The Master Betrayed

The Sorcerers Apprentice

A parable of the emissary, and a journey into what it means to know.

The title for “The Master and his Emissary” comes from the folk tale of the Sorcerer’s Apprentice, which tells the story of the foolish emissary, who, having a certain amount of knowledge, begins to believe he knows best. We’ll let McGilchrist tell it in his own words:

“The story goes, as I tell it, that there was a wise spiritual master who looked after a small community and it flourished and grew. And after a while he realised that he couldn't actually look after all the business of this community himself. Not only could he not, but he must not get involved with certain things because if he did, he'd lose the overall view on which the wisdom of his custody of this community was based. And so he appointed his brightest and best to be his Emissary and go about on his behalf doing his business. The trouble is that this Emissary, bright as he was, wasn't bright enough to know what it was that he didn't know. And he thought he knew everything and that he was doing all the hard work and the heavy lifting, and that Master back there was contributing nothing. He was just sitting there smiling seraphically. And so the Emissary started to pretend that he was the Master, adopted the Master's cloak. And unfortunately, because he didn't know what he was doing, things rapidly fell into ruin and ended with the destruction of the community, the Emissary and the Master.”

Of course, McGilchrist interprets the Master as the brain’s right hemisphere and the Emissary as the left. It is a tale that encapsulates the idea that knowing is not a simple process of acquiring information, as the Emissary would believe. In fact “it is not only useless but actually dangerous to have information which gives you power, if you don't have any wisdom about how to use that power.”

McGilchrist speaks of a kind of knowing that goes above and beyond the straightforward knowing of facts, that is a process of understanding that gets only deeper the deeper you go; “And that is the kind of knowing that applies to everything important in life, including our friends, our place in the world, the places we love, the poems we like, everything that matters to us. We get to know more deeply through experience, and it's a never-ending process.”

Our understanding of different ways of knowing is particularly constrained in by the English language where we have only one word “to know”, whereas other languages make a distinction between types of knowing. For example in French there's a distinction between savoir and connaitre, savoir being more of an external knowledge and connaitre being the inside knowledge of acquaintance.

What about knowing consciousness?

Beyond these two different types of knowing, in “The Master and his Emissary” McGilchrist speaks about what it means to know the two hemispheres, so effectively what it means to know consciousness. But how can we know consciousness when it's consciousness we're using to know it?

To know what consciousness is is determined by the two hemispheres, so the type of knowing employed can be more external in manner (ie. the acquisition of knowledge as practised by the left hemisphere) or more based on experience, as practised by the right hemisphere.

McGilchrist addresses and profoundly disagrees with the views of behaviourists and eliminative materialists who believe respectively that there is nothing but behaviour, and that consciousness is an illusion. “If it's an illusion, in whose mind is it an illusion? Who's being deceived here? And if it's an illusion, what does the real thing look like? You know, how would the real business of consciousness differ from this, what you call counterfeit of consciousness?... If there was no consciousness, there could be no such thing as a deceit or a lie or an anything else.”

The problem with a philosophy of utilitarianism

Elon Musk’s theory that we are all a computer simulation in an endless loop of computer simulations is similarly disregarded by McGilchrist, in that “there is a difference between something that looks very like something and that is something”, meaning just because computer simulations begin to look closer and closer to human consciousness does not mean the two are the same. What interests McGilchrist here is that for a computer simulation and human consciousness to be one and the same the two need to begin to resemble each other more and more, meaning that we diminish ourselves as we make ourselves more machine-like; as we interface more with machines we become more machine-like ourselves.

“Now that is not a cost-free process. What that means is that you are beginning to think algorithmically. And the more we think algorithmically, the less human we become.”

McGilchrist compares this algorithmic thinking with a philosophy of utilitarianism, in which it is the outcome of an ethical question that is prized above all else when deciding on the morality of a situation, disregarding the complexities within the question being posed. Take the following scenario as an example:

“A woman is having a cup of coffee with a friend and she puts what she thinks is sugar in her friend's coffee, but it is in fact poison and her friend dies. The other scenario is the woman is having coffee with her friend and she puts what she thinks is poison in her friend's coffee. But in fact, it's sugar. And the friend lives. In which case was the person acting more immorally?”

Of course, most people would agree that the morally worse situation is the one in which the friend intended to kill. However a utilitarian philosopher, and indeed an individual with brain damage to the right hemisphere, believe the outcome in which the woman dies is more immoral. This utilitarian way of thinking propounds that ethics can be quite simply calculated, rather than depending on a complex web of norms of behaviours, expectations and values. This mechanistic, external way of knowing is in contrast to McGilchrist’s preferred way of knowing through experience. He shares Hegel’s amusing observation that many philosophers are like the character he calls Simplicius, who was very keen to learn to swim but was not prepared to get into the water until he'd fully mastered it.

We end here with the chiming of McGilchrist’s clock, a paradoxical moment in which the sound of a ticking clock intensifies the sense of timelessness.