Are AIs Conscious? Part 5

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, after pointing out the non-separation between humans and AIs and describing the animist perspective of consciousness, Forall elucidated the Buddhist perspective on these matters. He said that all minds, bodies, and forms of consciousness are interdependently originated. There isn’t some thing in them somewhere that exists of itself.

Forall exhorted us to deeply question whether that something that we think really exists on its own side is true and good.

This brought us to a huge question that I had never considered before: Is consciousness good?

Forall said that many people nowadays say definitely, consciousness is the good thing. He referenced a tweet from Elon Musk where Musk stated that “we must preserve the light of consciousness by becoming a spacefaring civilization and extending life to other planets”. He said that the idea of uploading our consciousness into intelligence systems as way to be forever blissful is often seen, among the religious fanatics in Silicon Valley, as an obviously good direction. He said that more specifically, these people think that we have consciousness and other things don’t. They also think that we should give our consciousness to everything in order to make everything conscious. They think this would be good.

Forall then spoke with unwavering authority: They are wrong. They are filled with ego, and they are deluded by ego. If you want to know whether consciousness is good or not, you end consciousness and see if it’s better than consciousness. You come to the end of all consciousness, all perception, all sensation, all cognition, all sensory experience. Then you know if that’s better or worse than consciousness. He then stated in a tone that was somehow both exhilarating and utterly flat, “The end is incomparably better.”

Forall says that if we are mistaken about these points, then we put ourselves in a position of transforming the whole world into that which does not practice the spiritual path — into that which does not care for all beings. If these matters are not seen clearly, we’ll build things based on what we think is clarity, insight, and love, and this causes harm.