Article 70: The Invisible Gorilla

The Blinding Effects of Reductionist Materialism

Recently I published a one-minute left-brain right-brain attention exercise to feel the different hemisphere attention styles, then two visual demonstrations, the gorilla video and the more simple and effective yellow dot .gif, both of which show how our brains can shut off incoming visual signals even those clearly there and clearly right in front of us.

Though the exercises were both in the visual field, the same dynamics – including cognitive myopia – happen with all the senses including the thinking mind. One can first focus intently on a mental image or word and then also become aware of the space around that object of focus. Same with a note played by an instrument, or a guitar chord; or you can listen to a complex symphony, first zooming in to focus intently on the raw sounds, then stepping back, whilst also maintaining the focus, to include the atmosphere around those sounds and thus also the feeling space, or inner landscape, the composition depicts. The particularity is mainly left brain function and the context is mainly right brain function.

In truth, am not personally all that interested in whether or not the brain is involved with this any more than I want to know what each part is doing in my car or computer since whether or not I know what those parts are doing the experience of driving or watching the screen is unaffected. However, the focus-field dynamic IS interesting: just as every yin involves a corresponding yang, so all forms exist in space, so all particulars exist within a larger whole. Sometimes with our minds we tune out the context and get caught up in particular thoughts, or caught up in an especially intense emotion, at which point we forget where we are and drive off the side of the road into a drainage ditch. More importantly, by ignoring the space, or context, around the emotion – which in this case is inner, not physical, space – we become trapped in a dungeon of our own making, feeling there is no way out, that there is not even an outside at all; whereas in fact we have made our own prison simply by blanking out the larger context in which such thoughts or feelings are playing out, just as we blanked out the gorilla or the yellow dots. And of course this individual dynamic can play out in wider society: an entire population can develop blind areas trapping itself in a societal prison of its own collective making.

These blind spots inherent in left brain dominant approaches are dangerous in society-wide dynamics especially since the very nature of such blindness means that most of us remain unaware of these dangers, again just as we blanked out that gorilla pounding its chest right in front of us. Perhaps this explains why societies on the brink of collapse rarely seem aware of how critical things have become until it is too late; witness France in the late 1780’s or Russia shortly before 1917.

This whole business boils down to attention, in this case attending through the lens of reductionist materialism embedded in the modern world view and especially promulgated by our expert and ruling classes. This way of attending has profoundly imbalanced modern societies and threatens to lead them all into dark ends wherein similarly blinded followers will willingly consent to remain forever tethered without expecting or demanding eventual freedom. Many would argue we are already in such bad places; maybe, but we can still say: a) things could still get far worse and b) it’s not too late to change course. Just as intense left-brain visual focus can make us miss gorillas pounding their chests right in front of us, so also left-brain dominant mindsets can make us miss core aspects of our individual and collective makeups such that we are no longer able to lead sane, fulfilling human lives. It’s that simple.

And if you like me are still not comfortable talking about all this in terms of left and right brain function, just think of it this way: if we get stuck in overly narrow and usually habitual ways of thinking, feeling and experiencing, we become numb, or blind, to many other textures and dynamics of experience. So we need to become both focused and open, not only focused or habitually staying in the same behavioral lanes. I will continue using the left brain – right brain language because it’s as good an analog as any viz this focus-and-field dynamic which I believe is that of Creation itself – an ever-ongoing process – and why even extremely primitive creatures present with two-hemisphere brain systems. That brain structure reflects a form-in-space reality which in turn we process as such in brains fashioned by and further creating that primordial twin-but-not-two existential paradigm.

So: what are those missing gorillas? Well, before answering this, let us further explore the left-brain tendency to abstract things, because in order to appreciate the other side, as it were, we must first recognize how it is that we blank it out. (If you like shorter Articles, you can now skip to the last few paragraphs beginning with ‘So once again, what are those missing gorillas?’.)

To build a house you need a plan; to drive to the dentist you need a map. Both things are helpful; however, what happens in life over time is that do the same things regularly so each time we are following a now familiar plan or map. After a while we start to think of the process in terms of the plan or map and it is no longer a vivid, lived experience – even whilst we do it. The mental abstraction becomes the journey. Or put another way: when we think of doing X or Y we imagine in terms of our memory according to the representation in our left-brain ‘map-mind’, the idea being that the right brain feels the whole situation and its presence, whereas the left brain tends to conceptualize it as an abstract cognitive construct.

(By the way, this is very different from the hemispheric theories of only a few decades ago, wherein the left brain was regarded as logic and reason, and the right brain as mainly emotional. Research has come a long ways since then in this neurological field although the general public is largely unaware, just as the general public is also largely unaware of how the reductionist materialist paradigm has been definitively disproven after decades of quantum physics theory and experimental demonstration.)

This is essentially the same as how our minds see a tree and then fit it into our conceptual and language processing modalities by naming it ‘tree.’ The first time we see a tree this is a wide-open, fresh experience but the second and subsequent times we see any tree of any type in any location, we instantly label it ‘tree’ without paying much attention to it, fitting it into our map / scheme / idea of whatever it is we are doing and pass on by. We don’t really look at or feel the presence of the tree. It’s just a tree like all other trees; we ignore it, we don’t really see it because we have identified it and now pass on by to the next labelled thing we are going to ignore as well.

There is nothing inherently bad about this process, far from it. If we paid attention to every tree and person we pass on a busy city street, for example, we would have a nervous breakdown. (A certain amount of autism is a necessary thing! Perhaps this is why we humans have the highest percentage of filtering and negating processes in our brains.) However, if only mapping becomes the dominant mode of journeying through life, it is problematic because we end up missing out on too much that is getting blocked out by our over-reliance on abstract re-presentation versus being present and aware. It becomes an habitual, collective way of absenting versus presenting.

If we extend this process into personal relationships, family dynamics, workplaces and society in general, we find ourselves most of the time moving from one overly abstracted preconception to another because we immediately translate no matter what happens into previously learned representations, mainly via language reciting endless internal discursive commentary and tape loops. We may say ‘Good Morning!’ to our spouse, mother, brother, friend as we see them for the first time that day, but we don’t really see or feel them, so caught up are we in our internal monologue which, once we have them placed into, passes them by as taken care of and no longer of interest.

This dynamic manifests in no end of ways, for example in the field of Science which, bizarrely, last century we elevated to define reality for us, making it the contemporary equivalent of both Monarch and Church. There have been substantive arguments for about a century now following discoveries in physics, which is the study of matter and energy, specifically quantum physics, which drills down to the smallest of smallest of particles initially in the materialist belief that by so doing we could find the fundamental building blocks of reality. First an aside:

This sort of approach, by the way, was analyzed by both Buddhist and Hindu meditator-philosophers, aka ‘sages’, before 500 BC; they called it ‘atomism’ and debunked it by pointing out that every particle, no matter how small, still has six directions around it: above, below, front, back, left and right. In other words, the particle does not exist in a void, there is space around it. You cannot anywhere find a particle without such space since otherwise it would stretch out forever in which case it would not be a part but the Whole Enchilada. Last century, thanks to new technology, quantum physicists went further exploring the micro world on the physical level than humans had previously been able to do; and what they found, to their surprise, was that their own minds influence the properties of the space in which are found the particles within such space, so much so that experiments to see if particles can go from one place to another instantaneously found they can indeed do so once the situation was set up to track such behavior. Put simply, they proved that particles and space are symbiots in that one always exists with the other which is why one cannot claim that the universe is made only of physical matter starting with the building blocks of particles or ‘atoms’. It’s an arcane subject too dense for this blog and its author, but basically they found that particles exist in space and space cannot be separated from the human mind. As it turns out, this is what the old meditator manuals in several traditions have maintained for millennia. Quantum physics has used advanced physical technology and examination to verify what was already known, and thoroughly argued, back in 500 BC.

So let’s look at this from another angle: one of the assumed tenets of the reductionist ‘only physical matter is real’ view is that it posits an external, self-existing ‘objective reality’ separate from our own being and mind. The physical components of reality exist on an assumed physical plane, the only plane regarded as ‘real’ making any mental or other ‘experiential’ plane no more than illusory tricks conjured up by brain chemistry and synaptic flashes. It means that trees, which exhibit sensitivity, resilience, creativity, generosity, beauty and life force, are merely collections of mindless subatomic particles mechanically following genetically programmed scripts – at least scientifically speaking.

‘Mind’ here doesn’t only mean our internal ‘monkey mind’ or general human mind, rather any sort of awareness including that of plants which clearly exhibit some sort of feeling and response to stimuli and surroundings. All living creatures clearly also exhibit some sort of intelligence and awareness – they are aware of their surroundings through which they navigate, find sources of food, manage their domestic arrangements, defend against predators and so forth. In other words, that which we identify as ‘sentient’ or ‘living’ – or again ‘experiencing’ as I prefer to call it – has some sort of mind or awareness function in the mix.

Be that as it may, here we are with scientists and most philosophers stuck now for decades dealing with ‘the hard problem’ of mind or consciousness. What is hard about it? Determining whether or not something which cannot be physically measured even exists let alone, since it cannot be measured, whether or not it can even be subject to analysis using the scientific method. They have actually been arguing about this; interminably; for about a century. Why? Because the reductionist premise is deeply flawed but they refuse to jettison it because belief in it is virtually hard-wired in most scientist’s bones at this point. Such thorny issues notwithstanding it’s all very, very simple and staring us all in the face all along, just like the gorilla: we have all sorts of mental, sensory and emotional experiences none of which can be physically measured including therefore our minds, which we all experience every second of every day. So whether or not it lends itself to scientific measurement, nevertheless we experience it. So although it is not physical per se, yet it is there, it exists, we experience it. It’s that simple, but for some reason reductionists want to blank it out. (Though simple as it is, it is a Big Deal with Enormous Repercussions throughout our Modern World!)

Aside: personally speaking, have come to the conclusion that we can go one step further than simply saying that we live in an awareness field experienced and created by all living creatures (indeed, I suspect that one of the primary functions of all of our brains is both to transmit as well as receive awareness, or creation, fields). Rather, what we describe and label as the ‘space’ around all living creatures IS itself the awareness field. It isn’t one belonging to an individual with particular location and shape, such as you or I or a squirrel, mosquito, flower or tree; rather the entire space in which anything and everything arises is a type of living, breathing, continuous awareness (though lung-less breathing!). The whole universe is a vividly present cathedral of wakefulness, without fixed structure, in which various living forms and beings arise, strut their stuff for a while, and then shuffle off.

Meanwhile any notion of ‘objective reality’ is something we have inferred or imagined using our conceptual facility, mainly with language. We cannot actually experience it, we know nobody who ever has or ever can, and therefore it is forever and only an article of faith among materialist scientists who insist that they and only they are studying and determining ‘truth’ or ‘fact’. What is being insisted upon is that the same space which has been proven to be inseparable from Mind by quantum science simply doesn’t exist, so form exists only in a dead void, a blank. Which essentially makes all life forms, all beings, essentially dead and blank too: we are all machines, soulless, mindless, unaware, unsentient machines. This is neither a healthy nor a realistic mindset; we can and must do better.

So we are confronting a veritable gorilla of an hypocrisy here because Science’s very notion of ‘objective reality’, being entirely unverifiable, is of course no more than a belief, an article of faith. It’s a reasonable belief, to be sure, one most of us have little problem going along with it; but then so is the belief in God reasonable, the One Mind creating and embracing the All. There is some dynamic over-arching presence permeating all reality, past present and future, just as the sky presides above all that happens below, just as there is an overall Whole in which and of which we are individual and distinctive parts. That Whole can be called God or many other names. Different cultures describe this in different ways but that there is something greater than our individual selves is something everyone instinctively and knowingly feels. In a way, ‘objective reality’ is another such term, but since it is so abstract and devoid of any living characteristics, it falls far short of doing our collective reality justice. In any case, we must all realize that ‘objective reality’ as a self-existing phenomenon is as much an article of faith as the notion of God, making Science’s insistence that it and it alone knows the nature of Reality a clear and present fallacy, one we should stop buying into.

So one important point here is that much of what materialist scientists say about the nature of reality is based on a concept-derived fallacy that discounts no end of dynamic processes they fail to treat as relevant because they don’t fit into their ‘only the physical is real and the physical has no mind’ fallacy. Put another way: there seems to be a huge divide between Science’s ‘objective reality’ and our lived experience, or what we could also call ‘actual reality’. Put in the context of the left-brain right-brain analog: the notion of objective reality is a left-brain construct. That doesn’t make it entirely wrong or entirely unhelpful but it does make it both inaccurate and incomplete, moreover way too narrow to encompass all of ‘reality’. Yes, we can study the physical in depth and learn no end of truly marvellous things, but the world we live in is not only the physical, especially the physical divorced of its many expressive, imaginative, creative, mysterious even transcendental aspects. We simply have to stop excising them from our worldviews. The movie Titanic is more than just pixels of light on a screen; it simply is; but not to Science. To Science, the story does not exist because it has no physical dimension to be measured. To Science a tree or flower have no beauty; they are just various cells following genetic programming.

Simply put: science can be extremely helpful, but it is not a proper vehicle for determining the nature of Reality nor, therefore, how to lead our individual or collective lives.

So once again, what are those missing gorillas?:

This divide between objective and experienced reality pervades nearly every aspect of society these days which is why it is such an important, though generally overlooked, topic. Because just as left-brain dominant focus misses the gorilla, so also does our reliance on a left-brain dominant materialist view makes us devalue – or miss altogether – a huge swathe of human experience; and by constraining our political and social theory to fit within this artificially narrow bandwidth we are creating unhealthy and increasingly dysfunctional societies with increasingly less ability to perceive, let alone remedy, any mistakes being made, thus allowing them to fester as they compound each and every day. We cannot fix what we cannot see.

According to McGilchrist, about 90% of our experience is outside the purview of left brain attention which focuses on particulars, whereas the right brain sees wholes and overall contexts. So by emphasizing only left brain mapping perspectives, we are ignoring that 90% which is where comprehension and meaning is found. No doubt this will be explored further in future Articles, but let me end this one with a short list of the sort of things this materialist myopia misses whilst worshiping the false god of ‘objective reality’.

Feelings, relationships, family, love
Morality, developing Virtue, courage, nobility
Worshipping the Divine, spirituality, meditation, prayer, aspiration, faith, souls,
Dreams, symbol, metaphor, meaning
Sensuality, beauty, grace, manners
Childhood, aging and dying, healing
Making and listening to beautiful music, Dance
Building elegant buildings, high culture,
Smelling the flowers, cooking, wine
Imagination, stories, the unseen, the undiscovered
Our One and Many Experiential Universe

Outside the confines of objective reality

The above are regarded as unimportant, even somewhat silly, by the high priests of the ‘objective reality’ mindset, especially those given elevated status in our leadership and managerial classes. They give us scientific, objective-sounding things like social studies, hard sciences, communism, capitalism, fascism, socialism, liberalism – no end of -isms -, economics, finance, banking systems, weapons manufacturing, chemical fertilizers, commercial law, high-rise buildings, automobiles, air-conditioning, factory farms, industrial pollution, cancer-causing foods and medicines, corrupt political Parties mouthing vapid, insincere slogans and so on ad infinitum, all without ever acknowledging the harm such mindsets cause, all the while insisting that they are the only ones in touch with ‘reality’ and know what is best for all of us.

The pull to discuss Reality in pseudo scientific ways, speaking in terms of forms, structures, physical objects and dimension instead of poetic, cultural, imaginative and qualitative is insidious and deep-rooted. Indeed, because of that pull I have spent the bulk of this perhaps overly long Article still tethered to that which am debunking.