Transcript
-
Could you elaborate on how the two hemispheres are different with respect to structure?
-
Yes. It's a good point because when there are things that you can point to and measure, people find it harder to dismiss. And believe it or not, there still are a few dinosaurs around who think that there isn't any difference, but just to show you how absurd that point is, there is nothing about the two hemispheres that you could measure that is the same. They're reliably different. There are different sizes. They're different shapes. They're different weights. They have different gray to white matter ratios. They have different cyto architecture. That's to say the structure of how the cells relate at a deep level, in the two hemispheres. Even the neurons are different in themselves. I mean, they're broadly the same, but of course, but there are differences in the number of branches they make and the number of connections they make and in their length. There are differences in the way in which the two hemispheres respond to neurotransmitters and the way in which they respond to neuroendocrine hormones.
[01:25]
So there isn't really anything there that is the same about them.
-
Well, that's a good starting point. And then let's get onto some of the differences from a neuropsychological point of view.
-
One of the more striking differences between the hemispheres is that the left hemisphere is seeking certainty. It's trying to close down to a possibility, whereas the right hemisphere is looking for possible alternatives and opening up into possibility and potential. So these tendencies are both important in trying to get a hold on and understand any phenomenon. We need both to be aware of other possibilities and at the same time willing to close down to the ones that we think are important. But these are broadly speaking differences between the two hemispheres.
-
Let's speak a bit about individuals versus categories. I think it's my understanding is that the right hemisphere, generally when it meets someone, it will see what's particular about that person. Whereas the left hemisphere will prefer to label it as something.
-
That's right. The left hemisphere is interested in forming categories. Both hemispheres, of course, have to categorize because if you don't categorize in any kind of a way, then every experience is entirely fresh and that way one would never learn anything. So both hemispheres do group things. They group them according to different principles.
-
And perhaps it's worth saying a word about generalizations because we are of course here making generalizations about the left hip, so about the right hemisphere.
-
Yes.
-
And it's a fairly common rebuttal for people to say, "Oh, well you're generalizing about anything, not just about the left and the right." So could we just speak for a moment about generalizations and why they are important?
-
Well, it's often thought that just because you can think of a counter example, a generalization is false, but we have to make generalizations in order to have any kind of conversation about the world or to be able to understand it. We have to be able to say, as a general principle, certain things are more true than others. But broadly speaking, the right hemisphere is the one that understands the unique case. So when people have right hemisphere strokes, particularly in the temporary parietal region, they often find it very hard to recognize individuals, including simply individual people. In fact, Oliver Sacks' man who mistook his wife for a hat is an instance of that. He'd stopped being able to recognize her face altogether. He just had to go by the fact that somebody who wears that hat must be my wife. So that is a good example of that loss of particularity.
[04:18]
I mean, that has a deep meaning because of course, ultimately in encountering what we encounter in the world, it's always individual. There's only in our mind general abstract concepts. In reality, there are only individual and individually different things. So while it's an important kind of process to be able to generalize, it's also got to be balanced with the ability to be able to differentiate individuals. If you think of somebody that you know, who is obviously an individual, their individuality is not something that's parts based. It's as a whole that you understand their individuality. So the right hemisphere is the one that's able to see that wholeness of an individual. Whereas the left hemisphere in breaking things into parts makes them curiously general because parts don't have any kind of individual quality. They just are the bits.
-
That's
-
A good answer. One thing I wanted to draw out was the distinction between the tendency towards fixity in the left hemisphere and the tendency towards flow in the right hemisphere. In other words, the left hemisphere, part of it's wanting to be certain is that it tends to want to freeze things in a moment rather like a snapshot, which has no depth in space or time, but enables it to be grasped. Whereas the right hemisphere rightly sees that everything is part of a flow. When we start, everything is a flow, I should say, but what the left hemisphere is seeing is trying to take a part out of a flow and there is no such thing as a part of a flow.
-
I think this leads on quite well to talking about truth in a more general sense. You make the point well in your book, a mountain to one person is one thing, whereas to another, it's something else. And I've often heard you talk about the mountain that's right by your house. My understanding is the left handster really wants to try and tie it down to some thing, whereas the right hemisphere more realizes that it's contextual. Could you elaborate on that and tell the story yourself?
-
Yes. The important point I think is that things come into being for us by the way we attend to them. And so there can't be a truth behind our ways of attending because in trying to find that, we are already creating our own version of truth. For example, to take the example of the mountain behind my house, its name in North was the sloping rock, an expression which comes down into the name of the place, Taliska, which apparently comes from a north expression, meaning a sloping block. What that tells you is that at a certain time in history, about a thousand years ago when Northman were coming down to this part of Scotland, it was a landmark that was very important for their safety because there's a notoriously dangerous bay here and it meant that that was where they were and they needed to navigate it.
[07:36]
So for them it was something that meant security. It also meant security, but in a different way to the pits who lived in the shadow of it, just up in the valley below the mountain, there's a Brock where they lived. And to them, that was safety and shelter and the mountain was the home of the gods. Then in the 18th century and 19th century, people came here to draw it. And so for them it was a beautiful, multi-textured form of different colors and shapes and textures. And then in the 19th century, again, people started getting very interested in the geology of it. It's a very good example of Kalama bassled formation. To a speculator, it could be the means of wealth. So all of these are perfectly real descriptions of the mountain. They're all true for different people. There isn't a single true mountain behind all those descriptions.
[08:38]
And if you say to me, "Well, it's really just a lump of rock," then that's not to evade subjectivity because that is your own point of view that already brings a whole lot of baggage of certain values and priorities with it. So truth is always something that is generated in relation
-
To- And of course you would add that when someone says it's a lump of rock, you'd say, "Well, over what timeframe?"
-
I would, because if you were able to install a time lapse camera over millions of years, you'd see that the rock was actually flowing.
-
And it would be more like a lovestream.
-
It would be more like a lapse.
-
Or if you went on an even longer timeframe, it would be like water flowing in a river.
-
Exactly.
-
And in that sense, there's this time is obviously something we can't remove from our understanding of what it is that we're bringing into being.
-
What confuses us is that we see things that are moving slowly as static because on the timeframe that we observe them, they're static, but actually nothing is static.
-
I mean, I love the idea that you mentioned in a book where you say that because there are many truths, depending on the person who's bringing that truth into being, we are in essence artists in our own way because the attention we give-
-
We're creating reality.
-
Changes, exactly. We created ourselves, but what I want to talk about, which I think is absolutely crucial to this issue, and I fell flat on my face with this problem personally because I got attracted to this idea of subjectivity that there's no fixed truth. And then I loved a line in Nietzsche where he said there are no facts, only interpretations. But what that then led me to believe is that all truths are equal and that every truth is as valid as the next truth. Trouble is that once you get to that place, then nothing has any value over another thing with respect to whether it's true or not, and it was troubling. And I'd like you to elaborate on that.
-
Yeah, there's a common fallacy of our heroes to suppose that just because there isn't a certain truth, there isn't any meaning to truth. I mean, if there wasn't any ranking of somethings as being truer than others, there would be no possible means for us to be having this conversation. There's no reason for one to get out of bed in the morning because nothing would be truer than anything else. Of course, everybody depends on the idea that some things are truer than others. What I think is important to realize is that we still haven't in that sense got rid of the subject object divide because we're still thinking that, okay, it's all subjective, but that's still to be in the subject object of eye to think that there is a real object out there which we can never contact, but there isn't. That doesn't mean to say that our experience is not real.
[11:36]
When I taste chocolate, I'm not somehow having a representational experience or a fantasy. I am tasting chocolate. So what actually happens to us is reality. There isn't a reality somewhere behind it. Of course, it's obvious that there are commonalities to experience because in general, we do manage to function, we do manage to get up in the morning, we do make choices all the time. And so on a large scale, I mean, obviously there are fashions in which people think differently, but there are a lot of things about which generally speaking we would broadly agree. So there's something there. The question is, how do we arrive at it? And most of the theories about how we arrive at truth depend on, I think this misconception that there is a subject objectivevide.
[12:37]
What I want to stress is that just because there isn't a subject object divide doesn't mean to say that there aren't truths, but one way of thinking about truth is your mind makes a replica of something that exists out there, that in other words, what goes on in here corresponds to something out there, but that's not going to work as a way of thinking about truth because we don't really know anything except according to that theory, our representations. So how would we have any way of judging that one thing is truer than another? We can't get to know what the thing is that we're trying to correspond with because all we have is our correspondences, if you see what I mean.
-
And would that be, broadly speaking, the Cartesian take?
-
Well, I think, I mean, it certainly depends on the Cartesian tape, but it's not the full story of the Cartesian tape. But yes, I think it does depend on this idea that there is a subject object divide and that what we're doing is trying subjectively to replicate something that exists objectively. If you dislike this way of thinking, one of the main alternatives, of course, is coherence theory, which is that things are true if they broadly coherre with the other things that you believe to be true. It's not a bad principle either, but the problem with it is that you can have a whole body of truth that are coherent, but wrong. For example, you can believe the earth is flat and believe a lot of things that would follow from that, but they still be wrong. So coherence on its own can't work, nor can correspondence.
[14:22]
And that's led some philosophers, for example, Anthony Quinton, thought that probably the problem would be resolved when we were able to combine coherence and correspondence. But as I say, neither of those will really be very satisfactory. And combining two unsatisfactory principles isn't necessarily going to result in satisfaction either. So you then come to other sort of ways of thinking about truth like it's a consensus. So what is true is what, broadly speaking, everyone agrees to be the case.
[14:55]
The trouble with that one is that suppose most people believe that the consensus theory of truth was wrong, and actually most people do, then it would have to be wrong without being examined. And indeed no new idea could come along because when it was new, most people would not recognize this or believe it to be the case. And so everything would automatically be wrong. So that can't be a good ... Everything new would be automatically wrong. That can't be a good basis.
-
And it's similar to the world is flat, that was the consensus.
-
And that was the consensus. It doesn't help, does
-
It?
-
Yeah. And there are a number of other ... In the wake of this, people got rather gloomy and I think defeatist and said, "Well, okay, there isn't any meaning to truth or it's just what I think it is or it's a socially constructed phenomenon which is probably used by one social group to oppress another." I'm afraid these are all, again, I would call them defeatist points of view. I think we can not give up on truth that easily. It's a question that's very much brought into focus for us now politically in the world, but what is it that we are going to follow? What is it that we believe is true? It's a very important question and just saying, "Oh, well, it's anything I care to believe will not get us very far." What I like is the version, which I still think is the most profound of what truth is, developed by William James and along with CS Person and John Dewey, they're thought of as the pragmatist, American pragmatists.
[16:33]
The trouble with the name is an unfortunate name because it makes people think that what they were saying was what is true is whatever is pragmatic. So if it works for me to see the world like this, then it's true. What they meant by pragmatism or certainly what James meant by pragmatism was a view that if you held it in the course of experience, it will be less likely than any other point of view might have held to trip you up, to fall apart in the face of experience. So there are many things, for example, that we believe now officially that are clearly false. For example, we believe that we can make the world safer by protecting children from every kind of danger. In fact, what we end up with making children extremely vulnerable and actually not making them stronger, or we can overuse antiseptics and antibiotics in order to make the world safer.
[17:40]
But in fact, in doing so, we make the world more dangerous. We go into Iraq to stabilize the situation and radically destabilize it. There are examples of this everywhere. So a lot of our policies are based on thinking we understand the nature of things, but when we find that reality doesn't answer to that way of thinking about things, then we know that it's untrue. That would be an example of a pragmatic approach to truth, which is not just what happens to suit me. It's what actually in the business of leading a human life turns out to make sense or doesn't make sense.
-
What's difficult with that though is that if you take, for example, the idea of protecting children so that they're safe and you hold that to be true, then as events occur, you can always tell yourself a story that aligns with that original truth. You can always find ways to fit in. Perhaps you protect your child and then they develop a disease and you can find a reason that's nothing to do with you having protected them. So you can hold onto these truths that might not in fact be truth.
-
Indeed, we're very good at hanging onto truths. And so it's important that we should have debate about them. There are no certain truths, as I'm constantly saying, but that again doesn't mean there aren't any and it's not worth our while debating them, thinking critically about them. And one test might be to be sure that one is adopting a number of different possible takes on something before deciding which one seems more likely in the face of the rest of one's experience. So there's a value to espousing as many different, only temporarily, I mean, but to inhabit for a while a certain point of view. If you don't actually inhabit the point of view, but just criticize it from the point of view that you already have, you won't see any value in it. So you have to make a sort of little leap of faith and try thinking about the world from that point of view and see what comes of it.
[19:56]
I'm not suggesting that we necessarily need to do this constantly formally as an exercise, but it should be second nature.