Leaders vs. AI: There Ain’t No Such Thing As Artificial Wisdom

As my new book Spiritual Atheist reveals – a book about how to blend scientific and contemplative understandings of human life and leadership – William James, the grandfather of modern psychology and an arch-challenger of orthodox scientific materialism, suggested over a hundred years ago a way of understanding human consciousness that resists it being reduced to the movement of sodium ions across neuronal membranes. This has become known as the transmission or filter model. Over millennia, Buddhist contemplative “science” has come up with a similar theory of human consciousness. Such a framework might help us comprehend how we have intuitions, insights, and ideas that seem to come from beyond the everyday: like the breakthrough idea we have in the shower or the winning concept(s) that somehow emerges from a team of committed people.

In such a framework, the brain is elemental to consciousness, and shapes it, but does not produce it mechanistically. Consciousness pervades the entire world, including the brain. It is one of the two aspects of the non-dual reality that is everywhere. The brain then ‘renders’ consciousness into the experiences and thoughts we have in any given moment. In this view, we cannot have human-style conscious awareness without a brain; but the brain is not sufficient for consciousness. Much like a radio does not create the program you are listening to but turns radio waves into coherent sound using electronics within, the brain may access non-local information from connective consciousness and turn it into our experiences.

Creative experiences of flow, vision, insight, and intuition are what occurs when the brain changes how it filters the enormity of infinite reality. Aldous Huxley, an ardent materialist before he took psychedelics to explore his own consciousness, also proposed such a filter model, using the analogy of a “reducing valve”. When we meditate, move ecstatically, or take a shamanic medicine plant, the “doors of perception” are opened, the valve stops reducing so much data, and we see the world as it truly is: infinite (and intense.) It is fitting then that recent studies at Imperial College, in which scientists have scanned the brains of people taking LSD and psilocybin, corroborate such a model: the unconstrained mental experience associated with psychedelics is linked to less activity in parts of the brain that might filter or limit the full experience of everything rushing into our sensory field. The entropic state that follows leads to a less definitive order or pattern being imposed on the billions of bits and bytes of data coming into our brain. We get the whole kahuna burger of reality with #nofilter.

Drawing on cutting-edge science like this, as well as a deep reading of various wisdom traditions, I think it likely that the brain accesses local information from our memories, as materialists propose, as well as “non-local” information from beyond our neural wiring. It then integrates the two streams of data together into our consciousness. The relative mix between the two sources of information determines what kinds of thoughts we can have – like a DJ mixing between tunes A and B on the decks – and how we lead ourselves and others in the moment. This model aligns with the key differences between brain networks and digital networks: brain networks seem to manifest consciousness from the bottom-upworkings of classical (and potentially quantum) biological material… whereas in digital networks the bits of information stored are encoded from the top down. As Sean Webb has stated in a great blog post, “[w]e don’t yet have computers which write bits from below the level of the bit itself, we therefore hit the limitation of information resolution.” In other words, I don’t think consciousness will ever “boot-up” on non-organic circuitry, no matter how complex and Google-ified it is.

In my book, as well as in all our leadership programs, I outline the two Modes of consciousness I believe human beings are in during the vast majority of their waking hours. Control & Protect Mode is a state of consciousness in which we are focused, often without being fully aware of it, on defending ourselves against threats and dealing with uncertainty to maximize our chances of survival. In this state we rely on efficient, but not always effective, solutions, habits, and thoughts that have worked in the past. These can often include variations of the fight, flight, or freeze response. We are good at creating and using best-practice to get jobs done to time and to budget. We can solve technical problems with rules and algorithms that have worked in the past. This Mode is great for dealing with recognizable challenges that we have encountered in the past. But it sucks for engaging with new problems like how to: reduce poverty for 9 billion people, avoid populist extremism, solve climate change, ensure our businesses operate with fully digitalized business model, help our enterprises attract the best Millenial talent, and deal with the trials and tribulations of parenting teenagers in the 21st Century child.

On the other hand, we all have access to what I call Create & Connect Mode. This is a state of consciousness in which we are focused on growing, learning, loving, leading, and thriving by connecting with ourselves, each other, and the universe. In this state we can access imaginative thoughts, ideas, insights, and intuitions to create effective, if not always efficient, solutions to new and emerging challenges. We can bring breakthrough ideas into the world and land transformations in people, products, and processes.  If we rely heavily on Control & Protect Mode, we are limited to existing patterns, rules, and habits encoded into our neurons. In Create & Connect Mode we are opened up to connective consciousness and thus to genuinely fresh ideas, empathic insights, and moral intuitions.