Get it on Amazon, my wife graciously purchased the two volume hardcover for my Christmas present! This post refers to the first 778 page volume 1.
I am often humbled by the multifaceted nature of our modern tragedy, especially the lack of understanding (or even the belief in) Human Nature. Our founding fathers were very aware of the fragile timber of man, and the horrible difficulty of governing a nation made up of such imperfect creatures. Go scan this list to scratch the surface of the kind of knowledge they based their decisions on.
Looking for and quoting statistics would be counter to the message of this book. We all actually KNOW in our "hearts" (right brain) that the number and "quality" of the books that we read today is FAR lower than it was even in "1960". This is the age of distraction and blind allegiance to some dogma.
A key objective of these writings is to help us understand ...
Introduction, page 3
"that the brain's left hemisphere is designed to help us ap-prehend - and thus manipulate - the world; the right hemisphere is to com-prehend it - see it all for what it is."
The word "designed" here is intentional. McGilchrist scrupulously denies God (in this book, not the second), however he recognizes what current physicists, and increasingly biologists, are not seeing any way out of "design/direction/purpose/etc". The models and numbers simply don't "add up" to us being here "looking" at what our split left biased post "enlightenment" brains perceive to be "reality".
Our current world is highly left brain biased, which is highly dangerous. The left brain is literal, takes things apart, is concerned with "what works" rather than implications of that "working", and sees the world in absolutes ... black and white. As I repeat too often, the left brain (science) is the tool used for building a nuclear weapon. It has precisely NOTHING to say about if it is "good" to do so, let alone if it is "good" to use it. For the left brain, "good" is a synonym for "works, computes, agrees with a hypothesis, fits a model, etc". Woe to any who question the logic of the left brain.
It is ironic that as I am writing this, ChatGPT is a very hot topic. An AI program/system that looks for patterns in big data and attempts to answer questions "like a human". To some extent it can write software, poems, music, etc. It already has some people wondering "what is thought"? Or even "what is creativity"?
In a left-brained culture, this looks GREAT!
Certainly some right brained artists like Mary Shelley (Frankenstein), Paul Dukas (the Sorcerers Apprentice), or even James Cameron (Terminator) have issued a few warnings, but what do they know? The left brain KNOWS it is right because only a philistine or neanderthal fails to "believe the science"! The left brain is amoral ... if you can do it, and you want to, go ahead! If you disagree, you are clearly not "intelligent" ... you are standing in the way of what works, and what is desired!
As I've heard, if you think things like art, literature, religion, poetry, etc are somehow "important", perhaps you ought not use electricity, modern medicine, or any of other fruits of left brain technology. Aren't you being a hypocrite if you do?
On page 40 McGilcrest states; "Not ignorance, but ignorance of ignorance, is the death of knowledge."
As Proverbs 9:10 says, “The fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom: and the knowledge of the Holy One is understanding.”
Or as Socrates says; "True knowledge exists in knowing that you know nothing".
Or Daoism "discard knowledge, forget distinctions, reach no-knowledge".There are thousands of quotes like this ... many in the book. At one level, the book is looking at the "wetware" of the brain via the hemisphere model exposed by brain damage, scans, surgeries, etc and seeing what effect those physical damages or studies have on the subjects perception of "reality".
McGilchrist keeps reminding us that we are an integral part of what we are perceiving. There is no "view from nowhere" in physics, philosophy, psychology, etc. Wherever we look, there we are.
We live by "models/analogy/stories/myth/etc". "Moral Believing Animals" is a good (and much simpler) book to understand the limitations of our thinking, and hopefully encourage more compassion for our fellow man. Our left brains are not interested in compassion, so neither is our current left brained culture. It is interested in POWER! Individual freedom! Escape from old ideas!
p627, "A myth was never intended to be an accurate account of an historical event; it was something that in one sense happened once, but that always happens all the time".
To look at this scientifically, Brian Williams "Fabric of the Cosmos" gives a model of "is, was, and always will be" in physics terms.
As a Christian thinker, Computer Scientist, wannabe philosopher -- understanding why both our religions and our cultures have come to such left brained dogmatic views which constantly deride "myth" as "fantasy" using language and math which are also abstractions. The abstraction is never reality. The map is not the territory.
On page 235, a little example is instructive. A researcher questions a Russian peasant:
Q: All bears are white where there is always snow; in Novaya Zemlya there is always snow; what color are the bears there?
Peasant Ans: I have seen only black bears and I do not talk of what I have not seen.
Q: But what do my words imply?
Peasant Ans: If a person has not been there, he cannot say anything on the basis of words. If a man was 60 or so and had seen a white bear there and told me about it, he could be believed.
The peasant is correct. They understand the difference between analytic and synthetic propositions. Pure logic cannot tell us anything about facts, only experience can.
page 712; "Even those who revolt against tradition are doing so as part of a now venerable, tradition -- that of the 17th. to 18th century Western Enlightenment. You cannot NOT belong to a tradition!
As he says earlier on that page, " ... the Enlightenment had a prejudice against prejudice. Prejudices cannot be done away with; they are only replaced by other prejudices ...".
"Prejudice" has a bad name today ... "world view", "assumptions", "generalizations" may all be better terms. We have preconceived notions of everything ... some of them are correct most of the time, some of them are false all of the time, and everywhere in between. Very close to none of them are correct all of the time, because they are models of whatever reality is as seen by our brains that we don't understand.
Page 751; "In our culture, all mores have been abandoned; and what should remain implicit and in the realm of embodied skill is foregrounded as a "problem" to be consciously solved - with the result that we grossly simplify and omit what is beyond calculation. I remind you of Whitehead's insight: civilization advances by extending the important operations that we can perform without thinking about them."
Can we know what a woman is without having to consciously solve a problem?
No comments:
Post a Comment