[Whit Blauvelt]

On a general level, the Triple Network Model and the Hemispheric Hypothesis suggest a shared set of questions, both in for what might be found objectively of brains, and subjectively for ourselves. If McGilchrist is right about our culture promulgating a mentality where the emissary (whether seen as LH or as task-mode network) has run away and is no longer properly contextualized by the master (whether seen as RH or as default-mode network), is this primarily:

1. The LH is hyperactive over time — truly a run-away state?

2. The RH is hypoactive?

3. The if either of those, is it a flaw internal to the LH or RH (such as the cases of organic damage to the RH McGilchrist catalogs)?

4. Or is there, between these, something like the switch which this paper is calling the “salience network,” and is the switch stuck?

5. If the switch is stuck, is that stuckness internal to the switch, or to yet other factors which should toggle it (or fail to)?

6. Whereas McGilchrist — and the myths he cites — more blames the emissary for running away, since the sense of self is more in the RH (and the default-mode network — both are supported by evidence) then might the fault be more in a flawed sense of self — and perhaps an attempt at escape from that into an over-tasked life? Is the LH really running away, or is the RH too often deserting its station?

7. Can we identify aspects of these two hemispheres and/or three networks (or two plus switch) introspectively, and move our internal focus of attention between them, so as to tune their relations (and/or adjust the switch) from the inside?

[Whit Blauvelt]

Don,

The negative affect some find in the default, mind wandering, daydream mode may not be, as you claim, the results of biological evolution, but merely a symptom of the modern discomfort in being in any state other than task-focused or entertainment-focused. I’ve always loved daydreaming. I’m sure I’m not the only one. Discomfort with it looks more like a culture-relative shortcoming, in our world where everything’s on the clock. Telling just-so stories about “programmed” “‘negativity bias'” where the evidence is nothing better than small studies on what tiny samples of modern college students feel when not occupied by work or entertainment is speculative, to say the least, not yet a proven scientific fact.

Not all of us become anxious when between tasks and entertainments. It may well be culture, not biology, which makes that the case for some.

[Whit Blauvelt]

McGilchrist’s personification of the two hemispheres helps put forward his hypothesis, but also may risk being taken too literally. The differences in their character — indeed in our character as constituted — become apparent when they are either physically divided, as by surgery, or one of them is suppressed or impaired, by injury, disease, electro-magnetic means, etc. The hemispheres are separate personae after split-brain surgery, as Sperry’s experiments showed. But for those of us with an intact corpus callosum, we are a single person, both to ourselves and to others.

That said, the full use of language, given a typical brain (which is 90+% of us, but not everyone), requires the left hemisphere. So the degree to which we view ourselves and our world solely through language, leaving aside vision, feeling, and the more artistic and metaphorical ways where right hemisphere capabilities are stronger, we risk becoming less than our fullest selves.

But it’s not, for those of us with intact corpus callosums who do not have multiple personality disorder, a matter of two separate selves. We are single selves, blended from capabilities arrayed between the two hemispheres. It’s a question of the balance and harmony in that array. Particularly in regards to language, through which we receive our assignments, our orders for school and work, do we often take it too far and become disordered by it? Freud thought so, when we internalize the boss’s orders, producing the “super ego.” Freud also thought that repression happens when we don’t allow nonverbal comprehensions to gain access to words — which he viewed as the key factor in “neurosis.”

I hasten to add that, like McGilchrist, I have serious reservations about Freud. But I do wonder if the problem of relations between the hemispheres largely comes down the the problem of relations between our nonverbal and verbal mental “contents.”

[Whit Blauvelt]

Ah, shifting. The gears, the transmission of mind.

Is the transmission automatic, or manual? Or perhaps an automatic transmission with an optional manual override?

Is the gearing such that we can shift to LH, shift to RH, or shift to both — sort of like the switch on an electric guitar which can use either one of two pickups, or both?

How does one, from within one mode, willfully shift to another, when will itself is partially a product of the mode? It would seem we may have to surrender the very will-as-product which would choose its own surrender to the new constitution of will in the other modality.

[Whit Blauvelt]

Thanks for the pointer to James’ pluralistic monism. I hadn’t read him on that distinction. It’s a nice one. Having only glanced at the text, I wonder if it naturally extends to a sort of polytheism, more so than monotheism. If we can only ever have partial views of the whole (something Fichte, by the way, claimed of our view of our self), then reifying one of those partial views as “the” God is to make a thing of It/Her/Him, and deny the truths in all the other partial, aspectual views.

[Whit Blauvelt]

Don,

You question whether a scientific experiment can demonstrate the reality of the physical? Do you have an example of a scientific experiment which does not presuppose that reality? Presupposing the reality of the physical allows us to do science. That science demonstrates high accuracy in predicting the outcomes of experiments which themselves presuppose the reality of the physical.

If reality were merely a conscious dream, and the physical unreal, the repeatable accuracy of scientific results which presuppose the reality of the physical would be nearly impossible to explain. After all, when we dream, everything in the our dreams is in flux, without the reliable consistency we find in the physical world. Clearly, the physical world is more than a dream.

That science works so well as it does in so many areas, given that it starts by presupposing the reality of the physical, means that every useful result of science is evidence towards proving the reality of the physical. This does not show there’s nothing in reality beyond the physical, nor that entities with a physical aspect may not also have a non-physical aspect, as in dual-aspect monist theories.

But to deny the reality of the physical is to deny the very possibility of science. Yet, we have science. McGilchrist’s books have more pages devoted to science than to more RH claims which point beyond it. I very much share his conviction that those RH claims are “substantial.” Yet, he also states repeatedly that the LH does real and valuable work, including especially large parts of science. His goal for us would seem to be to bring the LH back into harmony with the RH’s larger perspective, not to exile the LH, nor science, nor science’s appreciation of physicality.

[Whit Blauvelt]

Per McGilchrist, only the LH has full command of our spoken language. It follows from this that only the LH can employ our spoken language as full command of us. Now, some people fully lack “inner speech,” while others fully lack “inner imagery.” But for those of us with both, “inner speech” will more represent the LH, and “inner imagery” the RH.

The solution then for balancing them cannot be to substitute one inner speech regime for another. It’s not just identifying with a new set of opinions. Any set of opinions, as such, is a LH regime if one strives to live under it. It’s an ideology; all ideologies are LH. Rather we should wish speech and imagery to be brought together, so that each can lend its particular strengths to the combination. And we might also note that the RH is also more capable in terms of present awareness.

For the hemispheres to “speak” together then requires going into the realm of metaphor, where language and imagery blend. The field of cognitive linguistics claims that’s how language achieves meaning, so this is not a betrayal of language. It’s returning it to the strength of its roots. But it is a demotion of ideology — of any and all ideologies. It’s not that some bodies of opinion aren’t superior to others, but that any body of opinion becomes corrupted when used by the LH to suppress RH ways of knowing.

Note the solution is not to just get the LH to “shut up.” Rather, its to bring the hemispheres into a collaboration which is necessarily negotiated beyond the limited scope of our public language, to achieve results which, however much we then may speak of them, still require us to forever go beyond what we can, in words, describe, even in our best prose and poetics.

[Whit Blauvelt]

Don,

You say “Actually not just in Indian philosophy but universally among
contemplatives, ‘Consciousness’ (with a capital ‘C’) is the energy of
which all ‘things’ in the universe are made of.” Okay. My view is when the word is defined thus, you’ve made “Consciousness” mean nothing — not just “no thing,” but meaningless.

What we’re concerned with, in discussing AI, should be whether any AI can ever rightly be considered the equivalent of human, a living being. A pile of rocks, per your contemplatives, is “Conscious.” Yet to treat a pile of rocks with the same respect and consideration as you treat another human being would entirely miss the point as to the value of human beings.

The tree outside my window may in some sense be a conscious being. There’s fascinating recent research on plants leaning towards such a conclusion. The car parked under the tree is not. And the car that will be parked under that tree a decade from now, with an advanced AI in it, also will not be a conscious being.

If we are to care properly for life, we should distinguish it from what is not alive. The threat of AI is that too many people will mistake it for conscious beings, to the detriment of the real conscious being which deserve our love and compassion.

[Whit Blauvelt]

Don,

I began studying consciousness in the ’50s. When I was 4 years old I liked to sit in a dark closet and observe the mind with the senses stilled. Then in college in the ’70s I spent a year in a coordinated studies program on consciousness which prominently considered Sperry’s work.

You say “Right away – if everything exists in Consciousness (and there’s no
empirical evidence that even hints otherwise) there can’t be anything
that’s actually ‘unconscious.’ A better term of mental-consciousness
and submental-consciousness.” That’s a big “if.” Yes, in The Matter … McGilchrist somewhat favors that stance in the latter chapters; and Deepak Chopra has made it popular of late. But I find it obvious there are things in consciousness that are not in the world (e.g. unicorns), and things in the world which are not in consciousness (e.g. unobserved quantum fluctuations in ’empty’ space).

In any case my long, particular interest is talk in mind, with a background which also includes studies in Buddhism and poetics. McGilchrist’s summary of the differences in how the hemispheres anchor linguistic capabilities is of obvious interest here. One way to approach the disharmony many of us experience between hemispheric capabilities is to use meditative techniques to quiet talk in mind. But that’s like solving the disharmony in a choir by asking the person singing out of key to shut up. Better to help that person learn to sing in harmony. My focus in on ways to get the “emissary” in tune, to sing with the “master.”

In any case, I’m quite happy if you read my use of “unconscious” to mean your “submental-consciousness.” I have no notion what it would mean if the world contained “non-mental consciousness” as well as “mental-consciousness,” yet it’s entirely plausible that what from our waking point of view is “unconscious” may be in some way conscious within itself.

[Whit Blauvelt]

Don,

Thanks for the Les Femhi reference. His name is new to me. Aside from Buddhist practices, and Ram Dass’s “be here now” approach, I’m also familiar with Ellen Langer’s work at Harvard. And I’m particularly taken by several specific suggestions from Chuang Tzu along these lines. I’m not only convinced there are varieties of mindfulness which work, but focus on my own variant thereof on my daily constitutional walks in the forest. It works well for me.

Granting all that, I don’t see why you’re encouraging us to simply ignore further work in extending and integrating McGilchrist’s hemispheric hypothesis. Where I’m finding it particularly useful and challenging is in the implicit suggestion that, in addition to the unconscious-conscious threshold, there is also a threshold between the hemispheres. That’s to say, in our typical understanding of “the unconscious,” we may conflate conscious contents arising from the true unconscious, as it were from beneath consciousness, with contents as it were coming across from the less verbal side of the brain.

We can, of course, take an effective medicine without understanding the chemistry and physiology of it. We can practice effective mindfulness likewise without knowing how it is really working. But to develop new medicines, new practices, digging into the underlying reality is essential. I’m not dismissing mindfulness — quite the opposite; but it would be wrong to dismiss all the evidences McGilchrist has assembled too. Isn’t our deep respect for his work why we’re here?

[Whit Blauvelt]

Don,

I’m in no way suggesting that inhibitory neurons are some simple explanation in themselves, just that they are part of one. My own approach to mindfulness has much to do with reading a lot of Krishnamurti as a teen — an emphasis on keeping consciously aware. The paradox is that maximizing awareness is not simply a matter of concentration, but also requires relaxing back into the awareness we already have. This, if McGilchrist’s ascription to the hemispheres is correct, is itself a leaning towards the RH perspective, as the RH is according to him more richly aware of our surroundings on an ongoing basis. The “absent minded professor,” on the other hand, lost in verbalized thoughts, should be more LH, obviously.

Yet there’s also a state, epitomized by McGilchrist’s hero Wordsworth perhaps, where awareness is integrated — where we’re both intensely experiencing awareness of the our present scene, and are clearly engaged in abstract, verbalized thoughts which are consonant with, even informed by metaphors from, clear present awareness. That’s what some of us experience with great music, great landscapes — an awareness where, whatever the inhibition of one mode by another, the modes are active in mutually-supporting ways.

It’s one thing to become skilled enough at mindfulness to ease suffering. Perhaps, for many Buddhists, this is enough. But it’s another to become skilled enough at mind tuning to achieve our positive creative potentials, across the range of arts and sciences, as well as personal and social relations.

There are different modes of consciousness, appropriate to different circumstances. But there may be principles of tuning which apply for playing consciousness well in any of those modes. So we may be shifting between task mode and default mode, that is between tight focus and daydreaming (neither of which I find depressing); and we may be shifting between LH and RH led activities; but there’s something to handling those modal transitions well which goes beyond simply preferring one to another. In Western music we use “tempered” tuning, which enables switching between modes and keys while still sounding in tune. Is there then a mindfulness which is beyond simple preference for RH over LH orientation, or task mode to default mode, or visual over verbal thinking, but rather enables us to range across modes, and play in each of them relatively well?

[Whit Blauvelt]

Paul,

What struck me from McGilchrist’s writing on psychosis, is how the psychotic rather than being nonrational, instead are typically hyper-rational. So you get the elaborately worked-out schemes of the paranoid, who rather than having irrational fear as in the cultural stereotype of “paranoia” have marshaled numerous bits of what looks to them evidence. They are hallucinating order beyond what exists in the real world, often vast conspiracies of coordination far beyond real human capacities to conspire or coordinate, for instance.

With the merely neurotic — whom McGilchrist doesn’t much discuss — you have the verbal loops well dealt with in Cognitive Therapy, where people just chase their tails and dig themselves into a circular rut. But psychosis, in McGilchrist’s framing, looks much more like what the AI researchers are calling “hallucinations” by these new chat systems, which are essentially built to predict what, given preceding language, is most likely to come next, enabling them to proceed onto new ground by confabulations not fully justified by evidences from reality or sense.

Are these artificial information processors, when devoted to language generation in their current models, innately psychotic systems by design? Further, are “neurosis,” “psychosis,” and perhaps the “borderline” conditions with traits from both, on a spectrum of LH-imbalanced states rather than having, at base, separate etiologies?

[Whit Blauvelt]

“God” does not equal “Tao.” It’s just sloppy to read other philosophic/religious traditions as if they were about the same universal structure as Christianity. “Tao” means “way(s)” in Chinese (same word for plural or singular). Taoism is about the paths we can take, and how they differ from our descriptions. In other words, the “path” of Taoism is to keep clear vision and feeling of the actual paths we may take, and get beyond what of those paths can be “told in words,” which is — and this is the central Taoist insight — not the same as the paths eternally are themselves.

McGilchrist should welcome this, since it’s precisely about the relation of LH’s verbal fluency to the RH’s greater capacity for engaging in the fullness of the paths before us — and their junctures. Trying to turn “Taoism” into “Godism” misses this central point, which is so close to McGilchrist’s own. A great book on this is Chad Hansen’s A Daoist Theory of Chinese Thought.

[Whit Blauvelt]

Don,

What jumps out to me in this research is the centrality of the inhibitory neurons. McGilchrist mentions in his books that the corpus callosum has more such connections between the hemispheres than it does excitatory. (It’s unclear from the write up here whether these long neuronal connections are through the corpus callosum, more more direct; but that’s not central to the finding.) So to learn, we need to break from habit. Evidently either hemisphere’s “executive” frontal lobes will continue on the path of habit unless the other hemisphere jumps in to inhibit it. (Frustratingly the authors aren’t differentiating hemispheres, at least in their gloss here.)

Mindfulness, too, is at least in part learning to inhibit habituated responses, so as to look more freshly at the world. To stay on the path of mindfulness, then, may require either hemisphere to regularly inhibit the other’s tendency to settle into habit. McGilchrist argues that the RH is far better monitor of the LH that vice versa; but perhaps this inhibitory potential is potent in both directions?

Much as I find the suggestion of “free won’t,” which follows from Libet’s claims, generally overdone, the research reported here does suggest something similar — that inhibition of one hemisphere’s “executive function” at appropriate occasions is a key to our freedom and response ability to newness in the world.

[Whit Blauvelt]

Many nutritious foods require careful preparation to remove toxins from them prior to safe consumption. Even so, the same food which can provide health to the good person, also can grant strength to the bad. Philosophy is food. Religion is also a feast.

A plant which is a boon in one ecosystem is a dangerous invader in another. The Puritan Christianity of New England, where I live, has matured into the Unitarianism and Congregationalism of today — both comprised largely of sane, loving, liberal congregations with nuanced views of the world. Meanwhile elsewhere in American the White Christians are an active fascist threat, out to replace democracy with theocratic feudalism. The difference there is that the latter group comprises literalist believers in LH rules to apply to all decisions in life.

A core population of our would-be theocrats is Scots-Irish, originally from the Scottish lowlands and northern England, by way of Ulster. They’ve become White Baptists here. (I’ve lived among them in the North Carolina mountains, and they’re quite friendly if you’re White and hold back your opinions.) At the same time, the Black Baptist congregations are a bulwark against fascism in America. It’s not the faith and doctrine, as such, which is good or evil. It’s how it’s applied.