Whit Blauvelt
Forum Replies Created
-
Beautiful. Sounds like you got as much from the journey as the destination. It’s been 43 years since I visited Kyoto. Reassuring to see it still much the same.
-
The large language models are predictive, as you say. Given the sentences of the prompt, what responses can you predict, having ingested enough literature to have data on what’s likely to follow what? Now consider how much of talk in mind may also be predictive. When we listen to someone else speak, we are already engaged in predicting where they will go with it. That’s part of why jokes that frustrate our prediction can work so well. When we take ourselves to be listening to our own talk in mind, don’t we similarly predict? Once we’re doing so, can we tell the difference between “true” talk in mind and the prediction of where it’s going? That is, which of it represents our real ideas, and which merely represents where we predict they might go? Can such prediction run away, such that we effectively have a short circuit, where what we predict we might think becomes confused with our better founded thoughts?
That presumes there’s better founding to be done than words-strung-from-words can ever have. Those who believe the source of consciousness to be in our colonization by public languages might disagree on that.
Can the LH problem such as McGilchrist maps out be accurately described as that hemisphere short-circuiting on its own linguistic predictions, as if there were an ego, a self-in-self, a homunculus there to listen to in a predictive way, as if it were something other than our listening selves, and then nonetheless accepting what appear to be its thoughts as if they are really ours, not just plausible predictions of what we (or someone else) might say?
If so, keeping talk in mind in a predictive frame might prevent the short, as the short requires taking the merely predicted as already really said. For most uses of language, this preserves their usefulness. It creates a puzzle though in the context of telling oneself what to do — of a language-based will such as Freud’s “ego” (or Freud’s positing of society’s will as “super-ego”). Can the answer to that puzzle be recentering the will so it’s seated in the RH rather than the LH? Or is such recentering only practicable for the artist or poet?
-
Jeff,
You quote both hemispheres. Yet per McGilchrist only LH has fully command of syntax, while RH’s more capable with finding the poetically-appropriate word, but not with the assembly into sentences and paragraphs. I’ve long been convinced by Jerry Fodor’s work that the language of thought cannot be our public languages. If so, then even the LH perspective, as we know it in the form of the public-language “I” (Freud’s “ego”) is translation of the actual language of thought. I’ve also long favored Rudolph Arnheim’s claim for “visual thinking” — that the visuo-spatial is primary, and anything with language secondary to the core of our thought. But then factor in McGilchrist’s evidences for hemispheric specialization, and the blended picture could be of LH being more language-like, more “literal,” at both language-of-thought level and the surface public language, and RH being more visuo-spatial at every level. In either case, what’s brought to the conscious surface entails translation; but what’s brought to verbal discussion as here, in non-poetic terms at remove from metaphor, requires more of it by the time it’s expressed in our discussions.
Of course, we are as a species good at telling stories of talking bears and the like, facile at translating into public speech. What I’d like to ask: As you recount your experience, does it feel like you’re doing more translation, more story-telling, on the RH side than on the LH?
-
In my case, when my back is in trouble, my attention turns from the body, and in doing so also turns from sensory immersion in the present world. Striving to return attention to the present world then can be effective in bringing attention back to the body in a way where I find ways to relieve its trouble, whereas focusing directly on the body first, paradoxically, I’ll tend to get it even tenser, rather than find effective moves to bring appropriate subtlety to correcting the alignment.
Where this may support the McGilchrist picture is that attention to the present world should require a shift into the right hemisphere, whereas working directly on the body first may entail more of the left hemisphere’s focus on mechanical moves, rather than going into the organic sense of it.
-
Hi Charles,
So on the one hand those with the higher verbal scores are in the humanities — as anyone who reads the science journals might suspect — and by corollary the STEM “thinginess” correlates with being less verbally astute. As McGilchrist notes, the LH is more syntactically skilled, handling fluency with words, whereas the RH is more responsible for poetic depth, deeper semantics and the metaphors anchoring words’ meanings.
It would seem then that the LH has more to say, and says it better, when speaking as emissary for the RH master, than the LH has when speaking for itself. From the LH POV inspiration (that is, ideas crossing freshly from the RH) is superior, as measured by quality what’s produced in language, to what the LH can achieve by using language in a relatively isolated way for calculating what to say, as it were by logic alone.
Thus a culture of rational self-control should be inferior to a culture of inspiration. This should be even the rational conclusion. And children should best be educated to seek muses, more so than “self-discipline” according to rules and metrics.
Does this seem to be implicit in McGilchrist’s approach? Does it fit with your personal experience?
Best,
Whit
-
Hi Lucy,
In the recent online session where McGilchrist spoke with the woman who leads workshops based on Mark Johnson’s Moral Imagination (one of my favorite writers, too), McGilchrist voiced discomfort with the term “spiritual,” while he’s more comfortable with “God.” For me, it’s the reverse. When you ask about a “prescribed” path, well, yes and no. If the hemispheric hypothesis is right, we need more paths, accessible from wherever people are, by which we all can find at least balance, or even to lean to the RH as McGilchrist advises.
There are the paths we take, and the spirits with which we undertake them. These paths often branch, or converge, or cross. The spirits — both the better and the worse of them — are quite varied too. The notion of reducing all the spirits to one “Great Spirit,” or all the paths to one “True Path,” is that a LH idea? Recognizing that there are spirits and paths of great value, and finding the paths which access those spirits, and the spirits which enable us to walk those paths … that’s what I’m after.
Working this out in some detail in terms of the “path” and “spirit” metaphors (or schemas, if we’re going to work this out in a Mark Johnson-style way) may be of general use in this. Doing so may constitute one path in — not the only one. This way in quickly gets to levels of abstraction many people aren’t comfortable with. Zen, too, works at high levels of metaphoric abstraction, thus perhaps the greater comfort with the more literal Pure Land Buddhism in the larger Japanese population.
-
Hi Lucy,
Beautifully put. By McGilchrist’s account, when out in nature the RH is more aware of the natural world than the LH, while the LH is more capable of describing the experience in complex linguistic syntax, yet with the semantic grounding of meanings of individual words yet more the RH’s strength. Freud, in The Ego and the Id, claimed that for something to come from preconsciousness to consciousness requires it acquire word-representation. But from your words, we see that you were conscious of far more than those words can say — although they act as hand-waving towards much of it.
Aren’t we always aware of more than we can say? If we effectively restrict ourselves to only those aspects of consciousness fully translated to words, might that not be the very LH-dominant position that constituted the “neurosis” which Freud diagnosed as epidemic in our civilization? Of course, McGilchrist writes only of psychosis-like symptoms, not neurosis. Yet, might both be from the same basic mistake related to our relationship with and use of language, both as individuals and cultures?
If so, is AI further compounding the error of asking language to do too much; or might it be offloading some of the over-use of language on our own parts, so as to all us to become less programmed by it ourselves, and freer to find ourselves back more fully in the world as the RH can know us to be?
-
Hi Don,
If every “thing” is made of consciousness, don’t we have “trouble with things”?
We are organic, living systems (at least). So if our individual cells are conscious in some way, and if even the molecules and atoms within them are, still we as whole, living systems have dimensions of consciousness of our selves, of our wholeness.
Now, we can take any random collection of things, and call it a “thing.” Take everything from your pockets, put it in a pile, that pile is a “thing.” Should we think the pile has consciousness as a whole, of itself as a pile? Well, computer systems are random collections of things. True, they are collections of tools which can be used by us in concerted ways. But a workbench full of tools is not, as a pile of “things” — workbench and tools — coherently conscious. Is it?
Why should artificial information processing be conscious in any way that the collection of wood processing tools on my workbench isn’t — which is to say, other than perhaps at the molecular level of some sort of proto-consciousness, not conscious at all? When your word processor auto-corrects, is that a conscious decision? What are large-language models other than elaborate systems of auto-correction, guessing blindly at what might make sense to human beings reading their output?
-
Just read the Tricycle article. Thanks. D.T. Suzuki’s translation of the Diamond Sutra deeply impressed me as a teen. The tie between Zen and the samuri goes back centuries — they were always its chief sponsors in Japan. An argument in favor of this tie is the claim that Japan under the Shogunate (samuri rule rather than imperial) was a long period of relative peace. It was under the imperial restoration that Japan became so dangerously imperialist, with the cult of the emperor. Meanwhile for the broader Japanese population, the more attractive Buddhism was always the Pure Land variant, not Zen.
I’m named after an uncle shot down by the Japanese over Taiwan. His father had been partner to a Japanese expatriate in New York. They were on a business trip in Tokyo for the ’22 earthquake. My dad was in Japan after the surrender, with the Navy. On the other side of my family, a cousin now maintains our national bonzai collection in DC. I was fortunate to attend a series of Maezumi Roshi’s lectures on Dogen Zenji back in the ’70s, which were wonderful.
In the context of neo-feudalism, we might discuss whether we’re best with different varieties of RH-restoring spiritual practices, an equivalent of Zen for the elite, and Pure Land for the masses.
-
Agree that The Gnostic Gospels is great. It’s been a few decades since I read it; it was a great pleasure to discover it back when.
To some high degree, as the Ohio Players sang, “It’s not what you do, it’s how you do it.” Values have always been obviously real for me, along with incomprehension of how so many are taken in by ways of turning away from them, and explaining them away. If we grant that they are, then there’s the question of how to have social leadership which embodies them. There are examples from the edges of history of greatly differently constituted societies. The Dawn of Everything is a good recent book on that vast variation.
I’m in New England for the last 20 years, in Vermont, where people are on average more kind, more honest, more tuned to nature and beauty than across much of America. Vermont is also the least religious state in the nation, in terms of subscribing to congregations. Yet it’s a culture descended from Puritanism. McGilchrist condemns Puritans, after praising pragmatism as well as Milton (and I do love Milton). But Milton was the chief propagandist for Cromwell’s Puritan government; and the New England pragmatists had prominent among them Emerson, who was from a long line of Puritan preachers, not so divergent from them. Do these paradoxes flag a closeness to truth?
Those who want Trump as king I suspect want a sort of feudalism. So do some of the billionaires who are funding right-wing groups in America seeking to end democracy here, or hollow it out, so that those same billionaires can become true feudal lords — if they aren’t virtually so already.
Seeing as I 98% agree with McGilchrist’s lines of thought, it’s perhaps too easy to go to the spots of disagreement. I see the Enlightenment in, well, a more positive light — any many of those he so well quotes as being in various branches of it. Does form of government matter most, or is the primary challenge some new turn of enlightenment, a retuning of the hemispheres? If we can find more ways to enlighten people in the rediscovery, and reintegration of values, will our civilization(s) find new, better paths and forms?
-
McGilchrist is in sympathy with popular culture, which has in the last few decades turned largely from science fiction to fantasy — fantasies are based in feudal cultures.
Given that the LH handles commanding language, the farming family in feudal times often were left to farm on their own schedules, and holiday on the church’s, which came frequently. The basic requirement was only to turn over a portion of their crop to the lord of the land each harvest. Compare the modern, factory- and military-based cultures, where most workers are having to constantly fit work behaviors to what management requests of them. In European feudal cultures the military matters were largely reserved for the lords and their squires, and hired mercenaries, rather than on a general draft. So the typical feudal farmer didn’t need to internalize the “boss” as super-ego. The modern worker is trained through our school systems to be unimaginative, and fit their actions to the words of the boss — as well as other expert opinion when outside of work, as the ideal. It would have been easier to live in and from the RH while tending the fields, while the boss was away at the Crusades.
That said, McGilchrist also cites research claiming that people are happier today in societies with more unequal distribution of income, which cuts totally against abundant other research on why Scandinavian cultures, with far greater economic equality as well as more leisure time than American or British, are by many measures happier and healthier. So we might wonder if social democracies can, and in some instances are, tilted back towards RH awareness. Additionally, the super-egoic boss is monovocal. Our current political factions, which McGilchrist so deservedly disapproves of, are decidedly monovocal. Democracy, when functioning well in either society or within us as individuals, is polyvocal. When we’re monovocal, the LH necessarily controls as it maintains the monolog. If we appreciate a Shakespeare-style polyvocality both within and without, does that not require we settle back into the RH POV to achieve that?
-
Hi Don,
Oh, practice is everything.
Also, it’s common for gestalts seen by the RH to be arbitrarily mapped to word-concepts of the LH, such that people will use the same sets of words for quite different gestalts, and apparently opposed sets of words for gestalts that match. Is the Hindu atma (self) and the Buddhist anatma (no self) the same? Why not?
As for awareness, to be aware of something is to have some notion of its prospects. A rock in the path is only such if you might stub your toe on it. A dog is only such if it might do any of many doggish things. Can we be aware of awareness then, separate from knowing something of the prospects of awareness?
My own practice is somewhat along the lines of tuning the cooperation of the two hemispheres, as well as cs/uncs synchrony, towards a common, unified prospective sphere, whose “hinge of the taos” (Hecate’s crossroads, to the ancient Greeks) is here, now.
Does one direct ones practice(s) from a LH or a RH perspective? In which side does one, by preference, seat the will? McGilchrist’s The Master and … was obviously about this. Yet his books suggest little to me by way of formulas for such a practice, beyond the deep immersion in literary, scientific and artistic cultures he draws such amazing erudition from — and in which I for one could never hope to equal him.
Might we seek formulas for practice(s) consonant with McGilchrist’s insight, without too much risk of reduction? Are there alternatives to be grounded in his work which might prove more transformational than the popular methods of “mindfulness,” and meditations based on mantra or breath — as worthy as those are?
-
Don, Lucy,
I working through his “God” chapter now. As a side note, McGilchrist lists “tao” as a Chinese equivalent to “God.” The closest correspondence to “God” in Taoism is “Tian” (heaven). “Tao” means “way(s),” can be singular or plural. As Chuang Tzu wrote of the “hinge of the ways,” in Taoism the plural generally might be the best reading (in contrast to the Christian claim of Jesus as The Way).
Personally, I favor Shaftesbury’s stance in his earliest work (published anonymously in Amsterdam) where he argues that to hold a flawed image of God is worse than to hold no image at all. I’m glad to see McGilchrist take a stance on virtue and the moral sense which owes much to Hutcheson. Hutcheson drew from Shaftesbury while staying more of a Christian perspective. Hutcheson was foundational to the Scottish Enlightenment. McGilchrist does in passing cast aspersions on the Enlightenment as being too LH. Hutcheson though, grounded his logic in aesthetics — and saw beauty as essential to reality. He may fairly be seen as exemplifying putting the LH into the service of the RH.
As for personifying the holy, we might discuss whether there are advantages to the plural “gods” rather than “god,” as there may be advantages to the Taoist “ways” rather than “way.” Perhaps counting the holy is too LH either way? The old Taoists should agree that Tian is “at hand” — although without insisting we “repent” on account of this.
-
Hi Don,
Agreed, the social advance can’t just be regression from science to magic, from LH to RH. We need both legs to stand on, and to walk forward. Also agreed, the return to psychedelic research is positive. (Yet my brother as a teen used to drop acid and go to the mall, gaining little from it — set and setting remain crucial).
McGilchrist points out that life requires obstacles to create solutions for (not quite his words, but at least roughly his gist). As a species, we have arrived at, largely by our own careless creation, obstacles which require further technological and spiritual creativity of high order. As McGilchrist also points out, religion has not always been a separate category of culture. The Japanese, for instance, had no such category or concept before the Portuguese introduced it there. So we might no so much need any new religion, as a newly spiritualized culture in all aspects, including our sciences.
We might assume, if some are catching a glimpse of such cultural advance, a few drawn here may be among them, and share of such glimmerings.
-
Ralph,
While I appreciate your caution about merely presuming ourselves to be right, anyone who thinks that climate change isn’t a serious threat, or that epidemics don’t require sensible public health responses, or that elections in Western nations are rigged, is dangerously wrong. Those who think these things (hrumph, my brother) are typically hyper-rational, which as we know from McGilchrist’s work comes with left-hemisphere dominance. Any solution must be move people towards more love of the natural world, the health of humanity, and open democracies — to get more of us to our “right” minds. Arguing won’t work when it pushes folks farther into left-dominant perspectives. So what are the alternatives, beyond retreat to our private meditations and happiness?
How may we nudge societies towards the sort of right-hemisphere enlightenment which will enable them to self-correct, and pull back from hyper-rational, paranoid certainties? We might hope experience of the arts can help; indeed those in our great cities with their artistic resources are less prone to these problems. We might hope that experience of nature will too, yet those in rural areas are often the most beset. I’m in rural Vermont, where paranoid perspectives are fortunately far rarer than in, say, rural Texas. But I’ve no sense of how to bottle Vermont sanity, the general respect here for both science and nature, for export.
We should help left-hemisphere-leaning paranoid people out of love, when we can. But we also should hope to help those we don’t love. On their present course they are a deadly danger to humanity and this Earth, not individually but because of shear numbers. Ours is not to judge in order to apportion punishment or blame, but we need all the better techniques we can find to turn folks towards the virtues the right hemisphere can illuminate. Might we find means of broad cultural transmission — something bigger than the Beatles in their prime — to shift people by the millions quickly enough for the beauties of this world to revive and survive?