Yesterday I tried to watch the latest Mission: Impossible movie ('the final reckoning'). I didn't care for it; in fact, I just couldn't get through it.

But it did get me thinking about “AI,” as the big baddie in the movie is an “AI” program called 'the entity'.

The thought that struck me as I tried to get into the movie and follow the inexplicable plot — and to care about any of the characters (except for Luther Stickell, played by the incomparable Ving Rhames) — is that “AI” reflects us as a culture: who we are, and who we have become, for better and especially for worse.

“AI” reflects us as a culture: who we are, and who we have become,

for better and especially for worse

. . .

Specifically, artificial so-called intelligence (“AI”) perfectly reflects the stark inversion of how our brain's priorities and processes are innately ordered — in particular, the deliberate subversion of our right-brain by and to our left-brain — something we have been forcefully practicing as a culture for the past 400 years, at least.

This concept is explored in depth by the British psychiatrist and neuroscientist, Dr Iain McGilchrist, in his book The Master and His Emissary: the divided brain and the making of the Western world. [1]

The titular 'master' is our right cerebral hemisphere, often just called the right-brain. The 'emissary' refers to the naturally subordinate or subservient functions of our left cerebral hemisphere, or simply the left-brain.

As Dr McGilchrist puts it:

❝ Our talent for division, for seeing the parts [a left-brain function], is of staggering importance – second only to our capacity to transcend it, in order to see the whole [a right-brain function]. ❞

A contraction of something Einstein said makes the same point, although perhaps in more relatable terms:

❝ The intuitive mind is a sacred gift, and the rational mind is a faithful servant. We have created a society that honors the servant and has forgotten the gift. ❞

(Einstein never actually said that, but it's a pretty fair representation of the much longer and far more 'Albert' things he did say on the subject. [2])

The premise of Dr McGilchrist's work is that we have elevated the priorities and processes of the emissary or servant (the left-brain) above, and at the expense of, even to the exclusion of, those of the master (the right-brain).

Artificial so-called intelligence perfectly reflects the stark inversion

of how our brain's priorities and processes  are innately ordered

. . .

As I was working on a presentation for veterinarians last year, on harnessing our intuition for medical purposes, it dawned on me that “AI” appears to have been designed to not only emulate the functions of the left-brain, but to do so exclusively and superlatively — that is, to perform functions that are the province of the left-brain, and to do so faster and “better” (whatever that means in real terms) than the average human brain has yet been able to achieve. In the process, it appears to completely dismiss the equally essential and innately superior or supervisory functions of the right-brain.

As for original outputs that are the province of the right-brain, such as art, music, poetry, prose, quantum leaps of scientific discovery, and so on, “AI” is utterly derivative. All it is capable of doing is imitating something humans have already created and then passing it off as novel.

“AI” reproductions of Australian indigenous (aboriginal) art is a perfect case in point. It goes waaaay beyond cultural misappropriation, to mimicry bordering on mockery in its ludicrous repackaging of human creations that may be thousands or even tens-of-thousands of years old, and whose original context and meaning may have long-since been lost in the mists of time.

See if you can recognize “AI” in the following lists of left- and right-brain functions — what “AI” can and cannot do; what it was designed to emulate (and does so well) and what its designers can never hope to achieve with it because they don't appear to recognize, and value even less, these qualities in themselves.

[This list is adapted and expanded from an interview Dr McGilchrist gave in 2025. [3] ]

My hope is that you'll not only see yourself in this list — your whole self — you'll also see the way forward in ending this rolling global technocratic coup once and for all.

The left-brain sees the parts, whereas the right-brain sees the whole

The left-brain is very detail-oriented.

The right-brain focuses on the bigger picture.

The left-brain deals in separate bits of information.

The right-brain sees the interconnectedness of things; it sees relationships.

The left-brain ignores the context in which the bits exist, even removing them from their context in order to categorize them.

The right-brain sees the meaning that is lost when a thing is taken out of its context.

The left-brain doesn't see depth (space, time, or emotion), and so it creates two-dimensional representations of the world — maps, as it were — and never understands anything deeply.

The right-brain sees in three dimensions; it appreciates depth, both literally and figuratively, and so it understands things deeply.

The left-brain can't see what it can't see, it doesn't know what it doesn't know; it doesn't even know that it doesn't know.

The right-brain, in seeing the bigger picture, understands its need for the left and oversees its acquisitions.

Here is where Dr McGilchrist's concept of master and emissary comes from: the right-brain is designed to be the master, and the left-brain its emissary.

Now consider how Western civilization has turned that on its head, placing the left-brain in the position of ruthless ruler and the right-brain as little more than a conquered foe, always "too weak to lead," its innate authority usurped and enslaved to the left-brain's insatiable desire for power and control.

The left-brain focuses on objective reality, whereas the right-brain focuses on subjective reality

The left-brain is focused on the physical or visible.

The right-brain is more focused on the nonphysical or the invisible.

The left-brain prioritizes input from the five senses, and it diminishes or completely dismisses “feelings.”

The right-brain is largely responsible for such essential functions as intuition (our “sixth sense”), imagination, and inspiration — and for the pure enjoyment of alliteration. ☺︎

The left-brain appreciates only what can be measured, what it perceives as concrete or “real.”

The right-brain appreciates things that cannot easily be measured or quantified, and that may be dismissed by the left-brain as unimportant because they are “not real.”

That latter point is illustrated by another quote attributed to Albert Einstein:

❝ That which can be counted doesn't count, and that which counts cannot be counted. ❞

Of course, that is a bald overstatement, but I take his point. Some very important things simply cannot be measured.

And so, the perspective of the left-brain is one of a rigid materialism.

That of the right-brain is an expanded awareness which includes and even celebrates the immaterial (nonphysical).

The left-brain categorizes and pigeon-holes things, whereas the right-brain sees nuance and individuality

The left-brain sees an item as either one thing or another; “it cannot be both,” it says.

The right-brain is comfortable with complexity, ambiguity, and lack of resolution, of a thing being as-yet unresolved. It says, “it can be both, and something more besides.”

The left-brain deals only in generalities and it lacks sublety, so it treats all individuals in a category as the same.

The right-brain appreciates subtlety and uniqueness, and so it treats every individual as uniquely identifiable in some way.

At first, I thought this point about the left-brain was completely at odds with the first point about it being very detail-oriented. But Dr McGilchrist cleared that up with a couple of short anecdotes about patients who had lost access to key right-brain functions because of a stroke in their right temporo-parietal lobe.

The first example was of a farmer who, before his stroke, knew each of his cows by sight. Each cow had her own name because each was uniquely identifiable to him. But after his stroke, he could not tell one cow from another; in fact, he could barely tell a cow from a horse.

His left-brain, having identified the object before him as a cow, simply put it with the rest of the cows in the 'cow' box and moved on. That was the extent of its interest.

I imagine that we could have shown that farmer a close-up photo of a cow's tail or ear or nasal planum (the large, hairless portion of a cow's nose), and he'd have correctly identified the body part as belonging to a cow. But to which of his cows it belonged would not have concerned him, and he would not have been able to tell anyway.