Excellent work. There is a lot to ponder here. We learn about what the right hemishphere does when we examine people who have some form of right brain injury. This "subtractive" examination is not uncommon. Here it is interesting. We cannot do a description justice by employing only left hemisphere techniques, so we look at the whole of the person, and then the absence of a component of the right hemisphere to understand the thing.
Meanwhile civilization rushes toward "optimization" in a transhumanistic frenzy led by people who have various forms of right hemisphere disfunction.
It is interesting isn’t it? Some of the examination is based on R-hemisphere damage, some from corpus callosotomy lobotomies (and I believe using rTMS to suppress one side or the other), and yet more evidence from psychopathologies like schizophrenia and ASD. All together we have constructed this picture of left hemisphere perception which looks disturbingly like modern Western culture. And as you say, a culture driven by L-hemisphere dominated transhumanist technocrats who are trying to create a world, indeed selves, that mirror the left-hemisphere’s mechanistic take on the world.
Actually (unlike my comment above maybe) I've tried not to use a word salad to describe a particular aspect of humanity (that isn't necessarily an innate action) and has profound impacts on all of us. I hope the piece did not come across as trying to describe every malaise of man - if it did I've failed dismally, and so has McGilchrist.
Good to know Allan - wasn't sure how to interpret the wink, sorry, my lack of discernment. And I do agree there are many out there (especially if you dare dip into the woke academic literature) who bamboozle you with incomprehensible word salad cyphers - but sound sort of smart, but are not.
Excellent work. There is a lot to ponder here. We learn about what the right hemishphere does when we examine people who have some form of right brain injury. This "subtractive" examination is not uncommon. Here it is interesting. We cannot do a description justice by employing only left hemisphere techniques, so we look at the whole of the person, and then the absence of a component of the right hemisphere to understand the thing.
Meanwhile civilization rushes toward "optimization" in a transhumanistic frenzy led by people who have various forms of right hemisphere disfunction.
*edited to correct typo.
It is interesting isn’t it? Some of the examination is based on R-hemisphere damage, some from corpus callosotomy lobotomies (and I believe using rTMS to suppress one side or the other), and yet more evidence from psychopathologies like schizophrenia and ASD. All together we have constructed this picture of left hemisphere perception which looks disturbingly like modern Western culture. And as you say, a culture driven by L-hemisphere dominated transhumanist technocrats who are trying to create a world, indeed selves, that mirror the left-hemisphere’s mechanistic take on the world.
Actually (unlike my comment above maybe) I've tried not to use a word salad to describe a particular aspect of humanity (that isn't necessarily an innate action) and has profound impacts on all of us. I hope the piece did not come across as trying to describe every malaise of man - if it did I've failed dismally, and so has McGilchrist.
Good to know Allan - wasn't sure how to interpret the wink, sorry, my lack of discernment. And I do agree there are many out there (especially if you dare dip into the woke academic literature) who bamboozle you with incomprehensible word salad cyphers - but sound sort of smart, but are not.