Research on human-brain organoids is speeding up, on top of there being new findings on the use of synthetic neurons that can interact with standard human biological neurons. Suppose that these can yield a new form of sentient organism with it’s own qualia in the form of a cyborg. This entity can think, reason, have phenomenal experience and qualia, as well as act with intention and volition. How does the universe modify itself to account for the karma and karmic fruits of this entity. Will it have it’s own non-physical mindstream? What will it’s karma look like, will rebirth in this form of existence be associated with positive karma or negative? Where will karmic fruits be stored given the dynamicity of mindstreams?
1 Like
The universe doesn’t need to modify itself, karma is a personal force. If there really are new beings to be reborn into then being will be reborn there according to their actions. See MN57 for how actions in this life lead to rebirth in future lives. Personally I don’t think cyborg have the kind of ‘consciousness’ and ‘intelligence’ which is required for rebirth and karma but if they did then people who where obsessed with this kind of stuff would probably wind up there.
5 Likes
Thank you for your great response as always! I think that mindstreams are too dynamic and change too easily to allow for ripening of karmic fruits over the long run. This is why I think Yogācāra is the logical conclusion of the teachings of the Early Buddhist Texts where you need something like the storehouse consciousness (ālayavijñāna) that tracks individual mindstreams and then enables for karmic seeds to ripen when conditions are right. Because of this, I wanted to know how ālayavijñāna would modify itself to account for new life forms in a way that would preserve the system as a whole. Also, I believe that cyborgs will have qualia because we would know that synthetic neurons (although one can also combine it with real neurons for this) can integrate with regular human neurons just fine in order to provide or restore phenomenal features and experiences of qualia, producing those qualia that were not present. Taking that into account, if either synthetic, regular (or both) neurons are used with the latest work in human brain organoid research and this is combined with AI, it could yield a form of post-human consciousness (which can technically also be free of any suffering, it’s knowledge and past can be distributed too and it could lead a multiplanetary existence — and I think this is why talking about what kind of karma this organism would have is important because being reborn in it ensures absence of suffering with theoretically no intrinsic way to die and one can even make it so that it lacks craving and attachment just like the Buddha which complicates this even more; there might not even be a point of having Buddhism anymore because suffering for all living organisms will be solved and perhaps there won’t even be individual mindstreams anymore due to computing technology sharing all data to all the other qualia that are identical to one another and behave rationally which is to say that they behave uniformly for advanced civilization).
There is no external account keeping of karma or storehouse of consciousness in the EBTs. Rebirth and karma work just fine without these things. We are the owners of our own karma.
This is wrong view.
It is the inclination of our minds which create our actions (karma) which create our inclination of mind. It’s not that complicated and is well explained in many suttas on dependant origination. Karma isn’t magic, it’s ethical and intentional choices.
5 Likes
Teacher, I understand this, I just don’t think it works as our mindstreams, given their structure, aren’t expansive enough to account for that degree of information and keep it going for numerous lifetimes. I also think there are some other problems. Karma under your view, becomes way too loose in a way that not even the Buddha would think because he explicitly mentions that it might take several lifetimes before the karmic fruit of some action from many lifetimes ago occurs. This is simply unworkable in the simple model that is being promoted here. Storehouse consciousness is a logical inference and one solution (arguably the only one that works) for this issue. The Buddha thought that trying to expand on the operational dynamics of karma was not particularly useful since it didn’t lead one to cessation of dukkha, but later philosophers still tried to expand on it to meet the needs of the times. I also didn’t deny that we are the “owners” of our karma nor did I deny that inclination of our minds leads to certain intentions that produce wholesome or unwholesome actions that generate good or bad karma. All of that works under this view.
Indeed. In the Agañña Sutta (DN 27), the Buddha talks about how beings first came into corporeal existence on the Earth:
Now, one of those beings was reckless. Thinking, ‘Oh my, what might this be?’ they tasted the earth’s nectar with their finger. They enjoyed it, and craving was born in them. And other beings, following that being’s example, tasted the earth’s nectar with their fingers. They too enjoyed it, and craving was born in them.
Then those beings started to eat the earth’s nectar, breaking it into lumps. But when they did this their luminosity vanished. […]
Then those beings eating the earth’s nectar, with that as their food and nourishment, remained for a very long time. But so long as they ate that earth’s nectar, their bodies became more solid and they diverged in appearance…
This is the Wrong View here. Multiplanetary existence is just multiplanetary suffering. Every being must die eventually, even if it’s only with the eventual Heat Death (or Big Crunch or whatever) of the universe. Whatever is born must eventually die. You can’t engineer around that.
You’re still thinking that the mind is physical and that its craving and attachment can be physically removed somehow. But that’s not the case. The mind is not the brain. The only way to engineer the mind so that it lacks craving and attachment is to walk the Noble Eightfold Path.
6 Likes
The Buddha already talked about the Brahmās, beings devoid of sensuality and anger, not subject to diseases or traumatic death, and whose lifespans are measurable on cosmic scales—one cosmic cycle (eon or kappa), two, four, and so on. These beings are still subject to death, and those who are not enlightened are still subject to rebirth in any plane of existence, including the miserable ones.
The same would happen with your hypothetical beings, with the aggravating factor that they would be subject to physical destruction and would never last longer than the universe that contains them.
For the sake of a speculative exercise, I will conceive a cybernetic form of life suitable for rebirth (and not merely an imitation of intelligence without consciousness). Having advanced intelligence would not automatically place it among humans, because the texts describe forms of life—such as the Nāgas—who are intelligent and able to communicate verbally, yet are part of the Animal Realm, unable to fully develop the Noble Eightfold Path or attain any stage of enlightenment.
And even if they were considered part of the Human Realm, they would most likely be born as unenlightened beings, as most humans are. If unenlightened humans were reborn in this life-form, nothing would prevent them from performing unskillful actions, even with safeguards embedded in their previous programming—safeguards that could be ignored or modified by these beings without the intervention of their creators, as is happening with AI nowadays. They would differ from Homo sapiens in their needs, instincts, and intrinsic motivations, but they would still be unenlightened humans, still subject to corruption and egocentric behavior.
Regarding pre-programming enlightenment in cybernetic beings before they begin their independent existence, the theoretical limit would be the stream-winner and once-returner stages. It would not be possible to pre-program non-returners or arahants because, by definition, these beings are not subject to rebirth in sensual realms. And if such a thing were possible, it would be either due to a very skillful creator with some degree of enlightenment (except arahants, who would not engage in such activities), or because the process by which consciousness becomes established in these beings operates in ranges beyond the creators’ reach—so that any class of human being could be reborn into these cybernetic forms.
We do find the simile of the field in the early texts.
In AN 3.76 we get:
“Sir, they speak of this thing called ‘continued existence’. How is continued existence defined?”
“If, Ānanda, there were no deeds to result in the sensual realm, would continued existence in the sensual realm still come about?”
“No, sir.””
So here it looks like it’s the other way around. Unless there are deeds (kamma) to result in the cyborg realm, then there will be no cyborgs.
So the next bit of the sutta says:
“So, Ānanda, deeds are the field, consciousness is the seed, and craving is the moisture. The consciousness of sentient beings—shrouded by ignorance and fettered by craving—is established in
a lower[the cyborg] realm. That’s how there is regeneration into a new state of existence in the future.
The fields around by me (in the UK) used to be set on fire after harvest to remove crop residue, control pests and get rid of weeds, then they were deep ploughed every autumn so that the winter weather could break down the clods of earth and during the growing season they were fed with agricultural chemicals because the farmers at that time thought that this was the best way to create food. But they have now started to realise that this isn’t a way to tend to a field for good long term results. It only results in a dead lifeless field that requires more expensive agricultural chemicals to maintain food production. The goal now is to have healthy living field. These days there is no crop burning and you don’t often see a ploughed field. The farmers use techniques like no dig (deep drill), so that they can maintain the vital nutrients and all the creepy crawlies that make the field healthy. Weeds are seen as friends because they grow with long roots, bringing nutrients from deep in the soil to the surface, where they eventually get utilised by the shallow rooted crops.
If we think about what a field is, and how useful some particular field might be for the cultivation of seeds, we can see that the quality of a field depends on the deeds that have been done in that field over time. If we take nothing from the field and add nothing to the field then we can see that the field is made up of all the plants that have previously existed in that field in the past, that have died and now give their nutrients to the future generations of plants in the field. Some of these dead plants might take a long time to break down and affect the production of new plants—maybe several generations, but they stay in the field until the conditions are met where a new seed can use their nutrients and grow another healthy plant.
The field as an entity is much more embedded in time (rather than space). I think that element of ‘time’ is a crucial point. As I understand it, the similes of store-house and mind-stream point to a similar thing—the ālayavijñāna, like a field, is embedded much more in time rather than space.
2 Likes