Note: I have reworded this essay following feedback in the comments. Thanks to all commentators!
In the last couple of essays, I have considered the use of AI as applied to Buddhist texts. This is, of course, an extremely small subset of a much larger industry. From now I will be taking a look at the larger picture of the AI industry as a whole, its philosophies, its people, its purpose and impact.
One might agree with the problematic nature of the industry as a whole, yet accept that specialized applications are justifiable. We can do our little bit over here, and itâs not really got anything to do with what the big guys are doing. Clearly there is something to this, and there is a moral distinction in the purpose for which the work is done. But the boundaries are never as clear as we would like. The same big companies whose AI is powering military offensives are sponsoring AI at big universities to do the fundamental research. You can work on your small AI project, but the big companies really want to swamp you.
This is no accident. Itâs a corollary of the fundamental nature of the field: the effectiveness of AI depends on scale. The more it goes on, the bigger it gets, the harder it is to do any human-scaled work. And thatâs why it is becoming increasingly monopolized by the same few corporations. In this way, it is similar to crypto, which likewise started out with small scale basement mining operations, and when it hit mainstream, became a planetary system of industrial server farms.
But let us turn to the idea underlying the very idea of AI: they want to build a machine mind. Unfortunately, the AI field has no clear conception of consciousness. They are, by and large, materialists, who believe that consciousness emerges from brain activity. And they think that if they make a machine that is brain-like enough, it will become conscious. Buddhism, of course, is not a form of materialism, and we reject the notion that consciousness arises from brain activity. This is a philosophical notion that is not determined by science. Buddhist philosophy, in any form, therefore must reject the fundamental premise of the entire AI project.
Alan Turing spoke of whether machines can âthinkâ. These days people speak of machines âreasoningâ or using âintelligenceâ. There are no clear definitions of these terms, and the persistence of, on the one hand, being completely unable to say what it is that they are trying to achieve, and on the other hand, devoting trillions of dollars to achieving it, is symptomatic of the delusional thinking of the AI field.
Just today, the Guardian reports that Elon Musk is claiming:
My guess is that weâll have AI that is smarter than any one human probably around the end of next year
By not defining âsmarterâ, he elides the delusion of this kind of thinking. Humans are aware, machines are not. We all know that machines can do some things better than humans. My Texas Instrument calculator in the 70s could do maths better than me. But none of these things that machines do has anything to do with consciousness. Musk goes on to say:
If I could press pause on AI or really advanced AI digital superintelligence I would. It doesnât seem like that is realistic so xAI is essentially going to build an AI. In a good way, sort of hopefully.
Has any other industry ever developed by telling people itâs a bad idea, but we will try not make it good, âsort of hopefullyâ?
The Buddha had something to say about this kind of thinking.
âSuppose, PoáčáčhapÄda, a man were to say: âWhoever the finest lady in the land is, it is her that I want, her that I desire!â Theyâd say to him, âMister, that finest lady in the land who you desireâdo you know whether sheâs an aristocrat, a brahmin, a peasant, or a menial?â Asked this, heâd say, âNo.â Theyâd say to him, âMister, that finest lady in the land who you desireâdo you know her name or clan? Whether sheâs tall or short or medium? Whether her skin is black, brown, or tawny? What village, town, or city she comes from?â Asked this, heâd say, âNo.â Theyâd say to him, âMister, do you desire someone who youâve never even known or seen?â Asked this, heâd say, âYes.â What do you think, PoáčáčhapÄda? This being so, doesnât that manâs statement turn out to have no demonstrable basis?â (DN 9 PoáčáčhapÄdasutta)
Early Buddhism, on the other hand, does have a clear conception of the mind. And it is one that, if it is correct, completely rules out the possibility of consciousness by the pathway imagined by the AI devotees. This conception is not established by the pseudo-scientific process of scanning brains and postulating mental correlates. It arises from the inner reflection that is deepened through meditation, and guided by knowledge of the Buddhaâs teachings. This process reveals layers and nuances of the mind, allowing the meditator to develop an understanding that is not just theoretical, but practical and effective. Like any true understanding, it works: when you understand the mind, you can let go.
Let us briefly explore this process. From an early Buddhist point of view, the working of the mind is understood in relation to subjective awareness or consciousness (viññÄáča). This consciousness arises dependent on sense stimulation, with the mind itself as the sixth sense that is aware of thoughts, ideas, and memories.
As viññÄáča is the consciousness of other phenomena, it lacks the qualities of those things but it is affected by them. That is to say, consciousness in and of itself is not red or white, not sweet or sour, not angry or greedy or wise. However, as the subjective awareness of these things, it reflects their qualities, as a mirror reflects the color red without actually being red.
It does not lack its own qualities, of course. Its nature as a conditioned phenomenon is to be aware, and it may be more or less aware, bright and clear, or dull and cloudy. In this way it is unlike a mirror, which reflects light without being changed by it. ViññÄáča is changing all the time.
We witness a major transformation of consciousness every time we fall asleep: awareness dims to almost-darkness, the dream realm from which logic and reason have fled. Or even deeper, full sleep where the only betrayal of consciousness happens if we are awoken. And then we see the climb of awareness back into the daylight as we regain our faculty of knowing, being able to discern the things around us. And as consciousness returns, so to do all of its concommitants. And we think and desire and wonder and begin another day.
When the mind is filled with greed, that affects the manner in which our consciousness knows. It is hard to describe such things, one reason for that being that it is always different as desires are always different. The horniness of a teenage boy is not the same as the rapaciousness of a CEO. Yet they share a similar quality of limiting and narrowing consciousness, yet energizing it one specific direction.
In dependent origination, the primary conditioning factor for consciousness is saáč khÄrÄ, which here refers to moral choices. When we choose to do good, it focuses the mind in a certain direction, shaping consciousness. When we choose to do evil, it creates another kind of mind with different experiences. If we get into the habit of choosing evil, our minds take on those evil qualities, becoming depraved and degenerate, devoid of compassion and wisdom. If we do good, we create a mind of openness and clarity. This is the fundamental principle that lies behind all Buddhist meditation. If we want to create something that is like a mind, then, morality cannot be an afterthought: it must be the defining characteristic. It is how you create, not just a mind, but a healthy mind. There are many more ways to create brokenness than health.
Consciousness is an organic sense of knowing. It does not exist by itselfâthere is no such thing as pure consciousness separate from other dimensions of the mind. Rather, consciousness is the subjective function of the mind, created and supported in conjunction with aspects such as feeling, perception, intention, and attention. These factors cannot be separated, and they always proceed in an interdependent stream. Consciousness is present from birth, and grows and evolves during life, in response to experiences and to fulfill desires. More than that even, it is a stream that flows from one life to the next, providing continuity in that most drastic of changes, death.
Consciousness is the most subtle, hard to grasp, yet universally pervasive of all conditioned things. It is there when you taste salt, when you sleep, when you die. As meditation grows deeper, consciousness starts to reveal itself as an echo or a reflection, or better, as a glimpse of movement in a reflection. It has a surpassing softness, a tenderness and reactivity that it normally hides from us. Consciousness wants to know, not to be known. Yet there is something about it that, deep down, yearns to be understood.
It is the last bastion of the Self, the resort we cling to when we have seen through all other tricks and deceits. But it too is empty, like a magicianâs illusion.
Once we understand consciousness in this way, it is clearly impossible to get from âthoughtâ to âconsciousnessâ. You canât start by putting together bits and pieces and then consciousness pops out. Thought or imagination or reasoning cannot exist without consciousness. They are all there from the start. But itâs worse than that, because a machine does not have âthoughtâ or âmemoryâ, it has something else that happens to go by the same name.
When we speak of a machine having âmemoryâ, it doesnât have the same faculty that a mind does. Rather, it does something completely different that partly resembles the functions that we associate with memory, namely, the recall of past events. One of the betraying factors here is that machine memory is in some ways better than human memory: a machine can replicate something exactly, whereas real consciousness relies on fuzzy recreations. This shows that machine memory is quite a different kind of thing than human memory.
We use the same word for convenience, but that fools us into thinking that they are the same thing. This is the same kind of logical fallacy that Buddhists have long understood in the context of the âselfâ. We understand that there is no âselfâ in the sense of a metaphysical, lasting entity that is who we are in our utmost essence. Yet we use the word in everyday conversation just like anyone else. But with mindfulness, we remain clear-headed about what it is that weâre actually referring to. If we donât, our deeply-held tendency towards egoism (ahaáčkÄra) quickly leads us into blind attachment to our metaphysical fancies.
The same applies to, say, the exercise of logic. When you or I do a maths sum, there is some kind of conscious process that goes on. A machine can do the same sum, using a completely different kind of process. Yet we functionally describe them both in the same way as âsolvingâ the problem. Again, the difference is betrayed because a simple calculator can already do sums faster and more accurately than we can, yet it is clearly not conscious.
Machines donât remember, they simulate memory. They donât recognize things, they simulate recognition. They donât think, they simulate thinking. Externally these processes appear similar to a degree, as there are functional overlaps. But for the machine, all there is is the outside. There is nothing inside, nothing from the machineâs point of view, nothing that it is like to be a machine. You will never get from simulated thought, simulated memory, simulated feeling to actual consciousness. At best, youâll create something that is better at fooling more people.
The history of Indian philosophy is intertwined with the emergence of contemplative sages such as the Buddha. When the great and wise pointed to the centrality of consciousness as the key to liberation, people listened, they discussed, and they formulated philosophies. Their attention was magnetized by the power of insight, and they inclined their own attention and mental development down that same path.
AI is doing the same thing, except we are bewitched by a simulacrum. Human attention worldwide has been transfixed, our thoughts and fears and hopes and fantasies magnetized by the appearance of something so alien that seems somehow like us. We want it to be real. We want to be it. In doing so we long for the erasure of our own subjectivity.
AIs are not conscious and do not understand or feel anything. They were not conceived in lust or raised in love or tormented by hate. They just spit out streams of data.
It is a blind faith of the AI salesmen that this âlimitationâ will be removed in time. They say a singularity is approaching, when a machine is smarter than a man. They see this as necessary and desirable. Elon Musk said, âWe will all be dumber than a house cat compared to AI, if thatâs any consolation.â Bear in mind that in the same tweet he endorsed the racist and eugenicist pseudo-science of phrenology, which I guess at least proves that AI is already smarter than some people.
If we can make a machine smarter than us, surely it can make another machine smarter than itself, leading to an exponential spiral of intelligence limited only by energy, materials, and the speed of light. Then itâs on to quantum computers, for which the speed of light is more a guideline than a rule.
None of this will happen. Itâs sheer fantasy, with zero evidential basis. What AIs do has nothing to do with consciousness. It doesnât matter how big you make your data-cruncher; itâs just a data-cruncher.
But the belief that it will happen is real. This evidence-free fantasy drives the hopes and fears of our generation. AI proponents deliberately play on this, amping up the fears while hyping the possibilities, all the while lying about ethical responsibilities and legislative guidelines. Donât believe them.
Gratitude for the great SuttaCentral search engine!
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