In conversation with Dr. Iain McGilchrist
Discover more from Charles Eisenstein
In conversation with Dr. Iain McGilchrist
Author of The Master and His Emissary, and The Matter with Things
Before we began our conversation, we set an intention that it reach places that neither of us could go by ourselves. That intention was fulfilled.
This conversation is part of the Sanity Project. Here is the audio, video, then a few text excerpts.
“You're talking about AI systems here. It’s what I call the hall of mirrors. The left hemisphere lives in a hall of mirrors in which its own representation, its own theory about things, is more important than any evidence that comes from the senses or from experience.” — Iain McGilchrist
“There are kind of gaudy substitutes for beauty that we've become hypnotized with that are associated with that word… Beauty is an emergent function and it cannot be copied. It has to come from the infinite. And that's why I think that it is such a liberatory orienting principle. It's because of its irreducibility. And when you're just shuffling the bits, which is what AI does and to a large extent what our culture does, when you are cut off from life, from the infinity of being, then you just end up recycling things and beauty is lost. Because beauty is contextual, it has to draw from something outside of what already is.” — Me
“If you suppress the right frontal cortex, people actually start to see living things as inanimate. They start seeing people as kind of zombies. And whereas if you do the opposite and suppress the left frontal cortex, they start to see things that wouldn't normally be considered animate as animate. They see the sun and they see it moving in the sky and they see this as a living thing. “ — Iain
“We need both union and division. And in fact, Goethe, who was an uncommonly wise man, said that uniting the divided, dividing the united, this is the whole business of nature.” — Iain
“The reason we can replace human functions with with AI is that human functioning has become more and more mechanical. It's very easy to to artificially generate text that is trite and cliched and unimaginative, and just a lowest common denominator generic example of what everybody else is doing.” — me
In conversation with Dr. Iain McGilchrist
My wife pointed out this morning that MRI scans, etc, are all situated within a left-hemisphere context. You lie in a tube of metal as it hums loudly doing decontextualised thought experiments devised by people with left hemisphere dominant ways of seeing the world, who think they are disembodied observers of their experiments, and then think the results they get have relevance on how our brains work while in our normal lives, and what about the Real Humans, living in right story?
The whole thing needs to be walked away from. It's insane.
Thank you Charles and Iain for the beautiful conversation.
I stay with this: “ … Beauty is an emergent function and it cannot be copied. It has to come from the infinite, … Because beauty is contextual, it has to draw from something outside of what already is.”
And as my observation for you and Iain, I quote Socrates:
“ … one ought to to be beautiful to approach one who is beautiful.”
(Plato’s Symposium)