Uncommon Ground with Justin Brierley #4. Iain McGilchrist & Anil Seth: Minds, brains, consciousness and the God question.
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Mar 24, 2026 
Anil Seth, a neuroscientist studying perception and consciousness as a controlled hallucination. Iain McGilchrist, a psychiatrist-philosopher exploring brain hemispheres, value and the God question. They debate brain vs. mind, hemispheric ways of knowing, panpsychism and emergence, meditation, prayer and nature’s role, and how science and spirituality can meet.
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Two Hemispheres Create Two Ways Of Being
- The brain's two hemispheres offer distinct modes of attention: the left fragments and abstracts while the right provides holistic, contextual understanding.
- Anil and Iain argue civilization swings between these modes, with cultural decline when the left's abstract, reductive view dominates.
Consciousness Is A Biological Predictive Process
- Consciousness is usefully framed as a biological property tied to life and prediction rather than mere computation.
- Anil links perception to survival: brains make controlled predictions to keep bodies alive, connecting metabolism, autopoiesis, and conscious experience.
Anaesthesia Reveals Brain Consciousness Link
- General anaesthesia shows a tight causal link between brain states and personal consciousness: under deep anaesthesia the person disappears and later reappears with no time passage.
- Iain uses this to argue brains cannot be cleanly separated from the conscious person, supporting empirical study of brain-consciousness correlates.
