divided brain

two modes of experience McGilchrist describes (one associated with the left hemisphere, the other with the right) match up pretty precisely with two modes of experience that have been described again and again elsewhere, from Taoism1 to John Keats' letters2 to Federico Campagna's philosophy3 to Proust — you can even see it in things like Finite &am... See more

McGilchrist notes:

Only the right hemisphere has a whole body image; the left hemisphere sees the body as an assemblage of parts, and as if it were an object in space alongside other objects, rather than a mode of existence. ...For the right hemisphere, we live the body; whereas for the left, we live in it, rather as we drive a car.

More than that, physics teaches us that, at the most fundamental level of existence, there simply are no discrete pieces of inert matter. Instead there are clusters of interrelated probabilistic events that change their nature when observed. In the words of the great physicist Richard Feynman, quantum mechanics deals with ‘nature as she is – absurd

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In Chapter 1, we discussed how each human has two “minds”—the Primitive Mind with its fiery flame and the Higher Mind with his orb of clarity and consciousness. So when humans band together, they can generate a double emergence phenomenon.

Using McGilchrist’s terminology: for such an increasingly delusional, left hemisphere dominated mind everything turns into just another inanimate object: be it a beautiful 5000 year old tree, or a rich indigenous culture. Something which stands in the way of getting from point A to point B on the map (or standing in-between the selfish individual a... See more

Because the left hemisphere is concerned with power, its narrative is always about power. You will notice this all around you nowadays.