The Matter With Things

So what is this bigger picture? This could be seen as the key question McGilchrist addresses. If there is a bigger picture, then there must also be a smaller one. Obvious? Yes, but recognizing the significance of the obvious is the work of genius. It seems obvious that reality comprises more than one ‘thing’: we do not live in an indistinguishable sea of fog. There is this and there is that. Division is ontologically fundamental, and the existence of the two hemispheres reflects this fact. When we are seeking to understand something we have a choice; we can do it either via reductionism and analysis – investigating its smaller constituents – or we can attempt to seek the thing’s place in a bigger whole. The left hemisphere way is the former, ‘narrow-beam, sharply focused attention’, while the right hemisphere is striving for the holistic view. Science generally goes the way of the left hemisphere (ecology being a possible exception). McGilchrist does not argue against the reductionism of science, but rather for the need to integrate the knowledge it yields into the more comprehensive view given by the right hemisphere. This is something that science itself cannot easily do and he lists a number of reasons. One is that the methods of science – reason, rationality and quantification – are not equipped for the task. What is needed are the faculties of intuition and imagination, he argues – faculties exercised by the right hemisphere but misappreciated by the left hemisphere and therefore have been allowed to atrophy. How much richer, he suggests, would our own experiences be, and how much healthier the world, if when we shopped we looked outward with our imagination. Take an avocado from Peru on the supermarket shelf: as well as recognizing its price, can we exercise insight to see its cost in environmental and social terms? Can we also get some intuitive sense of the majestic web of relationships that resulted in its presence here – relationships stretching far in space and time? Can we thereby allow ourselves to be lost in awe by this simple fruit? Probably not. McGilchrist says that, ‘We do not permit ourselves to be awestruck or amazed by what it is we come to see’.

Then there is the important principle that we can go from the larger to the smaller but not from the smaller to the larger. The one, can – and does – give rise to the many, but not the many to the one: ‘the left hemisphere, having dismantled the universe, it is at a loss to know how to put it together again’. To see the bigger picture, we need to begin with an idea of what it is, and science lacks this. Think of a jigsaw. Without knowing what the whole can be, assembling the individual pieces is a near-impossible task. The tragedy is thus that we see a world of fragments rather than one in which the parts belong to a whole. However, if we have a vision of the whole, then dividing reality into parts is worthy, as it deepens our understanding. ‘The whole purpose of division’, McGilchrist tells us, ‘is to enrich a union’ .

In his view, therefore, to understand a part as a piece of a whole, it is necessary to recognize the part as having a purpose, that is, that it has an extrinsic teleology – serving something bigger than itself. But teleology is a ‘dreadful’ word in science, because (quoting the biotechnologist Eugene Koonin) ‘teleology is a non-scientific concept’. McGilchrist cites J.B.S. Haldane: ‘teleology is like a mistress to a biologist; he cannot live without her but he’s unwilling to be seen with her in public’. He recounts the appalling experience of ‘the distinguished paleontologist Dr Günter Bechly who having been a lifelong atheist, and a follower of Richard Dawkins, in 2015 […] was foolish enough – or brave enough – to express open support for Intelligent Design. […] He was immediately forced to leave his post’.

Purpose is, of course, accepted by engineers: machines do have an extrinsic purpose, always a utilitarian one. And we commonly perceive utility as the purpose: ‘At the core of the contemporary world is the reductionist view that we are – nature is – the earth is – 'nothing but' a bundle of senseless particles […] whose only value is utility’. McGilchrist is arguing that there are other purposes, such as those found in living things, and, indeed, in the quantum world of physics. ‘Contemporary physics, too, has found teleology hard to ignore because of a change in the way we conceive probability’. The objective probabilities of quantum mechanics are better understood not as expressing some meaningless randomness but as propensities or dispositions.

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