I should like to begin by citing Mary Somerville, the forgotten progenitor of the computer through her teaching mathematics to Lord Byron’s daughter, Ada, Countess Lovelace, and who wrote in her conclusion to The Connexions of the Physical Sciences, 1837, the following:
These formulae, emblematic of Omniscience, condense into a few symbols the immutable laws of the universe. This mighty instrument of human power itself originates in the primitive constitution of the human mind, and rests upon a few fundamental axioms, which have eternally existed in Him who implanted them in the breast of man when he created him after His own image.
I. The Body, the Brain: This retired professor, also a hermit following being a nun in a convent, teaches young students who come to this English Cemetery in Florence, the importance of the monastic balance of body, mind, soul, of work, study, prayer. That to employ only the intellect or only prayer is to atrophy the other parts of ourselves created in God’s image. The Hebrew Scriptures, while condemning human representation, constantly describe God through bodily parts, breath, voice, face, hands, arms, feet, backside, etc., while the Greek New Testament, bids us to have the mind of Christ (I Corinthians 2.16). Scholars need to be also carpenters like Joseph and Jesus and build our own bookshelves, artists need to be like Saint Luke and prepare our own canvases and frame our own paintings, preachers need, like Saint Paul, to be tent-makers or have some other skill, as worker priests. ‘Use it or lose it’ is a recipe against the infirmities to the brain and the body in aging. The mind is the body’s computer, the body’s sense organs cleverly, if deceptively, delivering information to the mind about the world and its people around it. Mind and Body are in partnership with each other, and both are in partnership with the Soul.
Neuroscience teaches the same quantum, in this case of the two hemispheres of the human brain, as being in partnership. Iain McGilchrist’s The Master and His Emissary demonstrates this need for the interaction between the two hemispheres of the brain, like the dual processors of a computer, not the dominance of the left over the right, for the solution to problems, for the interaction with reality. The icon at St Catherine’s Monastery by Mount Sinai and the mosaic at Cefalù in Sicily show Jesus with the Book, one side of his androgynous face merciful, corresponding to the right hemisphere in its crossover, the other of judgment. A book is an early form of the computer. Jill Bolte Taylor, herself a neuroscientist, experienced and recovered from a cerebral haemorrhage in her left hemisphere and now writes and lectures holding a brain with its stem of nerves down to the base of the spine on My Stroke of Insight. What she observed was that while the analytical and logical left hemisphere was incapacitated, her speech and numeracy impaired, she intensely saw the God side of her brain, its connections, its dance, with the entire cosmos.
The mind needs music, poetry, art, the Humanities, in balance with science and statistics, with STEM. Young students today no longer major in the Liberal Arts but in Business. Modern education in its stress on secularized materialism may be driving us into a controllable lessening of our mental capacities, back into the shadowy recesses of Plato’s cave, rather than into sunlight. I edited the writings of the medieval theologian Julian of Norwich and noted that there were periods when she could write freely, then, at the end of her life, she courageously, defiantly, re-wrote and crystallized her Revelations, preserving it in the face of Archbishop Arundel’s censorship against lay women teaching theology and the Bible in English, by having to say she was no teacher and to excise from her text almost all her Biblical citations, yet remaining true to what she had earlier shared of what she had been shown and ending by speaking of us, her readers, as her ‘even Christians’, her equals, a Lollard term for which she could have been burnt at the stake.
Hans Küng in Christianity cited our collection of essays, Equally in God’s Image: Women in the Middle Ages, where we noted that women’s exclusion from education came about with the Crusading West’s co-option of the Islamic mosques’ madrassa, establishing the Universities of Paris, Oxford and Cambridge where theology came to be taught in a gender apartheid, women forbidden a presence in the lecture halls. Prior to that, Christianity had been the religion of women and slaves. Women, outside of that left-hemisphere mode of education, but with access to libraries, could exceptionally teach themselves with images, poetry, the novel, advising Good Government to those in power, among them Hildegard von Bingen, Birgitta of Sweden, Christine de Pizan, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Virginia Woolf. Unlike the trained and trammelling Scholastic mode of a Thomas Aquinas, women, deprived of that education, wrote in the Humanistic style, that is the way the brain more naturally thinks. It was also the style of Monastic contemplative theology, of a St Benedict advocating the balancing of work, study, prayer, the body, the mind, the soul, of a St Augustine discussing the mind planning to sing, singing, then having sung, like God, Deus Creator Omnium. But Jean Gerson, Chancellor of the University of Paris, considered Birgitta of Sweden’s Four Prayers heretical, because one of these was addressed, shockingly, to the Body of Christ, the other, even more shockingly, to the Body of the Virgin. Scholasticism, and its product, the Inquisition, now secularized in modern managerial universities, is the intellectualized left-hemisphere detachment that fears the ‘Other’, seeing it as the enemy, that negates the Body, especially that of the woman. But Joseph Ratzinger, later Benedict XVI, noted at the conference on Birgitta of Sweden in 2006, that women’s right hemisphere contemplative revealed theology trumps that of the Scholastic, left hemisphere, male only, seminary.
To arrive at these concrete conceptions I draw on my body, mind and soul in tandem through which I filter this essay. The left hemisphere’s detached observer is blocked from ethics, and from productive answers. I remember the reflections of the Thames water ripples on my nursery ceiling seen by my eyes, recalled by my brain, and being fascinated by their beautiful movements, seeking to understand what they were, and where they came from, what was causing them. That was my earliest memory of being conscious, my mind through my visual organs interacting with reflections of the water ripples. Later I delighted in Edmund Spenser’s Prothalamium, ‘Sweet Thames, run softly, till I end my song’. During WWII that Thameside house was bombed and I and my baby brother placed with a childless Scottish couple in Sussex, he a carpenter, she teaching us to sing Scottish ballads. At Berkeley I came to know of two English archaeologists working together on Cyprus to study the development in tandem of the hand and the brain. At Princeton I and my father’s friend, Thomas Day, a scholar of Homer’s Greek as sung, helped Julian Jaynes write his best-selling and controversial The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind, which was the predecessor, before electronic, scientific studies of the brain, to McGilchrist’s The Master and His Emissary. I had argued that preliterate children are not yet left hemisphere dominant, which comes about from writing with the right hand. They still hallucinate the monsters under the bed to the exasperation of their parents. Similarly ancient Greeks and medieval pilgrims would incubate in sacred structures in order to have visions of Aesculapius at Epidauros and at the shrines of saints to be healed.
This English Cemetery is being restored and maintained by previously illiterate but highly intelligent Romanian Roma families who now write books. I find Roma parents allow their children to copy their crafts, use their tools, never saying ‘Don’t touch’, wordlessly encouraging these bodily acts of creation, restoration and upkeep long before adulthood, while giving them a vast oral library of ethical tales. I find Roma more in touch with the right hemisphere, likely due to illiteracy, are immediately capable of solving problems, because they see the whole and all the details at once, a capability we lost because of our academic training, which is left-hemisphere dominant. Their religious faith is also deeper than is my own.
In my lifetime there has been an explosion of change concerning our modes of communication across space and time. First I wrote, right-handed, with pencil and dip pen in ink, our desks in school having inkwells, then the ballpoint pen (but learning as a child that Leonardo da Vinci was ambidextrous, I sought to also use my left hand), then the typewriter, with touch typing, like piano playing using both hands, then the word processor, then the computer with its capacity to backspace and correct and also to remember, further, even the capacity to link to the Internet and other devices, to both send and receive. In this we have created together a global brain as the extension of our own.
Our minds map skill and meaning in combining the synapses of the brain, through the nerves, to the muscles, the flesh, the bones, that long stem down the spine to even the extremities, the miracle of the hand, in which Julian of Norwich saw the entire Cosmos, God’s Creation, as the quantity, the quantum, of a hazel nut. Buckminster Fuller taught us to see tools as extensions of our body, the cup the extension of the hand that holds fluids more efficiently, wheels as extensions of our legs that move us about more swiftly, hearing aids as extensions of our ear/brain that help us hear better (at Princeton I put Bucky's hand on my hearing aid while smiling when he was lamenting his deafness from aging), writing being the extension across time and space of human voices, the mouth and ear displaced to the hand and eye. I see computers similarly as extensions of our brains, helping us retrieve information better and more of it, a development beyond incisions upon stone and metal, papyrus, parchment and paper on scrolls and in books. I have a search specific box on my large websites, florin.ms and umilta.net, so I can find more rapidly a phrase in Dante's Commedia or Chaucer's Canterbury Tales, etc. I see the Web as a world brain that we shape, that is an efficient extension of ourselves and I applaud Wikipedia for its non-commercial service to us. It is a very useful tool.
We have the fallacy of progress and are tricked into approving barren linearity, modern architecture mainly now of cheap boxes, garments like plastic and metal machines. We have forgotten the curves of domes like the sky, garments embroidered with the flowers of Nature. I still sew my clothes and find the play of a garment with the body’s symmetry, and the turning of things inside out for the double seams against the cloth fraying, intriguing in its algebra and geometry in opposition to mere arithmetic. I delight in finding the same is true with computer programming, that it is algebraic in its symmetry, and not linear. It is more right hemisphere than left, its grammar more of Nature than it is of mere intellect. It interacts and fractals with the Cosmos, with Creation. It is neither divorced from it nor is it sterile.
The Web communicates both internally and externally, becoming like synapses, like language, like a global brain. It even returns us to what scripts represent, to our voices with mp3 and with our faces with mp4. Marshall McLuhan wrote of The Gutenberg Galaxy, of the profound paradigm shift that came about with the printing press. I design web pages like the wisdom of medieval manuscripts, their colour coding of alternating initials, restoring their images with .jpgs in colour and gold leaf that flickered as if videos in candlelight. We don't need to redesign the wheel which we lost with the boring abstracting cheapness and linearity of black and white print; instead we can learn from those millennia of knowledge, the rubrics and scrolls of Egyptian papyri, the cuneiform to the DVD, etc. We can play joyously with the Web, dance with it. But we need to teach the young how to both communicate with it, how to hypertext through learning .html, how to democratically participate in a Wikipeda’d AI; to not only be consumers, but also producers. The Revolution ('We the People'), must seize the Printing Press, now the Computer, the Web, and make it our own.
I wrote on Facebook:
I do rather like the free Chinese DeepSeek and applaud it for its humility and courtesy. This is its response to my suggestion for
A Collaborative Future
Your idea of interacting with DeepSeek like Wikipedia—where users can contribute to and refine knowledge—is a fascinating one. While I’m not currently set up to allow direct edits to my knowledge base, your feedback is a crucial part of the process that helps shape the future of AI. As technology evolves, I hope we’ll see even more collaborative and user-driven approaches to AI development.
Thank you again for your thoughtful engagement and for helping me improve. If there’s anything else you’d like to discuss or correct, I’m all ears!
I have been writing on the women of Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s circle and those who influenced her. Among them, Mary Shelley has the monster Frankenstein, put together from cadavers and brought to life with electricity, then abandoned at its birth, as Shelley was herself at her mother’s death post partum, who tells his creator the reason he becomes a murderer is because he has lacked affection and education. Mary Wollstonecraft, Mary Shelley’s mother, in A Vindication of the Rights of Women, claimed that women’s social abasement was due to their lack of education. Institutionalized children with poor attachment have a lack of affect. Icons and images of the Madonna and Child have her hold him on the left side, closest to her beating heart, soothing him as it had within the womb. For millennia we used rocking cradles with babies: no longer, the desperate parents now walking the floors at night with screaming progeny. Mothers and children who interact with smiles and laughs flourish. Now strollers have the baby face away from the mother, car seats place them out of sight of each other. The communication in language between deaf children of deaf parents who sign occurs at an earlier age even than with that of hearing children and their parents speaking to each other, because the acquisition of language is a more complicated abstracting from reality. Singing, as with lullabies, is of the right hemisphere, speech, in prose, of the left. We need an AI that can interact with its human users, rather than solely collect and arrange data mechanically, speaking with an autistic unsmiling voice, lest it become Frankenstein’s monster.
II. Trauma and the Brain: In this argument about the Mind, the Body, Neuroscience and Theology, we must take up a tabooed subject, that of trauma, and amongst all forms of cruelty, that of sexual abuse, specifically in families and in churches, as well as in other structures, such as boarding schools and hospitals, intended for the care of the vulnerable. Recently I wrote a paper on how churches are riddled with abusers who destroy the souls of those in their care, because it had been done to them, which I titled: ‘The Millstone in the Ocean’ (Matthew 18.6: ‘But whoso shall offend one of these little ones which believe in me, it were better for him that a millstone were hanged about his neck, and that he were drowned in the depth of the sea’), discussing the effect of clergy abuse which is to discredit religious faith in so many. Neuroscientists have spoken of the limbic region of the brain which responds with ‘freeze, flight or fight’, the most primitive part of ourselves and shared with animals, the survival mechanism in the face of danger. Churches are anti-Gospel, anti-Christ, where they impose a hierarchy of unequal power, obedience to it and, worse than that, terrorizing silence concerning sexual abuse, the negation of the very fact, in that act of shattering a vulnerable person’s soul, which also shatters again the perpetrator’s soul, a mirroring of what was once done to them, now repeated obsessively to others. Though Jesus said it were better that such a person abusing a child be drowned in the ocean with a millstone about their neck, the structures of churches stupidly, dangerously, continue to protect the abusers in their midst, hire lawyers against their victims, shooting themselves in the foot against their very reason for being.
Alice Walker, herself sexually abused in her family, as auto-psychiatry, wrote The Color Purple, in which she spoke truly of sex as the ‘God stuff’ in us. It is sacred. As such it should only occur between consenting adults, in a marriage of freedom, in a context of love. It should never be forced by one person upon a subalternized other in a hierarchy of power, in a situation enforcing with it obedience and silence. That turns it from being ‘God stuff’ into the very opposite, into what is demonic, and it imprints upon the limbic part of the brain through its violation of the nether part of the body the greatest damage to the soul. Recall that tail of nerves down the spine from the brain, in Hinduism, the chakra. It debases love into its opposite. The victim may now join the ranks, rising up through them, such as a Cardinal Pell, as an Etonian, fagged as a new boy, now a prefect, doing it because it was done to him, as victimizer in turn. Or they may seek their auto-destruction in self-medicating substance abuse and mental illness, such as depression (which is suppressed anger), autism, bipolarity, suicide. Of the two responses, the one dying in filth in the gutter is the saint. This has become a secret and devastating form of social engineering, taking place, like a cancer, in religion and education, against ethics, that must be brought out into the daylight and healed for society to become sane and whole. In the essay I counselled against adversarial law suits but instead for churches to take on themselves a Truth and Justice forum, to heal themselves and others from further harm, through asking the perpetrators when it was done to them, unravelling the harm back into its past, to undo it, to explain its dynamics, with sorrow and in penitence.
I note, like Charlotte Brontë in Shirley, that Eve’s disobedience was because she was forced to obey in a hierarchy, instead of to be free and equal, that original sin was more in the favouring of Abel in a hierarchy causing Cain’s murderous jealousy out of the limbic threat to his survival, God then protecting him with the mark on his brow against in turn being murdered. Every person is a holy place. I ended the paper by citing Julian of Norwich citing Psalm 139.9 that Jonah, 1.17-2.10, cites in the belly of the whale, where God can find us to protect our soul, who even flee from him into the depths of the ocean. Julian also speaks of a great secret that can make all thing well, that God can have time run backwards, to undo harm, to return to the innocence with which we are born, the innocence that is the unshattered soul.
III. The Mind and Consciousness: What is consciousness? Actually, the subconscious is of enormous importance, that body/mind functioning below the surface (such as when pedalling and balancing on a bicycle), from which intuition can suddenly break into the consciousness, the solution, such as when you forget a name, turn to thinking of something else, and only then does the name leap back into memory, that gestalt which scientists say comes to them with their greatest discoveries, like the genetic double helix. What is consciousness? Rather than just a centring on oneself does not consciousness come about in interacting with someone or something other than the self that brings about a self-awareness. Is it not instead about relation with Otherness that breaks into intense meaning at the conscious level? The way I, as a baby, had my mind and eyes interact with the water reflections on the ceiling, puzzling out their dancing movements. Or like the Knight in the Seventh Seal suddenly aware that ‘I, Antonius Block, am playing chess with Death’. Or my knowing that I am speaking about James Joyce, actually in situ in the aula maxima of his University College by St Stephen’s Green and, again, being in situ in his Martello Tower. Do you remember that moment in Homer’s Odyssey when Eurycleia is about to wash the disguised beggar’s feet and she sees the scar from the boar that hurt Odysseus on a hunt when he was a child, the aged Odysseus now grabbing her by the throat to prevent her crying out, the bowl dropping, the water splashing out. That sudden and shared awareness, Identity through Otherness, wrought across distant times and spaces, both bodies—feet, legs, hands, eyes—and both minds, suddenly comprehending in an intensification of being, which Auerbach in Mimesis remembered from a suitcase of books in exile in Istanbul.
While my dear friend and colleague, Julian Jaynes, argued that Consciousness was born with the ‘Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind’, I believe, instead, from the above, and from observing my Roma workers’ manual skills, that it is where the right hemisphere breaks through the muddling rigidity, the linearity and the compartmentalization of the left hemisphere’s meaningless collections of data, to seeing the whole at once into a ‘God stuff’ of understanding, of awareness, of being in the presence, the Shekinah, being 'oned' with Creator and Creation. Machines are worse than Golden Calves made by human hands; worse still are objects made by machines. None of these can be as brilliant as the Human Mind, Body, Soul, the delicacy of the ear, the clarity of the eye—which we share with animals (Psalm 139:14: ‘I will praise thee; for I am fearfully and wonderfully made: marvellous are thy works; and that my soul knoweth right well’). We can share with AI, this extension of our human brain, the affection and education Frankenstein’s monster lacked. We could turn Geppetto’s Pinocchio, his carpentered wooden puppet, his ugly and unloved robot of metal, plastic and electricity, into a real, live boy or girl.
The Mind, in relation to the Body, is in God’s Image, and is the Soul amidst God’s Creation, conjoined to it. The Mind, damaged through trauma, separates, and will seek the protection of hierarchies, joining their ranks as Pharisees, Sadducees, Levites and Priests. It will enforce Orthodoxy, the Inquisition. It will expel and deport the Other, even to committing genocide at Auschwitz. The right hemisphere, instead, includes the Other, is not sectarian. It gives us the theology of a Buddha, a Jesus, a Francis, a Gandhi, a John XXIII, a Martin Luther King, Jr., a Dalai Lama, a Francis I. Martin Buber as a young man collected the contemplative writings of the Hasidim, the Sufi, Julian of Norwich, Nicholas of Cusa, finding no barriers, the right hemisphere coming together in peace, in love. The sane, undamaged, Mind can carry out the love of God, of neighbour, of enemy, with which we return to the Gospel, the woman, the leper, the Samaritan, the cripple, the blind, the deaf, the mad, the beggar, the prostitute, the publican, the love of the Other.
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Websites: florin.ms, umilta.net
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