Capacious Minds
The two hemispheres of the brain, and our quest to understand the world
Capacious means roomy, having lots of space. This is a wonderful word for a well-functioning mind and outlook. A capacious mind has room for ambiguity. Room for the explicitly irrational. Room for empathy and kindness and wisdom. Room for contradiction and nuance. Room for facts. A capacious mind is comfortable using categories, though acknowledges the risk of category error. Contradictions (struggle) are used to get more understanding. More room, more frameworks, more meaning. The capacious mind is wired for identifying and understanding, for the static and dynamic, for capturing and interacting: recognising that there are different tools for sense-making (or better yet: meaning-making) in different contexts.
I've been on something of a philosophical writing streak lately. When you realise words are less important than the truths you are grasping at, the words seem to flow more fiercely.
The Divided Brain
I've been reading (and writing about) psychiatrist and philosopher Iain McGilchrist's exposition on the 'Divided Brain'. His interpretation of brain science is that there are two hemispheres in our brain that do very different things. The left is the grasping, manipulating, precise, model-making, always-certain sphere. While the right is the holistic, understanding, contextualizing, meaning-making sphere. One cannot function without the other. He sees modern rationalists as overemphasizing the certainty of our world-models, and thinks we claim things have a pattern and rigidity and inanimateness that is just not so. His claim is that rational fallacy is unmaking the Western (and wider) world. With this approach, we are denying (the non-religious in particular) the search for meaning. I'm not sure about the scientific veracity about this strict brain hemisphere model, it seems compelling, but I do think it's a wonderful metaphor and lens for how we perceive and attend to the world. This framework encourages us to use different and varied tools to sate our left and right brains.
After my reading of Iain McGilchrist, I grappled with what this means practically for us. Everyone has the capacity for Capacious thinking. But we can limit ourselves with dogma, an anxious need for certainty, or pseudo-science - and we can narrow the capacious corridors. Yet we can never truly kill our exploratory capacities. The question, simply put, is; what meaning-making framework, if any, is your right brain favouring? In the search for the spiritual (meaning, ethics, values, purpose, love) - we all use different approaches. Some of us subscribe to Science, or to Religion, others to the arts, others deny the transcendent (these are the not-so-capacious). Most of us oscillate frustratingly between the above to maximise our chance of finding a version of meaning that is applicable to us. But this idea of capaciousness can benefit us in a variety of ways. There are many paths to beauty, goodness wellness, and truth - whichever you are looking for.
Divided to United
Capacious minds use both sides. Left 'serves' right, without parochial vision. There is no rational versus spiritual, rather there is reasonable compromise between what we do know and what we don't, between what satisfies us and what does not. I use the term Capacious Minds for those that accept that the world is not fully figured out, nor can it ever be. Capacious Minds admit to the great unknown. Some use a concept of God and a formal religion to search the great plains of unreachable uncertainties. Others use connection to people or nature. Others use arts. Others use science and the best explanations we have of the world. Capacious minds use some combination of the above. Capacious minds seek different tools of meaning-making for different occasions. Science for tractable problems, and practical soul-searching for existential concern.
Literature is Scripture, Scripture is literature.
I used to think of religiosity as a kind of irrational folly. Now I see it arising from a deeply rational need to make meaning. Religious frameworks provide the writing and poetry and history and story that we crave. They are often rigidly interpreted, but they are also an undeniably rich source of spiritual material and tradition. We flock to literature and art and explanations for the same reason some of us seek God.
I know most religious folk will never admit this. But their scripture seems to me to a similar meaning-making source as secularists use art or words. This might be a way to common ground. We will always use words in different ways. We will vary in our acknowledgement of the immaterial, of the numinous and nebulous. Overtly rational and fundamentally religious minds are at the extremes. The lightly-labelled rational seek meaning in literature and the softly religious might admit that their scripture serves as a similar device. That's the meeting ground. Our mutual panacea entails respecting any approach to the middle. Whatever that middle may be.
Building Capacious Minds
This is a powerful thing to realise, that you are not bound to one way of thinking. There is no One Way to make sense of the big picture, and your place in it. Talking about the 'real' world is problematic, our access to it will always be shrouded by problems of perception and parochialism - so we must continually vary our approach. At different times, we can pan superstition and we can be sceptic about the reach of theories. I covered similar ground in past posts: anti-ideology, and critical thinking tips; but these posts are thin gruel for rich ideas in meaning-making - overly literate and rigid. This more capacious approach makes room for other: rationalist tools plus whatever spiritual or artistic approaches you are comfortable with: science, experiences with people or nature, literature, scripture, or something else entirely.
An Illustrative Debate
Sam Harris and Jordan Peterson
an aside to the main post
A few years back, two public intellectuals got together by popular demand: Jordan Peterson went on the Sam Harris podcast. Their first meeting was an unsatisfying 2-hour semantic quagmire. It was quite interesting if you could stay on the horse. They couldn't get going, mainly because they couldn't agree on definitions. Primarily the definition of Truth. Schools of thought in Darwinism, Pragmatism, and Realism were bandied about to little avail. They got stuck at: What do you mean by truth?
Sam Harris is a very rational, realist, ultra-crisp thinker; while JBP is a more holistic, sprawling brain (that agrees with the McGilchrist model of things, I think) - and he explores beyond the strictly scientifically ration using Jung, biblical mythology, and Dostoyevsky themes. I am not saying one route to Meaning (let's rather not call it Truth) is better than the other - in fact, I'm saying they are both necessary; but with mutual acknowledgement. This conversation was a good illustration of stronger-left brain (Harris) meeting a stronger-right brain (Peterson). And just keep the metaphor if you doubt the neuropsychological claims of McGilchrist's Master and his Emissary - because it helped me see the confusion. They disagreed because Peterson can't bring himself to back Harris's claim that "we interact with some objective reality and that we might have a completely incorrect interpretation of this objective reality through faults in our perception and cognition".
(To me, Harris's position sounded a bit like a like a word game - and I'm sure I misunderstood it - but if we are never sure when we are interpreting objective reality, why is it useful to describe it as that? You might rearrange to: "Because we have possibly insurmountable bias in perception and cognition - objective Truth need not be defined, just interactive truth". But then post-modernists use this claim to absurdity. We can always find mutual truths in interaction - but mutual truths are all we have.)
In the pod, Peterson describes scientific rationality in terms of 'operationalising' some truth claims in a left-brained way - we write theories, parameterise the problem, make things explicit - and then say something about the world. Then, Peterson's dilemma occurs when we try to 'generalise' the scientific models, bringing them back into contact with our reality. Petersen might say we did not use enough parameters, we did not account for crucial independencies, the ignorant gaps in our theories may yet prove fatal, and that it's not enough to be right in a handful of context tests (experiments). Now I am sure there are examples of scientific truth claims where the operationalization satisfies the generalisation - and we move on merrily. But Peterson (and McGilchrist), as I read them, say we can never be sure about the alignment - and know the full, interactive, every-context Truth. Is this just a fallibilism, or is this denial of Objective Truth?
I was long a disciple of this objective, scientific worldview - matter is made from matter: at emergent levels, with different dynamics in varying systems of complexity. Humans are chemical machines - we will eventually understand our brains and how our source code interacts with things. The insights from this model are a wonderful achievement in modernity: that to some degree, we can comprehend and build and explore space by parameterising our physical environment. But there is no room for ambiguity in this model, rather a bit of a bold claim that we will understand all when we get the more correct theory, or better detail or evidence.
The surprising thing about the Peterson vs Harris debate is how it tapped into a deep cultural current - people desperately wanted to hear this conversation. Further conversations sold out stadiums and the talks became became a viral sensation. I'm not sure if Harris and Peterson are the heroes we need, perhaps they're the heroes we deserve. Nonetheless, there is something here.
I'm starting to think we need both of these voices, the champion of scientific reason (and the material success this can achieve) and the beyond-rationalist challenger that thinks a model will always miss something. We need the collision, the tension, and to see combatants shake hands and smile fondly at the end of it. We need the critic of religion and the proponent for it. Beyond the sematic debate about ultimate Truth, both Harris and Peterson would be for more tools for meaning-making. Harris offers rationality tinged with Eastern spiritual tools of meditation and reflection. (Perhaps you need Harris's vocabulary and background to navigate this nuance). Peterson is about the strengthening of individual character - citing biblical themes like confronting struggle bravely and the hero's journey. (Perhaps you need Peterson's classical education and readings to use these deep themes practically.)
We don't need to choose between explicit worldviews, a capacious mind can pick and choose the right approach (the right ideas or exploration) as and when is needed, alternating to what works for the moment.