How “The Matter With Things” Can Transform the World | book by Iain McGilchrist
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- čas přidán 8. 09. 2024
- This video introduces you to one of the most profound and transformative books I’ve read in years: Iain McGilchrist’s book, The Matter With Things. The book delves into the left and right hemispheres of the brain. This is a myth that could transform both individuals and society.
If you plan to buy the book from Amazon and want to support the channel, here is an affiliate link: amzn.to/4fzvsAi
This video contains image generated by A.I.
My mind shifted from predominantly left brain driven to predominantly right brain driven about 2-3 years ago. It has transformed my worldview in so many ways - I’m open to spirituality in ways I never was; I garden ceaselessly, and I feel more connected to other people. One of my favorite quotes that I came across during this time is, “The map is not the territory.” Could have been taken from this book.
(Also, I think these changes started for me after I heard that line from Good Will Hunting when Robin Williams asks the very intellectual student to describe how it smells in the Sistine Chapel.)
I’ve been reading books by Richard Weaver lately and find a similarity of argument by him to much of McGilchrist’s work in “Ideas Have Consequences,” and “The Southern Tradition at Bay.” Those books are almost a century old, and I felt that they were revelatory in understanding spirtuality, myth, society, piousness, morality, and ethics - and where they come from and how they shape reality.
Thanks for the great video exploration.
I'm endlessly amazed at how all your favorite books are also my favorites. Maybe there's no magic here just the Amazon recommendation algorithm.
ditto
Maybe “the algorithm” in play here, is how so many feel disconnected or alienated by “what is” - and can’t really imagine their future wellbeing within it? That an existence based on what perfectly fits into Excel seems…
…not all that meaningful and also pretty exhausting…? Just asking…😊
Yea, me too.
As an ardent McGilchrist fan, I love this video because you’ve so accurately portrayed his main points and made that information so accessible to viewers. BRAVO!!
When my dad (Colin Burgess) first lectured Access Students at Filton College Bristol UK in the 70s (80s Access courses began) to the 90s, his first handout was this quote from Francis Bacon
Reading maketh a full man, conference a ready man, and writing an exact man.
Crafty men condemn studies, simple men admire them; and wise men use them.
. . . the nature of things betrays itself more readily under the vexations of art than in its natural freedom. (1620)
Years later, after buying a few fat books 📚 I understood what my dad was saying and why he used this quote for his students.
Clive Burgess
Attention is a moral act. That's a sentence that could change the world.
I'm grateful for your work. I'm always excited to see how your synthesizing the world.
I feel that this book will go down in history as one of the most important books ever written. Ever.
Im dying to read this, finished The Master and His Emissary at the end of last year.
That was a really good presentation. I read the book in about three to four months a year ago. It's the sort of book you can go back to and read parts of again. As you were talking about what was left out, the human relationships, I recalled that he did emphasize organic relations as being more important that "things" that are related. I really liked his argument that living beings are not made of parts. The organs are not parts. Remember where he described the heart chambers of a human embryo being formed around a blood flow that begins before the organ forms and around which it develops. The blood flow is first, and then the muscle to give it power afterwards.
I would very much like to hear a conversation between Iain and yourself. I'm sure he would be interested to hear your views on his ideas and he'd have good responses in turn.
I love to tune into your channel from time to time. Most of my thoughts are on the left brain, analytical, materialist side. But sometimes it's nice to think about thinking and you're such a helpful guide! Very few people process/synthesize/explain so many ideas. Imagine if your channel was in the top 100 CZcams channels. How much smarter and more thoughtful would our fellow man be? I want to live in that place!
Like the trellis and the vine.
Two questions:
1. How do you withstand and overcome the world’s demand for proof/for perfect resolution?
2. How do you speak truth to segments of society/build coalitions of “ordinary” people that probably share some of the deepest right hemisphere values and beliefs?
You’ve inspired me to read this now. Thank you
I haven’t watched this video before commenting - Because McGilchrist (and many other thinkers) already changed my world (view, ontology) some years back. An ongoing process, as life is…
This is not a competition though - not a complicated sum of parts to assemble correctly. In many ways, embracing complexity as the holistic of being, may be a form of “liberty” that modernity itself keeps obscuring by complicated abstractions. Making us compete more…
Boiling it down - I’m just unimaginably relieved by you sharing _your_ way of contemplating - even before watching (listening). I will, though… 💛
Iain McGilchrist is an amazing mind.
his left or his right?
@@tuckerbugeater BOTH without a doubt.
@@tuckerbugeater classic!
Immediately after I encountered this video, I went over to Amazon, read about this book, and bought it. (It wasn't available at my local library.)
I suspect that this book dovetails with my studies of . . . here's a big word . . . "phenomenology". Phenomenology is the philosophical study of the way that things really are, so to speak, that is, the way that things fundamentally manifest or "show up." Maybe a more rigorously accurate word than "fundamentally" is "primordially." This leads directly into a "different" interpretation of "what is real", or "what it is 'to be'."
We're trained from birth to deal with reality in a "conceptual" way, and we become so accustomed to this that we operate as if it is the only way--we get lost in it, boxed in, confined. This takes us away from our actual experience, and this results in a severely degraded quality of life.
Martin Heidegger--a controversial figure, to be sure--was the most famous person when it comes to phenomenology, but he built his work on that of Edmund Husserl. But this is beside the point. The big point is that when you access who and what you are when you are operating directly with your experience (which itself is an enormous topic), then you gain access to your own fundamental operations--your "way of being", so to speak--and this gives a person overwhelming empowerment over their quality of life.
There's much more to say, of course. But it is apparent that this McGilchrist fellow spent his life looking at these issues, and his magnum opus is "The Matter With Things." Thanks for recommending it. I look forward to reading it.
Having travelled your story (so far) of morals and violence, the pardradim shift, etc, in relation to social change and the social landscape that we are witnessing together today.
Your concise way to tell your story is engaging and not facilitated ~ with reference to other presentations on your CZcams channel
Glad to see you like this book. It's incredibly good I think.
I appreciate your voice and viewpoint on so many topics. Thank you for this channel.
Referring to plants as having will and desire is a lovely expression. I view action and intent, no matter the source, as synonymous, so you can imagine I instantly get the world view being painted here. I love your artistry, thank you for all of it. 🙏
As always, a very insightful presentation. I've been trying to understand McGilchrist's thesis without having to read so much ! Thanks for your help with that.
I would really like to hear from other neuroscientists about his left/right hemisphere distinction. Every current researcher i've met tells me this distinction is obsolete. But i'm curious to understand whether his premises are true or at least can be reasonably taken as true.
"Arguments from a subjective stand point with someone arguing from an objective stand point will never agree."
Colin Burgess 1982 in Conversations with me Clive Burgess
Examples below
Well said Asley. I also was thinking that this is the message that is needed to open the eyes of so many who have apparently stopped seeing the forest around them.
22:20 It really is challenging for people to do that! Back in the day, during OJ Simpson trial, it finally occured to me that he was guilty AND he was framed. The debate in the media and in public discourse was that it had to be one or the other.
It felt great to reconcile the two things that seemed like opposites, but were not. Of course, people were entrenched in their views and would not consider it, which was fascinating to me.
Thanks Ashley, i love your insights into the book.
Not an easy read ...one slight weakness, in my view, is a lack of references to the idea of personhood ....but a great read .
I respect your content a lot, and I got really excited by this video of yours. And this video led me to the rabbit hole of the author. I watched his documentary- "The divided brain" as well. He suffers from many expert/guru of our times. He was making sense when he was talking about left/right bifurcation which is well agreed upon phenomenon discovered and agreed upon by scientists. And then he inauthentically extrapolates to things like art, love and society and the usual fear-mongering of these "westernized world". I am from India and recently shifted to the west, and the number of people I have met who are enamoured with mystical philosophies and the native people without understanding the nuances and importance of both kind of philosophy is mind-numbing. But I digress. All I am suggesting is he is a great academic in his field but tread with suspicion while putting your weight behind someone like him.
(I am adding this just for fun and not a concrete criticism- his documentary was paywalled for 10$ IIRC and his book is 137€ here. Interesting pricing for someone talking about mechanized, hyper-consumerized, unstable financial pin-ball machine the world that it has become)
realizing Iain charges $180 for a book that long forms Tools' album Ænima;
still love the review and look forward to reading the book when its affordable for the common man
$130 for both hardcover volumes On Amazon. About 700 pages per vol. Around $80 for paperback bundle. Not unreasonably priced at all.
Thank you! I also feel that this book is transformational, both for the individual and for understanding why our culture has become dysfunctional and how to restore it. I also would read just a few pages at a time because it so rich and evocative. Subscribed!
He seems very Hegelian if i'm not mistaken based on what you presented. It seems that he suggests a "dialectic" between the right and the left side of the brain. In that light I don't believe that we could always keep one of the halves as the master. Also after each cycle both right and left must transend what they are into a new level of consciousness. In that regard, I personally see the duality limited. I believe we have "many voices" in our heads and we have a dialectic with every object we have a representing of.
Thanks Ashley
From a gardener's perspective, Being There by Jerzy Kosińsky a book I read in the 70s and suggested that it would be useful for his students.
My dad (Colin Burgess) used it in his lectures "when I was used as the subject matter.:
Dr Iain McGilchrist 🙏🏻
I’d like to recommend the book that completely changed my view of the world. I would be fascinated by the review if Miss Ashley read it. ‘Demonic Males; apes and the origins of human violence’ by Richard Wrangham and Dale Peterson
4:18 - If it's a mind it's a mound of small tumors (or a pile of tribbles). Almost everything's here to eat everything, which I've heard is what happens with bodily tissue that goes cancerous - it starts treating the body like a landscape and resources to exploit rather than being part of the body. I don't think Nate Hagans's idea of the superorganism is that bad but it seems very unconscious, like there's a bit of stirring here and there. IMHO it's hard to believe in any kind of deity past vast superorganisms unless it's something like the de Chardin or Whitehead idea of process philosophy where the whole universe eventually becomes its own kind of Solaris.
Great selection. I saw his speech about this subject at Darwin college and found it incredibly elucidating. Hope I get a chance to read the book.
czcams.com/video/AuQ4Hi7YdgU/video.htmlsi=KYe4zmPc3PFfpqL3
A link to his hour lecture on this subject at Darwin College - czcams.com/video/AuQ4Hi7YdgU/video.htmlsi=KYe4zmPc3PFfpqL3
Iain has taken many of my ideas without attribution, it seems. Whatever, as long as the wisdom spreads. I get what he's trying to save, though it harms more. My ego aside, the Golden Ratio is symmetrical, as I show in my "dome frame" Zora mathart.
Antonio Damasio the neuroscientist adds a new dimension. The brain ie cognition is only part of human decisionmaking which is made by the nervous system as a whole. Descartes was wrong. Objectivity incudes feeling and emotion, including interception, data from within the organism like hunger and fatigue. This makes current blather about AI, for example, seem naive.
Interoception
Thanks much. But some confusion and questions remain. Does the author address _what reality is_. Is there a world out there? Direct realism?
If he jumps directly to the brain and "perception" then the assumption is that there is a real world out there?
I'd really like sources stating that schizophrenics are hyper-logical cause I think you just made that up.
I see it more as a mind that is experiencing visionary, mythic, archetypal content. Jung said it was the dream overlapping waking consciousness.
Then if the right hemisphere is atrophied and the left hemisphere is dominant, then the left hemisphere revs up and goes into overdrive trying to co pretend the visionary content coming through.
If the right hemisphere had been properly habilitated and wasn’t deficient, it would be much more capable of coping and exploring the visionary content. It doesn’t have language centres. It is made for the symbolic instead of the explanation in words. The left hemisphere is just not capable of coping and becomes confused and disorientated because all of it’s overdrive has a just spinning it’s wheels and not getting any traction.
It seems to me the same way the brain has these two types , the collective of humans do too, and the constant ebb and flow between the sides acting according to their type. Youd say obviously so, as these humans all have a left and right brain. So if the brain works this way, should we allow the world to work this way too?
Called into the never-ending story as coauthors. Caretakers at the end of time. Minding the garden.
Given my salience frame as a punk rock musician, I couldn’t help but think about how people nowadays approach or perceive music solely (or almost) in terms music theory.
Extremely left brain driven. It’s especially obvious if you watch video essays/tutorials by musicians.
To my ears, it gives this overly mechanical/engineered sheen to almost all modern music.
I mean, to me, that’s the whole point of great art: getting a hint of something indescribable with words that’s profound for whatever reason…
Seems we could use a bit more appreciation for the indescribable in the arts nowadays.
Talking about reconciliation of opposites, read the Qur’an❤❤❤😊
"What doesn't kill you makes you stronger." Friedrich Nietzsche 1888
I have a genuine question. And I never comment or weigh in on anything online, so please don’t destroy me just for asking…
Anger and disgust. Is there a healthy place for these emotions? (I’m not talking about one who allows these emotions to “possess” him/her)
But I feel like it’s a visceral, honest and healthy thing to experience disgust or anger against trespass of boundaries or threat to one’s body, children, family, etc.
I heard once that “A man who does not allow himself to feel, is not a true or complete man. But a man who allows himself to be possessed and lose himself to emotion is also not a man.”
Can you please review the book ‘Plurality’ about Taiwan’s direct digital democracy system?
I had a very similar experience with Debt by Graeber that you described for this book. Gonna check this one out after your great coverage of Debt.
SUPER, TY.
Some people have hemisphere that are switched.
...hmm... I'm definitely joining the group who are getting ever more concerned by the excess value people are investing in McGilchrist. There is no doubt there are things of value here, and observations he makes (which have been made by many others over the years) do hold some value, but his framing of the subject matter pretty much completely ignores AN ENTIRE PHILISOPHICAL BRANCH as if it doesn't exist at all, and so in part, he ends up trying to reinvent the wheel again and again, whilst making statements about science and philosophy which are likely convincing within one tradition, but do not hold true from the perspective of the other. As I see it, the value in McGilchrist's work comes in highlighting how society has abandoned ways of thinking leading to the world we are in now, and how education has been manipulated/framed to (quite deliberately) not explain the differences properly. As always, the proof (i.e. the hard bit) comes from the real world practical application (praxis), and in that, McGilchrist is sadly overwhelmingly lacking.
150$
First
the first volume was awesome, but the second was insufferable and obnoxious too many times. see rupert read's review of it.
ah! there's my scientist! It's a difficult project for more left-brained individuals.