The Matter With Things: Our Brains, Our Delusions and the Unmaking of the World

One cannot explain a changing process by unchanging elements, though our extraordinary bias towards ‘thingness’, rather than forms or processes, encourages us to think that we could.

And Toynbee continues, later, specialisation has become an indispensable intellectual tool. But being indispensable is not the same thing as being all-sufficient … the farther that specialization is carried, the more of the meaning of the phenomena is left unplumbed in the unexplored gaps between the specialists’ deep but narrowly constricted borin

following a stroke affecting the speech area of the left frontal lobe, known as Broca’s area, improvement can result from temporarily disrupting the corresponding area of the right hemisphere.55 Such studies ‘are difficult to understand in terms of traditional ideas that homologous cortical regions co-operate with each other across the midline.’56

Brains and minds are living, constantly adapting, interconnected systems. And they are conscious. A brain disease or mental illness, then, is a change in a person’s whole way of being in the world.

trying to see what has to be an unconscious process is like ‘trying to turn up the gas quickly enough to see how the darkness looks’, as William James memorably put it.

‘It is not incumbent upon you to complete the work’, goes one rabbinical saying, ‘but neither are you at liberty to desist from it.’

science is a matter of probability and certitude a matter of ignorance.

The flow of the universe is always creative, though it has order, and is not random or chaotic; the world is always a matter of responsiveness, though it is equally not a free-for-all. It is a process of creative collaboration, of co-creation.

To quote Lewontin again: ‘An organism is less like a machine than it is like a language whose elements … take unique meaning from their context’. Analyses of individual words and their possibilities of meaning can be an essential first step: without a knowledge of the words, we cannot grasp the whole. But at the same time, it is only the meaning of