Chapter 4: Journal
The need for resistance 
‍“There is nothing that is always good and nothing that is always bad and there is nothing of which it cannot be said that if you take it far enough, it will become bad in itself.”

Fulfilment requires a degree of resistance; it is easy to image a surfeit of good things will bring happiness, however mcGilchrist argues that happiness in fact depends on a counter balance – something to resist against. And this, he argues, is an important point not just about human life but about everything; it applies in a physical sense to everything that exists, that something can only exist and act through the presence of a resistance. When two things come in to contact, there is a response between the two: “One of them responds to the other and sets up a reverberate relationship. And out of that comes responsibility”. The need for resistance manifests itself in curious ways; for example during a war, suicide rates in a population drop to record lows. McGilchrist believes that it is a sense of purpose and responsibility during these times that provide the individual with meaning and ultimately fulfilment. This idea is probed by Camus and his exploration of the story of Sisyphus, condemned to eternally push a boulder uphill. Camus asks what he believes is the fundamental philosophical question: Should we or should we not take our own life? When you have the boulder to push uphill, at least you know what it is that you're doing. And when the boulder disappears, that's when you become lost.  
‍Circle as metaphor
‍From responsibility and purpose we briefly ponder upon the relationship between man and dog, and then find our way back to a discussion point raised in the previous episode – of virtual reality and our supposed increasing resemblance to it. Interviewer Oliver Trace raises the comparison to a circle; when we look at a circle, we instinctively feel it to be perfect, but to try and replicate that circle with mathematics it is not so simple, as pi (the relationship between a circle’s circumference and diameter) is in fact an infinite number. If we apply that logic to the idea of virtual reality, however close virtual reality may come to reality, it will never quite be the same. The circle again occurs through the ideas of Mark Vernon, who writes about the Eastern concept related to the circle of knowing and not knowing, whereby everything inside of the circle is what we know and everything outside of the circle is what we don't. As the circle becomes bigger, we know more, but the circumference of the circle also becomes larger and therefore we know more of what we don't know. This idea relates back to the two hemispheres; whilst the left is essentially interested in controlling the known, it is the right that is interested in exploring the unknown. McGilchrist argues that developments in technology can often be about having more power over things we are already familiar with, rather than being cognisant of how little we can know, how little we can control, and how little we should try to control. “The great thing is that people are constantly up againstthe  discovery that we have to just accept that all the things we thought were right are just not right. And the great physicists distinguish themselves from the lesser physicists, in my view, by having constantly said: The more I see of this, the less I realise that we have any way of knowing.”  
‍Finding the unknown in the known
‍This complex idea, of recognising the unknown in the known, is made possible by the right hemisphere, and can be demonstrated at a personal level in familial relationships. For a couple that have been together for years there are of course many things about the other person that feel utterly known, however the beauty of a long-term relationship is that they can also feel endlessly new – the familiar is kept alive by the fact that you never get to the end of the process of knowing someone. Similary, McGilchrist describes how the view from his living room is so well known to him, and yet “it’s not something that is ever exhausted. It's not something that is ever not new.”  McGilchrist demonstrates his point further through the example of Capogras Syndrome - a case of delusional misidentification caused by damage to the right hemisphere, whereby the individual can no longer recognise someone close to them. They believe that their loved one is actually being impersonated by someone else who is doing an exceptionally good job of it, but really this is no longer the person they knew. Similarly Fregoli Syndrome is where the individual keeps meeting people who they think are someone they’re close to, when in fact they’ve just met. McGilchrist gives the examples of a patient who thought her husband was cheating on her, as when she went out shopping she believed she kept finding her husband everywhere she went. Both of these examples come from an inability to recognise that the same enduring, flowing entity, that is subject to change, but is still the same.  “We come back to Heraclitus, my favourite philosopher who said that you can never step into the same river twice. Meaning that the same river is there, but the water in it is always changing. And this is true of people. You're still here. But what's going on in us is constantly changing.” This is likewise demonstrated by the paradox of The Ship of Theseus. When the Greek hero Theseus returned to Athens after many adventures his ship was preserved in the harbour as a monument to him. Over the years, the timber rotted and piece by piece the ship was repaired until at the end of 30 years none of the original timbers remained, leaving us to question, is this still the ship of Theseus? McGilchrist argues that the left hemisphere would say no, because all of the parts have changed, however the right hemisphere would recognise that yes, the idea of the ship as a whole remains. A perhaps even more convincing argument is to think about the human body itself; every cell in the body is replaced after 7 years, there is no part of your body in existence now that was there 7 years ago, and yet of course it remains your body. Or indeed we have Trigger’s Broom (from Only Fools and Horses): after multiple changes of head and handle over many years, to him it’s still the same broom.