Consciousness is always ‘of’ something: what is the nature then of that something that is both in part constitutive of, and in part constituted by, that relationship? Indeed I hold that everything is relational, and that what we call things, the relata, are secondary to relationship. In this talk I have chosen to make some very simple reflections on one aspect of consciousness: its relational nature. Most importantly the world of the right hemisphere is the world that presences to us, that of the left hemisphere a re-presentation: the left hemisphere a map, the right hemisphere the world of experience that is mapped. The left hemisphere is a world of atomistic elements the right hemisphere one of relationships. In the case of the right hemisphere, a world of Gestalten, forms and processes that are never reducible to the already known or certain, never accounted for by dissolution into parts, but always understood as wholes that both incorporate and are incorporated into other wholes, unique, always changing and flowing, interconnected, implicit, understood only in context, embodied and animate. In the case of the left hemisphere, a world of things that are familiar, certain, fixed, isolated, explicit, abstracted from context, disembodied, general in nature, quantifiable, known by their parts, and inanimate. These could be characterised in the simplest possible terms something like this. This means that each hemisphere brings into being a world that has different qualities.
What one needs to know is that the two hemispheres have evolved so as to attend to the world, and therefore bring into being the only world we can know, in two largely opposing ways: the left hemisphere paying narrowly targeted attention to a detail that we need to manipulate the right hemisphere paying broad, open, sustained, vigilant, uncommitted attention to the rest of the world while we focus on our desired detail.
Again there is no possible way I can give an account of the argument here. I cannot avoid referring en passant to the hemisphere hypothesis expounded in The Master and his Emissary, and greatly developed in The Matter with Things. The term clearly has meaning, however: it refers to the qualities of certain elements within consciousness which offer relative resistance and relative permanence as a necessary part of that creative process. Matter is a theoretical abstraction that no one has seen. Consciousness is irreducible, primordial and omnipresent: not a thing, but a creative process. In a very short presentation there is no possibility of arguing for a position on consciousness: so I will simply state my conclusions, argued for at length in my new book The Matter with Things: Our Brains, Our Delusions and the Unmaking of the World.
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