Short philosophical considerations on AI

Hegel and Heidegger were thinkers about their own time, thinkers about historical events and happenings. Few have the insight and courage to fathom the full depth of the meaning of an historical event, the coming to be (coming of age?) of an historical process. Tragically,  it is only some time after the event (the time of monsters?) has hit humanity with full force that Hegel's famous owl can spread her wings. Is it not true that some of what the prophetic author of Sein und Zeit wrote about technology only makes full sense at the present?

This seems to us particularly true of the emergence of the age of the Internet and the age of generative AI which is its logical development.

And yet nothing could be further from our own philosophizing than any form of historicism or historical philosophy. As such both Hegel and Heidegger, for all their interest and insight, must be considered as having crafted systems based on an incorrigible error. 

Social progress is not a law of nature but a legitimate hope - even if at present it seems a distant one - and it is our moral duty to work towards it in the midst of uncertain outcomes.

The advent of the internet was the advent of connection between people. This connection carried rhetorically moral undertones and echoed enlightenment ideals about the desirability of sharing and making knowledge available.  In the present age of the generative AI based Internet powered and controlled by corporations and governments aligned to anti-enlightenment ideals, it may be that it is morally called upon us to practice instead the process of disconnection and the purification and preservation of knowledge(not obviously in the sense of the 'great simplification' of the Canticle of Leibowitz).   

The most basic step is ensuring locality of core information. That is, to be in possession of machines onto which have been downloaded significant portions of Internet Encyclopedias (despite their serious shortcomings) as well as some decently performing LLM. To this we add, it needs not be said, massive of digital preservation of human cultural artifacts, notably libraries.

One can use Kiwix and download for offline viewing the most recent English Wikipedia (50GB text-only 150GB with pictures).  With a AMD Ryzen 7 5825U processor with 16GB RAM and 2GB Radeon Graphics one can use Ollama and download and use some decently performing LLMs (gemma4 comes in E2B, E4B, 31B and 26B A4B). 

Most living beings alternative between states of being awake and of sleep. Can would we design a dynamic LLM which similarly alternates between states of user interaction and re-training based on this interaction? The most important being the correction and/or updating of knowledge or perhaps the removal of harmful and biased content and "thought patterns". If LLMs can improve then it is not only  a question of having the number of parameters equal to the number of neurons of the human brain.

Computers can enhance and aid human cognition as well as hinder and destroy it (there is a growing body of evidence concerning the disastrous effect of excessive or inappropriate generative AI use for individual mental health and cognitive development, not to mention for society as a whole). 

But the harms of generative AI have little to do with lesser-known extremely powerful and beneficial aspects of the computer for human cognition. We cannot go into this in detail here. Let it just be said that it involves using adequate software for the rigorous formalization of human scientific theories and concepts (specially logic and mathematics and formal methods in the sciences) and the vital feedback-loop between human thought and the software interface (IDE) which results in the simultaneous enhancement of human understanding and production and the quality of the software-based formalization and implementation. 

The software in question includes not only Rocq (formerly Coq), Agda and functional programming language but such languages as Python, Javascript and C/C++. Python is a multi-paradigm and highly versatile language with an elegant syntax. Python comes close to achieving the ideal of a universal language in the Leibnizian sense and is a wonderful tool for formalization, implementation,  verification and exploration in a variety of areas in mathematical logic and finite mathematics. 

We note also the importance of minimalism (using as few dependencies as possible) and building things from the ground up - this goes for scientific and philosophical projects, not of course for commercial and industrial ones.  We will address in the future the question of the possible role of machine learning in this process.

The unknown Dharma of the West

Can we trace a continuous tradition from original Buddhism to Socrates to Plato and the Megarian school to Pyrrho to Sextus to Plotinus to Damascius to Pseudo-Dionysius ? As strange as this may seem to some, there are some striking arguments that can be made to support many links in this chain. In fact we are pleased to note that Sara Ahbel-Rappe in her edition of Damascius' Problems and Solutions concerning First Principles, makes a direct reference to Sextus. The Buddhism-Pyrrho link has been studied for instance by C.I. Beckwith's Greek Buddha (2015). It has also been argued (by C.M. Mazzucchi)  that the author of Pseudo-Dionysius was in fact Damascius who managed to inject core doctrines into the heart of the 'mystical'  tradition of Christianity (which has nothing to do with the literal sense of dogmas): and here we mean its better (predominantly medieval) manifestations such as Hadewijch, Porete, Eckhart, the author of the Cloud of Unknowing, the Viae Sion of Hugh of Balma (which we dedicated a small note to).  It is in this light that we would reinterpret Plato and the close connection to Socrates, Pyrrho and the Megarians.

'Spiritual realization' (we use this term temporarily) is not the same thing as psychotherapy (etymology aside). Psychotherapy aims at helping people adjust and balance personality traits so as to be at peace with themselves and the world around them.  It is about the constitution of an individual 'personality' and 'ego', often seen as the result of an integration of different tendencies or the product of past development and adaptation strategies.  Spiritual realization such as we outlined in our previous account of TPC and TPP more or less presupposes physical and mental health as a condition and its aim involves shining a light through self-hood and overcoming its underlying impulse, motives, determinations and limitations. But this does not rule out that it can also be highly beneficial in a psychotherapeutic context.

We are conscious of the present and the past in the form of recollected or anticipated mental content in the present. Past and future are mediated by the present and are indeed in the present. TPC involves awareness of the presentness of past and future directed or colored mental content. The theory of the 'present moment' and 'letting go of the past and future' and finding 'the timeless present moment' taught in many approaches to Buddhist meditation conceals something of huge psychological and philosophical depth and importance. Temporality is linked to the conditioning of the mind by thought, the constitution of the world by thought, and the falling away from TPC. Time is the magical stage of thought, the impermanence which is made permanent mixing perception and forgetfulness. We might say that this proper philosophical consciousness of psychological (inner) temporality is at the heart of TPC and TPP.  The same goes for self-identification, self-projection,  craving, repulsion.  But the aforementioned practices require the good fortune of being able to retreat to a secluded, quiet, safe and solitary place, the best option  being the countryside.

If we leave this world to attain another state of being we can at least control what we bring along to the next plane.  Let us not bring with us the least trace of anger, hatred, resentment, desire, attachment, clinging - or ignorance and delusion, specially delusion regarding identity and identification or the magic show of our own consciousness.

It is important to note that by 'buddhism' we mean the philosophy, psychology, ethics and spiritual practices that we interpret to be arguably and quite patently present in old Pali and Sanskrit texts (independently of the presence of elements of a different nature, textual history and corruption, etc.). Our meaning of this term does not depend in any way on any particular historical or cultural embodiment of buddhism and as such is not open to the common criticism that we are ignoring its cultural roots or merely picking certain elements which fit a pre-conceived agenda (we are not claiming to represent or interpret any concrete cultural buddhist tradition).  Also we are well aware that modern distorted abstractions and (mis)applications of buddhism can from a psychiatric point of view have harmful effects (cf. negative experiences with so-called 'mindfulness', vipassana and Goenka retreats, experiences which according to our interpretation have nothing to do with the buddhist spiritual path).

We would be quite happy to debate anyone on this topic. Also the focus on buddhism does not imply that we attach less value to the parallel traditions of the Upanishads, Yoga, Samkhya, Vedanta and so forth. 

It is quite possible that the philosophy of Schopenhauer (the philosophy of the principium rationis, the principium individuationis, the central role of voluntas, the theory of representatio, the theory of  supra-individual timeless, ubiquitous cognition,  etc.) offers some of the deepest and most important components of TPC and TPP. Schopenhauer claimed as ultimate source the Upanishads. In Schopenhauer all the sphere of manifest consciousness, individuality, identity, spatial and temporal limitation, conditioned by the Kantian intuitive and conceptual categories, is the product of a primordial impulse and energy.  The only way out of this prison is through a total reversal and repolarization of this fundamental impulse and energy which results in the 'involution' of all the modes, conditions and determinations of individualized consciousness and the consciousness-immanent world.

Also Schopenhauer might help us understand better what we wrote about the inner, first-person, experience of the body. 

One might entertain the idea that there is a far greater unity and affinity between Kant, Hegel and Schopenhauer than is generally believed.  Shapshay has argued this with regards to the ethics of Kant and Schopenhauer. And beyond the personal animosity between Hegel and Schopenhauer it is quite possible that Hegel might furnish some valuable structural and interpretative enrichment of Schopenhauer and that Schopenhauer could provide the essential clarification, correction, deeper meaning and completion so lacking in Hegel.