Many Worlds – What Do You Believe?

My first post on this blog, initially posted on Facebook, was inspired by the book I’ve just started reading, “The Master & His Emissary (The Divided Brain And The Making Of The Modern World)” by Iain McGilchrist. It concerns the hemispherical division of the brain and its effect on our culture. The standard idea of brain division (left hemisphere = language, right = visual) is simplistic.
I was fumbling towards an understanding of the predilection for seeing the world in certain ways. And how we judge the validity of a worldview.
I don’t want to regurgitate chunks of the book, partly because I’ve only just started the second chapter, but it got me thinking about our view of the world and what, in our brains, filters or colours our experience of the world.
Most “higher”/social animals, it seems, have equally divided brains. On a base level, an animal needs to focus closely on something like prising a nut from its kernel, a worm from a hole, or something similar, whilst also maintaining a wider focus on its environment for predators, or  competition from others of its species.
The same seems to be true of humans, although obviously more advanced in what we process. One can think, in general terms, of half the brain focusing on detail and the other on whole systems.
Just as some are left-handed, or more artistic or more lingual, so we may favour one hemisphere over the other and, as McGilchrist says, this colours not just how we think about the world but the entirety of our experience.
From the last chapter of Chapter 1, regarding the asymmetry of the brain -
Experience is forever in motion, ramifying and unpredictable. In order for us to know anything at all, that thing must have enduring properties. If all things flow, and one can never step into the same river twice – Heraclitus's phrase is, I believe, a brilliant evocation of the core reality of the right hemisphere's world – one will always be taken unawares by experience, since nothing being ever repeated, nothing can ever be known. We have to find a way of fixing it as it flies, stepping back from the immediacy of experience, stepping outside the flow.
Hence the brain has to attend to the world in two completely different ways, and in so doing to bring two different worlds into being. In the one, we experience – the live, complex, embodied, world of individual, always unique beings, forever in flux, a net of interdependencies, forming and reforming wholes, a world with which we are deeply connected. In the other we ‘experience’ our experience in a special way: a ‘re-presented’ version of it, containing now static, separable, bounded, but essentially fragmented entities, grouped into classes, on which predictions can be based. This kind of attention isolates, fixes and makes each thing explicit by bringing it under the spotlight of attention. In doing so it renders things inert, mechanical, lifeless. But it also enables us for the first time to know, and consequently to learn and to make things. This gives us power.
These two aspects of the world are not symmetrically opposed. They are not equivalent, for example, to the ‘subjective’ and ‘objective’ points of view, concepts which are themselves a product of, and already reflect, one particular way of being in the world – which in fact, importantly, already reflect a ‘view’ of the world.
The distinction I am trying to make is between, on the one hand, the way in which we experience the world pre-reflectively, before we have had a chance to ‘view’ it at all, or divide it up into bits – a world in which what later has come to be thought of as subjective and objective are held in a suspension which embraces each potential ‘pole’, and their togetherness, together; and, on the other hand, the world we are more used to thinking of, in which subjective and objective appear as separate poles. At its simplest, a world where there is ‘betweenness’, and one where there is not. These are not different ways of thinking about the world: they are different ways of being in the world. And their difference is not symmetrical, but fundamentally asymmetrical.

Now, I’m not supposing that McGilchrist is going to, in further chapters, forward a theory pertaining to scientific vs magical thinking. He may well mention it, but his opening premise sparked me to thinking about how Robert Anton Wilson spoke of these 2 views as entirely reconcilable, and of the 2 jpgs I linked to in my first post. I’m thinking also of R.A.W.s “neurological model agnosticism”.

I think that maybe if we, as a species, wish to evolve our philosophy of the world, then we may need to start using both of our cerebral hemispheres equally – or as appropriate. Have to keep reminding ourselves that our models of the world (and I use “the world” to refer to the totality of our experience of the Universe) are not the world itself. They are, at best, the nearest simulacrum we could construct using data/evidence gleaned from our very fallible sensory perceptions. Models which do not fit new evidence need to be discarded, and even models which serve us well should not be held complacently, because it’s usually only a matter of time before we make idols of our models and begin confusing them with the real world. Cue cognitive dissonance.