

EP 154 Iain McGilchrist on The Matter With Things
01:47:19
One Word for "Know"
- English has only one word for "know",
- which can obscure the distinction between factual knowledge and experiential knowledge.
Brain Hemispheres
- The brain hemispheres offer different perspectives on the world. The right hemisphere focuses on the broad view, while the left hemisphere specializes in narrow focus.
Right Brain/Left Brain
- It's important to avoid pop culture oversimplifications of right brain/left brain differences. Iain McGilchrist's book offers a nuanced, research-based perspective.
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Introduction
00:00 • 2min
Are Minds and Brains Welcome In?
01:30 • 2min
The One Word for No in English
03:49 • 2min
The Different Ways Our Brains Give Us Access to the World
05:38 • 3min
Is There a Difference Between Right Brain and Left Brain?
08:28 • 5min
The Deer's Roaming Problem
13:44 • 3min
What's the Difference Between Vigilance and Focus?
16:44 • 3min
I'm a Business Guy, and I've Been a Technical Mind for a Long Time.
19:33 • 2min
The Left Brain Is More Optimistic Than It Needs to Be
21:20 • 2min
The Left and Right Brains in a Cross Inhibition
23:24 • 4min
The Cursor of Attention
27:01 • 2min
What Is the Frontal Cortex For?
29:20 • 5min
Reductionism and Compliance - Part Two
34:12 • 3min
The Study of Complexity
36:56 • 3min
Objects and Processes and Relationships in the Microcosm
40:00 • 2min
Aren't We Machines?
42:03 • 4min
Is There One Simple Truth?
45:53 • 4min
The Error of Truth as Correctness
50:13 • 3min
Is Judgment the Foundation of Reasonableness?
52:55 • 3min
Intuitive Decisions - Part Two
56:07 • 4min
The Most Important Thing in Science Is the Intuition
01:00:08 • 3min
The Intuitive Leap, or Is It?
01:03:12 • 2min
Part Three of the Master and His Espossary
01:05:35 • 4min
Game B - A New Social Operating System
01:09:05 • 2min
I Think We Need Both the Shift and the Break on That Movement.
01:11:23 • 2min
All Is One, All Is Many
01:13:14 • 3min
What's Relevance Realization?
01:15:50 • 5min
The Science of Consciousness
01:21:04 • 6min
The One Thing We Cannot Say We Don't Know Is Consciousness
01:26:43 • 3min
The Evolution of Consciousness
01:29:54 • 4min
Consciousness Is a Specific Set of Cities to Exist in a Movie
01:33:27 • 2min
The Left Hemisphere Misunderstanding of Consciousness
01:35:46 • 2min
Is There Consciousness?
01:37:39 • 3min
What Do You Mean When You Say Value?
01:40:46 • 2min
Are Alues Randomly Chosen?
01:43:13 • 1min
The Moon Could Be Made of Cheese, but I Don't Think So
01:44:42 • 3min
Jim talks with Iain McGilchrist about his new book, The Matter With Things: Our Brains, Our Delusions, and the Unmaking of the World...
Jim talks with Iain McGilchrist about his new book, The Matter With Things: Our Brains, Our Delusions, and the Unmaking of the World. They discuss issues created by having one word for "know," the separation, asymmetry, & function of brain hemispheres, deprogramming pop-cultural right-brain/left-brain caricatures, the need for two kinds of attention, vigilance vs focus, ambiguity vs certainty, both/and vs either/or, pessimism vs optimism, arrogance vs humility, opponent processes & cross-inhibition between hemispheres, depth in space, time, and emotion, function of frontal cortices, lateralization of emotions, reductionism vs complexity, process philosophy, critiquing machine models of life, correspondence theory vs coherence theory, the error of truth as correctness, judgment & its replacement by bureaucracy, reclaiming imagination, the role of intuition in science, comparing the Renaissance & the Enlightenment, a complexity view on building a new social OS, appreciating C.S. Peirce, traditions as the currents of coherent innovation, differentiation within unity, relevance realization, discrete vs continuous time, Searle's analogy between digestion & consciousness, the problem of consciousness arising from non-consciousness, inanimacy as the limit case of animacy, Edelman's idea of primary consciousness, whether intelligence can exist without consciousness, integrative information theory, ontology of values, and much more.
Episode Transcript
JRS EP143 - John Vervaeke Part 1: Awakening from the Meaning Crisis
JRS EP106 - Michael Strevens on the Irrational History of Science
Game-B.org
The Origins of Order: Self-Organization and Selection in Evolution, by Stuart Kauffman
Antifragile: Things That Gain from Disorder, by Nassim Nicholas Taleb
JRS EP5 Lee Smolin – Quantum Foundations and Einstein’s Unfinished Revolution
Primary consciousness (Wikipedia)
JRS EP105 - Christof Koch on Consciousness
A Cooperative Species: Human Reciprocity and Its Evolution by Samuel Bowles, by Herbert Gintis
Iain McGilchrist is a former Fellow of All Souls College, Oxford, an associate Fellow of Green Templeton College, Oxford, a Fellow of the Royal College of Psychiatrists, a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts, a Consultant Emeritus of the Bethlem and Maudsley Hospital, London, a former research Fellow in Neuroimaging at Johns Hopkins University Medical School, Baltimore, and a former Fellow of the Institute of Advanced Studies in Stellenbosch. He now lives on the Isle of Skye, off the coast of North West Scotland, where he continues to write, and lectures worldwide. He is committed to the idea that the mind and brain can be understood only by seeing them in the broadest possible context, that of the whole of our physical and spiritual existence, and of the wider human culture in which they arise – the culture which helps to mould, and in turn is moulded by, our minds and brains.