The Ralston College Podcast

Generously sponsored by the Ben Delo Foundation.
The final lecture of Ralston College's symposium, AI and the Battle for the Soul, asks a question that turns from the future of artificial intelligence to something far older and more enduring: What does freedom require? Weaving together neuroscience, philosophy, physics, and literature, Dr Iain McGilchrist examines free will, consciousness, and the forms of attention that compose our engagement with the world. Over several decades at the intersection of philosophy and neuroscience, Dr McGilchrist's contributions have transformed contemporary discussions of consciousness, attention, and meaning. At a moment so often dominated by mechanical explanations and computational models, he emphasizes the indispensable role of openness, receptivity, and participation in understanding, arguing that reality exceeds reductionist accounts. 
If you would like to support us in this work, please visit ralston.ac/donate.
Authors and Works Mentioned in this Episode:
Henry Stapp

Pierre-Simon Laplace

Benjamin Libet

Immanuel Kant

Plato

Socrates

Aeschylus' Prometheus Bound

Charles Darwin

William Blake

Carl Jung

Albrecht Altdorfer

Daniel Phillips

Generously sponsored by the Ben Delo Foundation.
Ralston College welcomed Iain McGilchrist and Stephen Wolfram in May of 2026 for a public conversation during our symposium, AI and the Battle for the Soul. Beginning with the promises and implications of this technology, the discussion opens onto a deeper inquiry concerning consciousness, computation, purpose, and the irreducible constitution of reality itself. 
Setting out from seemingly distant philosophical commitments, these thinkers demonstrate an uncommon willingness to follow first principles wherever they lead. After decades in physics, computer science, and the study of complex systems, Wolfram shares his vision through the lens of computation, looking for the simple rules underlying complexity in the natural world. Drawing upon decades studying philosophy, literature, and neuropsychiatry, McGilchrist makes the case that reality exceeds computation, suggesting that consciousness is grounded in embodiment, receptivity, and participation. The two thinkers do not remain at the level of disagreement, but examine one another's fundamental assumptions with a rare seriousness and intellectual charity. 
 
If you would like to support us in this work, please visit ralston.ac/donate.
Authors and Works Mentioned in this Episode:
Alan Turing

Isaac Newton

Albert Einstein

Charles Darwin

Aristotle

René Descartes

Ludwig Wittgenstein

John von Neumann 

Roger Penrose

Generously sponsored by the Ben Delo Foundation.
In this second lecture from our recent symposium, AI and the Battle for the Soul, theologian and iconographer Jonathan Pageau asks: Who, or what, does AI serve? By drawing on mythology, scripture, symbolism, and poetry, he argues that the questions raised by AI directly concern human purpose and meaning. Through the stories of Prometheus, the Holy Grail, Moloch, and the Tower of Babel, Pageau unpacks the deepest questions raised by AI, calling on us to recognize what technology reveals about ourselves and the civilization we are building. 
 
Recorded at Ralston College in May 2026, this event brought together leading thinkers including Iain McGilchrist, Jonathan Pageau, and Stephen Wolfram for a day-long engagement with some of the most pressing questions facing technological advancement, the meaning crisis, and ultimately, civilization itself. 
If you would like to support us in this work, please visit ralston.ac/donate.
Authors and Works Mentioned in this Episode:
Dante Alighieri's Divine Comedy

The Holy Grail (Arthurian Legend)

Richard Dawkins' The Selfish Gene

Scott Alexander's Meditations on Moloch

Allen Ginsberg's Howl

Alfred North Whitehead

Simone Weil

Aeschylus' Prometheus Bound

Yuval Noah Harari

Viktor Frankl: Man's Search for Meaning

Generously sponsored by the Ben Delo Foundation.
In this opening lecture from Ralston College's symposium, AI and the Battle for the Soul, Dr Iain McGilchrist traces a line of questions concerning the nature of intelligence, embodiment, wisdom, and the soul in an age increasingly defined by mechanistic thinking and the rise of large language models. Drawing on neuroscience, literature, theology, music, and myth, he explores what it means to understand beyond the constraints of reductionist accounts that view the human being as a computational information processor. In this wide-ranging and dynamic talk, he invites us to consider, as deeply as we can, the essence of our humanity.  
Recorded at Ralston College in Savannah, Georgia, this event brought together leading thinkers including Jonathan Pageau and Stephen Wolfram for a day-long engagement with some of the most pressing questions facing technological advancement, the meaning crisis, and ultimately, civilization itself. . 
If you would like to support us in this work, please visit ralston.ac/donate.
Authors and Works Mentioned in this Episode:
E. M. Forster: The Machine Stops

Isaiah Berlin

Plato

David Bohm

Ludwig Wittgenstein 

Gabriel Marcel

Homer

William Shakespeare: Othello 

William Ernest Henley:  Invictus

Nelson Mandela

William Wordsworth: Lines Composed a Few Miles Above Tintern Abbey

Thomas Tallis

Giovanni Pierluigi da Palestrina

Tomás Luis de Victoria

William Byrd

Emil Cioran

Johann Sebastian Bach

Eugene Gendlin

George Gaylord Simpson

Galileo Galilei

Peter Medawar

Niels Bohr

Joseph Pieper

V. S. Ramachandran

D. H. Lawrence

Laozi: Tao Te Ching

George Steiner

Martin Heidegger

Hannah Arendt

John Milton: Paradise Lost

Saint Paul: Epistle to the Ephesians

Onondaga Nation

Yuval Noah Harari

Viktor Frankl: Man's Search for Meaning

Dr Armand D'Angour turns our attention to the lyrical poetry of Horace, as it is placed within the Greek musical and poetic inheritance. With close readings of key odes, he shows us how Horace uses Greek lyric meters to achieve something both rhythmic and aural. Constructed around the themes of love, time, and political life, these poems can be seen as carefully constructed personnae, rather than autobiographical confession. This lyric poetry is shown to be a disciplined artform that carries inherited Greek forms into something distinctly Roman, without disturbing the musical intelligence beneath them. These poems were not written to be read silently, but were deeply connected to music, rhythm, and memory. By recovering this dimension, Professor D'Angour illuminates Horace not just as a literary figure, but as a poet working within a living tradition of song in which meaning is brought about through the interplay of sound, structure, and voice. 
 
Authors and Works Mentioned in this Episode:
Horace's Odes

Homer's Iliad and Odyssey

Sappho

Alcaeus

Anacreon

Pindar

Catullus

Virgil

Aristotle

Plato

Epicurus

Augustus

Maecenas