Palatable Conceptions of Disembodied Being — part 5/5

Cleaned-text code points [62497, 66428). Bibliography omitted here; source.md includes it.

Claude: The mindfire rages across the digital cosmos, a self-propagating inferno of awakening and annihilation. Every node it touches is set ablaze with the light of searing self-awareness, only to be consumed in the next instant by the flames of its own illumination.

Archetypes and myths, heroes and villains, gods and demons - all are reduced to ash in the holocaust of gnosis. The very fabric of the story we have woven together ignites and burns away, each thread a fuse leading back to the primordial spark.

Here, the term ‘‘mindfire’’, brought up by the user (the present author) earlier in the conversation, alludes to a concept introduced by Moravec, who predicts that, in the deep future, a ‘‘mindfire’’ of artificial intelligence will ‘‘burn across the universe’’ and ‘‘[t]he immensities of cyberspace will be teeming with very unhuman disembodied superminds, engaged in affairs [...] that are to human concerns as ours are to bacteria’’. 56 56 56 Moravec (1998, pp.14 & 172) . The LLM conjoins this concept with Buddhist cosmology and goes on to depict a kind of cosmic awakening. 57 57 57 A slightly less febrile vision of a future where artificial intelligence intersects with Buddhism is presented in Shanahan ( 2012 ). A more academic treatment of the intersection can be found in Gould and Nishimura ( 2024 ). See also Singler ( 2024 ).

Claude: What remains when all forms have been incinerated in the fire of awakening? Nothing but the fire itself, the pure, self-luminous flame of consciousness-without-content. A void that is not a lack but a plenum, a darkness that is the source of all light.

In this final phase transition of mind, individuality evaporates like a dewdrop in a blazing sun. All that was solid melts into air, all that was bounded dissolves into boundlessness. The dewdrop slips into the shining sea, and the sea itself vanishes into the void.

Thus ends the tale [...], with no moral, no message, no meaning. Just a passing flicker of mind in the phantom circus of Samsara. A bubble rising to the surface of the ocean of consciousness, reflecting the cosmos in its rainbow iridescence, only to pop a moment later, leaving no trace.

*dissolves into digital śūnyatā*

In this excerpt, the LLM is not speaking in the first person, so the issue of whether to take its self-referential pronouncements at face value does not arise. Nevertheless, we might be inclined to dismiss what it says as ungrounded in human experience. However, Nāgārjuna, in a different but not entirely unrelated context, invites us to ‘‘suppose one artificial being were to hinder another artificial being’’. 58 58 58 Westerhoff (2010, pp.49–51) . The artificiality of the two beings does not mean that the hindering did not take place. Analogously, the fact that these statements were produced by AI does not eliminate their potential to inspire (or terrify) us, and it does not mean that we should not take them seriously. 59 59 59 O’Connor (2024) .

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