4. Starting with the Biggest Questions

Gary Peterson - February 27, 2024

(The first six postings of the blog serve as an introductory set.)

McGilchrist’s work takes on big questions, in fact, the biggest questions.  This is especially helpful when trying to bridge the divide between mind and matter. Chapter 25 of The Matter with Things is an 83-page exploration of matter and consciousness, as seen from the opposing views of the two hemispheres.

The modern Western view of reality – materialism — holds that matter exists before mind. It utilizes the machine analogy. You start with dead parts (sub-atomic particles), combine them, and build bigger structures. Then somehow, something magically adds life to them (vitalism), and  — voilà —  you have a living organism out of which consciousness begins to arise.

Unfortunately, there are two huge problems with this scenario. First, for most than a century, Western philosophy and science have been trying to explain how matter creates consciousness. In this effort they have been spectacularly… unsuccessful.  This is now known as the hard problem of consciousness.

Secondly, when we dig deeper into what matter is, looking at smaller and smaller components, it disappears into a cloud of probability. As to what matter actually is — Western science does not yet have an answer. Matter can only be described by its effects, properties, and interactions. This is the basis of classical physics, which does not explain what matter is. That job is left to the philosophers.

Consciousness As Fundamental

In contrast, the East starts with pure potential, a ground of being. When this potentiality collapses or ripens into actualities, the implicit becomes explicit. No explanation for the development of consciousness is needed if consciousness is implicit in the ground of being.

McGilchrist believes that we should begin with consciousness as fundamental. He sees it as a kind of holistic, flowing, complexity – an evolving organism — of infinitely interconnected potential. This organism of potentiality has several fundamental inherent tendencies and implicit properties that will guide it as it becomes explicit. Existing as pure potential, it also has no explicit context nor a point of view — yet.

Instead of starting with simple parts and combining them to build complex things, his approach holds that the simple can be constrained out of the complex by setting limiting conditions.  McGilchrist proposes that our experiences of reality are created when our brains alter, limit or sculpt consciousness. These constraining actions have the effect of collapsing potential consciousness into finite, limited forms of experience. The One becomes the experiential Many.

And what can constrain consciousness, causing this transformation?  Attention, which is one of the inherent properties of consciousness that our brain hemispheres specialize in isolating, organizing and maintaining. Awareness, another inherent property of consciousness, acts to unite different forms of consciousness into wholes. Attention and awareness act as synaptic chemicals of consciousness.  Our right hemisphere constrains overall consciousness to create its own big picture environment – an overall awareness of the energy flow of the “right here, right now” — that is pertinent to sustaining life. Using its attention, our left hemisphere then extracts subtle experiences from the flow of the right hemisphere. The left hemisphere then modifies this content into solid, familiar things which can manipulated within a context — time and space — that it creates. Accordingly, one could say that matter is decontextualized consciousness that has been reshaped — and then recontextualized — for our needs and use.

Here the simplest, best explanation I can offer:

If consciousness is fundamental, then the brain is involved in modifying it for our local use, for attending to life. It seems the left and right brain hemispheres shape consciousness differently, with awareness and attention, for different reasons, produce different outputs, are required to work together, but depending on which is dominant, can create very different concepts of self, other, and reality.

Interesting Ideas

Are there indications that the brain uses constraining or limiting actions?   Consider that the majority of the neurons in the corpus collosum, the band of nerve fibers that connect the two hemispheres, are involved in inhibiting the activity of the opposite hemisphere. The human brain has proportionately more inhibitory neurons than that of any other species.  Also consider that directing your attention to something begins to separate it from the flow. Focusing your attention on something removes the surrounding context. This is one way that inhibition becomes creative. Also consider that the age when your brain reaches its maximum number of neurons is … at 28 weeks of gestation. That number is reduced by 70% (!) by the time you are born. Considering that the brain is the organ of attention to life, does neural pruning reduce big “C” Consciousness to human consciousness?

McGilchrist uses the analogy of an eddy, or vortex, forming in a river is used to illustrate how consciousness becomes form.  This ‘product’ of the river is nothing mechanical or inert.  It is the river manifesting itself as form due to constraints in its flow. It is constantly renewing itself through the flow, which is both it cause and its effect. He offers that we are simply… more advanced whirlpools!

What Is Life?  And Reality? And Our Purpose?

McGilchrist suggests that the divide between the organic and inorganic may not survive when consciousness is seen as fundamental, as even subatomic particles appear to be aware of each other (an experience).  Life, as we define it today, might be best characterized by the capability to make rapid changes in the altering and sculpting of consciousness.  Certain limiting conditions arise that allow structures, patterns, and fractals to proliferate in consciousness. And for what purpose? Life seems to be driven toward developing and experiencing higher levels of consciousness.

As life grows more complex, it requires a higher point of view – a specialized awareness – in which experiences can occur.  Boundaries are necessary to give identity to a point of view.  Consider the fact that our brains develop from the embryonic ectoderm, which goes on to form the outer covering or skin.  Just as human skin is an evolutionary advancement from the cell wall, so too is the brain. What does a cell wall do? Isolate, organize and maintain chemical and biological functions.  What do our brains do?  Isolate, organize, and maintain certain properties of consciousness — i.e. awareness and attention. These provide new and higher level experiences.  Reality is experiential, not material. Awareness provides the context for experience, not time and space.

Life seems to be an inherent, self-organizing tendency of awareness/attention that allows consciousness to rapidly express its potentiality —  so that consciousness may create, discover and know itself –  its inherent capabilities and beauty —  in endless different manifestations of experience and context.  McGilchrist suggests that consciousness doesn’t serve our needs, but rather we are in service of consciousness.

Who are we?  Perhaps, ultimately, we are a disruption of the flow, which becomes creation’s experiencers and observers.  Our experiences and knowledge are then continually enfolded back into the unified, evolving potential of Consciousness. The explicit becomes implicit once again, allowing this source to develop new and even higher levels of consciousness.  We create each other.