If I am right, that the story of the Western world is one of increasing left hemisphere domination, we would not expect insight to be the key note. Instead, we would expect a sort of insouciant optimism, the sleepwalker whistling a happy tune as he ambles towards the abyss.
With the Enlightenment came a hardening up of the left-hemisphere point of view. Many of the aims of the Enlightenment were, of course, laudable, and much of what it brought we have to be thankful for. After all, the left hemi- sphere, the emissary of the story from which my book takes its title, is, at its best, the right hemisphere’s – the Master’s – faithful servant. But its problems are those of hubris: believing itself to be the Master, believing that it understands and can control everything, whereas in fact it is ignorant of what the right hemisphere knows. Thus the problem of the Enlightenment was its faith that, as long as we continue to think purely rationally, and prioritise utility, we can understand, and thereby come to control, everything.
With the rise of capitalism and the coming of the Industrial Revolution (both children of the Enlightenment), one sees a further cementing – literally – of the left hemisphere’s vision. The thinking they both involved is instrumental and competitive and they promote a more atomistic and competitive model of society, a more detached and manipulative stance in relation to one another and the world at large, which comes to be seen as just a heap of resources.
There's a lot of brain-talk, scientific experimental hard-talk, directed at that way of thinking itself. A frantic left brain appeal to the left brain to shut the fuck up a minute. At least one of the 'reactions' seemed to take this as a contradiction, which I think is a mistake. One has to talk to the clever dicks in Cleverdish, because they refuse to speak Barbarian. But when not banging on about brains, my overall impression was, "I've been saying and thinking all this since '68 - what took you so long?" — unenlightened
However you define and conceive the relationships between, for instance, brain and mind, mind and individual behaviour, and individual behaviour and social and cultural phenomena, the nature of our brains must be implicated in some way and possibly in quite important ways
A non-sequituur if I ever heard one. If you take an instrumentalist view of neurology, then the brain simply has no nature that could even possibly be implicated in those relationships. You already have to buy into some mind=brain ontology in order to find that line of thought convincing, and there are good reasons not to buy into that ontology which I imagine Ghilcrist doesn't even bother discussing in the 350,000 word book that they are discussing. — ProcastinationTomorrow
Moliere is (par for the course :wink: ) right, I think. — jkg20
Provided that one views any purported causal correlations between mind/brain as causal correlations between observed (and possibly, obervable) events, and not causal correlations between soft chunks of matter and intangible vapours of mind, the ontological issue between realism and idealism is untouched by the neurological research of scientists like Ghilcrist (of course, bearing in mind the Kastrup thread, I have to insist here that "observe" is being used in its usual and strictly phenomenal sense, and not in any sense the word might have as it functions in the spiel of realist QM theorists). This is presumably to take the "instrumentalist" view of neurology that ProcrastinationTomorrow recommends. The idealsim/realism issue would be about whether one can be instrumentalist about neurology without also being a realist about the brain - that is where the jury is really out.
I haven't read the Ghilcrist article that sparked this discussion, so cannot comment on his analysis. However, if he is suggesting that we can analyse societal development in terms of the domination of the right-hemisphere by the left-hemisphere of the brain, then the question would arise as to why the left-hemisphere became dominant, and in responding to that question, perhaps the ontological issues become more signficant. To anyone who has read the interview, or any of the works of Ghilcrist, what response does he have to that question? — jkg20
I think its success can be attributed to several things. First, it makes
you powerful, and power is very seductive. Second, it offers very simple
explanations, that are in their own terms convincing, because what
doesn’t fit the plan is simply declared to be meaningless. For example,
to declare talk of ‘consciousness’ a delusion or a linguistic error has
the virtue of simplicity. It may not, however, satisfy the more sceptical
among us, those who are not in thrall to our left hemisphere’s way of
thinking. If what does not fit the model is just discarded we will never
learn, never sophisticate our model of reality, and our understanding
will come to a standstill where it is. Third, the left hemisphere is
also, as I suggest in the book, the Berlusconi of the brain – a political
heavyweight that controls the media. It does the speaking, constructs
the arguments in its own favour. And finally, since the Industrial
Revolution, we have constructed a world around us externally that
is the image of the world the left hemisphere has made internally.
Appeals to the natural world, to the history of a culture, to art, to
the body, and to spirituality, routes that used to lead out of the hall
of mirrors, have been cut off, undercut and ironised out of existence,
and when we look out of the window – we see more of the world
we had created in our minds extended in concrete all around us.
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