Top all-time · #19618
Iain McGilchrist
Personal blog · iainmcgilchrist.comphilosophyscience
Iain McGilchrist's personal blog at iainmcgilchrist.com covers philosophy and science. Since 2013, 4 different Hacker News readers have linked it 5 times. It is still writing: the last post was on 2026-10-21, and you can follow it by feed.
Too few sampled comments (5) to say how often HN recommends it.?
Why HN links it
HN readers link this site for Iain McGilchrist's book The Master and His Emissary, on the divided brain and the making of the western world, and for his reply to Steven Pinker.
Summarised by Claude from a sample of 5 HN comments that link here. Each comment is marked recommending, critical or neutral (citing without judging); how this works.
What Hacker News says?
The idea that analogy underpins all thought is also argued by Ian McGilchrist in his book Master and His Emissary, which I'd highly recommend to people interested in the sort of epic philosophical undertaking GEB was: http://www.iainmcgilchrist.com/The_Master_and_his_Emissary_b...
Comment linking /The_Master_and_his_Emissary_by_McGilchrist.pdf
on “Douglas Hofstadter has a new book”Pinker seems like a horrible example, tho: * https://www.salon.com/2019/01/26/steven-pinkers-fake-enlight... * https://www.opendemocracy.net/en/transformation/steven-pinke... * https://www.currentaffairs.org/2019/05/the-worlds-most-annoy... * http://iainmcgilchrist.com/reply-to-steven-pinker/
Comment linking /reply-to-steven-pinker/
on “GPT2, Counting Consciousness and the Curious Hacker”Fascinating subject. Much more is address in Iain Mc Gilchrist's book "The Master and his Emissary : the divided brain and the making of the western world" http://iainmcgilchrist.com/ ps: put short, the book explains how pop psychology belief that left is maths and right is arts (you get the idea), was wrong, and yet.. there is a physiologically noticable difference as well as observable differences in how each hemi…
Comment linking /
on “When you split the brain, do you split the person?”After a quick skim, I would recommend Master and his Emissary as a book with similar themes about the limits, dangers and over-dominance of reductionism and mechanistic views of reality, but significantly better written and argued and ultimately much broader (although not focused specifically on software). An introduction can be found here: http://www.iainmcgilchrist.com/The_Master_and_his_Emissary_b...
Comment linking /The_Master_and_his_Emissary_by_McGilchrist.pdf
on “Software and Mind: The Mechanistic Myth and Its Consequences”The Master and his Emissary by Iain McGilchrist. http://iainmcgilchrist.com/the-master-and-his-emissary/
Comment linking /the-master-and-his-emissary/
on “Ask HN: Being a hacker, which books engaged your inquisitive mind the most?”