What is Iain McGilchrist trying to tell us with his Herculean writing efforts in The Master and His Emissary and The Matter with Things? I don’t think it is just a deluxe left-brain praise of the right-brain, as some would like to believe. It isn’t a spectacular display of reason arguing against itself either (although it is perfectly possible to use science and philosophy to show their own limits; one could even claim that that’s science and philosophy at their best). Iain’s work isn’t yet another theory-of-everything, nor an ideological push for the next hegemonic metaphysical “ism”. Continuously sustained for more than three decades, his magnificent project is a philosophical cosmology that offers no less than a deep understanding of the human condition and a timely revision of our current predicament.

Iain has recently gifted us with a 591,000-word counter-spell to our civilizational demise. Transcending the urge for a prognosis that would defeat its very diagnosis, a great deal of the “potential energy” of his vision remains to be converted into “kinetic energy”. Regardless of the affirmation that his work may provide (or fail to provide) for some our favorite scientific theories, philosophical commitments, and habits of mind, I believe that the extraordinary opportunity that this gathering affords is to meditate on whether his entire corpus of work has some general importance in itself, so that we can see what it entails beyond itself. In other words, to ask: what’s Iain pointing at?

Leaving mechanistic reductive materialism behind, we still have great challenges ahead. What about scientism, metaphysical dilettantism, wokeness, political correctness, confusion, collusion, war, and ultimately Evil? And what about Truth? What role are we, academics, playing in the unmaking of the world? Are we self-satisfied with our level of expertise? Is it working for us? Or are we seeking a transformative path as well, somewhat compromised by our intellectual investments?

I will suggest that moving back into right-hemisphere dominance means not only to restore balance in the human being, but also constitutes a creative evolutionary advance of the kind identified as necessary and inevitable by Sri Aurobindo (whose marble bust I believe stands in the CISS courtyard), whereby a holistic willing surrenders “separative knowledge” to attain “knowledge by direct contact” and even “knowledge by identity”, “the original and fundamental way of knowing, native to the occult self in things”, as the Indian philosopher put it in The Life Divine. If so, our horizontal hemispheric considerations become a hint to the vertical descent of truth-consciousness. Perhaps this venue is the sort of place where such a possibility can, at least, be introduced.

In this talk I will consider what the field of neuroscience might look like if the scientific process was guided by the philosophy of McGilchrist’s The Matter with Things. How would we study the brain? How would we approach psychiatry? I will focus on the wholeness and vulnerability of living organisms, their brains, and their capacity for getting to the heart of what matters.

First, I will argue that the brain is alive in its own right, extending the embodied cognition perspective to include the metabolic vulnerability the brain shares with the body. This paradigm is examined through the lens of experimental neuroscience and neuroimaging, including the dynamic relationship between neural activity and metabolism. Our work explores the hypothesis that neural activity is inextricably entangled with metabolism, and this strange loop ‘tension’ reflects the dynamical feel of experience.

Second, I will consider that the dynamics of neural activity can be understood as a global whole, a cross between an embryologic process and music. Brain activity does not convey literal meaning, like a piece of code, but instead, like Susanne Langer’s description of music, presents ‘global forms’ of feeling through a dynamic, unfolding process. Utilizing this perspective, we find evidence that the electrical activity of the brain contains a global core of dynamical regularity that, through the content of experience, differentiates into greater complexity.

Last, I will examine the implications of the above neuroscientific metaphors for clinical psychiatry and the culture of “neurospeak.” Dominant, machine-oriented neurobiological models have a surprising negative influence on public perceptions of mental illness. Worse, this model has been extended to encompass the entirety of society, now seen as an integrated unit of machinations, virtual or otherwise. I close with a reflection on the role an organic philosophy of neuroscience might play in the evolution of larger societal (and cosmic) narratives.

Affect makes emptiness matter.

The intrinsically “distinct reverberatory neural patterns” of affective consciousness, as Jaak Panksepp explains in his landmark 1998 book Affective Neuroscience: The Foundations of Human and Animal Emotions and also in his essays on music, are linked to basic body tones and physical movements encoded within the “intrinsic affective potentials of the nervous system” (318).

These encoded tones emerging are notes. The music, as Iain McGilchrist explains in The Matter With Things, exists “entirely between tones; and so, too, religion [which] exists in the betweenness of human beings.”

The empty psycho-affective space of emergence investigated by Panksepp helps clarify what McGilchrist means when claiming “something far greater than the sum of its parts emerges” in the between—something has just emerged from no-thing.

Panksepp investigates the emptiness between subjective feelings.

By locating music in the “betweenness,” McGilchrist also ventures into an investigation of no-thing, but without acknowledging it.

It is here in betweenness that, as Panksepp puts it, the primary genetically-dictated emotional operating systems like RAGE and FEAR and PANIC/GRIEF as a weak type of reverberation has the potential to become a “full-blown emotional state.”

If this emotional state occurs—affect matters a lot. And the affect revealed is often trauma formerly concealed by the cognitive terms of Western thought.

Ian McGilchrist’s works, The Master and His Emissary and The Matter With Things, lay out and elaborate the thesis that the two hemispheres of the brain have radically different views of the world and ways of interacting with the world, and that their respective perceptions and functions must be properly integrated for a viable way forward. This proper integration requires restoring the right-brain to its proper place as “Master”. In this presentation, I discuss a parallel to this insight in the dichotomous “worlds” of quantum and classical physics. Specifically, the quantum level is the fundamental “Master” of physical reality, while the classical level is a secondary “Emissary” that arises under specific circumstances. The quantum level is pre-empirical and not directly available to the senses, while the classical level is empirically available. I note that the classical level of apparently concrete and separate phenomena corresponds to a left-brain type of understanding, while the quantum level, with its holism, indeterminacy, and nonlocality, corresponds to a right-brain type of understanding. Thus, the right brain is ‘tuned into’ the quantum level, while the left brain is only able to deal with the classical level. Since modern thinking is dominated by left-brain modes of thought—such as either/or categories, nominalism, and mechanistic conceptualization, the ’emissary’ is inappropriately in charge, and prevailing attempts to come to grips with quantum physics are hampered by left-brain prejudices. This leads to the current situation in which the classical level, and its either/or, mechanistic quality, is generally mistaken for the “true” reality.  I argue that right-brain modes of understanding are needed in order to recognize the quantum level as the fundamental reality and to properly account for its manifestation at the classical, empirical level.

Recent developments in philosophy, logic and science suggest an integrative approach,supportive of Iain McGilchrist’s The Matter with Things (2021), that goes beyond simplistic physicalism and enables new non-reductive approaches capable of resolving several aporias arising from mechanistic thinking. Building on my work Untying the Gordian Knot (2020), I will discuss the importance of, yet limitations of, binary (Boolean) logic and how new possibilist (non-Boolean) interpretations of fundamental quantum process provide critical openings to re-consider fundamental questions such as the notion of reality itself, the reality of basic human choice, and the relationship of brain, mind and consciousness.

One of the greatest mysteries of science, philosophy, and personal spirituality is the question of embodied mind. Each of us makes the journey from the chemistry and physics of a single cell—the unfertilized oocyte—to the complex metacognition of a mature human mind.  In this talk I will describe our work to understand the self-assembly and scaling of cognition.  Our computational and experimental work is beginning to reveal the cognitive glue—mechanisms that enable the tiny competencies of molecular networks and cells to merge into larger, unified collective intelligences with grandiose goals in anatomical and behavioral problems spaces. The autopoiesis of the body is highly symmetric to that of the mind, including bioelectric networks which store counterfactual memories, neurotransmitter signaling, consistent left-right asymmetry (established as early as the first cell division), and most important of all, top-down control of molecular events by higher scales of emergent intelligence. Thus, we have been able to apply the tools and concepts of behavioral neuroscience to read and write the proto-cognitive pattern memories of cellular swarms. Applications of communicating with, not micromanaging, the agential material of our bodies include novel capabilities for birth defects, regenerative medicine, and cancer. We have also created novel synthetic proto-organisms which shed light on the origin of form and behavior beyond a history of evolutionary selection, and show the intelligence of the living medium. Finally, we have been working to understand diverse intelligence, developing a framework to better recognize and ethically relate to the plethora of forthcoming unconventional embodied beings. The opportunity before us is to develop a conception of embodied mind that enables a progressive widening of our radius of compassion toward all sentient beings, at the same time as it facilitates essential progress, in biomedicine and engineering.

My presentation aims to compare Alfred North Whitehead’s process-relational approach to Truth with Iain McGilchrist’s study of the portals and paths to truthful experience permitted us by our divided brains. Both thinkers reject positivistic and rigidly logical “either/or” definitions of Truth, instead reimagining what it means to know anything truly in the context of an unfinished universe imbued with divine creativity. Whitehead considers the scientific pursuit of Truth to be a variant form of religious worship, while McGilchrist proposes a third option to Pascal’s wager, suggesting that our attitude toward the possibility of divine existence impacts its truth or falsity. In Whitehead’s process-relational ontology, the cosmos is evolving and open-ended, with human beings and God involved in a reciprocal cocreative process. Truth is understood to depend upon the partial experiences of many creatures finding unifying expression within the evolving divine nature. McGilchrist’s approach adds that if reality is evolving and participatory, it’s rational to comport ourselves toward the possibility of divinity so as to actualize it more fully. 

My presentation will introduce Whitehead’s metaphysical theories of perception and propositions, comparing them to McGilchrist’s neurological account of human experience and its philosophical implications. I argue that Whitehead’s emphasis on knowing as a function of symbolic imagination and theory of propositions as “lures for feeling” aligns with McGilchrist’s view that the right hemisphere’s intuitive, metaphoric, relational form of consciousness is superior to the binary, decontextualized, abstract form of the left’s. Both thinkers will thereby be shown to converge in their understanding of Truth as a participatory event.

David J. Temple has argued that the collapse of value at the heart of global culture is the root cause of proliferating Global Catastrophic and Existential Risks. Exploring the truth of this suggests that radical educational innovation is needed to (re)align humans with the Universal Field of Cosmic Value. Essential to the survival of humanity is the cultivation of “value-ception”—the capacity to engage the “eye of value”—the human (right-hemispheric) ability to perceive intrinsic value. The question of what kinds of capacities are needed for humanity to navigate planetary meta-crisis reframes the philosophy of education implicit within McGilchrist’s hemisphere hypothesis. Concrete recommendations and ongoing projects are discussed, in the context of the imminent planetary catastrophe, driven in large part by the incapacitation—the blinding—of the eye of value.

Philosophers and fiction writers play in parallel, preoccupied with Iain McGilchrist’s beautiful question: “What then is true?” We both sense that truth may live more in questions than in answers, more in paradoxes than in binaries. Philosophy struggles with what it means to be human—and with the challenge of subjectivity. Fiction can situate such grand problems locally. It can conduct human experiments in language, replicate unfolding consciousness (because writing is a form of consciousness) or come forth in fragments. Fiction can bend time, span a life in three paragraphs or take 600 pages to render a day. It can show us experience from the inside or the outside, say the unsayable, speak the unspeakable. Why, then, do fiction and philosophy not understand each other better or help each other more? The problem may be—on fiction’s side—a Western, industrial obsession with story: Aristotle’s three-act structure, Freytag’s Pyramid, Joseph Campbell’s 17-stage hero’s journey, to name a few. There’s nothing wrong with stories, or with studying structures that undergird them. But not all fictions are stories, not all stories are true, and even the sturdiest foundation may buttress a lie. McGilchrist’s theory describes a left hemisphere bias toward structure and content over resonance and connection. Since we’re thinking together about the matter with things let’s challenge “story” as a thing, as an end—as opposed to writing as a process, a powerful mode of not-knowing. We’ll draw from examples by non-Western writers and philosophers, POC, women, neurodivergent, and LGBTQIA+ writers who rebel against industrial, systematic stories to bring forth new forms—archipelagic, autocosmological—that reconnect philosophy and fiction and resonate with ecstatic possibility.

Different epistemic stances shape different world views. In turn, different world views create different worlds. We could say that each era’s world view or governing framework of principles and assumptions is an evolutionary act of niche construction whereby a culture actively selects which features of the world it will rely on, thereby influencing the selection pressures it will face. But what is the effect on a civilization when, century after century, a major portion of its cognitive capacities and engagement with the world is systematically marginalized or negated by its dominant epistemic stance as being merely subjective in nature, with no affirmable purchase on reality itself? Beginning with Romanticism in the later eighteenth century, many critics of this dominance have emphasized the impoverishing consequences such a stance produces on our moral, spiritual, and aesthetic life. In our present age, however, it is clear these consequences have become life-and-death in nature, catastrophic for the entire Earth community. Have we, like Othello, tragically cut ourselves off from listening to the one voice, in his case Desdemona’s, that could radically correct and recontextualize the negative message, the reductionist world view, which we have till now accepted as the only truth, fatefully determining our collective beliefs and actions?

And beyond this, an overarching philosophical question presents itself: If we affirm humanity’s aspirations to metaphysical and religious insight beyond reductionist parameters, and if we go so far as to affirm a vision of the world as essentially unitary, processive, and spiritually informed, how can we make sense of a divine creative process that has brought forth such an overwhelming multi-crisis as the one we face today? Or to put it in different terms, perhaps we need to grasp not simply how the emerging cosmological vision is more adequate than the old mechanistic paradigm, but rather why the cosmos—through the human, through the modern mind—brought forth the soulless modern universe in the first place. Why did the cosmos and the human being, in participatory co-creation, bring forth the immensely powerful reductionist vision, with all the modern dualisms of self and world, inner and outer, spirituality and objectivity? Why would the universe reveal itself to itself, through the modern mind, as purposeless and meaningless, unconscious, ruled only by chance and necessity? Why did it—we—bring forth not only the genuine achievements but also the dangerous disenchantment, disorientation, and alienation of late modernity? What, if any, deeper evolutionary and spiritual logic might be at work?

This talk will present a cognitive scientific argument as to the nature and functioning of mattering in terms of an integration of predictive processing and relevance realizing accounts of intelligence. It will then argue that this processing is pre-representational and pre-formalization, and that it takes the form of an evolving caring connectedness, an optimal gripping, that always generates a sense of belonging and meaning in life. Belonging and meaning in life are caring connectedness that are inherently relational and primary to cognitive agency. The talk will then argue that the right hemisphere is central to these primary cognitive functions. The talk will then argue that this theoretical explanation of hemispheric understanding, plus arguments from Pickstock, ground a conformity theory as primary to knowing. This fundamental grammar of cognition strongly implies an inherently relational ontology as exemplified in the work of Filler and Whitehead. It is through the right hemisphere’s processing of mattering, non-propositional cognitive contact, that we get our metaphysical grounding in reality.

It is a credit to Iain McGilchrist’s recent work that he has in no way shied away from asking truly fundamental metaphysical questions. Indeed, two questions can be seen to respectively frame The Matter With Things, the tangled answers of which are patiently developed over twenty eight scintillating chapters. On the front end, McGilchrist inaugurates his inquiry with the question of Plotinus: “But we…who are we?” On the back end, he concludes his inquiry with the question that has long haunted the philosophical tradition: “Why is there something rather than nothing?” Not only are these questions worth asking for McGilchrist, but his robust axiological metaphysics assumes they are also worth answering. Who we are cannot ultimately be divorced from why we are, such that our answers to these questions are necessarily related. Our inability to offer any orienting answers, however, is an essential part of what is the matter with things: we do not know who we are or why anything exists. McGilchrist’s entire discussion in The Matter With Things thus presupposes that our answers to these questions matter and draw us either closer to or further away from the truth (of the matter). In dialogue with McGilchrist and a constellation of resonant voices, this presentation develops five propositions (as “lures for feeling”) concerning the nature and place of human and cosmic value in the universe. Noting different metaphysical depths related to the reality of value and value experience, I suggest (with McGilchrist) that the ultimate questions as to who we are and why we (and anything) exists can only be answered axiologically.