Intimations of a New Worldview, 5.3: The God of the Left Hemisphere (video 3)

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Links

References
Blake, W. (2011). William Blake: The Complete Illuminated Books. Lexicos Publishing.
Haidt, J. (2007). The Happiness Hypothesis: Putting Ancient Wisdom to the Test of Modern Science. Random House.
McGilchrist, I. (2009). The Master and His Emissary: The Divided Brain and the Making of the Western World (2nd, New Expanded Edition ed.). Yale University Press.
Nietzsche, F., & Kaufmann, W. (1977). The Portable Nietzsche. Penguin Books.
Nietzsche, F., & Kaufmann, W. (1989). On the Genealogy of Morals and Ecce Homo. Vintage.
Nietzsche, F. W. (2012). Philosophy in the Tragic Age of the Greeks (M. Cowan, Trans.; Reprint edition). Gateway Editions.
Peterson, J. B. (1999). Maps of Meaning: The Architecture of Belief (1 edition). Routledge.
Plato. (2022). Plato: The Complete Works. Pandora’s Box.
Sperber, D., & Mercier, H. (2017). The Enigma of Reason: A New Theory of Human Understanding. Penguin.

[deeplizard]

At the end of this lecture, you mention that you identify with the shaman, which is of course on the schizotypy side of the spectrum. However, at the same time, what you are doing with this series represents an extreme ability to create order. Your synthesis and the story you are telling is creating a higher form of order out of chaos. Is this not priest-like?

Can you help me reconcile this? I'm also interested in this because I see myself as having a similar ability to create order out of chaos, but I also identify with the shaman. I'm trying to understand how these two things can coexist. Is there some larger capacity that one can achieve that allows them to hold aspects of both the shaman and the priest?

I'm thinking the answer may be related to the optimal behavior of operating at the border of order and chaos, but I can't nail down this discrepancy in my mind. Thanks!

Some additional thoughts:

A related way that I have previously framed this mode of thought using the idea below:

Problem Solving (scientist) vs. Problem Finding (poet)

I view a genius as someone who encompasses both of these abilities and is also a polymath.

This quote by Arthur Schopenhauer speaks to this idea:
"Talent hits a target no one else can hit; Genius hits a target no one else can see."

As well as this derivative by Albert Einstein:
"Intellectuals solve problems, geniuses prevent them."

When Nietzsche said, "God is dead", he was clearly hitting a target that no one else could see. Perhaps he wasn't hitting the target, but rather, he was finding the problem? I'm thinking that Nietzsche also provided a solution, which was too balance between order and chaos?

[flavertex]

Excellent series, very glad I found this from Vervake's link. You are putting together in one place the insights and ideas that others of the same intuition have said in so many myriad other places. I'll be sure to follow avidly.

[domenicmolinaro]

Illuminating, this made me feel a kinship with my ancestors in a way I never conceived, an empathy. Like the load was carried forward and laid at our feet, but it was a necessary burden with the bodily horrors they faced, while I live in relative physical comfort.

[martinchikilian]

Brilliant episode and series, Brett. I've been getting a lot out of it.

Thank you 🙏

[hexagram]

A gloriously fascinating series of huge depths and huge syntheses. Thank you, Mr Andersen, I look forward to the rest of it (and to buying any related books you might publish). I realize you are already referring to heaven knows how many sources, but after this episode I can’t help wondering if physics will get a bit of a look-in somewhere. Many aspects of physics in recent decades have been appallingly left-hemisphere, it seems to me – sticking with string theory without coming up with any supporting experiments worth a damn; believing in what must surely be the tosh of the multiple parallel universes, ever multiplying; believing that “there is no such thing as time”, and that there is a frozen (“stable”) block universe which can be sliced up into bits of past and future, ever-omnipresent. Physicists do of course tend to regard “their” science as the ultimate foundational science, and by implication the most “right” and “important” one. Sorry if that’s a dreadful generalization (but is it left-hemisphere or what?!). I know you have mentioned Lee Smolin, who a number of physicists regard as an “outsider”, but it would hardly be the first time that an outsider has been more correct than the “mainstream”, in this case taking the existence of time very seriously. (I’m not trying to oversimplify the immense issues in trying to explain experimental results, cope with mathematics, take relativity into account, etc. Physicists just seem to often have some weird, and some rigid, ideas that they would prefer to stick to, even while insisting that it is, say, more “reasonable” to “believe” in something that could never be demonstrated, than to, say, choose to believe in the Virgin Birth, which has as much of a claim to experimental verification. That sentence is not supposed to be a gift to the gullible or naïve people who push, say, their views on intelligent design as somehow equivalent to teaching natural selection! Perhaps I shouldn’t have written it!)

[metatypology]

i found your work two days ago and soaking up this videos, amazing synthesis of ideas. i’m taking lots of notes

i too see the parallel between McGilchrist and Haidt’s framing of elephants/masters over riders/emissaries, but Haidt is working from the dual model of cognition model, which is distinct from how the hemispheres are understood, despite also presenting a primacy of more unconscious processes

haidt’s elephant goes by many names in psych literature (intuitive, system 1) but speaks to heuristic and affective frames that automatically come to mind. some articles i’ve seen suggest temporal lobe activity of both hemispheres is involved, while rational/system 2 thinking uses the frontal lobes

[bobdmb]

others say it better than me, but thank you so much for this. What an effort! wow!

[clumsydad]

fascinating discussion at beginning of the history of elevating reason and the abstract over the instinctual and the earthly. nietzsche's term 'crypto-priests' is great, haven't heard that, for the philosophers who also historically have searched for the 'higher truths' at the expense of the visceral and emotional. i've been learning more recently on the intimate connections of platonism and aristotelianism with christianity (and even broadening into relations among many religions) about the placing of reason and the remote abstractions and telos over the reality of everyday experience and the dynamic urges of being human. how we need to integrate our scientific discoveries into a new socio-spiritual project to integrate our instinctual needs and our need for belonging.

[clumsydad]

this is also our traditional way of organizing things, in the left hemisphere; a paternal and judgemental matter of cold social and economic hierarchies and our arguing of the 'one right way', or system, of how things should be done. and the denigration of the visceral feelings as they are too mushy and confusing and tedious/time consuming in the rush for a rectilinear building of civilizations and authority.

[late_fee]

Thanks for the series so far, getting a lot out of it. Will you explore more into nihilism/ beyond nihilism, in the vein of Nishitani in Religion and Nothingness? Thanks

[LiamGCErskine]

Have you read the fall by Steve Taylor?

I disagree with some of his arguments but it is an excellent investigation of the pre-agrarian mind

[PeterPohl-uqxu]

You could argue that on an atomic level, that all things on a fundamental level remain the same, but they still rearrange so there still is change in structure vs. material. But then you run into the emergent properties as you scale up physically that result in chaos materially. From what I gather, the concept of becoming is sound materialistically.

What religions would you classify as the Priest Class that are persecuting the shamanic during the last 20 years? Islam, Catholicism, and early America Protestant Christianity? Its hard to see the persecution in the modern day outside of Islam but maybe I am missing something. The west seems to have moved on. I understand if you dont have time.