"But, after all, who knows, and who can say"

Uranus in Taurus is a great time to reassess your value system. What are your priorities? What do you think is worthy in your life?

It is difficult to figure things out when there is a lot of confusion going on in the world. It seems as though they want to dangle an apocalypse on our heads everyday. Remember that the universe has been forever out of control. Also remember Vinashakale Vipareetha Buddhi- when the times of destruction fall, your intelligence may work against you. Fear is a way to control what you think.Drop it.  They could very well be as clueless as you and me.

There are the AI hype and hoopla people who will say you are no longer relevant. It sounds so absurd to point out the beauty of being human. But when you still go ahead and tell them there is a difference between an organism and a machine, they all always throw one name at you- Rene Descartes. The man who said - I think therefore I am. They suggest that because AI is doing something like thinking, it now exists, as in it is conscious. And it seems to do what we do, so we are also machines. And because we can't do what it does, therefore it is greater than humans.

Rene Descartes' followers are called Cartesians.

Earlier, I could never really respond to this argument, because I had no idea who Descartes was or what his philosophy is. I sat down with AI trying to learn. Any question I would ask AI, it would frame my question as a leading sentence in the beginning and copy, paste the same stock response at the end.I opted out and chose, instead, to sit through a four hour philosophy lecture by a human, on Youtube. Here is what I learnt.

I think, I exist.

Descartes was something of an existentialist. He was wondering 'Who am I?' ,' What is all of this is? 'etc. He sat down to study. He began with a premise, that everything should be doubted. So one by one he began eliminating feedback from his senses and he found that he didn't seem to exist. You know you look down and see your hands, touch the chair, smell the air, hear your neighbor and sip your coffee and you know that you are here. But when you doubt all of that as mere illusion, then you begin to doubt if you exist at all.

Yeah, you say, this is a well known concept in Indian Philosophy. Go on...

He then realized- Hang on, even if I am sitting here doubting that I exist, there is still something that is doing the doubting/thinking. That doubter/thinker exists. I am the doubter/thinker. So I exist.And I am existing as a thinking being. Cogito ergo sum. I think therefore I am.

So far....so okay...

But then it all falls apart.

I would like to ask, "What about when you are in a deep, dreamless sleep? Where is the thinking? Where is the I? Where are you? According to your philosophy- you don't exist. And what doesn't exist cannot have a preference. Ergo, I am free to throw you into the sea. "

Yeah....

It gets worse. How bizarre the world is. People who throw Descartes at me will often add a jibe at the end, "the world doesn't work in mysterious ways and through magical thinking. It is all science. We are all mechanical."

Now I am seriously beginning to wonder if any of them have read Descartes or have at least sat through a four hour lecture. Because if they had studied Descartes they would know that he makes some seriously absurd magical thinking claims. Let's look at the next one:

"The idea of God exists within me. I didn't put it there. So God must have put it there. Therefore God exists."

Is this the kind of science, you buy into? Couldn't one person at least tell him -"Hey maybe your mother put the idea of God into you". Or "Hey maybe you wouldn't have the idea of God in you, if you were born to an atheist".

Bizarre Cartesians and Their Bizarre Philosophy

The reason, I think, Descartes got away with it for so long is because he was a genius mathematician. People tend to think that if someone has achieved something great in one field, then they should know everything about everything.

Cartesians also hold that mind and matter are separate. In modern Psychology, if you think this way, they diagnose you as having a Disassociation Disorder. To think that matter has no intelligence is a limited thought. Because anyone who works with the body through dance, yoga, martial arts, chiropractory, massage or manual labor begins to understand that the body has an intelligence of its' own. Thought becomes an impediment while doing practice in these areas.

Strange when yoga says it is holistic health to integrate your body and mind. Here it talks of a bifurcation. Even if you are spiritual you surely see, if the body is an illusion, the mind is the same as well. It makes no sense to choose one as real and the other as unreal.

Also thinking is not all that we do. We are responding in mysterious ways to things happening within us and to an environment that is magic in its complex wisdom.

Descartes did the right thing by studying himself but he stopped where it was too convenient. He didn't dare to go beyond his assumptions.

But it is no wonder he became so popular. He gave clear license for all the rich colonialists he was hanging around. They must have said - Don't understand what the nerd is on about- but I like what he is saying. There is nothing other than God (Descartes seems to know him), my mind which is the only thing alive....and a vast world of nature created for my exploitation. He was a huge fan of Francis Bacon who is known to have said- 'We must torture nature's secrets out of her'.

Cartesians pretend not to understand the limited nature of thought. They don't seem to realize that reality is far more complex than what they are making it out to be. That AI is working with even lesser than 0.00000000000000000000000001 % of the mind. And they fail to say how much it is taking to work with that fraction of the mind. They started their research in the 1940s, now they have pumped billions of dollars into this, fed it tons of data, it sucks huge amounts of energy and water and creates massive amounts of greenhouse gases.

After all this, as of now, it works as a satisfactory assistant, i.e if you don't mind checking all of its work again. But it is still so limited.

But the Cartesians will say, you don't know how it will be used in the future. It will take over everything. And they start the loop of doom and gloom again. This is mostly because that is the future they want to see: they have money invested, they are coming up with a product that relies on AI or they have domain knowledge that places them at an advantage.

There is also a possibility that AI could very well become just like the sewing machine, in its scope and impact.

History

Until the 15th century AD, Europe and England were living in the 'Dark Ages'. They were constantly at war, and they had very little of note culturally or scientifically. The end of the 15th century was when Vasco De Gama came to India, and opened the sea route. And suddenly in the 16th century there was the birth of scientific thinking in the West.

Mainstream history or Wikipedia is not going to point this out to you. Nor is AI going to suddenly change the way the world thinks. It is programmed with the very same prejudices and propaganda geared towards keeping the status quo power structures intact. They have wrapped history up in a convenient box, which shows us a very limited time frame, and only achievements of a carefully chosen few. Most of these achievements were appropriated or inspired by thinkers from the East.

The East has been open source. Take one example: Galileo was inspired by Copernicus. Copernicus by Ibn Al Shatir. Newton was deeply into the study of the Hermetica. Steel making was discovered in India thousands of years ago, but in the 1850s one man in the U.S tweaked a process and got himself a patent.

It is good to see the roots of things. Archeologists have recently discovered Keeladi, that marks a civilization older than the Indus Valley Civilization, but you are not going to hear much about that in the mainstream.

Drishti Srishti Vada. Srishti Drishti Vada.

Technology can never be conscious. Take a simple thing like forgiveness. It takes a whole lot for a person to come to a stage where they choose to forgive. Forgiveness has no sense with a machine.

Technology can never have its own wants. It is owned by people. And it is owned by people who are greedy for money and lustful for power. That's just the way it is. They have a different world for themselves where they eat organic food and don't let their kids watch phones. Don't fool yourself into thinking they are philanthropists. People who hold the reins of power decide the mainstream value system.

For two hundred and fifty years now since the advent of the Industrial Age, we have been dehumanized. When we saw Nature as only a resource to be exploited, we in turn became the ones who were exploited. Since then we have been told that our value lies in how much we produce. How well we obey instructions. And how much money we make.

We have been drastically reduced to a tiny checklist.

And we very dutifully become the custodians of this value system. We then tell our kids- This is for your own good. Become a machine, find a way to fit into the system.

With AI when the future is so uncertain, it is certainly to our advantage. If no one knows what's going to happen- then everyone can for sometime drop this extremely limited, limiting value system.

How You See The World, Creates The World You Get To See

You've got to go on. We all belong to this system. We use the tools of this system. But we certainly don't need to carry their values within us.

Reclaim your humanity. Stop making a checklist for the people you love. Don't judge them by their compliance.

Don't measure your loved ones by how much they produce or how much they earn, or what marks they get at school.

Don't expect people to turn on at the touch of a button. Change at a command.

Then be compassionate, do the same for yourself.

And listen to some good old Bulleh Shah:

“You have learnt so much
And read a thousand books.
Have you ever read your Self?
You have gone to mosques and temples.
Have you ever visited your soul?
You are busy fighting Satan.
Have you ever fought your
Ill intentions?
You have reached into the skies,
But you have failed to reach

What's in your heart!”

Whatever changes , things somehow remain the same. It is better to use this time for your own benefit. A drop of silence will always help. Wishing you one to quench your thirst. See you next week.