‘If the human brain were so simple that we could understand it, we would be so simple that we couldn’t’.
~ Emerson Pugh

This video is an interview with Iain McGilchrist, psychiatrist, Oxford literary scholar and author of one of my favourite (and most challenging) books….a voluminous read… ‘The Matter with Things’.

Here is my review of The Matter With Things.

Here, they discuss chapter 25 of the book. A deep dive into the topics of matter and consciousness. Just like the book, this interview requires some dedicated attention and reflection. The rewards are worth it.

If we ask what evidence there is for the existence of non-experiential concrete reality, the answer is easy and mathematically precise. There is zero evidence. There is zero observational evidence for the existence of any non-experiential concrete reality. Nor will there ever be any. All there is is one great big, wholly ungrounded, wholly question-begging theoretical intuition or conviction: we don’t see most of the matter around us doing things that we think of as showing signs of experientiality, so we conclude we know it’s not experiential, and that it’s ridiculous to think otherwise. This appears to be the great foundation of the wildly anti-naturalistic naturalism de nos jours.

Iain McGilchrist. The Matter With Things.