February 22nd, 2020
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Notes on McGilchrist re Religion & Sprituality
- February 22nd, 2020 @ 20:43 - I've just read TARGET ARTICLE: Cerebral lateralization and religion: a phenomenological approach by Iain McGilchrist, as well as most of the Concluding eirenic (and mostly“unscientific”) postscript by Sarah Coakley
- I'm struck with some exciting thoughts here which is that I feel like I'm starting to see my own perspective on the brain hemispheres not just expand on McGilchrist's but diverge from it.
- I've had basically a year of not having a sense of critique in relation to what he's done, except for "not actionable enough" (but various other writing seems to fill in these gaps, from Vajrayana Buddhist stuff to Finite & Infinite Games by James Carse)
- But now, not even having read the critiques or McGilchrist's responses but just seeing Sarah Coakley's summary, I have a sense of "Oh, McGilchrist does seem to be equivocating here (re McGilchrist's hemispheric homunculi by Daniel De Haan) and I think I would actually just bite the bullet"
- specifically, my sense is that yes, the left & right hemisphere just are their own experiencers, so they have separate experience, and also, they're super fucking intertwingled because not only do they share a bunch of external sensory data but they have a fucking corpus callosum wiring them together
- I still don't know how to answer the question about how there sort of appears to be a unified me despite this, but honestly I'm no closer to answering that question if I don't bite this bullet :P
- like imagine ridiculously high-quality brain implants that create a corpus-callosum-level superhighway between your brain and your friend's brain
- that wouldn't destroy you being a valid experiencer, but it would also make it really hard to disintertwingle your experience from your friend's