The Master and His Emissary

language's role is in giving command over the world, particularly those parts that are not present spatially or temporally, a world that in the process is transformed from the ‘I–thou’ world of music (and the right hemisphere) to the ‘I–it’ world of words (and the left hemisphere).

Metaphoric thinking is fundamental to our understanding of the world, because it is the only way in which understanding can reach outside the system of signs to life itself. It is what links language to life.

Any one thing can be understood only in terms of another thing, and ultimately that must come down to a something that is experienced, outside the system of signs (i.e. by the body).

why there is something rather than nothing

We can inspect the brain only ‘from the outside’ (even when we are probing its innermost reaches), it is true: but we can inspect the mind only ‘from within’

Problems arising from whether we see the world as a process, always in flux, or as a series of static, finished, entities,

things are always embedded in a context of relation with other things that alter them,

of the fact that a figure in a grotesque gorilla suit walks into the middle of the mêlée, turns to face the camera, beats his chest with his fists, dances a jig, and strolls nonchalantly out the other side

The right hemisphere sees the lower values as deriving their power from the higher ones which they serve; the left hemisphere is reductionist, and accounts for higher values by reference to lower values, its

This acting ‘as if’ is not a sort of cop-out, an admission that ‘really’ one does not believe what one pretends to believe. Quite the opposite: as Hans Vaihinger understood, all knowledge, particularly scientific knowledge, is no more than an acting ‘as if’ certain models were, for the time being, true.155