(This is just a note I wrote out for myself)
Never mind the left brain/right brain stuff: it’s anatomically interesting and irresistible as a metaphor or framing device. But it’s too easily assimilated into the way we all already think. What I believe is truly revolutionary in Iain McGilchrist’s outlook is the reversal he implies between our notions of objective and subjective knowledge.
At present, the default, general assumption that only objective knowledge can be really true. To many people that’s going to look like a tautology: if it’s subjective, then it can’t be knowledge, or at least it can’t be knowledge of the real, substantial, world. Subjective “knowledge” is taken to be essentially private and so it becomes both indisputable and irrelevant. Objective knowledge is whatever can be tested by instruments and corroborated by other people. Originally, these instruments were the lenses in telescopes and microscopes, which showed things unimaginable before. I think this shift from direct experience to a trust in what the instruments tell us was the great change that made possible modern science — this isn’t an original thought but I can’t remember where I got it from.
At one extreme, this faith that what is real is only what can be measured by an external observer leads to behaviourism or the modified “mentalistic behaviourism” of Dennett, where you explain consciousness as an illusion caused by an infestation of memes.
Even without those grotesqueries, there is a huge gap in the third person interpretation of reality. The division between objective and subjective seems absolute. But in fact it cannot be maintained. As many people have pointed out, we theorise our observations, and we must if they are to make any sense. That is to say that we decide what the meaning must be of whatever the instruments tell us. However much we anthropomorphise them — they only “tell”, “show” or “reveal” things to us because we are listening in particular ways.
This is absolutely not to say that they don’t reveal truths, or that reality is not out there. We can have all kinds of experiences of external reality that are not theorised and don’t have a first person element. We just don’t know what they are, though we can name them. When I am skiing, or fly casting, my skis and my rod are constantly telling my muscles things to which they must respond immediately, long before I could be conscious of what’s happening. That’s why it’s so difficult to teach a physical skill like bicycling. This is contact with reality, but it is completely subjective. It can’t be put into words or measured. It won’t go into the third person.
Third person reality is something we construct, rather than simply discover. It is no less real for that, but it emerges from the interaction, the clash, the struggle (at least on one side) between desire and external world. There is no direct, unmediated, objective access to the external world. All our knowledge is subjective, even when our instruments deliver the data to us. We can’t learn without experience.
But subjectivity is not the same as privacy. Because we are social beings, and because language is a social construction, almost all that we experience is in fact intersubjective. We can correct others’ experiences, just as much as we can distort them. It’s what we do when we write, and what is done to us when we learn to read, or to use an instrument.
Is experience possible without consciousness? There are creatures — worms, say — which can learn without being conscious in any way I can understand.