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

[Krimel]

[Krimel to Ian]
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. 

[Krimel]
I understand why Quality and Tao are undefined terms. But I don't see the
need for having more. My question was what is the difference between
"circularity" and "paradox" on the one hand and "platipi" on the other?

Also could you clarify the meaning of this term you have taken to using
recently: non-conceptual.

[dmb]
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. 

[Krimel]
There has been a cottage industry in explaining the difference and meaning
of the left brain right brain split since Sperry first severed the corpus
callosum of epileptics in the mid-1950's and his graduate student Michael
Gazzaniga noticed perceptual and behavioral anomalies in patients recovering
from those operations. 

That literature includes everything from articles and surveys in Cosmo to
Gazzaniga's own most recent book "The Ethical Brain". 

[dmb]
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. 

[Krimel]
Pirsig talks about Ruth Benedict's "Patterns of Culture" which I believe was
among the first to claim that cultures conformed to certain personality
types or ways of interacting with the world. Cultural practices promote
certain ways of understanding and interacting over others. There are plenty
of stereotypical examples of this, they are easy to find. Jaynes was the
first to claim this fundamental shift from "the bi-cameral mind" to
"consciousness." This too has been discussed at length on this forum.

[dmb]
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.

[Krimel]
If these "two competing ways of thinking and being" cannot be explained in
terms of the brain, why is he talking about the left hemisphere.

As I said, the literature on this subject is rich indeed and from what I can
tell of McGilchrist's recent book may be a worthy addition to that
literature. But wouldn't it be easier and more productive to focus on a book
like Jonah Lehrer's "How We Decide" which you have cited and recommended to
us, rather than a book you know only from a radio interview and we know
nothing at all about?

Or perhaps you could link us the interview. I have no wish to discuss your
impressions of someone you haven't read.