 Welcome to today's event, the master and his adversary. My name is Patty, a co-host of the Sanity Project with Charles Eisenstein. And Charles Eisenstein is a speaker and a philosopher. If you'd like to know more about him, you can either click on the information link below this video, or you can google his name, Charles Eisenstein. And today, Charles Eisenstein is our hosting speaker, and he's going to have a very enriched conversation with one of the author, philosopher and master of his own work, which I deeply admire. He's the author of the book called The Master and his adversary. I mean, this is the book that I read, and he also recently published a two-volume book that we will mention toward the end. So today's theme is going to be going to extract from his first book. And so my one-minute reflection on this amazing book is that my background, I'm a yogi, and I study. I'm going to use Bhagavad Gita as an example. Bhagavad Gita is essentially a conversation of a student and a master. And the student represents the left brain according to corresponding to this book, The Master and his adversary, that is describing his despair in moving forward in life, fulfilling his duty. And then the conversation happens in a battlefield where the master guide the students how to move forward. And so as I was reading Dr. Ian's book, I thought, wow, anything that a human live in a way that is fulfilling to their own purpose and destiny to the master level, you cannot avoid touching divinity, God. So the word God like emerged from my experience reading this book. So right now I want to invite you to give Dr. Ian and Charles hands welcoming them. I'm going to put them on screen now. Welcome, welcome. Yeah. Thank you very much. Yeah. So, yeah, here we have Dr. Ian McGilchrist. And I, you know, his, his work has been popping into my field. Well, for decades, actually, but, but especially now as some of the topics I've turned to so closely parallel a lot of his work, including an essay I just published last night about artificial intelligence and its limitations. And we'll probably get into that, but first I just want to start off by naming the, the theme of that embeds this conversation, which is sanity. So, so, Ian, you know, we, a lot of people have a sense that society, that the world has gone crazy, that there's a derangement. And in the course, I have been looking at that from different angles, one of which is the insanity of mob violence. Of, I draw on the work of René Girard a lot, sacrificial violence, the dynamics of in-group and out-group, ostracism, dehumanization, that kind of thing. Second piece that I bring in is, is the immersion in a realm of, of abstractions, a digital realm that makes us less present and that can take on its own logic and get people lost in, in stories and maps. And I guess a related thing is the insanity that comes from the cutoff from relationships and their replacement by technology and market-mediated pseudo-relationships that, that don't anchor us in being. So, that's kind of the basis and of all of those, it'd be interesting to see how those interweave in your mind. But it's the second, I think, that is probably the most, like, obviously relevant to the work that you've been doing, the, with the left brain. And so, for those of you who are not familiar, you know, Ian McGilchrist is, is the one who really put a more sophisticated understanding of the left brain, right brain differentiation in, in not just like the right brain does this and the left brain does that, but the way that they do things. So anyway, Ian, I'll just turn over to you if you have any comment on what is the nature of the insanity that we sense in the world today. Well, in your introduction, those three things that you pointed to were very important. If I can remember them, I'd like to come back to them. But the, the, the book that I published at the end of 2021, this rather large, I'm afraid, book in two volumes called The Matter with Things is subtitled, our brains, our delusions, and the unmaking of the world. Because I believe we are entailed in unmaking the world in a very important and catastrophic way. And, and that this is partly to do with the fact that we're frankly deluded. Why? I believe that what I've described in the master and his emissary is arise in a certain kind of abstract thinking, which privileges the map over the territory, the theory over experience. Over a period of a few hundred years in the West recently. And I suggest that in the past, there were a couple of civilizations, those are the Greeks and the Romans that started with a wonderful balance between what the right and left hemisphere can offer. But inexorably move more and more towards this left hemisphere vision. What is that vision? It's one, if I can put it this way in which, well, maybe I ought to say just a little about why there are two hemispheres. This is a very interesting question to me. It's what started me off. Why the hell is this organ that has these interconnections and its power consists in the number of interconnections it can make? Why is it whoppingly divided down the middle? Why is it asymmetrical? You know, excuse me if you want to expand you can do it symmetrically. And why is the band of fibers is very smallish in relation to the size of the brain, band of fibers that connects to the hemisphere is largely involved in inhibition. It suggested to me that there were two different kinds of thinking going on. I would prefer to say ways of being because it's not just cognitive. It's about a whole way of attending to the world and being in it. And I believe it emerged for a very good evolutionary reason that every creature to survive needs to get food. And it needs to be able ultimately to do more than that. So birds can build nests and humans can build shelter and so on, but effectively to manipulate the world. And for that, there is needed a very tiny attention to detail. But if that's the only kind of attention you pay, then you miss the predator, you miss your family and you don't see the whole picture. So effectively the left hemisphere, this is the first point to make, is not designed to help us understand the world is only designed to help us utilize it or manipulate it. And because of this particularistic, very narrow beam precise attention to detail, what it sees is a world made up of fragments, bits that are decontextualized, abstracted, categorized, inanimate effectively, and fixed so that they can be grabbed easily. By contrast, the right hemisphere sees a world in which nothing is atomistic, because everything is ultimately connected to everything else, that it is moving, not fixed, that it is importantly what it is in a context. That context is often the body and that everything is actually unique, not just an exemplar of a category. You've got these two kinds of visions of the world vying. And I got interested in it first because I was studying literature, and I thought that one of the problems was that we took works of art that were implicit, embodied, individual, and worked on us in an embodied fashion, and instead turned them into abstractions that were, you know, exemplified categories and had a meaning that was quite different once you took it out of context. Once you explain a poem as if you explain a joke, it's destroyed. So that's really just setting the scene to what I'm about to say, which is that I think that we have developed more and more reliance on this left hemisphere way of thinking. And it's designed, as I say, not to understand that to give you power. And that power becomes intoxicating, addictive. It becomes eventually the only way of seeing the world, that it is a world for our use in which everything exists in order to be subjected to our utility. And all the other values, such as the beauty, the goodness, the truth, all these things are relegated. And I think in my lifetime, I've seen them even further relegated from their position, the position that Plato held they should occupy at the apex of the pyramid beneath the sacred. So that's what I think is going on. I think we're becoming more and more taken with this abstracting, categorizing and very simplified way of thinking at the expense of all the rich stuff, which we get through through art, through poetry, through music, through ritual, through narrative, through myth, all the things that can be expressed only in those ways get ignored by our culture. But unfortunately, they're all the stuff that would give it meaning. Yeah. So a couple of thoughts come up. You kind of named that this has happened over the last few centuries. But it's very striking that what we call the scientific worldview embodies exactly the ways of perceiving that you ascribe to the left brain, the decontextualizing, the inability to see things as unique, but merely as examples of a category scientific ideology at its very foundation says that it says, for example, that that any two protons are identical. They are they are merely members of a category. And their differences are only because of the different forces that act upon them, but otherwise they are they are generic. And it's not only physics or science that narrates the world in this way, but it's also economics has or you can say economics has created a world in the image of this way of perceiving by converting the uniqueness of each thing in the material world into commodities that are ripped from their relational context, their strip mind, you know, they're taken away from all of their relations and made into products that are whose only relation is the price. The only relation to the consumer is the price. So so here we have it's a kind of a feedback loop where the the these incredible powers that you speak of that have come from this left brain way of of of engaging the world have created an environment that further encourages that way of relating to the world like science and the technology that we've built. So so right. So it's not just like we had some, you know, bad idea and decided to use our left brains instead of, you know, our right brains for things, but but we created an environment that encourages us to continue and intensify that. I mean, it seems pretty a grim situation. What do we do to get out of that? Yes. Well, I noticed in the piece that you put up yesterday that I read with pleasure this morning that you talk about the sort of hermetic nature of the system that it can't find material from outside, but it gets surprising. The more you put into it, the more and more conformist and the less it actually sees of anything new. You're talking about AI systems here. And I think that is very interesting. It's what I call the Hall of Mirrors. The left hemisphere lives in a Hall of Mirrors in which its own representation, its own theory about things is more important than any evidence that comes from the senses or from experience. And so it has no way of breaking out. And I say that in the past, we broke out of this hermetically sealed representation of the world through things that made the world presence to us, things like nature, the greatness of viscerally powerful art, the business of religion properly understood, not as a matter of propositions, but of a disposition towards the world, a proper understanding of the body. These things, they gave us intimations of something beyond whatever construct of an abstract kind the brain was currently producing. And what we find now, thank goodness, is, and I would say about science and economics, to sound a tiny note of optimism here, that economics has discovered that we don't just behave to maximize self-interest. And therefore the model homo economicus, which has employed for so long, led to complete disparity from what was actually going to happen. They predicted one thing and something else completely happened. Now that may be partly that is dealing with a very complex system and complex systems are intrinsically unpredictable. But it's also that they misunderstood what motivates human beings, which is often to do things that are not immediately for their own interest, but are in some ways altruistic or other centered. And in science too, physics moved on about 100 years ago from a mechanistic vision of the universe. It just discovered that this simply didn't describe the universe that physics was continually revealing. And what is exciting is that after biology started to do that in the early 20th century, and then tailed off terribly badly in the second half by becoming entirely mechanistic and reductionist after the discovery that you could pretty much engineer things using molecules of DNA and so forth, that we now know that impact living things organisms are never of this kind. They're never fully predictable. They don't behave like machines. And they have completely different qualities from machines. Thank goodness. So there are signs amongst many biologists that we're recognizing that it's not just that machine that was wound up by an engineering God and that once it got going, all he had to do was occasionally oil the wheels, but that in fact, it is intrinsically unpredictable, intrinsically free. And there's an interesting way we could go on all that and why it needs to be free. But I'll just say that for now. I just like to comment actually on the idea that one subatomic particle is identical to another. I'm trying to think of the name of the physicist and think it might be in Robert Kelly. I'm not quite sure. But he said that no two particles are actually identical. Firstly, because they're connected differently, they're in a different context inevitably from any other particle. And also because if nothing else time has intervened, and we're now in a different universe, so connections, relationships make things what they are. You know, the way we believe that we can find out something by taking it apart is going to be very disappointing because things are what they are only because of the context they found in. You can't discover what the heart is by viewing it in isolation. It's anywhere you see that it's differentiated seamlessly from the body that you know what it's there for. And so in the new book, I actually argue that relations are prior to relata are prior to the things that we think are related. They only emerge out of the web of relations. Yes. Yeah, I think that this this understanding is arising in many, many places that the idea to paraphrase that to exist is to relate. And that that and you know to take quantum mechanics, for example, to say that something exists in the artesian sense of the world, you know, occupying a discrete place in space and time is nonsense in quantum mechanics. You can't say that it exists outside of what they call a measurement, which which is an interaction between the observer and the observed or between the observer and the system that is that entangles it. And we find that actually, you know, on the very human level, too, when when you're cut off from from rich and intimate relations with other people at the extreme, put into solitary confinement, but we're even for a few hours in a sensory isolation chamber, like you're you're being starts to decay, or if you're lonely, you feel like you're less in the world, like your existence begins to fall apart. We keep each other here, we keep each other whole. And so even this has been one of the things I've thought about and written about for many years, the the defining sense of self in our civilization as a discrete, separate unit. It seems very intuitive to to I guess you might say a left brain way of thinking. But it is and this is significant. It is no longer that conception is no longer aligned with physics, it's no longer aligned with biology. It's no longer aligned with with economics. You know, all of these seemingly objective foundations of what a self is, are are crumbling from the inside. And that, in a way, you know, it's part of of a awakening to sanity again, is to think of yourself as something other than what you are is a form of insanity. So we're, you could say this is more optimism, I guess, that that we are exiting the delusion, which is, which presents all kinds of cognitive dissonance that can kind of come become its own kind of insanity, like like this, these hammer blows to our story of what is and who we are can be kind of traumatic, you know, and people retreat maybe even more into the familiar narratives and want to establish objective, discrete, you know, Newtonian Cartesian beingness. The only thing I'd say about that is that we need both union and division. And in fact, Goethe, who was an uncommon UIS man, said that uniting the divided dividing the united, this is the whole business of nature. And I think this is right. Of course, if you fuse selves enough, and they all just become tools in a huge mechanistic society, such as the Soviet Union was, and that no doubt China probably is now, then the individual has lost all that uniqueness and all that capacity to contribute. And so you need to be able to preserve neither atomistic separation, nor total fusion. This is true of most relationships, that they are best when they enrich one another. In fact, we're enriched by the society out of which we come, and we can enrich the society in turn by what we give back to it, that each of those things is only possible because it is a distinction to be made. So, you know, in the story of the one and the many, which is a very important one, I think, and I have a whole chapter on it. We need both the idea of the one and the idea of the many, we mustn't fall into all as one or all as many on their own. Right. Yeah, that's, that's, um, yeah, I don't have any argument about that. No, no, no. Yeah, maybe another thread I wanted to pull. See, we're talking about, gosh, I mean, there's so many, so many things that I resonate with, about, you said it with left-wing, its own theory about things is more important than actual experience. That's something that has led in increasingly, in recent years, in politics, you know, all kinds of, on the one hand, like all kinds of conspiracy theories that were, I don't even want to call them conspiracy theories because it's a bigger category than that. They're like these alternate realities that usually involve a conspiracy because otherwise, how could reality be so different than what we're being told? But their essence is not actually conspiracy. They're like these completely, these alternate timelines, you know, these alternate histories, these alternate, that go along with alternate physics, you know, breakaway civilizations, extraterrestrial politics, you know, and I'm not actually wanting to dismiss these as mere conspiracy theories. I see them on a mythic level that, where their objective fact is sometimes less important than the truth that rides their vehicle. But, you know, people get wrapped up in these very convoluted, alternate realities. And the thing that the people who dismiss them out of hand do not recognize is that, from the inside, they are self-consistent. It's not that people are stupid and not clever enough and, you know, cognitively impaired, and that's why they believe that the earth is flat. If you go into that mythology, it is, it can account for every data point. And even Occam's razor cannot always distinguish what is, you know, a valid narrative and what isn't. And so this, but these are only maintainable in a kind of an isolation. And then I would extend that to the polarized, I'll finish in just a second here, the polarized opinion tribes that have come out in the mainstream as well. So yeah. Absolutely. Yeah. I mean, when we talk about madness, I mean, one of the things is that there are very obviously impossible things that are being put about as the absolute truth that mustn't be questioned. And when you're in that state, you're in the totalitarian state, as Hannah, I haven't pointed out, she said, when there are things that you can't even question, then you're in the totalitarian state. And I think one of the unique points you made at the outset was violence and anger and so on. And I think there's two ways of looking at this, that in some ways, the more improbable the position you're trying to assert is, the more you have to silence any possible opposition and be very angry about it. Because if the opposition was allowed to say anything reasonable, it would destroy your argument. So there's a lot of investment in maintaining certain positions. And once they become the positions that are the mainstream opinion, whether it's in Lenin's Russia or in England in 2023, woe betide you if you don't stick to this, because this is how people exert power. It's how bureaucracies flourish. They look at the way bureaucracies are taking over all the professions. Things that would have rooted us in some kind of a reality would be the intactness of a tradition, which we've taught to be only ashamed of and to destroy, the intactness of a family, religion, the professions, the doctor, the teacher, all these things have been systematic, a community. These have all been systematically attacked, localism. All these things have been pushed out of the way, partly for capitalist economic reasons and partly for reasons of just being able to totally control. And it's this desire for total control that I think is now the key element in our situation. And again, Hannah Arendt said that when people feel completely powerless, which I think a lot of people do to make any difference to this, they turn to violence. And so we're in a situation that can incubate that violence unless we begin to make it very, very clear that freedom to speak and to be honest is of essential importance. You know, find intellectuals querying that because again, it might upset the narrative that they're keen to peddle, but there is no narrative we should be peddling. We should be trying to look honestly at what the truths are, and then we can react to that with compassion and do the right thing. Whereas at the moment, because everyone's narcissistically getting angry and passionate about their particular being their bonnet, it's very hard to have that conversation at all. Yeah, so this mania for control and to protect the narrative, to protect the conceptual world that we've become lost in that drifts because it's hermetically sealed. I mean, I'm exaggerating from actual input from outside of itself. It drifts further and further away from reality and locked within it. We do things that are horrible to life in the name of progress. And so the censorship that is all around us today is it's necessary to maintain the integrity of that world reality story bubble because it becomes more and more vulnerable to assault, more common sense. Indeed, that very rare thing to meet these days, but one of the things I feel about it, which may sound a little bit extreme, is that there are drives that human lives are susceptible to negotiating certain value driven drives. Freud thought there were drives, Jung thought there were drives, and I believe that the left hemisphere's lust for power embodies a drive. And one of the reasons I'm not so sure about the paranoid conspiracy theories is that it suggests that there are people who really know what they're doing and are controlling this. But my view is that actually they may think they're in control of what they're doing, but they're actually themselves going to be eaten up by this leviathan, which is this enormous drive towards power. And they can't escape it any more than we can, but we're locked into this. And what it will breed is ever more layers of administration and managerialism to cut us off from contact with life itself. I mean, where can the young any longer find the sort of spontaneity, the kind of joie de vivre that I remember having when I was young. Nowadays, everything is so remote. It all has to be done through interfaces on some screen. And you have to watch exactly what you say and what you do. My God, this is an attack on life itself. We need to fight back for life because we're not. We're not just inferior computers or superior computers. We're not computers at all. And what worries me about the expansion of AI is as much the way in which we're becoming like machines as the way machines may be becoming like humans. I don't believe they are. Actually, I just think they're becoming expressions of this tyrannical will. Yeah, I wrote an essay, I think it was last year that I was on this theme to the robot who wanted to be a man that made the point that we're becoming more and more like robots. And one reason why it's so easy to replace human functions with with AI is that human functioning has become more and more mechanical. So it's of course, it's very easy to artificially generate text that is trite and cliched and unimaginative and just a lowest common denominator generic example of what everybody else is doing. We've already become very mechanical for the same reason that based on the same principles that these large language models operate on, which is, you know, they study what already is and they're locked in, they can't get outside of the Internet. But we can theoretically, but we haven't been, we've become more and more self-referential and more and more detached from the mystery, from the source of infinite and uncontrollable experience. And as we migrate into this bubble, we become more and more comfortable there. And it seems more and more that you can control everything. Like on a, if you're generating an image on a screen, you can designate where every pixel goes. And if your lived experience is that everything you see is on a screen, it suggests that you can control those pixels, you can control the world because the world shows you can do anything. Yes, it's the fulfillment of a nerd's dream to be able to control everything and be and do anything. And it's this that is, I mean, it was all said by Hannah Arendt long before computers became a part of our lives. So it's not as though it just originates with AI. I think AI is being used by this particular drive and it's accelerating. Intensifying it enormously. And I think that we have become less imaginative. I mean, it's a commonplace that science has become much less imaginative over the last 50 years compared with the previous 50 years in which it really made enormous strides. And I think the arts too, with many, you know, notable exceptions have become more say me more to do with being clever and less to do with communicating these ancient deep things that really in a way, I mean, perhaps we can't at this stage in a conversation bring in the concept of the divine and the sacred. But to me, they are hugely important in our way of conceiving what we are and what the world is and what our duties to it are and what our relationships with it are and what our imagination should be doing. I think that it's also hugely important. I mean, because that's one name that we can put on the infinite mystery that eludes capture by our concepts and categories. There's two ways I want to go right now. One is, I kind of wanted to just say one more thing about conspiracy theories. Interestingly, the left brain worldview that sees total control as possible is also susceptible to seeing a cabal of world control and conspiracy. Absolutely. You know, it's part of that same way of thinking. It's constantly paranoid. I mean, this is one of the features of the left hemisphere. It must have total control because if it doesn't, other people have power and what are they going to do? And it's no, just mention this and sorry, but when people have damage to the right hemisphere, they become paranoid. They start to have paranoid delusions. And in fact, schizophrenia is which is famous for having such delusions is largely a sort of hemisphere deficit state. Anyway, I didn't want to interrupt you. That was kind of an aside. The other thing that I'm just really resonating with and I'm sure people listening are too is like, you said something like we have to fight for life. It's like this exuberance of being alive that constantly challenges the confines that we have constructed around ourselves, like the dandelions bursting through the cracks in the parking lot, life wanting to live. That's yes. And tapping into the infinity, you know, you named the sacred which is another name for the mystery for the for the infinite that alludes capture. And I think that this is part of what this whole sanity project is about. It's to validate our innate knowledge that yes, there is something outside of the matrix. And then that it's not like some distasteful relic of a superstitious past. You know, I remember one time I was on a speaking tour and I was supposed to speak at Oslo University about economics and I titled the talk sacred economics because I was the name of my book. And the whole book is about really transcending the regime of quantity ultimately and the conversion of values into value, you know, like, and sacred being the unnameable, the qualitative, the ungraspable. Well, they canceled the university canceled the talk because they're like, well, we're, we're a rational, you know, we don't we don't do this, this religious stuff, you know, you know, that's outrageous. That's outrageous. And then I gave the talk. Have they been sufficiently? Have they been fought back against for this? This was years ago. I think it was 2016. I ended up giving the talk in this co-working space that was just really, it was actually, you know, I have actually trouble speaking in university spaces. You know, it's like stepping into a hostile environment and I start to feel defensive and I start to want to legitimize myself by adopting some of their language and and then I become like, you know, I just don't feel myself and my pipeline to the source to the infinite source is is constricted. So it was actually all for the best. But you know, just a case in point that that, like, I welcome you bringing this into the conversation, like, you know, the sacred God, the divine. And it is offensive to the modern mind, steeped in left brain thinking. It is offensive to the mind because it, it names the unnameable, you know, it, it, it tunes the, the constructed belief system that in which the left brain is comfortable. Yes. I mean, one of the things that you mentioned earlier was the triumph of the scientific reductionist materialism, but not just in science, across our philosophy of what it means to be alive. And in that system, a lot of people believe that science has proved that there is no purpose and science has proved that there are no values, that they're just things we invent. I believe, powerfully, that they're not things we invent, but things that we discover, i.e. they're there to be discovered if we can, or if we can't. So what we need to do is to be open to them. And they can't have said anything of the kind, because science begins from ruling out all considerations of purpose or value, because perfectly legitimately it wants to understand mechanisms and it wants to see how things work as it were. So it, it, it, it forbids talk about them, but it can't then announce that it has discovered that there are no values and there is no purpose, because it's what they themselves decreed. There's a nice little thing in C. S. Lewis where he says it's like a policeman stopping all the traffic in the street and then solemnly noting in his notebook, the silence in this street is very suspicious. Right. That's a, that's an amazing metaphor. Wow. Yeah, because they, they, they, they, they, it's like let us hypothesize that everything real can be measured and quantified. And then they build up this, this world in which there is nothing that cannot be measured and quantified, that anything that is unmeasurable does not exist. Yeah, yeah. It's so facto it's proven. And really what it is, I mean, I look at science as a religion and this is one of its metaphysical underpinnings. Yes. It can't be a religion. It's not what it's there for. It has very important use, but it shouldn't take on roles that it's, it's never designed for. But nowadays it's taking over our way of thinking. So that, you know, I just want to come back to the idea of beauty and goodness and truth. These things that have been so, so undermined, so travested, so contradicted in, in, in, in my lifetime. And that these are the ways, these are the lights that can lead us out of this, this mess. I used to feel rather skeptical about Dostoevsky's line, the world will be saved by beauty. And partly because I know that there are things that are superficially beautiful, that are not in themselves good. But I've come more and more to the idea that actually, at least it can act as a leading light. Things that are truly beautiful are powerful and cool to us. And we know when something is, is true in a way, we need, we need to trust our intuitions more. The trouble with trusting algorithms and rules and explicit procedures is that, as I say, all the stuff that is important is not expressible in that form. That's why we have poetry and music and dance and, and theater and, and narratives and, and, and religious rituals. I mean, these things are very important. And the Greek saw that mythos was one of the paths to truth. And the other was logos. And initially they thought mythos, the origin of our word myth, was more important than logos, that it was the only thing that would reveal the big truths, that logos was the kind of petrifying kind of reasoning that you do with an accountant. Yeah, with those logos, truth, beauty, beauty, you know, is one of my main operating principles. My, my best known book was called The More Beautiful World Our Hearts Know It's Possible. And I propose that as an orienting principle when, especially when our, our notion of what truth is has kind of collapsed into objective fact. And, and, and, you know, which I'm not going to get on that rabbit hole, but, but just to say, you know, I'm not sure if, if there, if it's really true when you really go into it, if there are beautiful things that are harmful to the world. I mean, there are kind of gaudy substitutes for beauty that we've become hypnotized and associating with that word. But I, you know, some of the videos I've been making for this, this program are about, I took one in, it was in Union Station in Washington, D.C. I could have taken a, you've, have you been in that building before? I have. I have a train station, right? Like it's got like, I don't know, a 70 or 80 foot high ceiling. It's, it's these gorgeous proportions, the, the, the, the stonework. I mean, the, it is beautiful. And you can't, I don't even think that we have the capacity to make something like that today. It's, it's, because it's not reducible to any set of principles. And even if you reconstructed it, stone for stone, it wouldn't be the same because of the relational quality of being. And then the essay that, that I published last night, you know, I made the point, like the Mona Lisa was a very unsold painting, but that is a product of its context. And if you just make endless copies of it, those are not going to have a quality of soul. It's, it's so beauty is an emergent function, and it cannot be copied. It has to come from the infinite. And that's why I think that it is such a liberatory orienting principle. It's because of its irreducibility. And, and when you're just shuffling the bits, which is what AI does, and to a large extent, what our culture does, I mean, how many movies are just sequels of other movies, cannibalizing our, our cultural legacy, you know, when, when, when you, when you are cut off from, from life, from the, from the infinity of, of being, then you just end up recycling things and beauty is lost because beauty is contextual, you know, it has to draw from something outside of what already is. Yes, of course, I would agree with that. I mean, it's interesting and rather mystifying, isn't it? What happens in when things are copied? And often it's because they're copied extremely badly. And something important is degraded in the process. I mean, almost all copies of things are degraded versions of what was first there. But you're right, that nothing can substitute for the immediate relationship in which one is awestruck by the beauty of something in its, in its presence. That reminds me of this difference between the presencing of something, which is always real and vibrant and awe-inspiring. And the re-presentation of it, and this is a distinction between the right and left hemisphere, the right hemisphere is what enables us to allow things to present as Heidegger would have put it. But I mean, what I'm talking about there is the kind of thing you can feel if you practice mindfulness and you, you stop the chatter and you try to just be there embodied in that place and see it for the first time. And that is something that requires imagination, something the machine can do. It's dealing only with representations. And so the mechanical reproduction of the things creates more of this debt effectively world. I mean, just out of interest because these brain things are not always known by people. But if you suppress the right frontal cortex, people actually start to see living things as inanimate. They start seeing people as kind of zombies. And whereas if you do the opposite and suppress the left frontal cortex, they start to see things that wouldn't normally be considered animate as animate. So they, they see the sun and they see it moving in the sky and they see this as a living thing. I love how you said, I love how you said they see things that wouldn't ordinarily be considered as animate as animate. You didn't say they see inanimate things as animate because, well, yeah, I think the sun is animate actually. Well, there were important traditions in many civilizations as well as in indigenous cultures where people have animistic beliefs that hold this to be true. And Rupert Sheldrake, who whatever else people may say about him is not a negligible scientist has written a paper on the fact that the sun is a living being. I wrote an essay on that too that drew from that paper. Really? Yeah, yeah. It was, I can remember when I called it. It was again last year, but it was about the homeostatic feedback loops that maintain the sun and the complexity of its electromagnetic stable, stable patterns that are very similar to those of the brain. I mean, it is irrational to dismiss the idea that the sun is alive and intelligent. I think so. I mean, I argue, in fact, in the book that along with the philosopher Robert Rosen, who I think is very, very interesting, that inanimacy is just the limit case of animacy. In other words, animacy is the norm in the cosmos. And inanimacy is when that animacy is reduced so far that we call it inanimate, but it's actually an asymptote that is never fully reached. So the cosmos is alive, I believe, unconscious. I know these things sound rather strange or woo-woo-like to some people, but I mean, I have written about it at great length and explain why I believe these things. So this is the issue though. Like, even this kind of need to offer a little bit of a disclaimer or a little bit of a caveat. Well, I know it sounds woo-woo, you know, that is part of the repudiation of what's actually true. And related to what I do if I'm speaking at a university auditorium, you know, and I'm like, okay, I better be careful to demote some of these ideas a little bit, just so that I'm acceptable. But I feel like we need to embrace them, you know, because this is part of the gasoline. I call it auto-gaslighting. And here we are together. We could client with it. Yeah, yeah. And then we end up gaslighting others, because if I say, well, you know, I'm not a new-ager and I'm not going to really believe in this woo-woo thing, then the people who secretly are like, but I think the sun is alive, but I think Earth is alive, but I think the cosmos is conscious. I think that we have to... The motto of our program is, sanity is a group project. And these counter-cultural beliefs that are based on a larger perception, and a more open perception of the world that you associate with the right brain, these are hard to hold by ourselves in against the onslaught of culture and economics and law and social pressure, you know. And that's why we're here. We're here to establish an island of sanity. So thank you. That's wonderful. Really grateful for you, you know, bringing this in. No, no. And I think, you know, much as I said, we need division and union, but we need them to be unified. We need to have boundaries to what we... I mean, there is such a thing as beliefs that are... You referred to some earlier that you call possible conspiracy theories. But there are things that, as it were, are so unlikely that taking into account everything else we know that we can say we don't believe those. But nothing is necessarily wrong. We need to listen and think and not be dismissive and judgmental before we thought something through. But provided one remains sceptical up to a point. But I believe that, you know, we need to be sceptical of the people who are sceptics as well. So scepticism needs to be applied there as well. And if it does, if you're sceptical of scepticism, in the end, you open up a path to some kind of a truth, which I think is calling to us all the time. And probably better when we're together than when we're apart, because we're less susceptible to this gaslighting that you refer to. I'm going to bring one more thing in and then maybe we'll take some questions from the audience. Sure. You know, okay, so like you said, some things actually are a woo-woo. And so I picked up this piece of sunguy here, you know, and I'm like, okay, what would be woo-woo would be to project human intelligence or human consciousness or human awareness onto something that doesn't. So it's an anthropomorphizing. Yes, yes. But I do think it's not that it's not that there's a little person trapped inside the piece of structure that can't get out and can't, you know, that that would be a terrible way to think. No. And that way of thinking of it, you know, it does tap into a genuine intuition that everything is sacred, everything is alive in some sense. But then it gets hijacked by the very kind of left-brain representational thinking that you're illuminating here, which is always a reduction. Representation is always reduction. It's a compaction mapping that makes the world smaller and smaller and smaller. And here we are together to liberate ourselves and each other from that prison and be fully alive again. That's it. We need to, yeah. Yeah. Do you want to add to that? I'll call it some more. On an embodiment and honor the sacred, because these are the things that will lead us back towards a greater sanity. Okay. So yeah, there's more, I could say about, about even like what we could talk for a very long time. I have no doubt Charles, it would be lovely. Okay. So let's see, let me, let me go to gallery view here. And Patsy, I might need help from you. Yes, totally. We need, so today, what we're going to do because we have a lot of people raising their hands. Therefore, what Charles is going to do is just going to tune in to the audience. And then he'll pick someone. So we won't be picking in any particular order, but him tuning in. So Charles, if you can't see gallery view, you should. I got it. Yeah, I'm, I can see gallery view. Awesome. Little hearts come up. That was really nice. Oh, that's nice. Yeah. I'm just scrolling through here. Of course, I've got lots of hands in my gallery view. I don't know why. Do you want to pick, do you want to pick one? One more principle I don't know. Just in that case, I'm going to, just Susan Steadman, you've got a hand raised. How do we unmute you? I need help here from yeah. I'll take care of that. Okay. I'm going to Susan up. Yeah. Hello, doctor. Thank you so much for being here. My question is on page 255, you're talking about the kind of blind spot in the right and left hemisphere. And, and I was, you know, I was going along with it and it all worked for me until you said something really startling. And I was, I was wanting you to explain that. Yeah, sure. You say, you're talking about the right hemisphere, it grounds the natural viewpoint of the self unreflecting being in the world, it therefore cannot sufficiently on its own disengage itself from the natural viewpoint. And then you say, and this is the part that threw me. The trouble is that the more natural its view seems to it, the less it is really allowing the extraordinary, awe-inspiring fact of the being of anything at all to be present for us. Thus it risks its own way lapsing into the inauthenticity of Heidegger's birth fallen. In this state, it is the left hemisphere that enables the willful taking up of an unnatural view. And then you, you talk about the left hemisphere being the vertical axis and the right hemisphere being the horizontal axis. And that's what threw me because in my way of thinking, right hemisphere is what gets us what it's the, it's what allows us to feel awe and wonder. And, and it's, you know, Richard Rohr talks about the emotional body being a direct access to spirit. So I always think of the right hemisphere as being the vertical axis, not the horizontal one. Yes. That's what really threw me. Yes. You're, you're in many ways entirely right. The difficulty with any such matter is that you need to be clear about the way in which it's understood. And I obviously didn't make it clear enough there. But what I was talking about is that the left hemisphere has a rather remote view as one would have looking at a map of the world, seeing it all laid out below you, but not really experiencing it, not being there on the terrain. So it has an idea of the territory from its aerial view, like a drone, but it doesn't actually have the on the ground lived experience of being there in the terrain. I make a distinction between the territory and the terrain. And that was what I intended. But you're quite right. The right hemisphere has to balance two things, being there and understanding the unique far better than the left hemisphere, but also seeing the whole much better than the left hemisphere. So then would thank you very much for raising that. Okay. Thank you. Thank you. Yeah. Yeah. How about, oh, Samantha Sweetwater's got her hand raised. Oh boy. This is going to be good. No pressure, Samantha. Yeah. Let's get Samantha unmuted here. Yeah, yeah. Just a second. I'm trying. Hey, someone, can someone unmute Samantha and I'm trying to exchange the spotlighting somehow okay. We're already in Samantha. I can't see the speaker at all. Just a second. I don't know if I'll show up if I see you. Oh, right. Sorry. Could you just say again what you just said? Oh, hello. It's lovely to be here. Hello. Hello. Okay. Well, that's all right. You can say that as many times as you like. Thank you for inviting me on this call, Charles, and it's such a joy to be here with you. I've recently discovered your work through Daniel Schmockenberger, and my experience of your work has been an intense validation of my own life path, which has been a path of embodied facilitation, mostly in community as a critique to what we cannot do from the cushion. So in my 20s, I realized that there were many horizons in terms of shared sanity that we couldn't actually address through spiritual practices oriented towards self-reference. And that's been my life path for 50 years. So my question is this, and the way I think of intuitively, this is intuitive having not yet had the time to fully dive into your work. But intuitively, I think of right brain and embodied and relational practices as the place where they find their fit from the brain's perspective and then also from the perspective of body, mind, and relationship. And I would really love to hear you speak to how you think about embodiment or the practices that engage us in embodied connection to ourselves, others, nature as a path to reattuning to the right brain. And in a way, I'm asking this perspective of reverse engineering because I see my life very much as a journey of working to stay in my right brain and bring others to their right brain. And from your perspective, both as philosopher and neuroscientist, how do you see the connection between, you could say, sanity and embodiment? And how do you think of the role of the body in becoming more sane? Well, in the world that we live in at the moment, we've become over-abstracted, over-conceptual, and cease to attend to what our bodies say to us, including not just, I mean, that sounds that they might be saying rather low-level things, but they may be saying very high-level and important things to us. There's an amazing complex of neurons in the gut and around the heart, but also the right hemisphere is more in touch with the rest of the body quite literally and has an image of the body. So the left hemisphere tends to take everything out and make it abstracted. And so anything that we can do that brings us back to this more grounded, embodied, here I am this living flesh and blood creature on the planet, is good. And these can be many, many practices. You don't need me to tell you that. They can be spiritual practices. They can be to do with the arts or music or dance or whatever. But it's trying to get away from the idea that we're cognitive beings. We're brains in a vat. We're far cleverer than any cognitive being would be because we have intuitions. And intuitions can tell us many things that we could reason until we were dead without having discovered. The troubles at the moment, it's all part of the war, in my view, on nature and the body, is that we're being told to discontent to our intuitions by clever psychologists who've got examples which are undeniably the case, where our intuitions deceive us. But that's because most of the time, they do such a very good job. You can invent a situation in which you don't. But that's like optical illusions. I can show you an optical illusion so good you can't believe it. But I don't think I ever heard anyone say, well, from now on, after seeing that, I'm just going to live my life with my eyes closed. So I think we need to rediscover our embodied being. And thank you for raising that. I don't think I've given much of an arm of it. Anyway, there we are. Thank you. Thank you. So yeah, Samantha's going to be a guest on the program later on. Okay, cool. Yeah. Let's see here. We'll go back to gallery view and see what I can find. Jonathan Putnam is. Okay, sounds good. Okay, just give me a second to find him because here we are. Hi. Yeah. Thanks for this talk. And thanks for just a great book. I was really curious. I was reading this book and I've got, you know, I put all these sticky notes that I wound up by just kind of putting in. And I was really curious as I was, you know, obviously, it's just a very comprehensive like, you know, the bibliography and footnotes are like 100 pages. And I'm curious, how did you actually go about organizing over time? You know, you know, you have file cabinets. I mean, do you have, I'm just kind of curious about how you were able to develop the structure of the outline and kind of pull these pieces together from so many, you know, everything from philosophers to scientific papers. How were you able to, you know, organize that? With difficulty. But partly because it's focused on ideas, philosophical concepts really. And so they form a kind of node around which neuroscientific findings can be grouped. And I had many different, I had something like 60 to 70 areas as it were. And when I found something very interesting, I made a note of it and put it in a file that had the name of that conceptual area. So in the end, I ended up with all these 60 files. And I didn't know where to begin because, you know, if I wanted to explain A, I had to explain B. If I wanted to explain B, I had to explain C. But if I wanted to explain C, I had to explain A. So, you know, it was like a, and I despaired of it. I in fact went into therapy in the end. So why can't I write this book that I'm so keen to write. And I never got an answer, but I did write the book. So that was perhaps the therapy working. But it was difficult. And I found it actually easier to write this latter book, even though it's much longer. But that's partly because I was actually still working 60 hours a week when I wrote The Master and His Emissary, whereas I wasn't when I wrote The Matter of Things. Thank you. Thanks. Okay, let's see. We can find someone else here. By the way, just if I can add a sentence to what I just said. In the end, I had to trick myself into writing it by writing what I thought was just a skeleton draft of 20 pages. And it ended up being 1200 pages. So in the process, I actually wrote the book. And I went to dinner with a friend who I wanted to read the draft whose opinion I greatly admired. And after dinner, I handed over a supermarket carrier bag with the 1200 pages in. And it still had a header that said draft of an outline of The Master and His Emissary. And he just looked in the bag and said, some outline. See, I'm having for some reason, I'm not seeing any hands raised, that cannot be my way. Oma, how do you pronounce it? Can you unmute yourself? Which part said the first? Oma, okay. Here, let me. Yeah, it's Elam. Thanks for the very interesting discussion. I want to go back to one of the points you were both mentioning at some point and kind of go, you could elaborate a bit further on that. And I think that was when Charles, you mentioned that talking about AI and that actually what is happening is the process of society or people becoming much more robotic. And I think I've always had or always for many years, I've had this idea of actually, when speaking of artificial intelligence, we call it artificial intelligence, but actually what lies behind it is a lot of natural ignorance, which is kind of like the mirror image of it because there's nothing artificial about it is what we invest in it. What it is is what is what we invest in it. And what we see from the outputs of all of these large language models is a lot of ignorance because we basically treat them without sufficient consciousness, without appreciating what they are. So going back into this idea of, well, that at least partly we can see this trend in society becoming much more robotic. And I was wondering like if we if we did take this idea to the extreme, then we can even think, which is a kind of a terrible thought, but I think it's one we have to come to address is that what if what we are seeing is in a way a kind of speciation event, which is non biological, but that some parts of humanity is becoming something else. Hmm, right. Yes. Yeah. In a way, I think you can say that in some ways we are also and I think that's also related to the destruction of the natural world. So in a way we are destroying the natural world and migrating into a virtual world that we are creating. So what if there is a speciation and some part of humanity is doing this migration while other people are resisting this migration process? Yeah, I thought about that a lot. I'll respond first and then see what Ian has to add to it. Sure. You know, the the the products of the human mind feed back into the evolution of the human mind. So it's entirely plausible that that the the creations that that are the product of the dominance of the left brain or the particular use that we're putting the left brain to in at the expense of the right brain themselves will contribute to the atrophy of of right brain functions, you know, that that start with just mere disuse but then end up getting encoded into the epigenetics and maybe eventually into the germline, you know, and eventually we have evolution happens a lot faster than biology traditionally understood because as one biologist I talked to a while ago said everyone's a Lamarckian now. The conditions in which we live feed into our evolution not only through random mutation. So and this is actually related to another theme that Ian and I were we're just kind of dancing at the edge of which is when Ian said that we we discover meaning, I'm not sure if it was if you asked the word to use, but we discover meaning rather than creating meaning that that order and organization and and and in some sense meaning and purpose is inherent in creation. I mean we see this from from, you know, the Mandelbrot set for example like like it's it's just like that you know we didn't know artists invented this thing so so this this so it's almost like there's there are these attractor states to human beings to the human species that we could go to toward one or to another and or maybe to both maybe there's a speciation and the one thing I would add to that is that this future this timeline this attract the the the result of which attractor state we go to is it one where the left brain completely takes over and and we are in this arms race against reality to to create better and better systems of control that we need more and more because we've cut ourselves off so much like like more and more a technology in the human body to constantly monitor our physiology in order to make the interventions that we no longer can make ourselves because we've been so cut off from the microbiome etc etc like there's or these cognitive crutches that we're going to need like you stop using your your imagination and you need images created from the outside you know you stop using your your ability to to do the things that chat b gpt is doing and then you need chat gpt and the brain conforms around that like so there is an attractor state I think where we become marooned in the world of concepts but never actually fully cut off from it there's always there's always a choice to be made that goes on a different branch and toward a different attractor and so this is what I wanted to end with you know that that we have a choice in the matter and we're making this choice right now it's not like a random outcome whether we end up as this species or that species or bifurcating so yeah Ian new thoughts on that hmm well I think there is an attractor I think that values attract us to certain ends what worries me is that the only value at the moment is that of power and it's a very attractive force for some people and what concerns me is that in itself it will degrade what a human being is there are a whole lot of vicious circles involved one is the one you refer to the AI the bigger part it comes to play the more and more it draws only on what it itself has created this is something that the left hemisphere specializes in is only recognizing what it itself has created it's a distinction I I'm a virtue in both the main books and that in doing so we the living part of us which is the part that acknowledges life and embodiment and the life of the spirit and all the subtlety that makes life worth living will be atrophied because we won't be using it and this other way of thinking will dominate and because of course that will atrophy we will have less and less when you talk about the choice there will be less and less left for us to use to get back there I mean of course it won't happen overnight and so there will effectively be choices but ultimately this is a very dangerous thing to be playing with and in almost every tradition around the world there there are myths about people who are seduced by the desire for material things or for power I mean it's one of the most common and and how this leads everyone to destruction not just the person but often those around them as well so I think we ought to take it extremely seriously and I would say artificial intelligence is a misnomer it's got nothing to do with intelligence it's a I call it artificial stupidity because it is artificial and it is very stupid and however clever it gets at mimicking intelligence it will never be intelligence you know in the in the 18th century we started off with machines that looked like people and moved a hand and so on we've got much much more sophisticated but we're still on the other side of the chasm that separates the representation from the real thing thank you both yeah that that the misnomer that you're speaking of artificial intelligence it really does come down to mistaking the representation for the thing yes the imitation of intelligence for intelligence and it's a pretty good imitation depending on where you look yep people have it's going to get better yeah yeah no they really will I mean already I think it's getting more difficult because there are fifth and sixth iterations of whatever chat GPT is that are apparently far more sophisticated than chat GPT and people will begin to I don't know what it well we won't go there because it'll take too long we need to ask some questions but I think it will have damaging effects on almost every aspect of our lives right I mean we won't be able to trust anything on a screen anymore but that might be a good thing exactly no now we're only going to trust things that are embodied uh I mean I don't know I tend to be obviously but but here's another interesting thing here's that that relates to the point about beauty being contextual and and that that suppose hey everybody how can you be sure that this whole conversation was not the product of synthetic art artificial intelligence that that that these are not this is not a deep fake of Ian McGillchrist yes um who's saying words that are generated by a large language model that comprises all of his work how do you know that and I think you can know that it might take when these technologies become very highly developed it might take some time and attention to know it but the way that you would know it is you'd be listening to this you'd be like this is all stuff I've heard before I've heard them all say it before you know in one way or another maybe in slightly in like distorted form but it's all something I've heard before but but but I'm I'm quite sure that I mean maybe early in our conversation you were saying things you have said a lot in other contexts but I'm sure that something has emerged in our conversation and this was the intention I stated in my email to you that that we would go somewhere where neither of us could go by ourselves something I think it's much better that we just allow it to evolve yeah yeah but you put a great onus on me to to save something new new every time I'm interviewed that I've never said before in 2000 pages so that that would be quite a quite a task but if you do say something new but if you do say something new it it comes from the interaction it comes from the relationship yes I have the same thing like I sometimes I'm on podcast where afterwards I'm like oh god I spent half the time quoting myself you know it doesn't feel good I'm like what was the point I already said that stuff you know but the good interviews are when I'm really tuned into the person who's interviewing me yeah and something new comes because maybe it's called beginner's mind you know I'm not taking refuge in the conceptual castle that I've already built no and so I think that that future data archaeologists who come across this video from a time when deep fakes you know we're starting to become prevalent will be able to say no this one was actually genuine because look at what these two people said before um yeah I don't know hopefully you're not going to confess right now that you are a deep fake I hoped you wouldn't get to spill the beans before the end of our show but now you know you say it of course I'm afraid I have to have to own up yeah well I'm a philosophical zombie so you know okay that's it you're going to interrupt us it's yes so I put myself up here because no I'm noticing the time and I thought that maybe we can take the last few minutes for uh Ian to introduce his new book because for me personally I was wondering because I come to your first you know the master and sorry book first so whatever and I haven't finished so I was wondering if uh what is the good timing to dive into it and this one would be helpful to read your other book before that or you know could you tell us a little bit more about what this new book is sure okay thank you yes um well in brief it takes the things a lot further than the master and his emissary and since it says the things that I'm really interested in now and I did design it so that you wouldn't have to read the master and his emissary first when people ask me this question I usually say no it's okay you could just start reading the matter with things but there's no doubt that there is stuff in the master and his emissary which is perhaps an easier read and it's a shorter book believe it or not um so in this book what I did was to take um the three sections one is neuropsychology so I'm looking at um how the hemisphere thing does change our ability to to um the difference between hemipheres governs what we can actually take from reality our portals to reality things like attention perception judgment and intelligence and creativity all those things and in every case they're better served by the right hemisphere than the left you may say well that doesn't leave the left hemisphere with anything that doesn't sound possible but it does because the left hemisphere is extremely good at grabbing and guessing not just using the right hand but using language in order to track things and specify them and pin them down and manipulate them the second part of the book is epistemology and in brief I look at what most people would consider probably the four main parts to knowledge science reason I don't think there'd be any doubt about that intuition and imagination some people will demur on but I explain why they are extremely important all four of them have a proper role they have limitations each one of them so we need wherever possible to bring as many of the four to bear on the question we're looking at as we can and then part three is ontology or metaphysics depending on how you want to call it but basically it's so armed with this information when we look at what we can know about the cosmos what structure does it have and I have chapters on the coincidence of opposites the one and the many and then on things like you know small topics like time space consciousness matter but also values purpose and the sense of the sacred which I think are also non-reducible elements in the cosmos that again we don't invent but actually are things that we respond to and one of the reasons that there is life at all is to increase the capacity of the cosmos to respond so that's really the book and I offer a bit of a critique of where we're at at the end and some suggestions of why what we're doing is probably counterproductive and what we might do in its place thank you thank you Ian um yeah Patsy I just want to um yeah I want to thank you also Ian for uh taking the time time with us here um I had a really good time absolute pleasure yeah it was really fun it was fun and and yeah um don't know what's next but I hope that we have opportunity again to uh yes I would like that so yeah so let's after a decent interval do something again yeah great and yeah so yeah thanks and and Patsy do you want to do you want to yeah I have one comment to make I that was a really important comment and coming from uh you know my my own reading and studying of your knowledge is that uh you know my indigenous background and my personal esoteric practices uh what really drawn to me into your book is like it opens up a like very entertaining universe for my left hemisphere meanwhile I also realizing all of the practices that I had been uh uh taking on embodying such as meditation and studying of the teachings of the jesus see the vedantic the hematic science all of these teachings is essentially um reawakening the right hemisphere and to uh arising the master within us to begin to uh take um the duty the responsibility to uh direct our incredibly intelligent and competent people the disciples on the left so I just thought that it was such a beautiful dance and uh so that would be my final comment uh and thank you very much yeah thank you so right so can you just be can you just be sure to save the chat I'd be interested to read it because you can never read it oh yeah when you're talking and I just like to know what questions people had that they weren't able to ask you know and that kind of thing so thank you very much and thank you Charles for for graciously asking me along it's been absolutely lovely and we'll do it again I hope yeah great thanks