I wish I could remember how this podcast came across my radar so I could give credit where it’s due. But alas, I cannot.

It’s episode 217 with Dr. Iain McGilchrist.

At one point, he shares his perspective about how science and reason can only take you so far:

[science and reason] have their limitations. Most scientists and most philosophers are very well aware of that. Some people who are not terribly aware of [this] think that [science and reason] can answer all our questions. The fact that they can answer very many questions and be extraordinary servants doesn’t make them the arbiters of everything that we know.

Replace “science and reason” there with “AI” and you have a pretty good assessment.

I like the word “servant” there too — AI can be a good servant, but it’s a terrible master.

[AI] has no body, so it cannot suffer, it cannot love, it doesn’t know that it’s going to die, none of the things that humans deal with, so it is a very, very poor guide to how we should think [of consciousness]

Ok, enough AI. Back to science and reason.

There’s a lot to be said for the scientific method, but not everything can be understood by analysis:

What most people don’t understand is that most [of the great] discoveries in science and mathematics were not made by following the scientific method at all. They were not made by linear powers of logic or algorithms or anything else. They were made by suddenly seeing a gestalt. In other words, a whole that is a form that cannot be reduced to its parts without a loss.

Einstein was famous for this kind of working. He worked in thought experiments and visualizations. His moments of breakthrough came not as the final steps of a deductive chain of reasoning, but through a sudden restructuring of the whole picture of his understanding — “suddenly seeing a gestalt”. He didn’t have new data or a new experiment. He had insights that provided a new framing to hold the existing pieces together.

Those insights were later translated into equations, and then verified through experimentation by others — to this day, scientists are still conducting experiments whose results prove “Welp, looks like Einstein was right. Again!”

As Dr. McGilchrist says: analysis only gives you information, and information is only useful when it is fed back into a context of a whole.

He illustrates this point by talking about a piece of music. You can take it apart, break it into pieces, practice individual passages, etc. — and that can be useful — but it’s the song as a whole that you’re drawn to and the performance of a song will be futile unless it is re-cohered from individual parts into a whole.

(It’s not the things, but the relationships between them that matter.)

Perhaps there’s room for a bit more humility in our knowledge and creative work:

right at the core of reality is the coming together of opposites. That less can be more. That unknowing can be more than knowing. And that there can be something rich in “non-doing” as Buddhists say.

And these are not the same as idleness and ignorance. Ignorance is what you have before you have knowledge. And unknowing is what you have after knowledge if you’re lucky. And it is the beginning of wisdom.

I love that articulation:

• There’s a difference between ignorance and “not knowing”.
• Not knowing is what you have after you’ve gained knowledge (because you realize how little you know).
• Knowing how little you know is the beginning of wisdom.