AI and the Battle for the Soul with Iain McGilchrist - Lecture 2: True Freedom in an Artificial World

[outro music] Here we go.

I want to talk to you about a, a topic that I think is of extraordinary topical importance, cognitive freedom.

And the, um, the motto of the college of which I'm proud to be becoming the chancellor is Sermo libera vita ipsa, freedom of thought is life itself.

In The Undiscovered Self, Carl Jung wrote, "If the individual, overwhelmed by the sense of his own puniness and impotence, should feel that his life has lost its meaning, which after all is not identical with public welfare or higher standards of living, then he's already on the road to state slavery and, without knowing it or wanting it, has become its proselyte." These words are of critical importance to us at the juncture in history in which we find ourselves now.

It's well known that liberty has many facets.

Isaiah Berlin, whose company I enjoyed for a time at All Souls, famously distinguished between negative and positive liberty, broadly speaking, freedom from and freedom to, and argued that these not being always straightforwardly compatible, they needed to be held in balance.

Balance is an important word here.

Ours is a peculiarly extreme and dogmatic age in which the subtler nuances that lead to harmony, including the insight that opposites often coincide, have been lost.

I associate that, too, with an imbalance at another level in the way in which we in the modern West use our brains, but I'll come to that shortly.

Current societal discourse on freedom, both on whether or not we are determined in our very nature and to what extent it's necessary to place constraints on human freedom, assuming it exists, has lost its equilibrium.

However, at a deeper level than the merely societal, I believe that, rightly understood, freedom is essential to what it means to be human and must be prized and protected if we are to aspire to an intellectual, moral, or spiritual life at all.

The nature of freedom is beset with paradoxes.

A prayer that is engraved on my heart comes from the morning service in The Book of Common Prayer of 1662, which begins, "O God, who art the author of peace and lover of concord, in knowledge of whom standeth our eternal life, whose service is perfect freedom." So it is that to be truly free, we must break loose from the bounds of our own ego.

At the societal level, to achieve freedom, we must bind it by laws, yet laws blindly applied or enforced with excessive zeal are a common source of injustice.

We need restriction and openness, freedom and constraint simultaneously.

Everything flows from the pairing.

We lose ourselves and consequently find ourselves in music, dance, or contemplation of a beautiful painting or landscape.

At the heart of life lies the conjunction of opposites, something we appear to have ignored or forgotten.

If properly understood, it can set us free.

If denied, it leads to repression of truth we are unwilling to accept, a truth that will sooner or later, with renewed strength, return to wreak its vengeance.

Jung knew, and every psychiatrist since him knows, that this is the case.

But where is this crucial insight to be heard now in public debate? Some things we seem to believe are just good, and more and more of them is better and better.

Others are just bad and must be destroyed.

I'll divide my reflections in this talk into two parts.

In the first, I will ask, are we essentially free? Or is our sense that we are free a delusion? And why does that matter? In the second part, I will offer reflections on two more strictly accidental issues, issues specific to our time and place, ever-increasing political pressures to limit our cognitive freedom and the impact of technocracy, especially artificial so-called intelligence.