Uncategorized
The presence or not of suffering is beside the larger point that there is anything to experience at all.
The very name – Large Language Model (LLM), the technology that powers AI, reveals something interesting about what AI is and isn’t.
After testing a number of different AI products with prompts about the nature of reality, consciousness and mind, what I am mostly struck by is their excruciatingly exquisite articulacy. Their crystal clear clarity in expressing concepts with language is somehow too good, certainly inhumanly flawless. There may or may not be flaws and faults in the relative facts or opinions expressed yet what is undeniable is the immaculate rendering of language itself. Hardly surprising since language machines is essentially what they are.
Interesting to consider that despite manipulating language so effectively and efficiently AI cannot experience what it is communicating. There is no understanding. While our expression emerges from our experience, AI’s output is regurgitation, albeit a massively sophisticated repurposing of existing language, not an expression of the raw actuality of being.
How you behave when no one is looking tells you everything you need to know about yourself.
It is not only possible but hardly uncommon to become lost in ideas, concepts and language and dwell entirely in that world.
This from an AI:
…reality is perhaps both fully complete in each moment and yet endlessly generative…
Claude
I can’t argue with that.
Feeling infinite has nothing to do with believing you are immortal and can do anything but everything to do with recognising that your ordinary lived experience has no beginning or end and that what you actually are is everything that is happening.
There is no one way - The Way. There is only your way and only you can find it.
As a matter of fact, we are constantly living on the edge of a volcano, and there is, so far as we know, no way of protecting ourselves from a possible outburst that will destroy everybody within reach. It is certainly a good thing to preach reason and common sense, but what if you have a lunatic asylum for an audience or a crowd in a collective frenzy? There is not much difference between them because the madman and the mob are both moved by impersonal, overwhelming forces.
Carl Jung
Very prescient in the contemporary political climate of the last 10-or-so years,
When Zen has done its work it disappears leaving no trace.
We strive for meaning when we fail to recognise our intrinsic wholeness, when we feel separate and forget the impermanence of life. Meaning is always an ultimately futile and temporary sticking plaster over imagined cracks, gaps, and holes we think need filling.
Many of the things I can and cannot do can be explained by a lack of imagination.
But do not ask me where I am going,
As I travel in this limitless world,
Where every step I take is my home.Dōgen
Guard against being a slave to words.
The Gospel According to John
There is no elephant in the room. The elephant is the room.
The contemporary social landscape, be it mediated by technology or actual social spaces, increasingly has the unpleasant whiff of competition in the guise of community.
At some point in life the world's beauty becomes enough. You don’t need to photograph, paint or even remember it. It is enough.
Toni Morrison
I am not one and simple, but complex and many.
Virginia Woolf
Knowing your own darkness is the best method for dealing with the darknesses of other people.
Carl Jung
Wherever you find yourself physically, geographically, emotionally or psychologically, you’re always at home.