The Master And His Emissary

The Master and His Emissary by Iain McGilchrist, 2009 Yale Press ISBN 9780300168921

The Divided Brain and the Making of the Western World

See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Master_and_His_Emissary

There is not a direct link to programming. There is an indirect link through PragmaticThinkingAndLearning as both books reference Dreyfus and Dreyfus (see DreyfusModel).

I believe that there are some profound thoughts in this book, which I want to find ways of sharing. I have hesitated to create a page here until I had something particular to say, which I have found. -- JohnFletcher

p.195-6 (stated as a metaphor for how the human brain processing relates to the world)

Life can certainly have meaning without books, but books cannot have meaning without life. Most of us probably share a belief that life is greatly enriched by them: life goes into books and books go back into life. But the relationship is not equal or symmetrical. Nonetheless what is in them not only adds to life, but genuinely goes back into life and transforms it, so that life as we live it in a world full of books is created partly by books themselves.

p.461 In this book certainty has certainly not been my aim.

Compare with BookStart and BookStop.

CategoryBook, CategoryPhilosophy, CategoryPsychology

CategoryJustSoStories

I don't know what is in the mind of the person who put this in. If it is a link to OriginOfConsciousness then McGilchrist does not take the same view as JulianJaynes. See p.260. I can see that there is a past discussion on this wiki of which I had no previous knowledge. -- JohnFletcher

I suspect the person who put that in wasn't referring to OriginOfConsciousness, but to the fact that the book is apparently based primarily on psychological and psychiatric information that has little neurological basis. In other words, it makes for a nice story but is scientifically questionable.

Thank you. I am though grateful to see the link to OriginOfConsciousness. I wonder if he/she has read the book and in particular the comments from neurologists. One thing is that it does not make a 'nice story' at all. It is highlighting the dangers he sees in our current culture and asking people to think about a rebalance between the analytical and the intuitive, which we can think about even if we don't go with the model. He accepts the problem that when we think about this we are using our own brain and may be misled. I am very keen to promote discussion of this and some other topics but this is difficult if people approach the problem with a closed mind. -- JohnFletcher

By "nice story", I mean "has the appearance of being based on science and therefore appears to make sense", not that its message is necessarily pleasant.

There are some pages around which seem to be relevant e.g. PhilosophyAndScienceSeekTruth, ScientificBeliefTrap.