of Vermont’s recent senators several times for discussion. Definitely not gangsterish.
It’s not that I’m taking this personally. It’s that I have personal experience of the world that provides evidence that your thesis of total gangster domination (in your metaphoric sense) doesn’t entirely hold up. Sadly, there are many places where it’s true. But not everywhere. And it’s the gangsters who would have us believe it’s simply true everywhere, so that we see no hope and surrender to their dominance. In painting a picture of the world as you do, you risk serving their interest even as you are motivated to oppose it.
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Charles, Have you read The Dawn of Everything, by Graeber & Wengrow? Their claim — with abundant evidence — is that there have been many more forms of human societies than in any of our “just so” stories. Your gangster hypothesis strikes me as one of those “just so” stories.
Any broad-brush account oversimplifies. Trump learned much of his approach from Roy Cohn, attorney to Mafia bosses Fat Tony Salerno, Carmine Galante, and John Gotti as well as to Senator Joseph McCarthy. The GOP wants to gut IRS enforcement of tax laws, remembering how they were used to bring down Al Capone. So yes, we have gangsters in American politics.
But we’ve also got people in high places who aren’t. I knew Van Galbraith, Reagan’s ambassador to France — not a gangster. My wife has known Jill Biden for years — not a gangster, and I’m pretty sure Joe’s not. (My wife would recognize a gangster; her grandfather was acquainted with a few as a longshoreman’s union official.) The notion that it’s all gangsters is promoted by gangsters, who would have the population believe there is no one better than them. There are lots of us better than them. While the Confederate states are still largely run by gangsters, New England decidedly is not, despite Mafia presence in Boston and Providence. Here in Vermont nearly all the political leaders at every level and party are honest, good people. Abe Lincoln was not a gangster, nor was FDR. Truman had been, but got over it. JFK’s dad had been, but the sons were straight. Obama’s clean.
As for whether Zen priests could have in any way put the brakes on Japan’s imperial goals … how? The emperor was largely Shinto-aligned, and the population’s Buddhism more Pure Land. Have I mentioned I’m named for an uncle killed by the Japanese? No culture, nor person, has ever been purely virtuous. Yet virtue is real. To claim it’s not because it’s never displayed in pure form is to falsely renounce it.