Wisdom, Delusion, Consciousness & the Divine | Dr. Iain McGilchrist | EP 436

Dr. Jordan B. Peterson sits down in-person with psychiatrist, researcher, and philosopher Dr. Iain McGilchrist. They discuss right brain/left brain hemispheric specialization, the basis of delusion, “unknowing” as a necessary step toward wisdom, consciousness and the divine ground of being, and the imposition of mediocrity in the modern West.

Dr. Iain McGilchrist is a psychiatrist, neuroscience researcher, philosopher and literary scholar. He is a Quondam Fellow of All Souls College, Oxford, an Associate Fellow of Green Templeton College, Oxford, a Fellow of the Royal College of Psychiatrists, and former Consultant Psychiatrist and Clinical Director at the Bethlem Royal & Maudsley Hospital, London. He has been a Research Fellow in neuroimaging at Johns Hopkins Hospital, Baltimore and a Fellow of the Institute of Advanced Studies in Stellenbosch. He has published original articles and research papers in a wide range of publications on topics in literature, philosophy, medicine and psychiatry. He is the author of a number of books, but is best-known for The Master and his Emissary: The Divided Brain and the Making of the Western World (Yale 2009). In November 2021 his two-volume work The Matter with Things: Our Brains, Our Delusions, and the Unmaking of the World was published by Perspectiva Press.

This episode was recorded on March 17th, 2024

Dr. Peterson's extensive catalog is available now on DailyWire+

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- Links -

2024 tour details can be found here

Peterson Academy

For Iain McGilchrist:

The Matter With Things (Book)

The Master and His Emissary (Book)

- Chapters -

(0:00) Tour update 2024

(0:40) Coming up

(0:59) Intro

(3:15) Hemispheric specialization

(8:21) How the left and right brain hemispheres operate

(12:39) Newness, grasping the individuality of the stimulus

(14:13) Dr. Peterson’s vision of complex knowledge, conceptualizing reality

(21:59) The basis of delusion, how reason leads you astray

(24:51) Network function as it relates to radical ideology

(29:06) To what degree can we know anything is true?

(34:29) Not all philosophy is valid

(35:47) Science ends with personal truth

(41:10) All is one, one is everything

(45:31) Why is there life? The coincidence of opposites

(48:14) The Kabbalah, ideas that reiterate across time and multiple religions

(51:11) How resentment maps with left brain overreach

(56:21) Unknowing as a necessary step toward wisdom

(58:07) The symbolism of the disembodied eye

(1:03:10) Consciousness and the divine ground of being

(1:07:43) The spiral ladder to heaven, togetherness and distinction

(1:10:10) Intention as a moral act

(1:14:26) The way in which you attend alters what you find

(1:18:46) The appearance of God as intuition

(1:24:55) How hemisphere damage impacts right/left functionality

(1:28:17) The relationship between your brain and the spiritual

(1:33:35) Bridging the idea of flow to the spirit of play

(1:38:10) Imposed mediocrity and the inability to avert disaster

(1:40:56) What Dr. McGilchrist is working on now

// LINKS //

Tour Locations

// COURSES //

Discovering Personality

Self Authoring Suite

Understand Myself (personality test)

// BOOKS //

Beyond Order12 More Rules for Life

12 Rules for LifeAn Antidote to Chaos

Maps of MeaningThe Architecture of Belief

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