[MD] Left brain, right brain, whole brain.

[david buchanan]

Ian said to Krimel:
(I didn't need to re-order or re-interpret Dan's words, I quoted his phrase verbatim "Dynamic Quality Defined is static quality".) But yes, there is no "need" for the circularity. The circularity is simply a "good thing" to discover however, when people are looking for definitions, because it confirms that it's definition is in fact "undefined". That's a good thing, it confirms our hypothesis. To define it any other way is to turn it into sq. DQ Defined is "NOT DQ".


Krimel replied:
About all I can say here is, thanks for reminding me of something I forgot earlier. How does what you call "circularity" and a "good thing" differ from a platypus? Is the MoQ really about expanding the number of things we want to call "undefined"? How is that helpful or "good." I think one central undefined Quality is plenty. After all what good does it do to rid ourselves of SOM platypi if all we are doing within the MoQ is breeding platypi of our own?


dmb says:

Yes, there is an interesting paradox in defining something as undefinable but it's really not that complicated and it doesn't involve the reproduction of platypuses. The idea is simply that there are two distinctly different ways to experience; conceptually and non-conceptually. This is why DQ can't be defined, because definitions are conceptual and DQ is non-conceptual experience. 

Please take a careful look at the things McGilchrist is saying about the two hemispheres of the brain and what those differences mean in our culture and its ways of looking at the world. I think you'll see how neatly this fits with the DQ/sq distinction. And Krimel, please pay special attention to the way McGilchrist is using neurological facts without being reductionist about it. I hope the Rorty fans will notice how postmodernism only perpetuates the problem that Pirsig is trying to solve. I hope everybody notices that this author also happens to support the idea that pre-Socratic Greece was one of those periods when the whole brain was working in a balanced way, was not yet dominated by the rational side. The Sophists would fit right in there, right before the slide into rationalism began. 


According to McGilchrist, interviewed for ABC Radio National's All in the Mind programme, rather than seeking to explain the social and cultural changes and structure of civilisation in terms of the brain — which would be REDUCTIONIST — he is pointing to a wider, more inclusive perspective and greater reality in which there are two competing ways of thinking and being, and that in modern Western society we appear increasingly to be able to only entertain one viewpoint: that of the left hemisphere.

The author argues that the brain and the mind does not simply experience the world but that the world we experience is a product or meeting of that which is outside us with our mind. The outcome, the nature of this world, is thus dependent upon "which mode of attention we bring to bear on the world".

McGilchrist sees an occasional flowering of "the best of the right hemisphere and the best of the left hemisphere working together" in our history: as witnessed in Athens in the 6th century by activity in the humanities and in science and in ancient Rome during the Augustan era. However, he also sees that as time passes, so the left hemisphere once again comes to dominate affairs and things slide back into "a more theoretical and conceptualised abstracted bureaucratic sort of view of the world." According to McGilchrist, the cooperative use of both left and right hemispheres diminished and became imbalanced in favour of the left in the time of the classical Greek philosophers Parmenides and Plato and in the late classical Roman era. This cooperation and openness was regained during the Renaissance 1,000 years later which brought "sudden efflorescence of creative life in the sciences and the arts". However, with the Reformation, the early Enlightenment, and what has followed as rationalism has arisen, our world has once again become increasingly rigid, simplified and rule-bound.

Looking at more recent Western history, McGilchrist sees in the Industrial Revolution that for the first time artefacts were being made "very much to the way the left hemisphere sees the world — simple solids that are regular, repeated, not individual in the way that things that are made by hand are" and that a transformation of the environment in a simar vein followed on from that; that what was perceived inwardly was projected outwardly on a mass scale.[8] The author argues that the scientific materialism which developed in the 19th century is still with us, at least in the biological sciences, though he sees physics as having moved on. McGilchrist does not see modernism and postmodernism as being in opposition to this, but also "symptomatic of a shift towards the left hemisphere's conception of the world", taking the idea that there is no absolute truth and turning that into "there is no truth at all", and he finds some of the movements' works of art "symptomatic of people whose right hemisphere is not working very well." McGilchrist cites the American psychologist Louis Sass, author of Madness and Modernism, pointing out that Sass "draws extensive parallels between the phenomena of modernism and postmodernism and of schizophrenia", with things taken out of context and fragmented.

Asked in an interview whether he blamed the loss of "our relationship to beauty, to body, to spirit and art" on the left hemisphere, McGilchrist pointed to an article by Stanley Fish, entitled Does Reason Know what Reason Doesn't Know? and stated that the essence of the problem is "that the left hemisphere is not aware of what it is not aware of" and that the difficulty we are faced with is giving the right hemisphere a fair hearing. Whilst agreeing that beauty, spirit and art are not the sole preserve of the right hemisphere, the author does see a REDUCTIONISM not only in science but in popular culture and a loss of "the power of art to alert us to things beyond ourselves", to the transcendent.


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