Matter and Consciousness – Dr Iain McGilchrist

Get early access to our latest psychology lectures: It has become customary to talk about consciousness as the great unsolved problem of our age. I argue that consciousness itself is not the problem; the problem is our customary mode of thinking. I will outline the thesis of a new book, The Matter with Things, in which I suggest that, because of our allegiance to a certain model of the world, demonstrably associated with the left hemisphere of the brain, we misunderstand the fundamental nature of the world, and as a result run into predictable problems in trying to make sense of it. These problems are in evidence all around us in the modern West. For the purposes of this talk I will focus on the relationship between matter and consciousness, and ask: are they two things or one? Are they things at all? If they are different in what way? How necessary are brains to consciousness? And why do we have consciousness at all?