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

Employing analysis, which works from the outside of its object, without listening to intuition, which inhabits the matter at hand from the inside, is like looking for the power of a poem in the translation, where it cannot be found, and then when one cannot find it, denying it was there in the original.

Newtonian mechanics is at one level incompatible with quantum mechanics. It does useful work at the level of day-to-day reality, but at the subatomic level, or at the cosmological level, it no longer applies. But it is not that quantum mechanics applies only at the extremes of magnitude, and Newtonian mechanics, which contradicts it, applies only i

In scientific investigations the question, True or False?, is usually irrelevant. The important question is, In what circumstances is this formula true, and in what circumstances is it false?

there is the reality that, from any one standpoint, only a partial vision is possible. The opposition of ‘standpoints’ is a way of speaking of difference wrought by context. As Whitehead put it, ‘there are no whole truths; all truths are half-truths. It is trying to treat them as whole truths that plays the devil’.29 Each truth conceals another, op

Perception is not passive reception, but participation.

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

Precision and accuracy are often confused. It is said that a curator at the Natural History Museum was intrigued to hear one of the attendants telling an impressed party of tourists that a dinosaur skeleton was 9 million and 6 years old. When the curator later asked how the attendant knew, he received the reply: ‘Well, it was 9 million years old wh

male brains exhibit greater intrahemispheric, and females greater interhemispheric, structural connectivity.203 What these findings together suggest is that the hemispheres are more specialised in the male than the female brain.204 This could be expected to lead to complementary patterns of strengths and weaknesses.

A further difference here between the hemispheres is that they categorise to a different degree of generalisation. The left hemisphere has highly generalised, overarching categories, while the right hemisphere has finer-grained, ‘lower-level’ ones.63 As Stephen Kosslyn puts it, ‘the right-sided subsystem comes to be more narrowly tuned, whereas the