This paper addresses the nexus between mind, information and mental causality. How is it that the mind—what we think of as a mental entity, with a first-person perspective—how does the mind cause the brain to register particular neuronal states affecting the physical material of the brain and the body? As a way of probing the question of mental causality, we look here at the limit case of yogis using mantras, magical formulas, as a mental mechanism employed not only as a means for transforming a person’s state of mind, but also as a means to effect events outside of a person’s own physical body. This paper draws from a variety of sources, medieval Sanskrit texts, the work of the 20th century yogi scholar-adept Gopinath Kaviraj, contemporary neuroscientific work on the concept of information and mind to tease out the links between mind and the brain in relation
The second-season Star Trek: The Next Generation episode “The Measure of a Man” famously raises the question, “Does Commander Data have a soul?” Commander Data is an android and is one of the most beloved characters in Star Trek. This paper will examine the question, “Could an artificial intelligence, from the perspectives of various Dharma traditions, be possessed of jīva, the soul or essential life force of a living being?” The paper will examine various permutations of this question from the perspectives of different Dharma traditions. The Buddhist conception of ‘self’ as a process, for example, will be considered, along with Jain and Hindu concepts of jīva. The work of Marie Kondo, who recommends that we thank inanimate objects before we recycle them, will also be considered, along with the ethos of reverence for all entities, even those conventionally regarded as inanimate, which Kondo’s approach entails.
This is a work of philosophical reflection based on my formation in Indian and European philosophy broadly. My arguments are also based on my lay understanding and use of AI technology, as well as Erik J. Larson’s The Myth of AI: Why Computers Can’t Think the Way We Do (Harvard University Press, 2021). Larson argues that AI technology as it exists today and into the foreseeable future is not taking us one step closer to general intelligence, despite its dazzling ability to produce on command various images, prose, and poetry, and to organize data across an increasingly wide range of applications. The inferences that are required to comprehend a newspaper or hold a conversation with an understanding of its meaning cannot be programmed, learned, or engineered with our current knowledge of AI.
Critical posthumanism locates the human as a historical construct that is culturally and epistemically bounded. Modernity is a phase of the universalization or globalization of such a construct which has reached its limit. This paper will ask how one can understand dharma under these conditions and if yoga can provide us with new goals of becoming for our time.