Matter with Things
"Iain McGilchrist addresses some of the hardest questions humanity faces - Who are we? What is the world? How can we understand consciousness, matter, space and time? Is the cosmos without purpose or value? Can we really neglect the sacred and divine? Following neurology, philosophy and physics, McGilchrist leads us to a vision of the world that is profound and beautiful - in line with the deepest traditions of human wisdom."--Perspectiva Press.
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9recommend
14mentions
10people
2021–2025years
86% recommend14% neutral
Mentions per year
What Hacker News says
- The Matter With Things by Iain McGilchrist
Completely rewired how I view language, consciousness, and matter.
- "The Matter with Things" by Iain McGilchrist has the same effect. Highly recommend it.
- > as you transition to death those barriers are less necessary as the body diverts increasingly scarce resources to surviving just a few moments longer.
The more I think about survival based evolutionary explanations for NDEs, the less sense they make.
Obviously evolution is true, and there's an obvious relationship between the physical degradation of the body and the brain and hallucinations. I'm not trying to make a cheap appeal to mysticism and deny these things, but NDEs are profoundly weird and difficult to explain when you think about them from that angle.
Why would a body motivated to survive at all costs waste resources creating comforting hallucinations with some kind of internal coherence during catastrophic failure? Wouldn't a more logical and theoretically sound failure mode for a body trying to survive at all costs be some kind of increasingly incoherent descent into something like TV static as resources get diverted from sense making to repairing systems critical to survival? Or just pure unconscious blackness as with general anesthesia? If consciousness is purely computational, then any coherent internal experience implies the brain is spending biological resources maintaining the physical integrity of something, despite being increasingly severed from the sense input it needs to actually navigate the world to survive. And if the body is going through the trouble of maintaining some level of internal consciousness as it nears death, why wouldn't it simply create a hellish ever increasing amount of fear and pain until the moment of complete physical death to create the strongest possible motivation to avoid ever repeating the experience?
Many people who experience NDEs and survive report craving a repeat of the experience and losing their fear of death. That's profoundly counterproductive from a survival standpoint. There's an argument about group related benefits and a need to offset communal panic due to our knowledge of our own mortality that's easier to ground in a purely survival based explanation, and while that definitely fits better, I increasingly get the sense we're trying to overfit evolutionary explanations that assume a purely survival oriented computational theory of consciousness to things we don't actually understand nearly as well as we think we do, and that the fear of not knowing can just as easily be used to argue motivated reasoning for appealing to things we basically understand like computation and biology as the fear of death can be used to argue motivated reasoning for appealing to things we don't.
The history of all human knowledge is defined by an increasing ability to transcend and expand our theories to incorporate ever more detailed knowledge about previously unseen things. First we were convinced the world was made of unseen animal spirits, then we were convinced it was made of unseen combinations of the four elements in a world governed by a pantheon of superhuman deities, then we were convinced it was made of a hierarchy of unseen forces interacting with seen forces through God given, rationally discoverable natural law, and now we are convinced it is made of purely physical rules which may or may not be fully comprehensible given what we can observe, and those seen and unseen purely physical forces created complex biological systems that can model the world through different types of computation, some of which we understand, and some of which we don’t.
I think it's extremely unlikely that we've figured out the final and most comprehensive framework for understanding reality, and I think there’s a lot about conscious experience and our ability to meaningfully perceive and categorize things that are still deeply mysterious/poorly understood.
EDIT: Didn’t like my previous wording of this/changed it, and still don’t feel like I’m doing justice to what I’m trying to get across. Iain McGilchrist’s “The Matter with Things”, John Vervaeke talks about “Relevance Realization”, Freeman Dyson’s lectures/books about the importance of “heretical views” for the expansion of knowledge, Donald Hoffman’s work claiming evolved models of reality in every kind of environment never create accurate maps, and just observing how difficult the alignment/verification problem is in AI are all pointing in this same direction, and make a more compelling case for what I’m trying to say than I can.
- I have youtube ADHD, so here's how to read the transcript. Copy all, and paste into the timestamp remover:
https://ashley-cameron.com/yt/remove-timestamps/ I tried a regex but it has been a long time, and some text matched the regex.
Now, this is completely unformatted, so there are three books by the author that might be rewarding:
Blurb: his book argues that the division of the brain into two hemispheres is essential to human existence, making possible incompatible versions of the world, with quite different priorities and values.The Matter With Things: Our Brains, Our Delusions and the Unmaking of the World The Master and His Emissary: The Divided Brain and the Making of the Western WorldMost scientists long ago abandoned the attempt to understand why nature has so carefully segregated the hemispheres, or how to make coherent the large, and expanding, body of evidence about their differences. In fact to talk about the topic is to invite dismissal. Yet no one who knows anything about the area would dispute for an instant that there are significant differences: it’s just that no-one seems to know why. And we now know that every type of function – including reason, emotion, language and imagery – is subserved not by one hemisphere alone, but by both.
This book argues that the differences lie not, as has been supposed, in the ‘what’ – which skills each hemisphere possesses – but in the ‘how’, the way in which each uses them, and to what end. But, like the brain itself, the relationship between the hemispheres is not symmetrical. The left hemisphere, though unaware of its dependence, could be thought of as an ’emissary’ of the right hemisphere, valuable for taking on a role that the right hemisphere – the ‘Master’ – cannot itself afford to undertake. However it turns out that the emissary has his own will, and secretly believes himself to be superior to the Master. And he has the means to betray him. What he doesn’t realize is that in doing so he will also betray himself.
The book begins by looking at the structure and function of the brain, and at the differences between the hemispheres, not only in attention and flexibility, but in attitudes to the implicit, the unique, and the personal, as well as the body, time, depth, music, metaphor, empathy, morality, certainty and the self. It suggests that the drive to language was not principally to do with communication or thought, but manipulation, the main aim of the left hemisphere, which manipulates the right hand. It shows the hemispheres as no mere machines with functions, but underwriting whole, self-consistent, versions of the world. Through an examination of Western philosophy, art and literature, it reveals the uneasy relationship of the hemispheres being played out in the history of ideas, from ancient times until the present. It ends by suggesting that we may be about to witness the final triumph of the left hemisphere – at the expense of us all.
blurb: In this 10,000-word essay, written to complement Iain McGilchrist's acclaimed "The Master and His Emissary," the author asks why - despite the vast increase in material well-being - people are less happy today than they were half a century ago, and suggests that the division between the two hemispheres of the brain has a critical effect on how we see and understand the world around us. In particular, McGilchrist suggests, the left hemisphere's obsession with reducing everything it sees to the level of minute, mechanistic detail is robbing modern society of the ability to understand and appreciate deeper human values. Accessible to readers who haven't yet read "The Master and His Emissary" as well as those who have, this is a fascinating, immensely thought-provoking essay that delves to the very heart of what it means to be human.The Divided Brain and the Search for Meaning: Why We Are So Unhappy? - With regard to Free Will, there is a little intellectual dodge called the Compatibilist solution (popularized by Dennett), which says you really feel like you have free will, but you do not. Also see Sam Harris and Robert Sapolsky on the topic (but note Dennett strongly disagrees with Harris, he has no choice, it could not be otherwise :)
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/compatibilism/
The feeling of Free Will is bootstrapped from making decisions in a complex world. The subconscious makes most decisions automatically, based on left-brain exploitation of the current situation for survival. The timescales are too short for slow consideration to have an evolutionary advantage. Any imprinting of this instant behavior is made by stress hormones, which enhance memory retention for unusual or extreme situations.
However, the right brain is tasked with fitting actions into a wider context of long-term survival. It can run what-if scenarios, imagine different courses of action, and different outcomes. Its view of an action is always in the belief that something could be different next time, so something could be different last time - I could have done something else. But this is false, the left-brain was in control, and the right brain just provides post hoc rationalizations for those forced actions.
So, approximately, Free Will is the story the right brain tells itself after the left-brain already made the decision.
For more on the split brain aspect of this, see McGilchrist, The Master and His Emissary and The Matter With Things.
- I second the recommendation for Nongbri's "Before Religion". It definitely improved my understanding of what it is we even mean / have meant by "religion".
For a more evolutionary understanding of religion, I'd recommend Joseph Henrich's "The WEIRDest People in the World" and "The Secret of our Success".
Finally though certainly not least importantly, I'd recommend Iain McGilchrist's "The Master and His Emissary" and "The Matter with Things". Both touch on how it is we see and understand the world and how the current default perspective differs from those of other times and places.
