unpredictably dangerous rogue

No one's judging robots just yet. But would we judge one fully-tooled up with artificial intelligence and able to develop its own responses? Probably not. We'd say, No, it's acting according to its complex programmed logic, however refined that's become. And that's on us. Wouldn't stop us terminating it as an unpredictably dangerous rogue element in society. But we wouldn't actually apply moral judgement to it. We'd continue to reserve that for human behaviour (over a certain age and with observable functionality). Even though human behaviour is probably not that different.

ongoing drama

Channeling the psychedelic left confluence of exotic spirituality with popular oppositional anarchist politics, Patti Smith at Glastonbury brings the Dalai Lama onstage for a birthday celebration and a speech about compassion, and then sings People have the Power to the crowd. This of course exposes the hopeless confusion of that particular radical strand that goes back to Patti's friend and mentor, Allen Ginsberg, and his kind, and is kept alive in Britain almost single-handedly by Russell Brand. One of Buddhism's central characteristics is its belief in Karma, that great underlying driving force of the cosmos, that moves everything according to its implicit law. Every single organism is driven by it, just part of the big ongoing drama of creation. That may emerge as left wing activity, but it may equally emerge as its opposite. The universe is indifferent. Not that the crowd are likely to have shared her political views if these figures are accurate, despite the efforts of the organisers and the festival's regular speechmakers. 

utopian dream

From the Open Source Nano Replicator Initiative, another pitch for the end-of-suffering utopian dream that materialist realists can't function without. Same God's-kingdom-on-earth pitch as the religious millenarianists, the externalisation of spiritual enlightenment. See how detailed it is: 

several changes that the existence of a nano-replicator would bring to the world. They include:

• The end of poverty
• The creation of abundance & utopia
• The end of crime through the removal of greed
• End of financial and resource driven wars
• The end of money as we know it
• The end of energy problems throughout the world
• The end of government as we know it

destroy our sense of individual self

"For the secularised mind, meditation fills a spiritual vacuum; it brings the hope of becoming a better, happier individual in a more peaceful world. However, the fact that meditation was primarily designed not to make us happier, but to destroy our sense of individual self – who we feel and think we are most of the time – is often overlooked in the science and media stories about it, which focus almost exclusively on the benefits practitioners can expect." 

That this statement appears in an article in the Guardian (newspaper of the UK  liberal bourgeois worldview) is a sign that the widespread understanding of mindfulness/meditation is under scrutiny from from an informed spiritual perspective. The widespread emergence of mindfulness/meditation (and physical yoga) practices in western society over the last 50 years or so (really since The Beatles met the Maharishi at the Hilton Hotel in London one summer evening in 1967) can be seen as an antidote to mass existential anxiety, arising as traditional life modes are superseded by a global materialistic outlook. This anxiety is underpinned by an economic system rooted in atomised individualistic drives, so it's not surprising that meditation is presented from this atomised materialistic perspective, and widely supported by the kind of corporations that drive the economic system, part of the incorporation of people into the underpinning bourgeois materialist lifestyle. 

pic from here

invested with complex functionalities

UK TV Channel 4's new series, Humans (Sun nights @ 9pm), has got people's attention. It's a drama with Robots, or Synths as they are termed in the show, and its subject matter is the usual concern about artificial intelligence (AI) threatening the social order. One character, a concerned professor, even makes a speech about the singularity. It's that kind of script, plenty of inter-human relationship problems but underwritten by big ideas, not the least that of affection between humans and machines (see here for some preliminary notes on the general subject).

It's a growing concern in popular culture, as movies like Her, Ex Machina and Transcendence demonstrate, but its becoming an issue in economics and politics too. Thoughts about the great "decoupling" of workers from production are stirring debate about how our current economic structures are going to support idle populations. (It could also be viewed as the deeper question prompting current interest in the Citizens Income, which has advocates on the liberal Left see EC730 and libertarian Right.)  

For this blog, however, the main question is how our culture deals with the nature of consciousness, and what discussion about AI reveals about the dominance of what I term, materialist realism. That robots are becoming a feature of our landscape is obvious, but fears that they will come to rival us, as conscious organisms in a competitive power game, is clearly a projection of our own drives onto what will be simply usefully functioning adjuncts to our world. 

Artificial limbs activated by brainwaves is just one way the human body is becoming enhanced by robot technology, but consciousness in this instance remains with the human. Under material realist presumptions, consciousness is only the interaction of certain forms of insentient matter, so, for materialist realists, consciousness might just as easily develop in a machine that has been invested with the complex functionalities of a human kind. 

From our perspective, this is a complete misunderstanding of what consciousness is, but provides a useful context for the kind of discussion that places this fundamental question of human existing in a popular framework. We need a much more sensible approach to metaphysics to grasp the nature of our own sentience, of which consciousness is the foundation, and allay fears about future wars with machines that betray present time confusion and ignorance. 

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to feel its own grandeur

"Us, these beings that have been created, that are looking up at the Milky Way, we are in fact products of the Milky Way. It's the Milky Way looking up at itself and wondering what it's all about. What does this imply about somebody like Walt Whitman admiring a beautiful sunset? ...Walt Whitman is a space the Milky Way fashioned to feel its own grandeur. Instead of our eyes being the result of chance mutations can we see them as created by the cosmos in order to perceive itself."

from Bodhisattva of the Biosphere, by David Loy on Buddhist Geeks

This is a passage from the keynote address to the 2013 Buddhist Geeks conference in Boulder, Colorado, USA. Along with much of the rest of the talk it represents an advanced view of spiritual practice in the modern, urban age. I would question, however, some of the assumptions implied by the language as it goes on, especially when he talks about humans choosing to live a certain way (to make the world a better place, for example). If we are the cosmos regarding itself through the agency of the human body, with all its interconnectedness with everything else within the totality of our formless essence, then how can we have separate agency, a concept implied by the term choice? As with other similar podcasts (Secular Buddhist, Present Moment, Daily Evolver etc) the discussion is rooted in political and social concerns and is primarily interested in psychological and physical wellbeing rather than spiritual enlightenment, which unfolds under the cosmos's own volition and reveals the lack of individual agency in our actions and thought as we transcend the limited mind.

The focus of discussion on limited concerns is often presented as a way to avoid the disconnect an emphasis on transcendence and other-worldly escape can produce, and to root practice in relationship with the world as it is. But true transcendence implies that we are embedded in the world of form - it cannot occur if we are not. It arrives after we have exhausted our attachment to gross physical objects - a naturally-occurring process of experiencing desires at their most intense and moving through them to a new perspective where we become rooted and yet unattached. Then we express the reality through our body, practising loving kindness, not as a choice, but because it is our nature. Talks like the above demonstrate a lack of a fully evolved perspective among modern practitioners, and though they represent an unfolding of our collective awareness, they are limited in their message.

pic from here

there is really no sky

"Experience has the knack of fooling us on a regular basis. We see the sun setting every day, but we know very well the sun never sets. It is the earth rotating backwards, which gives us the experience that the sun is setting in the horizon. The sky looks blue, but we know that there is really no sky and neither is it blue. There are many such examples where our experiences are false. The same is also true of how we visually perceive the world. Science has taught us that the light is reflected from any object in this universe that we observe, and travels to the retina in our eye. There are 120 millions rods which are sensitive to black and white and there are about 7 millions cones which are sensitive to color. These rod and cones convert the incoming light into an optical signal. This optical signal is transmitted to the visual cortex in the human brain. This is the end of the journey of the perception process. There is no explanation as to what happens to the optical signal and how the brain decodes the optical signal and reconstructs our visual world. Science also never tells who is at home within the brain who finally sees the reconstructed visual image. Who is final observer of this image? I guess this idea of the final observer has always been outside the bounds of science because there is no way to empirically record the observer’s existence. Anything “subjective” is discarded in the scientific world." 

This well presented observation goes to the heart of our deluded sense of the world. But the idea that we encounter the world as individual objects experiencing phenomena that are obviously not occurring is embedded in our everyday language and thoughts, through common speech acts, through educational discourse, through legal procedure and scientific and philosophical enquiry. All literary text manifests the same and amounts to the expression of a state of ignorance, from popular fictions to the so-called great works. Where do we ever encounter a scene in which a protagonist is truly seeing the world the way it is? And is it ever possible to write such a description?

Pic from here