As many others and I have written, the real world always wins, in the sense that no matter how much we think we are in control, outcomes result from whatever forces are at work out there. Objects will always fall down, not up, when we drop them. People will behave the way their brains tell them to, no matter how we think they should respond to our commands. Even proven scientific theories don’t work when the circumstances depart from those from which the theory was deduced. Newtonian mechanics do predict the path of a cannonball, but not how electrons in… Read More
Continue ReadingMore Synchronicity
From time to time, I have posted entries that superpose McGilchrist’s divided brain model on dichotomies that appear in others works. I have pointed to Thomas Kuhn’s two modes of science on several occasions. Today, my focus is on some writing from Humberto Maturana, whose work has been very influential on my thinking. Maturana, a Chilean biologist, with his co-worker, Francisco Varela, developed a theory of cognition (the Santiago theory) that claims to have overcome the Cartesian duality of mind/matter. The theory is too complicated and challenging to be elaborated here, but here is a brief summary from Wikipedia The… Read More
Continue ReadingMcGilchrist, Meaning, the Divided Brain, and History-making
I came to realize an important error in my writing, that of the sloppy way I have been using the important word, “Meaning.” I have generally used it to apply to the whole of situations that are being attended to primarily by the left brain hemisphere. Meaning can also be applied to individual words in the sense that we know the meaning of an isolated word, such as desk, or run, or over, or fast, or slowly. The conventional use of semantics refers to the essential meaning of individual or groups of words. Merriam Webster dictionary defines semantics as: “the… Read More
Continue ReadingPrejudice Starts at Birth
Evolution has endowed humans and many other animals with a brain that is bi-hemispheric. The great mass of neurons are contained in two separate halves. In his book, The Master and his Emissary, British psychiatrist and writer, Iain McGilchrist, argues that each side attends to the outside world in strikingly different ways that reflect their evolution. One half, the right side in humans, gathers information about the immediate world, a function derived from animals’ need to be alert for predators. The other half, the left side in humans, contains information necessary to perform essential tasks like feeding or gathering food.… Read More
Continue ReadingFinding Something Good in Covid-19
Everyday more bad news. Deaths around the world have reached into the hundreds of thousands. Economies have shut down, leaving millions unemployed. I was born in the middle of the Great Depression, and certainly never expected to see anything like that again. But here it is. One might ask of anything good can come out of this crisis. The best answer to that question that I read about is some return to normalcy. But when and how close to the old status quo is a big unknown. Fewer people are asking a related question, “Why should we return to the… Read More
Continue ReadingAnother Example of the Right/Left Brain Dichotomy
Some week ago, I pointed to the right/left dichotomy in the seminal book by Thomas Kuhn. In The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, he distinguishes between normal and “revolutionary events”. Normal science is what scientists do all the time. Every normal science investigation tries to add a little more knowledge, but always within what Kuhn called the paradigm. Paradigms are accepted theories, models, and methods that can stand up to peer review. Revolutionary events are paradigm-changing moments that occur when the current paradigm, say Newtonian mechanics, cannot explain some observation. Most of the time the inquirer gives up and moves on.… Read More
Continue ReadingThomas Kuhn, Iain McGilchrist, and the Divided-Brain
I am always looking for examples of dichotomous situations that add to the credibility of McGilchrist’s divided-brain model. The more instances that it explains something important, the more likely it will be accepted as a new, paradigmatic design model for attacking those “big,” persistent problems in our individual and cultural lives we are struggling to overcome. Last night, as I was in bed, trying to quiet my thoughts, one really good one popped up. I have been reading a series of essays by Richard Rorty, collected in his book, Philosophy and Social Hope (great read). One is devoted to a… Read More
Continue ReadingLiteracy and Domination
I have been reading Leonard Shlain’s fascinating book, The Alphabet Versus the Goddess: The Conflict between Word and Image. I wish I had encountered it before I had completed my now book. I have been referring to Iain McGilchrist for the last year or so as my primary source for the divided brain model, but Shlain has described the same dichotomy, using a completely different style, telling historic stories without adding any clinical data. I find his work just as compelling as McGilchrist’s. In this book, Shlain traces the many shifts between the two brain hemispheres that have occurred over… Read More
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