Wisdom, Delusion, Consciousness & the Divine | Dr. Iain McGilchrist
Dr. Jordan B. Peterson sits down in-person with psychiatrist, researcher, and philosopher Dr. Iain McGilchrist. They discuss right brain/left brain hemispheric specialization, the basis of delusion, “unknowing” as a necessary step toward wisdom, consciousness and the divine ground of being, and the imposition of mediocrity in the modern West.
Dr. Iain McGilchrist is a psychiatrist, neuroscience researcher, philosopher and literary scholar. He is a Quondam Fellow of All Souls College, Oxford, an Associate Fellow of Green Templeton College, Oxford, a Fellow of the Royal College of Psychiatrists, and former Consultant Psychiatrist and Clinical Director at the Bethlem Royal & Maudsley Hospital, London. He has been a Research Fellow in neuroimaging at Johns Hopkins Hospital, Baltimore and a Fellow of the Institute of Advanced Studies in Stellenbosch. He has published original articles and research papers in a wide range of publications on topics in literature, philosophy, medicine and psychiatry. He is the author of a number of books, but is best-known for The Master and his Emissary: The Divided Brain and the Making of the Western World (Yale 2009). In November 2021 his two-volume work The Matter with Things: Our Brains, Our Delusions, and the Unmaking of the World was published by Perspectiva Press.
Chapters -
(0:00) Tour update 2024
(0:40) Coming up
(0:59) Intro
(3:15) Hemispheric specialization
(8:21) How the left and right brain hemispheres operate
(12:39) Newness, grasping the individuality of the stimulus
(14:13) Dr. Peterson’s vision of complex knowledge, conceptualizing reality
(21:59) The basis of delusion, how reason leads you astray
(24:51) Network function as it relates to radical ideology
(29:06) To what degree can we know anything is true?
(34:29) Not all philosophy is valid
(35:47) Science ends with personal truth
(41:10) All is one, one is everything
(45:31) Why is there life? The coincidence of opposites
(48:14) The Kabbalah, ideas that reiterate across time and multiple religions
(51:11) How resentment maps with left brain overreach
(56:21) Unknowing as a necessary step toward wisdom
(58:07) The symbolism of the disembodied eye
(1:03:10) Consciousness and the divine ground of being
(1:07:43) The spiral ladder to heaven, togetherness and distinction
(1:10:10) Intention as a moral act
(1:14:26) The way in which you attend alters what you find
(1:18:46) The appearance of God as intuition
(1:24:55) How hemisphere damage impacts right/left functionality
(1:28:17) The relationship between your brain and the spiritual
(1:33:35) Bridging the idea of flow to the spirit of play
(1:38:10) Imposed mediocrity and the inability to avert disaster
(1:40:56) What Dr. McGilchrist is working on now