He writes and speaks about this in a captivating and beautiful way, ‘I certainly feel strongly that there is something very powerful, of ultimate importance and great beauty in the source of life and creativity that is behind this cosmos, expressed in its richness, complexity and responsiveness.’ I greatly appreciated McGilchrist’s honesty about finding the final chapter of his book - titled ‘the sense of the sacred’ - the most difficult to write and yet being convinced of its importance as the finale to the book. The area of biggest difference between us was over the nature of the divine. However, Christian theism takes this one step further, believing that this primary consciousness is personal as well as transcendent, and has a name, Yahweh. I was in agreement that the primacy of consciousness in the cosmos makes best sense of why conscious beings have arisen from within it. In this view, physical matter is not the end-game of reality, but is rather a ‘phase’ of consciousness - a bit like water has different phases depending on whether it happens to be steam, liquid, or ice.
McGilchrist himself is drawn more to the final view, describing consciousness as being ‘ontologically primitive’ - the primary and fundamental reality of the cosmos.
McGilchrist isn’t afraid to critique prominent atheist philosophers such as Daniel Dennett, who espouse the first view (often also called the ‘emergent’ view of consciousness), describing this view as ‘incoherent’ during the discussion. That the brain permits a certain level of consciousness. That the brain transmits consciousness a bit like a radio transmits a program.ģ. That the brain emits or gives rise to consciousness.Ģ. Three perspectives on the brain and conscious mind were outlined by McGilchrist:ġ. A greater influence of the right hemisphere, in contrast, would take a more holistic and embodied perspective, attending to the bigger picture, as well as to its constituent parts, and allowing imagination and intuition to flourish in order to properly tune in to all that is real. McGilchrist develops the thinking from his earlier influential book The Master and his Emissary and argues that the tendency to view people through just one very narrow materialistic lens is linked to the disproportionate influence of the left hemisphere over the right hemisphere in today’s culture. His thesis? That the reductionist materialistic view of human persons is wholly inadequate. McGilchrist’s new, two-volume work, The Matter with Things, took him ten years to write and is already being spoken of as a classic in the field of mind, matter and human consciousness. Although we had travelled to London from opposite ends of the country (I had come from Oxford and McGilchrist from the Isle of Skye), we did not approach this question from opposite ends of the spectrum.
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