AI and the Battle for the Soul with Iain McGilchrist - Lecture 1: Information is Not Understanding

What exactly is AI? Whatever it may be, I know this.

It never gave birth to a new life.

Never mourned the loss of a beloved partner.

Never knew joy in the world and yet grieved over its fragility.

Never saw a beauty that scarified its heart.

never fell in love and yet lived to see that love falter, never suffered and had to contemplate its own death, never felt intimations of something inexpressibly great and grave that spoke only to its soul.

for it has neither soul nor body, those two elements which together, interpenetrating one another, constitute the entirety of human existence here on Earth.

As Wittgenstein said, the human body is the best picture of the human soul.

AI can have as much information as you like, but what could it ever understand? What does it mean to know, really to know? Isaiah Boleyn, describing the tenets of Enlightenment thinking, refers to the three propositions upon which the whole Western tradition rested, namely, that all genuine questions can be answered, that if a question cannot be answered, it is not a question, that all these answers are knowable, that they can be discovered by means which can be learned and taught to other persons, and that all the answers must be compatible with one another.

When Berlin refers to the Western tradition, he's speaking of the Western philosophical tradition, that is, that part of Western culture, dealing in explicit fashion with the resolution of questions and answers.

Although philosophers in the West since the time of Plato, but importantly absolutely not before, had behaved as though these tenets, Berlin's three propositions, were true.

There was, until the time of the Enlightenment, enough implicit expression of cultural wisdom through the media of poetry, drama, painting, and above all, religious ritual, in all of which it is easily perceived as far from true that all questions can be answered, that all questions can be answered and their answers taught to others, and that all the answers are mutually compatible.

These tenets, though espoused by philosophy, had not come to shape the culture itself.

But with the heightened self-awareness of the movement called the Enlightenment, and which the great physicist-philosopher David Bohm called the Endarkenment, these three obviously false propositions came to dominate not just academic philosophy, but the business of life itself.

Or, to look at it another way, in what became known as the age of Les Philosophes, we all became Philosophes malgré nous.

AI is an expression of this very unusual way of thinking, in which information aspires to replace meaning, to replace by mimicry knowledge, intelligence and understanding.

In every language I know other than English, a distinction is made between two fundamentally different ways of knowing.

Knowing the facts of the case, so to speak, and knowing from experience.

In French, for example, savoir is used to denote the first kind of knowledge and connaître the second.

Thus, I know savoir that Paris is the capital of France, but I know connaître Paris because I lived there for several years.

Similarly with wissen and kennen in German.

The first is a kind of propositional knowledge, knowing that as opposed to having knowledge of.

In other words, the first remains in an abstract conceptual realm which is wholly unlike reality, rather a mere and meagre representation of reality.

It is like the glaring simplicity of a map contrasted with the almost infinite complexity of the world that is mapped.

Another way of putting this difference is that between knowing about something from the outside and knowing it intimately from the inside.