EP 333 Worldviews: Iain McGilchrist
From The Jim Rutt Show by The Jim Rutt Show
February 19, 2026 · 1h 12m · Season 1 · Episode 333
About this episode
Jim Rutt interviews Iain McGilchrist about consciousness, matter, and the nature of reality.
In this Worldviews episode, Jim talks with Iain McGilchrist about consciousness, matter, and the nature of reality. They discuss consciousness as the basis of everything we know, matter as a phase of consciousness that provides resistance and persistence, pan-experientialism and the belief that everything in the cosmos experiences in some form, the whirlpool metaphor for individual consciousness within a broader field, emergent naturalism and nested levels of organization, the question of whether the universe is continuous or granular at the Planck scale, consciousness in animals including chimps and corvids, language as the principal difference between human and animal consciousness, John Vervaeke's distinction between propositional and participatory knowing, the divided brain and how the left and right hemispheres attend to the world differently, the left hemisphere's focus on decontextualized abstractions versus the right hemisphere's grasp of interconnected wholes, how the left hemisphere deals with representations while the right hemisphere experiences presences, living in a world dominated by the relatively stupid left hemisphere, the relationship between consciousness and…
People in this episode
Host: Jim Rutt
Guest: Iain McGilchrist
Topics covered
- consciousness
- nature of reality
- pan-experientialism
- divided brain
- language and consciousness
- emergent naturalism
- time and reality
Keywords
- consciousness
- matter
- pan-experientialism
- divided brain
- language
- emergent naturalism
- time
- reality
Mentioned in this episode
Organizations: The Jim Rutt Show
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