The Future of Humanity: Lecture One The Sovereignty of Truth with Dr Iain McGilchrist

[Music] well thank you very much thank you for those words of introduction and thank you for your welcoming Applause um I'm very aware that we are facing a real crisis and I feel my my fragility my weakness really in in having anything useful to say about this uh put together some thoughts about the importance of Truth and I'll try and convey as much as I can in the time that I have in a way this is my IL penseroso and the other lecture will be lro because in this one I'm putting forward the shadow side

and in the other I'm hoping to put forward a much more hopeful side so don't cut your throats um before you've heard the the after lunch talk okay I read um yesterday that almost a third of young French people have lost faith in democracy according to a poem why I think the roots go deep and we're no longer remotely what we were born to be Emerson as it happen we didn't confer um said in his 1836 book nature very very profound and interesting book man is a dwarf of himself what did he mean by that

what he meant was that we are destined to we have the potential to achieve a really important role in the cosmos not just for ourselves but for the existence of what is good beautiful and true and in my lifetime I've seen each of these important transcendental values uh sidelined decried debased destroyed why is the life at all well I'm not going to say much about this now I'll say something more about it in the second talk I give today but effectively I do think that our role the reason there is life and the reason there

are human beings is to reflect and to magnify the elements of goodness Beauty and Truth in the cosmos and now of course there is an attack on all three and I'm mainly going to be talking about Truth for uh now I think the sheer trashiness of our culture is killing us it is distracting us from everything that is important and every time somebody tries to raise a question that is really important it is dismissed ironized or becomes the object of some kind of political um targetry and it's not just that we're distracted Ed from truth

but we demand protection from truth in case it hurts us in case life hurts us will grow up and live because life is tough everybody's life is tough life is a challenge a challenge we should rise to we are resilient we have in US resilience and yet we are all the time being encouraged to think about what we believe might have determined Us in the past and so we're TR ized and of no use but instead I think we should think of what we will allow ourselves to be drawn towards in the future which is

all we have to mold our own and that of humanity we live in a lying culture in so many ways in government in the universities alas um and across a whole range of public debate um mediated by social media of course at its worst but even by the once trustable sources of Integrity which seem to have become partisan um I was very struck by a book I read in 1978 uh when it was first published called lying and it's by Ces CES Bach a philosopher and and she talks about lying in and deception of all

kinds in public and private life across government medicine law Academia journalism in the family and between friends and she rather controversially argues that there are no situations and I think she's wrong about this but there are no situations in which a lie can be excused I think a better way of putting it is that the price of lying is enor mostly high and that only the most extreme circumstances make a lie justifiable we can't live by lies um and this is the book um simply entitled lying um and it's still in print but actually 8

years before I had heard what David was referred to um so init sin's Nobel Prize acception speech he was a man who had been tortured imprisoned subjected to inhuman circumstances and wasn't allowed to go and receive his Nobel Prize but his lecture was read for him and I remember hearing it through the radio in the kitchen and I was completely electrified I'd never heard anything like this um not that I had an education that wasn't interested in Morality and in philosophy and in the face of humanity but the urgency of the way in which he

described the importance of Truth struck me very deeply and has never left me there is the man interestingly and amusingly when you go looking for pictures on the internet and I did go looking for this picture when you download it for a slide a little thing at the bottom uh a little bar pops up out cheex T something like this and it says person with beard and um there we are this is the book I have this little pamphlet um I'm sure it's been reproduced but his quotation was of a Russian proverb one word of

Truth outweighs the whole world I'm I want you to think about that because at the end of my second talk I'm going to talk about what we can do and one of the things that people are unfounded by is I'm so small and it is so big what impact can I have I think the answer is you can have an enormous impact locally but I I don't want to anticipate what I'm going to say later um and then of course there's another person with beard no it doesn't dare say a man with be person with

be um and this of course is is Fodor bski and uh among many things that he had to say was above all do not lie to yourself and um it's a it's a very important point because the point that he makes is and I hope you can see the text up there I can't actually see it to read it um but you can read it yourselves it's rather annoying when a lecture puts up a text and it starts reading it to but so so read it and take it in but the point that he's making

is that when you lie to yourself you become less than human and your relations with others are falsified debased and that ultimately the reason for not lying to yourself is Love Without truth we cannot trust those words of course are cognate in their origin and without trust we cannot love but we live above all in an age in which we don't know what or who to trust truth and Trust are Central and they are related to belief because when we say true we're really analogizing with a relationship everything in the cosmos everything is relational in

the matter with things I argue and I'm I'm not alone in this uh fortunately physicists say this that relations are prior to relat the things that are related and that sounds very odd to our How can there be relations if there aren't already things to relate but of course those things only become things because of the web of relations that they're in you are only you because of the context of everything else that you experience and the society in which you grow up and to which you hope I hope to give back and beliefs are

like this too the root of belief is Lian in German and we had the word Leaf in Elizabethan English so Shakespeare will have a character say my leaf Lord my dear Lord whatever it is now belief is and the German word glin which means to believe is also rooted in liba love and what one is saying is not that I can prove that this thing is true in a kind of laboratory sense but I give it my fidelity I give it my trust I place my trust my truth in it unfortunately a lot of people

approach religions as though they were a sort of test in how many impossible things you can Ascent to before breakfast but that's not really it's not really a matter of propositions although it's often put in that way it's a matter of dispositions and this this is actually a difference between the left hemisphere State I want to have this absolutely black and white what is the truth here and the truth is a thing that you can find by following steps and the right hemisphere sense that it is a it is a relationship it is one of

trust but that trust is not blind it's no more blind than if you are forwarding a stream and someone on the other side reaches out a hand to you you don't take a blind leap of faith you answer to the hand that is stretched towards you dosi also said um the world will be saved by Beauty and that's a puzzling saying how could the world be saved by beauty beauty is beauty is is is it not somehow an add-on well I don't think it is I think it's at the core of everything that matters and

what he meant I think is that though truth can be debased good can be traduced it can be turned into following a certain Doctrine um assenting to certain um approved beliefs but that is not being good good comes from the heart and so it resists the LIE the beautiful cannot be faked and only whatever certain artists now claim their work shows that is not what art is doing art is bringing into being for us in a metaphorical sense a beautiful truth which the soul immediately recognizes cognition is bypassed and it's through our ability to distort

cognition that we are misunder understanding truth and misunderstanding um goodness interestingly I think utilitarianism is a although it's very fashionable in in um philosophical uh faculties in universities is the Quin entially um corrupt way of estimating good uh doing a calculus but that calculating mind is exactly the mind that goodness calls us to uh lay aside so we in the west have descended into utter mediocrity I believe as a result of the ways we've just dismissed goodness Beauty and Truth in recent years but note this is not just another attack on the west but to

point out how it has fallen short of what it once was and has the potential to be in other words we have become dwarves of ourselves now as well as um the the the people I've mentioned um there is also Hannah aent on Truth uh person with cigarette and um but in in this case U no beard none I can detect um don't know how she got in actually uh the ideal the ideal as far as I'm concerned Hannah aent is is almost a saint and her work is so important now there's almost nobody that

if you haven't read them I would more urge you to read and although her great works were published in the 50s and 6s and some of them even earlier um they are so preent of where we are now and they're not preent because she could imagine something uh happening because she see she'd seen it happen she'd seen totalitarianism she was at a little distance from it but she was able all the more readily to see uh how it had happened so what she says is the ideal subject of totalitarian rule the con is not the

convinced Nazi or the convinced communist but people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction I.E the reality of experience and the distinction between true and false I.E the standards of thought no longer exist that should make us sit up I think the level of political debate these days is lamentable and I've seen it uh plummet during my lifetime both in Britain and in America if you look at some of the politicians the caliber of them and the way in which they were able to discuss among themselves um in a reasonably harmonious way is so

much of a you know a wakeup call when we look at the the caliber of politicians we have now and the kind of easy mudslinging that um seems to be substituting for um serious thought about the predicament we're in and and there's also an unfortunate tendency to talk down to the population which I blame a certain cast of um middling intellect middling politics middling whatever people who have taken over the big institutions and their mediocrity dict hates everything for us it's common that whenever people persuade finally Channel 4 to put on a marvelously interesting documentary

or film everybody says why can't we have more of this but when the same filmmakers I'm talking about this because I know this has happened in my experience go to them and say here's another one they oh no it's too difficult they won't get it so we're all being dumbed down all the time and the trouble is when you dumb people down like that they behave as so they dumb down because they actually become dumb down and the idea of people being held to high standards is now something that is considered undemocratic but without it

a civilization simply will quickly collapse and those standards are being not met all around me every day the idea of a democracy is not that we should all be equally crass in our taste and throw away anything that requires dedication and talent reward the lazy and dull we'll seek Amusement in the basis and most trivial distractions but what we're being offered is a Sinister looking um pack I'm not a not a par you know I don't have some sort of paranoid Theory and I'm going to talk about where all this comes from but there is

a sense in which we're being offered metaphysical or metaphorical opiates huxley's Soma uh to keep the people distracted from the real issues and above all keep them from having a life because then they might act spontaneously they might even learn to love one another they might form cohesive opposition to the powers that be even notice that they're being ripped off and disempowered and so the need to divide to encourage resentment grievance Discord aggression disgust and contempt division where there should be tolerance and patient attempts at Mutual understanding self-interest and greed are there in the place

of pride in the spirit of collaboration that builds a functional society and all this is very typical I'm not going to go into hemisphere Theory at all because I assume that probably if you're here you either have already read or will very shortly read uh something I've written that will make it clear but this is all very in keeping with the left hemisphere particularly the emotional T so the left hemisphere is not unemotional as people used to say it's the the locus Primus of aggressive uh feelings and its General attitude is discust contempt and um

the fueling of me me me and Discord so it is a serious point but I just put it before you and pass on we're being made passive so Hannah Erin again for even now laboring is too lofty too ambitious a word for what we're doing or think we're doing in the world we have come to live in the last age of the laboring society the Society of job holders demands of its members a sheer automatic functioning the only active decision still required of the individual is to abandon his individuality the still individually sensed pain and

trouble of living and acques in a dazed tranquilized functional type of behavior bring a new Bells it's quite conceivable that the Modern Age which began with such an unprecedented promising Outburst of human activity may end in the deadliest most sterile passive history uh sorry passivity that history's ever known so we must not be passive arent warned as you know that loss of faith in the institutions is a precursor to totalitarianism and I'm afraid I have lost faith in institutions I once felt pride in our great universities that I was honored to be a member of

our Health Care system that I was honored to serve in our police our Armed Forces our government no longer command respect no longer seem to know where they're going or what they're doing and part of this is a loss of innocence in other words nobody thinks innocently anymore about things that have value in themselves in its place there's a shallow knowingness a cynicism which seems clever but interestingly psychological experiments show that people who are cynical are of lower IQ so it's not clever um those who are intelligent don't need to be cynical about things uh

but people who are protecting themselves um because they don't really understand adopt a cynical View and I think of those great lines of Yates from the second coming the blood dim tide is loosed and everywhere the ceremony of innocence is drowned in other words there's an instrumentalizing of everything and it changes its nature in that process AI compounds the problem a thousandfold AI generated evidence May support whatever narrative the international conglomerates wish to propagate I say the international conglomerates because although um traditionally there has been a sort of um opposition perhaps between the um public

sector and the private sector I believe that they now embody exactly the same drives and work in a kind of um combination which is very hard for us to resist they are working at supernational levels at Global levels where they're no longer accountable to a population that elected them and can carry on the fantasies the the world economic Forum as as David was saying um proposes so at the same time it may propagate a narrative and claim there is evidence from the point of view that suits those conglomerate but it may also of course Monitor

and suppress any kind of thinking that doesn't align with that narrative above all of course AI has no conception of what I mean by innocence um it doesn't really believe in anything of course it doesn't think it can't actually in any way help us humans except by taking work that is tedious out of our hands and even there it is not succeeding As I Shall explain we don't want to be more Machin likee we need to be better humans and none of that will help us become better humans um I'm not going to do a

lot about epistemology I wrote about it at Great length in the second part of the matter with things but effectively I'm asking where do we go to find truth and I've suggested that there are four main Pathways they are science reason intuition and Imagination and in short I show that each of these has its value each of these has its limitations but ultimately we've been obsessed with science and reason as the only way to achieve um uh in insights into the nature of reality and indeed um certain people have gone become very famous like Dan

conman uh even got a Nobel Prize for writing a book which decries intuition his own work can be easily falsified and although intuition can deceive us so can lines of reasoning so can science in fact one way of thinking of science is it's the it's the um process of truth of untruth towards truth so science is always provisional and in process now some people might think that I'm therefore attacking science and reason quite the opposite I believe they're terribly important and I believe they are under attack now so for example in the humanities um when

I was growing up the process was started by Marxism in which everything was uh diminished uh and compressed and chopped off uh on the procrustean bed of a certain political Doctrine and then this was followed by deconstructionism which basically said uh there is no truth and whatever I want to say is fine uh this is utterly irresponsible it was wrong and it was was taking the basis from under the the really important fruits of human creativity um so I do think it that truth is very important in the humanities but truth is also very important

in science and I regret to say that nature the oldest and most prestigious science journal in the world um has recently um adopted a line that if research reveals uncomfortable truths that don't fit with whatever the approved politically correct narrative is they won't publish it now once that happens where are we science is our load star when we can't trust the science we can't trust them to just tell us what they found but instead to go no well these are things that are unsafe for you to know then we've lost something very important and of

these I mean reason to is being suborned maruza argued that rationality was being transformed from a critical Force into one of adjustments and compliance with the system of Life created by modern industry those were his words now the real world precisely because it is a presence not it's a living presence not a representation that's a distinction between what the right hemisphere knows and the left hemisphere's map but the very Pres Ence of life it cannot be represented in Concepts and language without distorting its Essence we can write about things we can argue about them but

we should always be aware that what we're doing is grossly simplifying what experience has told us and cannot be fully articulated has often to remain implicit because once it's made explicit it becomes something else I mean this is obviously true about all the things that really matter to us love um poetry music architecture art ritual myth story religion all these things have truths that once they're reduced to the language of the dishwasher manual is betrayed it is no longer has the power that is in its Essence so that is it's not a a weakness of

the right hemisphere that it doesn't have language it realizes that language was a kind of a virus that had got in and it sequestered it in the left hemisphere largely the right hemisphere understands language understands it actually better than the left hemisphere but it doesn't compose the sentences that make for you know scientific pros and you know and both of these are okay but it's not a weakness in the right hemisphere that it has decided not to use language because it realizes that language will distort so the left hemisphere misconception is that truth is simple

can be uh fully known is single black and white all or nothing and independent of context but as Oscar wild said truth is rarely pure and never simple mistaking part of the truth for the whole is one of the problems um I'm trying to think of the exact quote but Whitehead said um all truths are partial truths it's treating them as the whole truth that plays the devil and I often think of the Insight of John Stuart Mill that where there have been arguments in philosophy it has most often been not that people were wrong

in what they asserted but that they were wrong in what they denied and if we could remember that that there may be more than one truth about something and that both points of view or all points of view need to be heard we might be less in the pickle we're in and actually that sentiment was uh voiced by liit over a century earlier in one of his letters so it is a it's a point that has a good pedigree and context changes everything the context of a remark can completely reverse its meaning and context is

what we don't take into account when we think that they things as in themselves absolutely the truth uh as as again Whitehead said the real question to ask is not is this true or not but in which circumstances can it be said to be true and in which can it be said to be false and often just because a move we've made in One Direction worked it doesn't follow that making more and more steps in that direction will make things better often it makes them manifestly worse truths always come with their opposite truths something that

the great physicists of the last century understood that obviously the everyday truths don't carry with them a shadow of of an untruth um either I had milk in my coffee this morning or I didn't but when it comes to the really big questions the really big truths every Angel has its devil and every devil has its Angel so what is real is in process it's an encounter everything that we experience and know is out of an encounter of what I have in me with what the world that I'm encountering gives to the meeting and so

truth is always happening but it is not the case that it is made up emphatically not you can't just say anything and say well that's my truth I mean that's that's just a ridicule whole idea of Truth now here I want to just say something about the importance of imagination so we're obsessed of course with new newness as novelty but there's another way of newness which is newness of further unpacking the truth that is there and that requires imagination imagination is the opposite of fantasy W and CID wrote about this very um persuasively so fantasy

is what takes you away from reality but imagination is the only chance you have of entering into reality if you don't use your imagination you remain remote from whatever it is that you are encountering so all is changing and making a new all all the time but not from nowhere it's not like we should uproot everything and just start again it's an unfolding like the unfolding of a bud in a plant like the movement of a stream is what is new good or bad well it depends on the goal the nature and the degree of

the change um so that's uh what I say and this is also thank you and this is this is true of everything including AI that it depends on why it's being used how it is experienced by the humans who interact with it and the degree to which it is allowed to intervene or interfere so truth imagination and creation go together all our experiences an Act of Creation we are always creating the world not just out of ourselves but out of a stream that comes from the the past of which we are the product and goes

towards the future that we have a duty to preserve and hand on in reasonable order to uh those who come after us so the creative cos I think this is the nature of the cosmos that one thing you can say about it is is always creating stuff it is always unpacking something new so we start with a very simple thing and then it explodes and all kinds of things come into existence and the one and the many are very important dipole to bear in mind together it's not all one and it's not all many but

the many is not an opposition to the one you know people go be man all is one yeah and I go yeah and all is many so now what and the thing is that this business of the unfolding of what is implicit into the exit is the cosmos discovering its own nature it maybe the Divine ground of being exploring what it has the capacity to make and feeling it reflected in another so uh it's like this the unfolding Bud doesn't destroy the plant it fulfills the plant it's unfolded now but it's it's is not lost

this process is important and of course there David bom's U work on um the implicit uh and the implicate order famous book he wrote about the physics of of the cosmos and what is sometimes forgotten is that he believed that it Not only was a matter of unfolding what was infolded but then further unfolding the new hole so that it could unfold again into something new so there's always this dance of coming together and separating Gerta said dividing the United and uniting the divided is the whole work of Nature and my god did that man

knows something imagination also helps us see things aresh so the famous lines from the uh defense of poetry by shell it purges from inward sight the film of familiarity which obscures from us The Wonder of our being it compels us to feel that which we perceive and to imagine that which we know it creates a new the universe after it has been annihilated in our minds by the recurrence of Impressions blunted by reiteration so imagination is the faculty whereby we nurture reality into being it's not the faculty whereby we fashion an already existing reality it's

not sort of in a Cupboard waiting to be discovered it is actually coming into being in our process of contact with it imagination is inextricably bound up with reality in a way that its badfellow fantasy is not now there's a lot of confusion about what we can know and this comes from the fact we live in a world of data of enormous quantities of data and this leads to many misunderstandings when we come to AI quite clearly there's a difference between data information and any capacity for this to have any meaning it only has meaning

when a Consciousness that's able to put these things in a context can create knowledge or at any rate an explanation so one up from data is an explanation but explanation is not to understand I can you say I don't really understand music I can explain to you how harmonics work how composers write how these things are brought into being when they're played but I can't help you understand the mic for that uh something else in other words imagination and intuition is required above explanation which is just unfolding something within a certain context as long as

I imagine that the world is a sequence of events that trigger one another then I can explain how something comes into being and that's valuable but it's restricted further knowledge um and knowledge is of two types which in most languages other than English are distinguished by different verbs so for example in French there is a distinction between Sav to know the facts and ketra to know from experience and in German the similar distinction between vison and Canon so for example I know savwa that FR Paris is the capital of France but I know Paris KET

because I spent three years years living there and had an embodied experience of it which gave me a different kind of path to understanding it's a a more Royal Road to understanding than its partner and here there are requirements for intuition and Imagination and when it comes to wisdom A4 Ori we need intuition and Imagination now in the left hemisphere dominant world and those of you know my work will know that I believe that there is a gross in balance between what the right hemisphere could tell us uh we' stopped listening to it and it

knows far more and is more intelligent literally both emotionally and socially yes but also cognitively in terms of IQ it is more intelligent it is far more in touch with reality than the left hemisphere the left hemisphere is good for purposes of grabbing and getting and that is what it is specialized for but it is not specialized for understanding now this left hemisphere dominated World Rejects Truth for four reasons the left hemisphere is just less veridical in fact it's often frankly delusional and it's not just me saying that I can quote numbers of neuroscientists or

neurologists to be more truthful those who actually understand what goes on in the lab in terms of what happens with human beings when people have a right Hemisphere jok and they're trying to construe reality just from the left hemisphere they become deluded in the most striking way secondly the left hemisphere only has a map which is a very diminished version of reality and of course it's not important for it to have all the other information a map is not more useful for having more and more information on it in fact it becomes unusable at a

certain point its great strength is that it selects only a sceletal structure of reality and thirdly it prizes internal consistency over New Evidence so if it discovers something oh God that see means I've probably been wrong about this it goes no no no that must be wrong I'm going to find a way of fitting it into my picture and fourth it sole value so value is utility and power it's the exertion of power over the world to control it um all is instrumentalized and tools of power uh governmental or technological are self- select Ed to

go to the very hands in which you don't want power to reside who most commonly seek control Psychopaths but utility is not the only value so at the bottom here this is shaya's Pyramid of values that those of you who know my work will have seen probably more than once I think it's terribly important he thought there was a hierarchy of values and at the bottom were the the values of utility and power and pleasure which is like this is good for me above those there are the labens F which are the values of life

so they're things like courage magnanimity generosity forgiveness greatness of mind all these things that are very important in a society above them with the G give out and interestingly in German which often makes distinctions we don't intellect and Spirit come together in the word Guist but the these are basically the platonic U virtues of beauty goodness and truth and at the top of the pyramid is thus heiliger the holy now I I've shown here and elaborated that in what I've written that effectively the right hemisphere shows at the lower level support the top but the

left hem is the top as merely an excuse for finding utility and power and so on down this only ruls and suckers um espouse uh virtues that will cost them because they aid others in society but who but a loser would do a thing like that so I've talked about the humanities and truth and all that and I note on Pas in the way the debates in the humanities now go the emotional tber of the left hemisphere anger disgust narcissism in our world wrote Orwell in 19 1984 there will be no emotions except fear rage

Triumph and self-abasement there will be no laughter except the laugh of triumph over a defeated enemy last night I was talking to someone who's undoubtedly in the in the auditorium today and he was saying if you had to redesign um a curriculum for doctors what would it be and I said well actually the first thing to do is to select the right people because of things that can't be taught if you either get them or you don't and and he said sense of humor and I thought absolutely spoton sense of humor is so important and

sense of humor is being censored and driven out of our lives and you know I'm a great fan of and a friend I'm proud to call myself a friend of John C and I think his humor is one of the reasons for living and you know he went to um Saro and he was greeted by somebody who said said you know you saved my life and he said how did I do that well when we were under siege my daughter was murdered and we just didn't know how to live how to sleep or anything but

in the basement of a multi-story car park we set up a cinema and we invited everybody knew in and we played largely your Monti python um and fory towers and all these things and they filled us with a sense that okay it's worth living I think that is such a wonderful story so um no educated person I think should be unwilling to engage in civil respectful discussion to quote s nson again it's a universal law tolerance is the sorry intolerance is the first sign of an inadequate education all educ ill educated people behave with arrogant

impatience whereas truly profound education breeds humility and I think the new religion of wokeness shows Discord in place of Love speaks of freedom but is coercive in the opinions that it will allow to hear expressed is superior self-regarding mocking and aims to ruin the lives of those who dare to disagree the goal is absolutely not tolerance for all but intolerance there is a frontal assault on any standards by which you can appeal to reason or truth if my truth is as good as any other truth there is iof fact of no truth and if there

is no truth we are utterly lost education I had thought was about enlarging not narrowing the mind as is well known the Greek word for truth aliia means an unconcealed so it's not that truth is there sitting on a table and I take the necessary steps I find truth but truth is a matter of clearing away as Michelangelo produced David he didn't put it together he just threw away stone for years and at the end of it there it was what has seen since time in Memorial been accepted is ipsofacto inverted and its opposite made

obligatory we're not progressing in intellect we're throwing away the hard one and I mean hard one through hardship through battle in many cases the hard one knowledge skill and insight that could have helped us out of our Folly what does the crisis of mental illness and the sheer scale of unhappiness in our society tell us about our experiment in destroying a society and why do scientists value Truth at all if they believe the universe is meaningless and pointless and simply lump and matter coinciding and hitting and bouncing and so why worry about truth surely in

that world the only decent thing to do is to increase pleasure and if lies will make people happier why not follow them but amazingly these people know they think truth is very important I think truth is very important I think it's absolutely important in science and everywhere but why would somebody who had no belief in anything beyond the material think it's important both Humanities and science should be in pursuit of the evolution of the new and the vital but this requires encouraging an organic growth not a cutting off from our sources but like training a

plant you can make it go many places but you don't do it by breaking the stem and sticking it on a wall you you chain it there but the left hemisphere produces something that is the opposite of creativity it produces sameness and in two senses so one is that the manifold becomes the uniform and the second is that it endlessly repeats itself now this is interesting because a number of commentators have noticed that technology peaked in its value around 2015 2016 up until that point it has shown itself to be indeed very useful but since

then it has mainly impeded progress taken up more time unnecessarily complicated what inition can lead us towards and has generally starved us of time and energy so Tech has become less helpful and is now slowing us down and getting in the way of creativity and interestingly about the same time the internet um had been up to that point interested in what people seem to like and giving them it but now it refers at a different level to what the internet gathers be like so there are algorithms that dictate it that are no longer in touch

with what people really like so in a way this is the beginning of many vicious circles when you ask CH chat GPT a question it goes out and does a trolley Dash around the the internet and comes back with with a vanilla milkshake which is a kind of a kind of ma mish mash of um received um you know uh acceptable opinion but of course for us to be alive intellectually we need to debate we need to have different points of view represented Wikipedia is appalling in this it treats anything that is not already mainstream

science as quote pseudo science so how is it going to get to be the science of the future which it sometimes may well be most things that we believe now that science shows us at one time were not what science thought science has to evolve and once AI becomes our source of knowledge on reality let alone our path to understanding it all variety of views or freshness of thought is banished from the world this is because it's programmed to a consensus views this is thought control on a whole different level from anything predicted by Orwell

and haxley and the left hemisphere specializes in vicious circles I mean this is true about the brain structure and I haven't got time to explain it but effectively the right hemisphere has much more broad ranging connections across many areas so it is constantly seeking different points of view from different parts of that hemisphere whereas when you exercise thought in the left hemisphere it Narrows down concentrically to an area where it thinks the truth lies but of course it may not it might be like that man who was found looking for his keys under under a

Street Lamp where did you leave them oh I lost them over there why are you not looking over there because there's no light over there so that that that is the way we are now um regressing not progressing and and by the way I just want to say that nothing I'm saying has anything to do with left or right in a political sense I think those La labels are completely mistaken and I think there are left hemispheric people on the right and on the left and right hemispheric people on the right and on the left

what I'm talking about is something that Embraces capitalism and bureaucracy both drain our Vitality capitalism trivializes disregards the preciousness of all it exploits and helps to destroy thrives on aggressive competition and discontent promotes atomism and unrest meanwhile bureaucracy wastes our creativity our freedom and our time which is all we have it is our life and things that you used to take five minutes because you could ring and then speak to a person now you waste a whole morning going round and round up to another platform and and in [Music] in in you know it's it's

extraordinary because of course we now cannot bypass this and we cannot get to real people and if we do they're equipped with an algorithm which means that they're more or less working like uh so impoverished Society U adopts these harmful policies such as Dei as though this were a substitute for virtue and both think the big businesses and the bureaucracies that we cannot see through that as a ploy both propagate the left hemisphere mentality in the world which AI now hardens up and at the same time that we're minutely controlling the minds of people we're

not actually controlling their actions where they are harmful so the police no longer seem to be able or willing to prosecute people for violent behavior in the street for shoplifting for Crime that is escalating probably because they're too busy back in the station going through people's Twitter feed in order to find um a non-crime thought crime incident and then recording it somewhere any society other than ours would have found this and a host of other fantasies now banded around as gospel truth unimaginably absurd which one is the blind one all those wise people who lived

before us or we just in the last 15 years has suddenly become terribly wise I'm not sure and I think AI is like putting machine guns in the hands of toddlers because in order to use it properly we need to have wisdom and wisdom is plummeting at the same time that power is growing so is it a servant or a tyrant well it's always presented as your servant but I might point out that any harmful Innovation you like to name was without exception presented as for your benefit um it's the Sinister and serious aspect of

those silly letters that you get in order to improve our service to you we're going to stop doing all the things you wanted us to do and and here Hannah arent is interesting so in her marvelous book on violence which you should all be reading as well as The Human Condition and she wrote it's as though we've Fallen under a fairy land spell remember this is this is I don't know 80 years ago we've Fallen under a fairy land spell which permits us to do The Impossible on the condition that we lose the capacity of

doing the possible to achieve fantastically extraordinary Feats on the condition of no longer being able to attend properly to our everyday needs so yes you can always point to some machine that does something quite unnecessary and is extravagant on energy and time but can simulate walk about a room and look like a person but actually you can't do simple things like pay your gas bill so this is a colossal expense of time and resource pavl kohut um a Czech thinker um who corresponded with Gass fora a world ruled over by an elite that derives its

power quote from the councils of intellectual AIDS who actually believe that men in think tanks are thinkers and that computers can think quote the councils may turn out to be incredibly Insidious and instead of pursuing human objectives May pursue completely abstract problems that had been transformed in an unforeseen manner in the artificial brain can it bring us Leisure well again Hannah erand it is a society of laborers which is about to be liberated from the fets of Labor and this Society no longer knows of those higher and more meaningful activities for the sake of which

this Freedom Was Won within this society which is egalitarian because this is Labour's way of making men live together there is no no class left no aristocracy of either a political or spiritual nature from which a restoration of the other capacities of man could start a new we need seed beds of people not the term hierarchy is a little unfortunate but what she's really saying is there is Excellence there was Excellence we need that excellence and we're losing it we're in the grip of an ideology yes but it's not even that more a force of

some kind we know not what that is not political but perhaps a cerebral malaise of what kind are we knowingly and willingly attacking ourselves or does the Drive come from somewhere else well I would say both um in other words it's rather like cancer or parasitosis so bureaucracy is like a cancer that draws um the resources that were destined for teachers for doctors or whatever and builds a shiny big building awards itself huge salaries and proliferates at the expense of the host organism which it is supposed to serve and AI is a parasite it it

it has ripped off human creativity and try all it can do is try to imitate it this is an incredible impoverishment of which we've never consulted about um and it feeds back to us a very basic vers so the thing about cancer is it is ourselves it's not somebody else C the thing about parasites is they they get into our system and we are a host who um I think it's 30 6 trillion bacteria on many of which our life depends we need them they're commensal organisms in other words literally they sit at the same

table with us and but this is a parasite and it's expressed in managerialism and it's both external and internal and this is entirely consonant with the idea of a drive that is frankly evil I don't uh I don't Flinch from that word because I have never bought the idea that evil is just an absence of good evil I have experienced it I've been a psychiatrist I've led a life I have definitely experienced evil it has a drive of its own which it is to diminish to say that it's simply an absence of something it is

a presence and it doesn't mean it's necessarily outside of us it acts through us as good acts and can only act through us so the big corporations institutions simulate diseases in this way the right hemisphere explores but the left hemisphere merely exploits in other words it is parasitic and what's more it only wants and only understands what it itself has made it's not in tune with whatever else exists with what for reasons of brevity we might call nature and evil is not just greed though and again it's an irrational Lust For power for its own

sake and according to Hannah aent a distinctive feature of radical evil is that it isn't done for humanly understandable motives such as self-interest but merely to reinforce totalitarian control and the idea that everything is possible um I hope yes this is a cartoon by George G um from between the wars it it says a lot in a very small image the future man says Hannah arand whom the scientists tell us they will produce in no more than 100 years seems to be possessed by a rebellion against human existence that it has been given a free

gift from nowhere secularly speaking which he wishes to exchange as it were for something he has made himself and as a result we come to this preent phrase from the Austrian novelist Ferdinand kunberger life no longer lives when I read those words they sent a even saying them now they send a chill down my spine but who of us does not understand that Vitality is draining away that spontaneity is being taken away that choice and freedom are being taken away that the characteristics of life are being supplanted by mechanism the birth rate is falling physical

sexual relations are now too dangerous so teenagers prefer to indulge in pornography and glue themselves to the internet rather than dealing with people who may suddenly turn on them and ruin their career or sue them dance has become soloistic art has become cynical and what has happened to the ability to do something just on the spur of the moment the right hemisphere was the dominant feature of the great period of human creativity in both Art and Science as I explored in the um uh mastering his emiss what does live is the lie and it's been

pointed out that in the war between the real and the Bogus the bogus is now preferred so on the internet if you go for an image of somebody it will give you one created by an AI before it will give you the photograph of the real person Psychopaths actually prefer to lie and do so needlessly not for benefit but just because they're addicted to the power of a lie and so do UT utilitarians those who cannot understand goodness coming together then uh Ai and capitalism exploit us are parasitic um I gather there was a woman

with 73,000 Tik Tok followers who who generated 11 million views for her videos and this is all to do with the money that is paid for advertising associated with these things and she got paid $185 the CEO of Spotify which is purely parasitical is reportedly richer than any musician in history AI requires piracy on a vast scale sucking dry human creativity if AI were as we're told revolutionizing Fields such as healthc care life expectancy should be rising not falling as it is mental health should show progress rather than a catastrophic decline the like of which

we have never seen before if AI were all its claim to be wouldn't we see Human Society thriving not becoming less stable and less benign with every passing day dis disempowerment has hit us with the con Confluence of three important forces Global conglomerates the Central State and above all the International bodies and forces that are not accountable to any country where there are citizens the nature of unaccountability is wonderfully explored in Dan Davis's book The unaccountability Machine why big systems make terrible decisions and how the world lost its mind so I'm just my last reflection

is from Hannah aand the greater the bureaucratization of public life the greater will be the attraction of violence in a fully velop bureaucracy there's nobody left with whom one can argue to whom one can present grievances on whom the pressures of power can be exerted bureaucracy is the form of government in which everybody is deprived of political freedom of the power to act for the rule by nobody is not no rule and where all are equally powerless we have a tyranny without a tyrant no one is responsible anymore but we we must be responsible and

in my second lecture I will talk about how we do that thank you very much