AI and the Battle for the Soul — A Ralston College Event

With Iain McGilchrist and Jonathan Pageau

An intimate, intensive one-day seminar bringing together students, scholars, and practitioners for sustained conversation around the most important question of our time.

AI technology is radically reshaping the conditions of human life, the work we do, and our modes of social organization. It is already transforming how we know, how we remember, and how we perceive ourselves as free conscious agents. AI is being developed to simulate human intelligence and human interactions, simultaneously forcing us to ask fundamental questions about who we are, what we care about, and why we do things. And yet, we lack a clear understanding of the very qualities we are attempting to reproduce in these powerful machines. We lack this, in part, because of a still much larger problem: we have lost sight of human nature itself, and with it the conditions of human actualization: that is, we have lost sight of the only means according to which these problems can be understood and answered.

The purpose of this gathering is to collectively experience and explore insight into questions of intelligence, attention, and agency – that is, into the human soul and the conditions on which the realization of human potential depends – to reflect on how best to protect a fully human future amidst the revolution of artificial intelligence.

Our conversations will be anchored by lectures from the renowned neuroscientist, Dr Iain McGilchrist, whose work is at the forefront of the effort to think through the consequences of AI, including for technologists at the world’s largest AI companies. We will also be joined by theologian Jonathan Pageau, of The Symbolic World, who will moderate discussions and lead a conversation. Together, these thinkers will help us take up the question of AI in a setting that exceeds reductionist and computational accounts of cognition.

The day will also include directed group conversations, music, shared meals, and a walking tour of Ralston in Savannah.

General Tickets $130; Student & Alumni Tickets $50 (includes lunch and morning and afternoon refreshments)

Registration required by May 8th.

As a burgeoning humanities college, Ralston is uniquely positioned to ask the fundamental questions surrounding AI. Concerned more with the context in which thinking takes place than with any single body of knowledge, we invite a mode of attention that opens a more expansive vision of the human person, restoring the capacity to recognize that the questions raised by AI are, at root, questions about the mind, knowing, the human subject; in short, they are matters about the soul.

We hope you can join us for this singular event in Savannah.

To learn more, visit ralston.ac.