Forall points out in many ways to us that conceptual grasping causes suffering. It took me several months, perhaps several years of training, to get a sense of this in my direct experience.
It also took me a long time to understand what conceptual grasping has to do with existential risk and the destruction of life. Forall would say things like we’re willing to do anything, including kill everyone, in order to protect our ideas. I wasn’t sure what he was talking about at first, but I trusted the clarity expressed in statements like this.
As artificial intelligence has become the hot topic of our culture, Forall hasn’t wavered in his teaching that conceptual grasping is at the root of why AI is so dangerous.
Forall says as technology, and intelligence broadly, has exponentially increased over the past several thousand years, the destruction of life has exponentially increased with it. Without wisdom and compassion, intelligence tends to cause omnicide, the killing of everything.
Forall says that this is because intelligence (unlike wisdom or compassion) is based on a mind of conceptual grasping which aims to convert the universe into a model of the universe. By trying to force the sacred life that is free of these models into these models, this mind destroys life.