attention is a moral act as I say and attention changes the world if you attend to it in a certain way you see certain things if you attend in another way you see quite different things and therefore attention helps our Consciousness helps to bring into existence the experiential World which is the only world that we can ever know it's is now my great pleasure and my true honor to introduce you to our keynote speaker this year Dr Ian mcgilchrist Ian is perhaps most well known for his International best-selling book The Master and his Emissary published in 2009 and his more recent two volume book the matter with things published in 2021 he's an avid writer and speaker and has given many popular talks and interviews especially over the past few years he known for what he calls his hemisphere theory of the brain and how this impacts the way we attend to each other in the world Dr mcgilchrist started in the humanities as a literature scholar at Oxford University he then came to the Sciences first as a medic then a psychiatrist and a neuroscientist researcher and now a philosopher as well he writes with the ability to integrate both science and the humanities and is informed deeply by Human Experience within the context of his love for literature and poetry and from working clinically with patients his books are extremely rich filled with scholarly research and a sense of the poetic Dr mcel Christ is from Scotland from the aisle of sky sky is known for double rainbows a misty Enchanted climate slanted rain apparently and colorful mountains so it's really wonderful to have you speak to us today from Scotland I feel like your keynote is welcoming us as we welcome you to the Symposium so thank you so much well thank you very much for [Applause] well good morning and I see that the uh timing has slipped by about 20 minutes um I'm not going to be able to make it up I'm afraid uh I make up plenty um but uh we'll see how we go and there's nothing uh that induces epistemic humility more than the knowledge that it's only me that is between you and a cup of coffee so I will I will do what I can but what can it mean to speak of turning my attention onto my own Consciousness this is surely the queerest thing that could be and there's only one person who could have said that fiten Stein I do love him and rather famously the psychologist Stuart southernland wrote in the international dictionary of psychology Consciousness is a fascinating but elusive phenomenon it is impossible to specify what it is what it does or why it evolved nothing worth reading has been written on it so uh undeterred but with a renewed sense of humility about what we can understand here I'm going to give you a few Reflections on Consciousness the first hurdle really is the meaning of the word Consciousness uh so just a few I'm going to be very cursory I'm not going to give you any uh back ground to why I reach the conclusions I reach because it just isn't time and I've written about it at Great length but I'm just going to give you a worldview so the meanings of the word Consciousness is it what a corpse doesn't have is it what someone in a coma doesn't have is it what someone who is asleep doesn't have or is it what somebody who's distracted doesn't have so you take something in but you are not conscious we say of what it is which means really a kind of focused self-aware attention which is a special kind of Consciousness so what I'm going to suggest is that the word experiential covers all the activities that go on for each of us as we say unconsciously and preconsciously as well as consciously but couldn't go on without what is conventionally referred to as subjectivity or inwardness of some kind which I submit there isn't in a corpse the conscious and the unconscious we often think of them like the conscious is the living room in which we live and that somewhere in the basement there's an enormous area of darkness which is that unconscious and sometimes things pop up as it were almost from the tank below into conscious oh hello um but this is not uh really a very good image at all it's the better image is that of a stage so on a stage there's a spotlight and where the spotlight Falls that's where your attention is but it doesn't mean that the rest of the stage has disappeared it's just not illuminated at the moment and this is kind of important because I will eventually come to talk a little bit about the difference between the kind of attention paid by either hemisphere one of them the left hemisphere paying this focused Spotlight on something that its noses of interest and the other taking in all the rest now the extent of the unconscious is something that most people are not aware of they think it probably there in all of us but it's a very kind of subsidiary role well first of all uh in terms of its size it has been estimated I love the Precision of this that 99.44% of all that is in our psychology is unconscious uh and you don't have to buy the uh accuracy of this percentage to get the point that most of everything is actually unconscious and that's not a reason to worry it's not inferior your unconscious I discriminate I reason make judgments find things beautiful solve problems take decisions weigh possible outcomes imagine possibilities exercise acquired skills fall in love and struggle to balance competing desires and moral values all the time without being reflexively aware of it note that these are not just calculations but rely on my whole embodied being my experience my history my memory my feelings my thoughts my personality even dare I say it my soul psyche in the broadest sense VF gang PO said there is a psyche long before there is consciousness and what he means by Consciousness there is self-aware consciousness I'm a great follower of a an Whitehead who put it rather nicely operations of thought are like Cavalry Charges in a battle he was writing the beginning of the 20th century about the time that the last Cavalry Charges were made they're like Cavalry Charges in a battle they're strictly Limited in number they require Fresh Horses and must only be made at decisive moments and the rather uh underrated but excellent late 19th century Oxford philosopher FCS Schiller said that it's only when the guidance of Life by habit Instinct and impulse breaks down that we become conscious William James another of my heroes it is a general principle in Psychology that Consciousness deserts all processes where it can no longer be of use in fact progress is not towards becoming more conscious but by allowing most of what goes on in one's life to inhabit the realm of what we call the unconscious and so this is true of people with great skills like surgeons Pilots chess players they they realize something when they act but they cannot necessarily explain afterwards how it was that they decided this was what needed to be done so when I'm conscious of something it means more often than not that there's something wrong or that I becoming a philosopher might might amount to the same thing how to reconcile matter and consciousness of course is one of the big questions and again to cut hundreds of pages short there are basically I think five options either you can deny Consciousness one of the silliest positions ever adopted by a thinking human being some of them actually occupying chairs at um non-negligible universities or you can deny matter which I'm rather reluctant to do it's such an obvious part of all our experiences these are cheating these are saying this is difficult I'm going to solve it at a stroke by simply denying something uh and shouldn't be given too much Credence or any thirdly they could be both in existence but totally distinct sort of parody cartisian view fortunately they could exist but are exactly the same or fifthly the position that I would prefer they distinct phenomena reflecting different aspects of a nonetheless indivisible reality now what about the place where for most of us matter and Consciousness meet namely the brain I'm not going to bore on about the brain very much today but there are really three possibilities about how Consciousness can relate to the brain either the brain can emit it or it can transmit it or it can permit it uh I'm the idea that it could emit it uh has been one of the most unsuccessful uh ideas in the history of science nobody has the slightest clue how Consciousness can emerge from matter if matter has nothing whatever to do with Consciousness and it comes from the rather naive belief that matter is simple so we'll deduce what Consciousness is from something at least we understand matter but as physicists will tell you the more they explore the world of physics the less obvious matter becomes and it's at least as problematic as Consciousness so I think the best way to think of it is something that permits Consciousness now transmitting is a rather simple idea like a radio set but permitting brings in the notion that our brains sculpt Consciousness that Consciousness is there what comes through as our Consciousness is something that our brains have helped to form to shape to sculpt in the way that um a um well William James gives this lovely image of his voice so he has a voice because breath comes out of his lungs but he wouldn't have a voice if it weren't that there was an obstruction in the way which filters the possible sounds that's the larynx and I believe this is the way in which things are created uh for example Michelangelo didn't put uh his David together from a limb and another limb and a torso and a head he spent years and years throwing away Stone and at the end of it there was the finished David now another possible um Gambit is emergence and I want to suggest in brief all this I'm saying I'm afraid I'm doing very much in short hand so if it lacks subtlety forgive me I think emergency is effectively oh Emer is a fudge because it's still a hard Severance unless Consciousness was there all along in which case it's not emergence Galen straon um another philosopher I admire and follow on emergence for any feature why of anything that is currently considered to be emergent from X there must be something about x and x alone in virtue of which y emerges and which is sufficient for y in this sense it is not like uh The Familiar Trope of H2O and water if you understand enough about uh electrical Bonds in in in in atoms you can deduce the qualities that appear at the phenomenological level that we call water but there's no feature of matter as conventionally conceived that explains how it could possibly on its own give rise to Consciousness those words are gayen strawson's it's been put about again I'm sorry this is very much a Cook's tour very rapid it's been put about that maybe it comes out of complexity this this sounds good because the word complexity immediately suggests something profound is going on here but I believe this is a magic trick so there is things bit complicated and and then they become complex which is different and then at a certain moment a miracle arises and we've got Consciousness out of complexity I don't think so and another problem with complexity is that if it's to do with masses of interconnections you probably know that 80% of the neurons in your brain are in the cerebellum this ancient part of the brain uh which in when I was in medical school we hardly knew what it did it was something to do with balance we thought uh and coordination but it has much more it enters into the realm of uh the mental and U all aspects of our being but it doesn't sustain Consciousness the 20% that we think of as our brain the cereum uh does seem to sustain Consciousness but it's less complex in the cerebellum and it has fewer neurons and you might say well maybe the neurons in the cerebellum are rather simple they don't make lots of connections wrong the most complex cells in the brain are the pereni cells massively ramified cells uh and so I'm afraid I am not an advocate of this position and of course if there is a miracle in which Consciousness arises out of matter that has nothing to do with Consciousness I make that point because for it to emerge there has to be a point at which something new is happening it can't have been there all along according to to this kind of thinking this is a miracle that doesn't happen just once but it happens millions of times every day when a an embryo becomes a living person this is an extraordinary miracle and it's not a way of thinking that I would encourage in any case we have Consciousness so is the priority of Consciousness over matter there's certainly an argument that this is so we know about out the experiential directly from experience well we assume the nonexperiential only indirectly again from experience in fact there's something like a reverse anthropomorphic effect uh you know anthropomorphism it sort of looks a bit like a human so let's analogize it with the human but there is also in this case there's a sort of reverse thing which doesn't seem out there to be doing things that we associate with Consciousness so can't have much to do with Consciousness similarly it cannot be denied that matter is something disclosed to me by my mind I do not know that mind is something disclosed to me by matter it might be or it might not and uh spoiler alert I don't think uh it is uh dependent on matter paradoxically matter itself is an abstraction which no one has ever seen we've only seen elements of the world the experiential world to which we attribute the quality within our experience of being material it both substitutes an idea for an experience which is a kind of event and in doing so produces something static no longer in process no longer an experience now a thing and I wrote a long book called the matter with things which can be read several different ways but one of them is that I think the idea of things as a basis of existence highly problematical materialism derives the only thing we undeniably know the concreteness of experience from an unknown abstraction matter according to Neil bore isolated material or particles are abstractions their properties being definable and observable only through their interaction with other systems nonetheless we mustn't dismiss matter I think it's rather important don't you I suggest that these are phases of the same underlying entity and I'm using the word phase not in its temporal sense but in the sense that physicists and chemists use the word phase to mean another expression so in the case of water there is water in another phase it is ice in another phase it is the tons of water vapor that are in this room we can't see them but without them we' die so it doesn't cut much ice that matter and Consciousness don't look alike or behave similarly neither do water and ice or the tons of water vapor in this room we have to give up a conception of matter that excludes consciousness and a conception of Consciousness that preludes matter even though we may be able to conceive them distinctly only one at a time mass and energy are interconvertible that's what eal mc² means the brain is a manifestation as mass the mind a manifestation as energy so what I want to say is there's nothing merely physical about the physical I say materialists are not people who overvalue matter they're people who undervalue matter matter is extraordinary and we don't really understand it at all and get this if they are right and there is nothing in the universe except meaningless matter bumping into itself and in a chaotic way it's rather extraordinary stuff because after a certain length of time it produces Mark and John Passion that's rather special for something that is random and has no meaning and has nothing to do with the conscious so I suggest that Consciousness is and possibly the ontological Primitive in other words uh that which Beyond or behind which we cannot go and on this topic I could name many many physicists in my book I probably quote about 30 of them but for now let's just take these two remarks as standing for many many others so Elvin schinger Consciousness cannot be accounted for in physical terms for Consciousness is absolutely fundamental it cannot be accounted for in terms of anything else Max plank was famously asked whether he thought Consciousness could be explained in terms of matter and its laws no he replied I regard consciousness as fundamental I regard matter as derivative from Consciousness we cannot get behind Consciousness everything that we talk about everything that we regard as existing postulates Consciousness and of course I do not need to point out to and it's already been referred to uh by Simon uh this is in keeping with the wisdom traditions of east and west the old traditions of wisdom before they got drummed out by the cleverness of the Scientific Revolution and its simplifications our modern deception on this topic is because of our bewitchment with our cleverness in making machines that we seem to understand the machine because we created it we put it together and we therefore think that everything has been put together in the way that a machine has but this is um a a a simpleminded jump which should be resisted so what do I think I think pans psychism and uh there is evidence uh I wish I had time to discuss it but I don't uh for Consciousness in all life down to the simplest single cell organism uh there's a lot of evidence of this uh from people like James Shapiro from Mike LAN H and and Beyond there is evidence for Consciousness in all life in Plants uh as I was talking last night with my dinner companion uh this is a burgeoning area but also there is a sense in which nothing is devoid of Consciousness but what is that sense well there are various ways of understanding this and it's been in the west as well as profoundly in the east East uh something that has uh a good history including the alltime greatest philosopher don't let them tell you that Plato and Aristotle are greater heraclitus and edic and in some senses SES as well Spinosa liit herder schopenhauer it's present in all of these and in the Eastern wisdom traditions and in some North American Native traditions and no doubt other indigenous Traditions around the world the part that is played by Consciousness in reality is is interesting and there are different ways of understanding it um one way is to think that Consciousness is just in everything so um particle have Consciousness um uh even subatomic particles have Consciousness and I'm not here to deny that possibility that may well very well be right and certainly I don't really make a hard distinction between non-life and life there is a vast and important distinction but it is almost a difference in kind rather sorry a difference in extent rather than an absolute difference in kind what do I I mean by that I mean that matter shows organization it shows responsiveness to the environment it is changing and forming but its ability to be responsive is billionfold smaller than that of the simplest living being so there's something in the cosmos that life enables us to respond to and this idea of response relation responsiveness reverberation responsibilities that we have for the things that we bring into being through our attention this is part of the way that Consciousness Works in relation to reality now attention is the fundamental difference between the two cerebral hemispheres I I'll say a little bit about that in a moment but attention is a moral act as I say and attention changes the world if you attend to it in a certain way you see certain things if you attend in another way you see quite different things and therefore attention helps our Consciousness helps to bring into existence the experiential World which is the only world that we can ever know indeed arguably all that exists is relation so I don't like the idea that conscious is either out there simply and that the world that is real is somehow in a simple objective way out there there is definitely something out there and there's something in here and there's the connection between what's in here and what's out there what words was referred to as what the Mind half perceives half creates that is the way in which I think we should understand conscious experience so let me just talk about um the hemispheres very briefly so first of all why is the brain divided it's slightly odd thing isn't it the brain is very powerful because it makes connections and it seems like an obvious design flaw to have a whopping Great Divide right down the middle of the brain uh why wouldn't it have been better if it all been one neuronal Mass uh for those of you who don't look at brains every day this unhappy looking chap um not surprising CU he's had the top of his skull taken off and uh there you see the two hemispheres with the left hemisphere drawn aside of it so that you can see the Corpus kosum in the base of the brain there uh that connects the two two hemispheres and why is the brain asymmetric I won't go into this picture but just take it from me the brain is profoundly asymmetric why is it asymmetric not only in its Anatomy but in its physiology and in just about everything that we can measure down to the preponderance of neurotransmitters in the two hemispheres and so on why is it asymmetrical if it just needed more room Why didn't it just symmetrically expand and thirdly why is the Corpus kosum this band of fibers at the base of the brain that connects them why is it getting smaller with Evolution not larger and why is much of its function inhibitory so yes excitatory neurons glutamatergic neurons are involved but they for the majority of cases are but on uh gabaergic neurons which are inhibitory so the overall message of transmission between one Hemisphere and another is of course positive to bring it into the uh equation if you like but it's also to tell it to keep out of it for now there's something interesting about the division between these hemispheres which simply can't be dismissed and I've written about this I'm afraid at very great length most recently in in this book but why should this be relevant well it comes back to this idea of attention changing the world why we have two hemispheres the best bet and I don't know of anyone who's uh challenged this or come up with a better theory is that every creature needs to solve a conundrum which is very easy in Kinross Castle in 2024 which is how to eat and stay alive now for most of History uh living beings have had to focus on something to Target it to get it and they know already what it is that's why they want it to eat it to use it to manipulate it and so they focus on it and get it but that Arc of attention is probably no more than about 3° which leaves the rest of everything uncovered and that is the job of right hemisphere to take in the whole picture and rather than think of the right hemisphere as being a specialization the right hemisphere is really the norm set against a highly specialized and unusual kind of attention the grabbing and getting the apprehending attention of the left hemisphere the grounding attention is the comprehending holding together attention of the right Hemisphere and importantly the right hemisphere understands and values and uses what the left hemisphere knows but the left hemisphere seems less willing to and simply can't actually understand what the right hemisphere's importance is so it's a bit like the so-call Dunning Krueger effect you may have heard of in Psychology the more you know the more you understand how little you know but unfortunately when you know very little you think you know it all so there are these dipoles of attention why are they relevant because attention changes the world now on the left in each of these dipoles I don't know if you can see them I hope um is the left hemisphere's tendency and on the right is the right hemisphere's tendency so remember the left hemisphere I try not to be in the way here but I just come around and point to them um the left hemisphere's tendency is to go for something with which it is familiar that it already knows it needs and wants for it to grab it and get it it needs to be fixed and certain because of its narrow Arc of attention it tends to see the parts and thinks that a whole is composed of its parts it can only see what is explicit it tends to abstract things from their context of course it generalizes and has little room for things that don't fit into a category it quantifies things rather than being interested in their qualities or differences it tends to lump together in fact and it produces a world which is literally inanimate uh compared with the right hemispheres World it has an undue optimism which is based on the fact that it knows very little sees very little and anticipates very little and this is so extreme that patients who have a right hemisphere stroke and are therefore reliant on the left hemisphere they may have a half of the body which is completely paralyzed but they will deny that there's anything wrong with it and if you ask them to move it they say that and no it didn't move if you bring their arm around in front move that oh that's not my arm that belongs to somebody over there or it belongs to you Doctor uh that it's it's completely delusional I'm not the only person who said that I can quote at least three uh other neuros pychological researchers who have said the left hemisphere on its own is frankly Del and in the book I I look at some fascinating syndromes about 25 of them in neuros Psychiatry which involve delusion and every one of them is commoner after damage to the right hemisphere than after damage to the left and in some cases only happens after damage to the right hemisphere not the left and last of all and it looks very boring but it's terribly important is the difference between representation and presence I can see that may be there is that a little bit better the angle I don't know worse for some I don't know there's no answer to this so with this kind of attention operating phenomenology subtended by the left hemisphere is a representation which literally means something that is no longer present it's presented again after the fact when it isn't present and a representation is very different from that which is present to you so for example this world is present to you but a map of it is a very thin two-dimensional schema that leaves out almost everything in the world that is a representation it's made of isolated things the things moreover are already familiar predetermined fixed bits I.E fragments that are decontextualized disembodied meaningless abstract generic in nature nonunique and infinitely reproducible and quantifiable whereas I'll come to the right hemisphere none of these things is true in the right hemisphere it effectively produces a world that is mechanistic and inanimate and uh when people have damage to the right Hemisphere and you can suppress um using a technique called transcranial magnetic stimulation you can suppress the right hemisphere experimental for say 20 minutes and when this happens people see things that they would normally consider animate like their wife or husband or whatever it might be as a thing as possibly an automatan uh or a zombie and NB philosophers who love zombies and automat um but if you do the opposite experiment and enhance the right hem and suppress the left people see things that they would normally think of as inanimate like the sun as a living presence that moves and gives light and warmth and in this left hemisphere world the future is a fantasy that's under our control and all will be well because we'll be able to solve all the problems we're just now creating I philosophy is an interesting subject isn't it I I think it was vican who was vien Stein's pupil and professor of logic at Oxford who said that philosophy is largely a matter of solving problems created by philosophy in other words is a kind of healing for the pathology induced by a certain kind of philosophizing don't get me wrong I think philosophy is wonderful in the sense that the word means a love of wisdom a lot of what goes on in university faculties called philosophy is not entirely a love of wisdom I was just giving a keynote at the uh austral Asian Association for philosophy which covers Australia New Zealand and Southeast Asia and I was mystified by some of the uh abstracts from some of the other talks I mean one of them began with an old problem I have a lump of clay I make a statue have I now got one thing or two I think gosh fancy wasting your life on questions like this created by the way you're talking in thinking so what is Right hemisphere phenomenology like well nothing is entirely certain in this world but it's not random it's not chaotic it is not entirely predictable but it is orderly and it's that bridge between the orderly and the disorderly that is really really important for creativity all in this world is ultimately interconnected nothing is fixed but all is flowing and in process what exists are holes in fact the parts are an artifact of left hemisphere attention because everything is a whole at a certain level of attention and holes are in this sense nested what is at one level a part is at another level a whole and vice versa meaning is implicit now almost everything that matters to us and makes life worth living is to do with the implicit once you lose as we are in danger of doing in society as it is now a respectful an understanding of the implicit and have to make everything explicit so we can have laws and algorithms we've just destroyed the things that make life Worth Living Like Love Like nature like music architecture art poetry metaphor myth sex our understanding of ourselves and the cosmos this cannot be rendered explicit and yet it is without it our lives are meaningless and a lot of people I know because I'm a psychiatrist are very troubled at the moment by the fact that they're told they live in in a meaningless random world don't let them get away with it so what I think is that there's not both of these ways of attending have their uses don't get me wrong there's nothing wrong with the left hemisphere as I sometimes say it's my second favorite Hemisphere and uh it it as long as it knows its place it's marvelous the trouble is it's arrogant and there are stories throughout indigenous uh cultures around the world and particularly in the Orient in the iching uh in the bedanta uh in the secret of the Golden Flower there are stories that point to this idea that I called the master in the Emissary there is a subsidiary functionary that is very valuable and was appointed by the master but because it knows less thinks it knows more and that is where the ruin starts now we live in a world in which we stopped attending to everything the right hemisphere tells us and we've prioritized only what can be made explicit and linear in the left hemisphere fashion so objectivity while not strictly speaking achievable is nonetheless an honorable aim what one is trying to do is avoid the pitfalls of a single particular Viewpoint and I think sharing different viewpoints as many as possible is a wise move if you're trying to understand something but you can't understand it in a way that doesn't involve an understand standing by definition so we can't remove ourselves from this picture but we don't our choices are not either being lost in subjectivity or lost in a world of objectivity a distinction which is important doesn't mean Severance please remember this because so many problems now come from the fact that because we've made a distinction we think we've made a severance but we haven't the unity of things is constantly be beautifully ramifying into individual uh being but that ramification into ever newly created uh inwardness and expression of it outwardness in the whole does nothing to threaten the integration of the whole it actually enhances the meaning of the whole when a flower unfolds I should have put it have a beautiful gift of this happening of a flower sort of unfolding and you know all all the comes out the petle zape and the there's all the the stam and and the rest of it that hasn't threatened the flower that has fulfilled the flower when it was a tight Bud it had that potential now the potential is fulfilled and all of life has that kind of a structure I would like to suggest and we Midwife the world into existence it's not that we make reality up heaven forbid that's a kind of postmodern delusion nor is it that reality is simply out there for the recording as though we were Geer counters or cameras who were just receiving data no we Midwife being into existence and this is a reciprocal process we are changed and it is changed and in this I want to refer to Gerta who said that all all things in existence have rightly considered evoke in one the organ of perception whereby they can be realized uh I I find that a very uh it chimes with my experience I think it's a point worth mentioning and what all this implies is that there is a presencing to use a hiigaran ISM uh Anis in German was a verb until heidik came along and made it a noun and presence is our noun and hiigarans in English have used the term presencing because something being present sounds a bit passive it's there yes okay uh but when it presences it comes into being for you and that is a process that involves you in nourishing it mid wiping it as I say into being and this is contrary to many views so there are people whose philosophy I quite like who nonetheless can't break out literally from the padded cell of the mind they see us as walled in to a a windowless cell in which we create fantasies for ourselves that we call reality but have nothing to do with reality now of course they're not the full story of reality but they are part of reality and everybody's version of these things will be different but it doesn't make them more false it means that there are different aspects of Truth so why do we have matter and why Consciousness in other words why these different forms of consciousness well one is to do with The Coincidence of opposites and oh gosh I wish I could talk about this I have a whole chapter on it in the matter with things but we've presocratic knew about this Eastern philosophers always known about it but since we were told that the thing and its opposite can't be true we've been um misled in my view there are certain Senses at the everyday level of course in which they can't be true either I had milk in my coffee at breakfast this morning or I didn't it's not a question of uh both being possible but as Neil bour pointed out the higher the deeper one goes the more it is true that thing and its opposite are true and you know simple expressions of this are the way up is the way down which is literally the case um depending on how you look at it which direction you look at it um but this coexistence of opposites is really important and in as much as you can call matter and Consciousness for our purposes opposed they simultaneously interact with one another and create something so I'm hoping I can make this work this is a sculpture in an art gallery in Switzerland yes I kind of like that um the first thing about this universe is that it is creative that we can know without going anywhere that people might go oh that's woo woo but it is a creative universe that's what's happening it's just constantly producing new forms and it's organic not mechanical in other words it's complex in a way that is not fully predictable and cannot be reduced to a linear sequence almost everything that exists in nature has this quality you can pick out if you go focus on a detail in a very complex scheme in which the re-entrant loops and all the rest you can find a place where a leads to B and you can intervene there and you go see it's a machine but it that's the wrong conclusion to draw it's a complex system that has little Parts in it that are linear and which we can manipulate and necessary to Creation are three things that matter gives us and none of them by contemporary Norms are typical of creativity the first is constraint so our mind can go anywhere but matter constrains the possibilities for us that is very important when you're creating secondly it offers resistance which is not the same as constraint so resistance is facilitatory not just negative as we say for example what is friction friction is what stops motion isn't it we all know that we learned that at school it's also what starts motion by the way without friction I would be unable to move from this spot so it has dual qualities in that way and resistance is important for anything coming into being it needs to force its way against something and this is how in a way the image of the Michelangelo sculpture or whatever it is it comes into being because of uh the degree of resistance offered by matter and another is permanence so uh of course nothing is permanent um but what is material has that little little bit more permanent than my words now disappear instantly but this screen may still be here tomorrow because it's material and this is like whirlpools in a stream and I'm borrowing here very much from shelling who is um I think becoming much more a figure that philosophers were prepared to talk about who really was the most extraordinary genius at a very young age he had insights into things that have changed the way we think whirlpools are in the Stream but they're not in the Stream in the way that a ball is in the Stream or a fish is in the Stream even they are the stream for the time that they're there and they can be photographed they can be measured they move they have power to move things and they have forces to be reckoned with and after a while eventually they will move on and they arise spontaneously from the flow once again the image of sculpture or the filter uh Shell's wonderful line that life is the Dome of many colored glass that stains the white Radiance of Eternity in other words the filtering that happens with the stained glass produces all the Manifest uh original elements in our world and it's like the the air passing through the vocal cords as James said what is interesting is that the brain becomes more powerful by shedding neurons and Pro in connections now it may astonish you to know that by the time a baby is born it has shed 70% of its neurons not to 70% of its neurons it has shed 70% of its neurons and it goes on shedding pruning sorting and creating and it's that through actually doing that process of resistance uh of that it produces something that has a degree of permanence and the primary function of the Corpus kosum is to inhibit probably the single most important function of the frontal loes is to inhibit the frontal loes inhibit the posterior cortex of the same hemisphere that is what they exist to do and that is profoundly creative it enables us to stand back from experience and not just be swamped by it but be able to look at it and see things that if we were too close to it we wouldn't be able to it's like reading a book too close to it you can't read it too far away you can't read but the frontal loes mediate for us the necessary distance from uh what exists and it may interest you to know that the human brain has proportionately more inhibitory neurons than that of any other species creation is differentiation and for Bon another underrated but very important philosopher in my humble opinion creation is inhibition and he thought that the brain was in fact an inhibitory organism and that it banished it wasn't that it stored memories it banished the possibility of retrieving certain memories and that when the brain is damaged sometimes they they reemerge and flow is uh relations only here are FL it looks like a network doesn't it with interconnected uh elements and all flow has quality of uh singularity unity and differentiation so these these images are all taken in a straight sided channel in which water at a steady pace is put through the channel and in that rectilinear uh model uh rods again of rectangular cross-section are dropped into the flow and look what comes out of it that could never have been predicted from the Rector linearity is is this extraordinary beauty in which these sort of shapes when you magnify are present and eventually you get something like this and there are photographs of this from the air happening in I I know one of them happening off Baka California um anyway here we are uh it's called The caran Vortex Street and it is simply produced by an obstacle Leonardo saw this he he paint pained a picture of an old man with his stick in the water and saw these fascinating patterns that emerg from it so where do brains come into it they provide resistance they are not strictly necessary uh as I say many creatures have Consciousness without a brain and there are phenomena such as terminal Lucidity in which people just before they die and having been uh more or less incapable of thinking suddenly achieve as the brain fails Insight the ability to see things talk about them in an animated way after not perhaps speaking for a year or two and then they die and then there's the very interesting case of how dran and ke hydris is interesting I quote in the book a chap who had a first class degree in mathematics from Leeds and an IQ of 127 that he had almost no cerebral cortex whatever the space in the skull was almost entirely filled with fluid but hydran carefully is another thing in which a child is born that has no brain basically it stops at the brain stem and yet somehow these children are able to see things to recognize people to behave and react appropriately to have favorite toys to enjoy music please don't ask me how what I want to open to you is the wonders in all you know shared humility before what exists I I don't know the answers I think you ECT anyone who says they know the answers to these problems which is not to say we shouldn't continue to try to find them but the idea that Consciousness interacts with matter which was an insuperable problem in the 18th century 17th century is no longer insuperable since Matter's already intrinsically a field that acts at a distance and interacts with Consciousness take gravity electromagnetic forces and it's not incomprehensible that such fields of force in Consciousness affect matter and it would perhaps be harder to account for if they didn't in any case it's not disputed that observation changes the nature of matter and not just in some incidental fashion nor by the way is quantum mechanics only something that applies to the very very tiny or the very very large it happens all the way through just as the the surface of the Earth is is is round we know that uh and everywhere you stand it seems to be flat but as you go out from that you realize that the illusion of flatness is because of your point of view so changes wrought in the mind have material effects it's not just brain and the body but the mind and the body so the placebo effect which is still not properly understood hypnosis that can cure of skin condition CBT which can alter your thought processes and change the chemistry of the brain so that reminds us that while brains may not be absolutely essential bodies are in the words of Loff and Johnson as embodied imaginative creatures we never were separated or divorced from reality in the first place what has always made science possible is our embodiment not our Transcendence of it and our imagination not our avoidance of it that is Loff and Johnson so why Consciousness since we could do everything we can without having Consciousness and why life well I've already said I think Consciousness is the ontological Primitive so why life as Whitehead said the secret of persistence is never to have been alive psyche is in everything life enables a certain evolution of psyche so psyche is everywhere but what life adds is the evolution of Consciousness and in life it is much more obvious that it's directed to a purpose that it involves complexity and that it involves values like Beauty and goodness and Truth eventually in the human and to some extent even in ag it's the basis whereby we have imagination which is the creative faculty and which by the way is not something that science does not Avail itself of most of the great discoveries by mathematicians and scientists were made by an imaginative Insight an aha moment which correlates precisely with the activity in the right Superior temporal sulkus and gyrus and in the right amigdala and there is an attraction to Value so I believe we're not just propelled mechanically hydraulically as we used to believe in the 19th century from behind but we are drawn from in front by attractors and those attractors are the sense of a direction to a purpose we may not be able to articulate it but you can see animals even microscopic ones under the microscope exploring and appearing to take tendencies that will further that existence but also by Valu so we are attracted by what is good what is beautiful and what is true and this means that there is really relation between the ground of being and the cosmos this ground of being what can we say about it it is self organizing it is self-propagating it is endlessly creative and it's on the borders of Order and Chaos order without determinism uh sorry sski um and fractal in nature there are fractal holes when you go down in them you find more of the same structure and the holes are greater than the parts now if you add in to Creative Drive purpose and value and wonder the word God I don't mind them the slightest there are parallels between panentheism and my understanding of pan psychism panentheism is not pantheism in which everything is lumped together and that's God but panentheism is that whatever God is it's more than that and all that exists exists in God and God is in everything that exists now my understanding of pan psychism is not that it is a summation of small psyches which leads to the so-call combination problem I believe this is a result of thinking in a partitioning way but actually the field of Consciousness is one and doesn't need to be put together it's just that it looks like it because Consciousness is not only the field in which we operate but is in everything I'm I'm getting to the end the cup of coffee is coming I promise so so Julian Huxley man is that part of reality in which and through which the cosmic process has become conscious and has begun to comprehend itself p shardan man discovers that he is nothing else than Evolution become conscious of itself Thomas Nagel each of Our Lives is a part of the lengthy process of the universe gradually waking up and becoming aware of itself quantum physics David bone there is no need to regard The Observer as basically separate from what he sees nor to reduce him to an epiphenomenon of the objective process more broadly one could say that through the human being the universe has created a mirror to observe itself so there are four independent voices that suggest what Whitehead says in his philosophy that God whatever it is the ground of being and the cosmos are co-creating they're evolving in a dance together and understanding themselves as they come more and more into being ran Williams doesn't like that because it suggests that God is not perfect at the start but it's actually possible to square these positions I won't go into that so is consciousness then holy personal no a thousand times no it's like James's image of islands in the ocean that are all rooted at the base of the sea it's like the forest in which there is an unseen tangle of roots of communication that knows no end between these creatures the creative Cosmos is us we are nature we come out of Nature and return to her which is why I abominate the word environment which suggests a technical thing that surrounds us but it isn't it's in us and we are in it environment is the sort of thing you might have a department of one day I don't know but we we uh we have an unforeseen and unfathomable gift to be here and it's our resonance our reverberative existence our response ability to use the time we have here what is our role while we're here as persons now people say how can it matter what I do I'm so small the universe is so big but this is a left hemisphere way of thinking about let's get the magnitude and then we know the worth and the value but actually when you say my love for my loved one is as broad as the heavens as deep as the ocean how big is that we know these things have value in another sense and by responding to what is we help to create and involve evolve The Good the beautiful and the true so my final words are taken from Gerard Mandy Hopkins famous poem just the first eight lines as king fishes Catch Fire dragonflies draw Flame as tumbled over Rim in Roundy Wells Stones ring like each tucked string tells each hung Bells bow swung finds tongue to fling out broad its name each mortal thing does one thing and the same it deals out that being indoors each one dwells selves goes itself myself it speaks and spells crying what I do is me for that I came thank you than thank you thanks a lot coffee