The whole notion that we will end up with either a technologically controlled utopia, or some kind of panopticon AI-supervised dystopia, but either way with the machines in charge, is depressing, but also boring, and highly unlikely. Machinery never works as well as people think. Vendors, overhype what their gear can do, people fail to follow the manual and break things, upgrades are installed that actually make things worse, etc. People still need to make it all go, which means it will never be perfect, neither perfectly good, nor perfectly awful.
One science fiction writer who understood this was Philip K. Dick. In his novel The Penultimate Truth, there is a supposedly fully automated underground civilization, living in big cylinders. But we find out that there’s one old guy who is the only person who knows how to keep the machinery going, and he is plugging things and keeping it working, but if he died, it would all stop. So the protagonist, when he finds out the old guy is dying, violates all the protocols, and comes to the surface to get a prosthetic pancreas, and he finds out that everything he was told and that he believed wasn’t true. But the image of a futuristic world that is only kept going by some guy, down in the basement, with a greasy workbench, and old tools, and tape, and spare parts pulled off of stuff that’s not being used anymore, that is how any future world, any world reliant on technology, will always have to work. Even chief engineer, Scott on the Starship Enterprise in the original series worked like this.
So if the Utopia and the dystopia are not going to happen, what will? More ordinary human muddling through, that’s what will happen. Some of it will be great, some of it will be destructive, but hopefully the net direction, the sum of all vectors, will be positive.
Hi Contarini, thanks for pointing out the Philip K. Dick novel, I’ll have to get that sometime. Your description reminds me of E.M. Forster’s The Machine Stops. People live in a perfectly managed 100% boring underground machine, but eventually there’s no one around to fix it, so it just stops one day. Of course nobody knows how to live anymore. Forster could write that in 1920 something? So we’ve got this slow burn towards these futuristic visions it would seem.
Dystopian sci-fi/spec-fi epics don't do much for me. I prefer Robert Anton Wilson's emphasis in novels like the Schrodinger's Cat Trilogy, on protagonists who use their wit and resourcefulness to subvert the mechanisms of control rather than simply finding themselves in a condition of passive, hopeless victimization.
The thing is the forest is still there, whether you can see it or not, and will defy every effort made to reduce it to a mere collection of objects. There is no tech dystopia or utopia coming, only the consequences of attempting to make one: a devastating lesson in the impossibility of micromanaging fractal complexity.
To be a little less vague both the tech cultists and the doomsayers accept the fundamental technocratic premise that we understand a lot more than we actually do, and are in control of a lot more than we are. All evidence points to the contrary: that every single grand technocratic project has failed catastrophically; every single time they thought they had it all figured out; and it's vanishingly unlikely that they've got it all figured out this time, given results of all past experiments.
Imagine instead a future where this premise is fundamentally incorrect, and the relentless undermining of every known-good state of every aspect of society will lead not to its New and Improved (tm) replacement, but collapse and regression to an earlier, lower-"progress", less complex, fragile, and interdependent state of being. That's where we're going. And after a period of adjustment, it's going to be pretty nice.
Yep. I think it’s already kind of obvious on the pedestrian level of the ‘user experience ‘ of consumer-level computer interfaces and performance. Especially when my gadgets do something spontaneously that’s dumb, pointless or vaguely creepy. Funny how so many have opted-out of the ability to perform basic tasks involving what used to be considered routine judgment and knowledge and placed their trust in tech instead. That’s basically how a miles-long line of cars ended up crawling along at 10 mph on a rough dirt road recently between Vegas and LA when an accident snarled traffic on I-15. Dystopian perhaps, but funny and embarrassing too.
Hah, I had Google maps send me down a dirt road during the same trip once upon a time, about a decade ago. That is the last time I trusted it. Somewhere past Apple Valley if I remember right.
This is an enormously valuable and much needed counter to all the doom-obsessing about the technocracy. I’m guilty of it myself, to be sure, but I don’t apologize for it, and I do know that things almost never turn out as bad as I feared they would, nor as good as I hoped.
“… every single grand technocratic project has failed catastrophically; every single time they thought they had it all figured out..”
This is true, but the truth is also that over a greater arc of history, there simply haven’t been that many projects attempted. So even if it fails again this time, they’re almost certainly not going to stop because they’ve exhausted every possibility. What we can rest a little easier about is that, while some technology is indeed far advanced, most of the stuff that they’re creaming about now is still very much at or not far removed from the ‘suck-it-and-see’ phase of maturity, so there may be more than a little wiggle room left to us here or there which will be opportunities for us to crack, sabotage, and exploit.
I contend that what they are trying to do is impossible on multiple levels, so it will always fail. Even if we did nothing to stop it, it wouldn't work. We only have to survive it. It will suck, but lots of people have lived through a lot of suck.
I agree with your contention. To my mind, their tragic superciliousness and the utter limit of their overweening managerialist approach will be revealed when genuine, spontaneous problems arise - and they will arise. For instance, all of human prehistory and history has played out during an atypical period of geological quiescence. When these processes and natural cycles return to their usual rates of activity - and they will - then it is quite conceivable that our technological society will be destroyed, and maybe also the human species as well, either in part or entirely. Cataclysm is impartial.
Over the last century or so, the global directorate has demonstrated itself to be completely uninterested and extraneous in all things except for the "management" of manufactured "problems" contrived as pretexts for the forceful implementation of social transformation. But in events of natural disaster - the 1980 eruption of Mount St. Helens, and the 2005 Hurricane Katrina flooding of New Orleans being two examples that spring to mind - the most powerful nation on Earth presented itself as woefully ill-prepared and incompetent, and whether accidental or intentional, government made a bad situation worse.
"It will suck, but lots of people have lived through a lot of suck."
For anyone who has lived half their lives or more before the internet and can not only still clearly remember what it was like but are also capable of critical discernment, with things being as they have come to be, life is already virtually unlivable. What civil society has become is what enabled COVID-19 to happen. I have friends who have yet to apologize to me, and I have no expectation they ever will. So be it.
I wrote an article tangentially along these, er, lines, a few years back, in the groove of the way that intelligence itself is seen - in particular by researchers – as a reflection of the tool that is used to look at the question, and indeed it is a very left-brain tool.
It's also interesting to ask what is aware of the content of consciousness, since the brain hemisphere observations and models beg that question. It's akin to saying that television sets create TV shows, rather than being a mere instrument of the contents. In the case of consciousness, the "TV Show" is the totality of mentations: perceptions, sensations and thought (did I leave anything out?). Every *thing* is composed of those elements (including any content concerning brains, such concepts, images, theories and models), but what is *aware* of them is not a thing, is not content.
Great post. I’m currently reading McGilchrist’s “The Master And His Emissary”, and have been having thoughts about my own musical practice (clawhammer banjo, a bit of guitar and - in the last year - clarinet), which closely parallel your observations. I’ve found it’s quite noticeable that I become more able to multitask (e.g., talk to people, take greater notice of backing tracks or other performers) when playing a piece after it “beds in”, and the hemispheric “shared processing” model certainly fits with that experience. It’s a fascinating thing to see from the inside, as it were. And McGilchrist’s book is quite beautifully written.
Hi Richard, thank you and wonderful that you’re reading that book! He has a multivolume set just published in 2021 too, by the way. I just received them and I have started reading.
Erik, I like this as epistemology, though Descartes has been getting a bad wrap since forever along these lines. It's worth remembering, by way of balance, that he was also a swordsman of some renown. Anyway, the problem that you raise in your subtitle "what we're getting" and then gloss over -- and far too long for a post or a response -- is not in epistemology, but in political economy. The idea that the modern sees nature as a thing to be manipulated in the pursuit of power (Heidegger, back to Nietzsche), or for that matter MacGilchrist's scientific of neurological structure, is not some abstract philosophical, scientific, or otherwise elevated thought, along the lines of what does "grooving" or even the Cartesian unity of geometry and algebra (truly foundational) MEAN. Instead, the sort of thinking you are (rightly) pointing out the limitations of is the root of both military and commercial striving, and embedded in social structures that are not easy to change. So, for example, we've been talking about neurosymbolic research, surely a left brain obsession. But do you think the folks involved, Google, or DARPA, or China, could stop? How? (I don't know if this condemns us to a kind of Darwinism.). As for the engineers, they may not want power in the crude sense, but yeah, can they keep themselves from wanting to solve the problem, make the engineering work? That's what they do, that's their Gestalt, so zu sagen. If you ask them the sort of big picture "what about the quality of life on earth" question that interests both of us, they will mumble something in utilitarian fashion about progress, which they cannot see, it's just what one says. They just want to solve the problem, and their solutions (which were bought and sold beforehand) will be used . . .
I find myself perforce thinking/hoping with Contarini. Humans muddle; the machine's ghost have a sense of humor. As you know, I do lots with CS, the military, money. All this pursuit and use of power is full of all sorts of thinking, ghosts in the machine, even grooving. And one must hope.
FWIW, I've been thinking in this channel since I was literally a kid, worried about technological excess in 70s, environment and all that. Not that I ever produced anything elegant here . . .As always, keep up the good work.
By the way, I don't think Heidegger's insights show that philosophers are somehow more fundamental than McGilchrist's neuroscientific approach (he's also quite the philosopher it would seem). Rather we have two ways of getting at something, and they compliment each other. Heidegger's standing reserve is what the left brain sees when it sees a waterfall, to put it somewhat crudely. I'm not saying that you were saying this, just it's something I wanted to mention.
Eric, whether or not philosophy is master was hardly my point, and didn't mean to imply that (meaning you misread!) I've edited the above. My point was that being right about the science, the ideas, the philosophy is all well and good, but -- as you have said with regard to weapons, advertising and other "LoFi" use cases -- we have to think about how this stuff is embedded. And, crucially, how the actors are themselves embedded, not philosophers or gentlemen scientists, with freedom.
I suppose they'll have to learn their lessons from close up and personal experience with their errors. Hopefully not at the expense of the rest of us. That's where the rest of us come in: doing our best to prevent them from imposing those costs on us.
For example, I just leave my phone at home and treat it like a landline most of the time. It slows everything down to a more dealable and humane pace, and I find that an enormous benefit. I think more people should limit the cellphones reach and importance to their existence. A cellphone has no business being regarded as anything close to an autonomic breathing reflex.
I agree with you. I wrote something about this on Colligo a few months ago, about how once we determined that "AI" in its current guise conferred an advantage in competitions from militiary battles to selling stuff on Amazon, we're effectively locked in. The only that saves this is either a VERY BIG idea by an individual or group working outside the current constraints, which for the reasons you've given here is somewhat unlikely, or we do the other thing, mentioned by Contarini and Fukitol, which is (very rough) muddling through while in turns vaguely or painfully aware of squandering so much for so little, or we simply drive the damn thing off the road, crash, and like humans do, pick up the pieces. There's an obvious problem with the latter, as the destructive capacity of the world now is somewhat troubling. But hitting bottom is a way of righting the ship (to mix metaphors). Thanks for your insights here.
I wonder if, as we learn more about mind, consciousness, and intelligence in other species, and perhaps eventually machines, if we won't see a greater, more holistic understanding of our own in both the sciences and humanities.
Also, we have already swung so far to the left brain that a correction is likely, if only because the left-brain destroys the conditions that give it dominance. I am cautiously optimistic that the conditions are becoming right for another shift in styles of consciousness like we saw start in seventeenth-century Europe.
As Churchill said, "success is not final" - that is something the Left Brain has great difficulty understanding. I don't think the question is whether styles of consciousness will shift back towards a more balanced style, but how much damage the current style will cause before that happens.
Is human agency deteriorating? Or is it's exponential growth responsible for the growth of technology? Has there ever been a time before now when so many humans can contribute their thinking to the world? Warnings about the tree of knowledge go back millennia for good reason, and power is wielded best with balance. Thank you Erik for your thoughtful writing!
Man, I’m getting old. If I haven’t played a piece on the piano in the past two weeks (let alone 30 years!) it’s gone. Pull out the sheet music, start over, and it comes back. Slowly. Not in 20 minutes, maybe 45-60 minutes.
Your broad reach, Erik, is one of the reasons I love Colligo. It feels you’re a person who does see the forest despite the trees, and it feels so enriching when I oftentimes only see the trees.
It is very easy to fall for (tech, but not only tech) visions which seem all-encompassing, and I’m often left with just feeling “off” - that there must be something more. Your posts never fail to provide the perspective I’ve been missing. Thank you.
This is a fascinating piece and I’m glad I’ve come across it. Of course the left/right brain analogy extrapolates beautifully to aspects of tech development… I can read music very laboriously and learned to play piano and guitar mainly by tricking the teachers into playing the piece to preview it and then picking it out by ear when I got home. I can jam and I can groove but I am keenly aware of the risk of missing certain trees in the forest…
Why is it risky to miss certain trees? Because you are looking for a specific outcome? What if you fill in those trees with your own ideas, couldn't you come up with something just as beautiful?
I love this reply! This is basically my justification for being a bad piano student as a kid. The teacher would stop me mid-piece and ask where in the music I was (admittedly always totally lost). I would gloat to myself I was “riffing” on Bach’s piece and potentially adding to it lol.
Absolutely! Why not add to it? Bach is my favorite composer but I've actually re+written some bars of his music. If you're interested check out the two versions of prelude 18 I arranged for flute and 3 cellos. https://youtu.be/-w6vtpUpFF8?si=i1VIPYrT_zuDmDN7
One of my favorite bits of McGilchrist is when he comments that if mind is purely a result of the material, then matter must have properties we do not yet understand.
Beautiful post, Eric. I’m late to the McGilchrist party. Having just dipped into Master and Emmisary recently… wow, there are deep waters to be plumbed here. Your music example is so illuminating. -Matt
This is interesting to me in light of my recent birth (a VBAC) and my field (Clinical research in ASD). In ASD research, one holy grail is sleep - many autistic individuals don’t sleep all that well; and we know that sleep studies in non-naturalistic settings are not going to *represent* well what’s happening in the home. One private foundation just funded a large sleep study in the home - with expensive equipment, like a headpiece. It’s pretty difficult to sleep in this headpiece. But the evidence for ecological validity is certainly, you know, a little higher… In effect, our evidence is junky. It’s so junky. But suspension of disbelief is required for the field to be, you know, solvent. And you get so used to it that sometimes you forget how many steps removed your evidence is from reality. And that’s how you get clinical psychologists who honest to God will argue that their representation of a child patient’s functioning is “valid” and the standard against which the parent’s account must be measured. Without these little falsehoods, you don’t get clinical research; you don’t get clinical care; not the way they function right now.
Same with birth. Cohort study after cohort study shows better outcomes with midwives; reduced morbidity on all counts; happier women (adding that as if that mattered, I guess… ha). Birth being a complex physiological and hormonal process, and not a mere medical object; the uterus being attached to a woman with thoughts, feelings, and opinions, rather than isolated in a jar; these are inconvenient facts for OBs, who (at least the newer crowd; you’ll still get older OBs trained in breech with skills beyond wielding a scalpel) typically proceed as if the one owning the uterus is an obstacle to the baby; and RNs, who will argue fervently that all manner of encumbrances to birth (from IVs to constant monitoring, loud beeping machines, bright lights, pitocin and epidurals and foley bulbs and catheters and scratchy gowns and amniotomy and constant cervical checks) are *meant to facilitate vaginal birth.* The 633% increase in cesarean since the 1960s stands in stark contrast.
The bias to action to check a box. Due diligence is box-checking. That’s it. And you work in these fields long enough you believe it. You believe what you do and what you see before your eyes. And that’s it. There’s also a word for that - ascertainment bias - but that’s something that happens to other people, anyway, not to us.
I think you’ve hit the nail on the head using music as one of the best analogies for showing how we have not been accessing the bigger picture and how awesome it would be if we did!
From the chapter 'In Search of Meaning' in my book "YOGAi: Interplays of Yoga and Artificial Intelligence"—
According to Iain McGilchrist’s influential work "The Master and His Emissary", the left hemisphere of the human brain plays a significant role in shaping our perception of reality. Contrary to popular belief, McGilchrist argues that the two hemispheres of the brain have distinct functions, with the left hemisphere being responsible for language and categorisation. However, he suggests that relying too heavily on these functions can lead to a false sense of understanding and perception of reality. Moreover, the left hemisphere tends to be overconfident in its assessments and can foster mistakes and deception.
In contrast, McGilchrist emphasises the importance of the right hemisphere, which he views as more inclusive and holistic in its approach. The right hemisphere serves as the master, instructing the left hemisphere as its emissary. However, McGilchrist observes that the left hemisphere often operates independently, believing itself to be the master. This dynamic highlights the complex interplay between the hemispheres of the brain and underscores the importance of understanding how they influence our perception and cognition.
The right hemisphere seems to be more in touch with presence, with what we actually experience and what we inhabit, whereas the left hemisphere provides a representation, no longer the presence, but a map, a program, a theory, a diagram. It is abstracted, categorical, removed from and not having the constancy of the characteristics of the world that it is intending to map. The left hemisphere “treats the world simply as a resource to be exploited. It’s made us enormously powerful. It’s enabled us to become wealthy, but it’s also meant that we’ve lost the means to understand the world, to make sense of it, to feel satisfaction and fulfilment through our place in the world,” emphasises McGilchrist.
In this remarkably abundant era, a shift occurred around the close of the seventeenth century, roughly coinciding with the scientific revolution. During this period, there was a growing belief that understanding everything as mechanisms was not only possible but also highly beneficial. While this perspective has undoubtedly yielded numerous advancements, it led to a profound philosophical misconception. This error isn’t merely abstract; it penetrates deeply into our fundamental experience of the world. The prevalent notion became that the world consists of isolated parts, and by delving deeper and deeper, we could uncover reality in almost identical bits. However, the reality is quite the opposite.
The dominance of left-brain thinking has created a culture that focuses on material acquisition, competition and personal gain—basically power—which are identified by Vedic traditions as Artha, or the pursuit of wealth, name and fame.
The whole notion that we will end up with either a technologically controlled utopia, or some kind of panopticon AI-supervised dystopia, but either way with the machines in charge, is depressing, but also boring, and highly unlikely. Machinery never works as well as people think. Vendors, overhype what their gear can do, people fail to follow the manual and break things, upgrades are installed that actually make things worse, etc. People still need to make it all go, which means it will never be perfect, neither perfectly good, nor perfectly awful.
One science fiction writer who understood this was Philip K. Dick. In his novel The Penultimate Truth, there is a supposedly fully automated underground civilization, living in big cylinders. But we find out that there’s one old guy who is the only person who knows how to keep the machinery going, and he is plugging things and keeping it working, but if he died, it would all stop. So the protagonist, when he finds out the old guy is dying, violates all the protocols, and comes to the surface to get a prosthetic pancreas, and he finds out that everything he was told and that he believed wasn’t true. But the image of a futuristic world that is only kept going by some guy, down in the basement, with a greasy workbench, and old tools, and tape, and spare parts pulled off of stuff that’s not being used anymore, that is how any future world, any world reliant on technology, will always have to work. Even chief engineer, Scott on the Starship Enterprise in the original series worked like this.
So if the Utopia and the dystopia are not going to happen, what will? More ordinary human muddling through, that’s what will happen. Some of it will be great, some of it will be destructive, but hopefully the net direction, the sum of all vectors, will be positive.
Hi Contarini, thanks for pointing out the Philip K. Dick novel, I’ll have to get that sometime. Your description reminds me of E.M. Forster’s The Machine Stops. People live in a perfectly managed 100% boring underground machine, but eventually there’s no one around to fix it, so it just stops one day. Of course nobody knows how to live anymore. Forster could write that in 1920 something? So we’ve got this slow burn towards these futuristic visions it would seem.
Dystopian sci-fi/spec-fi epics don't do much for me. I prefer Robert Anton Wilson's emphasis in novels like the Schrodinger's Cat Trilogy, on protagonists who use their wit and resourcefulness to subvert the mechanisms of control rather than simply finding themselves in a condition of passive, hopeless victimization.
Incredibly, Forster wrote that in 1909.
Yes, nicely done. I sort of responded in the post above.
The thing is the forest is still there, whether you can see it or not, and will defy every effort made to reduce it to a mere collection of objects. There is no tech dystopia or utopia coming, only the consequences of attempting to make one: a devastating lesson in the impossibility of micromanaging fractal complexity.
To be a little less vague both the tech cultists and the doomsayers accept the fundamental technocratic premise that we understand a lot more than we actually do, and are in control of a lot more than we are. All evidence points to the contrary: that every single grand technocratic project has failed catastrophically; every single time they thought they had it all figured out; and it's vanishingly unlikely that they've got it all figured out this time, given results of all past experiments.
Imagine instead a future where this premise is fundamentally incorrect, and the relentless undermining of every known-good state of every aspect of society will lead not to its New and Improved (tm) replacement, but collapse and regression to an earlier, lower-"progress", less complex, fragile, and interdependent state of being. That's where we're going. And after a period of adjustment, it's going to be pretty nice.
Hi Fukitol,
I posted your second paragraph in Notes. Excellent points.
Yep. I think it’s already kind of obvious on the pedestrian level of the ‘user experience ‘ of consumer-level computer interfaces and performance. Especially when my gadgets do something spontaneously that’s dumb, pointless or vaguely creepy. Funny how so many have opted-out of the ability to perform basic tasks involving what used to be considered routine judgment and knowledge and placed their trust in tech instead. That’s basically how a miles-long line of cars ended up crawling along at 10 mph on a rough dirt road recently between Vegas and LA when an accident snarled traffic on I-15. Dystopian perhaps, but funny and embarrassing too.
Hah, I had Google maps send me down a dirt road during the same trip once upon a time, about a decade ago. That is the last time I trusted it. Somewhere past Apple Valley if I remember right.
This is an enormously valuable and much needed counter to all the doom-obsessing about the technocracy. I’m guilty of it myself, to be sure, but I don’t apologize for it, and I do know that things almost never turn out as bad as I feared they would, nor as good as I hoped.
“… every single grand technocratic project has failed catastrophically; every single time they thought they had it all figured out..”
This is true, but the truth is also that over a greater arc of history, there simply haven’t been that many projects attempted. So even if it fails again this time, they’re almost certainly not going to stop because they’ve exhausted every possibility. What we can rest a little easier about is that, while some technology is indeed far advanced, most of the stuff that they’re creaming about now is still very much at or not far removed from the ‘suck-it-and-see’ phase of maturity, so there may be more than a little wiggle room left to us here or there which will be opportunities for us to crack, sabotage, and exploit.
I contend that what they are trying to do is impossible on multiple levels, so it will always fail. Even if we did nothing to stop it, it wouldn't work. We only have to survive it. It will suck, but lots of people have lived through a lot of suck.
I agree with your contention. To my mind, their tragic superciliousness and the utter limit of their overweening managerialist approach will be revealed when genuine, spontaneous problems arise - and they will arise. For instance, all of human prehistory and history has played out during an atypical period of geological quiescence. When these processes and natural cycles return to their usual rates of activity - and they will - then it is quite conceivable that our technological society will be destroyed, and maybe also the human species as well, either in part or entirely. Cataclysm is impartial.
Over the last century or so, the global directorate has demonstrated itself to be completely uninterested and extraneous in all things except for the "management" of manufactured "problems" contrived as pretexts for the forceful implementation of social transformation. But in events of natural disaster - the 1980 eruption of Mount St. Helens, and the 2005 Hurricane Katrina flooding of New Orleans being two examples that spring to mind - the most powerful nation on Earth presented itself as woefully ill-prepared and incompetent, and whether accidental or intentional, government made a bad situation worse.
"It will suck, but lots of people have lived through a lot of suck."
For anyone who has lived half their lives or more before the internet and can not only still clearly remember what it was like but are also capable of critical discernment, with things being as they have come to be, life is already virtually unlivable. What civil society has become is what enabled COVID-19 to happen. I have friends who have yet to apologize to me, and I have no expectation they ever will. So be it.
Fascinating. Thanks for posting this.
I wrote an article tangentially along these, er, lines, a few years back, in the groove of the way that intelligence itself is seen - in particular by researchers – as a reflection of the tool that is used to look at the question, and indeed it is a very left-brain tool.
It's also interesting to ask what is aware of the content of consciousness, since the brain hemisphere observations and models beg that question. It's akin to saying that television sets create TV shows, rather than being a mere instrument of the contents. In the case of consciousness, the "TV Show" is the totality of mentations: perceptions, sensations and thought (did I leave anything out?). Every *thing* is composed of those elements (including any content concerning brains, such concepts, images, theories and models), but what is *aware* of them is not a thing, is not content.
https://onbeyondzen.com/true-intelligence/
Thanks, Eric, I’ll check it out.
Great post. I’m currently reading McGilchrist’s “The Master And His Emissary”, and have been having thoughts about my own musical practice (clawhammer banjo, a bit of guitar and - in the last year - clarinet), which closely parallel your observations. I’ve found it’s quite noticeable that I become more able to multitask (e.g., talk to people, take greater notice of backing tracks or other performers) when playing a piece after it “beds in”, and the hemispheric “shared processing” model certainly fits with that experience. It’s a fascinating thing to see from the inside, as it were. And McGilchrist’s book is quite beautifully written.
Hi Richard, thank you and wonderful that you’re reading that book! He has a multivolume set just published in 2021 too, by the way. I just received them and I have started reading.
Thanks for the recommendation, Erik - not that I need encouragement to find yet more books! Happy reading (fascinating subject)…
Erik, I like this as epistemology, though Descartes has been getting a bad wrap since forever along these lines. It's worth remembering, by way of balance, that he was also a swordsman of some renown. Anyway, the problem that you raise in your subtitle "what we're getting" and then gloss over -- and far too long for a post or a response -- is not in epistemology, but in political economy. The idea that the modern sees nature as a thing to be manipulated in the pursuit of power (Heidegger, back to Nietzsche), or for that matter MacGilchrist's scientific of neurological structure, is not some abstract philosophical, scientific, or otherwise elevated thought, along the lines of what does "grooving" or even the Cartesian unity of geometry and algebra (truly foundational) MEAN. Instead, the sort of thinking you are (rightly) pointing out the limitations of is the root of both military and commercial striving, and embedded in social structures that are not easy to change. So, for example, we've been talking about neurosymbolic research, surely a left brain obsession. But do you think the folks involved, Google, or DARPA, or China, could stop? How? (I don't know if this condemns us to a kind of Darwinism.). As for the engineers, they may not want power in the crude sense, but yeah, can they keep themselves from wanting to solve the problem, make the engineering work? That's what they do, that's their Gestalt, so zu sagen. If you ask them the sort of big picture "what about the quality of life on earth" question that interests both of us, they will mumble something in utilitarian fashion about progress, which they cannot see, it's just what one says. They just want to solve the problem, and their solutions (which were bought and sold beforehand) will be used . . .
I find myself perforce thinking/hoping with Contarini. Humans muddle; the machine's ghost have a sense of humor. As you know, I do lots with CS, the military, money. All this pursuit and use of power is full of all sorts of thinking, ghosts in the machine, even grooving. And one must hope.
FWIW, I've been thinking in this channel since I was literally a kid, worried about technological excess in 70s, environment and all that. Not that I ever produced anything elegant here . . .As always, keep up the good work.
By the way, I don't think Heidegger's insights show that philosophers are somehow more fundamental than McGilchrist's neuroscientific approach (he's also quite the philosopher it would seem). Rather we have two ways of getting at something, and they compliment each other. Heidegger's standing reserve is what the left brain sees when it sees a waterfall, to put it somewhat crudely. I'm not saying that you were saying this, just it's something I wanted to mention.
Eric, whether or not philosophy is master was hardly my point, and didn't mean to imply that (meaning you misread!) I've edited the above. My point was that being right about the science, the ideas, the philosophy is all well and good, but -- as you have said with regard to weapons, advertising and other "LoFi" use cases -- we have to think about how this stuff is embedded. And, crucially, how the actors are themselves embedded, not philosophers or gentlemen scientists, with freedom.
Definitely agree.
I suppose they'll have to learn their lessons from close up and personal experience with their errors. Hopefully not at the expense of the rest of us. That's where the rest of us come in: doing our best to prevent them from imposing those costs on us.
For example, I just leave my phone at home and treat it like a landline most of the time. It slows everything down to a more dealable and humane pace, and I find that an enormous benefit. I think more people should limit the cellphones reach and importance to their existence. A cellphone has no business being regarded as anything close to an autonomic breathing reflex.
Hi David,
I agree with you. I wrote something about this on Colligo a few months ago, about how once we determined that "AI" in its current guise conferred an advantage in competitions from militiary battles to selling stuff on Amazon, we're effectively locked in. The only that saves this is either a VERY BIG idea by an individual or group working outside the current constraints, which for the reasons you've given here is somewhat unlikely, or we do the other thing, mentioned by Contarini and Fukitol, which is (very rough) muddling through while in turns vaguely or painfully aware of squandering so much for so little, or we simply drive the damn thing off the road, crash, and like humans do, pick up the pieces. There's an obvious problem with the latter, as the destructive capacity of the world now is somewhat troubling. But hitting bottom is a way of righting the ship (to mix metaphors). Thanks for your insights here.
I wonder if, as we learn more about mind, consciousness, and intelligence in other species, and perhaps eventually machines, if we won't see a greater, more holistic understanding of our own in both the sciences and humanities.
Also, we have already swung so far to the left brain that a correction is likely, if only because the left-brain destroys the conditions that give it dominance. I am cautiously optimistic that the conditions are becoming right for another shift in styles of consciousness like we saw start in seventeenth-century Europe.
As Churchill said, "success is not final" - that is something the Left Brain has great difficulty understanding. I don't think the question is whether styles of consciousness will shift back towards a more balanced style, but how much damage the current style will cause before that happens.
".... destroys the conditions that gave it dominance." Ay, there's the rub! Thank you, Guy.
Is human agency deteriorating? Or is it's exponential growth responsible for the growth of technology? Has there ever been a time before now when so many humans can contribute their thinking to the world? Warnings about the tree of knowledge go back millennia for good reason, and power is wielded best with balance. Thank you Erik for your thoughtful writing!
Man, I’m getting old. If I haven’t played a piece on the piano in the past two weeks (let alone 30 years!) it’s gone. Pull out the sheet music, start over, and it comes back. Slowly. Not in 20 minutes, maybe 45-60 minutes.
Great article.
Yes. It's a strange feeling to look at sheet music and somehow not recognize it, when you're looking at a song you used to play.
Your broad reach, Erik, is one of the reasons I love Colligo. It feels you’re a person who does see the forest despite the trees, and it feels so enriching when I oftentimes only see the trees.
It is very easy to fall for (tech, but not only tech) visions which seem all-encompassing, and I’m often left with just feeling “off” - that there must be something more. Your posts never fail to provide the perspective I’ve been missing. Thank you.
This is a fascinating piece and I’m glad I’ve come across it. Of course the left/right brain analogy extrapolates beautifully to aspects of tech development… I can read music very laboriously and learned to play piano and guitar mainly by tricking the teachers into playing the piece to preview it and then picking it out by ear when I got home. I can jam and I can groove but I am keenly aware of the risk of missing certain trees in the forest…
Hi Dani,
If you can jam and groove, you got it!
Why is it risky to miss certain trees? Because you are looking for a specific outcome? What if you fill in those trees with your own ideas, couldn't you come up with something just as beautiful?
I love this reply! This is basically my justification for being a bad piano student as a kid. The teacher would stop me mid-piece and ask where in the music I was (admittedly always totally lost). I would gloat to myself I was “riffing” on Bach’s piece and potentially adding to it lol.
Absolutely! Why not add to it? Bach is my favorite composer but I've actually re+written some bars of his music. If you're interested check out the two versions of prelude 18 I arranged for flute and 3 cellos. https://youtu.be/-w6vtpUpFF8?si=i1VIPYrT_zuDmDN7
The cello is wonderful. Thanks for sharing.
Very good, Erik, very good indeed. I"ll try to think of something intelligent to say later. :)
Sounds good, David.
McGilchrist is a pretty disturbing thinker for pretty much any Materialist.
One of my favorite bits of McGilchrist is when he comments that if mind is purely a result of the material, then matter must have properties we do not yet understand.
Here here.
Indeed. Although it is the least probable option for the creation of mind, according to him.
Beautiful post, Eric. I’m late to the McGilchrist party. Having just dipped into Master and Emmisary recently… wow, there are deep waters to be plumbed here. Your music example is so illuminating. -Matt
Thanks, Matt. I had your work in mind when I was thinking about human agency. There's a confluence here!
This is interesting to me in light of my recent birth (a VBAC) and my field (Clinical research in ASD). In ASD research, one holy grail is sleep - many autistic individuals don’t sleep all that well; and we know that sleep studies in non-naturalistic settings are not going to *represent* well what’s happening in the home. One private foundation just funded a large sleep study in the home - with expensive equipment, like a headpiece. It’s pretty difficult to sleep in this headpiece. But the evidence for ecological validity is certainly, you know, a little higher… In effect, our evidence is junky. It’s so junky. But suspension of disbelief is required for the field to be, you know, solvent. And you get so used to it that sometimes you forget how many steps removed your evidence is from reality. And that’s how you get clinical psychologists who honest to God will argue that their representation of a child patient’s functioning is “valid” and the standard against which the parent’s account must be measured. Without these little falsehoods, you don’t get clinical research; you don’t get clinical care; not the way they function right now.
Same with birth. Cohort study after cohort study shows better outcomes with midwives; reduced morbidity on all counts; happier women (adding that as if that mattered, I guess… ha). Birth being a complex physiological and hormonal process, and not a mere medical object; the uterus being attached to a woman with thoughts, feelings, and opinions, rather than isolated in a jar; these are inconvenient facts for OBs, who (at least the newer crowd; you’ll still get older OBs trained in breech with skills beyond wielding a scalpel) typically proceed as if the one owning the uterus is an obstacle to the baby; and RNs, who will argue fervently that all manner of encumbrances to birth (from IVs to constant monitoring, loud beeping machines, bright lights, pitocin and epidurals and foley bulbs and catheters and scratchy gowns and amniotomy and constant cervical checks) are *meant to facilitate vaginal birth.* The 633% increase in cesarean since the 1960s stands in stark contrast.
The bias to action to check a box. Due diligence is box-checking. That’s it. And you work in these fields long enough you believe it. You believe what you do and what you see before your eyes. And that’s it. There’s also a word for that - ascertainment bias - but that’s something that happens to other people, anyway, not to us.
I think you’ve hit the nail on the head using music as one of the best analogies for showing how we have not been accessing the bigger picture and how awesome it would be if we did!
From the chapter 'In Search of Meaning' in my book "YOGAi: Interplays of Yoga and Artificial Intelligence"—
According to Iain McGilchrist’s influential work "The Master and His Emissary", the left hemisphere of the human brain plays a significant role in shaping our perception of reality. Contrary to popular belief, McGilchrist argues that the two hemispheres of the brain have distinct functions, with the left hemisphere being responsible for language and categorisation. However, he suggests that relying too heavily on these functions can lead to a false sense of understanding and perception of reality. Moreover, the left hemisphere tends to be overconfident in its assessments and can foster mistakes and deception.
In contrast, McGilchrist emphasises the importance of the right hemisphere, which he views as more inclusive and holistic in its approach. The right hemisphere serves as the master, instructing the left hemisphere as its emissary. However, McGilchrist observes that the left hemisphere often operates independently, believing itself to be the master. This dynamic highlights the complex interplay between the hemispheres of the brain and underscores the importance of understanding how they influence our perception and cognition.
The right hemisphere seems to be more in touch with presence, with what we actually experience and what we inhabit, whereas the left hemisphere provides a representation, no longer the presence, but a map, a program, a theory, a diagram. It is abstracted, categorical, removed from and not having the constancy of the characteristics of the world that it is intending to map. The left hemisphere “treats the world simply as a resource to be exploited. It’s made us enormously powerful. It’s enabled us to become wealthy, but it’s also meant that we’ve lost the means to understand the world, to make sense of it, to feel satisfaction and fulfilment through our place in the world,” emphasises McGilchrist.
In this remarkably abundant era, a shift occurred around the close of the seventeenth century, roughly coinciding with the scientific revolution. During this period, there was a growing belief that understanding everything as mechanisms was not only possible but also highly beneficial. While this perspective has undoubtedly yielded numerous advancements, it led to a profound philosophical misconception. This error isn’t merely abstract; it penetrates deeply into our fundamental experience of the world. The prevalent notion became that the world consists of isolated parts, and by delving deeper and deeper, we could uncover reality in almost identical bits. However, the reality is quite the opposite.
The dominance of left-brain thinking has created a culture that focuses on material acquisition, competition and personal gain—basically power—which are identified by Vedic traditions as Artha, or the pursuit of wealth, name and fame.