Thank you for offering a defence of philosophy along with your defence of the sciences!
"Yet the practice of science involves, whether you like it or not, being aware of what it is that you are doing – and equally not doing; and that is part of philosophy."
A great deal of the problems we are wrestling with today are downstream of the 'phasing out' of philosophy, something that I'm ashamed to say that academic philosophy has directly participated in by adopting as a requirement 'analytic' philosophy methods and rejecting (or simply eliding) 'continental' philosophy, a subject that Nietzsche scholar Babette Babich has tirelessly drawn attention towards. The moment analytic philosophers were content to be merely downstream of research scientists, they signed their own intellectual death warrant.
But I disagree with you that the sciences successfully side-lined 'value and purpose'. As my mentor Mary Midgley drew attention towards, "the idea of purpose never went away", it just became naturalised into various weakly-recognised philosophical mistakes encoded within certain scientific fields. As for values, almost all the major Culture War battlefields that intersect with scientific topics have become sites of rupture precisely because the sciences (and most egregiously, the medical sciences) have been busy 'smuggling' values over the allegedly Demilitarised Zones. As Hilary Putnam put the matter, facts and values are entangled... the sciences can no more stay out of values than the domain of religion can ignore facts.
I have written about these topics extensively at Stranger Worlds and elsewhere, but these problems in philosophy are wildly underestimated as contributors to our contemporary crisis. If you wonder why your productive metaphors for neurobiological patterns are met sometimes with incredibly narrow 'refutations', look no further than the cultural abandonment of philosophy, a field that we all require at certain times of our lives. For there is no worthwhile life for humans without language, and philosophy's art of 'conceptual plumbing' (as Midgley put it) is thus indispensable for everyone.
Yes, philosophy does indeed lie at the heart of the matter. To put it very briefly, Tommy Blanchard (the author of the target article here) cursorily dismissed the hemisphere hypothesis, essentially based upon a single paper by Michael Spezio. [1] However Spezio's critique of McGilchrist implicitly relies on a very particular set of philosophical assumptions. Yet these assumptions have been effectively questioned by many, among whom we may include Michael Levin, as well as Alex Gomez-Marin and Juan Arnau. [2] So Spezio's work, contra Blanchard, is certainly not the last word on this topic. Not by a long shot.
The theory of ‘attaching’ a narrative to an individual to dismiss it, is the usual boring witch burning.
Being alongside any of the sciences and or arts, the thing missing in most schools, is clearly the investment of being in the fold.
The only risk of course is becoming siloed in specialist language that gets a nod, but no repetition, because the narrative is parroted and not expressed in our own words and own skill of interpretation (improvisation or improvement).
As once riffed on by Mark Twain, there is nothing needed of memory if we already have honesty and the skill required.
But it’s much easier to tell a lie, to keep others happy.
Few are choosing forensics as a point of wonder and a vocational skill, conspiracy is all the rage and it pays well.
I wonder if you'll forgive a respectful shill of my own recent essay that faintly echoes your work on hemispheres: I argue that the print-mind itself - sequential, lines, analytical - is dying as the networked media ecology retrieved a second orality.
Hi Dr. Mcgilchrist, I am not familiar with your work, nor have read your books other than a memorable impression that I had of you during a zoom call that you had organized with Mattias Desmet, which inspired me to want to read and study your work. I suspect that such envious attempts in attacking both your thoughtfulness and the body of your life's work, will only be appreciated in the decades and centuries to come. Perhaps one day I can enjoy one of your lectures at Ralston :-) Warm regards, Paulina
Krauss, who incidentally was tight with Jeffrey Epstein, along with others who enjoy mainstream backing, states with lab-coated authority that we are insignificant because the universe is vast. Whenever I'm reminded that this is the dominant conceptual mode of our crumbling civilization, I chuckle at how throoughly and completely Monty Python "debunked" this POV half a lifetime ago.
As an individual, I observed the general low-minded, thoughtless discourse of Krauss and similar people and thought, "How can such people be in charge of important scientific projects that influence others' lives?" What a world we live in ... fortunately let's hope we can at least keep our livers.
Creativity and openness are integrity linked. So is openness and curiosity. While the scientific method relies on the rigor of the left brain, it cannot work without the curiosity of the right.
Perhaps the most unscientific thing about being left brain dominant, the laziness you point to, is the interpreter in the left hemisphere.
We can’t trust our thoughts, so it’s unscientific to make assumptions, or follow them, and not question them.
What strikes me reading both pieces is the shared assumption that the brain being discussed is a fixed substrate, that the question is purely one of how we interpret its architecture. But membrane composition, and specifically the fatty acid profile of neural membranes, is a modifiable variable that directly affects the signal fidelity of the system McGilchrist is describing. The quality of attention, the capacity for the kind of open, implicit, right-hemisphere attending he values, may itself be a downstream function of whether the physical substrate that attention runs on has been adequately composed. The philosophical argument and the biological substrate are not separate questions. One sets the conditions for the other.
Let's examine "the question more appropriate to part of a person, ‘how does each hemisphere attend to the world?’" This assumption here is that perception of the world happens separably on the scale of each hemisphere, in normal brains where the interconnections (neural, chemical, electro-magnetic, perhaps even quantum) are all in operation. Yet current research in neuroscience identifies networks which span the hemispheres, rather than each hemisphere operating as if it were a separate conscious being, or even a separate organ of sense. There are shifts in modality of mentality between, notably, the default mode network and the executive network, shifts mediated by the salience network. This had not been mapped out when the professor's books were written.
When the default mode network is most active, we're in the state that McGilchrist might consider right-hemisphere; and in executive mode, left-hemisphere. Yet these are not activations of one hemisphere or the other, but of complex networks which span the hemispheres. There are evidences that many people in our modern culture are often uncomfortable in the default mode, which is the state of mind in which daydreaming and lateral thinking occur most often. Being in the default mode is what, back in the 60s and 70s, got spoken of in pop psychology as being "right-brain." It wasn't really, physically, that. But it is and was a real thing, in terms of the brain networks more recently discovered and explored by neuroscience.
There's much to be said for our learning to shift between the modes more comfortably and productively. McGilchrist's books have much to suggest about this, if we shift to the more current neuroscience and reinterpret much of the evidence cited in this newer light. Neuroscience, in work largely done since he wrote his books, shows that we all alternate between periods where either the default mode or the executive (task-focused) network is predominant during the day, with the salience network involved in regulating the alteration. The subjective experience, the phenomenology of this, much resembles the "right-brain, left-brain" stories -- yet it's not, physiologically, actually a switching between hemispheres, but a switching between network activation across the whole brain.
Once the evidence has been mapped to these networks, and thus accounted for, McGilchrist's hemispheric hypothesis, if taken literally rather than as a convenient myth, faces Occam's Razor. His work still stands in large part, though, when remapped to the (not-so-hemispheric) findings of more recent neuroscience.
One might say that our brains work like a hierarchical brain system, where consciousness is the result of both 'bottom up' and 'top down' causation, and the highest integrative level or scale of opponent processing will provide us with the greatest explanatory power. That highest level appears to be at the level of the hemispheres, which are capable of sustaining the activity of two separate spheres of consciousness. The network approach, for all its other advantages, cannot claim this as easily.
To really understand the hemisphere hypothesis, we need to go all the way back to the notion of "opponent processing," which is necessary for a healthy biological brain (it's even important for many artificially designed systems too). This necessary friction may take many forms, but under the majority of circumstances it tends to simply lateralize in a way that corresponds with the hemispheres. No surprises here. There are exceptions, of course, because as an adaptive and neuroplastic system the brain is very capable of reinstantiating opponent processing following severe insult or injury. The "network approach" is a very general explanation, of which the hemisphere hypothesis is a special case. What McGilchrist has shown is that this special case is able to explicate some very specific phenomenological features that contravene the claims of philosophical eliminativists. Which means that eliminativists find it very uncomfortable.
So it's understandable why they would follow him halfway to his conclusions, but would prefer to part ways at some point. Everyone likes the network approach, but only some of us will also like the hemisphere hypothesis. The terminology of networks keeps us safely within a mechanistic paradigm. It also maintains a single sphere of consciousness that doesn't threaten us in any way. But the terminology of the hemisphere hypothesis introduces a relational paradigm. At the highest integrative level (or scale of opponent processing) of our hierarchically networked brain system we find "two separate spheres of consciousness." That's paradox, that's the coincidence of opposites, that's dual aspect monism, and that exposes us nakedly to the threat (or promise) of radical alterity. Beware all ye who enter here!
First off, I'm not a "philosophical eliminativist", despite your implication. Secondly, the hemispheric hypothesis is just another network approach, what with McGilchrist's concern with the bandwidth of the corpus callosum in his argument for the hemispheres operating separately. It's specifically to counter that argument that I introduced the strong evidence for unity, mediated by chemical, electro-magnetic, possibly photonic, and plausibly quantum means, as well as the neuronal network connections across the callosum which McGilchrist focuses on. The broader coordinations, obviously, are not of generally of the network type. Most are fields. There is also unity at the base of the brain, where Panksepp and Damasio find the origin of our sense of self and consciousness.
"Opponent processing", by the way, is a computationalist concept. Yes, there's lots of dualism among our myths, sun and moon and all that. But saying the sun and moon are opponents is silly; although perhaps not so silly with day and night; and disputable with good and evil.
Apologies Whit, I certainly wasn't intending to imply you were. Rather, I'm thinking of the more well known eliminativists (Dennett being the poster boy for that position).
Ah, Dennett. "Consciousness explained away". None of the brands of illusionism really make sense. Yet not a year goes by without a new book out proclaiming a grand discovery that we never see reality, but only hallucinate it somehow. If we aren't real, how can we hallucinate?
In any case there are differences over time in our conscious balance, which do have neural correlates which can be subject to objective scanning. So the question at hand is whether the neural correlate in, say, Schelling's case when he was making his most valuable observations was more a hemispheric difference, or more a difference in neural networks spanning the hemispheres -- if we could go back an put him in a scanner. This is an objective question. Given meditators who know how to shift focus appropriately, science could answer it, as to which hypothesis, hemispheric or default-mode, best fits the findings.
Schelling's great. McGilchrist did a great service in bringing his work back before us.
Dr McGilchrist continues to demonstrate not only his extraordinary capacity for scientific thinking but his even more extraordinary patience with mortals who are much lower on the scale of wisdom or Being. He is not required to defend his thesis with these left brain-captured proto-humans yet he takes precious time out of his limited remaining life to address them mercifully. I say Dr McGilchrist should, at this stage of his life and subsequent to his prodigious work, only concern himself with individuals and arguments that meet him on his level intellectually or otherwise. As Thomas Paine, one of my heroes, said, and it applies here "... it is folly to argue against determined hardness."
Great response, Ian. I read the post you referred to. What striked me reading both pieces is something beyond what's being discussed as a "static substance." As "architecture that doesn't evolve, breathe and adapts." I see the "philosophical argument" and the "biological substrate" as two questions that must be held in tension. Thank you for your amazing work. harold
I don't know about Tommy at all and have not read the complete post, but when I saw the pull quote that you had introduced, which was the basis of Matt Whiteley's response:
There are other attempts to make a fuss about the asymmetries in the brain, like Iain
>>McGilchrist’s speculations that the left hemisphere being dominant explains all of Western civilization’s ills. Like the older mythology tying creative versus analytic modes of thinking to specific hemispheres, these claims don’t line up with the evidence, rely on speculative psychological models with little evidence, and go far beyond the neurological facts.>>
As I had commented before, I thought that a prior analysis that you'd put regarding the book of Genesis and other Biblical beliefs regarding good and evil, was written by Claude - this paragraph is something that a model of Grok responded with when I was inquiring about your work a couple of weeks ago. Whether from Grok or Claude, this paragraph does not represent "original thinking."
Tommy Blanchard's irritable knee-jerk dismissal of Dr McGilchrist's work seems to me perfectly ordinary and quite in line with a familiar medical tradition: to reject as unimportant or possibly untrue everything that a given expert cannot explain and control.
That was how, for example, they dealt with the appendix, or the tonsils and adenoids. Purpose unknown, so can't be important: get rid of them. At least you can charge 50 guineas for each operation.
this is an entirely unreasonable standard to set for a criticism of the specific claims about lateralization. most of the body of work is, as you note yourself, basically independent of the empirical issue. it's not part of the criticism so why would it be required in order to make the critique?
Dear Professor McGilchrist,
Thank you for offering a defence of philosophy along with your defence of the sciences!
"Yet the practice of science involves, whether you like it or not, being aware of what it is that you are doing – and equally not doing; and that is part of philosophy."
A great deal of the problems we are wrestling with today are downstream of the 'phasing out' of philosophy, something that I'm ashamed to say that academic philosophy has directly participated in by adopting as a requirement 'analytic' philosophy methods and rejecting (or simply eliding) 'continental' philosophy, a subject that Nietzsche scholar Babette Babich has tirelessly drawn attention towards. The moment analytic philosophers were content to be merely downstream of research scientists, they signed their own intellectual death warrant.
But I disagree with you that the sciences successfully side-lined 'value and purpose'. As my mentor Mary Midgley drew attention towards, "the idea of purpose never went away", it just became naturalised into various weakly-recognised philosophical mistakes encoded within certain scientific fields. As for values, almost all the major Culture War battlefields that intersect with scientific topics have become sites of rupture precisely because the sciences (and most egregiously, the medical sciences) have been busy 'smuggling' values over the allegedly Demilitarised Zones. As Hilary Putnam put the matter, facts and values are entangled... the sciences can no more stay out of values than the domain of religion can ignore facts.
I have written about these topics extensively at Stranger Worlds and elsewhere, but these problems in philosophy are wildly underestimated as contributors to our contemporary crisis. If you wonder why your productive metaphors for neurobiological patterns are met sometimes with incredibly narrow 'refutations', look no further than the cultural abandonment of philosophy, a field that we all require at certain times of our lives. For there is no worthwhile life for humans without language, and philosophy's art of 'conceptual plumbing' (as Midgley put it) is thus indispensable for everyone.
With unlimited love,
Chris.
I completely agree, Chris. I don't think there is a word you have uttered here that I don't agree with.
Thank you!
Yes, philosophy does indeed lie at the heart of the matter. To put it very briefly, Tommy Blanchard (the author of the target article here) cursorily dismissed the hemisphere hypothesis, essentially based upon a single paper by Michael Spezio. [1] However Spezio's critique of McGilchrist implicitly relies on a very particular set of philosophical assumptions. Yet these assumptions have been effectively questioned by many, among whom we may include Michael Levin, as well as Alex Gomez-Marin and Juan Arnau. [2] So Spezio's work, contra Blanchard, is certainly not the last word on this topic. Not by a long shot.
[1] https://doi.org/10.1080/2153599X.2019.1604416
[2] https://philsci-archive.pitt.edu/16804/
My apologies you have to put up with such things.
The theory of ‘attaching’ a narrative to an individual to dismiss it, is the usual boring witch burning.
Being alongside any of the sciences and or arts, the thing missing in most schools, is clearly the investment of being in the fold.
The only risk of course is becoming siloed in specialist language that gets a nod, but no repetition, because the narrative is parroted and not expressed in our own words and own skill of interpretation (improvisation or improvement).
As once riffed on by Mark Twain, there is nothing needed of memory if we already have honesty and the skill required.
But it’s much easier to tell a lie, to keep others happy.
Few are choosing forensics as a point of wonder and a vocational skill, conspiracy is all the rage and it pays well.
Dear professor,
I wonder if you'll forgive a respectful shill of my own recent essay that faintly echoes your work on hemispheres: I argue that the print-mind itself - sequential, lines, analytical - is dying as the networked media ecology retrieved a second orality.
Cheers!
Dan Baker
https://mantecanaut.substack.com/p/the-sensorium?utm_source=share&utm_medium=android&r=6h1hg
Hi Dr. Mcgilchrist, I am not familiar with your work, nor have read your books other than a memorable impression that I had of you during a zoom call that you had organized with Mattias Desmet, which inspired me to want to read and study your work. I suspect that such envious attempts in attacking both your thoughtfulness and the body of your life's work, will only be appreciated in the decades and centuries to come. Perhaps one day I can enjoy one of your lectures at Ralston :-) Warm regards, Paulina
Dear Paulina,
Thank you so much, and I hasten to point out that i will be at Ralston in the first half of May - may we meet!
Iain
I wouls love that! I really am dreaming of attending that program :-). Enjoy Savannah! Paulina
Krauss, who incidentally was tight with Jeffrey Epstein, along with others who enjoy mainstream backing, states with lab-coated authority that we are insignificant because the universe is vast. Whenever I'm reminded that this is the dominant conceptual mode of our crumbling civilization, I chuckle at how throoughly and completely Monty Python "debunked" this POV half a lifetime ago.
"Yeah. Can we have your liver then?"
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BJyUCOvnjYs
As an individual, I observed the general low-minded, thoughtless discourse of Krauss and similar people and thought, "How can such people be in charge of important scientific projects that influence others' lives?" What a world we live in ... fortunately let's hope we can at least keep our livers.
Bloody brilliant! I aways try to impress on John Cleese that he is up there with the poets and philosophers .... and maybe beyond
Absolutely right. I loved his book.
Creativity and openness are integrity linked. So is openness and curiosity. While the scientific method relies on the rigor of the left brain, it cannot work without the curiosity of the right.
Perhaps the most unscientific thing about being left brain dominant, the laziness you point to, is the interpreter in the left hemisphere.
We can’t trust our thoughts, so it’s unscientific to make assumptions, or follow them, and not question them.
Peter Cook's riposte was to say: "I looked up at the stars and thought how little they mattered."
What strikes me reading both pieces is the shared assumption that the brain being discussed is a fixed substrate, that the question is purely one of how we interpret its architecture. But membrane composition, and specifically the fatty acid profile of neural membranes, is a modifiable variable that directly affects the signal fidelity of the system McGilchrist is describing. The quality of attention, the capacity for the kind of open, implicit, right-hemisphere attending he values, may itself be a downstream function of whether the physical substrate that attention runs on has been adequately composed. The philosophical argument and the biological substrate are not separate questions. One sets the conditions for the other.
Let's examine "the question more appropriate to part of a person, ‘how does each hemisphere attend to the world?’" This assumption here is that perception of the world happens separably on the scale of each hemisphere, in normal brains where the interconnections (neural, chemical, electro-magnetic, perhaps even quantum) are all in operation. Yet current research in neuroscience identifies networks which span the hemispheres, rather than each hemisphere operating as if it were a separate conscious being, or even a separate organ of sense. There are shifts in modality of mentality between, notably, the default mode network and the executive network, shifts mediated by the salience network. This had not been mapped out when the professor's books were written.
When the default mode network is most active, we're in the state that McGilchrist might consider right-hemisphere; and in executive mode, left-hemisphere. Yet these are not activations of one hemisphere or the other, but of complex networks which span the hemispheres. There are evidences that many people in our modern culture are often uncomfortable in the default mode, which is the state of mind in which daydreaming and lateral thinking occur most often. Being in the default mode is what, back in the 60s and 70s, got spoken of in pop psychology as being "right-brain." It wasn't really, physically, that. But it is and was a real thing, in terms of the brain networks more recently discovered and explored by neuroscience.
There's much to be said for our learning to shift between the modes more comfortably and productively. McGilchrist's books have much to suggest about this, if we shift to the more current neuroscience and reinterpret much of the evidence cited in this newer light. Neuroscience, in work largely done since he wrote his books, shows that we all alternate between periods where either the default mode or the executive (task-focused) network is predominant during the day, with the salience network involved in regulating the alteration. The subjective experience, the phenomenology of this, much resembles the "right-brain, left-brain" stories -- yet it's not, physiologically, actually a switching between hemispheres, but a switching between network activation across the whole brain.
Once the evidence has been mapped to these networks, and thus accounted for, McGilchrist's hemispheric hypothesis, if taken literally rather than as a convenient myth, faces Occam's Razor. His work still stands in large part, though, when remapped to the (not-so-hemispheric) findings of more recent neuroscience.
One might say that our brains work like a hierarchical brain system, where consciousness is the result of both 'bottom up' and 'top down' causation, and the highest integrative level or scale of opponent processing will provide us with the greatest explanatory power. That highest level appears to be at the level of the hemispheres, which are capable of sustaining the activity of two separate spheres of consciousness. The network approach, for all its other advantages, cannot claim this as easily.
https://groups.io/g/mcgilchrist-irregulars/message/1623
To really understand the hemisphere hypothesis, we need to go all the way back to the notion of "opponent processing," which is necessary for a healthy biological brain (it's even important for many artificially designed systems too). This necessary friction may take many forms, but under the majority of circumstances it tends to simply lateralize in a way that corresponds with the hemispheres. No surprises here. There are exceptions, of course, because as an adaptive and neuroplastic system the brain is very capable of reinstantiating opponent processing following severe insult or injury. The "network approach" is a very general explanation, of which the hemisphere hypothesis is a special case. What McGilchrist has shown is that this special case is able to explicate some very specific phenomenological features that contravene the claims of philosophical eliminativists. Which means that eliminativists find it very uncomfortable.
So it's understandable why they would follow him halfway to his conclusions, but would prefer to part ways at some point. Everyone likes the network approach, but only some of us will also like the hemisphere hypothesis. The terminology of networks keeps us safely within a mechanistic paradigm. It also maintains a single sphere of consciousness that doesn't threaten us in any way. But the terminology of the hemisphere hypothesis introduces a relational paradigm. At the highest integrative level (or scale of opponent processing) of our hierarchically networked brain system we find "two separate spheres of consciousness." That's paradox, that's the coincidence of opposites, that's dual aspect monism, and that exposes us nakedly to the threat (or promise) of radical alterity. Beware all ye who enter here!
First off, I'm not a "philosophical eliminativist", despite your implication. Secondly, the hemispheric hypothesis is just another network approach, what with McGilchrist's concern with the bandwidth of the corpus callosum in his argument for the hemispheres operating separately. It's specifically to counter that argument that I introduced the strong evidence for unity, mediated by chemical, electro-magnetic, possibly photonic, and plausibly quantum means, as well as the neuronal network connections across the callosum which McGilchrist focuses on. The broader coordinations, obviously, are not of generally of the network type. Most are fields. There is also unity at the base of the brain, where Panksepp and Damasio find the origin of our sense of self and consciousness.
"Opponent processing", by the way, is a computationalist concept. Yes, there's lots of dualism among our myths, sun and moon and all that. But saying the sun and moon are opponents is silly; although perhaps not so silly with day and night; and disputable with good and evil.
Apologies Whit, I certainly wasn't intending to imply you were. Rather, I'm thinking of the more well known eliminativists (Dennett being the poster boy for that position).
Ah, Dennett. "Consciousness explained away". None of the brands of illusionism really make sense. Yet not a year goes by without a new book out proclaiming a grand discovery that we never see reality, but only hallucinate it somehow. If we aren't real, how can we hallucinate?
In any case there are differences over time in our conscious balance, which do have neural correlates which can be subject to objective scanning. So the question at hand is whether the neural correlate in, say, Schelling's case when he was making his most valuable observations was more a hemispheric difference, or more a difference in neural networks spanning the hemispheres -- if we could go back an put him in a scanner. This is an objective question. Given meditators who know how to shift focus appropriately, science could answer it, as to which hypothesis, hemispheric or default-mode, best fits the findings.
Schelling's great. McGilchrist did a great service in bringing his work back before us.
Dr McGilchrist continues to demonstrate not only his extraordinary capacity for scientific thinking but his even more extraordinary patience with mortals who are much lower on the scale of wisdom or Being. He is not required to defend his thesis with these left brain-captured proto-humans yet he takes precious time out of his limited remaining life to address them mercifully. I say Dr McGilchrist should, at this stage of his life and subsequent to his prodigious work, only concern himself with individuals and arguments that meet him on his level intellectually or otherwise. As Thomas Paine, one of my heroes, said, and it applies here "... it is folly to argue against determined hardness."
Wow! Can he write!
“If a child asked me whether I have a brain, I would not say ‘I know that I have one.’ I would say ‘Of course I have one.’”
— On Certainty, §159 Wittgenstein
Great response, Ian. I read the post you referred to. What striked me reading both pieces is something beyond what's being discussed as a "static substance." As "architecture that doesn't evolve, breathe and adapts." I see the "philosophical argument" and the "biological substrate" as two questions that must be held in tension. Thank you for your amazing work. harold
I don't know about Tommy at all and have not read the complete post, but when I saw the pull quote that you had introduced, which was the basis of Matt Whiteley's response:
There are other attempts to make a fuss about the asymmetries in the brain, like Iain
>>McGilchrist’s speculations that the left hemisphere being dominant explains all of Western civilization’s ills. Like the older mythology tying creative versus analytic modes of thinking to specific hemispheres, these claims don’t line up with the evidence, rely on speculative psychological models with little evidence, and go far beyond the neurological facts.>>
As I had commented before, I thought that a prior analysis that you'd put regarding the book of Genesis and other Biblical beliefs regarding good and evil, was written by Claude - this paragraph is something that a model of Grok responded with when I was inquiring about your work a couple of weeks ago. Whether from Grok or Claude, this paragraph does not represent "original thinking."
Tommy Blanchard's irritable knee-jerk dismissal of Dr McGilchrist's work seems to me perfectly ordinary and quite in line with a familiar medical tradition: to reject as unimportant or possibly untrue everything that a given expert cannot explain and control.
That was how, for example, they dealt with the appendix, or the tonsils and adenoids. Purpose unknown, so can't be important: get rid of them. At least you can charge 50 guineas for each operation.
diamonds are pollution
this is an entirely unreasonable standard to set for a criticism of the specific claims about lateralization. most of the body of work is, as you note yourself, basically independent of the empirical issue. it's not part of the criticism so why would it be required in order to make the critique?
Perfect day to post😊
1st April
#ProfoundFools
🌀🤸♀️🌀
ALL FOOLS DAY
As Real as you are.
🌀🌊🐬
This is the Day; as free as the sky
When high becomes low and low becomes high
The Fool Profound is OUTSIDE THE BOX
{throw open the windows.. dismantle the clocks}
A true Corpus Callosum Day
Profound Fools will Ride
the Paul Revere (save-the-day) Bridge 'cross the Great Divide
Make New Sense from Nonsense
Turn Rules on their Head
Have Thoughts to surprise the refrain thoughts (inbred)
All Fools is to slice through
ossification
infuse and imbue with Wow {scintillation}
Tumble Me Tumble Me
clown me around
make dogmeat of doldrums
All Fools Profound
—CCR McF—
💫