Vive la Difference / Différence / Différance

The significant reality of male / female brain / mind differences

This is the first new piece on my Psybertron SubStack since I mothballed (*1) my long-standing (25yrs+) WordPress blog of the same name. It’s a topic I’ve written about multiple times over the years with the various anglicised, original French and Derridean post-modern spellings.

Difference, significant difference and the significance of difference, are fundamental to both ontology (existence) and epistemology (meaning), and in the real world there is no ontology without epistemology anyway. And, all such differences are essentially binary (dichotomies technically - this-not-that - even in monadic or triadic world-views), even if their intentionally dividing significance may not be helpful - divisive - to our wider purpose. There is a proper place to recognise it and others where it is irrelevant. Derrida’s neologism is closer to defer / deference, to be able to agree some difference exists, whilst deferring any agreement on exactly what it is or its significance - what it means. As in many cases, less is more, less definition is better until after understanding and agreement are reached (*2).

When Derrida wrote his 1968 essay “La Différance”, he was already talking about the sexes. Throughout my neuro-psycho-philosophical “What, Why and How do we Know?” researches in the 00’s there were many implied sex differences that the authors failed to make explicit, presumably choosing not to highlight differences that might lead them into problematic areas politically. In an environment of equalities of rights and opportunities, why highlight differences that don’t need to affect those rights and freedoms?

It was for me McGilchrist’s 2009 “The Master and his Emissary” (TME) that made physiological and functional male and female brain differences explicit. He didn’t highlight it by making it the subject of any particular chapter or an explicit part of his wider thesis, but it was and is, clear that the neuronal connective tissue between brain hemispheres - the corpus callosum - is generally larger in women than men. Since his main thesis - the left-right divided brain generally and why and how the halves function and interact - was already resurrecting and treading on controversial left-right-brained pop-psychology ground, he didn’t need any additional controversy. By the time we get to his 2021 magnum opus “The Matter with Things” (TMWT) he extends into a third area of controversy in his “Sense of the Sacred” on top of his divided brain hypotheses and, on my reading, sex differences don’t really get a mention.

However, “in the past few months” McGilchrist has seen many of his readers asking questions and implying simplistic views of left-right brain differences between the sexes. In typically thorough, erudite and fully scientifically-referenced style he posted on his own SubStack “In response to reader requests .... Why the story about sex differences and the hemispheres is not straightforward.”

My own summary is that it’s not that left and right brains are functionally different in either of the sexes, neither is more or less left- or right-brained than the other. That language misses the point that the sex differences lie in greater permissive communication between the halves in women than men. We both have left and right brains that are capable of holding distinct views of the world and to quote my earlier summary of TME & TMWT:

The hypothesis is that, as a result of a 20thC backlash against left-right-brain pop-psychology, the true relationships between our deeply divided brains and the distinct views of the world they give us has been ignored in mainstream knowledge about the world and our relationship with it – our attention to it.

And, whilst the right view recognises and understands the power of the left, the left view fails to notice why it even needs the right. Because of this imbalance, the rational left-brain view and behaviour continues to further exaggerate and promote itself at the expense of the intuitive right. A vicious cycle. A shared mental-illness.

We must, individually and as a society, recover the evolutionarily intended use of the right in relation to the left, or as Eddington quoted Einstein:

“The intuitive mind is a sacred gift and
the rational mind is a faithful servant.

We have created a society
that honours the servant
and has forgotten the gift.”

Women in general are simply more capable of attending to both, resisting the self-reinforcing imbalance. To my mind, that’s a good thing, a difference we need to maintain and recognise the value of as requisite variety in the gene and meme pool. There are perfectly good reasons why the sexes evolved these differences, we must value the differences and not repress them, even if we can’t agree all immediate details and significance of those differences, hence:

“Vive La Différence!”

And the corollary of that for my own epistemological-ontology agenda is obviously to ensure that the model properly reflects both views and their relationships.

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(*1) My Psybertron blog “What, Why and How do we Know?” has over 25 years of content on WordPress. A fork in development of that technology platform is making support increasingly problematic, so whilst I am maintaining that content on-line, I am looking for alternatives to preserve its value and accessibility as well as continue future blogging here. In that 25 years I have often remarked that blogging notes was very similar to the paper-slips or index-card techniques used by various authors to create and organise their semantic web of complex ideas and their relationships into manageable evolving texts. Robert Pirsig’s story of how he wrote both “Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance” and “Lila” is one clear example. That technique however has a name - “Zettelkasten” - German for note-box, and unsurprisingly these days there are electronic tools that support it. Not for the first time, I’m in the process of capturing the semantic-web of my own thinking and writing to date, in the “Obsidian” tool. (And a couple of days ago the founder of WordPress, Matt Mullenweg posted a plea to stop the fork becoming “internecine warfare”.)

(*2) The idea that tight and clear definitions can be counter-productive to systematic complex thinking, that vagueness has value at certain levels of abstraction, has two sources here. One is Dan Dennett’s “Hold Your Definition” in his (2013) Intuition Pumps and Other Tools for Thinking. The other is Anatoly Levenchuk’s “Definition as a Coffin” in his Systems Thinking 2020.