Projection into the public sphere

Modernity deals with the objectification and the projection into the public sphere of the abstract, rational, reasoned side of the mind's experience; the ancient world deals with the projection into the public sphere of the carnal, hormonal, felt side of the mind's experience. 

Metaphor and model

Language processes things serially while vision processes things contextually but metaphor is linguistic and it functions like the visual. 

So metaphor and model are both left brain-centric. 

Metaphor allows the left brain contextually to experience quality while model allows the left brain contextually to experience quantity. 

The two different hemispheres of the brain pay attention in different ways.

From all stances

The bi-hemispheric structure of the brain is the root of the action of the dialectic in the world. 

The reason we need to understand how things work in alternating sequence is because our brains require that alternation for them to be able to see things as whole, from all sides, which is to say, from all stances. 

The fellow and the adversary

To love your fellow as yourself does not mean to love your co-member of the nation, it means to love your complement as yourself. 

To love the stranger, likewise, means more than to love the immigrant or the resident alien, it means to love your adversary as yourself. 

Both the fellow and the adversary are the 'others' to your own way of thinking and of apprehending the world. 

The source of hubris

"... the left hemisphere is ultimately dependent on, one might almost say parasitic on, the right, though it seems to have no awareness of this fact. Indeed it is filled with an alarming self-confidence. ... [I]t is as if the left hemisphere, which creates a sort of self-reflexive virtual world, has blocked off the available exits, the ways out of the hall of mirrors, into a reality which the right hemisphere could enable us to understand. In the past, this tendency was counterbalanced by forces from outside the enclosed system of the self-conscious mind; apart from the history incarnated in our culture, and the natural world itself, from both of which we are increasingly alienated, these were principally the embodied nature of our existence, the arts and religion. In our time each of these has been subverted and the routes of escape from the virtual world have been closed off. An increasingly mechanistic, fragmented, decontextualized world, marked by unwarranted optimism mixed with paranoia and a feeling of emptiness, has come about, reflecting, I believe, the unopposed action of a dysfunctional left hemisphere." (The Master and His Emissary, Iain McGilchrist, 2009; page 6).

 Here is the source of hubris. 

A metaphor of the world

In the structure of the brain we can locate the functions of the mind; out of the functions of the mind we can assemble meaning; and in the organization of meaning we can perceive culture. 

Culture evolved as the spearhead of civilization, which shapes the drives that define the higher functions of the human species. Those drives are what political/economic and moral systems are meant to channel into productive and co-operative activities. 

If the brain is a metaphor of the world, it is so insofar as the brain contains the makings of how we sense and shape our environments. 

Fine calibration of function

The alternation of dialectical states creates a dynamic stablity by the use of 'opponent processors.' 

Opponent processors allow for the fine calibration of function. The brain is made up of three opponent processors: 

1. the 'up/down' inhibiting effects of the cortex on the more basic automatic responses of the subcortical regions; 
2. the 'front/back' inhibiting effect of the frontal lobes on the posterior cortex; and 
3. the 'right/left' influence of the two hemispheres on each other. (See The Master and His Emissary, Iain McGilchrist, 2009; page 9). 

1. The up/down opponents superimpose consciousness onto an unconscious life form; 
2. the front/back opponents superimpose the human faculty on the animal impulses; and 
3. the right/left opponents pass back and forth the formation of self-understanding. 

Instructions are indicators

The difference between a command and an instruction is the difference between a rule and a bias. 

Commands are rules. They leave room for little variance. 

Instructions are indicators. They are suggestions about how best to do something but they do not preclude someone finding a way that works better for them. 

Assymetry has its own appeal

We tend to favor symmetry. 

We like to think of symmetry as simple, efficient, balanced, beautiful. Symmetry corresponds to mathematical elegance. 

Assymetry however has its own appeal. In assymetry we can find the dialectic, and thus the engine of change, precision, growth. 

Symmetry tends toward the static whereas assymetry tends to the dynamic, to changes over time. 

An alternating unity

The corpus callosum links the two hemispheres through 

"300-800 million fibres connecting topologically similar areas in either hemisphere. Yet only 2 per cent of cortical neurones are connected by this tract. What is more, the main purpose of a large number of these connections is actually to inhibit – in other words to stop the other hemisphere interfering." (The Master and His Emissary, Iain McGilchrist, 2009; page 17). 

The Aharonic kehuna differs from the first-born kehuna in this bi-directional, inhibitory function. 

Inhibition at the neuronal level does not necessarily lead to functional inhibition. You can take your foot off the gas pedal and the car still moves forward in a functionally permissive fashion. 

The corpus callosum however seems to operate in order for one hemisphere to inhibit the other. Both sides can't be working at the same time. After an initial arousal in the contralateral hemisphere, excitation on one side of the brain is accompanied by a subsequent inhibition of the corresponding regions on the other side of the brain. The connecting channel stays open all the time but it serves alternately to shut down one or the other side of the redundancy. 

The function of the corpus callosum is to render the hemispheres not into a single unity but into an alternating unity. Like covenantal partners who are so dissimilar they can consume each other's wastes, the unity of the two hemispheres is based on an alternation rather than on an integration. 

For any dialogue to be possible the other person must be quiet while the first person is speaking. The difference between war and sport is that in war both sides go on the offense at the same time while in sport the offensive and defensive teams alternate under the rules of the game and under the referee's signal. Who will give and who will receive is something the referee settles at the beginning of the game and then the rules determine the order from then on. 

Gift receiving is as much a sign of affection as gift giving, if not sometimes more. 

Self-inhibition so that the other can come forth and take charge is a sign of diplomacy and a courtesy that bespeaks a certain decorum. 

The what and the how

The left hemisphere experiences the whatness of things. It thus measures and evaluates quantitatively. The right hemisphere experiences the howness of things. It thus measures and evaluates qualitatively. 

The confusion between the what and the how gives rise to so many errors in explanation although not so much errors in experience. 

The distinction between the brain and the mind is something the right hemisphere can grasp more easily than the left because the distinction between the brain and the mind is not one that readily resides in the what of the thing but in the how. The brain and mind occupy the same whatness but operate in different hownesses. All living things have whats and hows. The brain/mind is special because the howness is so basic to the functioning of the what that it doesn't make sense to speak of them as distinct matters, as would be more reasonable were were talking about the pancreas, for example. 

When a society moves from scarcity to abundance it moves from experiencing the material world as whats into experiencing the material world as hows. 

God is important not as a what but as a how. That is why God and the non-material are more easily understood by the right hemisphere and not so easily understood by the left. 

An animal with a spiritual dimension

"The defining features of the human condition can all be traced to our ability to stand back from the world, from our selves and from the immediacy of experience. This enables us to plan, to think flexibly and inventively, and, in brief, to take control of the world around us rather than simply respond to it passively. This distance, this ability to rise above the world in which we live, has been made possible by the evolution of the frontal lobes." (The Master and His Emissary, Iain McGilchrist, 2009; page 21). 

"The frontal lobes not only teach us to betray, but to trust. Through them we learn to take another's perspective and to control our own immediate needs and desires. If this necessary distance is midwife to the world of Machiavelli, it also delivers the world of Erasmus. The evolution of the frontal lobes prepares us at the same time to be exploiters of the world and of one another, and to be citizens one with another and guardians of the world. If it has made us the most powerful and destructive of animals, it has also turned us, famously, into the 'social animal', and into an animal with a spiritual dimension." (The Master and His Emissary, Iain McGilchrist, 2009; page 22). 

Part and parcel

The bi-hemispheres manage how in our modes of attention people are simultaneously both part and parcel. 

People are parts of greater wholes while at the same time they are wholes and parcels of lesser parts. The right hemisphere manages people as parts of larger wholes, while the left hemisphere manages people as parcels who are in charge of the lesser parts. 

The right hemisphere manages people’s wide open attention and their peripheral vision; the left hemisphere manages their narrow focus attention and their acute vision. 

Attention is the prism

• Attention defines the color of our perceptions. 
• How we attend to things is prior to our sensation of them. 
• Attention is the medium of meaning in our senses. 
• Attention is to sensation as mind is to brain. 
• The view that pretends to objectivity, the 'scientific' mode of attention, strips away the meaning and replaces it with detachment. That mode is the novice’s view. 
• The expert has built up a storehouse of meanings in his apprehension of 'the facts.' 
• We bring meaning into the perception of things, and we thereby add a creative ingredient into how we apprehend both the world as well as how we apprehend ourselves. 
• Meaning is inescapably value-laden. 
• Meaning is evaluative in that it shapes our attention to a thing, and thus shapes our relation to the thing. 

The question is how is meaning tied to desert? Both meaning and desert involve the action of some creative element. The question is how does creativity relate to meaning-generation and how to desert-generation? 

It could be meaning and desert are complements. Meaning is the personal experience of what the general society experiences as desert. 

Attention is the way in which we perceive. With our left hemisphere we attend with respect to utility; with our right hemisphere we attend with respect to how we are connected to the thing and how we can serve the thing in stewardship. 

Attention is the prism through which we 

"bring into being a world and, with it, depending on its nature, a set of values." (The Master and His Emissary, Iain McGilchrist, 2009; page 29). 

Joining in the fluxity

Cognitively to know a thing is to fix it, and by fixing it to remove the life from it. 

Experientially to know a thing is to join in its fluxity, and by joining in the fluxity to remove the objective distance that would allow us to manipulate it, make it useful, and exercise power over it.  

Pre-reflective frame of mind

When we experience the world pre-reflectively we do not, in a sense, view it at all or divide it up into bits, we experience it rather in its betweenness.  

In that pre-reflective frame of mind we are not thinking about the world so much as we are experiencing the world as a way of being in it. 

The meaning of the data

The world is not present to people’s minds so much as it is re-presented to them as a virtual image. 

That virtual character of representation is what allows people to know things as meaningful. It is not the data about the world that makes it useful so much as the meaning of the data, and the meaning has more to do with prior learning and with the storehouse of experience people bring to their representations. 

Meaning comes from the feelings and beliefs people have built up about the sorts of things they are apprehending and representing to themselves. 

As animals alter their environment to make it more congenial and home-like so the mind alters its perceptions of the world by introducing meaning into the way people know things to make the world more ready to hand than it would otherwise be. 

Five styles of attention

Five styles of attention: 

1. vigilance, 
2. sustained attention, 
3. alertness, 
4. focused attention, 
5. divided attention. 

Vigilance and sustained attention are similar, and together with alertness comprise the intensity axis of attention, associated with the right hemisphere; focused and divided attention comprise the selectivity axis of attention. 

Focused attention is lodged in the left hemisphere. 

Divided attention belongs to both hemispheres, with the right hemisphere more dominant. 

Intensity is a dimension of wakefulness: 

1. alertness makes us responsive to the world; 
2. sustained attention makes the world continuous and unfragmented; 
3. vigilance opens us to new and unfamiliar inputs. 

Novelty & the expected

• The right hemisphere processes novelty whereas the left deals with what it knows and so the left prioritises the expected. 
• The right hemisphere is vigilant while the left hemisphere is predictive. 
• New skills are learned in the right hemisphere and then move to the left hemisphere when they become more well practiced. 
• The left hemisphere is drawn by its expectations while the right hemisphere works better whenever initial assumptions need to be revised or when there is a need to distinguish old information from new material that may be consistent with it. 
• The right hemisphere is more capable of a frame shift, which is especially important for flexibility of thought. (Damaged right hemispheres lead to preservation, a pathological inability to respond to changing situations.) 
• The right frontal cortex "is responsible for inhibiting one's immediate response, and hence for flexibility and set shifting; as well as the power of inhibiting immediate response to environmental stimuli." (The Master and His Emissary, Iain McGilchrist, 2009; page 41). 
• The left hemisphere fits things into an already generated schema whereas the right hemisphere is actively watching for discrepancies and plays the devil's advocate. 
• The right hemisphere works to keep options open while the left hemisphere takes the single solution that seems best to fit what it knows and latches on to it. 
• Efforts of will tend to focus attention, and thus efforts of will tend to favor the left hemisphere whereas relaxing the effort to produce something favors the right hemisphere, because it broadens attention and expands the attentional field.