link: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SbUHxC4wiWk
Very appropriate for this list. <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SbUHxC4wiWk> Great brief lecture with a more enlightened interpretation of neuroscience than usual. His views are very much in alignment with my own. Sort of the antidote for Daniel Dennett: "If you think of something like a mountain, it can be for a speculator a source of wealth, for a sailor it can be a landmark, for a painter it might be a many textured form, for the inhabitants of a land it might be the home of the Gods. Which is the real mountain? There isn't a *real* mountain that is separate from those different, ah, if you like, interactions of us with the world. Science sort of suggests that there might be one, which is the one in which we play the least part." This is what I mean by multisense realism. The idea that realism is the syzygy of various modes of experience - sensation, measurement, etc and that there is no reality which is necessarily external to that universal interaction. Not talking about human perception creating the universe, but the universe as a layer cake of perceptual participation in both personal modes and impersonalized experience. McGilchrist goes on to remind us that the simplistic notions of hemispheric modularity are exaggerations but that there are some interesting aspects of lateralization of brains which go beyond myth and pop psychology. He discusses how birds and other animals use their left hemisphere to focus on what they already know is important while they use their right hemisphere to remain generally vigilant, looking out for friends or predators, other opportunities etc. Right = broad alertness, Left = focused attention. At 10:35 he talks about how in humans the prefrontal lobes are up to 35% of our brains, and that their function is to inhibit the other parts of the brain, to stand aloof from ourselves for both Machiavellian exploitation and empathic relation. Our ability to relate to ourselves as an outsider, I would say is meta-awareness or 'consciousness'. (To feed back on this too far would be 'self-consciousness' in which we identify with our projection of the others perspective of ourselves, inviting what I would call an 'elliptically truncated neurotic infinite regress'.) At 14:17 there are some good slides of drawings by split brain patients. The center tree is with the left hemisphere only, and as he explains, this is the pattern of left hemisphere awareness, literally truncating the other half of any given figure. The right hand tree is with right hemisphere only, notably more exuberant and unbound than the far left tree which was drawn with both hemispheres. There are more detailed slides that follow to illustrate the asymmetries between the hemispheres. This fits well with what I have been trying to say about ACME and OMMM, the propensity for us to favor one hemisphere's mode (both brain and planetary hemisphere, figuratively speaking as the Western mind favors the Western hemisphere, while Oriental philosophy favors the Eastern hemisphere). The role played by denial in the left hemisphere patients rationalized narratives about their nonsensical perceptions is useful to understand what we are up against in trying to help people deprogram themselves from Western style instrumental-reductionist thinking. There is an excellent passage here beginning at 16:19: "Newness of the right hemisphere makes it a devil's advocate. It's always on the lookout for things that might be different from our expectations. It sees things in context. It understands implicit meaning, metaphor, body language, emotional expression of the face. It deals with an embodied world, in which we stand embodied in relation to a world that is concrete. It understands individuals not just categories. It actually has a *disposition for the living rather than the mechanical*." He goes on (17:45): "The world of the left hemisphere, dependent on denotative language and abstraction yields clarity and power to manipulate things that are known, fixed, static, isolated, decontextualized, explicit, disembodied, general in nature, but ultimately lifeless. The right hemisphere by contrast yields a world of individual changing, evolving, interconnected, implicit, incarnate, living beings within the context of the lived world." He talks about how the left hemisphere buys a sense of perfection at a price of a kind of emptiness or self-reference, and goes through some interesting ways that hemisphere bias manifests in patients reasoning. "Even rationality is grounded in a leap of intuition. There is no way you can rationally prove that rationality is a good way to look at the world. We intuit that it is very helpful....Reality is not linear, it is curvilinear, and there is a conjunction of opposites that we use to understand. Hear hear! He concludes with the Einstein quote: "The intuitive mind is a sacred gift and the rational mind is a faithful servant. We have created a society that honors the servant and has forgotten the gift." -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Everything List" group. To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msg/everything-list/-/yspVkvtvUqQJ. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en.
