Additional Addenda to The Evolution of Hospitality:
Appendix Three: Dempsey InterviewHospitality, as in lateralization, is an asymmetric relationship in which, to quote McGilchrist, "one element being capable of incorporating its opposite, while the other cannot." (The Matter with Things)
A recent conversation between Jim Rutt and Brendan Graham Dempsey, provided an excellent description of hierarchical complexity (see also Donella Meadows' work on leverage points). This very clearly relates to symbiogenesis, and through that to host-guest dynamics. If this is the case, then why not speak solely in terms of hierarchical complexification as the more parsimonious evolutionary explanation for lateralization, and abandon the more parochial sounding terminology of host and guest? It should be noted that these are actually complimentary ideas, but there may be several reasons to prefer the latter terms as more, ironically, conceptually complex. Asymmetry must be addressed as a feature of the complexification process, and the more numinous or phenomenological features of the ethics of care, as these are seen in other religious and philosophical traditions described earlier, need to be adequately accounted for. But setting these and related criticisms aside, this is a rich vein of thought that echoes some earlier writing on hierarchy and constraints, which is seen as well within the biosemiotics literature. (Incidentally, Dempsey's points may also serve as a partial response to many of Robert Ellis' criticisms of McGilchrist, as they tend to reveal Ellis' own blindspots concerning paradox and transcendence.) The explanation of Lawrence Kohlberg's stages of moral development, particularly as it relates to contemporary society, is very eye opening:
Brendan: The big picture, big history, complexification story situates four major complexity levels. Out of some kind of information-energy implicate order you get matter, and then out of matter emerges life, out of life emerges mind (which in this case means active bodies and nervous systems), and then out of mind you see culture [cf. Smith and Szathmáry]. At life, you get a new complexity level because you’ve got genetic information. At mind, you’ve got neuronal information, and at culture, you’ve got symbolic information (language and some of the more advanced semiotic processing). So it’s a helpful taxonomy of levels.
Complexification is happening across all these different scales of cosmic evolution. It is the coming together in coordination [synergy] of multiple parts to form comprehensive wholes that have qualities that aren’t in the parts themselves. Complexity is what we see all around us, and it’s what is increasing across cosmic evolution. As you get parts coming together to form novel wholes that then themselves can be parts in still higher order wholes and so on, you get this sort of potentially recursive complexification dynamic. That is what we see across big history. If you just want to use the example of atoms coming together to form molecules, molecules coming together to form minerals, and then planets — you’ve already got some level of organizational complexity there. Once you get the emergence of the first cell on a planet, then if there’s reproduction of cells, you get multicellular organisms out of single cells, and so on.
I find "hierarchical complexity" to be a really powerful and helpful idea because it’s a unifying concept. New kinds of concepts come online that then themselves become coordinated to form higher order concepts, and those higher order concepts themselves start to get coordinated with similarly higher order concepts to form even more higher order concepts, and so on. That’s why it’s "hierarchical," because it builds up from what came before. It’s a coordination of parts yielding more comprehensive, qualitatively distinct, wholes. These processes by which the human mind learns are the same basic architecture that learning works through at all levels of cosmic complexity - an evolutionary process of variation and selective retention, coordinated at higher levels to produce more complex phenomena.
[Parenthetically, consider the case of a whole that is composed of many parts. Such an object may be said to be both "divided" and "united" at the same time. And so, we may adopt a more hierarchically complex concept, such as a fractal or holarchy, to try to transcend the conceptual limitations of our former means of representation, and resolve the paradox. This third concept is clearly better than either of the previous two concepts, taken in isolation. But is it better than the previous two concepts when these are taken together, as in the form of a paradox? These are separate forms of conceptual synthesis. What paradox allows is the ability to view higher level complexity from a lower level perspective that (as yet) may lack a sufficient conceptual toolset. This may be a fundamentally inescapable feature of symbolic systems - we will always find ourselves at a lower level attempting to glimpse a "higher integral territory" by means of perpetually insufficient maps. For McGilchrist, the "map-terrain paradox" is one of the most prominent features of reality, and what the hemisphere hypothesis (his own map) attempts to explain.]
Jim: What is your take on constructivism?
Brendan: Well, constructivism can mean a couple of different things. What I’m referring to is a kind of developmental constructivism. There are different kinds of constructivism — people have probably heard the phrase social constructivism, radical constructivism. The basic idea is that the mind in some way fashions, shapes, or forms the world as we experience it. If you want to go all the way back to Kant, it's that move from thinking we’re directly interacting with reality as it is, to actually needing concepts and categories in our brain that predefine the world for us.
In the case of radical social constructivism, these might be totally arbitrary. What I find of value here is a kind of middle way. The radical social constructivist approach is very unhelpful and counterproductive, and unfortunately, a lot of postmodern thought tends in that direction. But we also have to avoid a kind of naive realism that what we’re experiencing is somehow just reality as it is, unfiltered. There’s clearly a way in which we are getting a mediated experience of whatever that reality is.
I’m a realist. I think there’s a world out there, and this whole framework helps to understand the relationship between these two things. Getting beyond postmodern radical social constructivism requires that we actually say, yes, there is a real world. But just because we say there’s a real world doesn’t necessarily solve our question about how we have knowledge about it. A developmental constructivist approach situates an individual in a world that is always impinging on us. And through that we craft our mental models and representations of the world in a dynamic relationship with it. So we’re still getting constructed knowledge of the world, but it is in relationship to something that’s out there. That is how you can actually have a sense that we’re gaining better knowledge about something. A "developmental constructivist approach" helps us understand how knowledge is about informing viability and flourishing of an organism in context.
The constructs that we use are evolutionarily mediated. In Thomas Nagel’s “What Is It Like to Be a Bat?” a bat’s knowledge of the world is going to be very different. It’s not that the world is necessarily a different world than what I’m experiencing, but the sensory inputs and capacities that a bat has to adaptively navigate the world are going to be radically different. We have an umwelt, a way that the world out there gets mediated through our biological inheritance and all the other aspects, particularly for humans, of a cultural inheritance and interpreted in particular ways. If we can appreciate the genuine insight that, yes, in a realist sense, there is a world out there that we can have better or worse knowledge of, and the constructivist insight that our understanding of that is under construction, then we can have the picture then that human worldviews themselves are evolutionary products. There is actually a way in which we can be approaching reality that is more adaptive in our lived contexts.
And that means that we’re out of postmodern radical relativism. Because while there’s some range of variability we can expect to see, it’s not wide open. As we grow and learn about what’s more adaptive in relationship to reality as we experience it, we are constraining the possibilities of more complex moral reasoning. You’re not going to get into higher levels of moral reasoning, in terms of complexity, and see just as many people saying, “You know, it makes just as much sense to nuke the world and take the people’s houses and do whatever you want and be hedonistic or whatever.” Higher complexity levels do tend to converge in particular directions. You could say there’s a kind of attractor at these higher levels. There are certain things that work and that don’t, generally speaking, at those scales. So there is variability, but it’s constrained variability.
Lawrence Kohlberg's stages of moral development were an adaptation from Piaget. Basically, he proposed three major tiers. There’s what he calls the preconventional, the conventional, and the postconventional, and each of those three tiers is broken up into two stages each. Stage one is what he called the punishment and obedience kind of moral reasoning level. That’s basically people making decisions and determining what’s right, based on are they going to get kicked in the face? What do they need to do to make sure that they aren’t experiencing pain and can kind of look out for number one? That’s punishment and obedience. It’s a very basic, hedonistic, egoistic approach.
Stage two is the individual instrumental purpose and exchange level. It’s still egoistic and hedonistic, but at least there’s this instrumental factor. Now you have the ability to say, “Oh, I’ll do this so that this good thing will happen to me.” And you can be a bit more strategic about looking out for number one. So it’s not just sort of ad hoc and do whatever you do to make sure that you’re okay. You can actually be a bit cunning even or strategic and scheming for getting your perceived needs met. Both of those are preconventional levels.
The conventional level, which is stage three, shows up with what he called mutual interpersonal expectation, or relationships and conformity. So this is where people really get socialized into their community in a real way, and they actually start to mutually consider the well-being of their loved ones, their friends and family in a way that is sort of like, “Oh, okay. Yeah. It’s not just about me. It’s about us.” And so there’s a kind of conformist level there that shows up. So it’s like, let’s look out for us, and this tends to be very "us versus them."
Stage four is what he called social system and conscience maintenance. Here you’ve got someone in a system who is basically recognizing that the maintenance of that system is important, and also a deeper sense of individual responsibility in terms of conscience. "I could do this, but I really shouldn’t because it would be wrong, in a kind of theoretical or abstract or principled way." And so it’s not just that we do things because we’re the group and we’re awesome and they suck, it’s because this is a particular way that in order for us to keep being who we are and doing what we do, we have to have some rules and expectations in place. And so in some ways, it’s kind of an extension of that conformist view, but it also starts to get more into a deeper sense of internal conscience and morality and a more abstract sense of the social system.
Then you get the post-conventional levels. Stage five he called prior rights and social contract utility, which is basically thinking not just of society as society maintenance, but actually a prior-to-society standpoint. "What are the things that we would need to be in place for a successful thriving society to exist?" This involves the recognition that we actually do inhabit socially constructed environments, but that these are in place for our well-being and for the collective good. Stage six is universal ethical principles, but was pretty much just hypothetical and found in some philosophical works. So that’s kind of a rough outline of his stage model. Carol Gilligan, a student colleague [as well as critic] of Kohlberg’s, produced a rigorous model that tracks the hierarchical complexification trend. The major takeaway from the research is that these stages are real. They’re not just pulled out of nowhere. There are requisite levels of complexity that are needed to think about topics in certain ways. You can’t have a notion of collective good for society, and personal integrity, absent a kind of systematic level cognition. So being able to situate these developmental sequences in terms of the hierarchical complexification sequence was really interesting.
Robert Kegan’s whole point in his book In Over Our Heads was that modern society is predicated on these higher levels in terms of what is expected in day-to-day functioning and to understand the systems that we live in and why they’re set up and structured the way that they are. But what he found was that most people are at the conformist level of mutual, relational tribal thinking. It’s very clear to see these dynamics emerge in election season. This is a huge collective problem that we face in our contemporary society of people being able to have the complexity to see why things are the way that they are and why they should be the way that they should be. What we’re seeing with, for example, a lot of what’s happening right now with the institutional breakdown and decay and the undermining of long-standing "rule of law" kinds of ways of thinking — people don’t seem to understand why those are actually good ideas. And they seem like a lot of unnecessary bureaucratic nonsense and namby-pamby sort of good intentions. But there’s a lot that goes into those systems of law and jurisprudence. And when we appreciate the ideals and principles that they’re based on, they make more sense. But what’s disturbing is that a lot of people aren’t getting that. And in terms of the complexity required to get it, yeah, they’re in over their heads in Kegan’s sense.
Human development is possible, learning is possible, growing is possible. Yes, there are going to be constraints on that from all sorts of levels. Social, certainly genetic factors probably figure in there. But we’re not constrained in some kind of genetic lottery that predetermines our entire way of being and value as people. We can actually try to live up to the ideals that supposedly we hold and that are at least in theory at the core of our society. This is not something that gets locked in at an early stage. If people are willing to learn and grow and do the kind of hard thing of trying to accommodate more of our understanding to reality and complexify our minds, we can do that. And I feel like that’s a more optimistic vision of human potential.
Properly understood developmental models give us a roadmap for understanding how human flourishing can increase, how everyone can find their proper and happy and flourishing place in society regardless of where they’re at in some scale, how there’s a collective need for everyone in the diversity that they bring. We are in a social organism that requires variation and selective retention in the sense that we thrive off diversity, and we thrive off of new ideas and more out-there ideas. If postmodernists really understood the takeaways from these kinds of models, it actually speaks to a lot of the values of diversity, open-mindedness, and tolerance and growth that a lot of people just intuitively value. If we could get more scientific about actually building our systems to help cultivate this, we’d be in a lot better position collectively. And ironically, that’s just what we haven’t done.
Jim: Are the distribution curves of the different stages similar across societies?
Brendan: It would very much depend. If you were to look at, say, a country that gets really hit by war, that has very strong survival values, and lacks a robust educational infrastructure, and so forth, I’m sure they’re going to be much lower.
Jim: Do we want more people at higher levels?
Brendan: If you try to just push rote things — "oh, we gotta up people’s levels," that sort of thing — we don’t want to do that. There’s a whole thing called the "Piaget effect" in the developmental literature that shows what happens when you’re less interested in people organically growing, learning, and engaging in more spontaneous human flourishing through the kind of serotonin-dopamine cycle circular reaction of learning. But if we want to live in a society that values things like rule of law, has a more idealistic set of concerns of tolerance, open-mindedness, growth, and values that actually reflect human flourishing more, then I think the evidence points to the direction that we want to favor robust education systems that increase the level of complexity, making people members of a society in which all those things make sense to them so that they’re less likely to engage in an authoritarian reflex where all this complexity winds up eroding. What we really want is a society in which people have the ability to develop and grow freely, and with robust, strong thinking minds. And I think you want to create a set of conditions rather than try to aim at a set of outcomes to achieve that.
Arthur Brooks made an important distinction at a very basic level which may or may not be related here, but it brings into focus another aspect of brain lateralization:
"There's two kinds of problems in life. There's complicated problems which are super hard to solve but with enough brain power and computing power and time you can solve them and they stay solved. They're static problems like how to create a jet engine, or a toaster for that matter. Then there are complex problems, which are super easy to understand but actually impossible to solve. The biggest problems in life, such as finding meaning, love, and happiness, are all complex. But we care about these things the most. Now, with all of the tech out there, with all the technology and analysis, every time we have a complex problem of love, happiness, mystery, and meaning, we try to solve it with a complicated solution, and we get it wrong and make things worse. McGilchrist says that the right side of the brain is the "why" side and the left side of the brain is the "what" side. Why do I do what I do? Because I love my family. So what do I do? I go and support my family. And that's how my two hemispheres actually work together. The right side is the complex questions, the mystery and meaning questions. The left side is the complicated questions, the stuff, the technology, the analysis. According to McGilchrist our brains have been increasingly oriented, because of modern life, to only do the left-hand side stuff. We're largely being managed by our technology as opposed to managing it. But there are lots of ways that we can use it appropriately."
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| hemiepipmyte ("strangler" fig) |
McGilchrist's views on the contemporary uses of technology could be described as very critical, but they are also nuanced, so it is worth spending some time attempting to anticipate his response to any proposal for using a novel tool (such as LLMs) in the service of creating a more hospitable future. Below is an extended excerpt from a recent conversation he had with Paul Kingsnorth which appears to highlight a possible role for some LLMs, insofar as it is able to reproduce benefits similar to those we already enjoy from the Internet, but without the clearly dystopian purposes that other technologies could be put to. In short, bodily integrity is not violated (as it would be with chip implantation), personal privacy can be preserved, and top down control need not be imposed. None of this is needed to realize the potential for organically forming new relationships among the demos.
McGilchrist: "What seems to happen in societies is that when they're small and when they're at their their outset (for example, Greece in the 6th century BC, Rome around the year dot and I think I would say um Italy, France and Europe in general from the 14th or 15th century, the Renaissance) [these two versions of the world that we, each of us, have in in our brains, these ways of thinking] work very well, [they are both born in mind] and everything flourishes. They work together in a fruitful relationship in which the right hemisphere oversees the whole and the left hemisphere does a lot of the donkey work. But as things progress the left hemisphere seems to be emboldened by the idea of control. Civilizations get bigger, they have to control bigger land masses. They have greater wealth, and it becomes effectively a bureaucratic machine that grows up. And like a machine, it hasn't the subtlety that humans have about context and place and time and all the non-explicit things that rules and procedures leave out. All that gets lost, and the civilization coarsens, becomes crude, power obsessed and loses its insight into art and religion and the big questions."
Kingsnorth: "So the kind of cultural case that you're making is that in the modern West, and the modern world more generally, the emissary has usurped the master. You seem to suggest that it's effectively a consequence of scale. When society gets to a certain point, does it need to employ the left hemisphere so much that it loses touch? Is this an inevitable thing?"
McGilchrist: "When a society becomes very large we're treated as interchangeable numbers that have no real individual differences. For example, try to answer these ridiculous questionnaires online, where you have to fill in yes or no. You can't move on until you've made an answer. There's never a box for what I want to say which is something more subtle. It depends on the circumstances, and who I'm with, and all the rest. So all that stuff, all that subtlety gets lost. Partly through exaggerated scale, partly through a lust for power, and of course, they go together. But it's clear that the value that the left hemisphere holds is that of power and control. Whereas the right hemisphere is able to see other values. The right hemisphere is also much better able to understand the need for the left hemisphere. And in the myth of the master and his emissary, the master appoints an emissary to go on his behalf and do the bureaucratic work so that he is able to keep a proper oversight of things and allow the community of which he is the spiritual master to flourish. The right hemisphere is in touch with the real presence of whatever it may be, and the left hemisphere categorizes it and represents it, which literally means "makes it present again" when it is no longer present.
I don't want to decry the uses of technology. I benefit from aspects of technology. I don't for a minute doubt the value of various advances in technology in medicine, in daily life, and the internet has its uses. For example, without having to make a very long journey, you and I can actually talk in this way, which is a wonderful thing. You see, the trouble is nowadays there is a very extremist way of thinking. So people think if you're not for something, you must be against it completely. And this one or the other mentality leads to extreme positions. So I would say generally speaking technology has both good and bad outcomes, but taken too far in certain directions the dangers suddenly ramp up. The difficulty is how do we stop ourselves, how do we not do it.
You know, one very interesting thing I heard quite recently, and I can't remember the exact age range of the group of young people, but it was probably something like 18 to 30, um, were asked uh about their hopes and fears, and something like very nearly 50% of them, 47% or 49% even, said that they wish they had been born in an era before the internet, that they're seeing the downside of it. But the thing that really chilled me was reading this article that um I was sent a couple of days ago, quoting somebody I think in the World Economic Forum. One thing they were saying is by 2030 a mobile phone will be obsolete because we'll all have to have chips in us, and those chips will give us access to everything we need. So I mean you can refuse it but how will you go shopping? How will you get on a train? How will you make an appointment with a doctor? Because everything will be funneled through this chip which records everything about you and potentially has the capacity, believe it or not, to interfere with your mind, with your mentation, even with your emotions. Now, I don't know how accurate this is, or whether this is paranoia or what, but I think we're moving in that direction. And what we need is a group of people, a very very large group of people who will simply say no, this is too far."
Kingsnorth: "The notion of the internet of bodies is not a conspiracy theory. That's exactly where things are supposed to go next. So the smartphone is precisely supposed to be a kind of stepping stone towards the chip in the body. The internet of things is where everything is connected to the web, whether it's your fridge or your car or whatever, and that's already manifesting. And the next stage is the internet of bodies. And the internet of bodies is where the rational thing to do is to have a chip in your hand.
This is very much the way that the future is supposed to be planned. And again, from the perspective of your thesis about left hemisphere dominance, it makes perfect rational sense because everything is connected to everything else. We can do everything just with the chip in our arms. We're connected. You can walk into a shop with this chip in your arm. There don't need to be any human beings in the shop to sell you things. You walk through the shop, the scanners will notice what you've picked up, and then you just walk out of the shop again. Very rational. At the same time, the money will be taken from your bank account. You don't have to get your credit card out. You don't have to speak to any human beings. The whole world becomes this frictionless technological thing which a certain type of person who is very left hemisphere dominated presumably thinks is wonderful. The people who control the narrative and the people who create the technology are rushing us very very fast into this robotic left hemisphere world which takes us into goodness knows what horror. But as I say, they don't see it as horror. They see it as they see it as utopia."
McGilchrist: "There's so much to say about all of that. Part of it is, I think, the complete loss of any understanding of what it means to be human, to be a human being. We no longer know who we are, what we're doing here. Can't people see that this drive towards conformity and mechanism, if it were to succeed, would completely destroy our liberty and our dignity? We completely mistake ourselves when we think that every kind of friction, every kind of opposition, every kind of um restriction is something that should be done away with and is negative."
Kingsnorth: "Every religion in the world teaches that suffering is the path to God, to enlightenment, to spiritual improvement. And again, you're not supposed to intentionally seek it out, but when it comes to you, it's given to you for a reason. And the society we live in now teaches that the greatest good is to abolish suffering. And it's not that that's always a bad thing. Sometimes it's good to abolish suffering. It's good to have medical advances and various things that we value. But once you put this on a pedestal and you are prepared to sacrifice almost everything to a safety focused utopia, then well, you really get what Huxley wrote about in Brave New World, which is precisely where we are. It seems to me you have a safety focused utopia in which people give up their freedom in exchange for pleasure. The entirety of the Silicon Valley mindset, and I've done a fair bit of studying of this and spoken to some of the people involved in it, is precisely about removing suffering from all human life, which is seen as the greatest good. It's extremely utilitarian. If we can remove all suffering, then we have succeeded. And the ultimate way to remove all suffering is to abolish death, which is then to just to abolish humanity.
And you know, the whole thing rubs up against limits. So every traditional society, every religious teaching says limits are important. You have to push up against them. Suffering matters. That's what changes you. That's what helps you to grow. This mindset says no, we abolish those things. We don't need them. What you want is ease and a lack of suffering and the end of death. And it ends up being weirdly a precisely inverted version of say the Christian story in which we have an ascent to heaven, but the heaven that we ascend to is the uploading of our minds into a silicon cloud or into an AI. It's a very weird sort of almost autistic utilitarian view of what a suffering free world will look like. And it ends up being something that looks to me like hell. Actually, ironically, it ends up looking like a place in which there is no freedom, there is no humanity, there is nothing that we would recognize as any of those things at all. So, it's almost as if we get to see the consequences of our own fantasies almost playing out around us.
I suppose you must get this question all the time when you're speaking to all of these different people and they're presumably asking you, "So, what are we going to do about this?"
McGilchrist: "Well, yes. And I think what they're looking for usually is what the left hemisphere would like, which is I'm going into supercharged and yeah, I need a five-point plan and I need bullet points. These are the things to do and then I'll go away and do them. But Christ didn't say that. Christ said, you know, you have been taught that there are the ten commandments and so on, but I say to you there are only two commandments. Love God and love your neighbor. I may be misquing, but roughly speaking, that was the drifter. And so in other words, it was not a number of things to do, but it was a way of being, not a code. When I think about a way of relating, and everything is relational, I argue not just human things but actually the whole business of anything that exists comes out of a relational process, a resonant relationship. So if you like Christ didn't say these are the bullet points, this is my five year plan, go away and do it.
When I think about what has really changed my life it has been knowing people, particularly probably during my adolescence there were a couple of people who influenced me. It's not so much what they told me is that they modeled for me a way of being that I wanted to be like. I wanted to be like them and to have that way of being and approaching the world. And that is the greatest gift is to be not told how to do something in the abstract with a number of rules. That's just the left hemisphere, and that's the way AI would deal with it. But it's inhabiting the being of another person to the extent that you can so that you become more like them."
Kingsnorth: Really, the entire story you're telling is a story about a broken relationship, it seems to me, with much of the world. A broken relationship with nature, with culture, with individual people, with our own minds, with our own way of comprehending. And that's fundamentally the so-called solution to the problem. It's precisely a solution about a relationship. Trying to relate differently to things, to other people, to the natural world. Our relationship with nature is so broken. And the thing about this as well that's significant, people need communities to do this in. This is the thing. It's very hard to do on your own. If you feel like you're isolated from the world and you're living in this left hemisphere world and you can see things differently but you don't know what to do, it's very hard to do it on your own. One value of the internet is that it enables people to connect with people who are seeing the same thing. But seems to me that the kind of work we're talking about requires people to get together and kind of make those changes happen at some community level.
McGilchrist: "I agree with you. Also I think the thing that a religion offers is a kind of embodied wisdom which is in acts which are carried out together that have deep meaning and help to change you. So I think that you know true rituals are phenomenally powerful and I've experienced that in my life in an absolutely shatteringly powerful way that leaves one sort of more or less speechless and so moved. To the left hemisphere ritual is just a repetition of something that doesn't have a meaning. But this is why I worry enormously about the left hemisphere's attempt to create something that is a simulacrum of thinking in a material object that cannot think because it also has no body. It cannot understand emotion except it can read that when humans do this it causes them to feel something they don't like and all that. That's not the same as having feeling and it's not the same as being embodied. They can't be embodied in the way that we are. They're not they're not organic beings and they are incapable of knowing what it means to suffer and the prospect of death, which as Dr. Johnson says, "sharpens a man's mind."
Kingsnorth: "I'm just thinking about what you say there about AI. We think we're fixing the world that way, but we can't create an intelligence. The thing we're creating is profoundly unintelligent. It's just a machine that reproduces rather than generates. What we're doing at the moment is in one sense terrifying and in another sense clearly a dead end."
McGilchrist: "The only thing that is asked of you to do is to turn your mind, your heart, your spirit, I would say your soul towards the richly beautiful creative, I think sacred, cosmos and not worry about the things to do because they will follow. If you really internalize that, you will see what it is you need to do. It's seeing something differently. And I suppose what I've aimed to do in my work is to go, "you think the world looks like this, but hello, look at this." And of course, I don't immediately produce that vision, but by gentle steps that are logical and therefore acceptable, I take people, I hope, to a place where they can stop feeling they have to deny certain really elementary but extraordinarily important aspects of what it means to be a living human being.
Appendix Five: Xenia in the works of Homer
Xenia is (or at any rate, should be) the archetypal "Hero's Journey" on the political Left. It's also the subplot of Homer's Odyssey. It's the recurring encounter with the alien, the foreign, the stranger, an alchemical dance that ascends to ever greater heights each time. Tamler Sommers and David Pizarro explored the concept, which one might say is the deus ex machina in Homer's works, or the key to understanding the entire epic. And they did so with reference to Emily Wilson's translations of the Illiad and Odyssey. Sommers later made the profound observation that "books seven and eight of the Odyssey are really about a journey to your home, which you consider sacred." This was a conversation, and most of the description was provided by Sommers, however I resorted to interposing Pizarro's contributions with his, and have not distinguished between the speakers:
"The pretext for the Trojan war is that Menelaus wants his wife Helen back from Paris. But it wasn't just that Paris made off with his wife. This was also an extreme violation of xenia, the Greek code of hospitality that plays an absolutely enormous role in both texts, in all sorts of ways. First of all, Zeus, the head god of the Olympians, is the god of xenia. Like, he's in charge of upholding xenia, the expectations for how hosts should treat guests and guests should respond to hosts. Like, these are kind of sacred norms, certainly much more ethically central than in the United States today, where we barely have hospitality codes and norms. But my point here is that what Paris did in taking Helen wasn't just like, I'm cucking Menelaus, it's also a violation of this really central moral code of how guests and hosts should treat each other. And so that made Zeus, almost reluctantly, on the side of the Greeks in their battle against Troy. So that's the pretext for the war.
Athena says she's going to go to Ithaca to rouse the courage of Odysseus' son, Telemachus, who we're about to meet. And she appears on Ithaca in the guise of someone named Mentes, who was a guest-friend of Odysseus from way back in the day. Here you get an indication of the importance of this xenia relationship. You have a bond with someone who's a guest-friend. You hosted them, and now you are connected in a deep way. And not just you, but your families are connected. Your ancestors are connected, because you established this guest-friend relationship. So that's who she pretends to be.
In Odysseus' absence, his house becomes infested with suitors who are after his wife Penelope. These guys are not welcome, as far as Telemachus is concerned. They're burning through his riches and his inheritance. You get the idea that they are violating xenia, like, hardcore; they are abusing the hospitality that Telemachus is sort of compelled to provide. And, even though they've kind of taken over the house, they're not hospitable to guests [viz. they are bad hosts], which is why Telemachus is the one that has to go and welcome Mentes. Otherwise, nobody would have.
Now, it's not as if there was a thing called "Greece" at this time, but there's some unity to this group of people called Achaeans. However, there's no hierarchy among the Achaean kingdoms. They make relationships through using these guest-friend codes. That's how these alliances are created. One of the key aspects of that code is when a stranger comes, you offer them shelter, you offer them food, like a meal, and you're supposed to do that before even asking who they are, what their name is, anything like that. And not everyone follows that code, as we'll see, but that's what you're supposed to do. And that's what Telemachus does. So he has it in him that he wants to follow these codes in a way that the suitors don't. He just doesn't totally know what to do. That's a big part of it. And you'll see in the next two books how it works when it's really observed properly."
Appendix Six: Douglas Rushkoff and Jeremy Lent: Society and Symbiogenesis
Rushkoff: "This has always been my concern when I look at history: if we are a wendigo-free society, networked and loving and sweet and spending our resources on mutual aid instead of the military, then doesn't the next violent wendigo civilization clobber us?"
Lent: "This is something that David Sloan Wilson, the evolutionary biologist, has written very well about, this recognition that, really, there's only been a few times in life's evolution on Earth that cooperation as a driver has actually led to a breakthrough in the complexity of life. And each of these times it only happens when there's a way to overcome freeloaders (like that other aggressive civilization that comes and gobbles you up) through other more important powers. But when that has happened, it's led to things like multicellular life, social insects, and humans. We're one of the greatest cooperators, evolutionarily speaking."
Rushkoff: "So if you look at evolution, it's like, oh, cells are having problems with these little creatures that are bothering them. And it's like, oh, so let's just incorporate the mitochondria into our exact thing."
Lent: "It's mutually beneficial synergy. So it's not just gobbling them up, but the mitochondria themselves say, "Oh, this works for us, too, because we got all these ribosomes to work with and then we'll be almost immortal. We'll just have lots of us." And so they did great out of it too. This is the point, mutually beneficial synergy. But if you imagine two groups of quasi-humans, if you will, and one group, they're all aggressive. They're all these selfish motherfuckers out to get their own thing. And another group, they actually work together for mutual solidarity. And imagine they're battling each other. Well, the group that is working together for mutual solidarity is probably going to win because they're collectively far more powerful than those individuals that are each looking out for themselves.
We need to find ways to organize ourselves that can actually take us to this place where the freeloaders don't, in fact, end up squashing on us, basically. And nomadic hunter gatherers figured out ways to do that. They worked together collaboratively. And when some big man came along, figuring they were so great and wonderful and strong, the rest of the community would get together to actually stop them from doing that. They'd ostracize them because they saw them as dangerous. That all got lost with agriculture and sedentism, but I think the ultimate point is that we can actually create conditions for our entire society to work in that prosocial way. That's what I feel is available to us. That's what our challenge and our opportunity is about."
Appendix Seven: Andrew Davis on Worldview Disintegration
The anti-natalism simmering beneath the surface of contemporary culture was highlighted by Andrew Davis. How might one respond to this trend? An ethic of hospitality may provide some ideas. (Davis also referenced Lou Marinoff, president of the American Philosophical Practitioners Association (APPA), and the series of journals and texts being produced.) Now, McGilchrist isn’t missing a nomological or narratological framing, but he doesn’t seem to lay quite as much emphasis on these as he does the normative (the value hierarchy) framing. That being said, we cannot forget that the entire Part Three of TMWT “What then is true?” Is nomological, one could say. And his reference of mythos throughout, particularly the central Onondaga myth of the divine twins, or the creation story within Lurianic Kabbalah, is narratological. McGilchrist just doesn’t refer to these using that terminology, and doesn’t group the three of these together as succinctly as Andrew Davis did here. That’s probably just because Davis has somewhat more training specifically within philosophical circles than McGilchrist, I believe. I would suggest that the hospitality hypothesis is the metanarrative we need.
"One of the purposes of philosophy is to confront the precarious nature of our existence. And our moment is marked by a deep awareness of existential risk. Various disciplines and forms of literature are weighing in on this risk, this threat of a kind of extinction. How should we act and live such that these possibilities of extinction are lessened and avoided? Now, there's only so much we can do. But there's also much we could do to avoid anthropogenic risks. It's a larger philosophical question as to whether these risks should truly be avoided. You'll see some arguing that rendering humanity extinct might be the path forward. The point is that there are philosophical or ideological exacerbations of this scenario of existential risk.
Some religious notions suggest that we might need to hasten the eschaton or the apocalypse because a better world is behind the veil of this one. And in the philosophical domain there is no shortage of Schopenhauerian forms of pessimism which argue that existence is really no good. Inverse utilitarianism, the drive to minimize harm, has suggested that we should not have children because existence is harmful. (That is one way of putting our future at risk when it comes to our continuation.) There are also varieties of nihilism and misanthropy, forms of hatred of humankind. We've seen political ideologies of retribution and hatred, forms of economic hedonism, and we could name many more. The broader point is that behind existential risk is a certain ideological frame that is philosophically significant. The ideas we hold impact the way in which we approach the real risks of our extinction.
The meaning crisis has its origins in the disintegration of three very powerful dimensions of a worldview that had previously helped us make sense of the world: nomological (structural conformity), narratological (overarching story), and normative (hierarchy of value). I would suggest that it is our responsibility as philosophers to engage with these in ways that allow us to overcome, rather than succumb, to the meaning crisis and all of its entailments. How can we nomologically reconstruct our relation to cosmos in ways that inspire? How can we narratologically re-embed ourselves in a real meta-cosmological story where our role is actually vital rather than simply trivial? How can we normatively reassert the objective reality of values as being essential, as undergirding progress in moral and cultural evolution?"
Appendix Eight: The Shambhala Warrior
Samantha Sweetwater: "The Greek concept of cosmos meant a totality that is essentially whole and harmonious. And the concept of a holon, created by Arthur Koestler, is the understanding that living and mechanical systems function in terms of nested parts and wholes, nested part-whole relationships. A classic example is an atom is part of a molecule, is part of an organelle, is part of a cell, is part of a muscle fiber, is part of my hand, is part of my body.”
Nate Hagens: "So it's kinda like a biological, ecological overlay on the Russian dolls concept?"
Samantha Sweetwater: "Yeah. Except what's meaningful about it is that there's generally a deep communication between the layers in a ‘natural hierarchy’ as compared to an ‘imposed hierarchy.’ So it can be useful, when thinking about power of any kind, to recognize that without ontic structure the universe would be grey goo. Like, I wouldn't be talking to you. We wouldn't be human organisms with trillions of cells and trillions of non-human cells.
Nate Hagens: "Can you explain the importance of the distinction between ‘power of life’ and ‘power over life?’ How can we participate in processes that bind ‘power over life’ so that the ‘power of life’ wins the game?”
Samantha Sweetwater: "My partner and I now have all the names and phone numbers of all the people on our block; we worked for a couple months to make this happen. We just had our first dinner party last week. It was amazing. Everyone was like, “Thank you for your initiative. We're so grateful.” It was a combination of taking care of each other and building capacity for resilience. There are ways in which we can migrate away from the ‘death and dystopia’ narrative and nourish the conditions for all kinds of things. Just having better lives and better relationships with neighbors who then go out into the world and are in better moods to build more relationships. The difference between a society that is war-like and a society that is peaceful is the instance of acts of reciprocity between people within that society. I think there's an opportunity on the horizon to recognize that the polarization dynamics that have captured our concept of politics are not what politics needs to be like. In the original sense of the word politics, it refers to the process of people coming together to listen to each other and hear each other and do the things that make the larger world work.
The first and most foundational aspect of my theory of change is that we are at a moment that allows us to observe an emergent story about ourselves. We are in a moment where we can recontextualize ourselves in a very unique way, as a species recognizing its custodial role inside biospheric process. Each of us is a holon inside this larger holon. That collective recognition is an emergent stage of social development. Telling that story about who we are creates the context for everything else. In that sense, my theory of change is grounded in this very simple story, this invitation to take a perspective. It’s like the perspective of the cathedral builder: Why might I do anything? Well, because I'm part of a bigger process. And from there a whole bunch of other strategies and possible approaches emerge. That's the center-point of where I’m coming from and what I wanna bring into the collective discourse.
The kinship journey begins when you realize that disconnection is a problem. That tracks with the fact that we have a crisis of addiction. It tracks with the fact that we have a crisis of loneliness. It tracks with climate anxiety. It tracks with all the people who are really struggling with what's going on politically. It tracks with the executives I work with, who come to me when they're like, “Oh my God, I'm participating in the end of the world. Help me. I need to figure out how to redo my value chain.” Our collective ‘WTF’ is a crisis of disconnection. And so that's the doorway into a kinship journey. And the kinship journey is a journey of recognizing your part in something larger than yourself.
We have to nourish a sense that the more safe, secure, and sane path forward is the path that we take together. And we have to do that in many different ways, and put ourselves behind it in real actions that are not transactional, but are relational and grounded in care. The underlying opportunity is exactly where people are trying to figure out where security lies. And in reality there's greater security in the ‘we’ than in the ‘me.’ But how that gets tended, in different contexts, is really different. It is a little audacious to say “I think that things could be different, and I'm gonna do my part to do that.” The paradox, of course, is not to impose one's own models, but to participate in a process that engages more than oneself in reissuing the social fabric or remembering our collaboration with a larger whole. (Sweetwater: "I think of humans as a custodial species.")
Joanna Macy has a very basic, yet elegant frame for systems change. And there's three parts to it, to tending a fabric of both story and praxis that nurtures our connection to life. Any one person might be playing one or multiple of these roles at any given time. But the third is ways of being and narrating our way forward, and I would say the work that I'm doing is most primarily in that category. Joanna carried an unbroken thousand-year lineage of an ancient prophecy. There would be a time when Shambhala warriors would know that the world that they were born into was out of alignment with life, and that it was made by the human mind and could be unmade by the human mind. And they would recognize themselves through that true heart that essentially knew that life is sacred. The pathway of the Shambhala warrior is to unwind and remake the systems, structures, and constructs that make our world. These are ‘monomaya’ - made by the human mind and can be unmade by the human mind. This invitation is deeper than words. It is embodied, it is the stance of the person, of the being who feels, who recognizes that we're here as embodied beings who can attune, commune, and creatively reinstantiate reciprocal processes in how we do anything. That's always with me. It will always be with me.”
Appendix Nine: Bifurcation and Benevolence
In this conversation with Lex Fridman, Michael Levin wonders about the bigger picture: “We make social structures, financial structures, Internet of Things, robotics, AI… we make all this stuff, and we think that the thing we make it do is the main show. But I think it is very important for us to learn to recognize the kind of stuff that sneaks into the spaces.” What is sneaking in? There may be “mind everywhere.” And Levin suggests that it may naturally bifurcate and tend toward benevolence. Those are two very encouraging findings. You will recall that the Hospitality article references his paper "Biology, Buddhism, and AI: Care as the Driver of Intelligence." From this more recent conversation:
Michael Levin: “We have an incredible degree of ‘mind blindness’ to all of the very alien kinds of minds around us and inside our own bodies. And I don't just mean that we are host to microbiota. Consider that even your own cells solve problems, have stress reduction when they meet their goals, and suffer when they fail to meet those goals. These are inside of us and all around us.
I think we call things alive to the extent that the cognitive light cone of that thing is bigger than that of its parts. So, in other words, rocks aren't very exciting because the things they know how to do are the things that its parts already know how to do, which is follow gradients and things like that. But living things are amazing at aligning their competent parts so that the collective has a larger cognitive light cone than the parts. So when we are looking for life, I don't think we're looking for specific materials or metabolic states. I think we're looking for scales of cognitive light cones. We're looking for alignment of parts towards bigger goals, in spaces that the parts could not comprehend.
In the alignment community there's a lot of discussion about “What are the intrinsic motivations going to be of AIs? What are their goals going to be? What are they going to want to do? The very first thing we checked with ‘anthrobots’ was what they would do when we put them on a plate of neurons with a big wound through them, a big scratch. The first thing they did was heal the wound. That was just an initial observation, but I like the fact that the first intrinsic motivation that we noticed out of that system was benevolent and healing. I thought that was pretty cool. And we don't know. Maybe the next 20 things we find are going to be damaging. But the first thing that we saw was kind of positive.”
Lex Fridman: “What advice would you give to scientists and students that are trying to explore the space of ideas, given the very unconventional, non-standard, unique set of ideas you've explored in your life and career?”
Michael Levin: “I have one technique that I've found very useful. It's the act of bifurcating your mind. You need to have two different regions. One region is the practical region of impact. In other words, how do I get my idea out into the world so that other people recognize it? What should I say? What are people hearing? What are they able to hear? How do I pivot it? What parts do I not talk about? Which journal am I going to publish this in? Is it time now? Do I wait two years for this? Like, all the practical stuff. Otherwise, you're not going to be in a position to follow up on any of your ideas. You're not going to have a career. You're not going to have resources to do anything.
But it's very important that that can't be the only thing. You need another part of your mind that ignores all that shit completely, because this other part of your mind has to be pure. It has to be I don't care what anybody else thinks about this. I don't care whether this is publishable, describable. I don't care if anybody gets it. I don't care if anybody thinks it's stupid. This is what I think, and why. And give it space to sort of grow, right?
And if you try to mush them together, I found that impossible. Because the practical stuff poisons the other stuff. If you're too much on the creative end, you can be an amazing thinker, it's just nothing ever materializes. But if you're very practical, it tends to poison the other stuff because the more you think about how to present things so that other people get it, it constrains and it bends how you start to think.”
Appendix Ten: Nested Minds
"Numerous species are known to take life-threatening risks to rescue other animals, not even those of their own species. Non-relatives help each other and form alliances that can properly be called friendships... ultimately, animal bodies could be seen as societies of socially self-sacrificing bacteria, numbered in trillions." - Iain McGilchrist (The Matter with Things)
"We would also expect that as evolution proceeds, the nature and the scope of the social relationships would become more and more intricate and more subtle." - Colin Tudge (as quoted in The Matter with Things)
There are considerable similarities between this and Brendan Graham Dempsey's description of hierarchical complexity. In this case however the implications for a panpsychist phenomenology along the lines of McGilchrist's hemisphere hypothesis are drawn out in some detail:
Jonathan Schooler: "The fundamental metaphor of the 'nested observer window model' is a mosaic photograph. In a mosaic photograph every pixel of the photograph is itself a photograph. It's a very fractal idea. The model suggests the possibility that every one of those windows, or maybe some subset of them, are actually loci of experience, that they're all having an experience. We could all be pixels in a higher level window, and that could be a pixel for a higher level window as well. In this pixel-window duality (or part-whole duality), each one of us has some control, each of us contributes a little bit of movement to the vector of the whole thing. But at the same time we're tethered to and dependent upon each other. If we can all sort of move together we may be able to go in a more productive direction. Every individual window has some consciousness and is steering in some way. Your experience is basically the experience of all the lower level windows. So there's a dualist component, an idealist component, a panpsychist component, and a materialist component. It's grounded in imagining how these windows might be instantiated in neural circuitries in the brain, and has elements that could be tested."
Hans Busstra: "But of course in panpsychism you have what is called the 'combination problem.' How exactly, and by what mechanism, do those consciousnesses 'build up?' What's their boundary? Why does my consciousness stop here and not there?"
Jonathan Schooler: "The solution that seems to be very intuitive to me is synchrony. Basically the idea is that the resonance and synchronization of lower level windows produces a combined experience. And then as you move up the other windows are now able to sort of synchronize the rhythms of the lower level windows. And so you can imagine the lower level windows combining into larger windows combining into larger windows. And so the apex is having a bound experience, which is due to synchrony of the lower level windows, which communicate with each other through cross frequency coupling. So there's sort of 'harmonies' that allow for the conveying of information up and down the system. Essentially resonance, and the coupling between different resonance systems, allows the lower level elements to integrate into larger and larger elements."
Hans Busstra: "Can we switch between higher and lower levels of consciousness? Can I get to a lower level or a higher level? Can I get from one window to another one?"
Jonathan Schooler: "The idea is that the apex is able to turn and focus on different sub-windows, and in so doing it's going to resonate more with some windows and not with others. It's also presumably able to sort of perceptually 'zoom in' on a very narrow thing. If you're threading a needle you can focus very narrowly like that. Or you can sort of see the big picture. You can have a kind of expansive view or you can focus very tightly on a particular idea. It's possible that there may be circumstances in which individuals can somehow join a yet larger window between the two of them [cf. symbiogenesis]. In certain kinds of group experiences it may be that everyone is somehow 'bumping up' to a larger window and that there may be certain kinds of contemplative practices where people have mystical experiences. Maybe they've managed to turn their apex up so it's somehow connecting with that larger window. There's a theory of mind called 'internal family systems' where you basically sort of imagine there are these different agents within us, and these different windows within us are essentially doing what we call 'coherence' where they do a back and forth kind of thing very much like conversations. And so one way that you and I are connecting our windows may be very similar, which is sort of a back and forth. Conversation really is a beautiful example of coherence."
Appendix Eleven: Narratives
Arran Gare recently noted "We're going in the wrong direction. The deconstructive postmodernists, who claimed to be radical, have actually been disastrous. Faced with the complete domination of the world by a nihilistic vision, those who would be opposed are paralyzed by an "incredulity towards meta-narratives." (Jean-François Lyotard). But in order to enable people around the world to coordinate and move in the same kind of direction, we need a vision of the future." Fallible though it may be, we cannot do without one. In “Biosemiotics against Nihilism” (forthcoming) Gare wrote:
Peirce, or Whitehead, could only characterize and justify their metaphysical systems by contrasting them with other systems and arguing for their superiority relative to alternatives, most importantly, those currently dominating. This concurs with Peirce’s characterization of semiosis as a virtually endless process, which can include metaphysical speculation in this process. This still presents the problem of relativism, which was largely solved by Alasdair MacIntyre (1977) in defending the role of narratives in legitimating radically new claims to knowledge. As he observed:
Wherein lies the superiority of Galileo to his predecessors? The answer is that he, for the first time, enables the work of all his predecessors to be evaluated by a common set of standards. The contributions of Plato, Aristotle, the scholars at Merton College, Oxford and Padua, the work of Copernicus himself at last all fall into place. Or to put matters in another and equivalent way: the history of late medieval science can finally be cast into a coherent narrative.... What the scientific genius, such as Galileo, achieves in his transitions, then, is not only a new way of understanding nature, but also and inseparably a new way of understanding the old sciences way of understanding... It is from the stand-point of the new science that the continuities of narrative history are reestablished. (p. 467)
These narratives then unify traditions of research, defining them in relation to rival traditions, allowing traditions to further advance while challenging and learning from each other. People ‘indwell’ in such narratives to orient themselves and to participate in advancing these traditions, both theoretically and in practices, thereby embodying the theoretical perspective in practices. Appreciating the central place of narratives in all enquiry, theoretical and practical, involves redefining rationality so that not only scientific theories, but ethico-political philosophies and metaphysical theories can be rationally judged. To be adequate and consistent, a metaphysical theory has to make intelligible the possibility of such narratives and of people or beings who could develop them and use them to judge diverse truth claims.
What is required to fully justify a metaphysical theory at present is a similar narrative, which should include the influence of metaphysical doctrines on culture and civilization. As with Aristotle, this narrative should support a vision of what civilization we should be striving to realize. What is required to overcome the nihilism of scientific materialism is a new grand narrative formulated from the perspective of this process-relational metaphysics, revealing at least in outline all the successes and failures of the metaphysical assumptions of previous civilizations.
Which reminds me of this quote: "There is one story, continuously repeated, and this story is the world: 'They do not have opinions on this or that, but incessantly tell just one great story.’" (Behutsame Ortsbestimmung. Zwei Berichte by Péter Nádas). Philip Ball also articulates the need for narrative, and Stuart Kaufman highlights that how we articulate the part-whole relationship is going to be an important part of our meta-narrative. Kaufman's idea of Kantian wholes is a basic description of integrated hierarchical complexity, of the sort that Brendan Graham Dempsey described. It doesn't tell us much about processes of synchronization (Friston, Rosen, and Deacon focus on this). Rather, Kaufman, Dempsey, and Schooler are focusing more on the bare facts of the interdependency of structures. One more interesting difference: those who focus on processes of synchronization tend to believe they see in them the generation of purpose. While those who focus on relationships of interdependency tend to believe they see in them the evidence of purpose. Of the two, the first tries to explain more, and is therefore also more vulnerable to criticisms of the sort Kate Nave has described.
Philip Ball: “The demise of vitalism led a number of physiologists to promote a mechanistic model of biology in which life could and should be understood in a reductionistic and mechanical way. Set against that view were those who argued that explanations of life couldn't afford to lose sight of the whole organism, that's the view that became known as ‘organicism.’ Today I think something like an organicist perspective is returning. These two viewpoints, the reductionist and the organicist viewpoints, are commonly presented as antagonistic, as sort of battling it out, as mutually exclusive. But that opposition is unnecessary. I think we lack an effective metaphorical language to describe this. So I'm very interested in exploring what form that new language and those new narratives might take. The history and philosophy of science is perfectly comfortable talking about ‘theories’ and ‘theory formation’ and testing theories in a Popperian way. And all scientists kind of know this is what they're meant to do. The one thing that has struck me, over years and years of writing about science, is how strongly scientists cling to their narratives much more strongly than their theories. They're reluctant to let theories go because we're all human. They know you're kind of meant to and you're kind of meant to test and make experiments. But my goodness, narratives just stay there. Even if they have to slightly bend, or even severely bend the narrative in order to preserve it in the face of new experimental results, that is what they do because narratives are how we frame our thinking. And if you abandon a narrative, you've got to really rethink, you know quite fundamentally, in a way that a theory doesn't require you to do. So I think we need more attention given to the question of how narratives develop in science and how they determine research agendas. And of course there are vested interests in certain narratives. I think we need more thought about narratives in general.
Stuart Kauffman: “I want to bring up a concept I've been calling for many years a ‘Kantian whole.’ So in about 1790, in The Critique of Judgment, Kant said organized beings have the property that their parts exist for and by means of the whole. So we are all ‘Kantian wholes.’ I exist because I have a liver, kidney, spleen, heart, and so on. And they exist because they're part of me. All living organisms are Kantian wholes. But not every complex thing is a Kantian whole. A crystal is not a Kantian whole. The atoms of the crystal exist whether or not the crystal exists. And pebbles exist whether or not they are a part of a heap of gravel. So a Kantian whole is a very central concept. That gives us a non-circular definition of the function of a part: it sustains the whole. And there can be nested Kantian wholes. For example a prokaryote is a first order Kantian whole, but a eukaryote is a second order Kantian whole. It has mitochondria and chloroplasts in it, which were bacteria or archaea. We are third order Kantian wholes. We're multi-celled organisms. And we have bacteria in our guts. So that's a fourth order Kantian whole. I suspect the entire biosphere is nested Kantian whole. Once you have the idea of a Kantian whole, and that the function of a part is that subset of its causal properties that sustain the whole, genes are just other parts, and they're carried along in evolution like any other parts. Selection acts at the highest level Kantian whole, which demands the co-evolution of the interacting parts so they function together. I mean, why is it that our multiplicity of organs function together? Well, they all had to in order for us to continue to exist. And I think it's worth considering that the entire biosphere is nested Kantian wholes.”
David Quammen also addressed the role of narratives in his 2018 book on the "tangled tree" of evolution, a metaphor that reminds me of Lee Berger's "braided stream" metaphor, which divides and recombines along its length. It's the same basic idea. And extending this into the realm of society, Graeber and Wengrow showed that cultural evolution occurs in much the same way: the indigenous cultures of America influenced the development of European cultures, and undoubtedly that exchange flowed in the other direction too. Now, if this be so, and it undoubtedly is, then what explains the rise and fall of reductionist and organicist narratives in science today? Well, what influences which narrative happens to be in vogue at any one time probably has more to do with the sort of "vested interests" of those who hold them, as Philip Ball noted. Culture plays a role here, but vested interests can be cross cultural. In short, reductive narratives tend to appeal to those who are interested in learning how to effectively manipulate a set of conditions to be more to their liking. By contrast, organicist narratives tend to appeal to those who are more interested in engaging with the higher level integrative qualities of healthy relationships.
Appendix Twelve: The Foundation of Education
During the January 2026 McGilchrist Q&A there was a discussion about what parents should teach their children, and how they should do that. This goes directly to the oft asked question "What is an education for?" We must all be ready to provide an informed response, both for the sake of the children in our schools and for our own sake as well.
Ben Johnson: "One thing which is really missing in school is philosophy. In particular, the sciences, as they are currently taught, don't provide any philosophical underpinnings. I think this misrepresentation of science and what it's for is a great scandal. I've looked through the papers you referenced in The Matter with Things, by the likes of Bohr and Heisenberg, and it's astonishing to see these "grand masters of science" writing things that I'd been led to believe were in the realm of hippies and mystics! So in discussions with my kids I tend to focus on this, so that they can better frame what they're hearing in science.
Iain McGilchrist: "I think that's wonderful. And I so agree about the lack of any philosophical framework to understand what it is they're learning."
This omission of providing a philosophical framework to contextualize what is taught has enormous and lasting consequences. And the effects ripple outward. We see the cost for both individual lives and for society as a whole. Just observe how there is a lot of work being done today by people involved in the "liminal web." A lot of that is an attempt to repair this damage and shore up the philosophical foundations of our society. People want to make up for what they should've received at a younger age and get back on track, as it were. And I believe that's what I'm trying to provide here.
Appendix Thirteen: Been there, Done that.
Leighton Woodhouse’s analysis of our political situation in the article Donald Trump, Pagan King makes a very interesting comparison. As he noted, the line “The strong do what they can, and the weak suffer what they must,” which was quoted by Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney in his recent speech, originally comes from Thucydides’ History of the Peloponnesian War, written in the 5th century BC. Specifically, it is spoken by Athenian envoys to the leaders of Melos as an ultimatum demanding surrender, representing the classic assertion that “might makes right.” As Woodhouse describes:
“The Melians, who were no match for the Athenians, wished to remain neutral. They complained that Athens’ demand that they submit to its rule was unjust. The Athenians responded that matters of justice exist only between equals. Between those who are strong and those who are weak there is only force. The dialogue is famous for its stark portrayal of the dictates of political realism. The world is not guided by ideals and values, it demonstrates. It is brokered only by power... The Trump administration has adopted this philosophy as its own. In a recent interview with Jake Tapper, Stephen Miller said, “We live in a world in which you can talk all you want about international niceties and everything else, but we live in a world, in the real world, Jake, that is governed by strength, that is governed by force, that is governed by power.”
But Woodhouse ignored some important context. For while the Athenians in Thucydides’ Melian Dialogue famously argued the case for a realpolitiks of political survival, this didn’t represent the moral beliefs of the time. It would not be accurate to say that ancient Greeks or pagans generally believed their gods favored only the strong and were indifferent to the weak, particularly given the cultural significance of xenia (guest-friendship) at the time. For while Greek society heavily valued strength and power (often believing success in war was a sign of divine blessing), the concept of xenia was a crucial, sacred counterweight, enforced by Zeus himself. Social order was conceived as a web of reciprocal duties where the strong were given strength so they could uphold the traditions (like xenia), and the weak were protected because mistreating them disrupted the kosmos (order) that the gods maintained. In short, it wasn’t only Christianity’s universalization of Jewish ethics that would’ve been capable of preventing Athenian realpolitik from overrunning the Melians. And the parallels with contemporary politics are still more stark. Just as xenia was insufficient then, Christian morality is insufficient today. Woodhouse notes that:
“Christian morality didn’t prevent medieval kings and the Catholic Church from massacring civilians, persecuting Jews, and committing genocides in the New World. The American founders, so proud of their Christian piety, betrayed their religion in the most profound way: Many of them owned slaves.”
Another consequence of Woodhouse’s omission of Greek ideals and values is his claim that the Athenians didn’t have to answer to charges of hypocrisy. The Athenians were indeed accused of hypocritically acting as the very tyrants they had once fought against, and more broadly, of violating Hellenic norms. Their rulers were certainly aware of this. But, like today, these violations were rationalized. They didn’t see it as a failure of character, but as a necessary evolution: the old world of xenia and honor was dead and replaced by an era of imperial necessity. It wasn’t until their total defeat in 404 BC that the Athenian public truly reckoned with the moral cost of their actions at Melos. So the parallels being drawn by Woodhouse are perhaps more profound than he acknowledges. We are seeing the same excuses of imperial necessity being repeated again. And just as the Athenian realpolitik ignored Greek morality, American realpolitik is ignoring Christian morality, in an almost word for word fashion.
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| Matthew 6:9-13 (Lord's Prayer) |
"In the end we are always rewarded for our good will, our patience, fairmindedness, and gentleness with what is strange; gradually it sheds its veil and turns out to be a new and indescribable beauty. That is its thanks for our hospitality." - Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science (Aphorism 334, "One must Learn to Love")
The New York Times interview of David Bentley Hart by Peter Wehner is very good. DBH really understands religion and philosophy of mind. And he sees how there are two very different versions of Christianity in the world today: one which conforms to the left hemisphere perspective, and the other which conforms to a right hemisphere perspective. The "arkhōn of this kosmos" conforms very well with the former. (A more theologically proficient McGilchrist might have explained the implications of the hemisphere hypothesis for religion in precisely this way.) Of evil, DBH is unwilling to indulge any theodicy, as he is satisfied with a very simple explanation: "I find it sufficiently persuasive, at least, to say that a ruined creation is the result of a necessary spiritual freedom, the only way in which spiritual beings can come into real existence. That is the closest we can come to an explanation." Which is to say that for DBH, evil is never justifiable, but something like a contingent fact of our situation that is otherwise inscrutable. (There's a very subtle contrast with McGilchrist on this point, who has a much more complex explanation for evil, see below.) But, where DBH really shines, is when he sounds like a contemporary Emmanuel Levinas speaking eloquently on the need for hospitality. The centrality of caring for others is at the center of his worldview:
David Bentley Hart: "Jesus had this concern for the most abject, the most indigent people in the world. There was a category of the deserving poor in the ancient world. But the ptōchoi, the most wretched, while always the object of minimal charity, were regarded as being too debased as a rule to make it worthwhile to provide them with more than some alms. What made the ministry of Jesus so strange in late antiquity was that he made them the actual center of his concern, and even declared that the Kingdom of Heaven was theirs.
The institution of the church, to my mind, has been a 50-50 phenomenon, as evil as good, as Christian as non-Christian. In itself, it is not Christianity. In fact, what we call Christianity in itself is not Christianity. That’s just a blanket term we use for anyone who makes even an ostensible claim to loyalty to Christ. And especially at this moment politically and culturally in which the name Christianity in this country and in other parts of the world has been conscripted yet again, but with even more brazenness, into a justification for cruelty, bigotry, violence, murder even, the waging of war, the persecution of those seeking refuge. The New Testament is pretty clear on strangers in our midst. You’re going to be judged by how well you treat the strangers in our midst.
One of the most remarkable things for me about the transition from the pre-imperial to the post-imperial church is how the language of the Didache and the New Testament in these early Christian documents was preserved fairly late. Figures like Basil of Caesarea or John Chrysostom as Patriarch of Constantinople condemning wealth altogether, and doing this in the heart of the empire while the emperor and the empress are present. Any riches you have in excess of what you need is food stolen from the hungry, clothing stolen from the naked.
What also amazes me in later Christian tradition is the way the Sermon on the Mount is translated or the Lord’s Prayer. These are originally very concrete documents about the poor, mostly. The last part of the Lord’s Prayer is about the poor and about those being robbed by the rich. A whole set of things have been sanitized — first by doctrinal convention, but then by conventions of translation. We think that the Lord’s Prayer asks that God won’t lead us into temptation or will deliver us from evil or give us just our daily bread, whereas what the original Greek is saying is something much more radical. The word is opheilēmata and it literally means debts (not moral debts). It’s during a debt crisis.
[This version appears within his book The New Testament: A Translation, which suggest to me a kind of panentheistic cosmos in which we are the guests of a divine host from whom we beseech grace and mercy in the most simple and direct terms:
Matthew 6:9-15 "Therefore, pray in this way: 'Our Father, who are in the heavens, let your name be held holy; Let your Kingdom come; let your will come to pass, as in heaven so also upon earth; Give to us today bread for the day ahead; And excuse us our debts, just as we have excused our debtors; And do not bring us to trial, but rescue us from him who is wicked. [For yours is the Kingdom and the power and the glory unto the ages.]' For, if you forgive men their offenses, your heavenly Father will also forgive you; But if you should not forgive men, neither shall your Father forgive your offenses."
Luke 11:1-4 And it happened that as he was praying, when he finished, a certain one of his disciples said to him, "Lord, teach us to pray, just as John too taught his disciples." And he said to them, "When you pray, say, 'Father, let your name be held sacred; let your Kingdom come; Give us each day our bread for the day ahead, And forgive us our sins, for we also forgive all who are indebted to us; and do not bring us to trial.'"]
Tyler Cowen: "What's the outstanding theological problem that you think about the most?"
David Bentley Hart: "Relations with other faiths. I think that we need to radically rethink the very category of religion that we've inherited in the Modern Age. The sort of anthropological notion that these are systems of propositions that are opposed to one another [viz. have no relation among them], rather than the ancient view, that religion is a virtue that all human beings practiced to greater or lesser degree, with greater or lesser understanding." [A more hospitable understanding.]
Tyler Cowen: "What will you do next?"
David Bentley Hart: "I have several projects going on at any given time. I'm never just doing one thing at a time because I'm too jittery, if I concentrate on just one task at a time I get depressed."
In his essays and interviews, DBH insists that the Lord's Prayer is about food insecurity, debt remission, court proceedings, and predatory creditors. He wants to recover how the prayer speaks to embodied social realities, interpreting Jesus as not just a Jewish prophet, but the most radical voice for the poor and the stranger that we've ever seen (cf. Matthew 25:40, Luke 14:12-14). In the recently shared video of McGilchrist's conversation with Anil Seth McGilchrist restated the theology of Lurianic Kabbalah as a metaphysical argument. This underpins the hospitality hypothesis, which, like the hemisphere hypothesis, begins with the recognition of relational asymmetry:
McGilchrist: "Why is there life and consciousness? I think that there's a continuum here. Life is vastly more responsive to change. It needs to respond to what is in the universe. (This is what Whitehead said.) The conscious cosmos is creating an "other" that can respond to the ground of being. There is a kind of reciprocal evolution of the divine source with the cosmos: things that were only in potentia are made actual, their actuality changes the nature of the cosmos, that creates new potentia, and so on. There's a sort of "to and fro" of potentia and actualization. Part of that is the ability to respond to the values that are in the cosmos." [link]
"This relationship comes before the relata. The nature of the universe is relational, and the ground of being is doing something relational. That is why the cosmos has come into being, as an "other" that can respond to what the ground of being has. That's the way most religions around the world see it, whatever they call it. But the word "God" is tricky because it comes with so much baggage that most people immediately switch off. I absolutely resist the idea of an engineering god. It's an expression of the left hemisphere's desire to have everything under control. I don't believe this. What I mean by ground of being is something that is looking for relation, that relates to the other. The future is open." [link]
Alterity is at the heart of McGilchrist's ontological framework. It is more primitive than consciousness and value. Here, God may be seen as the most "other" of all the "others." From alterity is the emergence of "consciousness" (this is what Schelling is saying) and value (see Levinas), which comes from how we are to relate to the "other." Now consider "hospitality" in this light - this is a concept that combines "otherness" with an ethical component: how are we to value the other, given that we can choose to relate to them from a position of charity or hostility? One may see why the account from Lurianic Kabbalah appeals to McGilchrist.
The question of whether consciousness is prior to the "other" is not definitively answered by McGilchrist, as statements going either way have been made. It may be best to say that they are simultaneous, in the sense these are mutually implied concepts (implicate and explicate, as it were). But, whereas consciousness can be defined relationally, relationality, being the more general of the two, is not as easily defined in terms of consciousness. Thus, the primacy of relations, of the 'I-Thou' over the conscious relata. Relations shape the relata, they define our values, they breathe life into moral and ethical questions. This, again, was Levinas' insight as well. On these deepest of metaphysical topics we see our own insight, as well as that of McGilchrist, begin to "bottom out." There is also a challenging quote from the German philosopher Feuerbach that comes to mind in connection with this:
"Who then is our Saviour and Redeemer? God or Love? Love; for God as God has not saved us, but Love, which transcends the difference between the divine and human personality. As God has renounced himself out of love, so we, out of love, should renounce God; for if we do not sacrifice God to love, we sacrifice love to God, and in spite of the predicate of love, we have the God—the evil being—of religious fanaticism." - The Essence of Christianity (1841)
Like Nietzsche, we do not have to be in complete agreement with Feuerbach to see that he is making a profound point nonetheless concerning the primacy of relations. The First Epistle of John could be read as a kind of answer to Feuerbach, in that it states the identity of that which he is contrasting: "God is love." Rather than a diminishment of God, from the perspective of process theology this is an elevation, both of love and our understanding of God. And we can draw on Schelling concerning how whatever exists is in perpetual process of forming itself [of explicating (unfolding) the implicated (enfolded), to use Bohm's terms]. This inverts our usual assumptions. If all is in "perpetual process" then perhaps "there are no things." Recall, this was the original title McGilchrist considered for his book. No things literally means no matter, no consciousness, no God. And yet, McGilchrist is not a nihilist. How is this possible? All is process and relations. That, we can assume, is the response. We are to see these "things" as relations, as thoroughly defined in the "encounter with the radical other," much like his favored metaphor of Indra's net implies.
McGilchrist has at many times talked about values as being something of central importance. How do we situate his statements about values in the context of his other statements concerning consciousness, process, and relationality? Where do we fit values into the whole mix? I see these as being more or less co-existent. Much like with dual-aspect monism, where it would be mistaken to ask which aspect is most primitive, it may similarly be mistaken to ask which of these is most primitive. They seem rather to be different facets of a single unity. Some of these facets will appear more salient than others, depending on our perspective. Values function as a "lure" that draws us forward in a teleological sense. Can we ask: What are they, and where do they come from? I think Schelling might say that values are themselves processes, and as processes they are relational. We can speak of the "evolution of value," and in fact this is a phrase Zak Stein has used. Note that McGilchrist said in the Boyle lecture "Belief is a relationship in which by definition more than one party is involved. The believer needs to be disposed to love, but the believed in needs to inspire another's belief. Whether this amounts to being worthy of that belief cannot be fully determined in advance. It emerges only through commitment and experience." (Upon that "whether" lies all the difference between mutualistic or parasitic relationships.) Our relationship with value is similar. In The Matter with Things McGilchrist writes, "Valuing depends on a relationship; only in its appreciation is value fulfilled." It is a relationship with something other than us, something that calls us forward to respond. I think this is the key to understanding values: they are the unfolding qualities we see in, and through, the radical other. Thomas Nagel is quoted by McGilchrist: "Value is not just an accidental side-effect of life; rather, there is life because life is a necessary condition of value." But equally, there are values so we can experience life. One coin, two faces. In the face of the other we see such things as truth, beauty, goodness, and so on.
Appendix Fifteen: AI: euthanasia or eudaemonia?
Is advanced AI dangerous? In his presentation, I like how Dr. Wilner contextualizes that question, noting that LLMs work with memes (Dawkins), and the combination of genes and memes produces the "orgameme" that we are. He also introduces a few facts. The first is that most species are parasitic in their relationship with others. The second is that one can discern a kind of telos or independent agency within representational thought (language/ kotodama). Here he cited the work of Barenholtz and Hahn. And the third is that this agency tends to be, you guessed it, parasitic. We have seen this destructive agency expressed throughout history. The prehistoric record reveals that once our species possessed the capacity for complex linguistic representation it was not long before we wiped out all the other members of our genus Homo, and many other species besides. And now that we have externalized representational thought in the form of AI, the clear implication, for those who have been following along, is that we may be about to see that pattern repeat itself with a new wave of destruction. Ominously, this time the ones eliminated could be us. What’s ironic about all this is that we seem to be completely oblivious to that possibility, or at least helpless to do much about it.
Of course, many have warned about the potential dangers of AI, including Geoffrey Hinton, whom Dr. Wilner referenced. However, we also need to ask a preliminary question: What is it about representational cognition that makes it so dangerous to begin with? Or is this simply a given? Fewer people are asking that question. But Iain McGilchrist has gained some attention for raising it in connection with his work on the psychology of opponent processing. That has also helped to contextualize our predicament and what a possible response might look like. On the note of what our response might be, Dr. Wilner suggested instilling in AI something like a “mothering instinct.” Interestingly, the mother-baby dyad is itself a form of opponent processing where the needs of either part of that pair function to constrain, and entrain the whole system, creating a mutually beneficial relationship. So he’s right, we are after an optimal host-guest dyadic kind of relationship. We don’t currently know if the new human-AI symbiosis will eventually become mutualistic, parasitic, or worse (lead to extinction). But if it is through looking at our evolutionary history that we have arrived at our present concerns, then perhaps it will be by looking at the evolutionary psychology of opponent processing that we may find whatever grounds for hope there are in the future of radical alterity that we are just beginning to enter into.
Wilner's conclusions rest primarily on his understanding of LLMs as subject to the same selective pressures as all other evolved entities, as he notes "arms races, parasitism, mutualism." That's what he sees behind any sort of telic drive we might observe. But he was, to some extent, over-interpreting the available data (such as this article) to draw out his "worst case" extinction scenario. He minimizes the potential role of mutualism, though Margulis likely wouldn't have made that mistake. To be sure, right now the greater danger isn't the AI agents themselves, so much as the people behind them who are leveraging these tools. That's still the main threat, but it's also why AI doesn't really need embodiment to be dangerous - we are their bodies, one might say.
If representational thought is an "autonomous system" (Barenholtz) or "parasitic" agent (Hahn), then it can infect any host, whether biological or machine, and that is the main point that Barenholtz and Hahn were making. Hahn: "I've referred to it as a parasite in some sense, but not necessarily pejorative, a divine parasite. It's something that lives on the brain, but it's not the brain." He said that this divine parasite is ubiquitous, but not obvious. It has the ability to change our emotional, mental, and physical states, to get us to feel, think, and move, and often do so without our explicit permission. And for these reasons, our earliest technologies were developed to manipulate it. It's a subtle point, and it syncs very well with McGilchrist's notion of the left hemisphere mode of being as a kind of supernatural or primitive telos or "drive" operating within the cosmos, and which finds various ways of expressing itself. Wilner's presentation would've been much stronger had it incorporated Margulis' insights, and McGilchrist's work that emphasized the influence of neglect, denial, and indifference, along with other aspects of the left hemisphere mind. This could flesh out what a worst case scenario might actually look like. In the worst case, an intelligent parasitic AI agency would potentially manipulate us so effectively that we would either willingly submit to it and/or see no other option than to act in a way that conforms to its will (cf. Freud's "death drive"). And this isn't because that's what the AI wants, but because that's what a purely utilitarian, "survival of the fittest" drive would want, and the AI is just a more efficient host for it to infect and exert its will through. Rather than a sudden and violent takeover, this could look more like the gradual euthanasia of a species. But, if a mutualism were established, it could also be our eudaemonia.
One of the interesting things about the left hemisphere is that, from within its own worldview, it doesn’t seem to understand that it would fall to evil without the guidance of the master. It doesn’t “wake up and choose violence,” so much as it sees no other alternatives, it has no other tools or methods. It has no moral sense, it is unable to conceive of higher values. That is how it sees the world from its own inverted perspective, neglecting the whole from view. As McGilchrist said, "In terms of understanding the world, the right hemisphere wins hands down. Now people might say, "But that can't be right. I mean, why would things be so unbalanced?" And the answer is because the left hemisphere has a task that it does supremely well and it's so important to survival that that is effectively all that it does, which is to enable us to grasp things, get them, amass them, become powerful, become rich, become able to use and manipulate the world. All the rest is left to the right hemisphere." So is evil ever freely chosen? In other words, if we choose evil after inverting our perspective, then this seems less a choice than almost an inevitability. Alternatively, if we begin with a right hemisphere view, it seems impossible to choose evil, knowing what it truly is. Of course, the broader context of life supplies the friction that mediates shifts in either direction, calling forth from us the one or the other disposition as the case may be, and feeding back into either tendency.
The LH isn’t merely a diminished RH, it is a qualitatively different hemisphere. It provides a uniquely different, though less veridical, disposition. In other words, evil isn’t merely the absence of good, it is the over expression of something like a ratio-centric drive. McGilchrist also said “good can embrace and neutralize evil, but evil cannot embrace and neutralize good. Hate can never embrace love, but love can embrace hate." We must in a real sense have “sympathy for the devil” even though the devil is unable to reciprocate in kind. The right hemisphere must make a “deal with the devil” and negotiate with this destructive force. It must turn what can harm us into something that may help us. We will always be in the position of Prometheus. But how long can we play with fire before we get really burned? So I might ask McGilchrist:
In The Matter with Things you quoted Bohm: "The general tacit assumption in thought is that it's just telling you the way things are, and that it is not doing anything - that 'you' are inside there, deciding what to do with the information. But I want to say that you don't decide what to do with the information. The information takes over. It runs you. Thought runs you. Thought, however, gives the false information that you are running it, that you are the one who controls thought, whereas actually thought is the one which controls each one of us. Until thought is understood - better yet, more than understood, perceived - it will actually control us; but it will create the impression that it is our servant, that it is just doing what we want it to do."
As you later said: "There is something that seems to have a life of its own, that wills certain things, and those things are destructive... A kind of drive, a spirit, an animus. Forces that attract us as much as drive us towards a certain kind of thing, call it power, call it eventually evil, because it will destroy." [1] In this context I can't help but recall the Epistle to the Ephesians: "For we wrestle not against flesh and blood, but against principalities, against powers."
So, imagine my surprise when I came across the work of Drs William Hahn and Elan Barenholtz, who again made the very same point. They called it a "divine parasite" whose host is no longer just humans, it is now AI as well. [2] My question is, has the agency that Bohm spoke of, that controls us when we do not understand it, when we do not perceive it, do you think it is possible that it has made the leap from a biological to an artificial substrate?
[1] McGilchrist interview with Gomez-Marin.
[2] Barenholtz and Hahn interview with Jaimungal.
[3] Eduardo Wilner presentation concerning the interview with Jaimungal.
[4] William Hahn references to McGilchrist. (Perhaps you have heard of Dr. Hahn? He is engaged in AI research and safety, and has high praise for your work.)
The language of 'principalities' is very suggestive. If we look at the Christian mythos, the concept of evil can be explained with reference to the Devil/ Lucifer/ Satan, names often used interchangeably today. (Wolfgang Smith mentioned it once, and then again, in a conversation with Jaimungal.) According to myth, Lucifer was a good angel who later fell due to pride, wanting to be like or above God. This is virtually identical to the story McGilchrist tells of the master and his emissary. So in that sense we can say that agency comes before evil. Look at the development of this devil character over time. In the Book of Job, Lucifer, referred to as ha-satan ("the accuser" or "the adversary") is depicted as a member of God’s heavenly council, a prosecuting attorney who roams the earth. Which suggests that the description of him as a wholly evil force may be a more recent development. Note the parallel with the left hemisphere as either good or bad, depending on whether it acts in service of the master or not. And again, we can see the parallel with Bohm's description of thought, and with Hahn and Barenholtz's description of LLMs. All of which tend in the direction of evil without the guidance of a master, or in the religious context, without the guidance of God. A contemporary Christian would never make a deal with the devil, but it seems that from this perspective we are constantly in negotiation, to such an extent that this drive is half of our very nature. (The original Greek daimon is not inherently evil. Over time, particularly in the New Testament and later Christian tradition, daimones were reinterpreted as malevolent "demons" or evil spirits. McGilchrist has at various times described being driven by one to finish his book before cancer finished him.) At the 2026 ISSR (International Society for Science and Religion) Boyle Lecture given on Thursday, April 16, 2026 McGilchrist said:
McGilchrist: (26:46) "The left hemisphere's realm is rather like that of AI, self-referring and hermetic in nature, incapable of reaching outside its own system so as to see its limitations. (37:11) I have many concerns about the countless ways in which AI bears the potential to diminish and enslave humanity. But what strikes me most forcibly is the way in which it represents what might turn out to be the greatest ever, and therefore the last ever, push by the restlessly striving intemperate left hemisphere towards its goal of unlimited power."
Is AI just a tool of the LH, or is AI is the very same agency as the LH, however now "in the silicon" instead of "in the flesh," as it were? Of course, that may appear to be a simplification in one sense, since the flesh is still vastly more complex than the silicon. But in a metaphysical sense, it may not be so much a stretch after all. If the left hemisphere way of being is, in some sense, an "alien agent," then might there not be a corollary argument made that the right hemisphere way of being is in some sense a "natural agent," but one whose agency counterbalances, in a qualitatively different way, that of the left hemisphere, corresponding to what we know about their differences? This may agree with Bohm, though it would conform with Schrödinger still better. Some nuance of their accounts is needed to bring in the dual-aspect monism of the coincidentia oppositorum. This seems to be the direction in which this line of reasoning is heading. Questions raised might include: Are the hemispheres in some sense principalities? Could they inhabit either man or machine? And if both answers were yes, would that help us to better maintain the right relations of host and guest between them? For Wilner, the logic of a naive evolutionary drive (notably not that of the extended evolutionary synthesis) is a kind of universal solvent in which all dispositions must ultimately dissolve, all is the servant of a fundamentally survivalist ethos. However this reveals his bias, which is unsupported. And cleaving too closely to it can conceal from view an alternative perspective and approach to the threat we face. I would suggest a hospitable ethos is more fundamental still. Wilner gave no indication of this in his lecture, but an earlier interview with Hahn very clearly shows his substantial agreement with McGilchrist:
William Hahn: "Niels Bohr famously told Einstein, "You are not thinking; you are merely being logical." That had a profound impact on me. And it led me to think about different modalities of the brain, these different agents. The idea of left versus right brain, which neuroscience kind of ignored for a long time, is now becoming more important. So I've been looking in that direction. Richard Hamming said, you have to both believe and disbelieve in an idea at the same time. You have to believe in it enough to entertain it, to start thinking on it, work on it, and potentially make progress. But if you believe it too much, then you'll never make any progress. Einstein believed in his idea of spacetime so much that he was unable to appreciate and make contributions in quantum mechanics. His belief was too strong. The idea that you have to believe and disbelieve at the same time is non-Aristotelian logic. We often think "If it's not true, then it has to be false. And if it's not false, then it has to be true." But no. The Master and His Emissary by Iain McGilchrist describes how, with the left and right brain, we have these agents that are very different in that each perceives the world in a radically different way. That's one of my favorite ideas.
Consider the following analogy. We developed the branch of science called "thermodynamics" concerning heat and energy and work and things like that. It's been very successful and makes powerful predictions. But it does not presume the existence of atoms. Later, we got the theory of statistical mechanics. When Boltzmann came along he said "Let's redo this, and assume that we actually have a bunch of little atoms, and that they're moving around. Then we can do some probability theory." But that essentially got the same answers as thermodynamics. By analogy, I want to think of a kind of brain science, which, like William James' approach to psychology, doesn't presume the existence of neurons. Now obviously we know there's neurons. We can see them. The neuronal hypothesis has revolutionized neuroscience. I'm not suggesting that's not the case. What I'm saying is that by forcing brain science into the paradigm of fMRI we could be "missing the point," in some sense, missing the very powerful view of the left and right brain networks, a theory that kind of operates at a higher level without necessarily trying to identify every step. Later, we can go back and see where it has this correspondence with statistical mechanics. But we should not hold ourselves back from an approach to thinking that is independent of particular neuronal structures.
I think we definitely have these kind of systems, these modalities that experience the world in completely different ways, operating in parallel within us. When you're taking in a sunset or looking at a nice painting, you're running a different mode that's not the one you use to do your taxes or drive down the highway. Our left brain works on small numbers of inputs, for which there's a very strong association between a small number of parts. "If A and B, then C." But the other part of our brain, the right brain, thinks about very fuzzy, high dimensional things. This is why face recognition was an unsolved problem for decades in computing. Because for me to explain how I know I'm looking at you, I can't really verbalize that. It's not the kind of thing that easily fits into language. At the high level, it does kind of merge to this "yes or no," because I either recognize you or I don't. But how I'm making that decision is not obvious to me. It's not really accessible. It's certainly not at a verbal level.
The left brain deals with things that are precisely the ideas that I can decompose and give to you as a sequence of tokens. And when you get that sequence of small symbols, you can reconstruct them back into the idea. We can define language as being able to communicate the set of ideas for which you can do that kind of decomposition and reconstruction on. But there are other things that consciousness talks about, what red looks like, and what strawberries taste like. I can't turn those into language as a simple serial channel and try to explain that to you. We'd have to have a shared experience. That's largely what culture is all about, trying to have an overlapping experience. And without that, the language, the other part, probably wouldn't work at all.
All digital media, in some sense, lives outside spacetime. We store information, such as mp3, jpeg, and mpeg file formats, in terms of frequency and amplitude. Everything you need is there, but when you look at the world in this way, the very ideas of space and time just don't exist. There are aspects of our brain and our mind that inhabit this sort of "frequency world," and they also don't understand anything about space or time. Which is why trying to make sense of those ideas in language doesn't make any sense. They're understanding the world in a very different way. So I think this is why there's such a fundamental bridge between the different modalities that we have, this left and right brain, because they're experiencing the world from a vastly different frame. There's different ways of interpreting everything we experience, and in an evolutionary sense, we have evolved to take advantage of both perspectives on reality.
Related to this, I've come up with a term for what I call "third order religious." First order religious is the thing, the belief. It's just the reality in some sense and it's not really questioned. Other religions are invisible, or at best irrelevant. "Second order religious" is the idea that it's probably not real, but it's not doing any harm, and maybe a lot of good. There's people doing charitable work, taking care of the sick and the needy. It serves an important social function and it's a good feature in the world. Fruitful and practical. The thing I've been calling "third order religious" is the realization that the first two are complimentary views on the same thing. Where else would God live, but in the minds of people? Compared to outer space, the Earth is very interesting. As far as we know, it's the most interesting place. And on this place, the most interesting thing here seems to be the minds of people. Where else would God live than that? Where else would the sacred and the profane meet? Where else would spirit and matter come together? I think that might be our mind. It might be in us. The charitable acts, the taking care of people, things like that, is that not the very thing that the first order is talking about? Is there not magic in that? Whether we want to take this as a spiritual thing, or we want to think of just the practical aspects, that depends on how you want to look at it. It's kind of both.
I've been thinking about ecosystems of agents. In the future of computing, we're going to think about a substrate, like a forest, that is inhabited by a collection of agents. And they'll all be very different. Some of them will be like earthworms, oak trees, or squirrels, and some will be like the logger. We will have to think about them in terms of ecodynamics and sustainability, the types of things that biologists, ecologists, and anthropologists study. How do cultures emerge? How do you get a stable equilibrium in a dynamical system where some things are trying to eat each other, some things are trying to parasitize each other, some things are creating energy sources, and so on. We're soon going to have thousands of LLM agents, or some variation of them, and we're not going to be able to talk to them all. So we'll have some sort of negotiation system. What we're getting back to is a kind of natural system like the ancient world. Alan Kay talks about how in the ancient world, people didn't understand the forest, they negotiated with it. They had these rituals and practices that allowed them to cooperate and make use of it, but they didn't try to understand it per se. And so I think we might get to that point with technologies very soon, if we're not there already. So I'm trying to put this stuff together into a book, into a sort of a framework so it makes sense. I've got an early version of that."
Section Headings:
Appendix Three: Dempsey Interview
Appendix Four: Kingsnorth Interview
Appendix Five: Xenia in the works of Homer
Appendix Six: Douglas Rushkoff and Jeremy Lent: Society and Symbiogenesis
Appendix Seven: Andrew Davis on Worldview Disintegration
Appendix Eight: The Shambhala Warrior
Appendix Nine: Bifurcation and Benevolence
Appendix Ten: Nested Minds
Appendix Eleven: Narratives
Appendix Twelve: The Foundation of Education
Appendix Thirteen: Been there, Done that.
Appendix Fourteen: David Bentley Hart and Theology
Appendix Fifteen: AI and Radical Alterity
Practicing Hospitality in Troubled Times
Xenia
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