'The master and his emissary' and 'The matter with things' by Iain McGilchrist.
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ELT
Jedi
I don't 'grasp' (say "hi left hemisphere") the logic here :
If an idea of a 'self' is associated with the right hemisphere (which I thought it was the Left as it would be more about details), wouldn't it be damage to the same one that would logically form difficulty in self concept ?
Didn't you mean :
"The idea of a 'self' seems associated with the left hemisphere; patients with damage to the left hemisphere have difficulty forming self concepts."
? Or reversely :
"The idea of a 'self' seems associated with the right hemisphere; patients with damage to the right hemisphere have difficulty forming self concepts."
?
ELT
Jedi
The quality of this discussion filled me with inspiration to pursue the Work, to intend to understand as much as I can while accepting that I won't know anything perfectly, which I start to be okay with.
I also found interesting to hear about their views on Dan Kahneman's Thinking Fast&Slow (33:30).
Moreover, a key idea that I found relevant has been formulated by J.B. Perterson after Dr McGilchrist made a remark about Attention, talking about the Wave's Collapse theory (from +/- 57:40) :
"So the idea in some sense is that the Direction of Attention towards possibility oriented towards Love, infused by Truth, produces the order that is habitable and good."
Since the term "good" refers too much to a binary way of thinking to me (lacking context, 'good' according to what?), I prefer using "creative"/"constructive". But is it my Left hemisphere here again searching to be precise in my selection of word, reaching for perfection ?
ELT
Jedi
In other words, with my understanding :
"Being aware of the Reality as it is (objectivity), as base from which I can focus my Attention towards the best representation of Love for me here/now - as much externally (in the environment around me) as internally (by my free will of choice) - produces creative order."
Is what I'm focusing attention on, right now, part of what I love ? If not, I can directly go towards what is.
In this way, I don't see anticipation coming into play, nor wishful thinking, as I focus entirely on the Present.
What do you think about it ?
ELT
Jedi
Would it be correct to make a connection here by saying that the Right hemisphere could correspond to System 1 from Daniel Kahneman // Level 2 from Anthony Greenwald and the Left hemisphere to System 2 // Level 1 ?
While the view on Intuition that Iain McGilchrist shares seems different from Dan Kahneman (System 1) ...
So which one to take ?
It reminds me of this comment from The Psychology of Blink's thread :
Moreover, still from the same thread, I find an opposition between McGilchrist's vantage point on asymmetry, who says in the last discussion with J.B.P. (I can't find the precise moment back) that some experiments (without citing them) showed that people were more attracted to asymmetrical faces, and this :
So once again, which one to take ?
While the view on Intuition that Iain McGilchrist shares seems different from Dan Kahneman (System 1) ...
So which one to take ?
It reminds me of this comment from The Psychology of Blink's thread :
A point that McGilchrist and Peterson seem to share, opposing Kahneman's one.
Moreover, still from the same thread, I find an opposition between McGilchrist's vantage point on asymmetry, who says in the last discussion with J.B.P. (I can't find the precise moment back) that some experiments (without citing them) showed that people were more attracted to asymmetrical faces, and this :
Meanwhile, in his series of lectures about Human Behavioral Biology for Stanford University, Robert Sapolsky evokes this symmetry argument as well, in this episode about Human Sexual Behavior 12:30 to 17:30.
So once again, which one to take ?
I've just finished this absolutely superb book (The Master and His Emissary). I think the hemispheres and their interaction are a really important piece of the puzzle, I don't think I will see the world in the same way again. That's how you know you've read a great book.
McGilchrist writes this in his conclusion:
"In the opening pages of this book, I wrote that I believed it to be profoundly true that the inner structure of our intellect reflects the structure of the universe. By 'profoundly' I meant not just true by definition, as would be the case for those who believe that the universe is in any case a creation of our brains. I think it goes further than that. I believe our brains not only dictate the shape of the experience we have of the world, but are likely themselves to reflect, in their structure and functioning, the nature of the universe in which they have come about."
This struck me as remarkably similar to the cosmology we talk about. The duality of creation, each side being part of the whole, needing each other to interact with. As above, so below.
McGilchrist writes this in his conclusion:
"In the opening pages of this book, I wrote that I believed it to be profoundly true that the inner structure of our intellect reflects the structure of the universe. By 'profoundly' I meant not just true by definition, as would be the case for those who believe that the universe is in any case a creation of our brains. I think it goes further than that. I believe our brains not only dictate the shape of the experience we have of the world, but are likely themselves to reflect, in their structure and functioning, the nature of the universe in which they have come about."
This struck me as remarkably similar to the cosmology we talk about. The duality of creation, each side being part of the whole, needing each other to interact with. As above, so below.
SOTTREADER
The Living Force
Interesting book - at the beginning of part 2 now which goes into how the hemispheres and their relationship have shaped western culture (with the left hemisphere somewhat having assumed a quasi - master role).
I find the descriptions of how the hemispheres work and what they specialise in quite fascinating. What truth is and how it is defined by the hemispheres is also quite interesting - for the right, truth is never clearly defined but it's a state of becoming, an unfolding whereas for the left, truth requires clarity, to be properly defined, to be broken down to its constituent parts which are static and can be connected in a linear fashion, one thing leading to the next and so on. It's not that the left hemisphere is wrong, it's that it needs to return what it finds or uncovers to the right hemisphere to be integrated to the whole.
Language as well and its description, that it may not necessarily have evolved with communication as its primary aim
. The constraints of language, of the written word, how it re-enforces a certain view of reality etc.
It's all interesting stuff - I haven't seen him touch upon it, are there exercises to do to ensure both hemispheres are somewhat working in harmony? Perhaps an exercise to reinforce the right hemisphere and its position as master?
I find the descriptions of how the hemispheres work and what they specialise in quite fascinating. What truth is and how it is defined by the hemispheres is also quite interesting - for the right, truth is never clearly defined but it's a state of becoming, an unfolding whereas for the left, truth requires clarity, to be properly defined, to be broken down to its constituent parts which are static and can be connected in a linear fashion, one thing leading to the next and so on. It's not that the left hemisphere is wrong, it's that it needs to return what it finds or uncovers to the right hemisphere to be integrated to the whole.
Language as well and its description, that it may not necessarily have evolved with communication as its primary aim
. The constraints of language, of the written word, how it re-enforces a certain view of reality etc.It's all interesting stuff - I haven't seen him touch upon it, are there exercises to do to ensure both hemispheres are somewhat working in harmony? Perhaps an exercise to reinforce the right hemisphere and its position as master?
Not as such, it's mainly philosophical and theoretical. There are some interesting practical examples though, especially in the art section and the associated colour plates. When I was a teenager I had this book, 'Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain"
Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain
Official website of Betty Edwards, author of Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain. Features Betty Edwards' blog, information about creativity, drawing workshops by artist Brian Bomeisler, DRSB Shop to purchase art and drawing tools and materials.
www.drawright.com
It has exercises which I used to improve drawing with depth and perspective (with limited success, I was really up against my natural ability). This is something which McGilchrist talks a lot about when looking at changes in art from different historical periods.
I remember Laura posting about the background to the EE program, she had found some information about certain breathing techniques (in through nose, out through mouth) helping with hemisphere communication.
Not sure if this post on the recent keynote speech by Iain McGilchrist should be in this thread or the AI thread - in any case consider it a cross post, with most information in the AI thread.
I'll repost the transcript here with some more bolding as it clearly summarizes the function of the left and right hemispheres while applying it to the concept of AI.
Transcript:
--------------
Keynote from AI World Summit, Amsterdam, October 2022 – Iain McGilchrist
“The Matter with Things: Our Brains, Our Delusions, and the Unmaking of the World”
To be or not to be - that I have it on the authority of a member of the Danish royal family, is the question, but not the only one. Some others of these: what is life for? who are we anyway? and what are we doing here? - in my recent book The Matter With Things I do my best to address these very questions and try to set up why we're getting things so badly wrong.
I'm not just here referring to our heinous crimes such as poisoning the earth's oceans, destroying its forests and persecuting its indigenous peoples. Fighting wars and enslaving people in the pursuit of rare earths, melting the ice caps and bringing to extinction rare and beautiful species of living things. Fading the glories of the world. These are visible, but less visible perhaps is that we're making ourselves wretched. There are no two ways about it. We are more affluent than ever, but riches and power, the only point in having riches, do not make people happier. Ask a psychiatrist, or take a look at the face of Vladimir Putin with power alas of life and death over millions of people and the owner of the most expensive lavatory paper dispenser in the world. No, as affluent as we are, we are also more anxious, depressed, lonely, isolated, and lacking in purpose than we have ever been. The effect is of staggering size and the evidence is clear it can be shown to have little to do with diagnostic fashion, so why is this?
I suggest it is because we have no longer the foggiest idea what a human life is about. Indeed there's a sense in which we no longer live in a world at all but exist in a simulacrum of our own making. You expect me to speak of brains and I will not disappoint you. Leaving nuance aside and condensing three decades of research and a vast body of supporting evidence into a phrase. We are now mesmerized by the least intelligent part of our brain. The reasons of survival, one hemisphere of the brain, the left, has evolved over millions of years to favor manipulation, grabbing, getting and controlling while the other, the right, has effectively been given so charge of the task of understanding the whole picture. So conflicting are these goals that in humans the hemispheres are largely sequestered one from the other. Our apparent ability these days to hear only what comes from the left hemisphere, does not depend on the brain itself having radically changed in the last couple of centuries, though it is certainly always evolving. It's more like this: you buy a radio set and you soon find a couple of channels worth listening to. For a host of reasons after a while you end up listening only to one. It's not the radio set that's changed, it's you. And in the case of the brain it would not even have mattered so much if we'd settled on the intelligent channel, but we didn't - we settled on the one whose value is nothing to do with truth nor with courage, magnanimity, and generosity but only greed, grabbing and getting, manipulation.
And no, the difference between the hemispheres is not a myth that has been debunked. That itself is a myth that requires debunking in which I've been rather successfully debunking for some while now. What definitely does need to be debunked is the bad old pop psychology story that the left hemisphere “does” reason and language and maybe a bit “dull” but is at least reliable like a slightly boring accountant. And the right hemisphere “does” emotions and pictures but is apt to be flighty and fay.
All this is wrong since we now know that each hemisphere is involved in everything and that for the record the left hemisphere is less emotionally stable as well as less intelligent and I mean cognitively as well as emotionally and socially than the right. The right hemisphere is a far superior guide to reality. Delusions and hallucinations are much more frequent, grosser [more coarse] and more persistent after damage to the right hemisphere than to the left. Without the right hemisphere to rely on, the left hemisphere is at sea. It quite literally denies the most obvious facts, it lies, and makes stuff up and it doesn't know what it's talking about, and it is relentlessly, vacuously cheerful in the face of overwhelming disaster.
You may well say but so what why the first, actually I don't care where things go on in my brain. But it does matter hugely because each hemisphere takes a different view of the world and those views are not strictly compatible. And so when we reflect, philosophize, or discourse publicly we're pretty much forced without knowing to favor one tape or the other. It seems that for us to be of two minds to appear inconsistent is a greater sin than to be consistently wrong - no room for “yes but”, for nuance, for seeing the hidden opposite that is always there in whatever is being peddled to us.
So what are these two hemispheric visions of the world like? I hope you may recognize them from experience. The left using narrow beam, scattered attention to one detail after another, to use what is already familiar, certain, static, explicit, abstract, decontextualized, disembodied, categorized, general in nature, and reduced to its parts. All is predictable and controlled. This is an inanimate universe and a bureaucrat's dream. It is like a map in relation to the world is mapped - useful to the degree that it leaves almost everything out and its only value is utility. Note that all here is a re-presentation which literally means present again when it's actually no longer present but dead and gone.
The other, the right hemisphere sees not the re-presentation but the living presence - bringing broad, open, sustained, vigilant attention to bear on the world, it sees what is fresh, unique, never fully known, never finally certain, but full of potential. It understands all that is and must remain implicit. Humor, poetry, art, narrative, music, the sacred - indeed everything we love. It understands that nothing is ever merely static and unchanging but flowing and radically interconnected. That parts of the left hemisphere's invention and that what we are seeing as parts are already wholes at another level. This is a free world, an animate universe and a bureaucrat's nightmare. It has all the richness and unfathomable complexity of the world that the left hemisphere simply mapped.
These two ways of seeing the world are each vital to our survival. We need to simplify and stand apart to manipulate things to deal with the necessities of life and to build the foundations of a civilization. But to live in it we also need to belong to the living world and to understand the complexity of what it is we're dealing with. This division of attention works to our advantage when we use both. However, it is a handicap in fact it is a catastrophe when we use only one. As I explained in the Master and His Emissary, twice in the history of the West, in ancient Greece and then in Rome, a civilization started out with an extraordinarily fruitful harmony of left and right. But as it overreached itself, it moved ever further towards the left hemisphere's take on the world before collapsing. And the same trajectory is now being pursued for the third time. After the miraculous outpouring of creativity in the arts, science, society, and philosophy that we call the Renaissance, our civilization has moved since the enlightenment, drunk with the arrogant belief that it knows everything and can fix everything further and further towards the left. We are now like sleepwalkers whistling a happy tune as we amble towards the abyss.
There is a phenomenon in Psychology called the Dunning-Kruger effect which means that the less you know the more you think you know and vice versa. The left hemisphere doesn't know what it is it doesn't know, and so it thinks it knows everything. The right hemisphere which in reality understands far more, is aware of those vast unknowns. When we're functioning well, the right hemisphere tests the left hemisphere's theory about reality against experience. But the left hemisphere's vision of a lifeless, mechanical, two-dimensional, geometric construct has been externalized around us to such an extent, that when the right hemisphere checks back with experience, it finds the left hemisphere has already colonized our reality. At least for those of us who lead a modern western urban life.
It finds a perfect simulacrum of the world according to the left hemisphere. The things that used to give us a clue that our reductionist theories weren't all they were cracked up to be, are fading away for most of us. These were the proximity of the natural world - the sense of a coherent, shared culture, of the body of something we live, not merely possess. The soul-moving power of great art, and the sense of something sacred that is very real but beyond everyday language.
Turning to AI, artificial information processing, by the way, not artificial intelligence, in many ways it could be seen as replicating the functions of the left hemisphere at frightening speed across the entire globe. Since the evolutionary reason for developing left hemisphere functions was solely to enhance power, this could indeed be seen as the ultimate logical aim of the left hemisphere. It has after all no sense of the bigger picture of other values or of the way in which context and even sheer scale and extent changes everything. Every angel has his devil. What looks good in one context may be far from good in another or when extended too far. But every devil has his angel and full credit to AI where it has potential to be an enormous help to us.
Above all I believe this is in finding ways to help reverse the damage done by the tide of destruction that industrialization itself has brought about. The destruction of the living world which I started by referring to: ecological repair. Here it can be truly a good angel, the very best we could hope for. And there’s much else to be grateful for - it can help treat diseases and perhaps find less destructive ways such as nuclear fusion to generate power. As an aside though, maybe our dependency on power is part of the problem and we should be aiming to use far less power in the future. And though as a doctor I believe in treating diseases, you'll be surprised to hear. Length of life is not by a million miles as important as the quality of that life and we will all die of something one day. We must focus on quality, not quantity, of life. Here again I believe AI could help us, but how? I suspect by dealing with the sort of technical problems I've mentioned and keeping as far as possible out of our daily lives.
Let me explain. Can't AI help us through freeing time up for us by removing mundane tasks? Of course. I.T. saves time by doing things quickly. Or does it? Bosses become rich by saving wages but we become their new unwilling wage slaves. This is already apparent in not so small ways that add cumulatively to the stress of everyday life, and rob it of its feel of connection with another human being - as well as robbing us of our most precious commodity: time.
This has got more obvious in the last four or five years, so not just because of covid, though that accelerated an already obvious development. As more and more processes that used to take a five-minute phone call become automated, we find ourselves entering into commerce with a computer program for several diverting hours leading us into inescapable escher-like closed loops, and then reporting playfully “oops something went wrong”. And if after this you hold the phone for an hour to speak to a real person they increasingly appear to have been so degraded by enforcement and machine-like algorithms that they might as well be machines.
Everyday life has got much worse. As machines gradually displace humans, what happens to human flourishing? What happens when reliance on machines strips us of our skills? A process already well advanced. And especially what happens if any number of reasons such as shortages of what we call resources, extended power failures, the breakdown of civil order, or war, or just the unsustainability of present levels of growth across whole populations - we can no longer always have those machines to rely on. How resilient, resourceful, skillful, will we then turn out to be compared with our forebears? Leaving aside such alarming but not I think merely alarmist possibilities, what about the impact on us of the loss of daily contact with human beings? As more and more jobs become automated, what happens to those who are rendered thereby unemployed? Yes a few lucky clever ones may get jobs in I.T., but the economic drive is very simple: machines are cheaper than people so the aim has to be to employ fewer people, doesn't it?
And what about our dignity as free individuals? Thanks to AI can we escape the appalling prospect already realized in China, that wherever we go, whatever we buy, whomever we're seen with, our every word, every action, the very thoughts we express in our faces - all is monitored, potentially marked down against us and whatever freedom is still left to us, parametrically curtailed accordingly. We become unpeople, non-citizens, non-humans. The only answer to this seems to be a kind of AI arms race in which the supposed goodies use AI to head off the AI of the baddies. But even if this could happen, I can't see how but then I'm not an AI expert, how do we know who are the goodies anymore? The WEF?
The problem with every step that increases the reach of human power as it will sooner or later be used for evil ends. Once a pernicious regime’s AI reaches a certain level, it can effectively destroy any attempt to resist it, bringing the prospect of a totalitarianism which can have no end.
All decisions affecting humans are moral ones, and as I've argued at length morality is not purely utilitarian and cannot be reduced to calculation. Every human situation is actually unique, and uniqueness has to do with personal history, consciousness, memory, intention, all that is not explicit that we refer to in that deceptively simple word emotion - all the experience and understanding gained through and stored in the body. All that makes us specifically humans not machines. Goodness stems from virtuous minds, not following rules. While machines, also it is claimed, to get more like humans, humans are getting more like machines. AI is there to make things happen to give us control but this is good only if we make progress in wisdom as fast as we make progress in technical know-how, otherwise it's like putting machine guns in the hands of toddlers. By the way if you spot evidence of a comparable growth in wisdom do send my PA a postcard won't you?
It's worth pointing out that subjects with schizophrenia whose thinking and behavior are like those with left hemisphere overdrive and hypo function of the right hemisphere, see a world made up of bits and pieces and often imagined people to become inanimate and machine-like or zombies. To them nothing seems real anymore, just a simulacrum a pretense, a play put on to deceive them. A person may look like a person but uncannily isn't: just AI. And to me the belief that machines could become sentient is really just the obverse phase of the view that we, sentient beings, are really just machines.
The psychiatrist R.D. Laing reported a schizoid patient who saw his wife as a mechanism. She was an “it” because everything she did was a predictable-determined response. He would for instance tell her “it” an ordinary funny joke and when she “it” laughed this indicated her “its” entirely conditioned robot-like nature.
In its assumption of determinacy and empty mechanistic behavior, this reflects what is hardly even a parody of a certain not uncommon scientific position. It also represents a chilling psychopathology. As to cyborgs: the best way to destroy Humanity would be to hybridize it with a machine. I do not call those who pursue this aim evil as they may just have a failure of imagination, but the aim itself is evil if we can call anything evil. It can only further degrade our idea of what a human life is for, and it obviously opens us to totalitarian control which knows no limit. It seems to me that we're like the sorcerer's apprentice in the story, who knew the spell that would set things in motion but had no idea how to make it stop. Obviously, the genie is out of the bottle and cannot now be put back, unless by a breakdown of civilization, which is I'm afraid far from unlikely.
So what can we hope for the future? What matters for the future of humanity is imagination and the values by which we allow ourselves to be led. The left hemisphere can often be an impediment to imagination and its value is single and simple: power. This is intellectually, morally, and spiritually bankrupt. So can AI further the workings of the right hemisphere? I think not directly because it's far from being a matter of different “processing”, say parallel rather than serial, but it can by choosing its projects very carefully, and positively turning away from those that will harm. Your choices are moral acts: you can't shrug it off.
I've painted some dark pictures but in the situation that we're in right now while we have time can we do something? Oddly, the paradox is that to succeed at AI whose entire purpose is to give us control, you must let go of control at least to a large extent - let go of mechanisms, bureaucracy, micromanagement, and strangulation by systems.
We must work with, not against, nature. A gardener cannot make a plant or make it grow. A gardener can only permit and encourage the plant itself to do what it does or crowd it out and stifle its chances to thrive. Humans in this respect are like plants. We can only be more or less impeded in our growth by external pressures. We need spontaneity, openness to risk, and trust in our intuition - for imagination and creativity and for us to be alive and truly present. So I say find people with a proven record of intelligence and above all insight, then give them time - stop breathing down their necks, stop asking how many papers they've published recently, or how near they are to a patentable product. It is true that if you trust, sometimes you will be let down, but more often in this arena you will be handsomely rewarded. Whereas if you monitor and control you will never get more than mediocrity and we cannot afford mediocrity right now. If we are not to become ever more diminished as humans we need people to be in control of machines, not them in control of us.
I'm not talking here about an apocalyptic future, I’m talking about apocalypse now. We're already calmly and quietly surrendering our liberty, our privacy, our dignity, our time, our values, and our talents to the machine. Machines will serve us well if they truly relieve us from drudgery, but we must leave human affairs to humans. If not, we sign our own death warrant.
All that we value most cannot be achieved by control or by an effort of will. Many rationally desirable goals such as sleep, are simply incompatible with the state of mind required to pursue them. They must come if they come at all, as the byproduct of a life well lived. Among these our wisdom itself followed closely by imagination, creativity, courage, humility, virtue, love, sympathy, admiration, faith, and understanding. They cannot be willed. What makes life worth living is what can only be described as a resonance - an encounter with other living beings with the natural world and with the greatest products of the human soul - some would say with the cosmos at large. It's only in encountering the uncontrollable that we really experience the world and come fully alive.
The resonance of a real relationship with a truly sentient other is not possible where there is no freedom, no spontaneity, no life. There is a mighty challenge then ahead: one in which your decisions and responses, my friends, will be of the utmost importance. So I shall leave you with a question, an important question, which is one that every human needs to answer: to be or not to be that is in fact the question.
Thank you.
I'll repost the transcript here with some more bolding as it clearly summarizes the function of the left and right hemispheres while applying it to the concept of AI.
Transcript:
--------------
Keynote from AI World Summit, Amsterdam, October 2022 – Iain McGilchrist
“The Matter with Things: Our Brains, Our Delusions, and the Unmaking of the World”
To be or not to be - that I have it on the authority of a member of the Danish royal family, is the question, but not the only one. Some others of these: what is life for? who are we anyway? and what are we doing here? - in my recent book The Matter With Things I do my best to address these very questions and try to set up why we're getting things so badly wrong.
I'm not just here referring to our heinous crimes such as poisoning the earth's oceans, destroying its forests and persecuting its indigenous peoples. Fighting wars and enslaving people in the pursuit of rare earths, melting the ice caps and bringing to extinction rare and beautiful species of living things. Fading the glories of the world. These are visible, but less visible perhaps is that we're making ourselves wretched. There are no two ways about it. We are more affluent than ever, but riches and power, the only point in having riches, do not make people happier. Ask a psychiatrist, or take a look at the face of Vladimir Putin with power alas of life and death over millions of people and the owner of the most expensive lavatory paper dispenser in the world. No, as affluent as we are, we are also more anxious, depressed, lonely, isolated, and lacking in purpose than we have ever been. The effect is of staggering size and the evidence is clear it can be shown to have little to do with diagnostic fashion, so why is this?
I suggest it is because we have no longer the foggiest idea what a human life is about. Indeed there's a sense in which we no longer live in a world at all but exist in a simulacrum of our own making. You expect me to speak of brains and I will not disappoint you. Leaving nuance aside and condensing three decades of research and a vast body of supporting evidence into a phrase. We are now mesmerized by the least intelligent part of our brain. The reasons of survival, one hemisphere of the brain, the left, has evolved over millions of years to favor manipulation, grabbing, getting and controlling while the other, the right, has effectively been given so charge of the task of understanding the whole picture. So conflicting are these goals that in humans the hemispheres are largely sequestered one from the other. Our apparent ability these days to hear only what comes from the left hemisphere, does not depend on the brain itself having radically changed in the last couple of centuries, though it is certainly always evolving. It's more like this: you buy a radio set and you soon find a couple of channels worth listening to. For a host of reasons after a while you end up listening only to one. It's not the radio set that's changed, it's you. And in the case of the brain it would not even have mattered so much if we'd settled on the intelligent channel, but we didn't - we settled on the one whose value is nothing to do with truth nor with courage, magnanimity, and generosity but only greed, grabbing and getting, manipulation.
And no, the difference between the hemispheres is not a myth that has been debunked. That itself is a myth that requires debunking in which I've been rather successfully debunking for some while now. What definitely does need to be debunked is the bad old pop psychology story that the left hemisphere “does” reason and language and maybe a bit “dull” but is at least reliable like a slightly boring accountant. And the right hemisphere “does” emotions and pictures but is apt to be flighty and fay.
All this is wrong since we now know that each hemisphere is involved in everything and that for the record the left hemisphere is less emotionally stable as well as less intelligent and I mean cognitively as well as emotionally and socially than the right. The right hemisphere is a far superior guide to reality. Delusions and hallucinations are much more frequent, grosser [more coarse] and more persistent after damage to the right hemisphere than to the left. Without the right hemisphere to rely on, the left hemisphere is at sea. It quite literally denies the most obvious facts, it lies, and makes stuff up and it doesn't know what it's talking about, and it is relentlessly, vacuously cheerful in the face of overwhelming disaster.
You may well say but so what why the first, actually I don't care where things go on in my brain. But it does matter hugely because each hemisphere takes a different view of the world and those views are not strictly compatible. And so when we reflect, philosophize, or discourse publicly we're pretty much forced without knowing to favor one tape or the other. It seems that for us to be of two minds to appear inconsistent is a greater sin than to be consistently wrong - no room for “yes but”, for nuance, for seeing the hidden opposite that is always there in whatever is being peddled to us.
So what are these two hemispheric visions of the world like? I hope you may recognize them from experience. The left using narrow beam, scattered attention to one detail after another, to use what is already familiar, certain, static, explicit, abstract, decontextualized, disembodied, categorized, general in nature, and reduced to its parts. All is predictable and controlled. This is an inanimate universe and a bureaucrat's dream. It is like a map in relation to the world is mapped - useful to the degree that it leaves almost everything out and its only value is utility. Note that all here is a re-presentation which literally means present again when it's actually no longer present but dead and gone.
The other, the right hemisphere sees not the re-presentation but the living presence - bringing broad, open, sustained, vigilant attention to bear on the world, it sees what is fresh, unique, never fully known, never finally certain, but full of potential. It understands all that is and must remain implicit. Humor, poetry, art, narrative, music, the sacred - indeed everything we love. It understands that nothing is ever merely static and unchanging but flowing and radically interconnected. That parts of the left hemisphere's invention and that what we are seeing as parts are already wholes at another level. This is a free world, an animate universe and a bureaucrat's nightmare. It has all the richness and unfathomable complexity of the world that the left hemisphere simply mapped.
These two ways of seeing the world are each vital to our survival. We need to simplify and stand apart to manipulate things to deal with the necessities of life and to build the foundations of a civilization. But to live in it we also need to belong to the living world and to understand the complexity of what it is we're dealing with. This division of attention works to our advantage when we use both. However, it is a handicap in fact it is a catastrophe when we use only one. As I explained in the Master and His Emissary, twice in the history of the West, in ancient Greece and then in Rome, a civilization started out with an extraordinarily fruitful harmony of left and right. But as it overreached itself, it moved ever further towards the left hemisphere's take on the world before collapsing. And the same trajectory is now being pursued for the third time. After the miraculous outpouring of creativity in the arts, science, society, and philosophy that we call the Renaissance, our civilization has moved since the enlightenment, drunk with the arrogant belief that it knows everything and can fix everything further and further towards the left. We are now like sleepwalkers whistling a happy tune as we amble towards the abyss.
There is a phenomenon in Psychology called the Dunning-Kruger effect which means that the less you know the more you think you know and vice versa. The left hemisphere doesn't know what it is it doesn't know, and so it thinks it knows everything. The right hemisphere which in reality understands far more, is aware of those vast unknowns. When we're functioning well, the right hemisphere tests the left hemisphere's theory about reality against experience. But the left hemisphere's vision of a lifeless, mechanical, two-dimensional, geometric construct has been externalized around us to such an extent, that when the right hemisphere checks back with experience, it finds the left hemisphere has already colonized our reality. At least for those of us who lead a modern western urban life.
It finds a perfect simulacrum of the world according to the left hemisphere. The things that used to give us a clue that our reductionist theories weren't all they were cracked up to be, are fading away for most of us. These were the proximity of the natural world - the sense of a coherent, shared culture, of the body of something we live, not merely possess. The soul-moving power of great art, and the sense of something sacred that is very real but beyond everyday language.
Turning to AI, artificial information processing, by the way, not artificial intelligence, in many ways it could be seen as replicating the functions of the left hemisphere at frightening speed across the entire globe. Since the evolutionary reason for developing left hemisphere functions was solely to enhance power, this could indeed be seen as the ultimate logical aim of the left hemisphere. It has after all no sense of the bigger picture of other values or of the way in which context and even sheer scale and extent changes everything. Every angel has his devil. What looks good in one context may be far from good in another or when extended too far. But every devil has his angel and full credit to AI where it has potential to be an enormous help to us.
Above all I believe this is in finding ways to help reverse the damage done by the tide of destruction that industrialization itself has brought about. The destruction of the living world which I started by referring to: ecological repair. Here it can be truly a good angel, the very best we could hope for. And there’s much else to be grateful for - it can help treat diseases and perhaps find less destructive ways such as nuclear fusion to generate power. As an aside though, maybe our dependency on power is part of the problem and we should be aiming to use far less power in the future. And though as a doctor I believe in treating diseases, you'll be surprised to hear. Length of life is not by a million miles as important as the quality of that life and we will all die of something one day. We must focus on quality, not quantity, of life. Here again I believe AI could help us, but how? I suspect by dealing with the sort of technical problems I've mentioned and keeping as far as possible out of our daily lives.
Let me explain. Can't AI help us through freeing time up for us by removing mundane tasks? Of course. I.T. saves time by doing things quickly. Or does it? Bosses become rich by saving wages but we become their new unwilling wage slaves. This is already apparent in not so small ways that add cumulatively to the stress of everyday life, and rob it of its feel of connection with another human being - as well as robbing us of our most precious commodity: time.
This has got more obvious in the last four or five years, so not just because of covid, though that accelerated an already obvious development. As more and more processes that used to take a five-minute phone call become automated, we find ourselves entering into commerce with a computer program for several diverting hours leading us into inescapable escher-like closed loops, and then reporting playfully “oops something went wrong”. And if after this you hold the phone for an hour to speak to a real person they increasingly appear to have been so degraded by enforcement and machine-like algorithms that they might as well be machines.
Everyday life has got much worse. As machines gradually displace humans, what happens to human flourishing? What happens when reliance on machines strips us of our skills? A process already well advanced. And especially what happens if any number of reasons such as shortages of what we call resources, extended power failures, the breakdown of civil order, or war, or just the unsustainability of present levels of growth across whole populations - we can no longer always have those machines to rely on. How resilient, resourceful, skillful, will we then turn out to be compared with our forebears? Leaving aside such alarming but not I think merely alarmist possibilities, what about the impact on us of the loss of daily contact with human beings? As more and more jobs become automated, what happens to those who are rendered thereby unemployed? Yes a few lucky clever ones may get jobs in I.T., but the economic drive is very simple: machines are cheaper than people so the aim has to be to employ fewer people, doesn't it?
And what about our dignity as free individuals? Thanks to AI can we escape the appalling prospect already realized in China, that wherever we go, whatever we buy, whomever we're seen with, our every word, every action, the very thoughts we express in our faces - all is monitored, potentially marked down against us and whatever freedom is still left to us, parametrically curtailed accordingly. We become unpeople, non-citizens, non-humans. The only answer to this seems to be a kind of AI arms race in which the supposed goodies use AI to head off the AI of the baddies. But even if this could happen, I can't see how but then I'm not an AI expert, how do we know who are the goodies anymore? The WEF?
The problem with every step that increases the reach of human power as it will sooner or later be used for evil ends. Once a pernicious regime’s AI reaches a certain level, it can effectively destroy any attempt to resist it, bringing the prospect of a totalitarianism which can have no end.
All decisions affecting humans are moral ones, and as I've argued at length morality is not purely utilitarian and cannot be reduced to calculation. Every human situation is actually unique, and uniqueness has to do with personal history, consciousness, memory, intention, all that is not explicit that we refer to in that deceptively simple word emotion - all the experience and understanding gained through and stored in the body. All that makes us specifically humans not machines. Goodness stems from virtuous minds, not following rules. While machines, also it is claimed, to get more like humans, humans are getting more like machines. AI is there to make things happen to give us control but this is good only if we make progress in wisdom as fast as we make progress in technical know-how, otherwise it's like putting machine guns in the hands of toddlers. By the way if you spot evidence of a comparable growth in wisdom do send my PA a postcard won't you?
It's worth pointing out that subjects with schizophrenia whose thinking and behavior are like those with left hemisphere overdrive and hypo function of the right hemisphere, see a world made up of bits and pieces and often imagined people to become inanimate and machine-like or zombies. To them nothing seems real anymore, just a simulacrum a pretense, a play put on to deceive them. A person may look like a person but uncannily isn't: just AI. And to me the belief that machines could become sentient is really just the obverse phase of the view that we, sentient beings, are really just machines.
The psychiatrist R.D. Laing reported a schizoid patient who saw his wife as a mechanism. She was an “it” because everything she did was a predictable-determined response. He would for instance tell her “it” an ordinary funny joke and when she “it” laughed this indicated her “its” entirely conditioned robot-like nature.
In its assumption of determinacy and empty mechanistic behavior, this reflects what is hardly even a parody of a certain not uncommon scientific position. It also represents a chilling psychopathology. As to cyborgs: the best way to destroy Humanity would be to hybridize it with a machine. I do not call those who pursue this aim evil as they may just have a failure of imagination, but the aim itself is evil if we can call anything evil. It can only further degrade our idea of what a human life is for, and it obviously opens us to totalitarian control which knows no limit. It seems to me that we're like the sorcerer's apprentice in the story, who knew the spell that would set things in motion but had no idea how to make it stop. Obviously, the genie is out of the bottle and cannot now be put back, unless by a breakdown of civilization, which is I'm afraid far from unlikely.
So what can we hope for the future? What matters for the future of humanity is imagination and the values by which we allow ourselves to be led. The left hemisphere can often be an impediment to imagination and its value is single and simple: power. This is intellectually, morally, and spiritually bankrupt. So can AI further the workings of the right hemisphere? I think not directly because it's far from being a matter of different “processing”, say parallel rather than serial, but it can by choosing its projects very carefully, and positively turning away from those that will harm. Your choices are moral acts: you can't shrug it off.
I've painted some dark pictures but in the situation that we're in right now while we have time can we do something? Oddly, the paradox is that to succeed at AI whose entire purpose is to give us control, you must let go of control at least to a large extent - let go of mechanisms, bureaucracy, micromanagement, and strangulation by systems.
We must work with, not against, nature. A gardener cannot make a plant or make it grow. A gardener can only permit and encourage the plant itself to do what it does or crowd it out and stifle its chances to thrive. Humans in this respect are like plants. We can only be more or less impeded in our growth by external pressures. We need spontaneity, openness to risk, and trust in our intuition - for imagination and creativity and for us to be alive and truly present. So I say find people with a proven record of intelligence and above all insight, then give them time - stop breathing down their necks, stop asking how many papers they've published recently, or how near they are to a patentable product. It is true that if you trust, sometimes you will be let down, but more often in this arena you will be handsomely rewarded. Whereas if you monitor and control you will never get more than mediocrity and we cannot afford mediocrity right now. If we are not to become ever more diminished as humans we need people to be in control of machines, not them in control of us.
I'm not talking here about an apocalyptic future, I’m talking about apocalypse now. We're already calmly and quietly surrendering our liberty, our privacy, our dignity, our time, our values, and our talents to the machine. Machines will serve us well if they truly relieve us from drudgery, but we must leave human affairs to humans. If not, we sign our own death warrant.
All that we value most cannot be achieved by control or by an effort of will. Many rationally desirable goals such as sleep, are simply incompatible with the state of mind required to pursue them. They must come if they come at all, as the byproduct of a life well lived. Among these our wisdom itself followed closely by imagination, creativity, courage, humility, virtue, love, sympathy, admiration, faith, and understanding. They cannot be willed. What makes life worth living is what can only be described as a resonance - an encounter with other living beings with the natural world and with the greatest products of the human soul - some would say with the cosmos at large. It's only in encountering the uncontrollable that we really experience the world and come fully alive.
The resonance of a real relationship with a truly sentient other is not possible where there is no freedom, no spontaneity, no life. There is a mighty challenge then ahead: one in which your decisions and responses, my friends, will be of the utmost importance. So I shall leave you with a question, an important question, which is one that every human needs to answer: to be or not to be that is in fact the question.
Thank you.
Still plodding through Iain McGilchrist's brilliant primer 'The Master and his Emissary'. Dense and enriching with every page. Reason for the post was that I just finished watching one of my all time favourite films, 'The Field of Dreams' (1989) and it struck me while watching that among other things its a beautiful examination of the left brain/right brain dance, with for once an unashamed love affair with the potential holistic and whole vision of the right brain's take on reality. If you've never caught it before, I wholeheartedly recommend a viewing (and no its not primarily about baseball!):
ELT
Jedi
He answers the question himself in this video :
He stresses the importance of Attention (disposal of consciousness toward the world), put in a highly focused way AND a highly broadened and extended way AT THE SAME TIME.
*Pretty much as what we can find in many meditative exercises*
(and where I also find a link with self-observation and external considering)
I just watched this talk with Ian McGilchrist and Rupert Sheldrake. Alex Gomez-Marin identifies himself as the corpus callosum between them... good one! Their is pretty free-flowing, each asking the other questions about their research, and eventually getting into questions of the bureaucratization of education, the necessity of academic institutions, and how to produce the thinkers of the future. Mention is made of Soviet and Chinese technical engineers as having very high social prestige.
Sheldrake gives a good image, he says they're both feral academics who have gone out into the wilds. McGilchrist reflects on his time in the wilds, saying that his 7-year fellowship with All Souls gave him the leeway to research his interests with no one looking over his shoulder, and it was this open, creative span of his younger days poring through his interests that eventually lead to the publication of the books mentioned in this thread.
Sheldrake also had his own period of freedom, where he talks about his fellowship at Harvard in the history and philosophy of science, being force-fed information. He managed to negotiate his freedom to study based on his interests. When he got his own fellowship, it was a similar six year period of free ranging study that he found to be priceless.
I thought this was interesting, because recently I had read that Putin mentioned (or decreed?) a change in the Russian educational system, with the focus being the production of highly trained specialists. Sort of like a return to the Soviet prestige maybe? Below is from Andrei Martyanov:
I just found it interesting to note the difference between these two ideas coming into my field of view one so soon after another. They seem so diametrically opposed, but I can see the importance of each approach, and how they can (or maybe should) work together in any given society.
Sheldrake proposes changing the name of 'unemployment benefit' to 'research grant' and a lot of problems may be solved. These guys have a great sense of humour!