Transcript
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Where there is danger that which will save us also grows.
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Which at first I didn't fully comprehend the meaning of the sentence, but then in a slightly more jejune way, you can say the closer you are to danger, the further you are from harm, which is a sentence that many people understand. But it also means that
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The healing thing comes out of the danger itself.
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I see. And that relates to this idea that outer struggle comes. The remedial-
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And maybe it's worth just commenting on the concept of struggle because again, it's very hard for the modern Western mind to understand what unfortunately is called dialectic and some people are very suspicious of it. But what it effectively means is the fruitful coming together of things that look like opposites in order to create something entirely new. So the dialectic is well expressed in this idea of Hegels that he wasn't commonly good at finding vivid images, but this one is a good one. That for there to be a fruit, there needs to be a flower and for there to be a flower, there needs to be a bud. And if you look at the unfolding of this, the bud must cease to be in order that the flour may fully be, and the flour must cease to be in order that the fruit may come to be.
[01:30]
But it's not that the bud and the flour and the fruit are somehow separate and at war with one another. They come into being and contribute and then stand back while something else comes forward and finally something else emerges. So this is a kind of progress out of the coming together of things that have to yield, but by yielding, they don't disappear. It's like the image of the person learning a piece of music that they, as we agreed, that they have to do this spade work. They have to do lots of practice of fingering and so forth. And it's not that that is somehow wasted. It's a necessary part of the process whereby you play something entirely differently from that. You're not clumsily thinking about your fingers. You stop thinking about your fingers, but in order to get to the point where you can stop thinking about your fingers, you have to think a lot about your fingers.
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I see. And it's not that one with them to take the flower story. It's not that one destroys the other.
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Exactly.
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Exactly. And so taking it back again to the individual versus community, it's not that you have to destroy the whole or destroy the individual.
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Absolutely not. In fact, you mustn't because if you would destroy either of these, you ruin the other because they're codependent. The individual is dependent on the society and the society is dependent on the individual.
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And I also liked how you seem to be alluding to this idea of truth and hiddenness,
[03:04]
Of how for one thing to reveal itself, another thing must conceal. But if something's being concealed, it doesn't mean that it's disappeared, so to speak. And I really like the story, and it's in Heidegger of a man or a woman walking into a dark room with a torch. You can't shine the torch everywhere in the room. So you shine it in one corner, say, and you see something, and you're concealing far more than you are revealing. And it also has ... It's a very good story because it also relates to how, well, one, we are agents in creation, because we're choosing what to attend to in the room. And two, what we experience changes how we will experience the next thing we experience. So we shine the torch in the corner of a room, and we see perhaps there's a light, and there is a ... Well, if there's a light, we might go on a turn on the light, but if we can say that's not the best example, but I'm just looking across the other side and I'm seeing a torch.
[04:14]
But here, this is another good example for how attention is primed. Because I'm telling a story of needing a light, I'm now seeing the lights in the room.
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Yeah. And I think that idea is a good one that we can only see so much at a time. And the risk is that having seen one thing, we think everything else must follow this. This is really one of the problems with the, I think, very reductionist mechanical way in which until recently a lot of science has been practiced. One of the odd things is that physics gave up on this mechanical way of thinking about the world at least a hundred years ago. However, in the so- called life sciences, the machine is still, for many people, the correct model. So we have the rather odd situation that physicists think that the inanimate world or the apparently inanimate world anyway, is far too complex to be modeled as a mechanism, whereas biologists are thinking that living things can be modeled as mechanisms. It's not that the model of a machine doesn't disclose things.
[05:30]
It does. Every model discloses some things, but by the same token, obscures others. And it's the things that that has obscured that are now or have been, as I say, until very recently, forgotten. I say until very recently, because there is a wonderful movement now in biology towards something called process biology, which means that instead of thinking of biology as composed of mechanisms of parts, we see it as processes that interact and that indeed are only artifacturally thought of as consisting of parts at all.
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Yeah, I like that idea and I'm instantly thinking about how we can only know something by something we already know.
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Yes.
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And if to a man holding a hammer, everything looks like a nail. So if we're taking this machine model and saying that humans are like machines as our starting point, then just like I was constantly only seeing light switches, then you only see how humans are similar to a machine, so you start to notice that the joints are quite similar to a robot joint.
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The most mechanical thing about a human being is the joints, and that's interesting because of course the point is that machines were built on the analogy of human joints. They were made to do manual work that used to be done by people using their arms and their legs and their backs, but then these parts, as it were, were then taken over by machines. So it's hardly surprising that machine ... We made them that way based on something very prominent, which is for certain actions we have joints. But as a way of trying to understand even a single cell, it's hopeless. Absolutely hopeless.
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Well, I think you touched there on an important point, which is that we made machines. And so once you ... And that relates to the left hemisphere and the right hemisphere, because the left hemisphere really likes ... The left hemisphere generally is the emissary who's building things, and it loves what it's made, but then the right hemisphere is looking out for something other, something beyond what it's made. Yes. And this begs the question of how do you ... Once you've been primed to attend to the world in a certain way, be it a machine model, or in my instance, noticing the light switches, how do you snap out of that?
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Well, you can't snap out of it, but you can train yourself to think differently by in part simply attending to experience. In other words, trying not to be constantly making judgements about things, the principle effectively of standing back and being watchful and mindful, not constantly categorizing, pigeonholing, thinking, "Oh, I know that. I understand that. " But thinking, now what actually am I experiencing or not even thinking that, but just being there with it. So the cultivating the tendency at best to stand back and be alert to what all your faculties are saying, what your imagination is telling you, what your intuition is telling you, as well as what your reason is telling you, and as well as what your scientific knowledge is telling you, and try and bring them into the kind of harmony, because there's no good saying that any one of them on their own is enough, but it's no good saying that any of them is simply a source of illusion or delusion, because we need each of these things very much in order to experience the world.
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And this seems to be about listening.
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It's about listening, and if it goes further than that, it's about questioning. In other words, questioning what it is that we always take for granted, and not often enough emphasized exercise that should be, in my view, part of everybody's education is to argue both for and against a position, to argue as passionate as you can for something you strongly believe in, and then be asked, "Okay, now you're going to argue as passionately as you can against it, and effectively we will be valuing you for how well you do on that task rather than the task of explaining why you think what you say is right." So it is very important to be able to do both of those things. Unfortunately, we don't always hear that in science.
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Yeah. But also the trouble is that you have to take a stand, you have to take a position in the world, and you've taken a stand with respect to the right and the left hemisphere- Of course. ... and if I were to now ask you, okay, present the position in the opposite direction, perhaps you could do it, perhaps you want to, perhaps you don't know, it's up to you. But it would be, for me, a slightly unfair question because just like you can't live 50 lives, you can't take 50 stands.
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Well, of course not, not in the long run, but if you haven't sampled a few along the way, then you won't have any way of knowing that the first one you lit on is not necessarily the whole story. That's all there is to it. You ask how is it we can shift from it? And as I say, you can't snap out of it, but you can help yourself to shift by thinking, okay, for example, there's a strong tradition for thousands of years in people who were civilized when we were still running around painting ourselves with wode. And there is a very consistent body of knowledge in those oriental civilizations of China and India, of thinking about the world in a radically different way from the way we think now. Would it be worthwhile taking it seriously for a while and just seeing whether that reveals something?
[11:46]
That would be a good exercise. There's a good basis for trying it in that it's been evolved and remained fairly steady for thousands of years among people who can't be dismissed. Now they have a point of view, try espousing it. You may want to jettison it, but until you've actually tried it, until you've really committed to it for a while and thought, yes, okay, I can see that now. Yeah, maybe. You may at the end of the day go, yes, it's fine up to a point, but I still want to maintain what I always used to think, which is this, and that's fine, but I'm not trying to prescribe what people are saying. And I can easily do if you ask me to argue ... I don't think I can argue against the hemisphere hypothesis because it's a matter of, as if we're having amassed a lot of facts that I can't just say, "Well, the facts add up." But I could, for example, easily give you an argument for the machine model.
[12:44]
I could say, for example, thinking about cells and living organisms as machines has led us to make many discoveries. Some of these have been very useful in medicine, in technology, and so on. Now you're telling me that this is not the way we should be thinking, and what I would say to that is I'm not saying that it can't be useful. I'm just saying it's a useful fiction and there's a difference between what's useful and what is necessarily true. For example, suppose you want to build me a garage, I don't require you to take into account the fact that the world is round. For your purposes, you can assume that the world is flat and the garage will turn out fine, but it won't help you if you want to go and explore the world to believe that it's flat. Now, the same thing is true about Newtonian mechanics.
[13:42]
Newtonian mechanics are very helpful, but actually wrong. We now know that essentially the way in which the stuff of the universe works, it does not obey Newtonian mechanics. However, Newtonian mechanics is a very useful fiction. It can therefore very much help me make a dishwasher or dig a canal or whatever. That's absolutely fine. But if I want to actually understand the world, then it won't help me. It will be a useful fiction. So what I would say is that while using the machine model eliminates some parts of what we're looking at, it's very dangerous if it becomes the only model. And that's why I'm saying we must constantly be thinking, what is it that my model is obscuring for me, not just what is my model illuminating for me?
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To me, I'm tempted to say that both takes are fiction, so both the right hemisphere and the lesson. When I say fiction, I don't mean to say they don't contain truth because fiction is a story that points to the truth, but they are both stories that you can tell about the world. We can tell the mechanistic story or we can tell the organic story. On reading your book, it's, well, certainly my interpretation is that the organic story is of more importance than the mechanic story, which is why you've met with some detractors who tend to find that the mechanic story is of more importance than the organic story. Now, for me personally, they're of equal importance. And to say that the organic one is more important than the mechanic is to say that ying is more important than yang or yang is more important to ying.
[15:22]
What would your response be to that? I think we're
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Going to have to put you out if you're going to talk. Sorry, Sunshine, you can't talk. I've just flowed these doors. Well, I think we need both, but that doesn't mean that both of the same value. So we may need division and we may need union, but they're not of equal value because in the end we need to unify union and division, not divide them. So in the end, the principle of union trumps, but it needs division along the way. And this kind of asymmetrical relationship is the way I understand the hemispheres. As you know, for all sorts of reasons that can be validated neuropsychologically, the left hemisphere literally sees less than the right hemisphere. What it sees is important for some purposes, but it isn't either the full story or even the more reliable part of the story. The book that I'm writing at the moment is looking at what the two hemispheres contribute in different realms of thought.
[17:03]
And I think demonstrating pretty conclusively that the right hemisphere is more reliable than the left. So although we don't want just one, we need both, it's not always true that because two things are necessary, they're equally necessary. For example-
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No, I agree, because you make a good point that we need division, but ultimately we need union and therefore union Trump's division. And I thought, that's a good point. And I was wondering, well, what would potentially be counter to that? But can we have union, an ultimate union without a division? Well,
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There's no meaning to union without division.
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But that's what I mean. So when you say union Trump's division, well, actually union's not sitting there because it's union with respect to what?
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Well, the fact that two things are mutually dependent doesn't mean that they're both of the same importance. For example, if you have trouble seeing, you may want to use a pair of glasses and the spectacles that you use will definitely help you see the world better. But there are two things involved here, your eyes and the spectacles. Of the two, the spectacles are less important. If you don't have eyes, there's no point in having spectacles, but with your eyes, you will not do as well as you would do if you were also wearing spectacles. So the spectacles require the eyes. The eyes require the spectacles, but they're not equally important.
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Yeah, I would agree in that example, it's clear that the eyes are more important than the spectacles. Well,
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I think that is a- Whether that's
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Equivalent, you think that's a fair equivalent to-
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I think it's a fair equivalent to the hemispheres in that the left hemisphere can help make more precise certain observations. It can help distinguish certain things that the right hemisphere wouldn't necessarily be able to distinguish, but in the end, that information is only helpful and it's taken back into the whole ... Again, another example, it's very important that people should work in highly specialized areas, so they may work on just one receptor in one organelle, in one animal, all their life. This is fine. And we couldn't do without people who do that, but if that information is just left as a fragment, it means nothing. It only becomes useful when it's incorporated into a broader body of knowledge. And so the broad body of knowledge needs the little pieces of expertise and wouldn't be the same without them, but the pieces of expertise are only important because they can be restored
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Into the- Into the hole. And I forward that story all the way, but then I'm thinking, well, where does that hole exist? Does that hole exist in a larger hole, in which case the hole is part of a larger hole? In which case there's division and separation. I wondered for this conversation to be easier. Perhaps rather than ... Because you only very briefly in your book discuss how perhaps the hemispheres are a manifestation of a deeper aspect of reality, which is that of division and cohesion. So perhaps for a moment we could put aside the idea of the hemispheres, but just focus on the idea of there being cohesion and division at the absolute base level. And then maybe talk about it in relation to hot and cold. There's the division of the hot and the cold. They come together to form a hole, which is temperature.
[21:05]
How can we fit it into this?
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Well, to take that example first, hot and cold are, if you like, kinds of opposite, but they're simply the ends of a single stick, if you like. It's like a magnet that has a north pole and a south pole, and it can't have the north pole without having a south pole. If you decide you didn't like the south pole and you're going to cut it off, you end up with a shorter magnet, but it's still got a south pole. You can't have heat without the concept of cold. You can't have cold without the concept of heat, but of the two, heat trumps cold because cold is simply the absence of heat. If you like, without the concept of heat, you can't make any sense of cold because cold is simply the ultimate case of the stealing of motion as far as you can, but that motion which creates heat is always in fact that.
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Which is why fire is such a wonderful
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Process. Yeah. But to go back to the thing about ... Sorry, what was the thing before? I wanted to not just talk about heat and cold, but you were saying something else before.
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The idea of division and cohesion as a substrate
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Of- Whether or not, as it were, they're an aspect of nevermind the hemisphere, whether sort of aspect of reality. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. Well, there's an interesting book by a man called Peter Barab called The Complementary Nature of Reality, I think. I could look that up. He wrote to me with a copy of his book very shortly after my book came out. And the point he made was in that book was that according to both physics and oriental philosophy, there are two principles, if you like. There's one in which as where things are static and there's one in which they're in motion, there's one in which they are known and there's one in which they are unknown. There's one in which they have momentum and one in which they don't and so forth, one in which they cohere and one in which they don't. So are these two aspects, not the left and right hemisphere?
[23:25]
And for a while, I conceived that there was a problem of knowing was it that the universe was like this and therefore our brains had evolved to cope with that reality or was it that the universe looked like that to us because it was processed for us through by hemispheric brains?
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Which came first?
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Which came first. And I said that in a public arena with Rowan Williams, and he, I think, brilliantly said, "But does it have to be one or the other?" And I think that is a profound point, that it isn't necessarily the case that is fall back into this subject object divide. Whatever the universe is, it is something that can only be known through our brains in any case, and it's impossible for us to sort of get behind that, to know what the substance of the universe is like. That doesn't mean to say there isn't one, but it's possible that it can only come into being through the existence of consciousness. Where all this ends up is that you must believe that consciousness is fundamental to the existence of a cosmos at all, that it is not something that mysteriously emerges out of no consciousness, which has been pointed out by many philosophers, including Western analytic philosophers, makes no sense.
[25:02]
Or is it something that is a constituent of the cosmos, which has been a point of view held by people for thousands of years?