“Counter to the traditional image of the brain as a unidirectional information thoroughfare, when cell stations in the brain connect, the traffic is almost always bi-directional. The traffic is not in one direction, with a little feedback, either. Areas interact equally in both directions, directly reciprocally, or indirectly by looping across several cell stations, so that the neural traffic reverberates through its starting point. The forebrain is overwhelmingly an arena of reverberating reciprocal influence.”

— Marcel Kinsbourne

In McGilchrist (quoting Kinsbourne), I find the phrase, ‘reverberating reciprocal influence’ employed to describe much of the signalling between cells. This echoes what we may observe in the world, at another order of relation — which is that things, beings, moments, places and situations do not entirely ‘possess’ identity, unless they are ‘mutually organizing and sustaining it’. This process may involve relatively concrete -roles- (that of a bird or a tree for example) but demands unique and creative -discoveries and extrapolations- of those roles in order to identify and occupy new domains of opportunity, protection, and general benefit. This is to say that, by a process of reciprocal signalling, we ‘call each other into being’ which each of our acts of relation, misrelation, blindness, invitation, presentation, or refusal. This is the ‘music of identity’ which is always symphonic and fugue-like, using counterpoint and elaborate relational frameworks in and between its orders and organs. This is the music of our minds.

Some might say that this model is ridiculous, because only humans have the capacities necessary to call beings or places into roles. I admit that, at first, that argument could appear compelling to a materialist or someone who has gone mad. The problem is this: if you subtracted all humans from all contexts (impossible at present), such a position could have more force — but it is still wrong because it misapprehends the basis of organismal relation as being like its estranged representations of it which they cannot be. In any case, once you have humans, or creatures similar to them, it no longer does. The human mind, is, effectively, a relational superposition of the environment, its agents, organs, processes, and participants. Add this to the mix, and all ordinary bets about identity disappear.