In a way, modern society has been leading up to this, in incremental fashion, for the past couple centuries. People have been turning more and more to mimicking unthinking machines and thinking of organic life as machinery. The human mind doesn’t have to be intelligent, after all. Being so malleable, so plastic, it can fall into a stream of consciousness as repetitive and unimaginative as a machine’s operation.
One of my past occupations was operating machines in a factory. Factory work is essentially doing repetitive tasks that the machines aren’t able to do. Inserting materials into machine inputs. Looking at a stream of widgets on a conveyor and watching for defects. Taking widgets out of a machine’s output and placing them into boxes. All usually at a pace that demands exact, efficient motions repeated the same way each time. There’s no time to think about it or anything else, because then you become distracted and make mistakes or slow down too much. You become an extension of the machine.
People in factories train their minds to be like machines when they are working, but they remain humans when they aren’t working. They definitely are not AIs. An AI is just a set of instructions running on electronic machinery that shuffles electric charges down copper coated pathways. The possible instructions that can be used are burned into the circuitry of the CPUs that “execute” them. The entire process involves only one khandha: rupa, form. There is no vedana, sanna, sankhara, or vijnana to found anywhere in a computer or a piece of software. If there were, those things would be found in a plastic molding or food processing machines that are chained together to produce products in an almost completely automated fashion. Factory workers, especially the maintenance people, often do anthropomorphize machines when they malfunction. We wonder if it’s “on purpose” when it randomly does something anomalous. But it’s a human hallucination, a conceptualization that isn’t real. There isn’t any formless khandhas there.
In software, we are fooled by the output looking like what our minds could produce, but it’s no different than passing raw materials through a physical machine and getting a finished product as an output. The output is patterns of electric charge, which humans conceptualize as zeros and ones. In the computer circuitry, it’s just high and low voltage levels arranged in whatever way the circuitry arranged them as they passed through, which was determined by the patterns that were input at the start.
Humans use programming “languages” to make it easier and faster to put together the thousands and thousands of opcodes that are fed into the CPU as input. The opcodes are just unique strings of high and low voltage levels that trigger other electric pulses to pass through circuitry that processes them in certain ways: arithmetic operations and binary logic gates, etc. It’s all rupa, from start to finish. The “decisions” that are made as the software executes are actually data passing through a series of logic gates and taking one path or another depending on the results.
By contrast, organic sentient beings are much more than rupa. They’ve got four more formless khandhas that make them what they are, in the Buddhist way of thinking.
Myself, I interact with tree squirrels every day. It’s astonishing how intelligent they are. They have brains the size of a walnut, and they are far more intelligent than ChatGPT, which consumes how much electricity running in giant data centers somewhere using an machine learning app trained on how much data? Observing squirrels, I’ve come to the conclusion that the essential thing that makes something intelligent is the ability to cope with the unexpected and the unknown, be aware of what is happening, and learn (which involves self-correction).
A squirrel’s mind doesn’t crash with a error code when it encounters something new or generate some bit of placeholder nonsense. They hesitate for a few seconds, to be sure, as they assess whether it’s a danger or not. Once they’ve assessed it, they go about their business. And squirrels know things with very little effort. They can move through a tree with minimal thought, able to calculate the exact forces required to leap gracefully from branch to branch with no idea what a number is. They can recover from a fall in about 300 milliseconds and control the rest of the fall to land safely. Their mastery of physics makes human gymnasts look like amateurs. Because a squirrel has a mind, and not a set of instructions written by someone else, it can learn what it needs to know about new things or situations, and do it very quickly. It doesn’t need to scrape the entire content of the internet to recognize a nut sitting on the ground and determine whether it’s good for storage, should be eaten on the spot, or discarded. The efficiency is amazing compared to computers. But after all, in nature it’s not just a matter of curiosity but of survival.
No, software is no analogue for the human mind or even the minds of small mammals like squirrels. Organic life is far, far more advanced that these machines we’ve created to serve as tools.
