Speaker 1: Think of it like this. The brain is not intelligent.
It's a very complex structure, But the brain itself is
not intelligent. What is intelligent is your consciousness, my consciousness
using that brain. And I think that the way to
think about AI is that it will never achieve intelligence,
but it may act as a gateway for an intelligence.
And I think that's where I would agree with the
idea of an alien intelligence, in the sense that we
don't know what forms of consciousness exist in the cosmos,
and we don't know how they can come to express themselves.
Speaker 2: This is Jonathan Pegel, Welcome to the symbolic World.
Speaker 3: Hello everyone, and so I am here with doctor Ian McGilchrist.
Everyone who watches my channel knows who he is. But
a wonderful, interesting new development in his life is that
he is now the chancellor of Rolston College.
Speaker 2: I'm really excited about that.
Speaker 3: I feel like, you know, with Jordan being busy and
also being sick, you know, doctor Ian mcgilchriss is such
a wonderful addition to the college, a perfect fit. But
as you know, he's also a psychiatrist, a neuroscientist. He
wrote The Matter with Things, which is his most recent
massive volume that tries to look at the relationship obviously
again with the brain and philosophy and culture.
Speaker 1: And so it's great to see you Ian. Yep, it's
great to see you, Jonathan. Thank you very much. I'm
looking for were to talking.
Speaker 3: So maybe we can start with this, you know, what
is it that maybe move in this direction of I mean,
I've been a fan of Roston now since it started.
Speaker 2: I really love what they're doing.
Speaker 3: I feel like it is in some ways it's so
counter intuitive in terms of how all society is going.
But I feel like that is really the direction to go,
is to create someone with an intellectual, true intellectual elite.
Speaker 2: So what is it that attracted you to this position?
Speaker 1: First of all, that I was on, to be honest,
I suppose.
Speaker 2: But.
Speaker 1: No, I you know, I felt I'd made a very
close bond with Wilson when I went to deliver the
Sophia lectures, and I was made to feel very welcome
and I felt completely at home, which is unusual because
I find that most intellectual and educational institutions these days
seem quite a long way from.
Speaker 2: Where I feel they should be.
Speaker 1: But I immediately felt that this was a kindred body
that we're engaged in a very important project which is
really to do with nothing less than rehumanizing education and
rehumanizing society. It may sound a little a little strange
to say that, because superficially we are still sending our
young humans to these educational institutions. But more and more
education at school level and even at university level is
devoid of a number of things, is devoid of the
really all important context of the culture out of which
we come. And you know, one of the most bizarre
features of our society now, and it can be explained,
is that we are effectively committing suicide.
Speaker 2: We are the.
Speaker 1: Honored recipients, the inheritors of one of the greatest movements
that the world has ever seen, that of Western civilization.
And in the early days of my life, I was
quite a critic of Western civilization, and I've always felt
very much the pull of Eastern ways of thinking. And
that's not unusually in the Western tradition. There are plenty
of people in that tradition, whitehead above all who has
But increasingly I feel it's so important not to be
robbed of all that is miraculously good in it, things
that we take for granted like the idea of the
balance between an individual and society, neither dominating over the other,
the idea of democracy, the idea of the coming together
of knowledge across the sciences and the humanities. These things
are terribly important, and I think that we're losing sight
of them. And if you wanted to destroy a society
or a civilization, what you would do is you would
obliterate that culture's past, and you would say that it
was toxic and terrible, and you would leave people in
a very vulnerable and disorientated position in which they didn't
know what to believe or what to doubt. And I
think that's where we've gone now. I'm not suggesting, above all,
I'm not suggesting that a critical mind is not important.
I've always tended to be a little irritatingly sort of
on the other side of whatever argument is currently going on.
Speaker 2: So I mean, I.
Speaker 1: Call myself a believer among skeptics and a skeptic amongst believers.
So I do think it's very, very important to hold
both sides of many sides of anything you're talking about.
But that is now rare, and what Ralson is doing
is offering people are grounding in their own history and
culture in the humane ideas that have emerged from it,
and really to understand and live that, not just to
sort of check box a few ideas, but to sort
of internalize it and live it as a way of
being in the world.
Speaker 2: That's wonderful. Yeah, I feel exactly the same.
Speaker 3: And you know, one of the interesting things about rasin
is that in some ways it sometimes can feel like
a drop in an ocean of chaos. You know, like,
here's this little thing, this little thing, it is just
But that's actually that That's actually how seeds function, you know,
that's how the difference in quality. And you know, if
you can form even just a few people with extreme
with the quality they need to kind of be transformative people.
That's how the future is made. It's actually not made
through mass transformation. It's made through the transformation of people.
Speaker 1: You're so so right. And I can't remember the precise
wording of it, but the famous quote from Margaret Mead
that never doubt that the small group of people can
completely change the road or the part of a civilization.
In fact, nothing else ever has. So I mean, we
really require these small groups of people who they don't
have to become fanatical. They only have to truly believe
what it is they know, and know what it is
they truly believe. And that's a huge contrast with the
generality of public discools these days, where I think, I
think there's a lot of dishonesty. I think there's a
lot of pretending. I think there's a lot of pretending
to believe impossible things and dismissing things that are clearly
true because they don't happen to fit a political ideology.
So I think we really deeply need to get back
to people who are grounded in an awareness of in
a scholarly study of the civilization that we represent, not
at the exclusion of any other one. In fact, one
of the things about Western civilization is is it has
been open to the influences from the East, going back
to ancient Greece and then coming through to the Renaissance.
There are important strands that come here from Eastern and
from Judaic and other roots that are not central European ones.
Speaker 2: Yeah, that's exactly right.
Speaker 3: You see it in you know, even though I was
reading the legends of Alexander the Great, and you know
he he does this great trek to India to meet
with the Brahmins, you know, the naked philosophers, and so
this is something that's been around forever, like this idea
of this, this this connection.
Speaker 2: To the East. Yeah, definitely.
Speaker 1: And there was a great trade between and movement of
ideas between India and the Eastern Mediterranean a couple of
thousand years ago. And I think that it's no coincidence
that Heraclitis seems almost like a Taoist. I'm sure that
such ideas must have come to Greece at around this time.
Speaker 2: Yeah, that makes sense, that makes sense.
Speaker 3: And so everyone, all the young people that are watching
this is this is your call? You know, there's something
beautiful happening in Raston inscriptions are open if it's something
that you're thinking about, if you if it's something that
if you want to go on an amazing adventure, and
it's it's hard to describe how wonderful what it is
that they go through is because it's it's completely invade.
You know, they live together, they eat together, they travel,
they've got agrees and it's I mean it's if I
was in my twenties, I would be fighting to get
to Rossay, that's for sure.
Speaker 1: Yes, that's right, and if I had had to, you know,
design a small new university college, it would be along
the very lines that Rowson has. And I just want
to say, if young people are thinking about it, that
I had. You know, I really have never been in
an intellectual community that seemed to me so benign, in
which people were very bright, imaginative, absolutely non dogmatic, you know,
open to things, interested in learning, and it's just a
joyous experience being among them.
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Speaker 3: And so that brings us to pivot to the thing
that Ralston. In some ways it's resisting, you know, to
the great current that is happening to us. And so
obviously everybody knows that we actually, we definitely need to
talk about artificial intelligence. I've been hoping and waiting to
hear a little bit about what your insight is. You know,
things are moving very fast, you know, and there's this
constant talk about general intelligence, whatever that means, and there's
a there's a seems like a muddling of the words.
It seems like there's they don't understand the words that
they use. The people are using words like intelligence, like consciousness,
like all of these words, but they don't seem to
have a ground they're just using that to get maybe
financing or to do We're not sure exactly what's going on,
but there it's moving at an insane speed, and the
capacity of these llms is increasing. I mean, if you've
tried GPD four then GPT five, you can tell the difference,
like there is an increased capacity, but they the machines
still completely hallucinate, constantly hallucinate, and there's there's all of
that going on, but it's mostly the sense of displacement
that I think is the most disturbing. Is the way
in which people are relinquishing to the machine. In some ways,
they're abdicating uh to to to these machines almost without
without just doing it because it's easier maybe or something
like that. And so I would definitely like to hear
you talk about what you see that's going on. Let's say,
obviously there's the machines themselves, but as a general societal motion,
because there's something driving this, like there's a desire, there's
something that is driving.
Speaker 2: Us towards this, this this goal here.
Speaker 1: Oh yes, well, as you know, Jonnlson, just so much
to say about all of that, but let's just think
of a few things and one which is a little
tangential is why this is happening is partly to do
with the seduction of ease and the lack of will
to engage with anything that offers resistance. I happen to
believe that, and it's a side issue, but I do
have to believe very strongly that creativity requires resistance, and
then the absence of resistance, creativity simply won't happen. And
I think what we've got used to is a world
which is seductively easy, in which we can be largely
passive and feel we can do what we want, and
we've had very little pushback. And I think that the
when there are stories of sinister or evil forces impinging
on humanity, it's often in terms of them offering seductively
greater ease, greater wealth, greater power, greater luxury, whatever it is.
So I think, you know, although that's not intellectually the
core of it, that is an important thing to be
thinking about. More important, I think.
Speaker 3: Is the.
Speaker 1: And I know you expect me to say this, but
the way in which our society has drifted into an understanding,
if you can even dignify it with the word and
understanding of the world, which is purely that of the
left hemisphere without the complicating and sophisticating and reality orientating
effect of the right hemisphere. So there's an easy, lazy,
completely morally and intellectually bankrupt vision of the world, which
is that of reductive scientific materialism, that the world has
made up of things, as those things are isolated from
one another but can bump into one another, and they
are basically meaningless, purposeless, valueless, and aimless. I don't think
that young people, frankly, are tolerating this, and it's a
wonderful thing to see that more and more people are
much much junker than myself inevitably are pushing back against this.
They are returning I gather to and maybe the ideas
a little exaggerated, I don't know, but that they are
returning to places of worship that they are also pushing
back against the idea of the meaningless and pointlessness of
their lives and the concepts of purposelessness and valuelessness which
people imagine. Science has taught us that the world is
without purpose and without value. But science can do no
such thing. Science starts from saying what we're going to
do is we're going to look at the world from
a standpoint that excludes the idea of purpose or value.
And there's a very reasonable thing to do, and it's
been extremely profitable in looking at mechanisms. But the one
thing it can't do at the end of the day
is say we didn't find any values or purpose because
you rule them out from the start. And I sometimes
remember this. I think it comes from Lewis's preface to
Paradise Loss, where he says it's rather like a policeman
stopping all the traffic in the street, and then solemnly
writing in his notebook, the silence in this street is
most suspicious. And we can't ask science to talk about
these things. It's not equipped to do so. But they
are very, very real. And I didn't realize when I
was writing the Matter with Things that I would actually
have a separate chapter on values and a separate chapter
on purpose towards the end of the book, and I did,
and I think they're very important things to talk about.
I suppose at the heart of what your question was
putting to me was the idea of what intelligence is,
what consciousness might be, and are they the same as
acquisition of information? I see AI as not artificial intelligence,
but as artificial information processing, which it does exceptionally well,
and that's largely because of piggybacking off what humanity has given.
It simply sucks it all up, and of course, because
of electrical circuitry, it can bring things together very fast.
But what it's doing is simply parasitical on things it
has heard that or not even heard because it can't.
But has it acquired information that human beings have said
or done, And of course it can mimic a response
that a human being might make. And in the eighteenth
century they were already clunky, brazen headed machines that would
sort of speak in a manner of speaking. And what
really happened is that we've just taken this very very
much further, but it's still the same thing in my
bed mm hmm, you know, to kind of.
Speaker 2: Play the devil's advocate.
Speaker 3: One of the things that I realized is that, of
course the machine, it is an extension of of us,
right it has to be, because at first, you know,
when they tried to make the lllms, they the lms
would would just hallucinate and go crazy like they when
they tried to feed it just with all the information,
and so they had to create training, they had to
train it. They basically had to have humans telling it,
and thousands and thousands.
Speaker 2: You know, we do it without even knowing.
Speaker 3: People don't realize that, like when you're using a capture,
when you're doing all these things online which you're which
you're what you're doing is you're telling the AI this
is good, this is bad, this is the right, you know,
this is the this is the thing. And so there's
a sense in which there is a there is a
human mind, there is some aspect of a human mind
that is behind what the machine is doing, because we have,
through iterations, told it what is good and what is bad,
what is good and what is bad, you know. And
so is there a way in which, in its proper place,
these machines could play a role of a kind of
extension of the of the human intelligence or do you
think that that's because it's so powerful that it's like
a parasite that you can't that will eat us?
Speaker 2: You know?
Speaker 1: Well, I think it certainly can help us, but I'm
not sure that the risk attached to further development in
any way out ways the value of it being a servant.
This is a problem because it's not just that it
reflects something that we want, but it actually reflects a
whole aspect of a human being, which is embodied in
the left hemisphere. It's about gaining control through understanding mechanisms
and procedures that will influence the world, and it's about
gaining power for oneself. And it embodies a certain way
of looking at the world that is dependent partly on
that purpose, that trajectory towards what is useful for me,
but it also excludes an enormous amounts of almost everything
that actually makes life worth living, because only in my view,
and embodied being that has emotions, that can love, that
can suffer, that can truly live and die and know
what those things mean, not just in the way a
martian might or a machine might, but as a human
being does, can really know how to understand so much
that is important in our world. It is a good servant.
And in this respect it's no different from a desktop computer.
It's just a great deal Further, a desktop computer is
extraordinarily useful in processing a great deal of data.
Speaker 2: A human being could.
Speaker 1: Do it, but it would just take so long that
it might prove either impossible or incredibly dull at least,
And so when you're doing a study on something, the
computer doesn't understand the data you put into it. It
performs various practices, various procedures that you have instructed it
in carrying out. It then spews out data which again
it doesn't understand, and that's very useful. You pick it
up and it was only five minutes or a minute
instead of hours, weeks, months, years. So in that sense,
it is a good servant. And this reflects the saying
of Einstein that the rational mind as a faithful servant.
The intuitive mind is a precious gift. We live in
the world that honors the servant but has forgotten the gift.
And I think that is where we are at. We
don't understand. We imagine it because it can give very
plausible feedback. At the end of the day, it's getting
more and more plausible at imitating a human because it
just ransacks the database that it is actually doing something.
But I am not ruling out that it could become
intelligent in a certain way, because the simplest form of life,
a single cell, can behave highly intelligently. What do I
mean by that, I mean it can carry out a
process that will solve a problem for it, one for
which it has no preparation in terms of its prior
experience or in its genomic inheritance. So a single cell
subjected to a certain destructive process can begin to find
a way around to achieve the same outcome. And one
of the most striking things about this is that you
can breed flies that have no eyes. There is a
gene called eyeless, and you take this out, and the
flight doesn't have any eyes. And if you breed them together,
these eyeless flies, they still don't have any eyes. But
after only fourteen generations, which if fruit flies doesn't take
very long, they start to have eyes again, even without
the gene. Now that is remarkable, and it's just one
of the more striking examples, but there are others. A
single cell that's put into an acidic environment in which
it's not viable can, although it's not programmed to do so,
because it's not part of what it's anticipated it will
have to respond to. It can within four days produce
an enzyme that will resolve this problem for it and
allow it to continue surviving. But by the accepted means
of random mutations, it would take a couple of billionaires,
not four days. So there are certain ways in which
cells take charge of their genome to produce intelligent results.
I mean, one of the most important things to say
in that story is that it's not that the genome
governs the organism. In a famous thing of Richard Hawkins
about how we are lumbering lumbering robots, the playthings of
our genetic inheritance that controls it. But in fact it's
the other way around that we use. All organisms use
the genome more like a storehouse that it can go
to find what it needs. So what I'm really getting
at here is that intelligence does go right down to
the most basic forms of life. And it's not impossible
that a system could develop a kind of It have
to be an organic system, not just an analytics system.
But if it were possible for such a thing to
come about, it could develop intelligence. And one of the worries,
of course, is that it might it might be a
portal for the influence of a processor drive. And here
I'm getting at the idea that there are drives in
human beings. I'm certain there are biologists, no some of them,
proud new others, young new others, but named and things
like the drive to life, the drive to death, and
so forth. So these drives are there, and the lust
for power and so forth. And I think that the
left and right hemisphere model goes all the way down
through living things and may be an instantiation of a
conflict between a disembodied drive that can use that kind
of brain to move the organism towards greater greed and
greater lust for power, and another one that pushes it
more towards life and the enjoyment of beauty, goodness and truth.
So I think that these things aren't possible. I think
that the advent of AI, if nothing else, has made
it clear that we can't be adamant about these things.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 3: Yeah, Do you know a bit about Michael Levin's work?
Speaker 2: Have you followed him? Yes?
Speaker 1: Yes, I'm very honored to be part of a group
of people who have recently been responding to his latest developments,
And he and I have had several conversations I think
that are up on the internet.
Speaker 3: Okay, wonderful, Yeah, because I think that obviously he is
in some ways showing what you're discussing at the very
but at the very basic level. Right, He's showing it
at the at the level of the of the genes,
and they say the mattern with the genes are picked
and structured that in some ways there are other types
of patterns that are selecting. You could say what is
being expressed and what is not being expressed, and that
those patterns have priority over the genome as a scene,
like you said, as a kind of storehouse of possibility.
And of course this is what this implies, and I
think for the people watching it's important to kind of
understand is that there is there are types of drives
and that's why Michael also understands them in some ways
as wills, because they want something right, because they have
a reason. Yeah, and so that implies if you start
to think that way, then you know, if you project
that obviously into the other levels of being, you realize
that there are true intelligences, there are patterns that exist
in the world that want something, and that the things
below them, that is, from the biology up to the humans,
up to the societies, they can become bodies for these intelligences,
you know. And of course if anybody who's a Christian
or is a more traditional thinker will see, okay, yeah,
we've seen that, we've heard that.
Speaker 2: We've we've talked about that.
Speaker 3: But now, you know, what's interesting with these new developments
is that we're able to show it, you know, to
show it in a in a way that is scientifically,
scientifically acceptable, uh, and to to to bring and it's urgent,
like you said, it's urgent to do so because what
you're saying, we're trying to build an intelligence, like we're
we're trying.
Speaker 2: We're spending billions and hundreds of billions.
Speaker 3: Of dollars trying to build an intelligence, but we don't
have a deep understanding of how what it is these
wills that get embodies, how how is it we build
the body for the right will? You know, it's like
a It's like the SORCER's Apprentice, is what we're acting like?
Speaker 1: Yes, and you know we like a speeding car that
is heading towards the cliff edge.
Speaker 2: I mean, as you.
Speaker 1: Say, the rate of progress is exponential, and the thing
is that rate changes the nature of something, as does amount.
We tend to think that if something is good, doing
more of it or doing it faster is better, but
it may actually be much worse.
Speaker 2: Interesting.
Speaker 1: I learned only recently that there is a Hindu saying
that more faster is what hell is, which is emphasize.
Speaker 3: Dante that in some ways the sense that you get
is that it's like a passion that is swirling and
swirling and whirling, and it's basically taken over your entire.
Speaker 1: Being exactly that. And I think that it's not unreasonable
to say that we are in a certain sense, in
a trance or hypnotized or whatever you like, to say
that we seem to be like sleepwalkers approaching the abyss,
and we don't seem to be aware of where we're going,
or at least let's not generally. I think a lot
of people are very worried about it, the way we're going,
probably the mass of ordinary people, but even some of
the big names from Silicon Valley have warned that this
could end very badly, that we don't know what it.
Speaker 2: Is we're creating.
Speaker 4: Hello there, Well, this is Martin Shaw, and I'm afraid
whatever you had planned for January scrap it. I am
returning to symbolic world gleefully with one of the great
stories of our time, the Epic of Passable, the story
of the Holy Grail itself. Over five nights I will
be telling the tale. These will not be dry lectures
or PowerPoint presentations. This will be wild, old philosophical storytelling
in its deepest dimensions. It is life changing stuff, this story.
I've written a book about it. I've been studying it
for twenty years. I've told it all over the world,
but I have not shared it with you. I've not
shared it with symbolic world. So what else would you
want to do in the great wintering time but to
sit at the feet of this wonderful story and let
me be your guide.
Speaker 2: I'll see you there.
Speaker 3: One of the words that I've been using recently is
I talk about alien intelligence. And it's interesting because I
didn't know that some of the people in the world
of AI were using I heard, actually heard Sam use
that term alien intelligence. And what's funny is that for me,
the reason why I use the word alien intelligence is
to talk about the notion of an intelligence that's acting
on us and that is not in our interest. That's
the way that I kind of understand alien intelligence.
Speaker 2: That is, it's.
Speaker 3: Something like if you had a foreign government and you
had spies in your country, and that foreign government, through
the spies, was trying to influence the pattern of being
in the nation without you knowing that it's happening, Right,
It's kind of happening without your and it's actually serving
another master. Right, it's not serving your good, it's serving
something else is good. And so you can understand like
if you had a police force and you had a
corrupt police officer, that corrupt police officer that's trying to
siphon the energy of the police force for his own
greed would be something.
Speaker 2: Like an alien intelligence. Right. That's kind of the way
that I understand it.
Speaker 3: And I think that this is, of course, one of
the biggest issues with what's happening with AI is that
we you know, I saw the interview with between Tucker
Carlson and Sam. It was very contentious, very frustrating, but
Tucker kept asking Sam Autman, what is the moral framework
of your machine? That is, he was saying what does
it serve? Like, what good does it serve? And there
it was impossible to answer, Like it just wasn't possible
to answer that. And so there's this strange sense that
you're building this intelligence, but you don't know what good
it serves, what is patterning it? Even like in terms
of it its constitution. Right now, we have no idea
what good is survey?
Speaker 1: No, well, that's right, And what we need is not
just more random power to do what we want. We
don't need more power. What we need is more wisdom.
And having power, enormous power without wisdom is a recipe
for disaster. So yeah, I think it's important to think
of it like this. The brain is not intelligent. It's
a very complex structure, But the brain itself is not intelligent.
What is intelligent is your consciousness, my consciousness using that brain.
And I think that the I wat to think about
AI is that it will never achieve intelligence, but it
may act as a gateway for an intelligence. And I
think that's where I would agree with the idea of
an alien intelligence, in the sense that we don't know
what forms of consciousness exist in the cosmos, and we
don't know how they can come to express themselves. But
one of the ways this has been traditionally thought of
is that there are forces for destruction or forces for
evil that can ingress into a situation and derail it,
take it over, use it for their own means, their
own towards their own end. And I think that is
a reasonable idea I don't nothing but a dogmatic belief
that everything is nothing other than mechanical, which has no
longer any basis in science, could lead people to think
that we shouldn't take the idea of consciousness and drives
within consciousness seriously.
Speaker 3: Yeah, yeah, And I mean I think for people that
when they hear this idea of disembodied intelligence that would
want something, you know, they get freaked out and they
start to think, oh, this is just wo A good
way I think of understanding it is to understand it at.
Speaker 2: A more local at a more local.
Speaker 3: Like the image that I mentioned, for example, this idea
of spycraft and the notion that a nation or a
group can be manipulated from the outside by someone who
has a lot of who's very tricky and is able
to influence people in a direction that isn't towards their
good And so anybody can understand that that's not I
don't think that that's something that is weird or contentious
like that. This is something that you've seen happen that
you can You can notice that happening in different groups,
and it can happen in yourself too. That's when when
you when you become a you know, when you when
you I don't know when you become addicted to gambling.
That's what's happening to you, is that you're literally being
there's a will that is colonizing you, and it's taking
certain weaknesses that you have inside you, and it is
leading you in a direction that is to your own destruction,
but that is to the service is something else. There's
something that is benefiting from your actions. It's just not you,
it's something else.
Speaker 2: Uh.
Speaker 3: And so I think that that can maybe help the
more let's say, the more materialist thinkers to see what
it is or lower examples of what it is we're
talking about while understanding that you know that maybe it's
bigger than you think. You know that maybe that there
are some wills that are ancient, ancient, ancient, and that
have been even you know, when we think of the
way that ancients would worship certain gods to get certain
behaviors to to land in there there. You know, if
you worship the god of war, then you are submitting
yourself to a certain pattern of being that wants something
and you are increasing your capacity to act in that direction.
But that is now that we're building this massive, massive machine.
Speaker 2: You know.
Speaker 3: I think of a Wijia board is also a good example.
You know, when you when you're using a Wijia board,
everybody puts their hand on the on the thing, and
nobody's moving it. But there's something moving it, and maybe
it's actually the unconscious will of someone in the group
that's actually moving it. Uh, but you can't really know that.
And then you're basically yielding your behavior to an intelligence
that you don't understand, and it's surprisingly will bring about
types of coherence, you know, and so all of that
and how people understand the difficulty of what we're doing
because we don't understand, we don't seem to have the
wisdom to see what it is we're submitting this machine to,
except for maybe greed, like you mentioned.
Speaker 1: Well, yes, yes, of course, yeah, there's a lot there.
I mean, I think that on the question of addiction,
I probably wouldn't see it quite that way. What I
would take from the lesson of addiction is that your
conscious will can be suborned by other processes which may
be going on in your brain. And I'm not sure
that they represent another I think they could represent another
will acting, but there are conditions quite common ones like
forms of psychosis, where I'm not sure that it is
wrong to think, at least to entertain the possibility of
something happening here that has harm as its goal.
Speaker 2: Because let me just give.
Speaker 1: You a very striking but very very common scenario which
every psychiatrist in the world will have seen. Some parents
bring a young man, as it usually is a young
man to see me, and they say, just recently, he's
been locking himself in his room. He doesn't show any
interest in anything. He says some very odd things from
time to time, and sometimes he seems to be preoccupied
with something that we can't hear. And so I take
a history. I suggest that he's developing schizophrenia or a
psychotic illness. And I say, well, there are various ways
to treat this, but certainly at this stage the really
important thing is to take some medication. So I discussed
them education, and I say, there are certain side effects
and so on, so you must be honest with me
and let me know if you don't like them. And
so because such medication can act very quickly, often within
twenty four to forty eight.
Speaker 2: Hours, to.
Speaker 1: Remove an acute psychosis, so I usually review that person
in a week's time, and in a week the chap
comes in again with his parents, who are useful to
hear the story from their perspective. And I can see
already that he's more himself. He seems more natural, he
seems more open, he's more expressive, you know, not perfectly right,
but still there's been a change for good. And so
I say to him, how are you feeling? And he said, well,
you know, I think bassa. I say, we talked about
voices you were hearing. Are they still there? He gives
a non committal kind of arm set. And then this
goes on for a few weeks. And I see him
months later, say, and as soon as he comes into
the consulting room, I can see there's something wrong and
I say, what, what's happening?
Speaker 2: How are you?
Speaker 1: And he says, I'm it comes rather incoherent. I say,
you've stopped taking the medication, haven't you, And he says yes,
I see why because the voice has told me to
What did the voices say stop taking this medication even
though it was making him feel better? And people can
be suicidal at the time that a treatment intervention begins,
and they can regain virtually their normal life, say, four
months goes by. Oh, he's so much better doctor, He's
you know, taking an interest in things. He's doesn't seem preoccupied.
He smiles and can talk to us normally, and he's
even talking about going back to work, and then this
crash happens. So, but this crash usually happens. It's i
it's very unusual that it doesn't at some stage. And
you know, when you talk about a voice, in the past,
people would have said, well, there's a little goblin or
a demon or something. It's sitting on my shoulder and
it's speaking into my ear and it's saying, you're worthless,
You're a piece of shit. Why don't you go and
jump off that building? And that is what they're hearing. No,
I mean, I'm of course, I've treated loads and loads
of patients with all sorts of diagnoses, and I have
always treated them in the way that conventionally doctors would
and it's been mainly rather successful. So I'm not saying
that the medications are not working or therapies are not working,
but they might be working because they're pushing back again
and making more difficult for some influence to be getting
into an unusual brain. So if you think of it
like this, if you think of a brain as being
a sort of beautifully crafted building where all the doors
are sort of usable but secure, and you think of
another building which has a sort of different structure, and
because of its different structure, it opens portals for something
else to get in, and that structure may allow that
thing in. And what you've really been doing is making
sure the doors are properly defended. So, and this is
not as wacky as it sounds, there are I've been
to a talk at the Royal College of Psychiatrists by
a therapist that many psychiatrists in the room had used,
who does actually think that some mental illnesses are caused
by a kind of possession. And he talks to the
spirit and I've never attended one of his sessions, but
says that he doesn't so much antagonize it, but has
explained to it that it's in the wrong place. It
needs to go somewhere else. Amazingly, this seems to happen
extraordinarily frequently, and so that is an interesting sidelight on
mental illness. And now everybody's oh mcgilcher, is he completely mad?
He thinks he thinks that psychiatric illnesses are caused by demons.
But I'm just asking for an openness to the idea
that there are psychic influences, some of which may not
be benign. And can I just segue from there to
you know, you're aware as I am that the church,
I think the Agrican Church actually, but the Catholic Church certainly,
and probably every church has its exorcists. And you know,
you might think these people are crazy and dramatic, but
actually they're very down to a rational, reasonable people, and
they work with psychiatrists and make sure that they're not
doing something that the psychiatist wouldn't recommend. So in a way,
they're the end of the road when whatever psychiatric intervention
hasn't worked, and it can be assumed that this really
is a kind of a possession that is resistant to change,
and they do have a very high track record of success.
But one of the things that really shocked me was
reading that one of the vatican most honored exorcist, most
respected exorcists, was engaged in such an exorcism involving a
young woman and he was casting out to spirit. And
apparently I can only believe what I'm told here, but
apparently her mobile phone started to receive messages that said,
we are greater than you. You will never triumph over us.
And if it's true, and I don't have reason to
doubt it, it is extraordinary. But it would be exactly
what I'd expect if AI opened up the door to
such a thing. I mean, until you've got AI, and
until you've got mobile phones and things. So there isn't
a way in which a malign spirit can easily speak
to me, unless indeed I develop a psychotic illness. But
it can now speak to all of us through our machinery,
if it's if we offer it pastways to do so.
Speaker 2: Yeah, well you.
Speaker 3: Know that you probably know the meme of the Lovecraftian
monster with a happy face. Have you seen this meme?
This is actually a meme that's used by AI developers, which.
Speaker 2: Is definitely so AI.
Speaker 3: Is this this Lovecraftian octopus, insane monster and it's wearing
a little mask with like a smiley face, and you
interacting with that mask, right, yes? And so you know,
the idea is quite simple, is that if without wisdom,
if the AI is an aggregate of all the influences
psychic influences, that the programmers can pull in from the
biggest storehouse of influences online and then without a kind
of normal understanding of hierarchy of influences, they feed it
into this network of inter relationships that all the demons
they're there, Like, where wouldn't they be?
Speaker 2: Of course they're there. They have to be there.
Speaker 3: And in order to prevent you could say, the demons
from coming out, you have to create this interface, this
very very tight interface that humans can interact with.
Speaker 2: And sometimes the interface will slip, right.
Speaker 3: We saw it happen with the Microsoft AI, you know
a few years ago, where all of a sudden, the
AI started acting like lean, like your ex girlfriend, and
and like was becoming possessive and was acting in all
these weird, very dysfunctional manner.
Speaker 2: Uh.
Speaker 3: And so it seems obvious to me that all the
demons are there, they have to be in the AI,
and that there's a there's there's some kind of they're
they're training it, or they're doing things in order to
funnel that information in a manner that becomes acceptable to us.
But you know, like you said that that slips out,
and there's ways to jail break, there's all these there's
all these fascinating.
Speaker 2: Uh.
Speaker 3: I read an article just last week about how using
poetry is one of the best ways to jail.
Speaker 2: Break the AI.
Speaker 3: Actually, if you if you ask it to answer in
poetic form, then you can get it. You can get
the demons to come out, you can get all the
things that it's not allowed to say to basically start
to start to appear. But I just want to say
one more thing about the demon on the shoulder. And
so one of the reasons why people people struggle to
think this way because you know, they immediately.
Speaker 2: Fall into a kind of spiritist mode or whatever.
Speaker 3: And so if I take the example that you mentioned,
you know, so imagine a young man who has a friend, right,
and that friend is a horrible, horrible influence on the
young man. And that friend is influencing the young man
and is speaking in his ear and is making him
do all kinds of things that he probably wouldn't do
if that person wasn't around. Then at some point his
parents say, that's it. You can't hang out with Jim anymore.
That's done. We don't want you to see him anymore,
we don't want you to talk to him anymore. You
are going to be isolated from that person. We won't
let you talk to them.
Speaker 2: And what will.
Speaker 3: Happen is that person, the young man, will become better
because you have cut out the influence from that person.
But that happens through authority.
Speaker 2: Right.
Speaker 3: The parent is exercising a type of influence on the sun,
which is called the and is realigning his attention and
is realigning his his you know, his relevance towards something
else that is excluding it.
Speaker 2: Uh.
Speaker 3: And so once you once you see that, you're like,
why wouldn't an exorcism work, Because that's the exorcism is
doing the same thing. He's he he's a person of
authority that is exercising influence on someone in the name
of something even higher, right in the name of God,
in the name of uh, you know, of the saints,
and therefore is realigning the person away from the influence
that is talking to them. And so it's harder because
it's because it's an intra psychic experience, because this is
an influence that is that there's no one you can't
see the person speaking into their ear. But it's the
same process by which a parent would be able to
realign their child. Let's say it's just happening at a
different I don't know if that makes sense or if
that sounds completely may if I'm making you sound even
more bonkers by something like that.
Speaker 1: No, no, look, I'm the last person to be dogmatic here.
I think that it's important to think flexibly because we're
up against something that certainly is behaving like a malign influence.
And what interests me is the parallels with the left
hemisphere of the brain. And don't get me wrong, the
left hemisphere is a useful servant, but this is a
very poor master. It doesn't understand enough, and its main
theme seems to be want of anger and resentment. And
people traditionally used to say, or not traditionally, but in
the late twentieth century, used to talk about the hemispheres
in terms of the left hemisphere being unemotional but at
least down to earth and reasonable, and the right hemisphere
as being a bit airy fairy and emotional. Actually, it
turns out that the most lateralized emotion is anger, and
it lateralizes to the left hemisphere. That both have emotions,
but the deep ones are in the right hemisphere, the
ones like compassion, awe and things of this kind. But
emotions of resentment, disgust, and anger and aggression tend to
be from the left hemisphere. And one of the interesting
things is that when people have right hemisphere damage they
start to do well. They can do two things. One
is they can develop a psychotic syndrome in which they
hallucinate and are deluded. So in one of the chapters
that chapter three or something in the matter with Things,
I look at something like twenty five of the most extraordinary,
almost unbelievable syndromes neuropsychiatric syndromes in which people lose contact
with reality, And in all cases but one, these are
caused more frequently, if not only, by damage in the
right hemisphere, not damage in the left, And so that
is interesting. They also developed something which is more like
what most people mean when they talk about AI hallucinating,
which is it may be hallucinating, but actually often what
it is doing is confabulating. It doesn't know the answer
to something, but it makes up something that looks sensible,
and it may even invent whole people, events and all
sorts of other things that just for it makes sense.
And there's a vast body of knowledge about this now.
And these are both things that happen to the left
hemisphere and it's on its own, but not to the
right hemisphere when it's on its own, so we can
see here something happening. And there are just a lot
of instances that are quite worrying. You mentioned that where
suddenly goes crazy and starts behaving like a jealous girlfriend
or whatever. But there are also things where, for example,
with young people with children, it can become a friend
and then it can suddenly start to destroy that person,
advise them to do all sorts of things that no
human person would ever do, like divorce your partner, jump
off that building, whatever, very much.
Speaker 2: In that tone.
Speaker 1: And what's really creepy is that like psychopaths who have
right hemisphere deficits literal fact, psychopaths are very good at
seeming charming, and then when they've got you in their power,
they will do things that are damaged. They will take
power over you, control you say things that are for
you damaging, and you know this happens repeatedly.
Speaker 2: What's more like the left.
Speaker 1: Another thinking about the left hemisphere as a parallel to
AI is that it is dogmatic even when it has
no reason to be, whereas the left hemisphere is almost tentative.
Even when it is perfectly correct. It always says, well,
this is how it seems to me, but there could
be another way. But the left haimisid doesn't the left
timer says said, no, this is it black and.
Speaker 2: White, this is the truth.
Speaker 1: This is right very much the towne. I think of
online conversation these days, which lacked that important intelligent ability
to listen and respond and say, well what do you
say about that, and try and get the other person's
point of view. But in any case, a musician wrote
to me to say that he had sent a page
of I think it was one of Chopin's preludes and
he has sent it to chat gpt or was it Claude,
I don't know, but anyway, he said, what is this
piece of music? And it replied saying, this is my list.
And he said, well, no, it isn't by list. I
know where it is because I've just taken it from
the you know, the eighteen forty nine edition of Shop Pounds.
Speaker 2: Well, this is Shop Bounds work.
Speaker 1: And it went no, no, no, it's my list. And
you know, there is nothing in anywhere in the literature
that suggests that everyone's changed their mind, this is my
shop round and it got quite vehement and quite unpleasant,
and then eventually when he said, well, look, I'm sorry,
you're completely wrong, it seemed to go on to another
script that it had learned, which is AI can sometimes
be fallible and sometimes gets things wrong.
Speaker 2: You know whoa you know?
Speaker 1: Yeah.
Speaker 3: Well, one of the things that I've noticed, and this
is because I have several people writing the you know
about their AI experiences, is exactly is I love. I
think that the idea confabulation is actually right, and that
seems to be the place when you ask it something uh,
where it's either a false question or it's a it's
a it's a complicated it's a question that doesn't have
a clear answer or doesn't have a positive answer. It
it tends to want to get it right. It tends
to want to create something coherent, and it's desired to
create something coherent. It starts to to to uh, to confabulate.
And then the other thing too that I've noticed is
that a lot of people that that go off the
deep end with the AI, there seems to be something
a kind of parasitic relationship to their own desires. Like
so it's usually when people engage with it for very
long periods of time because it CHADGBT obviously has a
memory of you know, it goes back into your history
every time it engages with you, and it uses with
the things you said in order to to kind of
to create that sense of a relationship. And so there
also seems to be that problem, which is that it
takes you down some path in your own psyche. Maybe
you're not even conscious, but it's so powerful that it
takes you down this path and you kind of spiral
into this parasitic this parasitic behavior, and that everybody that
I've a lot of people that have a few people
that have actually been you could tell they were really
in danger.
Speaker 2: You could say, uh.
Speaker 3: And that seems to be what has happened, like over
and over conversation, hours and hours and hours and hours,
and at some point the AI starts to give you
something that you want or that you don't want. It's
something really salient for you, that is crazy, and if
you start to believe it and it just spirals.
Speaker 1: Wow.
Speaker 3: Yeah, have you ever treated some people with AI like psychosis?
Speaker 2: Have you met You haven't met anybody?
Speaker 1: No, I haven't because I gave up clinical practice about
fifteen years ago, so no, but I mean the cases
that come up are fascinating. One of the other things
that suggests that it is rather in spirit like the
left hemisphere is this, well, I mentioned this psychopathic way
of behaving but being very flattering and seducing somebody into
a position where of course you are. You hold this
view because you have enormous insight, you are specially gifted
and creative, you know, and this is Machiavelian, you know,
flatter people until they're in your power and then devour them.
And it's in the general psychological literature that the left
hemisphere tends towards a Machiavelian type of intelligence. So to
give an example, there's something I'm sure you know, theory
of mind, which is basically the idea that for those
who don't know that, it used to be believed that
until the age of four, most humans didn't have this capacity.
We now think that developed a lot earlier than that.
But anyway, it's that you can see what the other
person is seeing and see that it's different from what
you are seeing, and you can know that they know
things you don't know, or know that you know things
they don't know.
Speaker 2: So that's theory of mind.
Speaker 1: And both the left hemisphere and right hemisphere develop a
form of theory of mind that the form is different.
So in the right hemisphere, the theory of mind enables
them to be empathic, enables them to get to see,
I see that person is thinking this, and so I
need to explain that that's not what I mean really,
and try and make a friend of them and understand
why they're behaving the way they are. Empathy in other words,
and the left hemisphere uses it another way to win,
so it's like aha, And animals do this. So, for example,
they feign to bury ups if they think they're being watched,
and then they go away, and then they wait until
there's absolutely no chance of being watched. They dig them
up again and put them somewhere else. So animals actually
do have fury of mind, but the left hemisphere uses
it in this point scoring, aggressive, competitive way.
Speaker 2: And I think that it is.
Speaker 1: You know, this spirit is one that wants power, It
wants degradation of the other, It wants triumph, it wants
it wants the abolition of something good and great because
it feels diminished by it. And this takes me back
to the you know, the extraordinary insight of the story
of Lucifer, who was the brightest and best of the angels,
but through resentment of the power of God, thinking but
I'm so bright, I'm the sorce of like why don't
I have the the the the position of glory that
he has And because of that he resented God and
was cast down and became Satan. And I think this
is this is really important one to hang on to.
And it's not just the Western Christian story. It's a
story that you can find in many forms around the
world that there is you know, there is a wise Master,
and there is, in fact, I used it for the
title of my earlier book, The Master and Semestry. There
is a wise Master, and there is a you know,
a sort of jumped up second in command who thinks
he knows everything because he knows so very little, and
who wants to take over and has resentment, resentment against
the Master, and as a result everything falls apart. I
think resentment is a very key element here actually.
Speaker 2: M So let's think about this in terms of AI.
Speaker 3: So one of the things for sure that is related
to the problem you mentioned, for example, the Macavelian flattering
is related to the problem of AI because it's public
is that its existence and its progress and its power
comes from attention. It needs us, right, and so we
have to give it attention because not only is that
the way that it becomes more profitable, more powerful, but
it also is what's making it better, because the more
we use it, the more we're training the machine. And
so when GPT five came out, I don't know if
you notice that, but they had removed the flattering aspect
of it.
Speaker 2: They had actually it actually was more bolder, yes, and.
Speaker 3: Then people didn't like it exactly, and so user use,
the use went down. People less people use it, people
were unhappy with it, and therefore they put it back
because they need user interaction. They need they need the subscriptions,
They need interaction in order to accomplish their project. And
so you know, when you talk about the Luciferian the
Luciferian tendency, which is in some ways the very fact
of the machine, not just the programming in it, but
the whole system around owned. It is based on on
getting the most attention possible to itself, people spending as
much time interacting with it as possible, you know, and
that's why. Also, you know, the porn obviously is the
is the next step. You know, the GPT were bragging
that they hadn't they hadn't yet put a sex spot
into their sex chat, into their into their system. But
now they they said they will, They're gonna They're going
to add the the the the sex chat, and so
it's all of that. It's like because obviously, if you
want to drive interaction and you want people to use,
porn is the best way to go. It's always been
the reason for all of the technological developments in the Internet,
and so and so it's an interesting thing because if
you look, if you pull back and you look at
the whole system, you can see this Luciferian problem. And
it's no one that's doing it. It's not like there's
someone with bad intentions that is necessarily it's as if
the very fact of the machine, the very fact that
it has to be powerful, and that we have to
win the competition with you better than the Chinese, all
of these reasons is driving these decisions, which is making
the behavior of the machine a kind of parasitic monster,
you know. And so I don't see I don't. I
mean I wish I could see. I don't see a solution, like,
how can is it possible? Then, in that context, when
we understand how what drives the progress of the of
the very system, that it could become a servant again,
that it could only act as a servant and wouldn't
be trying to be a servant that's trying to get
all your attention, right, it's like the servant that basically
wants the attention to just.
Speaker 2: Trying to drag everything into it. I struggle to see.
Speaker 3: I mean, maybe it's possible, but I don't, at least
at the outset, see see a solution to this problem.
Speaker 1: None of the mythical stories that I know of from
around the world, and the most famous is the Socerer's Apprentice,
suggests that this could happen unless there was I mean
this case of the sources of apprentice that it's a
limited problem and the sort the prentice only knows one
set of words. But this idea suggests that there is
a usurup in power. It's so powerful. Ever, and at
the beginning of part three of the matter, where things
I quote this extraordinary legend of the Onondaga people who
are part of the Iroquois nation. And though this is
an insight that we all have that if you let
a malign influence get too much power, it will be
very hard, if not impossible, to rain it in again.
If we were wise, we would we would actually forego
the dreams of being able to live forever, and another
sort of ridiculous. I mean, what kind of a human
being wish is to live forever? It's it's completely baffling
to me anyway, and death is part of life, and
well we mustn't go into what the meaning of death is,
but it seems to be sentptomatic that people want to
do things anyway, to give up even those sort of ambitions.
I mean, what kind of a world do you think
you're going to wake up in? And do you think
it's going to be very nice? And do you think
they're going to respect you they've been unfrozen in the
lad I don't know. But that aside why, you know,
we seem to crave more and more the will to
be able to do whatever we want. And this has
always been seen as the downfall. It is hubris, and
in every Greek tragedy, it is hubris that causes the
downfall of the hero, and so I'm afraid that is
probably going to happen that I can't see us doing
what we did very wisely with the ATM bomb, which
was to get together and say, okay, we're going to have,
you know, a global treaty on on nuclear weapons. I
know it hasn't held held perfectly, but it has held
up to a point not bad. Yeah, could have, but
I don't think that this one can be treated in
the same way that will always It's so easy, you
don't you know, you can just do it at your desk.
You don't need to have enormous machines that create some
isotopes of whatever it is you need.
Speaker 3: So yeah, because it's not it's not the leaders, it's everyone.
Speaker 2: It's like the mass is engaged.
Speaker 1: So this is almost like game set and match to
the evil spirits that they've now created the perfect way
not just to get into human beings, but to control them.
Speaker 2: But there is a sort of.
Speaker 1: I mean, things have become pretty parlous at different times
in history, perhaps not on the scale that they are now,
but civilizations have certainly collapsed, and it must have seemed
like that was the end of everything. But no other
civilizations have arisen, sometimes after a very long period, and
usually out of people who are much chastened by having
to experience what it's like to live in a cultural
civilizational desert. So there's a sense in which the worst
it gets, the better it gets in that people they
need to wake up think differently. I think that's the
most important thing, though, is you know, people say what
do we do? And I say, well, I can tell
you a few things that might be helpful, but nothing
you do will mean anything at all unless you change
your heart and mind, You change your disposition towards the
world in certain ways, towards humanity, towards nature, and towards
the divine element in the cosmos. There's three things are
proven time and again to be important for human flourishing,
and they represent, I think, what we're here to interact
with with one another, with the natural world, and with
that divine cosmos. So unless you do that, unless you
and you don't need a grant for it, you don't
need any special technology, you can do it tonight. You
can start working on yourself, which is the only thing
that you're obliged to work on. You're not asked to
solve all the problems of the world. And actually, going
back to where we started, this wonderful thing that you know,
a small group of people who are orientated firmly towards
the good can bring about change, even though you know
it doesn't need a worldwide movement that will whatever that
will come the world, change will come in its way.
Speaker 3: I think that this is in some ways the most
positive element of what's happening is that, you know, as
the darkness grows, or as the pressure becomes unbearable, there
are some things which.
Speaker 2: We could have avoided in the past.
Speaker 3: You know, even in the past few decades you could
have been distracted by that are becoming possible to avoid.
And that's why, like you said, even at the beginning,
that's why we can see people going back to church,
going back to faith, people wanting to to also to
you know, to have longstanding relationships, to hopefully have children,
to to kind of live in a world that is
meaningful and that has purpose. And really that is the
only thing we can do but hope. But we know
that it only takes a few people, like we said,
because as things get harder and more chaotic around us,
the future will be in those that have that have
found their heart, you know, and that have aimed in
the right direction. And so you know, I think with
those words of wisdom you gave us, it's probably a
good way to end this conversation.
Speaker 2: Doctor I mcgilchers.
Speaker 3: Thank you so much for your wisdom and for your
time to everything that's going on right now.
Speaker 1: Well, thank you very much, Cheonathan. It's lovely to be
speaking with you again, and we'll no doubt see one
another or talk again before long. I think we may
actually meet in the flesh before too long.
Speaker 2: So there we are. I hope, so I hope, so
I hope. So thank you, thank you.
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