Ian McGilchrist shows us what’s wrong with the world, and why we ought to pursue Beauty in the race towards AI and the Singularity.
The Opposite of True Beauty
But what is the problem, really, with AI, with this rush towards progress?
One way of looking at it is through the lens of Iain McGilchrist’s work on the left and right hemispheres of the brain, and how the history of western civilization can be told from the vantage point of which hemisphere was dominant at each major period.
As we can see from this rather crude and simple model, the left hemisphere of the brain according to McGilchrist is analytical, detail focused, and prefers a linear mechanistic view of the world. It excels at language processing, logical reasoning, and the manipulation of symbols and abstractions. It seeks out certainty. And its inclination is to narrow down, categorize, and seek control.
The right side of the brain is more about holism and integrating seemingly disparate things. It’s the arts and sciences combined, it’s the theoretical and practical working together, it’s the yin and the yang. It’s adept at processing emotions, recognizing faces, and interpreting art and music. It’s open to possibilities and understands uniqueness rather than that which is generically the case. It appreciates the interconnectedness and complexities of life.
McGilchrist …
While our left brain makes for a wonderful servant, it is a very poor master [, for] it is the right side which is the more relatable and insightful. Without it, our world would be mechanistic–stripped of depth, colour, and value.
A big problem with AI is it has been developed and fostered in a left hemispherical world; a world dominated by the pursuit of power, control, mechanistic frameworks, logical analyses as if a mere representation of an Excel spreadsheet.
But it’s not that left hemispherical thinking is wrong or somehow ‘bad’. It’s very necessary. We need to analyze and process information and sense perception. There are aspects of our world that need to be ordered in systematic ways. There are rituals that follow precise algorithms (for lack of a better word). However, the point of McGilchrist’s argument is that the left hemispheric way of thinking has become dominant, and has given rise to artificial intelligence at the expense of human creativity, imagination, and a holistic understanding of the world.
McGilchrist …
This is the theme of my current thinking and writing. There are it seems to me four main pathways to the truth: science, reason, intuition, and imagination. I also believe strongly that any worldview that tries to get by without paying due respect to all four of these is bound to fail. Each one its own has virtues and vices, its gifts and its inherent dangers: only by respecting each and all together can we learn to act wisely. And each is a blend of elements contributed by either hemispheres (xxvi).
A major thrust of his argument and observations and research is the necessity of the left-hemisphere to be as it were facilitated by the right–not to replace it as the dominant form of thinking. The problem he sees, and what many artists and creative folk feel in our world, is that the society around us–its algorithms, architecture, circuitous highways, dull monochrome modernism-gone-wild strip malls–has been built on the dominance of the left-hemisphere. McGilchrist …
[We] should be appropriately sceptical of the left hemisphere’s vision of a mechanistic world, an atomistic society, a world in which competition is more important than collaboration; a world in which nature is a heap of resources there for our exploitation, in which only humans count, and yet humans are only machines–and not very good ones at that; a world curiously stripped of depth and colour and value. This is not the intelligent, if hard-nosed, view that its espousers comfort themselves by making it out to be; just a sterile fantasy, the product of a lack of imagination, which makes it easier for us to manipulate what we no longer understand. But it is a fantasy that displaces and renders inaccessible the vibrant, living, profoundly creative world that it was our future to inherit–until we squandered our inheritance (xxvi).
We’ve squandered our inheritance.
True Beauty
Why?
Because we left Beauty behind for utility, for the bottom-line, for convenience, for a drive and thirst for power and privilege, for a plundering and, as McGilchrist describes the aim of the left-hemisphere, for clutching and grabbing what we want from the world, thus short-circuiting our intended relationship to the world.
And we’ve built systems to help us grab more; and now those systems are self-replicating into intelligent systems that will no longer need us to foster them. AI will reach a point where it will no longer need us. It will be faster, more intelligent. It will think innumerable steps ahead of us. It will not only subjugate us, but will drain us of our creativity, our meaning in the world … at least those who will let it.
And those who will try to level-up by chipping, to throw themselves full-game into the Singularity, will become super-intelligent humans. But that’s not what we’re created for–to bootstrap our way to deification at all costs to humanity, nature, our own bodies and souls. To become gods by leveraging the power of gods we’ve previously created.
Created for True Beauty
For we were created for Beauty.
Because we were created by Beauty Himself to bear the Image and likeness of the Beauty that He is.
Because we squandered the inheritance of our special role in creation: to steward it, look after it, expand the garden of Eden to the rest of the world, and, as such, to find our identity in that role–to become priests of creation.
As we continue to rush towards progress, we continue to squander.
But the squandering will eventually be the destruction of our souls.
Can we recover?
Maybe.
Maybe it’ll be as Samuel Beckett says,
We’ll try, fail, fail again, try again, fail …
Until we realize that squandering is no good anymore. That we actually want Beauty. And we’ll actually find our way into it. We’ll become more liturgical; more real; more human.
But to be fair, and not so LH about it all … There are many people I see who want to affirm beauty in the world; who want to create beautiful things. There is a place for all of us to come together in the great liturgy of the cosmos and offer the world to God and bring our own gifts as offerings, and work towards restoring the little places in which we dwell and work, raise our families, enjoy our leisure … to become saints.
