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

Reductionism envisages a universe of things – and simply material things at that. How these things are related is viewed as a secondary matter. However, I suggest that relationships are primary, more foundational than the things related: that the relationships don’t just ‘connect’ pre-existing things, but modify what we mean by the ‘things’, which

In one way, the hemisphere hypothesis is deceptively simple: the bi-hemispheric structure of the brain makes possible attending to the world simultaneously in two otherwise incompatible ways. It is the implications of this that are manifold. Immediately it gives rise to a number of further hypotheses: that this is a requirement of survival; that th

Here is Asimov again, this time on the permissive aspects of creativity: My feeling is that as far as creativity is concerned, isolation is required. The creative person is, in any case, continually working at it. His mind is shuffling his information at all times, even when he is not conscious of it …The presence of others can only inhibit this pr

Then comes Part II. Here I address the main paths that are open to us to take in our approach to truth. I take these to be science, reason, intuition and imagination. In each case I look at the strengths and limitations attendant on them; and bring to bear philosophical and psychological evidence and argument. I also look at what is contributed in

nothing we know is in reality ever entirely static; and relative stasis, not motion, is the unusual circumstance that requires explanation. Stasis is, in other words, the limit case of motion, in which it approaches, but never completely reaches, zero. Motion, then, is not an unusual departure from stasis, but stasis an unachievable imaginary state

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 i

Attention is not just another cognitive function. Attention is how our world comes into being for us. The altered nature of attention can appear to abolish parts of the world, collapse time and space, eviscerate emotion, and render the living inanimate. It is a profoundly moral act.

one of the many themes of this book is the role of resistance in creation; and the working together of opposites.

asymmetry of the nervous system has been universally conserved as a means of addressing the problem of how to ‘get’ without being ‘got’.