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 in the widest scope. One doesn’t expect an author in a single book to take on the nature of reality, the paths to truth, the nature of life, who we are and the purpose of our lives, then challenge our standard Western views on all these topics, and then offer deep and profound scientific and philosophical viewpoints that are based on an evolving Consciousness.  But how else can one address the wrong turn the West appears to have taken about the basis of reality…  since Plato and Aristotle?  I will only mention a few highlights here, as he covers these topics in a depth over 1500 pages that one rarely finds anywhere. For example, the spectacular 25^th chapter of The Matter with Things is an 83-page exploration of matter and consciousness, which takes on the debate whether the basis of reality is physical (materialism) or mental/experiential/mind (idealism).  These are among the reasons why I believe students of Eastern philosophies and meditation will be mining McGilchrist’s work for many years to come.

The modern Western view of reality – materialism — holds that matter exists before mind. On top of this we have adopted a machine metaphor for reality, seeing a world made of pieces, parts and things. While the machine analogy has brought enormous industrial and technological advances, it reduces the meaning of the world to things and their usefulness (utility). The West has no concept of an underlying unity of reality, nor a fundamental role for Mind. Instead, 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.

McGilchrist believes our currently dominant model of reality is mistaken…  and we need a better myth.

Consciousness As Fundamental

We needn’t look long for a better myth.  In contrast to the West, the East starts with a Ground of Being of pure awareness.  No explanation for the development of consciousness is needed if consciousness is implicit in a Ground of Being.

McGilchrist believes that we should begin with consciousness as fundamental.  Instead of starting with simple parts and combining them to build complex organisms that produce consciousness, his approach holds that individual consciousness can be constrained out of a unified Consciousness by natural limiting processes.  McGilchrist proposes that our personal experiences of reality are created when our bodies and brains alter, limit and sculpt a higher Consciousness. These constraining actions have the effect of collapsing implicit, potential Consciousness into explicit, finite forms of experience. The One becomes the experiential Many.

He sees Consciousness as a kind of holistic, flowing, complexity – an evolving organism — of infinitely interconnected potential. This potentiality has several fundamental inherent tendencies and properties that guide and shape it as it becomes explicit…and also as it becomes implicit again.  Instead of a mechanism of parts, this potential leads to the expression of actively coordinated processes, wholeness, values, meaning, purpose and self-realization in an ever-flowing informational context. What machine does that?

This potentiality is like an undisturbed flow or field, which when constrained or disturbed from within, forms stable patterns and processes which endure for varying periods of time.  Changing and evolving forms of consciousness arise in the relations between these patterns and processes.  Awareness of self and other arises in explicit experience. Explicit events are then be enfolded back into the Ground of Being, furthering the development of this unified, inherent Consciousness. This is the constant, evolving creation of our reality.  The One becomes the Many… and the Many become the One.

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 its cause and its effect. He offers that matter — and ourselves — are simply more advanced whirlpools!

In terms of the physical world, McGilchrist sees matter as an aspect of consciousness that limits or resists other aspects of consciousness, giving rise to experiences. It may also help to think of matter as slowed-down or frozen consciousness.  Matter is like a chunk of ice lodged in a flowing stream. Matter becomes a creative force for producing explicit experiences.

And what can constrain consciousness to produce mental experiences?  McGilchrist suggests that attention is an inherent property of consciousness that our brain hemispheres specialize in adapting and utilizing. Life gives rise to active observer perspectives and attention acts like the synaptic chemicals of consciousness, to include, exclude, limit, or synthesize experiential content.  Our right hemisphere synthesizes and somewhat limits overall consciousness to create its own big picture environment – an overall awareness of the energy flow of the “right here, right now” — in a context that is pertinent to sustaining life. Our left hemisphere, using its own kind of attention, 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 on a personal map of time and space — all being representations which it creates. Accordingly, one could say that ‘things’ are decontextualized consciousness that has been reshaped — and then recontextualized — for our needs and use.  Our right hemisphere has other inherent properties, including the ability to sense the appropriateness, coherence, and truth of the products of the left hemisphere as it assimilates that content back into the right hemisphere’s big picture.

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 provides one of the many ways 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?

If consciousness is fundamental, then the brain must be involved in modifying it for our local use, for attending to life.  To best serve the evolutionary process and survival, it seems the left and right brain hemispheres shape consciousness differently, with kinds of attention, for different reasons, produce different outputs, are required to work together, but depending on which is dominant, can create very different and often conflicting concepts of self, other, and reality among individuals. Yet it is all One.

Truth

McGilchrist offers that each brain hemisphere sees the nature of truth differently:

“I suggest that the left hemisphere would see it as a thing, certain, fixed, and independent of our interaction with it, standing outside time and concerned with the consistency of a representation.  Bu contrast, I suggest that the right hemisphere would see it as a process, always contextual, forever coming into being through our present interaction with the world in time, but nonetheless real for that – indeed, real because of that,  because constantly tested again experience.  I believe we often behave as though either truth is as the left hemisphere sees it, or else it does not exist.”

True depends on which brain hemisphere is dominant. Researchers have learned how to temporarily suppress the cognitive functions of one brain hemisphere while leaving the other intact. McGilchrist shows that researchers are able to get the same individuals to declare the same logical constructs either true or false depending on which brain hemisphere was suppressed.

Throughout the book he stresses that the differences between simple truths and deep truths as a way of explaining paradoxes.  Simple truths exclude their opposites.  Deep truths and their opposites are both true, e.g. The One becomes the Many… and the Many become the One.

What Is Life?  And Reality? And Our Purpose?

McGilchrist suggests that basing life on the divide between the organic and inorganic may not survive when consciousness is seen as fundamental. Where does one draw the line in chemistry and physics for properties of awareness? However, life as we know 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 higher levels of consciousness… and broader and deeper experiences.

Boundaries are necessary to provide a point of view – an observer — for explicit experience. Higher levels of consciousness consist of broader and deeper boundaries of awareness in which experiences can occur.  In response to infinite opportunity, life seems drawn to create more complex physical boundaries that can provide broader and deeper experiences. 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? In addition to chemical and biological functions, it also isolates, organizes, and maintains certain properties of consciousness — i.e. awareness and attention. This broader and more complex boundary provides new and higher level experiences.

If awareness provides the context for experience, and experience is all we can truly know, then our reality is experiential consciousness, not material. 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.

The evolutionary process of life constantly creates new experiences and adaptations. Perhaps, ultimately, we are a disruption of the flow of consciousness, which can become 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. In truth, we create each other, but the Other is much greater. McGilchrist suggests that consciousness doesn’t serve our needs, but rather we are in service of consciousness.

So, Who Are We?

McGilchrist begins The Matter of Things with this question. I found this statement resonated deeply with me. McGilchrist wrote:

“Adjusting our mode of attention can have far reaching and profound effects – indeed, one might call this striking ability “the attention effect,” as remarkable a phenomenon in its way as the recognition in quantum mechanics of how the act of observation alters what is being observed.”

Who are we? Perhaps the best general answer is, “I am my attention.  Everything else is given, is not mine.”