Iain McGilchrist, psychiatrist and author of The Matter With Things (Perspectiva 2021), defends the left-brain/right-brain psychological distinction often made in psychology. But his view is far more careful and nuanced than what’s offered in the pop psych books on the flea market table.

In an essay just published at First Things, which started out as a lecture delivered at the 2022 World Summit AI in Amsterdam, he warns against the growing AI dominance over our lives — which he interprets as left-brained:

The things that used to alert us to the inadequacy of our reductionist theories are fading away. They were: the natural world; the sense of a coherent shared culture; the sense of the body as something we live, not merely possess; the power of great art; and the sense of something sacred that is real but transcends everyday language.

AI—artificial information-processing, by the way, not artificial intelligence—could in many ways be seen as replicating the functions of the left hemisphere at frightening speed across the entire globe. The left hemisphere manipulates tokens or symbols for aspects of experience. The right hemisphere is in touch with experience itself, with the body and deeper emotions, with context and the vast realm of the implicit. AI, like the left hemisphere, has no sense of the bigger picture, of other values, or of the way in which context—or even scale and extent—changes everything. …

All decisions affecting humans are moral decisions. And morality is not purely utilitarian; it cannot be reduced to calculation. Every human situation is unique, its uniqueness arising from personal history, consciousness, memory, intention, all that is not explicit, all that we mean by the deceptively simple word “emotion,” all the experience and understanding gained through and stored in the body, all that makes us humans and not machines. Goodness requires virtuous minds, not merely following rules. …

The assumption of mechanistic “conditioning” reflects what is hardly even a parody of a not uncommon scientific position. It also represents a chilling psychopathology. But this mentality is not unlike the way we may begin to see each other, should the mechanical processes of AI become the standard for human behavior. As machines—or so it is claimed—become more like humans, humans are certainly becoming more like machines, by reason of their being obliged to interact with them.

Iain McGilchrist, “Resist the Machine Apocalypse,” First Things, March 2024

Read the whole essay here.

Here’s the talk:

If you are interested in discussions on left–right brain hemispheres, you may also wish to read:

The left and the right brain want pop science media to… chill. Neuroscience is not an especially rewarding field for the pursuit of dogma. The risk with neuroscience that tries to encompass Mozart is not that we will know nothing but that we will know just enough to get it all wrong.

and

Does left brain-only thinking impoverish our mental world? How? A discussion of the left brain vs the right brain that avoids pop science can set us thinking, as psychiatrist McGilchrist and neurologist Dirckx show. Materialism impoverishes mind–brain discussions due to Egnor’s dilemma: If your hypothesis is that your mind is an illusion, then you DO NOT HAVE a hypothesis.