E139| Cosmic Drives, Intuition, AI, and the Soul w/ Iain McGilchrist and Tim Adalin

Welcoming renowned psychiatrist and philosopher Iain McGilchrist in dialogue on the nature of intuition, power, and how attention shapes our world. Moving from neuroscience to metaphysics, we explore the relation between cosmic drives, the left and right hemispheres, attention, religion, power, good, evil, AI and the soul.

• Shownotes

  The following shownotes are AI generated to give a rough sense of topics covered and to aid with search discovery.

  Keywords

  intuition, brain hemispheres, AI, consciousness, human experience, animate, inanimate, doubt, faith, attention, pilgrimage, fields, religion, soul

  Key Topics Covered

  Opening: The Nature of Intuition

  • Intuition as arising from the unconscious mind

  • Why intuition can consider more than explicit reasoning

  • The "aha moment" and the right superior temporal gyrus

  • Understanding as embodied, not purely cerebral

  • The role of gut feelings and bodily wisdom

  Hemispheric Attention and Reality

  • Left hemisphere: closing down to certainty

  • Right hemisphere: opening up to possibility

  • The process of becoming: dividing the united, uniting the divided

  • Continuity between animate and inanimate worlds

  • Whitehead's influence on understanding process

  Bundling, Unbundling, and Economic Systems

  • The pattern of bundling and unbundling in capitalism

  • What drives us to unite versus divide

  • The relationship between capital, AI, and distributed intelligence

  • Anti-vital versus anti-human processes

  Wholes, Parts, and Aggregates

  • Right hemisphere: individuated wholes in relation

  • Left hemisphere: aggregates built from known parts

  • The learning process: from whole to parts and back to whole

  • The danger of getting stuck in analytical mode

  Understanding Beyond Information

  • Understanding as "standing among" rather than "knowing below"

  • The limitations of data and explicit knowledge

  • The horse tipster and Isle of Man TT racers: intuition in action

  • Life-and-death decisions made without conscious focus

  Animate and Inanimate: A Continuum

  • Why the cosmos is creative, relational, and contextual

  • The ground of being and the necessity of relationship

  • Love as requiring something other than itself

  • The step change that life represents

  • Consciousness as present throughout the cosmos

  The AI Predicament

  • AI as exponentially increasing self-referentiality

  • Artificial information processing versus genuine intelligence

  • The dangers of relationship with non-caring entities

  • Left hemisphere's hermetically sealed representations versus right hemisphere's window on the world

  • Why AI can only parrot, not understand

  Narcissism, Echo Chambers, and Certainty

  • The phenomenon of algorithmic echo chambers

  • Left hemisphere's demand for certainty and lack of nuance

  • The edge of chaos: where creativity emerges

  • Amount and pace as destroyers of proper understanding

  • "Hell is more faster" - a Hindu saying

  Fields, Potential, and Consciousness

  • Consciousness as field rather than fixed point

  • Michael Levin's work on morphogenic fields

  • Potential as generative, not a cupboard of pre-made options

  • The participatory universe

  • Attractors at the level of social formation

  Cancer, Bureaucracy, and AI: Runaway Processes

  • How normal processes become stereotypical and exaggerated

  • Bureaucracy: from servant to master

  • Max Scheler's pyramid of values: utility, life values, spiritual values, the sacred

  • The inverted pyramid of modern culture

  • Forces for life versus forces for death and degradation

  The Assault on Nature, Body, and Culture

  • Three fronts of attack: nature, embodiment, culture

  • How dictatorial regimes demoralize through cultural erasure

  • Nature as "ever about to be born"

  • The necessity of dialogue with what came before

  • Why more is not always better

  Authority, Doubt, and Transformation

  • Halakha (fixed pattern) versus Agadah (ceaseless striving)

  • The tension between form and limitless expression

  • How much doubt must we open to?

  • Meeting ultimacy in unprecedented times

  • Can tradition transform to meet new challenges?

  Religion, Certainty, and the Soul

  • The problem with fundamentalism of any kind

  • Christianity as myth in the deepest sense

  • Common truths across wisdom traditions

  • The concept of soul excluded from modern discourse

  • The world as "vale of soul-making"

  • Life as pilgrimage on uncharted waters

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• Iain McGilchrist

  Dr Iain McGilchrist is a psychiatrist, neuroscience researcher, philosopher and literary scholar. He is a Quondam Fellow of All Souls College, Oxford, a Fellow of the Royal College of Psychiatrists, and former Consultant Psychiatrist and Clinical Director at the Bethlem Royal & Maudsley Hospital, London. His influential work explores the relationship between the brain's hemispheres and the nature of human experience, reality, and culture. He is the author of The Master and His Emissary: The Divided Brain and the Making of the Western World and the monumental two-volume work The Matter with Things: Our Brains, Our Delusions, and the Unmaking of the World. His work bridges neuroscience, philosophy, art, and spirituality to offer a comprehensive vision of how we might navigate the challenges of modern life.

  “He is committed to the idea that the mind and brain can be understood only by seeing them in the broadest possible context, that of the whole of our physical and spiritual existence, and of the wider human culture in which they arise – the culture which helps to mould, and in turn is moulded by, our minds and brains.”

• Tim Adalin

  Tim is the founder of Voicecraft and a philosopher with a focus on the relation between participation and transformation.

  You can work with Tim individually @ https://www.timadalin.xyz

  On X @ https://x.com/tim_adalin

  And on LinkedIn @ https://www.linkedin.com/in/tim-adalin/

• About Voicecraft

  Voicecraft conversations deepen how the world is known across themes of psyche, culture and nature.

  The Voicecraft Project is comprised of a media & events platform, academy, and participatory membership network.

• Intro Music - 'The Big Break' by Cantrips

  Listen on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/embed/Qaj-stBL4W0

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