The Matter With Things

The question of time is fundamental to McGilchrist’s understanding. ‘Time’, he says ‘is […] at the core of what it is to be a human being’ and ‘Our understanding of time ramifies into everything that matters: especially into our understanding of life itself’.

Two words are key in comprehending what he has to say: ‘stasis’ and ‘motion’. They embody two ways of understanding time. One is that it comprises a series of instants, the other that it is a continuous flow. In the former case reality ‘is like a ciné film that consists of countless static slices’. This is the left hemisphere view in which ‘things appear simply static and what has to be explained is how motion comes about to this static scene; whereas to the right hemisphere, everything flows, as it is immediately experienced, and what needs to be explained is how stability can arise from this flow’. Here McGilchrist is inviting us to contrast ‘the difference between representations of experience and experience itself’. An example of this is the way we hear music. Do we experience it as a series of discrete notes or as ‘a self-organizing process which integrates the tones heard to create a melody’?. Your answer will almost certainly confirm that ‘Clock time is invented time’.

McGilchrist uses the example of the apple that Newton (purportedly) felt hit his head, leading to his insight about gravity. To outwards appearance, an object, a ‘thing’, was released from a branch and dropped. The thing that woke Newton was the same thing that fell from the tree. At least this is the usual representation and certainly Newton’s. The radical understanding McGilchrist wants to communicate is that it was not just an apparent object that was in motion but everything in that scene. The apple that hit Newton was not the same apple that began falling. It was not a static thing; it was a flow which could be represented as an apple.

Fundamentally, everything is in motion; this fact ‘is at the core of every aspect of our experience […] in a way of which we are normally unaware, because our analytic intellect cannot deal with it’. Indeed, it is hard to represent motion, as early portrayals of a galloping horse reveal. It is also the case that part of our difficulty in recognizing motion as primary is because our language prioritizes nouns over verbs – something which has been noted by other scientists. ‘Is it not possible for the syntax and grammatical form of language to be changed’, mused the quantum physicist David Bohm, ‘so as to give a basic role to the verb rather than to the noun?'.

McGilchrist concludes that we should understand that ‘immobility is merely a fictional representation imposed by the mind for the purposes of calculation’. ‘There are not things which flow, but there is just – flow, which manifests as things flowing; it’s the flowing that is the ultimate reality’. If we can appreciate this, so letting the right hemisphere rule, ‘what was immobile and frozen in our perception is warmed and set in motion. Everything comes to life around us, everything is revivified in us’.

If there is only flow, how can it present itself to us in perceptibly distinct forms (e.g. an apple, a horse, a thought, myself)? McGilchrist devotes a lot of space to explaining how this can be, using the analogy of flowing water with its turbulence and vortices, so that we are, in a sense, ‘simply more advanced whirlpools’. There is no duality in the river and its flow, and paradoxes should be embraced: ‘We need not non-duality only, but the non-duality of duality and non-duality’. Or perhaps you could say that McGilchrist has given us the answer to the old kaon ‘What is the sound of one hand clapping?’ – it is all you ever hear.

https://www.youtube.com/embed/MTKdPyIzoUY

Iain McGilchrist can rightly be called a renaissance man, both metaphorically and literally. His range of knowledge and professional interests are exceptional. Is there another neuroscientist who has also been a literary scholar, or philosopher who has worked as a consultant psychiatrist? This gifted man now strives to bring about a ‘rebirth’ of the proper way to understand ourselves, the world and our relationship to it and one another. 'The Matter With Things' is his magnum opus, the product of ten years work and the culmination of his long, varied and distinguished intellectual career(s). His core argument is that we need to move from an understanding based upon the reality of matter to one based on process and flow: ‘the assumption of a materialist world composed of things is the greatest impediment we face’.