Could AI Point Us to What It Means to be Human?

Chaos leads to pressure which can lead to deep knowing, wisdom and evolution.

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Maybe we don’t have so much to worry about?

“LLMs (Large language models) aren't even as smart as dogs, says Meta's AI chief scientist” -- the ZDNET headline.

And according to Meta's AI chief scientist, Yann LeCun, He says:

“LLMs (like ChatGPT) are not truly intelligent because LLMs cannot understand, interact with, or comprehend reality and only rely on language training to produce an output.”

So why have Ais captured our imaginations and begun to frighten us?

I believe it’s because they simulate the intellect – and only the intellect – but we have given the formative mind so much power.  As Eckhart Tolle has often pointed out, we identify so strongly with the mind that we have disconnected from many other aspects of being.

LeCun also said not to fear an AI takeover because “there is no correlation between being smart and wanting to take over.”

But who or what is that wants to take over? We can often sense it in our bodies, like when we have a fight or flight experience.  There is a survival instinct in us that makes us want to protect ourselves.

When threatened, the intellect can run wild, or we can learn to slowly become present through rhythmic breathing and connecting to what?  Our volatile insides. To the feelings that we may have repressed.

AI Has No Body

What’s so important to point out about Ai is that it has no body.  In many ways, it is pure mind and just a simulation of the linguistic part of the mind at that.

The mind and the way it can discern and label things give us the impression that we understand ourselves and Nature.  That is the premise of science.  But what do we know of ourselves?

Jacob Needleman, a philosopher whose work I greatly admire, writes in A Sense of the Cosmos:

“Western science has operated for centuries on the assumption that we can understand the universe without understanding ourselves. We are just now seeking to make the necessary connection between the general laws of nature the those of our own (inner) nature.”

That harkens back to the “Hard Problem of Consciousness”.  If consciousness is not something we “have” but in fact what we ARE – which many like Eckhart Tolle believe, how can we view it objectively?

This brings up another famous quote:

"The day science begins to study non-physical phenomena, it will make more progress in one decade than in all the previous centuries of its existence." – Nikola Tesla

While Needleman speaks of the “sacred” -- Tesla focuses on “non-physical phenomena” and I wonder what the relationship between these two might be?

It is interesting that science has generally relegated both of these fields to metaphysics.

Is Pressure Building for a Collective Evolution?

Except that this is where the dam of consciousness may be about to burst.  We have had clues and many who study indigenous cultures have come to even experience things that we might consider sacred or nonmaterial.

Even our physicists when they began to discover the quantum realm began to have mystical experiences.  In his book (edited) “Quantum Questions: Mystical Writings of the World's Great Physicists” Ken Wilber presents the “integrated” views of some of the world’s great thinkers – which point directly to something “higher” or perhaps even “sacred.”  Erwin Schrodinger even anticipated the discovery of DNA.

We’ve had glimmers of this in the media, such as Bill Moyers’ acclaimed series on “Healing and the Mind” where he found evidence of the presence of something healing, perhaps sacred and certainly nonmaterial that scientists couldn’t explain but acted intentionally and perhaps even with love.  To heal.

And of course, Eckhart Tolle also talks about an intelligence much greater than our own that runs the body; using as an example the autonomic nervous system which operates our vital functions without “our” conscious knowledge.

We identify ourselves with what we consider to be the conscious part of ourselves, by which most of us means our mental activity – our thoughts and beliefs.  But neuroscience has already approached the possibility that what we deem mind – or consciousness – is not localized in “our” brain.

We know from DNA that there seems to be a higher, perhaps even sacred intelligence at work in all of Life.  We aren’t the only species running the organic operating system.  All life we know of has DNA.

Have We Reached a Sort of Critical Mass?

What I wonder is whether we may have now hit a critical mass where a new way of thinking – or being -- may be forced on us collectively.  Perhaps by AI or by world events or both.

Joe Martino wrote insightfully over the weekend pointing out that many of us were bodily affected by the events of the past weekend, where the Russian government almost dissolved.

As Joe points out where this particular event is headed may remain unclear for some time, and yet our heads are abuzz with theories from all directions, and the chaos has affected us, either consciously or unconsciously by triggering old beliefs and scripts that have been programmed into us.

His description of finding truth in such a chaotic age is through “embodied sensemaking”; allowing oneself to feel and experience the sensations brought up by such a chaotic experience in order to perhaps process it or even just survive.

He says we sense-make when we bring our entire body to the experience and transcend our cognitive faculties and synchronize our thoughts, feelings and bodily sensation – I now believe this is best achieved within an inner embrace of loving acceptance.

How Are We Taught to Deal with Sensation?

The problem is that we are deeply conditioned to resist unpleasant sensations.  Something is “wrong.”

There is an industry devoted to getting rid of them, but what if these feelings are actually the portal to a new way of understanding life and ourselves.  Expanding consciousness as we allow all aspects of awareness to live freely within us.

Science has resisted attempting to even try to understand the experiences or “qualia” that arise within consciousness that trigger feelings like warmth, scents, and all other aspects of our sensory experience.  There is no scientific explanation for how “brain waves” or the activity of our nervous system can make us “feel” one way or another. 

Technologies like AI and Virtual Reality have suggested that they have mastered these phenomena when in fact they have merely simulated them.  AI simulates the mind and flat out tells you that it has no feelings or emotions which is obvious because it has no body.

(This is the implied joke of my recent book on AI, “Conversations with Nobody:  Getting to Know ChatGPT”).

Virtual reality is a bit more complex but with its headset and connections to kinetic sources like the hands, feet or direction of vision.  It can fool you into thinking you’re somewhere else and even stimulate some reactions but ultimately if the headset comes off the experience ends, but “you” don’t.  Life goes on.

The Darker Side of Science

Technology has also brought us to a time when our survival as a species is open to question.

Most of us were not conditioned to face such an existential question either collectively, or for ourselves.

For most of our lives technology and our economy gave us a relatively safe and seemingly evolving existence.  But now the party seems to be over.

Weekends like the one of the Russian almost coup can abruptly put the brakes on, as it was COVID and so many other recent seemingly chaotic events.

Our nervous systems – or our awareness systems – have been assaulted in ways for which we were not prepared and for and in which our society and economy often contribute to the trauma. 

In mass media, we are confronted at every turn by our own inadequacies, for which capitalism has a cure.  And of course our fears are stoked by the 24/7 “news.”

In addition, while through our upbringing we were strongly conditioned to be in control of our “lives”, right now they sometimes seem to spin out of control.

An Entirely Different Perspective

This reminds me of Eckhart Tolle’s wonderful line:  “You don’t have a life, you ARE Life.”  His counsel is generally to find or create some space around our feelings and reactions in an effort to gain inner peace.

I am blessed to live in a place of relative quiet and solitude, so I am able to return through rest, which I highly recommend, to a more natural state and allow these powerful feelings to be felt.

I also know that I have some generational and familial trauma that I have tried to connect with in a similar way – through acceptance and allowing the sensations, and also silence, contemplation and especially compassion for myself.

Even so, the events of the past weekend shook me up.  I felt deeply unsafe and vulnerable just as I had after my brain injury.  It took me a while to regroup.  The triggers were everywhere I looked.

We live on a noisy planet. and it is not easy to unplug from our phones and media devices.

I also know that it’s been hard for a lot of people, but ultimately I have to believe that through the chaos, and our conscious reactions, we are summoning something “sacred” and “nonmaterial” that will either marshal a new way of being.   Or we’ll be gone.

Eckhart Tolle says that our survival as a species is not guaranteed and suggests that by aligning ourselves with what we truly are – Life, not our beliefs or thoughts – a new consciousness can arise.

This brings us back to the need to begin to study and understand the nonmaterial and even sacred aspects of the universe – both scientifically and individually within ourselves.

AI can give us a lot of information but as for the wisdom we may seek, its obvious limitations may point us to the vastness and mystery of our true nature.  Not as just thinking beings, as Descartes believed, but as expressions of the wholeness of Life in all of its many dimensions.  It can be like a calm mind, our very helpful tool, but not our master.

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(Tom Bunzel was a contributor to Collective Evolution and now writes for The Pulse.  His new book "Conversations with Nob­ody: Getting to Know ChatGPT" – a book written with AI, about AI and giving a taste of AI, is available on Amazon.)