Ian McGilchrist

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=PQ9_FtLEeoc

Key points - slowing down to observe beauty. Left vs right brain think.

• Two modes of knowing – distinguishes between:
  • Right-hemisphere knowing: contextual, embodied, relational, grounded in lived reality
  • Left-hemisphere knowing: abstract, categorical, model-based, optimized for control

• Core problem – modern society over-privileges abstract representations (models, metrics, labels) and mistakes them for reality itself

• Loss of meaning – when representations detach from lived experience, words and concepts become unstable; the same thing can mean different things to different groups

• Disinformation is downstream – the deeper issue is not false information, but a weakened capacity to discern truth due to loss of context and integration

• Epistemic breakdown – truth becomes negotiable, narratives compete without resolution, and shared reality fragments into incompatible interpretations

• True knowing – requires participation in reality: embodied, relational, context-sensitive, and not fully reducible to symbols or abstractions

• Bottom line – meaning collapses when society replaces direct engagement with reality by abstract representations, leading to a condition where anything can be made to mean anything