Iain McGilchrist ~ Active Inference Insights 023 ~ Hemispheric Lateralisation, Relationality, Being 

Anyone else autonomously developing a working example of Iain's 'elevator speech' from watching that many of his interviews in order somehow to proliferate all this? Asking for a friend.

There is a way that Friston's free energy principle of mind/brain is VERY complementary to McGilchrist's hemisphere hypothesis. It may be helpful for Iain and Karl to realise this, and Darius gives us an important clue... 1:43:22 Darius: "When we receive the data from the world, which is ultimately always divergent from our predictions, we either update our model of the world (strategy A) or we act to change the world so as to make that sense data more concordant with our generative model (strategy B). In principle, this is a updating of the Helmholtzian notion of perception as inference but it includes action. And I think that's the great part of it, which is that we, in many ways, enslave the World by changing it in accordance with our preferences (strategy B)." So beautifully said, Darius. And to help Iain grasp and feel the significance, it may help to consider that the right hemisphere may allow us strategy A - to update our model to better conform with(understand) the world as it is. On the other hand, forcing change on the World so that it better fits our model (strategy B) is clearly the product of left hemisphere capacity for "power and control". These are the two main strategies our bihemispheric brain/minds provide for minimising brain entropy (free energy or surpisal), though there are others which can be associated with pathology. A Schizophenic, for example, uses maladaptive defence mechanisms (denial, projection, etc...) to reduce surprisal. In this case either deformed perception (hallucinations) or a deformed model of reality (delusions) can minimize the mismatch between predicted and actual sensory input. Because the distorted perception or model of the world are entirely internal, with no increase in understanding or ability to force the world to do our bidding, these strategies reduce overall function (mental illness). Now, to extend this fusion of Friston and McGilchrist, in which our dual brain hemispheres offer these two contrasting strategies (A & B) for minimising free energy, this is my take. Our right hemisphere provides the ability to better understand (internally adapt) to the world as it is - in particular, our relationships with individual living beings and collectives as they are. Strategy A affords adaptive awareness of the syntropic potential to join with other living entities to form a greater harmony, complexity, intelligence and beauty. The need for freedom (choice) is of central importance to syntropy. Healthy, intelligent, living systems are autopetic (self-assembled, self-generated, self-regulated), and this essential internal directedness is the opposite of external control. The predictible generativity that results from such uncoerced, cooperative freedom means that the potentiality of strategy A is inherently uncertain and imprecise in some ways. There is paradox here that reminds me of Tolstoy's quip that every happy family is happy in the same way (syntropy and health embody a dynamic stability that is familiar, knowable and predicible, less surprisal), but every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way (entropy and illness are chaotic and unpredictible, more suprisal). Happy families and healthy sustems also embody greater potentiality than unhealthy ones. The left hemisphere provides the ability to apply power and control to coerce, break apart or consume other entities into being useful to our narrow, individual goals. Strategy B affords awareness of entropic potential, which allows the desired degradation of an unfamiliar entity to be predictibly precise (not free and unpredictible). This inevitably reduces the entity's potentiality and also creates unanticipated and unwanted entropic "externalities". Darius' "enslavement" well captures the limitations of strategy B. Taken together, Friston's biophysical and McGilchrist's anatomic/phenomenologic insights help us better appreciate the nature of brain/mind and the human condition - our contrasting awareness of, and capacity for, a syntropic flow of events versus an entropic flow of events. Such dual awareness could be anticipated for the brains of animals - organisms with capacity for growth and reproduction (syntropy) but who rely on catabolism for energy (entropy). This essential thermodynamic (infodynamic?) duality distinguishes us from the dominant syntropic flow of the plant kingdom. It may also be central to solving the metacrisis of industrial civilization, which McGilchrist suggests is due to modern man's hypertrophied left-brain obsession with power, control, consumption, hierarchy, language and technology. The huge challenge we face for transtioning our entropic civilization (aka "the beast"), and the wonderous opportunity presented to us for understanding and harmonising with the living world, may well involve the thoughtful restraint of our left brain capacity for power and control and the unleashing of our right-brain capacity for syntropic culture. Humans have done so in the past, with many examples from around the world. The abberation is our current culture and mindset, with excessive reliance on strategy B using money and technology. The metamorpnosis of a hungry caterpillar consumer to a butterfly pollinator provides a lovely metaphor for transition from entropic anthropocene to syntropic anthropocene. May it be so. Thank you both for sharing your thnought provoking dialogue!

Thank you so much. It’s an honor learning from such a knowledgeable person about hemispheric interactions. As I have performed many QEEG/brain maps, it seems that I can now better comprehend the findings in relation to brain wave hemispheric findings and actualized behavior. Which of course greatly helps with treatment. I feel I have a better vocabulary to explain what I intuitively perceived, but couldn’t explain. Bravisimo!

What I am grateful to Iain about is not his enormous wealth of knowledge bringing about the publications of, "The Master and his Emissary and "A Matter of Things" but the enormity of this left brain enterprise guided and manifested by a delightful and playful Unknowing spirit, which somehow lives between the words, escapes the script and informs without intending to do so and thus brings about its Art through keys struck beyond the visible or apparent.

Excellent!

Thank you for the brilliant conversation, one of the best ever on You Tube. I watched it at intervals because I found my awareness triggered into all new spaces in the awareness phenomenological state space that I then wanted to explore on my own for a while. I have one request for Darius and Dr. McGilchrist; could the two of you do a three way conversation with Thomas Metzinger; bringing your insights together with his work with meditative states in his new book, "The Elephant and the Blind"?

Iain states the insight from his heroic efforts rather innocently with "the way to think about this in the abstract," without delivering the reality-wise proviso, "but don't go falling in love with the feeling of the abstract being real," that creates humanity’s multilingual, consensus-reality versions of reality, and our species generational confusion about the nature of language and reality. They say that our vocation tends to shape our worldview and I wonder if there any of those 3am moments when Iain contemplates his career choice of literary critique & Kafka's much loved critique of the human condition, when Gregor thinks he sees the sun at 3am, before drawing a final breath? A very clever story that tends to remind me of the reality-wise sayings "wisdom is more excellent for those who see the sun," and the Buddhist perception puzzle, "don't mistake your finger for the moon." While a more concise statement about the insights that will inevitably flow from Iain's heroic efforts to slay the Dragon of Abstracted Reality is, "The delusion is extraordinary by which we exalt language above nature. Making language the expositor of nature, instead of making nature the expositor of language," Alexander B Johnson, A TREATISE ON LANGUAGE. Insight inference; the vast majority of humanity understands next to nothing about the 'unseen' nature of being human and through the auto-suggestion power of memory, comes to believe that their autobiographical memory sense-of-Self, actually IS their Reality, which neuroscience research continues to debunk. While Johnson's treatise includes the comment "no words can reveal to me what my eyes have not seen," which can be contemplated with the thought experiment of looking at any object your eyes can see right now, and asking yourself if using any other word you can possibly 'imagine' to name the object will alter the object's reality or what your innate sight is actually seeing? After reading Iain's Master - Emissary hypothesis and trying to develop a visceral 'level' understanding of its insights into the representational system we call language, and his brief mention of 'the primacy of affect' I was left frustrated by TMWT's failure to explore this subconscious domain of human motivation, yet have continued to believe that the work lays the 'intellectual' foundation for a global reevaluation of humanity’s communication biased consciousness. And as Carl Jung so aptly pointed out "until you make the subconscious conscious, it will direct your life and you will call it fate." He was like an ancient prophet saying, "repent, the kingdom of Heaven is at hand," if you'd just stop perceiving it so abstractly, you poor dimwitted fools. While, as Albert Einstein so aptly pointed out, in the context of the 'future of humanity' conference in October of this abstracted sense-of-reality we name a year, "no problem can be solved from the same level of consciousness that created it."

There is no limit without determinability, no determinability without limit.

The limit is not the eNd

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Every comment gets a like. Oh and thanks for a fantastic discussion\sharing. Cheers from a retired digga down under.

Thank you both. Be like water ☯🙏 Just to be clear, that's Bruce Lee no' me 😉

My schizophrenic artist friend who has shown his paintings and poetry in NY is jealous (without deliberately showing it) of other's success when they show success. He has no idea how his shows are in galleries. A true outsider artist. Yet the latest Venice Biennale is a piss-take on outsider artists. They (curators) use a post-postmodern argument (a return to sincerity, authenticity, and a re-engagement with grand narratives and universal truths) to make their post-colonial argument. Making the art of the Indigenous the outsider. As the spokesperson argued, 'it is whoever shouts the loudest', as they stood in a hypercolourised gallery space of their own ego. Whatever happened to the dirty colours that make pure colours shine? Today the pure colours drown out the mud in which lilies grow. From my point of view, neither the outsider nor contemporary Indigenous art, are beautiful. But they are recognised as art today. Flow states? The first day as a professional chef, 'you are a snob now drop everything you know and do as necessary in the present moment'.

The right hemisphere has the capacity to inhibit. This goes along with and is part and parcel of the parasympathetic ventral vagus which has the capacity depending upon Neuroception (exogenous) or Interoception ; (endogenous) really work in concert, bi laterally. registering, accessing, perceiving. The left brain sympathetically adrenally mobilizes for apprehension or execution for material object-acquisition or repetitive compartmentalized formula-making or ideation. When doing so the ventral brake is disinhibited and allows for metabolic increase and thus sympathetic adrenal action (ie, defensive fight/flight responses). When the ventral vagal brake (right brain) is if you will put back on (ie in parasympathetic rest and restoration, calm) then the left brain sympathetic nervous system is mobilized no longer for defensive fight/flight but for play and joy.

Yes consciousness can (100%) have Mathematical explanation, because Mathematics is a modeling system for transformations (consciousness is a system of transformations and equalibrium tracking). The mathematical explanation for consciousness might be large, but it fundamentally can be described by mathematics. Our universe really is a computation that obeys mathematical rules, math is king, queen, and scribe of the natural world.