Very few books about the wild are wild, and so very few are worthy of their subject.
The Matter With Things is a devastating assault on the view that there is only matter (whatever that is), and that consciousness can emerge from a conglomeration of unconscious units. A follow-up to McGilchrist’s epic The Master and His Emissary, which explored the way in which our perception of the world, and of ourselves, is influenced by – or is – the conversation or stand-off between the two cerebral hemispheres. The Matter With Things by Iain McGilchristĪ massive book and a massive achievement. Here are a few of the books I took along the road. Though many mysteries have deepened and multiplied, I think I’ve got some idea of the sort of animal you are and I am. I’m now a bit less queasy than I was about saying “I love you”. These were the Upper Palaeolithic (the vast majority of our history: we’re still really hunter-gatherers, even if we wear a suit and sit slumped in front of a laptop), the Neolithic (when we caged the natural world and ourselves), and the Enlightenment (when the universe, previously seen as fizzing with consciousness, was declared to be merely a machine). I thought the best way to address them was to go on a journey back through the human story, pausing and immersing myself, using a kind of archaeological method acting, in three pivotal ages – ages when seismic shifts in human self-understanding occurred.
So we’re back to the first problem.Īll these questions worried me sick. I expect, if you’re asked what “you” are, part of your answer would involve saying that you were human. When you say “ I love you”, or “ I‘m afraid”, how confident are you about wielding that mighty and mysterious pronoun? Are you as confident as modern neuroscientists that “you” are just the chemical events that happen in your brain? Does that explanation satisfy you? And then there’s the problem of personal identity.
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