Feynman’s Birds: Richard Feynman is notorious for his witty quotes, including that “philosophy of science is about as useful to scientists as ornithology is to birds.” Indeed, some neuroscientists would look perplexed in front of analytic accounts of their own practices, methods, and foundations. Starlings fly by flapping their feathered wings and yet, regardless of their individual skills and collective choreographies, they may be ignorant about how and why they do it.
I begin with this quotation from the Introduction to The Matter with Things. In recent years I rejoined the Scientific and Medical Network in search of contemporary thinkers, outside the Anthroposophical Society, who appear to be awakening to the spiritual in the human being and the cosmos. They may consciously or unconsciously be representatives of the Spirit of our time – Michael. One such individual, I think, is Iain McGilchrist whose writings and interviews I have explored and would like to introduce in this article.
Es psiquiatra, filósofo y neurocientífico, dedicó toda su vida al estudio de la relación mente-cuerpo, se formó en medicina y en sus libros intenta explicar cómo los humanos podemos vivir y comprender el mundo real reuniendo la filosofía, la física y la neurociencia para crear una visión única de nuestra realidad; demoliendo el mito de la teoría de los hemisferios cerebrales y encontrando una singular interpretación para ciertas formas de entender el universo.
The underpinning thesis of this Essay is that practically useful knowledge concerning economic governance, and governance more generally for that matter, can be acquired by study of the structure and functioning of the human brain. The arguments have some resonances with, inter alia: the ancient microcosm-macrocosm analogy in philosophy, the brain being the microcosm and the governance system (‘Leviathan’s brain’) being the macrocosm; the Apollo/Cassandra story in Greek mythology; and much more recent mathematical analysis of self-similar systems, most notably in relation to fractals. They lead us to call for a new and better ‘Gestalt’ when thinking about the organisation of the structure and conduct of economic policy. The arguments follow a path already beaten in the development of AI, in the course of which major advances have been made via the study of neural networks and their use as analogies and sources of insight. No similar path has been trod in thinking about governance: as the 2nd President of the United States put it in his own time, the science of government has been “at a stand”.
Hutchinson and G. Yarrow, “To ‘see’, or not to ‘see’: that is the question. Moving on from a half-brained system of economic governance”, Essays in Regulation NS13.1, Regulatory Policy Institute, Oxford, 6 July 2023.
Human orders – scientific, artistic, social, economic, and political – are fictions. They are untrue, not because they necessarily are false, but because they necessarily are incomplete. All of our human orders, however inclusive we may try to make them, turn out to be some degree exclusive. And so we are always being surprised by something we find, too late, that we have excluded. Think of almost any political revolution or freedom movement or the ozone hole or mad cow disease or the events of September 11, 2001.
Abstract: A neuroscientist reflects on his near-death experience to ponder the nature of the human mind and the survival of consciousness after death. Ancient traditions, manifold personal experiences, nuanced philosophical views, and recent scientific evidence, all point to the brain as a filter (or receiver) of consciousness rather than its fanciful producer. No doubt, good-old-fashioned materialists —nowadays rebranded as physicalists, crypto-dualists, or illusionists wearing virtual reality goggles— insist that minds are “nothing but” what brains do. Nevertheless, a trans-materialist science can expand the scope and depth of the answers (and the questions) that really matter not only to science but also to human flourishing.
