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Sam Altman, the CEO of OpenAI and one of the most respected tech pioneers, has an interesting personal philosophy of Hindu Advaita. For people searching for answers on the final goal of AI, whether AI will become conscious and whether it will wreak havoc, some of these questions were indirectly answered thousands of years ago. Since Sam is an active follower of the non-dualist philosophy of Advaita, nobody interested in AI can overlook what it has to say.
As a Silicon Valley techie or someone tracking the latest trends, you already have some idea of Advaita or the Upanishads. Many of the tech leaders like Steve Jobs, Mark Zuckerberg, Larry Page, Sam Altman and others have come to India, spent substantial time in Ashrams and tried to understand extremely sophisticated Hindu constructs of consciousness, reality and existence.
For starters, what is Advaita? It is the most radical of all religions, philosophies and worldviews. It subsumes all of human thought, life, existence, consciousness and reality into an all-encompassing framework in the form of the pure universal consciousness – the Brahman. All of science and even mind-blowing Western theories of the world being the Matrix, virtual simulations or reality being composed of multiple universes are all juvenile theories in front of the Advaita unity of consciousness.
Through sophisticated questions that borrow upon the Upanishads and the internal consciousness of Buddhism, Advaita approaches the absolute truth of the universe by asking questions about the nature of consciousness. None of the Eastern faiths of Advaita, Buddhism or Jainism can be called a religion. They state that you can discover the truth yourself by asking a series of questions. There is no one holy book, one intermediary or any information you cannot discover by using your common sense.
The only thing you can be sure of in this world is not that there is an objective external world. Like Descartes finding thousands of years later, you can only know that you exist. All other realities are subservient to this personal subjective reality. Following the tenets of Buddhism, one looks within to identify the self. It is not the body that changes or evanescent thoughts that always disappear over time. Whatever your body and thoughts were two decades back is not what you are now. You want something different and are a new body every couple of years. All cells (except neurons and heart cells) are replaced every 2-3 years. What, then, do we mean by I?
If you reflect very carefully, the only thing you can be sure that exists is your consciousness, the sense of awareness of the world. The body, relatives, world, the universe, etc., have a secondary level of existence.
The world boils down to consciousness. There is one personal consciousness called the Atman, or to be more exactly the Jivatman. This Atman is the shared consciousness of all living beings. Modern science has nothing to say about consciousness, because of its focus obsession with the external world. It lacks any tool to study the subjective mind.
What, then, is the world outside? Is that real? This is where the Brahman comes in as the creator and substrate of all manifestations – material and non-material.
So, how does one study the Brahman? It is simple: just study your inner consciousness. If you understand the Jivatman, you understand the Brahman. Atman = Brahman.
I have presented a simplistic model of Advaita. However, the essence of Advaita is that everything in the universe is the Brahman. All of the universe, including yourself, is a part of the same absolute consciousness. There is no place for abstract ideas like God, Satan, heaven or hell. Worship of higher beings is a lower level of reality. Even concrete observations of life, non-life, stars, planets, galaxies, earth, and society exist only in the proximate world, exist in a higher level of reality but are not ultimate truths. These forms exist because of ignorance (avidya) and illusion (Maya). All these disappear at the higher level, when complete realization of Atman = Brahman happens.
Coming back to Sam Altman, one can try some of the tough questions I talked about in the first paragraph. No one can create consciousness; it is present everywhere. Hence, all talk of AI creating a new sense of consciousness is all hype and nonsensical. The final goal of AI will be what humans want from it, as it is incapable of human-like consciousness. Hence, AI can wreak no havoc in a human like manner. These are the answers that emerge from the Advaitic study of consciousness. If interested to know more, do read Erwin Schrodinger’s autobiography – “My View of the World.”
Schrodinger is among the finest minds of all time, and you will be surprised at how much his work in quantum physics (along with Bohr and Heisenberg) has been shaped by the Upanishads. Bohr famously said that ” I go to the Upanishads to ask questions.”
It is said that among the earliest humans to describe zero and its properties was the mathematician Bhaskara, who was trying to describe the Brahman’s properties and ended up describing not just infinity but also zero.
This is where Sam Altman closes the discussion in a Youtube conversation “I’m certainly willing to believe that Consciousness is somehow the fundamental substrate and we’re all just in the dream or the simulation or whatever I think it’s interesting how much sort of these Silicon Valley religion of the simulation has gotten close to like Brahman and how little space there is between them…“
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