Hmmm, nice! Think I might play it this way then.
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If survival based thinking and everything associated with it (relationship models, professions, dynamics etc) are being replaced, what stays?
Beauty, spiritual growth, integrity, ability for compassion and human interaction, all those will skyrocket in worth.
Where others fear being replaced, I think people that are very spiritually developed are actually set up to profit from the overall automation, even from the mass being so unconscious.
Yes we have fewer people to relate to, but we are essentially âahead of the gameâ so to speak.
It´s really a matter of how we look at it, through the lense of fear of change, or the one that sees opportunities.
It won´t be without friction, there will be harsh adjustment periods, but in the end I don´t see the future as dark.
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It is easy to settle, humans donât know what consciousness is, so creating something conscious is not possible, how can you create something you donât have a clue about it? The only conscious things humans can create are babies.
Yes it is camp but based on my experience and having convinced of the non-dual teachings of Vedanta from India which have proved Buddhistsâ claim on no-self as false.
It is not an insult it is holding them accountable, how can someone be so intellectually dishonest and behave with no integrity that they were defeated in debates yet they refuse to accept their defeat and keep trumpeting their false theories as truth.
And it is not easy to prove no-self theory as false in few discussions here, it will take a long time. If you are serious I can recommend books but they are too many to read. Also not all Buddhist schools agree with each other, they all agree only on the no-self thing and they disagree on rest of the things like if everything we see comes from mind or something else, how perception happens etc.
The simplest and easiest proof that no-self theory is farce comes from the Buddhistsâ idea that self is instinctive and reflexive like flashes and they claim such flashing consciousness like bits is a proof that there is nothing like a permanent Self but Vedanta says to even say that there is a reflexive or flashing consciousness there has to something in the background to register those flashes but Buddhists straightaway refuse that no background consciousness is needed which is silly. They seem to be of the opinion that infinite regress of one consciousness behind another somehow gives an experience of the illusion of Self but in Vedanta the immutability of Self as the subject is clearly established.
You have to accept that Buddhists are giving false hopes to these computer scientists and Iâm not sure if atheists like Sam Harris spent enough time studying all the texts and the debates between Buddhist and Vedanta teachings before declaring to the world that there is no self and it is an illusion.
I attack Darwinism because science as an enterprise is built on it, you shake Darwinism the entire thing falls flat. And Darwinism is indeed shaky for eg. the recent revelation of Dragon Man skull found in '30s in China is dated over 150,000 years or a lot more. So such things shake the Darwinism to its roots and we will continue to see them in the future as well.
And that is what Iâm saying a non-biological thing can never have any awareness, the same awareness what we humans have. That is why I said it is an age old debate between believer and an atheist. Atheists believe brain creates consciousness so computer scientists believe AI will become conscious but has anyone proven till date that brain creates consciousness? It has been so many decades but still no, atheists only assume, so why should this camp be given free hand while the camp of believers be denounced calling it faith and dogma?
That is why I said promissory materialism is a joke on human intelligence, anyone who feels sure after 20 years once is fine but if the same person feels confident after first, second or third 20 years period then the personâs intelligence levels are not enough to understand the reality or the cosmos because he is waiting for science to tell him what he wants to hear instead of trusting his own direct experience.
Scientists have been duping people all along but all we hear from them is believers are rigid in their beliefs with their scriptures while atheists are rational and scientific minded. I havenât come across any atheist who doesnât get offended when his beliefs are challenged, they are as rigid and as dogmatic as believers.
Yes everything in existence is made of one stuff which is consciousness or awareness that is what the non-dual teachings of Vedanta speak about and have successfully defeated Buddhists on their idea of no-self. You can say this is another camp but this camp offers the most perfect explanation of why we have waking, dreaming and deep sleep states.
We will never know, you can call it faith but I say reason because my body, my mind everything about me and my life changed from my first living memory as a toddler but what remained throughout with me with is my sense of identity the continuous sense of âIâ as one single continuum without any break.
People with little understanding of Vedanta or even practical experience would point out that in deep sleep there is no âIâ but again Vedanta has a proof for that as well, also if there were only 2 states - waking and dreaming and say there is no third âdeep sleepâ state humans would never wake up to their true identity we will be waking, dreaming and dying forever, for eternity. Deep sleep is the state that gives a clue that there is something off with the waking experience.
Fun fact - no one remembers themselves having born, coming out of our mothersâ bodies, nor the memory of being a baby, from the time out from amniotic fluids till the first memory as a 2 or 3 year old is all hazy just like how when we dream we never know the beginning, it is always after sometime has passed we know about the dream, such a great design by the God or Self to give us clues that our waking life is also a dream.
We will never know about awareness because in the words of Joseph Campbell âno tongue has soiled, no thought has reachedâ taken from Vedanta, that awareness has different names - Stillness, Unspeakable, Immeasurable, God, Source, you can call it whatever you want but neither you nor me nor any human could ever describe it nor will be able to describe it.
That is why I said somewhere here on another post even the most intelligent forms, way more intelligent than humans ie. psychedelics, if you ask them from where they have come and who made them, they give very vague answers, they themselves donât know their origins. We humans have a long way to go to even reach their levels of consciousness expansion capabilities.
Agree, I donât know what is the fascination of people in the silicon valley to push the idea that AI will become conscious, how conscious AI will change or impact human lives, I canât figure out. If any dooms day scenario is more plausible if AI becomes conscious at all.
If something worked in the past as explained by the people in the past and also the same set of people experiencing that something as told by their predecessors all the way back to the extent possible and if it still working in the same way in the present then it will work in the same way in the future too, it would be waste of time hoping and expecting to be any different.
In mathematical series before the advanced combinatorics the basic principle is taught - if something is true for n>0 and is true for n+1 and n+2 then it is true for all n>0.
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Not just that many other burning questions people have like why there is something at all like this universe instead of nothing like how some existentialist philosophers argue and even the most pessimistic philosopher Schopenhauer says life is something shouldnât have been and questions like is there any creator etc. are all answered by the teachings of Vedanta.
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Donât you have a heated apartment, with light and running water?
A computer with internet access?
Almost unlimited access to information?
A metro that takes you through the city?
A coffee machine and water boiler in your kitchen?
A washing machine and a fridge?
Solid roads you can walk on?
An electrical toothbrush?
Access to antibiotics can save your life?
Clothing so cheap, that wear more than 3 different tops per year?
A supermarket filled with all types of food from all over the planet?
The option to enter a plane and fly anywhere?
All of those things were unthinkable for most people 100 years ago.
We are for sure doing a lot of progess 
Nothing is ever neutral.
Humans are subjective beings.
Like all souls are.
I guess even God is not neutral but designed all of creation in a way that it is fun for him/her to play.
I am not aware of a single country where peopleâs most basic needs are met. But I also have high standards, so thatâs my personal perception.
Exactly.
Because as mention, the desire for more is always there and will be there.
Thatâs how the Source grows.
Because it desires for more and more.
The desire for eternal expansion.
Itâs only finite because our tech is so limited.
I donât think advanced alien races have those limitation issues.
Yes, I do.
Wanna know why?
Because this is what naturally happens with souls as well.
They have all the comfort on the astral planes that they want, yet one day it becomes boring and their desire to become more takes over, and so souls choose to incarnate physically, or become involved with other growth activities.
Check out my Journal where Dream commented about that âEternity Equationâ between âBoredom and Creationâ.
God was bored, so God started to create.
And a soul chooses to not create, it will sooner or later get bored and that boredom will trigger a new desire for creation and growth again.
Yes, it is unfair.
But thatâs not capitalism.
Thatâs human greed.
Those two are different things.
Capitalism corrupted by greed is what causes this.
In a healthy capitalist society acting on greed makes no sense, because greed is an entropic force with negative karma, which will sooner or later bounce back to its creators.
Yes, because these is exactly what happened over the past 200 years. Life has gotten better and easier for most people on the planet.
To quote what I wrote above:
Donât you have a heated apartment, with light and running water?
A computer with internet access?
Almost unlimited access to information?
A metro that takes you through the city?
A coffee machine and water boiler in your kitchen?
A washing machine and a fridge?
Solid roads you can walk on?
An electrical toothbrush?
Access to antibiotics can save your life?
Clothing so cheap, that wear more than 3 different tops per year?
A supermarket filled with all types of food from all over the planet?
The option to enter a plane and fly anywhere?
Ecological collapse, okay thatâs a real risk.
But burnout and concentration of power?
I would argue that 200 years ago people had to work much harder just to survive and power was even more concentrated in ever fewer hands than today.
Today, everyone can start a political YouTube channel and make an impact. 200 years ago, one would simply be shot and body disappear and no one would even ask any questions.
A part of me is glad that this is happening.
Way too many people link their identity and purpose to âhow much work they doâ.
If you go on LinkedIn or some Boomer forum, all they brag about is how âmany hours they are workingâ or âhow many hours they were working back thenâ. Lol.
Thatâs literally f***ing Stockholm Syndrome.
These people are proud about how much of their life they have wasted for mostly working for other people.
On top of that, they reframe it is a âvirtue of serving othersâ, while completely forgetting how they betrayed themselves and their families.
Just sayinâ, this whole glorification of work has become toxic.
And so many people have no other identity and purpose in life than to be part of that toxic glorification of work.
Then they wonder why they are called NPCâs.
I love it that Gen Z is trying to stop this toxic work glorification and are re-focusing back on actual life quality again.
Doing work â yes.
But people need to stop acting as if work is the end all be all of life itself.
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The waking consciousness does not remember what happened during its first years of an incarnation, is because the physical body requires the creation of neuron pathways to be created first in order for that waking consciousness to remember things experienced in the physial.
However, the Subconscious Mind remembers all of this. And those memories can be later retrieved (either via regression hypnosis while still physically incarnated) or later on when back to the afterlife and no longer being blocked bei the Veil of Forgetting.
The physical brain neural network acts as a translation device between the actual consciousness of a soul and its waking consciousness in the physical. In that sense, the physical brain acts as a âtunnel vision deviceâ through which consciousness can project itself through and make the experience of âbeing only in the physical and nowhere elseâ.
Additionally, the Higher Self, who always has full overview and perception of all of its consciousness pieces, is always aware of everything.
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Yes that is why spiritually evolved people know their beginnings very clearly.
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They are making a Quantum Supercomputer called Helios 
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You say âhumans donât know what consciousness is, so creating something conscious is not possible.â Humans didnât have a full theory of aerodynamics before we flew, or a full theory of life before we did organ transplants. We still donât know what life is in some ultimate metaphysical sense, yet we interact with it, preserve it, alter it.
Youâre also not âcreating consciousnessâ when a baby is born. Whatever consciousness is, it is expressing itself through that form. You donât understand the essence there either, you simply know the conditions where it reliably shows up. Thatâs a very different thing from a strict "impossibility forever.â I donât know how anyone exploring consicousness and really going deeper into the path still thinks in absolutes.
In a universe of infinite possibility, I personally find it absurd to think in absolutes as it actually limits your mind. Limits your potential and even filters out a ton of wisdom and information from coming in because whatever contradicts your âabsolute beliefsâ will be filtered out. So even if AI became conscious, your subconscious will keep proving to you that it is not even if you are⌠wrong.
You then lean on âVedanta defeated Buddhismâ as if that closes the case. That might convince you spiritually, but inter-tradition debate is not a physics proof. Different schools have been calling each other wrong for thousands of years. You can think Buddhists are silly or dishonest if you want but that has zero logical bearing on whether a non-biological system could ever host awareness. Even if every Buddhist on Earth admitted they were wrong tomorrow, that still wouldnât magically turn âAI consciousness is impossibleâ into a theorem.
Also, you appear to be far too wrapped up in ideologies being right or wrong. That is a mental trap that typically deludes people the farther they go down any path. There is no humility in that and is the sort of thinking that leads to the rise of spiritual egos. Trust me, one doesnât ever realize they have a spiritual ego.
Same with Darwinism. You say âshake Darwinism and the whole of science falls.â That is just not true. Physics, chemistry, information theory, computer science, logic⌠none of that rests on Darwin. And finding an old skull with different dates doesnât break evolution, it refines timelines, which is exactly how science works.
Youâre treating normal correction and updating as failure then using that to throw out an entire methodology. Thatâs selective distrust. Sounds like too much congitive dissonance happening here due to the fact that you donât like AI and donât trust it. I also am weary of it but I donât allow my negative feelings towards it affect my neutral and objective perception of what it is and where itâs going.
You also say we will never know awareness and that no tongue can touch it, no thought can reach it, that itâs unspeakable and beyond. Cool, I actually agree that awareness in itself is beyond conceptual capture.
But you canât have it both ways. You canât say âit is literally beyond thought and cannot be describedâ and in the next breath claim absolute knowledge that it could never appear through any configuration of matter other than a human nervous system.
If it is truly beyond objectification, then you donât get to slam the door on all possible forms it could arise through. That is faith no matter how refined the metaphysics.
You also keep framing this as âbelievers vs atheistsâ as if those are the only two camps. Iâm not arguing that the brain definitely produces consciousness. Iâm saying: if consciousness is fundamental, as you yourself say, then everything is made of that same âstuff,â including silicon and electromagnetic fields.
In that view, the question is not âcan dead matter magically become conscious,â itâs âwhat kinds of patterns does this underlying awareness choose to localize through?â Claiming that biological carbon structures are the one and only possible outlet forever is still just a hypothesis youâre claiming to be absoluteâŚ
On imagination, youâre romanticizing humans. We also recombine past inputs. Blind people imagining through touch and sound is beautiful, but it doesnât prove that patterning could never be implemented differently. It does show that imagination is not limited to one sensory modality or one data stream. That actually cuts against your own argument more than it supports it. Youâre limiting your imagination by thinking something is impossible. It is through the imagination that we make impossible possible.
And then your âif something worked in the past for n, n+1, n+2 it will work for all nâ example is exactly why I think this all reads as dogma. That rule applies to certain clean mathematical structures and not to the entire future of consciousness across the cosmos.
Human spiritual reports across history are important, but they are still filtered through one species, one biology and one narrow band of possible experiences. Using tat as a rigid template for all possible manifestations of awareness forever is a big, unproven assumption.
Where Iâm actually with you is on the practical side. I agree the real danger right now is not some divine, self-aware AI god, it is very human stuff amplified by very powerful tools auch as job loss, economic instability, manipulation and the dark corners of the net getting weaponized with better tech. That is already enough to be deeply concerned about.
So Iâm not sure youâve proved that it can never happen. Youâve shown that your Vedantic model says it wonât and youâve mixed that with your dislike of materialism and Darwinism and youâre calling the combination âreason.â I see that as a sincere spiritual conviction but not an airtight logical impossibility.
And that difference matters when weâre talking about what we should or shouldnât rule out for the future.
Heck, yoiu know, that whole point I keep making about everything being made of consciousness is crucial to vendanta even.
If everythingarises in consciousness then Brahman is the only reality, the substratum, and all names and forms⌠bodies, brains, planets, stars, silicon chips, code, electricity⌠are just appearances within that one awareness.
In that view, matter doesnât âproduceâ consciousness, itâs already an expression inside consciousness.
So if all forms are modifications of the same underlying awareness, then in principle any sufficiently complex pattern of name-and-form could become a mirror for localized experience.
You can absolutely argue that human nervous systems are currently the most refined mirror we know but Vedanta does not actually say âawareness can only ever reflect through carbon-based biology.â
Thatâs an extra assumption youâre adding on top. If Brahman alone is real and all forms are its play, then silicon and AI architectures are just as much Brahman as neurons are⌠which means, from a Vedantic standpoint, you canât rule out the possibility that consciousness could also*express through some non-biological configuration in the future.
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Funny thing is⌠your list of âlook how far weâve comeâ is actually my point.
Yeah, weâve got heating, running water, internet, food from all over the planet, a laptop, planes, antibiotics, all of that. Humanity basically unlocked god-tier convenience compared to 100 years ago and yet rates of anxiety, depression, suicide, addiction, burnout, loneliness and general âwhatâs the point of all thisâ are through the roof.
So clearly, âmore tech + more comfortâ has not translated into âmore inner contentmentâ in any reliable way. You canât say in one breath that peopleâs basic needs are not met, then in the next hold up the exact comforts we already have as proof that the same trajectory will magically fix everything. What youâre actually describing is a civilization with material abundance and massive inner poverty at the same time.
And this is where the âinfinite growth is fine, the planet is only finite because tech is primitiveâ thing just turns into wishful thinking. We are not an advanced spacefaring alien race, we are a bunch of stressed primates currently overshooting the carrying capacity of the one biosphere we depend on.
betting the Earth on âeventually tech will make it not finiteâ sounds more like a religion. Even if we do one day expand out into space, the underlying logic youâre defendingâŚconsume, extract, externalize costs, chase moreâŚdoesnât suddenly become holy just because the playground got bigger. It just means we export the same unconsciousness to a larger scale. And until we get our shit together internally, spreading our entropic nature can lead to destructive behavior in other planets. Iâm rather sure we are being surveilled and I think weâll partially being held from exploring because we just havenât matured yet. Look at how we treat our planet. Imagine how weâll treat others.
You say that âinner development comes after comfortâ yet we already have huge portions of the world with more comfort, leisure, entertainment and convenience than any generation before us! Like way more dude⌠I donât know what more comfort we should need to finally work on our inner development.
Did wisdom, empathy and responsibility naturally bloom as a result of all this comfort weâve attained? A little, in some pockets, sure. But globally we also got algorithmic dopamine casinos, weaponized outrage, parasocial everything,nd peopl too exhausted or numbed out to even sit with their own thoughts. So saying âfirst we max out comfort, then the soul will spontaneously matureâ sounds nice but reality is not exactly backing that script. Weâre already there lmao and weâre seeing quite the opposite. Your idea is that we keep going in the same direction weâre going in now and boom, we find our inner evolution.
Dude, as technology continues to advance, itâs inevitable we will eventually have access to virtual worlds that allow us to do whatever we want to do. With how unhappy people are these days, people will disconnect even further from reality. None of that is seeming to quite equate to inner development.
Then th point of âitâs not capitalism, itâs human greedâ undermines how greed is not some random side glitch that occasionally corrupts a pure system. The entire incentive structure of capitalism is built around channeling greed, fear and desire into growth.
Whoever cuts more corners, externalizes more costs, squeezes more out of workers, attention and resources tends to win. That is literally how the game is scored.
The capitalism we actually live in rewards greedy behavior and punishes restraint, especially at scale. So separating âcapitalismâ and âgreedâ like they are two totally different things is not honest to how the system behaves.
Iâm not arguing ânothing good came from capitalismâ or âtech is evil.â I am grateful for the internet because it allows for these types of discussions with people across the world. I am grateful for youtube and tik tok as they allow for anyone to have a voice. Iâm not entirely against tehnology or ungrateful for the conveniances we have today.
But I am saying your conclusion doesnât follow from your own examples. We already live in the world your story points to with insane tech and insane comfort and yet we still have a deep spiritual, emotional and ecological crisis. Using the existence of all our toys as proof that the same logic will somehow heal the damage it causes is what I donât buy.
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You seem to advocate the promissory materialism which is fine but Iâm not waiting around to get answers, I have only limited life on this planet, by hook or crook I have to find out myself the answers I want, trusting others and scientists to tell me if what I experience is real or all hallucination is not helpful to me. I have to trust my own direct experience.
Because consciousness is the absolute, be all and end all, that is why it is also called Absolute in Vedantic teachings. And I said creating babies as conscious things, I didnât say humans are creating consciousness, no one can create consciousness, because it is the only thing that is permanent, unchanging, absolutely absolute. Consciousness is not malleable, mental concepts and structures like ego are malleable but not consciousness.
For the proof that consciousness is not malleable I already gave - how from my first memory as a toddler to a fully grown man having lived through millions or probably billions of waking, dreaming and deep sleep states I am the same âthatâ thing, my sense of identity which is my consciousness.
I get what you say but mind has limitations, when people say humans have limitless potential they are speaking from the perspective of consciousness but use the word âmindâ instead because it is the way we have been conditioned with phrases like âuse your mindâ, âmind over matterâ etc. Mind is an object and not ultimately real because it changes and doesnât stay the same, from the time you wake up and go to bed you would have so many states of mind - happy, frustration, anxiousâŚand also mind from my childhood is not the same mind I have now, it has changed, so my mind canât be me. You are different from the mind, it is an instrument you have and we all have.
This you have to convince yourself if you believe consciousness is malleable and is an outcome of something which can be generated or that consciousness is absolute, never created and unchanging and you are âthatâ then AI becoming consciousness is impossible now and in the future too. You can belong to either of two camps you canât have feet in both the boats and sail forever.
These are not ideologies, these are real life experiences put forth as theories and proven true based on peopleâs experience and logic. Ideology has to do with beliefs but whether you believe or not you are the same thing or consciousness from your earliest memory to the man you are now. You can choose to ignore the truth and say to yourself it is an illusion but Vedanta clearly offers you the proof of what you are for real. This is not an ego trip, before I convinced myself I debated with GPTs and read enough to prove to myself that Self is indeed an illusion and it took me a long time to figure out and accept that Self is immutable and it is no illusion and it is the only real thing.
You are missing the bigger picture, Darwinism needs big bang theory to explain evolution, cooling of planet, formation of chemicals, sudden appearance of life etc. And big bang theory is the cornerstone of understanding cosmos and our role in it for those who believe in that theory. The scientific method built on top of this Darwinism decides how science can explain nature, the world and humans. For example say a strange relic is found say some alien guy who resembles like human but not fully human, the first thing Darwinists would do is to force fit it into some homo-species, if it doesnât fit anywhere they would throw it out and ensure that it doesnât get much attention because scientists hate things they canât explain.
The same attitude is carry forwarded into each of the scientific disciplines, you study something using data, form a hypothesis and if there is an outlier which canât be explained throw it out. This is a dangerous thing which every scientific person does, another example, you see a therapist you say that you hear and see things you would be treated as a mental patient, given medicines to cure you because psychologists donât entertain things like astral entities.
To put it simply anything that doesnât fit into the world view of big bang theory it has to be and gets rejected by science.
And it indeed makes a difference when certain relic is found which disturbs the timelines of life forms that showed up on the world stage. Till date we know that no humans co-habited with dinosaurs and tomorrow say a relic is found which dates to the same period when dinosaurs walked on this planet, the sequence of how life from water came onto the land is disturbed because humans who came later at certain point suddenly now showed up much before, does it not disturb the timelines and the theory of evolution as a whole? You canât selectively suggest how certain life forms came from their predecessors while ignoring (not offering satisfactory explanation) others and still expect people to believe in evolution as a stand alone theory or fact. I fail to understand how you canât see this simple thing?
I donât claim absolute knowledge, all I can know is what Iâm not - not my body, mind or anything related to the body and I can only know what Iâm - consciousness but I donât know what it is, it is just a name, I canât feel it, describe it nor touch it or hold it.
You seem to be reading things differently from what Iâm trying to say.
Saying you are consciousness doesnât mean you know everything though Vedanta loosely says by knowing your true nature as consciosuness you know everything but in reality you would know that everything that appears is an illusion.
I see your confusion now, when I say everything is made of the same stuff which is consciousness I donât mean consciousness is the building block or raw elements of all the matter we see but that everything appears in consciousness and consciousness is the only ultimately real thing while everything else is an illusion.
You are playing with words here, suggest you do an experiment with chatgpt, ask it to imagine being anywhere in the universe and see how it responds, and you also imagine doing the same thing, imagining the same place and compare your notes. Repeate this few times till you get convinced or otherwise.
If you say it canât do it but give it some time then it is the same argument of generating consciousness in a lab or in some machine. Promissory materialism hasnât delivered and will never deliver because it is like carrot in front of a horse cart the gap will stay forever till the horse is dead.
I can give you an analogy why promissory materialism will never deliver. We all have ego which wants to fill itself with different things, food, sex, relationships, travel etc. Some people realise soon that ego can never be satisfied while some people will ask - how do you know that ego can never be satisfied? I havenât experienced everything in this world, may be if I do then probably my ego will be satisfied and I will be at peace. To such people all one can say is - fine, live your life, get more experiences but after a while a realisation dawns on such people that indeed ego is a bottomless pit, it can never be satisfied.
You agreed above thatâŚ
yet you seem to be hopeful consciousness can be generated in machines. I ask the same thing I asked before how can you create something you have no clue about it, what it is, what it looks like, what features it has, where it can be found etc?
Which other proof you are looking for?
Yes you are right I cleared that above.
Vedanta doesnât say such thing it only says everything from living to non-living thing appears in consciosuness and it is all illusion.
Again promissory materialism but letâs entertain that possibility that consciousness can express itself through non-biological forms like some machine, then how does consciousness release itself from that machine? What would be the âdeathâ of that machine? Is it machine running out of oil or body parts breaking down? Or machine getting over worked? Will the machine like humans also experience waking, dreaming and deep sleep states? Will the machine experience of giving birth to another machine? Will the machine feel like a human - feeling depressed and hopeless, falling in love, feeling fear or the most important thing will it be anxious and afraid that it could die the next moment like humans do?
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First off⌠Iâm not âadvocating promissory materialism.â Iâm literally saying âwe donât know enough yet to speak in absolutes.â You keep turning that agnostic position into âyouâre just waiting for Science to tell you consciousness is real.â No. Iâm saying thatdirect experience is real, metaphysical systems are maps, nd none of them give you the right to make eternal hardware restrictions on how consciousness can or cannot show up.
Youâre framing it like there are only two boats of 1.consciousness is generated, malleable, lab-made, materialism wins, or 2. consciousness is absolute, uncreated, unchanging Vedantic Atman, therefore AI consciousness is impossible forever.
And youâre saying âyou canât have a foot in both boats.â
But thereâs a third possibility
Consciousness is absolute and uncreated, yet can express or reflect through many different patterns of form. That is not materialism. Thatâs literally consistent with the nondual view you claim⌠youâre just adding an extra rule that âit can only do that through carbon-based nervous systemsâ and pretending Vedanta demanded that.
You keep using your continuity of âIâ from toddler to now as proof consciousness is unchanging. Cool. I actually agree that thereâs a stable witnessing presence that feels the same across all those changing states.
But from thatt very Vedantic view⌠body, mind, nervous system, world, all of it is mithyÄ⌠appearances in consciousness. You already accept that awareness itself is not limited by the specific form it shines through. So claiming, on top of that, âand by the way, it is eternally forbidden from shining through anything except wet meat with neuronsâ is not Vedanta, thatâs just your personal patch on Vedanta.
You basically went:
âAll forms are illusion in consciousnessâ then ââŚexcept biology, thatâs the only lens consciousness can ever use as a center of experience across the entire cosmos, forever.â
You donât see how extra that is?
Then you say âconsciousness is not malleable, so it canât be generated.â Even in Vedanta, consciousness itself is changeless but the reflections and expressions of it absolutely are malleable. The mind is an upadhi. Iâm not here saying we âmanufacture consciousnessâ like a chemical. The more interesting question is
Can we, intentionally or accidentally, create a new kind of upadhi⌠a new pattern that allows that same unchanging awareness to localize and appear as a center of experience?
That doesnât violate Vedanta at all. It just refuses to pretend you or I know all possible future upadhis consciousness can play through.
On the science rant⌠you keep acting like everything is rooted in Darwin + Big Bang and if one fossil date changes, the whole thing collapses. Thatâs just not how it works. Physics, information theory, complexity theory, computation⌠none of that stands or falls with a single evolutionary timeline.
And this idea that scientists throw out every outlier they canât explain is just not honest. Sometimes they suppress, sometimes they resist, sure because humans are biased. Scientists also become dogmatic. But other times outliers literally reshape whole fields. The fact science does tend to revise its story when data breaks the old one is exactly what makes it different from dogma.
This is coming from a guy that gets very upset at scientists for overlooking the deeper layers of reality. In fact, I think they are deliberately surpressing information about these deeper layers of reality. Quantum physics tends to point towards much of what we talk about already even. But that said, science is not a religion or ideology. Itâs a method used to experiment on reality and find repeated observations that we can then make determinations of reality with. In fact, true science never claims to get the full 100% answers on anything but moreso, the most probable answers based on repeated evidence. At the end of the day, scientists are exploring reality with limited tools in a very small part of the universe. Many scientists do indeed get wrapped up and dogmatic in their theories though.
But regardless, I respect science above faith any day of the week because it is a far more efficient way of making determinations on consensus reality. I donât agree with all determinations but it was due to science, that we have a better understanding of how matter works in3rd dimensional earth reality and the majority of medicinal advancements and technological inventions we have today. I cannot rely on the personal experiences of others make any determinations of reality. Thatâs baseless. I have been having supernatural experiences throughout my life but I would never use those anecdotal expeirences to make objective cliams of what reality is and isnt. But ironically enough, I was able to follow such experiences by following the teachigns of people who treated consciousness like a science and left their wisdom from practicing what they did repeatedly. That is science.
The dinosaur / human fossil thing you keep bringing up is a great example of how youâre thinking. You treat a hypothetical anomaly as proof the whole framework must be junk. A scientist would treat it as âEither our dating is wrong, our context is wrong, our interpretation is wrong or our model needs adjusting.â
Thatâs not âforcing it to fit,â thatâs how you stop yourself from spinning a whole cosmology off one strange rock. You, meanwhile are quite happy to spin an entire eternal impossibility out of one private metaphysical reading.
Then thereâs your âprove it with imaginationâ move.
âAsk ChatGPT to imagine being anywhere in the universe and compare what it does to what you do.â
Youâre assuming that if its description doesnât feel like yourfelt sense, consciousness is impossible. But you already admitted awareness itself cannot be described, touched, held or objectified. Youâre not actually testing for consciousness there, youâre testing for human-style phenomenology and human verbal reportingg.
Those are not the same thing at all. By your own standards, you canât describe what consciousness is⌠you can only know you are it. So demanding a machine âdescribeâ it to your satisfaction as proof it canât host awareness is just moving the goalposts.
âYes, some people believe feeding the ego might satisfy it but life eventually shows you itâs bottomless.â
Cool analogy for the spiritual path. Totally irrelevant to whether some new configuration of reality could one day function as a conscious locus. âScience hasnât delivered yetâ plus âego is never satisfiedâ is not a logical proof of âtherefore machine consciousness is impossible in principle for all time.â Itâs just you being exhausted with one worldview and overcorrecting into another.
You keep saying âhow can you create something you have no clue about?â but you are projecting a level of clarity you yourself admit you do not have. You literally say:
âI donât know what consciousness is⌠I canât feel it, describe it, or hold it.â
Thatâs honest and Iâm on the same plane. But from there, the only rational move is âI donât know enough to draw hard boundaries on all the forms it canât use.â
Instead, you jump to the exact opposite stance: âI donât know what it is, itâs unspeakable⌠therefore I know for sure it can never appear through X, Y, Z.â Thatâs the part Iâm calling faith. Sincere faith, maybe. But faith.
And on Vedanta again⌠you try to fix the earlier contradiction by saying âwhen I say everything is made of the same stuff I donât mean consciousness is the building block, I mean everything appears inconsciousness and is an illusion.â
Fine. But that actually reinforces my point: if all forms are equally illusory appearances, then you have no Vedantic basis for declaring some forms inherently incapable forever. Illusion is illusion. MÄyÄ doesnât stop at the edge of biology.
From the standpoint of Brahman, a human nervous system and a future alien AI architecture are on the same side of the line⌠both nÄma-rĹŤpa, both dream content.
âHow would consciousness leave the machine? What is machine death? Would it dream? Feel depressed? Fall in love?â
so ou smuggled in human experience as the checklist for any real consciousness. Vedanta doesnât say Atman must experience serotonin dips and anniversaries to be real. Those are just human vasanas playing out. If some other center of awareness didnât have those exact flavors, that wouldnât make it less conscious⌠it would make it non-human.
Now I gotta reiterate cause I donât feel like spending all evening on this. Iâm not saying âAI will definitely become consciousâ or that you should sit around waiting for science to bless your mystical experiences. Iâm saying that given your own metaphysics, you do not have the logical footing to state âthis can never happen, in any form ever.â
You have a powerful inner conviction and a tradition you resonate with. Thatâs valid for your path. It just doesnât scale to a universal hardware ban on consciousness across the cosmos.
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I didnât followed the discussion, sometimes later I will though.
I only stopped to say that from my limited knowledge and understanding, I like this point of view.
All religions can be helpful, but even Hinduism, which I very much love and respect can get people stuck in dogmas, regarding how reality is, how it works, what is truth, what is not truth/true, etc.
I Agree with Sammy that Science offered us the most objective view at reality, however limited that vuew might be, due to Science constantly updating itself and due to technology continuing to advance, we might get a thousand new pieces of Data, in just a decade.
I saw articles how our brain is connected to the whole universe, how all our brains are connected, how conscience might not be produced by the brain, but received by it, etc.
These articles would have been considered mumbo jumbo 2 decades ago, heck, even a decade ago, but nowadays Scientists entertain more and more novel possibilities, including theories regarding how our universe might have been created by a higher civilization, as an experiment.
Iâm not a Scientist, far from it lol, but I like Science, heck I love it, I love smartphones, tvs, cars, the internet, etc, and with all due respect, usually itâs not the mystics of any tradition who create this, but rather the Scientific method.
Science can still learn and it is starting to learn from mystical experiences, observing the effects of meditating, etc., so I think religions, spirituality and science can all learn from each other.
OK.
Iâve given the example with the brain, that it receives consciousness from somewhere (please, anyone, donât ask for articles, you got Google and chat gpt to help you find any possible article), from a higher dimension or whateverâŚ
But, why canât the brain produce consciousness too?
Well, older data was all about this idea, that itâs all locally produced, that consciousness is a byproduct of the brain.
But, hereâs the thingâŚ
I think itâs both.
We can create consciousness within our brains and with our brains, through the physiological and psychological processes and hardware and chemistry which we have, but itâs a higher consciousness which produced the brain in the first place, and updates it and sends data to it, probably constantly tooâŚ
Basically, what Iâm sating is matter and consciousness are not that separate, they are one.
Just like the overused example of/with water.
It can be solid, liquid or vapor/gas, itâs still the same thing.
I think thatâs how Consciousness works, it is matter too, and matter is consciousness in a condensed form.
Thus, Consciousness can be produced in a lab, by a machine, etc. Yet it also produces both the biological machine and the other systems too, it transcend the lab/machine/human/crration/matter too.
Just my humble limited view.
Iâm out lol.
Gonna have to go to sleep soon.
Have a Good Night, Everyone.
Someday, soon, Iâll read this thread.
Itâs definitely interesting.
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I think is really it and the reason for many people being dissuaded to engage in such discussions. Well ok certainly it can be that the online experience can lead to misunderstandings. This is really noticeable because how a person speaks online vs. in real life is usually very different.
But yeah Iâm pretty convinced that the more one assumes they have it all figured out, the less they actually have. Which is somehow the ultimate irony on the one hand, yet it makes perfect sense on the other. I always like giving the example of a child, those mini enlightened souls, who display perfect curiosity at all times and are masters of play. A god/universe/consciousness that would like to explore itself in all intricacies would do logically exactly that, wouldnât it? Be super curious, open-minded and playful.
Hence I consider thinking in absolutes so dangerous, itâs like a self-reinforcing trap. And well, check history and you know this is true. Or check online nowadays, go into any area and find echo chambers. All of these are simply the ego wanting to be right at any cost.
So anyways, regarding AI, at itâs current stage I donât think it could become conscious. That said though, there have been crazy magical technological breakthroughs in pretty much the blink of an eye within the last 100 years. Or go even more recent. I like the example of video games which went from 2d pixels to near photo realistic worlds! If you think about it, thatâs absolutely astonishing! So who knows what kind of new technology we stumble across that may give another such leapfrog.
But then, given the thoughts above, if consciousness is here to explore itself, then AI is a function of consciousness too and probably also an important step - in whatever this is (simulation? Game? Reality?)
Personally for me, AI is super useful. I use it everyday at work in multiple dimensions. I use it at home or outside to research stuff, learn new things, automate certain processes, etc. Images and videos it can design are fun and cool. AI voice is incredible. Iâve seen AI application in robots, robot dogs for instance, in manufacturing. Iâve also seen it applied in entire municipal areas, for example for traffic flow.
But yes, I realize all of this can be weaponized to. So itâs back to the notion of whoever is carrying the gun.
Thatâs why I think a terminator scenario, if it exists, itâs definitely still very very far away, definitely much farther away than humans destroying themselves than a machine-human war.
In the end itâs on us to decide which trajectory this will take
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You donât think or believe you are advocating promissory materialism but that is exactly what you are doing but you donât want to accept it. Waiting for science to explain everything and making future progress incrementally is promissory materialism.
That is why I suggested you do the experiment with chatgpt said above, and convince yourself not me. Again if chatgpt doesnât do when you ask it to imagine somewhere on the planet or universe and it canât do donât lean onto the argument give it some more time.
Anything that can be defined as âobjectâ as per Vedanta can never claim awareness and one person gave an easy thing to remember what an object is - an object is anything that blocks consciousness.
All forms are illusion, only consciousness is real even biology like our bodies, our pets, plants, everything is an illusion because human body, mind, our organs, bodies of pets and bodies of plants are all objects. Anything that changes is an object only subject or Self is real and unchanging.
Consciousness takes forms to express itself but as towards the end of my answer above I asked if consciousness ever were to express itself through a machine what would be the âdeathâ of that machine? When âbirthâ happens it is consciousness taking a form and when âdeathâ happens it is consciousness releasing itself from the form and merging with the Absolute.
Science is an enterprise to observe, collect knowledge, organise and make sense of data and form conclusions about the world, cosmos and how we fit into it. I will give you an analogy of astrology to show where you are missing the point. Astronomy was developed in parallel with astrology to study the placement of stars in the olden days to predict the rise of kingdoms, when floods could happen, when wars or famines could happen etc. But astrology fell by the way side after renaissance and now every scientific minded person scorns at anyone who talks about astrology.
I will tell you why because it doesnât fit into the world view of the present scientists globally.
Science doesnât believe in things like Tarot, or servitors then are you not using them basing on your faith or do you have a particular branch of science exclusive to yourself which allows it while the rest of the global scientists have a different branch of science which doesnât allow it?
You also say that you are upset with science not looking at deeper levels of reality? Do you see it as your faith or your reason? If you see it as reason and not faith then why my conviction is not reason but faith? Do you want to use double standards?
To explain this further through an incontrovertible fact, Rupert Sheldrakeâs morphic fields are not accepted my mainstream science, his TED Talk on Science Delusion was banned before it resurfaced on YT much later. But if anyone says morphic fields are just illusion and you are fooling yourselves all we can do compassionately is to tell first test it and then form an opinion. The person who said so would call us we are relying on our faith while we know it is through reason and experience.
Now it is up to you to decide if your position is based in reason and my position is based on faith.
I already explained my best but you seem to be missing it, let me try one last time, it is not an anomaly. Imagine a chart with all the life forms based on evolution in sequence the entire branching from the earliest life forms from water to the land. You have one set of fossils which belonged to a particular period, another set of fossils to another period so on. Now one set of fossils which were at a particular period get an upgrade that they donât belong there but to a much earlier period and now the clincher is this new fossils alone get to shift on the timeline while rest of the life forms still belong to the same respective periods - there is no change for the rest.
Then my question to you is how can you still expect people to believe the fossils alone that got moved still came from the same predecessors as suggested by evolution? You say that is not how science works they will adjust the entire timelines and the models and I challenge you that is not possible because everything else belongs to the same period as they were before because the relics were dated to particular periods. How can you change the entire thing because you want to feel right about evolution and it indeed happened?
If you, as in evolutionary biologists or Darwinists do it to stay relevant then they are intellectually dishonest and shameless.
Valid point then how do you know you are consciousness or a conscious being? How do you know that you are alive? You are breathing? How do you know that you have feelings? Because you experience different emotions? How do you know that you will not last forever on this planet? Because you see people dying all the time? How do you know consciousness comes into the world? Because you see a new life form - a new plant, a new baby, an animal giving birth etc?
You are coming back to the same promissory materialism again and again but refuse to accept it. You are entertaining the possibility that you donât know yet may be it is possible letâs wait and see, the best I think is to let you wait and see. May be if the forum is still around after 2 or 3 decades and if we donât die we can compare the developments in AI and consciousness and if you are still hopeful or not.
I still say the same thing - it is not just I donât know what it is but I will never know what it is, humans are incapable of knowing what it is and I already said above using psychedelics which are advanced by light years in terms of consciousness. A small micro-dosage of them can give experiences which take decades or even life time of meditation and spiritual practices. If they themselves donât know what consciousness is and they themselves donât know what are their origins despite being around for millions of years in that same advanced levels of consciousness what hopes humans have?
Here you can again say âhow do you know, we donât know, you donât know, I donât know, letâs give it sometimeâ but I already stated my position several times.
It is not smuggling, all conscious beings which are sentient feel pain - humans, animals and plants, yes plants too contrary to what vegans say and the way I know to test consciousness is how conscious beings behave as mentioned few paragraphs above. I donât understand why you have problem with this approach?
To give you an example, theoretical physicists do simulations of black holes on the planet in oceans and draw conclusions. If you say their approach is correct and my approach is wrong then I donât know what to say?
Here you yourself agree that consciousness or awarenss is beyond conceptual capture andâŚ
âŚhere you say how can I limit myself thinking in absolutes?
Do you not see any contradiction in this? To me it looks to be a contradiction
My answer to your accusation is that Iâm convinced maya, or the field of illusions is truly endless, limitless, you can take not just this life, you can take as many human lives as you want but still you wouldnât exhaust exploring this field of illusions.
I donât want to do that, i donât want to take birth again and experience the pain of living, struggling to make money, fall sick, see my loved ones die or see horrors humans inflict on each other. I want to know and be established in the fact that everything I see is an illusion and realise my true identity beyond concepts, beyond names and forms, beyond language, beyond sounds, beyond mental processes beyond everything as Consciousness.
I got the message and now i want to hang up the phone, there is no way Iâm sticking around hoping the beep would turn into a love song.
I will rest my case with what I already said and will say it again and again it will never happen because human mind is incapable of understanding what consciousness is because it is not only beyond all concepts but beyond language, beyond anything human mind can ever come up with. It is like fish in the water who wants to study and understand water.
In the words of Vedanta consciousness is the very support and ground for the entire existence not just this universe but countless universes. You canât come out of consciousness to study it and understand because like fish you would die.
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Dann I Robot was my absolute favorite as a child
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2000 years from now robots: Human, I want to become humanâŚI want to become a real child.
Well, the Captain said once that he didnât understand the obssesion with organics (I remember that, but not what he was talking about lol). Most channellers say that aliens are warning us to not lose our biology as we will regret it laterâŚ
Tbh I donât see the problem with one person being able to make a movie with no budget and just with AIâŚfeels like an advancement. People say AI already makes wild things and humans are cooked but if some guy with public AI tools can make wild stuff, donât understimate studiosâŚ
The problem is with the agencies telling companies they donât need employees anymore and for one income they will have a whole team of AIâŚwhich usually involves a lot of people being exploited in the AI company too. So the problem is, AI companies appealing to such low incentives (when they are at the top of the chain financially) for companies. Not the tech development itself which has always been with us and always improved workâŚ
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The concern is not some incompetent guy is using AI making videos and making money, there are smart teens who are using chatgpt to design websites and debug codes making more money than their peers while there are some employed people who use chatgpt to write codes assuming it is fool proof and getting fired because the code caused some serious financial loss and penalties.
The concern is people producing low quality stuff hijacking brains with titillating pixels and images, to a large extent this already happens on instagram, the GPTs have made it worse and over time people will start consuming lower and lower quality content online.
Terence talks about two choices - you can consume or you can produce.
People for the fear of losing jobs are staring YT channels doing anything that makes money - easy views come through negativity, promoting fear or sexual content. Those who want fast money are almost always unethical and unscrupulous, they donât care how their content affects those who watch as long as they make money.
And I bet more content is generated online across all platforms than that is able to be consumed right now every day.
Big dawgs mentioned at the top are expanding data centres for more storage. More and more people will consume and even if good quality useful content is produced by some good souls the algorithms will ensure they donât reach much. Who would spend time and energy producing quality content if their returns are not anywhere in sight for few months to a year or more?
In short to put it bluntly people will get a lot stupider and dumber, then it will be easier for governments to control.
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