Letters - 4 October 2019
From a human story to illumination
Human story
Jacqui Poole (13 September) suggests we have been taken over by the ‘emissary’ of our analytical left brains to the extent that when we consider the nature of reality we ‘mistake the model for the real thing’. The picture she presents of the way we function is itself a model – one I believe to be mistaken.
It is right that when we approach an issue in an analytical, language-driven way we use our left brain more than our right brain. But Jacqui talks about the two sides of the brain as if each has a mind of its own.
This ignores our role as independent agents, with responsibility for our own actions. It is up to us what questions we consider, which faculties we choose to develop and how we choose to use them. The left and right sides of our brain do not have an independent existence. They are part of a complex interlinking network of neurons, which form the foundation of our consciousness and sense of self. This account ignores the role of our frontal lobes – the seat of higher order thinking, problem solving and self-monitoring.
Our brains are an integral part of the way we function. But it is people who are at the heart of the human story. People function in a sociological, technological, political and spiritual context. We may be mistaken if we try to reduce complex questions relating to the nature of the self, consciousness and the human condition to an argument between different parts of the brain.
Jenny Webb
Amazing brains
Jacqui Poole’s question ‘How does reasoning about a concept or model justify making claims about the nature of reality?’ is a good one, but modern neurophysiology finds the brain to be ‘plastic’ (adaptable to injury, blindness) and that the hemispheres, far from being at war with each other, are ‘integrative’ (several components making an effective system).
So it is unfortunate and misleading to imply that the left hemisphere is responsible for our western culture-driven worldview about the ‘ultimate mysteries’ while the right restores a theistically-inclined ‘proper balance’. Detailed studies of, for example, left-handed and ambidextrous people, people with ‘situs inversus’ where the body’s organs are arranged as a mirror-image of the usual, people after strokes, and people with a defective or surgically impaired corpus callosum (the main structure joining the two hemispheres), show amazing powers of brain adaptability and cooperation.
Fortunately, western culture is not humankind’s only venerable tradition. Jeremy Lent, in The Patterning Instinct, contrasts western platonic/Christian traditions, which reason that humans are justified in exploiting nature (Genesis 1:26), with neo-Confucianism that shows how the energy and matter of Albert Einstein’s famous equation can become integrated into sensate living organisms which develop intrinsic connectedness and love.
This eco- and science-friendly description liberates my spiritual experience from the need of ‘certainty’ and allows the sort of questioning that enhances my enjoyment of Quakerism. Whatever answers reason and modern physics provide, they can only be provisional however much we ‘define our terms’.
Frank Boulton
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