Matter with Things

Matter with Things: Our Brain, Our Delusions and the Unmaking of the World
by Iain McGilchrist

I’m hooked, this is one of the most profound books I’ve come across!
My 2022 summer (and probably until next summer) will be spent reading this 2,000 page tome I just started this week. My plan is to post excerpts I find particularly relevant on this page. Please join me in experiencing the wonders of this profound book!

Notes from the Introduction

The Left Brain (Ap-prehend) vs the Right Brain (Com-prehend)
“The brain is, importantly, divided into two hemispheres: you could say, to sum up a vastly complex matter in a phrase, that the brain’s left hemisphere is designed to help us ap-prehend – and thus manipulate – the world; the right hemisphere to com-prehend it – see it all for what it is. The problem is that the very brain mechanisms which succeed in simplifying the world so as to subject it to our control militate against a true understanding of it.”

The Left Brain (Re-presents) from the Right Brain (Presences)
“we live no longer in the presence of the world, but rather in a re-presentation of it. The significance of that is that the left hemisphere’s task is to ‘re-present’ what first ‘presences’ to the right hemisphere.”

Good Bye to Cherished Assumptions
“Stepping out of this world-picture and into the world, stepping out of suspended animation and back into life, will involve inverting many of our perhaps cherished assumptions.”

Simplifying May Result in Lost Meaning
“The explicit is not more fully real than the implicit. It is merely the limit case of the implicit, with much of its vital meaning sheared off: narrowed down and ‘finalised’. The literal is not more real than the metaphorical: it is merely the limit case of the metaphorical, in which the wealth of meaning is collapsed into a 1:1 correspondence for a useful, temporary, purpose.”

Is everything Predetermined?
“true randomness is a theoretical construct that does not exist.”

Reductionism
“simplicity represents a special case of complexity, achieved by cleaving off and disregarding almost all of the vast reality that surrounds whatever it is we are for the moment modelling as simple”

The Key – The Right and Left Hemispheres
“the hemisphere hypothesis casts a very revealing new light on those disputes and strongly suggests that the view that has prevailed – a view heavily indebted to a belief in reductionism – very seriously distorts the evidence of the nature of reality that is before our eyes if only we would attend to it fully.”

Reality Out There (ROT)?
“the hemisphere hypothesis casts a very revealing new light on those disputes and strongly suggests that the view that has prevailed – a view heavily indebted to a belief in reductionism – very seriously distorts the evidence of the nature of reality that is before our eyes if only we would attend to it fully.”

Science
“Two important truths, then: science cannot tell us everything; but what science can tell us is pure gold.”

Truth
“I can’t make you see what I experience as the truth. I can never convince you of a point of view unless you already, at some level, get it.”

To Understand
“The experience of understanding involves a shift from what seems initially chaotic or formless, to a coherent stable form or picture, a Gestalt – or from an existing Gestalt to a new and better one, that seems richer than the one it replaces.”

“The idea of a Gestalt is central to this book: by it I mean the form of a whole that cannot be reduced to parts without the loss of something essential to its nature.”