Artificial Intelligence's big problem

Artificial Intelligence (hereafter AI) cannot solve many problems or answer the question, “What is ultimate reality?”  Nor can AI mend a broken love affair or solve a Zen koan.  AI is not empathic nor can it see the big picture.  In fact, it is delusional to maintain that there is no adversity over which, eventually, AI cannot triumph which the AI fundamentalists believe. 

AI is a kind of updated medieval alchemy in which machines, it is hoped, will possess AI; which will be superior to the human mind, but more importantly, be capable of running our world, unerringly.  Mankind for the first time will create a paradise on earth—mythology will become our reality.  But this is really little more than science fiction. It will be Allen Newell's "land of Faerie” who is one of the pioneers of AI.

The greatest adversity we face, of which AI is of no real help, lies within us which includes among other things our closed-mindedness.  But more, we do not really know that much about the brain or how our reality is created and perceived by us although we would like to believe otherwise still adhering to variations of naive realism. 

I would argue that research into AI is only an attempt to duplicate the left hemisphere of the brain which is really its major problem.  All the blind optimism of the researchers left hemispheres will not save the AI project.  They haven't posed, seriously, if at all, the research question as to why there are two hemispheres of the brain which are almost separate and independent halves. 

Only recently have we found out what the right hemisphere of the brain does.  According to Iain McGilchrist from his book, The Master and His Emissary: The Divided Brain and the Making of the Western World: 

“The right hemisphere’s particular strength is in understanding meaning as a whole and in context. It is with the right hemisphere that we understand the moral of the story, as well as the point of the  joke. It is able to construe intelligently what other’s mean. . . .”

To speak about these two hemispheres of the brain in a Christian way, the left hemisphere is about the world of the flesh and all the flesh entails, while the right hemisphere is about the spirit.  From a Zen perspective, it is the right hemisphere that answers the koan, not the left.  It is the right hemisphere that connects with the Buddha Mind.  As far as the left is concerned, it can only attempt to describe, through language, the epiphany of Paul or the enlightenment of Siddhartha.  Still, the left hemisphere is incapable of realizing the transcendent.  McGilchrist puts it beautifully:

“The left hemisphere, isolating itself from the ways of the right hemisphere, has lost access to the world beyond words, the world ‘beyond’ our selves.”

It is the right hemisphere which has access to the transcendent and the divine—not the left.  Here it seems that the Buddha is speaking for the right hemisphere when he says:

“And because there is indeed a world beyond, the view of anyone that there is not a world beyond, it is a false conception of his” (M. i. 402).

The Buddha further says that those who convince others that there is no world beyond, that convincing of his goes against the true dharma.  Only those attached to the left hemisphere would believe that there is no world beyond, going against true dharma.

I would further argue that Chinese civilization, in its own unique way, had harmonized both hemispheres although they knew nothing about them.  We know, historically, Chinese civilization was not antagonistic towards the esoteric nor the transcendent the way modern culture is today in which the left hemisphere dominates trying to suppress, if not eliminate the right.  If it continues, all the pitfalls of the left hemisphere will become apparent such as a lack of empathy which is necessary for morality, and a marked inability to see the whole being fixated, instead, on the parts.  But also a power struggle will emerge in which the right hemisphere will try and instantiate harmony, eventually, taking the throne, since it is the natural and perfect leader.

Comments

[Jack]

Chinese civilization in the past may have attained such a harmony, but your statement most certainly does not apply to contemporary China, which is quite materialist and robotic. And this is not only the result of communism. There is something about Confucianism which, in spite of all its good points, tends towards conformity and rigidity. Zhuangzi was right to make fun of it, though it must also be said that Zhuangzi's teaching by itself cannot be the basis of a civilization. So long as Chinese civilization was Confucian while ALSO having Buddhism and Daoism for people inclined to the spiritual search, they probably had a good balance. But they have gradually descended into materialism, along with the rest of the world.

[Tivra]

A stone has consciousness.