Luca McCorry

“On the left hemisphere of the brain: 'Because it knows less, it thinks it knows everything.”
― Iain McGilchrist, The Matter With Things: Our Brains, Our Delusions, and the Unmaking of the World

“According to Max Planck, ‘Anybody who has been seriously engaged in scientific work of any kind realizes that over the entrance to the gates of the temple of science are written the words: Ye must have faith. It is a quality which the scientist cannot dispense with.’ And he continued: ‘Science cannot solve the ultimate mystery of nature. And that is because, in the last analysis, we ourselves are part of nature and therefore part of the mystery that we are trying to solve.”
― Iain McGilchrist, The Master and His Emissary: The Divided Brain and the Making of the Western World

“The only certainty, it seems to me, is that those who believe they are certainly right are certainly wrong.”
― Iain McGilchrist, The Master and His Emissary: The Divided Brain and the Making of the Western World

“David Levin, ‘prefers the distance of vision … even when it means dehumanisation’.149 But in this he was pursuing the belief that acknowledging our relationship with the world will make it obtrude. In reality it obtrudes more when not acknowledged. The baggage gets on board, as Dennett puts it, without being inspected. In a scientific paper, one may not say ‘I saw it happen’, but ‘the phenomenon was observed’. In Japan, however, science students, who ‘observe’ phenomena, do so with quite a different meaning, and in quite a different spirit, from their Western counterparts. The word kansatsu, which is translated as ‘observe’, is closer to the meaning of the word ‘gaze’, which we use only when we are in a state of rapt attention in which we lose ourselves, and feel connected to the other. The syllable kan in kansatsu contains the nuance that the one who gazes comes to feel a ‘one-body-ness’ with the object of gaze.150”
― Iain McGilchrist, The Master and His Emissary: The Divided Brain and the Making of the Western World