Quotes

“Alas,” said the mouse, “the world gets smaller every day. At first it was so wide that I ran along and was happy to see walls appearing to my right and left, but these high walls converged so quickly that I’m already in the last room, and there in the corner is the trap into which I must run.”

“But you’ve only got to run the other way,” said the cat, and ate it.

It’s hell writing and it’s hell not writing. The only tolerable state is having just written.

When we talk about the brain, we have to choose between one of two models. When we describe or try to understand anything whatsoever, we do it by likening it to something else we think we already understand better. There are only two models available for the brain: the machine and the person. In the end we don’t have a language specifically for hemispheres. We only have the language we developed for people or for machines. Using the machine model is an approximation: so is the person model. A single hemisphere is capable of sustaining human life – and therefore being involved in the processes of ‘wanting’, ‘aiming’, ‘desiring’, ‘liking’, having ‘values’ – this is no more of a distortion than pretending it is simply a machine. When we see two hemispheres in the same person treating things quite differently – clearly valuing and favouring some things more than others – as can be seen in split-brain subjects, for example, it is almost perverse not to allow one to speak of the hemisphere as at least having some of the qualities of the person that relies on it. The fact is that we don’t know what sort of thing the brain is – or even what a single neurone is. The neurone is often modelled as a wire or a chip: however it is a vastly complex self-regulating partially autonomous system, with tens of thousands of channels and ports interacting with one another and the whole context of the body in which it lies, manufacturing, transmitting – it isn’t fully modelled as a wire or chip. Much is left out. Still less is the whole brain fully modelled as a machine.

‘Plenty of things that are certain are mutually contradictory; plenty of things that are false contain no inconsistency. Contradiction is not a sign of falsehood, nor the lack of contradiction a sign of truth.’

I have some sympathy with McGilchrist’s claim that there is a growing tendency to decontextualise knowledge, to think of the parts as more important than the whole, which is often regarded as no more than the sum of the parts, to substitute information for knowledge. But this is only one side of the story. Another trend, equally important, is the downgrading of reason, the celebration of tradition, intuition and myth, the glorification of the holistic, the organic and the local. If we are forced to use McGilchrist’s terminology and imagery, we might say that the problem is not that the left hemisphere has control over the right but that there has been a tendency to develop both ‘left hemispheric thinking’ and ‘right hemispheric thinking’ in isolation and that both are, in isolation, equally troublesome. Or to put it anther way, the problem is increasingly that reason has become mechanistic, contextualisation anti-rational.

Artistic collaboration is a profoundly strange business. Do it right up to the hilt, as it were, and you and your partner will generate a third party. Some thoroughly other. And often one capable of things neither you nor the very reasonable gentleman seated opposite would even begin to consider. Who…is the third who walks beside us?

I take my cue from technology historian George Dyson, who argues that, from the perspective of the real world, the digital universe is accelerating rapidly but, from the view of the digital universe, the biological world is slllllooooowwwwwiiing doooowwwwn. Since we humans are amphibians and live in both universes, we are being torn by acceleration on one side and deceleration on the other. That sounds rough, but it’s actually pretty exciting.

Art, play and prayer are the only human activities that are totally meaningless and completely meaningful.

Knowingness, of course, is not knowledge—indeed, is the rebuttal of knowledge. Knowledge was what squares had, or thought they had, and they thought that it was the secret of life. Knowingness is a celebration of the conceit that what the squares knew, or thought they knew, was worthless.