Art is More True than Science
How our modern epistemology has come to see the world backwards
William Blake once said “Art is the tree of life. Science is the tree of death.” To our modern world such a statement seems lamentably preposterous. Everything around us is made by the ‘truth’ of science: technology, healthcare, everything it seems worth having depends on the knowledge and tools that science has given us.
But is it really truth? Psychiatrist Dr Iain McGilchrist uses an analogy to describe how we are coming to understand the two hemispheres of the brain. There is a master magician and his apprentice who has been learning under him. One day the apprentice hears the master recite a spell to get the brooms to clean the room themselves. Later, when the master asks him to sweep the room he instead recites the spell. Unsurprisingly he cannot control the brooms after he has uttered the spell and the result is chaos.
Iterations of this narrative are already being seen in warnings about A.I., a creation of our own making becoming untethered from our control. It is a stark reminder of a profound confusion we make between truth and power. The ability to manipulate, control, order and subdue does not constitute understanding. For McGilchrist this is represented by the subordinating of the right hemisphere to the left, which deals…
