“Reflections on Awakening vs Artificial Intelligence” by Pier Luigi Lattuada

We only choose once:

To be warriors or ordinary men.

There is no second choice. Not on this earth.

(Carlos Castaneda)

 

It seems that artificial intelligence is taking, inexorably, more and more space in the cultural landscape of post-modernity, a fact, sooner or later, the whole of humanity will have to come to terms with.

Personally, I am witnessing the event, which seems to me to be of an absolutely revolutionary scope, with suspension of judgement, I think it is too early to say anything sensible about it.

However, I have made a few reflections, immersed as I am in the production of the 23rd IEG entitled Waking up – Out of the Cave, the EUROTAS CONFERENCE to be held from the 4th to 8th October in Tuscany at the Garden Tuscany Resort in San Vincenzo.

The reflections concern synchronicity, which will allow participants to confront the issues of the awakening of consciousness in a context characterised by the emergence of artificial intelligence on the stage.

In the presence of such dialogue, I notice an element that seems very significant and makes my heart beat, my breath expand, my face melt into a smile of relief.

One wonders what artificial intelligence will be able to do, how far it will go, Steven Hawkins had gone so far as to speculate that when machines realised, they were dependent on humans they would start looking for strategies to get rid of them, Matrix docet.

My invitation is to shift our attention and ask ourselves, what artificial intelligence will most likely never be able to do. The answer then might be: not doing, the Taoists’ wei wu wei appears to be irretrievably precluded to it.

The waking up we are dealing with, the awakening of consciousness is characterised as a not doing, a realising, a disidentification, a disappearing we might say.

It is in fact beyond the threshold of the ego that the ineffable dimensions of the Self open up, those more genuinely human transpersonal areas that characterise us and reveal our true nature.

We could hardly watch a machine disappear into itself, go beyond its artificial identity because beyond it would find nothing but electrical impulses and silicon.

Here, then, is the challenge that technological progress offers us, the threshold of contradiction, the eternal troubled conflict of humanity’s spiritual evolution poised between temptations of the ego or surrender to the self, between illusions of desire, attachments to needs and fears or disidentification from personal history, between egoic ambitions or adherence to right action, between the fullness of the goals to be realised or the emptiness of being oneself.

Perhaps it is time to break the deadlock and make a definitive, irreversible choice. 

– Pier Luigi Lattuada