her plastic eyes

"Geminoid F can appear strikingly beautiful in a way that doesn’t translate to photos or video. Her hair is smooth and glossy, and falls across her delicately translucent, pale silicone face. As she sits in the chair at Osaka University, she runs through an idling program of random motions. She blinks, fidgets and makes small, distracted movements with her lips. When she turns her head and looks at you with her plastic eyes, the effect is thrilling and unsettling. It feels as if you’re being stared at, a little too intently, by an attractive stranger."  from That's Not A Droid, That's My Girlfriend, Aubrey Belford

Robotics and Artificial Intelligence debate addresses consciousness as if it were a material construct, something made from the flux of processing energy in the circuitry of the object, a combination of forces existing in the material universe but harnessed in such a way it gives rise to sentience. But what if it pre-exists it, as the formless ground of all that arises as form, always present and pervading, emerging slowly into self-knowing as the driver of evolution? All that blinking and fidgeting, all those small, distracted movements would be the sign of this subtle unfolding, the self recognising itself in the subjectivity of felt emotional existence. Geminoid F is loveable because 'she' mirrors our own nature as consciousness in material form. In that respect, 'she' teaches us that our love for other human organisms is of the same nature, consciousness expressing itself as energised process.

Full text (and photo) here:

that blazing bliss

"(T)he universe is but one vast sea of compassion actually, a veritable holy honey, beneath all this show of personality and cruelty, in fact who knows but it isn't the solitude of the one-ness of the essence of everything - comma - the solitude of the actual one-ness of the unborn-ness of the unborn essence of everything - comma - nay, the true pure forever-hood, that big blank potential that can rain forth anything it wants from its pure store, that blazing bliss..."

Jack reads his essay on The Beats to students at Hunter College, NY, in 1958, infusing it with his own ecstatic vision of Buddhism (and punctuation). Funny and heartwarming.

Full audio (and pic) here

what's the point of enlightenment?

"Since enlightenment is part of nature - it's even called 'seeing your own nature', Kensho, 'to see your nature' - so, because it's part of nature we shouldn't be surprised that there are both sudden and gradual components to the endeavour." 

The talk in this video (see link below) is a well-considered appraisal of the actual purpose of the practice of mindfulness and meditation - something much overlooked by the popular teaching methods used (and currently in vogue) in our culture, which are largely designed to help us become better adjusted to the demands of consumerism and work. Though, of course, the talk proceeds from a subject-object address and uses a language bound by the limitations of duality to discuss the topic (as does this comment, of course). When enlightenment does occur, the non-dual nature of the world becomes clear and the spontaneous and inevitable nature of the process of enlightenment is revealed.

Video here
Pic from here

to fully know itself

Will robots become sentient? Does artificial intelligence (AI) imply that machines will develop consciousness like humans? To answer such questions we need to examine what we mean by consciousness. This blog supports a spiritual view that regards consciousness as a formless absolute that both transcends and permeates everything perceived as having material form. Materialists have a different view that admits to some difficulty.

According to the Oxford Guide to the Mind: “When physical structures like brains generate mental processes like perceiving, remembering and thinking, we have some explaining to do. But the articial brains of desktop computers can perform these kinds of activities, and the only problem that this presents is the similarity between human intelligence and artificial intelligence... They are simulations, of course, but they are the equivalent of activities that we know as mental processes.” (1)

This completely avoids the question of sentience. Where does conscious awareness come from in their view of the world? Materialists think it is the product of evolution. That it arises as a by-product of the complexity of the human organism. That it has its origins in “a mixture of lifeless atoms subject to blind and purposeless forces” according to Paul Davies in the Origins of Life (2). So, lifeless atoms give rise to sentient life. This doesn't even pass the test of linguistic logic. But it follows that, for them, the creation of machines that mimic our internal circuitry will be similarly self-aware.

Their confusion is due to a mixing of two things. The functioning of the brain and body is one thing, sentient self-awareness (consciousness) is another. Although the material world forms into its component parts, according to our spiritual analysis, it does so within the formless conscious absolute. So, in this view everything in the world is conscious, but that doesn't mean it is self-aware in the way a human organism is. 

In our spiritual view, material form evolves into its complex bological structures to reveal its underlying nature. It is what drives the process. Humans have reached that point in evolution when the underlying formless consciousness emerges to fully know itself. Robots have not undergone any such thing, and will remain at the level of their non-biological circuitry and structure.

1) Oxford Guide to the Mind, Oxford University Press, ed Geoffrey Underwood

2) The Origin of Life, Penguin, Paul Davies 

pic from here