Notes on McGilchrist re Religion & Sprituality
- on February 21st, 2020, I found a new paper!
- Engaging Iain McGilchrist: Ascetical practice, brain lateralization, and philosophy of mind (paywalled)
- Wesley J. Wildman edited a paper consisting of a series of questions & critiques of McGilchrist's work, and responses from McGilchrist.
- Contents of this paper
- Introduction by Wildman (p1-6)
- TARGET ARTICLE: Cerebral lateralization and religion: a phenomenological approach by Iain McGilchrist
- (starts on page 7, and is largely what I'm taking notes on here)
- 1. Introduction
- 1.1. The rationale of this paper at the phenomenological level
- 1.2. The hemisphere hypothesis
- 2. Implications of right hemisphere phenomenology for the religious life
- A. Foundational or metaphysical issues
- 1. The "Other"
- 2. "Betweenness"
- 3. Paradox
- 4. Causation
- 5. Embodiment
- B. Epistemological issues
- 1. Knowledge, belief and truth
- 2. The implicit and mythos v the explicit and logos
- 3. Meditation and mindfulness
- 4. Negation
- 5. "Active passivity"
- C. Ethical issues
- 1. The self
- 2. Necessary vulnerability
- 3. The dark side
- 4. Growth through suffering
- 5. Healing
- 3. Implications of left hemisphere phenomenology for the religious life
- 4. Conclusion
- COMMENTARIES
- Cerebral lateralization and religion: the roles of ritual and the DMN by Candace S. Alcorta
- Where in the brain does Buddhism come from? Critical thoughts regarding Iain McGilchrist's reflections on religion by Dan Arnold
- Brain laterality and religious awareness by John Cottingham
- McGilchrist's hemispheric homunculi by Daniel De Haan
- The relationship of lateralization and phenomenology to neural circuits by Prantik Kundu and Derek Alexander Smith
- McGilchrist and hemisphere lateralization: a neuroscientific and metaanalytic assessment by Michael Spezio
- A response to commentators by Iain McGilchrist
- Concluding eirenic (and mostly“unscientific”) postscript by Sarah Coakley
- Overall impression
- 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
- Notes on specific sections
- There's a section in 1.2. The hemisphere hypothesis that features headline differences, which I'm inclined to just make into a twitter thread. Quoted here, with sources hidden in sub-bullets:
- Some of the headline differences, presented very much in shorthand form for present purposes, are
- 1. The LH is concerned with manipulation of the environment; the RH is concerned with under-standing the environment as a whole and how to relate to it
- (e.g., Desmedt,1977; Gitelman et al.,1996; Goebel et al.,1997).
- 2. The RH is better at detecting and dealing with novel stimuli, whatever the modality; as they become more familiar they are processed by the LH. The RH deals with information from the periphery or background; the LH deals preferentially with what is central and in the foreground.
- (Goldberg & Costa, 1981), (Ellis, Jordan, & Sullivan,2006; Schutz,2005)
- 3. The LH aims to narrow things down to a certainty, while the RH opens them up into possibility.The RH is able to sustain ambiguity and the holding together of information that appears to have contrary implications, without having to make an“either/or”decision, and to collapseit, as the LH tends to do, into a certainty. VS Ramachandran calls the RH the“devil’s advocate”, since it acts as an “anomaly detector,” on the look-out for what might be erroneously assumed by the LH to be familiar. Indeed, its style is altogether more tentative.
- (e.g., Brownell, Simpson, Bihrle, Potter, & Gardner,1990; Richards & Chiarello,1997; Tucker & Williamson,1984), (Ramachandran,1994), (Cutting,1997; Gazzaniga & LeDoux,1978)
- 4. The LH tends to see things as isolated, discrete, fragmentary, where the RH tends to see things as interconnected wholes.
- (e.g., Navon,1977; Nebes,1978; Tucker,1992; Zaidel,1985)
- 5. The LH’s world tends towards fixity, and stasis, whereas that of the RH tends towards change and flow. All things animate and inanimate—molecules, crystals, cells, cultures and human societies—depend on a proper balance of these properties.
- (Bender, Feldman, & Sobin,1968; Corballis,1996; Corballis, Boyd, Schulze, & Ruther-ford,1998; Ritsema & Murphy,2007; Schwartz, Assal, Valenza, Seghier, & Vuilleumier,2005)
- 6. The LH tends to see things as put together mechanically from pieces, and sees the parts, rather than the complex whole that the RH sees.
- (Anderson,1990; Bradshaw & Nettleton,1981,1983;Gainotti,2000; Hécaen & de Ajuriaguerra,1952)
- 7. Machines and tools are alone coded in the LH, and the inanimate is preferen-tially coded in the LH, while the animate is coded by both hemispheres, though preferentially by the RH.
- (Gainotti,2002), (Price & Friston,2002)
- 8. The LH tends to see things as explicit and decontextualized, whereas the RH tends to see them as implicit and embedded in a context. The LH fails to understand metaphor, myth, irony, tone of voice, jokes and poetry, and takes meaning literally.
- (Alexander, Benson, & Stuss,1989; Federmeier & Kutas,1999; Heilman, Scholes, & Watson,1975;Kinsbourne,1988), (Anaki, Faust, &Kravetz,1988a,1988b; Kaplan, Brownell, Jacobs, & Gardner,1990; Shamay-Tsoory, Tomer, &Aharon-Peretz,2005; Shammi & Stuss,1999; Winner & Gardner,1977)
- 9. The RH understands narrative: the LH, if offered a story whose episodes are taken out of order, will regroup them so as to classify similar episodes together, rather than reconstruct them in the order that has human meaning.
- (Hough,1990; Schneiderman, Murasugi, & Saddy,1992), (McNeill,1992, pp. 345–52)
- 10. Both hemispheres need to categorize, but do so according to different strategies. The LH tends to categorize using the presence or absence of a particular feature; the RH tends to do so by reference to unique exemplars, using a “family resemblance” approach. Superordinate (more general) categories are dealt with preferentially by the LH, subordinate (more fine-grained) categories by the RH. Damage to the RH can lead to a loss of the sense of uniqueness or the capacity to recognize individuals.
- (Wittgenstein,1967), (Burgund & Marsolek,2000; Laeng, Zarrinpar, & Kosslyn,2003), (Grossman,1981; Laeng et al.,2003), (e.g., Cutting,1997)
- 11. The RH contains the body image (not just a visual image, but a multimodal schema of the body as a whole). The RH has richer connections with the limbic system, the hypothalamic–pituitary–adrenal axis and the body generally, and tends to process in a more embodied, less abstract fashion than the LH. It is also superior at reading body language and emotion expressed in the face or voice.
- (Joseph,1988), (e.g., Spence, Shapiro, & Zaidel,1996; Yokoyama,Jennings, Ackles, Hood, & Boller,1987), (e.g., Blonder, Bowers, & Heilman,1991; Narumoto,Okada, Sadato, Fukui, & Yonekura,2001)
- 12. The LH is superior for fine analytic sequencing and has a larger vocabulary and more complex syntax than the RH. Pragmatics, the ability to understand the overall import of an utterance in context, is a RH function. Understanding prosody, the musical aspect of language, its tone, inflection, etc., depends, like music itself to a very large extent, on the RH.
- (Querné, Eustache, & Faure,2000), (e.g., Foldi,1987), (Blonder et al.,1991).
- 13. The RH is essential for“theory of mind”. It is better able to understand an other’s point of view, and to empathize. It makes moral judgments on the basis of the intention of the doer, the LH on the basis of the consequences of the deed. The LH tends to utilitarianism, the RH to deontology.
- (e.g., Happé, Brownell, & Winner,1999; McCabe,Houser, Ryan, Smith, & Trouard,2001; Stone, Baron-Cohen, Calder, Keane, & Young,2003), (Decety & Chaminade,2003; Drake & Bingham,1985), (Miller et al.,2010; Young, Camprodon, Hauser, Pascual-Leone, & Saxe,2010)
- 14. In general terms, both emotional receptivity and expressivity are greater in the RH.
- (e.g., Borod et al.,1990; Suberi & McKeever,1977), (eg Sackeim et al.,1982)
- 15. The sense of beauty is preponderantly dependent on the RH.
- (Di Dio, Macaluso, & Rizzolatti,2007; Habib,1986; Nadal, Munar, Capó, Rosselló, & Cela-Conde,2008; Vartanian & Goel,2004)
- 16. The RH is better at seeing things as they are preconceptually—fresh, unique, embodied and as they“presence” to us. The left, then, sees things as they are “re-presented,” literally “present again” after the fact, as already familiar abstractions or signs. In a sense, the LH is the hemisphere of theory, the RH that of experience; the LH that of the map, the RH that of the terrain.
- ()presence = Heidegger, anwesen), (Bellugi, Poizner,& Klima,1983; Goldberg,2001; Goldberg & Costa,1981)
- 17. The LH is, unreasonably optimistic, and it lacks insight into its limitations. The RH is more realistic, but tends towards the pessimistic.
- (Drake & Bingham,1985; Schacter, Glisky, & McGlynn,1990; Schutz,2005; Stuss,1991)
- > The LH aims to narrow things down to a certainty, while the RH opens them up into possibility.
- This relates very precisely to Finite & Infinite Games by James Carse
- p15 "Seriousness is always related to roles, or abstractions. [...] To be playful is not to be trivial or frivolous, or to act as though nothing of consequence will happen. On the contrary, when we are playful with each other we relate as free persons, and the relationship is open to surprise; everything that happens is of consequence. It is, in fact, seriousness that closes itself to consequence, for seriousness is a dread of the unpredictable outcome of open possibility. To be serious is to press for a specified conclusion. To be playful is to allow for possibility whatever the cost to oneself."
- > Belief does imply truth, but historically truth was no more propositional than belief. The word “true” brings us to an encounter, a relationship: like the German treu (faithful), with which it is cognate, it is related to “trust,” and is fundamentally a matter of what one trusts or believes. The Latin word verum (true) is cognate with a Sanskrit word meaning to choose or believe: like one's loved one, the one in whom one chooses to believe and place one's trust, to whom one is true. We still speak of two surfaces that “marry” well as being true. Fidelity is implicit in the concept.
- Etymology maps the slippage of thought. What it shows in this case is three revealing shifts. First, the words "truth" and "belief" used to describe a reverberative or two-directional relationship, in which each party is "“re-sponsible" for the fit. Truth and belief are no longer relational, but have become propositional. The causation is no longer distributed, but linear. Second, it suggests that truth and belief used to be embodied actions or processes, involving commitment, not (as they are now conceived) detached, disembodied "things." Third, as processes, truth and belief derived their value from the context, could never be absolute, and were never single or static. The idea of truth as independent of us, immutable and certain, is a recent invention.
- (this relates to Aro Buddhism podcast Aro03: Part 1 (Q&A Series 1))
- where Ngakpa Rinpoche talks about why he refers to the "Four Certainties" instead of the "Four Noble Truths"
- A few paragraphs on p17-18 about meditation & mindfulness.
- Basically what I would expect McGilchrist to write about this, though it's still cool to see it written.
- He talks about the role of both hemispheres, the sense that "the desired state of mind involves opening up to the RH’s way of being", and methological problems with imagining due to inhibitory activity as well as mastery meaning less activity not more.