2025-11-11 Roger Sperry on wisdom gap and primacy of being

Nobel prize-winner Roger Sperry (split-brain researcher) setting out the wisdom gap + primacy of being thesis very clearly 50y ago: human values (culture) must come first, systems will then follow.

By evolutionary time standards, the fate of life on our planet has suddenly, and quite abruptly, come to rest on an entirely new form of security and control, based on the machinery of the human brain. The older, noncognitive controls of nature that have regulated events in our biosphere for hundreds of millions of years, the forces of nature that lifted life from the amoeboid to the human level and created man, are no longer in command. Modern man has intervened and now superimposes on nature his own cognitive brand of global domination…

Any attempt to attack directly the overt symptoms of our global condition – pollution, poverty, aggression, overpopulation, and so on – can hardly succeed until the requisite changes are first achieved in the underlying human values involved. Once the subjective value factor has been adjusted, corrections will follow readily in the more concrete features of the system … Among the vast complex of forces that influence and control the brain and behaviour of man, the factor of human values stands out as a universal determinant of all human decisions and actions …