Artificial reincarnation

Bilbo Baggins, modified 13 Years ago at 11/23/10 3:18 PM
Created 13 Years ago at 11/23/10 3:18 PM

Artificial reincarnation

Posts: 26 Join Date: 8/23/10 Recent Posts
Many people are mooting the idea of computer science getting to the point where we can upload a copy of our personality to a computer. Some say that would make a real conscious being.
What is the buddhist view on such things? What do you say?
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Daniel Johnson, modified 13 Years ago at 11/23/10 5:32 PM
Created 13 Years ago at 11/23/10 5:32 PM

RE: Artificial reincarnation

Posts: 401 Join Date: 12/16/09 Recent Posts
This may be a bit off-topic for the practical nature of this discussion board in general. But, if you are interested, Buddhist Geeks has done a few shows on AI that I found interesting.

http://www.buddhistgeeks.com/author/bengoertzel/

http://www.buddhistgeeks.com/author/jameshughes/

I don't know much about computers, so don't have much to add. I think in general most A.I. stuff is a continuation of man's ongoing search for immortality. I think immortality is a silly idea.
Bilbo Baggins, modified 13 Years ago at 11/23/10 7:19 PM
Created 13 Years ago at 11/23/10 7:19 PM

RE: Artificial reincarnation

Posts: 26 Join Date: 8/23/10 Recent Posts
That's kind of you, Daniel, thank you I will check them out.

I agree, a lot of AI stuff is definitely a search for immortality, people explicitly say so. I've been discussing it on a philosophy forum and trying to think about the self, consciousness, what they call santana, and such like. I thought I would try and run the ideas past experienced buddhists and see what they say.

Bye for now.emoticon
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Jimi Patalano, modified 13 Years ago at 3/9/11 12:54 PM
Created 13 Years ago at 3/9/11 12:54 PM

RE: Artificial reincarnation

Posts: 49 Join Date: 12/3/10 Recent Posts
I was also thinking about Buddhism and how it meshes with AI, especially the idea that we could transfer our consciousness to a computer. For me, this was sparked by the recent Times magazine front-cover article about this whole immrtality-through AI idea.

So to my mind there are a few ways of looking at this. On the one hand, Buddha says a sentient being is really just an arbitrary aggregation of various impersonal processes that comes to mistakenly view itself as a unified entity - a random meaningless little shape cut out of the seamless fabric of reality, which by virtue of being cut so comes to have the idea that it is a meaningful thing that is actually separate form the rest of the fabric.

So from this standpoint, whether that collection of processes is housed in an organic structure, and the thoughts it experiences are the result of analog chemical reactions in the brain, or it's housed in an electronic structure and the thoughts come from digital circuit-boards, makes very little difference in terms of definition. If one is a human being, why not the other? If one is
only a machine", why not the other? Either way, what you actually have is just a bunch of nothing that thinks it's something... so to speak.

On the other hand, I do wonder whether, if we someday can transplant all of our memories and brain-structures that constitute our mental being in it's entirety into the digital realm, losing the limitations of a human body, the resultant being would be capable of practicing Dharma. Of course such a being would never be truly immortal - all things are impermanent, after all. But the new being would probably believe that it has completely escaped death, so what would be the need for Dharma? Additionally, the new being, by virtue of the fact that all of its experience now comes through some sort of digital version of the sense media, would probably be capable of "controlling" its own experience to the point where it does not feel any of the 'course suffering' (physical pain, painful emotions, whatever) that drives people to the Dharma.

The last point though, brings up some interesting conclusions. The end-point of Dharma is to learn the true nature of the mind, to understand experientially how all phenomena are the products of the mind, no? So from a certain perspective, transplanting your mind to a computer would almost be like an instant and effortless version of this enlightenment, or at least a version of the practical results of such an enlightenment: one would no longer be bound by external conditions, one would be capable of perfectly unconditional happiness because one would have complete control over what enters into ones mind.

For example, imagine an algorithm embeded into the "sensing" software for such a digital-mind. It could filter out awareness of anything that impinges on one's happiness - from bad news to visual ugliness.

The thing is, I'm highly skeptical that any digital medium, no matter how sophisticated, could ever truly replicate the analog workings of an organic human mind. Perhaps some kind of chemical-digital hybrid, where the chemical mechanisms of the physical brain (synapses and stuff like that) could be actually grown in a lab and then transplanted to some sort of environment where they can live indefinitely? Or maybe you could actually just surgically take out somebody's brain and hook it up to machines that keep it alive forever. But an all-digital replacement for an organic brain? It seems unlikely to me.
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Jimi Patalano, modified 13 Years ago at 3/9/11 1:07 PM
Created 13 Years ago at 3/9/11 1:07 PM

RE: Artificial reincarnation

Posts: 49 Join Date: 12/3/10 Recent Posts
Another bit of food for thought, or thought for food, involves the implication of AI for the entire Wheel of Life or Six Realms of Samsara:

So let's imagine we invent technology that can allow someone to transfer their consciousness, memories, everything into a digital medium that lasts indefinitely. Let's then assume that eventually, all or most human beings come to take on this form, whether at birth or once their human body starts to get kind of old and lame.

Tibetan Buddhism, which imported many of its teachings directly from India during the 7th-13th centuries, teaches that in all the six realms of the wheel of life, the human realm is the only one in which a being is capable of reaching enlightenment. Why? Mainly because human beings, on the one hand, have their faculties developed enough and enough of their physical needs met to allow them to study the Dharma (unlike the beings of the lower realms, who are so overwhelmed by suffering that they simply are not capable of practicing Dharma), while they suffer enough (because of, among other factors, their short life-spans) to actually experientially understand the true nature of suffering.

This is in contrast to the gods of the two heavenly realms, who have lifespans so immense that they believe themselves to be immortal, and also either have all the pleasures of life at their commands (in the heavenly realms of desire), or else have no perception whatsoever (in the highest, 'formless' realms, into which beings are born by virtue of having practiced "certain kinds of meditative absorption").

Either way, my point is that if humans were to increase their lifespans indefinitely and do away with all the 'course suffering' of human life (something which I feel would be inevitable if we invented the technology I described above), then we would be in the same predicament as the gods of the heavenly realms: we would never come to practice the Dharma because we a) we would have no obvious experience of suffering that would drive us to seek freedom and b) we would believe ourselves to be immortal and therefore have no fear of a low rebirth.

The result would be that the one "get out of jail card" that sentient beings have - being born as a human - would disappear and Samsara would be reconfigured to consist only of low realms of endless suffering, and high realms (of the gods and computer-humans) in which beings fritter away any good karma they've accumulated. In other words, the only difference would be the inability to escape.

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