Big thoughts on Chapter 9 “What Schizophrenia & Autism Can Tell Us”

McGilchrist ties together aspects of schizophrenia, autism, and right hemisphere disfunction/damage in chapter 9 of the new series. Pointing, like he did in his first big book, to the idea that these diseases are on the rise because of the imbalance of hemispheres, with most us living in a left hemisphere dominate culture. The way in which he describes the similarities of these diseases is primarily done by talking about the left hemispheres fixation on “representation”. He quoted numerous schizoid patients from throughout the last 150 years talking about how reality had lost its vital meaning… that the “map” of consciousness had become the terrain itself. That there is “a pane of glass between me and mankind..” McGilchrist talks about hyper-consciousness, quoting people saying “it can be regarded as a ‘loss of sparkle’, a freezing and repetition of present existence, and a reflection of the intellectual side of man’s nature rather than the ‘free play’ of individual life forces.” He also relates this form of paying attention to the myth of the machine. Again quoting several patients relating reality to a lifeless machine they can’t escape from. With this machine thread, he then pushed into the virtual, and relates the left hemisphere world to the ever increasing virtual world. “The left hemisphere’s world is now an increasingly virtual world. It no longer even pretends to yield a faithful portrayal of reality. For that it depends on the right hemisphere. It has, it thinks, more important - certainly other - things to do. It is there to unpack the implicit in what it is given about the outside world, make it explicit and deal with it according to the rules. It is there to aid strategy. Unfortunately, by being purely strategic in intent, the left hem makes strategic mistakes, since it remains largely ignorant of the reality on which it relies. As a sophisticated computer would. And very soon, no doubt, will.”

This thread of thought, however, that he so masterfully articulated, I do not hear McGilchrist repeat often in interviews. Definitely not with the amount of clarity he wrote in the book, with his strong views and precise dissection of the problem… like for example.. a video I watched of mcgilchrist being interviewed just 2 weeks ago, where he was asked about his thoughts on AI. The old man really let me down as he went off on a little ramble about (paraphrasing)“how long it takes to do anything online now days, whereas before you could call someone to get something sorted, now days it takes 15 minutes just to get through the computer assistant..” I mean how can you write a chapter like I’ve discussed above and then respond to that question with that level of Boomer generation intelligence? Relating AI to a call center while at the same time one of the biggest brands in the world is releasing a device that puts “a glass between you and humanity”, a “spatial computing” device which seriously projects real reality back in a virtual and controllable climate, a device that lives upon the analysis your eye movements, body movements, and soon to be inner bio statistics, making explicit what is to remain implicit in order to bend it to its rules, is a fucking FLOP. Like what is this? I truly feel like McGilchrist is seriously falling behind on the tech. I mean I know he is, he tells people in interviews himself that he is staying away from the online world. He tells people my age to “slow down” and find nature. Which is playing into this issue I have with the older generation and their lack of seeing what’s taking place in consciousness. Like how are we to slow down when we have devices like this, or software like chatgpt 5, being released? Technologies that are rapidly encroaching in on our collective consciousness… our collective imagination… if we don’t keep our finger on the pulse of this stuff, on how it works not only intellectually but also in practice, then how can we navigate the future warfare?? How can we fundamentally rework our myth to better serve the right hemisphere if the myth is clearly under attack?

The military is one of the main contributors in advancing the tech. We all watch movies that say that very message again and again… so like Daniel Schmachtenberger says, there is a weapons race occurring that is truly guiding the creation of the AI’s. One of the biggest things not being explicitly said is that a massive part of that weapons race revolves around our personal data. The public. Because the future of warfare is manipulating public attention, or our unconscious selves. Our most private and intimate selves, have become these massive organizations battlefields. This is not a question… many of my other posts have links to the people that are actively a part of this race.

So aside from McGilchrist kinda flopping on us when it comes to navigating this left hem beast technology… (which I still believe Daniel Schmachtenberger to be our guy to bridge the gap) there is the element of schizophrenia that I hear no one speak of at all.. like.. how these devices are the exact recipe for consciousness of our people to go full schizod in the next 20 years. At least by McGilchrist logic.. and this worries me the most of anything. If the military is driving the innovation, and it all aligns with left hem control, I.e. war and domination, then we are accepting a tech that is going to super speed us into insanity. And there really is no stopping this.