[Whit Blauvelt]

Hi Lucy,

Beautifully put. By McGilchrist’s account, when out in nature the RH is more aware of the natural world than the LH, while the LH is more capable of describing the experience in complex linguistic syntax, yet with the semantic grounding of meanings of individual words yet more the RH’s strength. Freud, in The Ego and the Id, claimed that for something to come from preconsciousness to consciousness requires it acquire word-representation. But from your words, we see that you were conscious of far more than those words can say — although they act as hand-waving towards much of it.

Aren’t we always aware of more than we can say? If we effectively restrict ourselves to only those aspects of consciousness fully translated to words, might that not be the very LH-dominant position that constituted the “neurosis” which Freud diagnosed as epidemic in our civilization? Of course, McGilchrist writes only of psychosis-like symptoms, not neurosis. Yet, might both be from the same basic mistake related to our relationship with and use of language, both as individuals and cultures?

If so, is AI further compounding the error of asking language to do too much; or might it be offloading some of the over-use of language on our own parts, so as to all us to become less programmed by it ourselves, and freer to find ourselves back more fully in the world as the RH can know us to be?