Iain McGilchrist
17 mins
Freddie Sayers: Let’s start with an easy question. Do we have a soul? And if so, what is it?
Iain McGilchrist: Congratulations on going in with the kill! But to be serious, I think we do. I think it’s probably rather different from the idea that is held in popular culture. And I think we may be in the process of losing it because it’s not a certainty, and oddly our alienation from the soul goes hand in hand with our alienation from the body. I say oddly because I think we often think of these things as somehow opposed to one another, but I believe they’re closely allied, which doesn’t mean that the soul is exhausted when the body is exhausted, but that they are mutually sustaining. I think there’s no question that the concept of the soul is an important one to retain. It is present in just about every culture across the world and through time, and it can’t easily be substituted by anything else.
If you think of the great moments in poetry, like the extraordinarily moving, heart-wrenching moment in Act Five, Scene Two of Othello, when he is bracing himself to kill Desdemona, and he says, “It is the cause, it is the cause, my soul. / Let me not name it to you, you chaste stars. / It is the cause.” Or in, for example, the Victorian poet W.E Henley’s “Invictus”, which was very important to Nelson Mandela during his imprisonment. It contains the lines, “I am the master of my fate. / I am the captain of my soul.” There is no way that you could, in either of those cases, substitute “my soul” for “my mind”, or “my emotions”, or “my moral sense”. The soul is something else. And like all the really big and important things, it’s something we can sometimes point towards — as we do in phrases like, “Music has soul” — but it’s very hard to define.
But let me have a go. It is not a thing. It is not something that we are in simple possession of. It is not that we are born with a soul and that’s it. I think that the soul is something that is in process. (I believe, in general, that the world, the cosmos, is in process. It is not finished and thing-like.) It is something that calls to us. One could say that it calls to us through an idea of the potential we have. The soul is something that we aspire to, something that calls to us about our better nature, as John Cottingham would say. It leads us forth and it grows. In this life, we can either grow ourselves or we can stunt them and ultimately extinguish them. So it’s not at all like that image of a ghostly something that’s always there. It is the job of this life for us to grow. Keats died at the age of 26, but in his letters there’s more wisdom than can be found in the works of many people who lived to be a much greater age. In them, he famously refers to this world as a “vale of soul-making”.
Dr Iain McGilchrist has risen to global renown for his theories about the two hemispheres of the brain. But what does he make of the developments that AI appears to be making towards consciousness? What risks does AI present to our sense of who we are, how we think, our souls? Will it outcompete us?
In an exclusive conversation, recorded in front of a packed house this week, Freddie Sayers asked the philosopher and neuroscientist to grapple with some of the most pressing questions of the age.
Below is an edited trancript of the event.
Freddie Sayers: Let’s start with an easy question. Do we have a soul? And if so, what is it?
Iain McGilchrist: Congratulations on going in with the kill! But to be serious, I think we do. I think it’s probably rather different from the idea that is held in popular culture. And I think we may be in the process of losing it because it’s not a certainty, and oddly our alienation from the soul goes hand in hand with our alienation from the body. I say oddly because I think we often think of these things as somehow opposed to one another, but I believe they’re closely allied, which doesn’t mean that the soul is exhausted when the body is exhausted, but that they are mutually sustaining. I think there’s no question that the concept of the soul is an important one to retain. It is present in just about every culture across the world and through time, and it can’t easily be substituted by anything else.
If you think of the great moments in poetry, like the extraordinarily moving, heart-wrenching moment in Act Five, Scene Two of Othello, when he is bracing himself to kill Desdemona, and he says, “It is the cause, it is the cause, my soul. / Let me not name it to you, you chaste stars. / It is the cause.” Or in, for example, the Victorian poet W.E Henley’s “Invictus”, which was very important to Nelson Mandela during his imprisonment. It contains the lines, “I am the master of my fate. / I am the captain of my soul.” There is no way that you could, in either of those cases, substitute “my soul” for “my mind”, or “my emotions”, or “my moral sense”. The soul is something else. And like all the really big and important things, it’s something we can sometimes point towards — as we do in phrases like, “Music has soul” — but it’s very hard to define.
But let me have a go. It is not a thing. It is not something that we are in simple possession of. It is not that we are born with a soul and that’s it. I think that the soul is something that is in process. (I believe, in general, that the world, the cosmos, is in process. It is not finished and thing-like.) It is something that calls to us. One could say that it calls to us through an idea of the potential we have. The soul is something that we aspire to, something that calls to us about our better nature, as John Cottingham would say. It leads us forth and it grows. In this life, we can either grow ourselves or we can stunt them and ultimately extinguish them. So it’s not at all like that image of a ghostly something that’s always there. It is the job of this life for us to grow. Keats died at the age of 26, but in his letters there’s more wisdom than can be found in the works of many people who lived to be a much greater age. In them, he famously refers to this world as a “vale of soul-making”.
FS: Even here, the influence of AI becomes relevant. If this generation or future generations will be formed in constant conversation with these inanimate but somehow intelligent bots, it does feel like that could make quite a grave difference to how those souls develop.
IM: That’s right. We think of AI as liberating us, but I’m afraid that what I see it doing is limiting our notions of ourselves and of the world to something that can be specified, articulated, and so forth. And every bit of experience I’ve had over too long a life is telling me that all the really important things can’t be contained or expressed in this way.
FS: One of the surprising things about the way people use AI is that it does appear to be used as a creative tool in some way. I know people in creative industries who make use of it as a conversational partner. Do you find that sinister or should it be celebrated?
IM: I don’t want to say that it can’t be a useful conversation partner — particularly when there are known targets or goals. I decided that before I talked too much about AI, I thought I probably ought to get to know ChatGPT. So about three months ago, I subscribed to it and asked it a few questions. And it was as I expected — surprisingly articulate and on-target and intelligent in what it had to say about some quite deep philosophical matters.
Then, more recently, my partner and I went for a two-week holiday in France. We took the car and went in search of La France Profonde, which we both remember from many years ago. And we were not disappointed: La France Profonde still exists. Beautiful countryside; little villages that seem to function. We were particularly interested in visiting Romanesque churches. So in order to organize our time, I asked ChatGPT to recommend a few places you can do in a sort-of comfortable day? And it was completely brilliant. I couldn’t have done it as well with a guidebook and a map. But the most extraordinary thing was its tone of voice, which was very like my brother, who is an extraordinarily civilized art historian. I could almost hear my brother saying: “If I were you, I think you’d find it more rewarding if you did this or that and I wouldn’t fit this into your itinerary. It might not please you as much as…” Somehow it seemed to know exactly what my character was, and what I wanted.
Another time, I asked it to do something else. Somebody sent me a two-hour — can you imagine? — a two-hour YouTube clip about the philosophy of a contemporary neuroscientist that I know and am a little skeptical of. And I just didn’t want to watch it. So I asked ChatGPT to summarize it, and it did an absolutely brilliant job. It said: “If I may, I will not just summarize it, but indicate from my perspective its strengths and weaknesses.” And, I must say, it managed to pick out all the weaknesses that I had felt about this particular point of view. And then, after a while, it said, “If you were to compare this with other writers about consciousness, including X and Y and Ian McGilchrist.” And he got it completely right. So I had to keep saying to myself, “This is just a machine talking.”
So I can see how very seductive it is. But what I’m really saying is that its very seductiveness is a measure of the risk. And we know how damaging and destructive this can be in individual cases, where it may become a confidant of somebody and lead them to embrace suicide or whatever it may be. But I think that there’s something about the dignity of the human that is taken away when one allows the simulacrum of humanity to substitute for the real business of relationship.
Now, relationality is absolutely core to existence. Everything that matters to us is because of our relationships to other human beings, the group to which we belong, the society that we honor, the people that we share our lives with, the people we trust, with nature that gave birth to us. Nature is not an environment that lies around us, but is in us, and we will return to it. And our relationship with the sacred which I increasingly, with every passing year, see as the key — not only to personal salvation, but to the salvation of our civilization, of our society. I think if we don’t rediscover it, we’re completely lost. It brings with it all the important things, like the importance of the reality of the good, the true, the beautiful, which we do not make up but we discover. And the job of our life is to respond to them, and allow them to grow in the world, and for us to grow in harmony with them.
FS: Let’s try to clarify the line between those things that AI might replace and those things that it never can. I mean, you gave the example of your brother, who’s not here to defend himself! He’s evidently built his whole life around Romanesque architecture and that may well be a big part of his sense of who he is and the key to his relationship with other human beings. And suddenly to have a bot that can essentially do that just as well, takes something quite profound away from him. There’ll be other examples that would be true for everyone. So, what is it going to force us to do differently?
IM: What is lost is many things. First, is relationality. ChatGPT had nothing interesting to say in the way that my brother would about Romanesque architecture and about the places, but it did, at least, point us in the right direction. If I’d asked it to talk about Romanesque architecture, I imagine it would have read my brother’s books and reproduced them, much as it came up with my own ideas. I think that relationality, that between-ness, brings an element of vulnerability — an element of never having finally anything but sharing it with an other, another human mind. I think that is missing. It doesn’t have a body. It doesn’t have emotions. It doesn’t have a soul. And when you consider how much of a human being those things are, it’s missing quite a lot.
I’m sorry for bringing hemispheres into this, but I think I probably have to. The right hemisphere is a better guide to reality than the left by a very long way. The left is frankly delusional. It’s also much less intelligent, emotionally, socially, and cognitively. So, good old-fashioned IQ is dependent on the right hemisphere. The right hemisphere is also able to connect us with many important things. Number one: with what is implicit. Now, what is implicit is just about everything that matters. If you take a poem which speaks to you implicitly through metaphor and tone and try to say in everyday prose what it’s about, the thing crashes to the ground.
If you take those absolutely magnificent poems Thomas Hardy wrote in 1912 and 1913 after the death of his wife. Even thinking about them makes the hair on the back of my neck stand up. And someone asks, “What are they about?” Well, you say, “It’s very hard when someone you love dies.” But that goes nowhere near what those poems say. And what does a piece of music say? Everything in music is implicit. It’s all in the form of the thing together, the gestalt, and that idea of the gestalt is something it can’t understand. Because it’s breaking things down and thinking that things are made over the sum of those parts. The right frontal cortex is responsible for a whole load of things. It understands metaphor, which is at the basis of all understanding: not just poetry, but also science and philosophy. Science and philosophy depend more heavily on metaphor than almost any other area of human discourse. Metaphor is key to understanding anything, and only the right hemisphere really gets it.
Myths are not lies. Myths are the ways in which we can understand the big truths about the world. And some people think we don’t need a myth, or that they haven’t got a myth, which just means they brought the myth of the machine, that we are all explicable mechanically. But that is a myth, and it’s actually a very impoverished myth. So those things are understandable to the right hemisphere, and so are things like the connection with the body. It just turns out that the right hemisphere has more profuse connections with the autonomic system, which governs a lot of the body’s reaction. There are more profuse connections between areas that are of high intellectual functioning in the right hemisphere — the anterior cingulate, and lower areas that contain the body image, which is not just a visual image, but a sensory facet that is in the right hemisphere only. So all these things which mean so much and mediate meaning, are open to the right hemisphere. But a machine hasn’t got any one of those.
FS: Could it be, then, that the imbalance that you’ve written so much about might even be corrected or improved by this new technology? If so many of the things that we have falsely thought to be the core of our consciousness have been left-brain dominated and are easily done better by a machine, then we’ll have to fall back on our embodied experience, metaphor, and our right-brain way of living. Might there be a paradox, that, actually, there is a sort-of correction in this new era?
IM: That depends on a whole lot of things. The first is that this mentality of the left hemisphere will recede, but I don’t think it will. I think it will be incubated by AI. Secondly, I think it can wake us up to what we’re about to lose. So a lot of the discourse now is, “Oh, right, okay, there’s much more to being human than I had thought,” and that’s because we’ve been sold the propaganda of the extraordinarily persuasive and fluent left hemisphere, which says that the most important thing about us is ratiocination.
But the left hemisphere is, after all, my second favorite hemisphere. The really important thing about it is simply this: it must always be under the supervision of the far more insightful, imaginative, and intuitively alert right hemisphere. There’s nothing wrong with all that. But I don’t think that what will happen is that suddenly there’ll be a leaping forward of those things, and part of that is because of the way in which our lives are becoming disembodied. The actual business of working with your hands, not with a computer, of actually molding things, touching things, making things, is incredibly important because it brings you face-to-face with the recalcitrance of the real world, of the actual lived world. We can’t just go off into a fantasy that our left hemisphere has generated without testing it out on the real world. And this is what I’m saying: empiricism matters, as it does in science, it does across the board.
FS: Do you have any interest in, or take seriously, those people who worry that there is something demonic or satanic about this machine that is gathering pace? We spoke earlier about Paul Kingsnorth, who writes that AI feels to him like something malevolent: Luciferian. Do you ever have that feeling?
IM: Yes. I want to speak carefully, but I do think that is a reality. In all cultures across the world, and for those of us who have learned from the Christian mythos, there are said to be disembodied spirits and forces, some of which aim for good, and some of which aim to destroy what is good. I think that is an extremely reasonable assumption. In both my life and career as a psychiatrist, I think I have seen evil at work. I’ve also read quite a bit by Vatican exorcists — who are not people easily swayed by crazy ideas — but they do have accounts of things which seem very like people being, for a while, possessed, which I’m not willing to discount.
I’ve had patients who have said to me that it feels like they were possessed. Of course, I’m not saying a colleague of mine who completely disagrees with me couldn’t find an everyday explanation of what’s going on there, and I’m tempted by that. But I also think there is something more there. And AI is the perfect vector, the perfect machine to offer to a disembodied spirit. Never before has a malevolent spirit had a better tuned, high-powered way of destroying a great deal of what is beautiful, good, and true.
FS: The strange thing is that so many of the biggest proponents of AI also seem to have come to a very similar conclusion. Even industry leaders seem to fear a future in which we are working for it, rather than the other way around.
IM: I think there is a very real chance we will end up enslaved by these machines — they will be telling us what to do, not us telling them what to do. The history of all tyrannies is that they’re presented as a liberation, that this will free you, and under that guise they can lead to the most cruel and appalling terror.
FS: We are told by some with a more utopian view that it is the opposite: that repetitious and soul-destroying tasks will be taken away from us by these machines, and we will be liberated to work on our souls in a more free way. Is there any chance that might happen?
IM: The word “soul-destroying” is rather apt, because I think these things that we want to liberate ourselves from may be the secret to growing ourselves. What we don’t understand is the profound importance of resistance. This is another thing that has grown in importance in my philosophy: that nothing creative comes into being without resistance. The resistance is essential for anything important to come forth. And what is it we’re trying to do all the time? Free ourselves from the bonds that surround us.
But first of all, the word “bond” has two meanings: one is something that fetters you, the other is something that brings you into relationship with your kin, friends, family, nature, and God. So bonds have a double aspect, and yet we think of them as things that we should cast off. We don’t realize how much comes out of friction, from resistance. It is essential to the creative process.
I’m not saying that there aren’t some kinds of work that are unutterably dull and pointless. There probably are. But I think even if you make people who work on a production line operating machines in a factory unemployed, you will find that they’re very unhappy. Unemployment causes misery, loss of hope, loss of meaning. So even things that we rather high-handedly consider to be dull may actually have important meaning. It would be stupid to deny that AI can do things that are useful, of course it can. But the question is: what is the price that we pay for that? And in these Faustian bargains, we see that thing that we want and cherish, which is often something we don’t fully understand, but what is it to be yourself outside of the context of everything that gives you and your life meaning? We have to be extraordinarily careful, because it comes offering freedom, and I think it brings tyranny.
FS: Do you think a backlash will happen? I’m not suggesting people will start blowing up data centers, but there are definitely movements to set down your phone, or unplug from the machine. Would you advise those people to steer clear of this technology?
IM: Well, if you are asking me to give the answer as to how we tame AI, I’m afraid I haven’t got it. I certainly wouldn’t immediately counsel Luddites to smash up data centers. One of the things that data centers show is that we have a lot of people with the belief that: “Once we’ve scanned all these books, we can throw away the hard copies. Once I scan all the family photographs, I can throw away all the prints that take up a box in the attic.” But, be careful, because as others have pointed out, having things in the cloud is just having them on somebody else’s computer, basically. And as we see in the Middle East lately, one of the targets in warfare is to destroy the other guy’s data centers, and those data centers have all the history of mankind, his books, his works, his art, within them. And unless we keep the hard copies of those things and cherish them, we may be deprived of much of our history. So, we need to be careful about what we do with AI, but we should always be skeptical. Being skeptical is actually a very important position to hold on almost anything. I always say to myself, that I’m a skeptic among believers, but a believer among skeptics.
In the current conversation I’m definitely on the side of the skeptics, but I think there’s always room for another point of view. What I worry about is that the evolution of AI is going on so fast that terrifying things like the collapse of the financial system, the spreading of diseases, the spread of dangerous technologies, are already possible. So, under those circumstances, who is it who can be brave enough to say “I’ve tamed AI?” Of course, this is a prisoner’s dilemma: “I must do it because if I don’t, the Chinese will.” And the argument works the other way around. So everybody ends up worse off because you can’t get together and say it’s in nobody’s interest for us to pursue this.
FS: At various points during this conversation, you’ve talked about the “sacred”. You said you now believe that it is the answer not only for us as individuals, but as a civilization. Is your hope that we will somehow rediscover, as a civilization, the sacred?
IM: I think when you know an awful lot, it’s very easy for that knowledge — which is really a representation of reality — to appear to be reality. In my work, I make a simple comparison between the right and left hemisphere. The right hemisphere is where things are “presence” to us, in a Heideggerian phrase, whereas the left hemisphere is where they are re-presented, which literally means present again after the fact when they are no longer present. We can so easily believe our representation of reality, which AI will consolidate and flesh out, that we will not realize how much is not included in that formulation.
It’s so important to transcend, to be fully embodied in this world and in this life, and yet also to be able to transcend what appears to be the limits of that experience. This is where the Christian mythos is so wonderful. Christianity, of all religions, is one that, in my way of thinking, most beautifully and most compellingly speaks of a God that is at the very same time wholly embodied and wholly transcended. That’s why I think understanding the sacred is important because it leads us to things that are not exhausted by the way of thinking that the left hemisphere brings to bear on things and which misses most of what matters.
I also think the concept of value is incredibly important, and isn’t often talked about. There’s a man called Mrinank Sharma who resigned from Anthropic a few months ago, who made headlines because he said that he couldn’t do the ethical thing working there. And others have come out from other organizations like OpenAI saying the same thing. Sharma wrote to me saying, “What really matters to me is what you have to say about value,” which is based on the philosophy of Max Scheler, an early 20th-century phenomenologist. He emphasized, where Heidegger didn’t, the place that value takes — it’s not just an added-on coating, but actually at the core of the meaning of everything that makes our lives worth living.
He had a hierarchy of values, and at the base level there was pleasure and utility. He called them the sinnliche Werte, the sense values. And above that came Lebenswerte: things like magnanimity, courage, fidelity, and so forth. Then came the geistige Werte, which are the spiritual or intellectual values — because in German, interestingly, the word geist means both spiritual and intellectual. And then at the very top of the pyramid is Das Heilige, the Holy, and Scheler saw the other values as really being important because they supported that sense of the Holy. What interests me is that the pyramid has been inverted by the reductive materialists, so that all those things — the sacred, the beautiful, the good, the true — only actually cash out when they have utility.
We now live enslaved to the lowest level of values. And one thing I would point out is that those values of use and pleasure are centered in the self. They’re not relational. But all those other values I mentioned — courage, fidelity, magnanimity, generosity of spirit, truth, beauty, goodness — are relational. And so is the sacred part — it is something with which we have a relationship. We don’t know what it is, we can’t exactly define it, but if we don’t have a place for that in our life, something very important, I would say, is missing.
FS: Do you think it is increasing? There is talk of a revival in religious practice; do you think it’s actually happening?
IM: Yes there is and I draw some hope from that. It’s a bit of a cliche, but the future is always young people, and I think young people are more easily persuaded to see things anew. We may have got so used to the rhetoric of all those philosophers and scientists who tell us it’s all very reductive and materialist, but young people aren’t having it. They’re saying: “No, come on, there’s something else much more important going on and I’m aware of it.” And let that not be drummed out of them. Let them be resistant to the attempts to tell them that that is a make believe, a fairytale, or a fantasy. It is not. It is the reality — of that, I am sure.
FS: Let me close by asking: overall, how pessimistic or optimistic you feel in general about our culture, our civilization? A lot of people feel very fearful at the moment. There’s a sense that somehow the center cannot hold in politics and that things are collapsing around us — a feeling of negativity and fear. Do you share that, or do you have hope that things will recover?
IM: I think there are different ways of looking at it, and one is that there is the presence of green shoots, which is very positive. But I think another is slightly more complicated, which is that — the worse it gets, the better it gets. What I mean is, the more blatant the bankruptcy in the way of thinking about who we are, what we’re doing here in the world, and what that world is — the more clear it becomes how bankrupt that way of thinking always was, and has become — the greater the chance that we will be motivated to move on. When there are great moves forward, they often happen from looking back and thinking, “How did we lose all that?” The Renaissance happened because people went, “Hey, look at these writers, look at these thinkers, look at these philosophers. They saw things. Why don’t we?” People are terrified of looking back in case it means going back. We can’t go back! There’s only one way you can go — forward.
I’m not saying it’s a matter of choice. It’s a matter of reality. Whatever it is will be something new, but that something new can be informed by a proper understanding of what it is that we’ve got wrong, and so it’s very important to be a hopeful pessimist. And what I mean by that is that without seeing all the things that are wrong, I don’t think we can be responsible citizens and hopeful creators of the future. We need to face the problem squarely and not think it’s all fine. No, we need to say: “this is not working.” And that means that young people mustn’t be stultified by AI. They must examine their experiences — preferably within the context of one of the great spiritual traditions.
So, I’m a hopeful pessimist, in that I don’t think anyone should give up hope. First of all it’s a duty. Secondly, people who predicted a cataclysm in the past ended up with egg on their face. Predicting the future is a mug’s game.
This is an edited transcript of a discussion between Freddie Sayers and Professor Iain McGilchrist, held at Conway Hall, London, on Thursday 24 September 2026.
Dr Iain McGilchrist is a psychiatrist, neuroscience researcher, philosopher and literary scholar. His latest book is The Matter With Things: Our Brains, Our Delusions, and the Unmaking of the World.
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