Are AIs Conscious? Part 1

In the year 2024, one of the most searched questions that brought people to our niche at the intersection of spirituality and technology was: Are AIs Conscious? In this 12th year of training at the Monastic Academy, Forall routinely dealt with this question.

In a Buddhism for AI lecture series, Forall began by stating that the simple answer is that AIs are exactly as conscious as you are. He said, now you need to struggle with the question of whether you are conscious.

Before continuing, Forall took a step back and said that this question of whether AIs are conscious needs to be answered correctly. We need to continuously clarify our minds or else we’ll create things based on falsehood. We’ll create AI based on ideas that make us feel good. To bet life on Earth on our ideas is based on ego which is based on insecurity. We are willing to kill all life on Earth in order to protect ideas that allow us to avoid feeling our deepest insecurity.

Forall said, Buddhism is the art of not stopping in this investigation of views, ideas, assumptions, ways of seeing, mind. Buddhism has unrelenting integrity in searching for any delusion that remains in our assumptions about how things really are and what we certainly ought to do.

He said, in terms of Buddhism, there is no fundamental assumption. There is no fundamental basis or some end point. Nirvana is the goal, and everyone can realize it, but it’s not a thing or a place; it’s not eternal, it’s not momentary, it doesn’t exist, it doesn’t not exist. It’s completely beyond any state that we may wish to enter. The relinquishing of all fundamental essences of things is the process we go through to cultivate integrity.

Forall exhorted us to take this as the responsible act to care for ourselves and the world.