I don’t quite remember when the enchantment of the religious beliefs rid it’s influence on me. I suspect it was when I left my hometown post my ICSE Board exams and venerated STEM education as my ultimate goal. Although my education in STEM was more of the academic kind – learning the theorems and laws of the sciences – I veered gently off my religion (Jainism) even as I continued to practice its prescriptions about how to ‘live and let live’ or ‘non-violence towards every being in this planet’, etc.
Growing up, I never considered questions about meaning, about existence, and about why there is something rather than nothing, for obvious reasons. Back then, I approached religion as not something opposed to knowledge, nor its myths opposed to reason. The realms of the spirit were invoked mostly in late night conversations with friends on urban legends or horror stories. But the spirit world and the religious world were separate from the beginning. My religion did not encourage questions about the moral, social, and metaphysical life as some other religions or communities did, and that was okay. Outside of its core tenet of strict ascetism, sacrifice, and relinquishing worldly desires, the religion seemed a habitual exercise, and the supreme being, just something to believe in.
Most of my conversations with friends who indulged me in long-winded discussions about consciousness, meaning, existential dilemmas, and God further drove me away from believing in a higher power. Back then, I considered a more rational, mechanical description of the world as the ultimate truth. Learning about Darwin and natural selection, educating myself on evolution, and on the rigors of the scientific method, I found it amoral to believe in God, the way my religion told me to. But in moments of crisis, e.g., when feeling perplexed about my exams, about a long, solo train journey where I found myself conversing with seeming criminals, etc. I found my way back to God. And questions of free will, absence of evidence, and the computational theory of mind took a backseat to the primal fight or flight reaction. Somehow, God as a metaphor for belief stuck with me, albeit mostly in the darkest of hours.
As I have progressed through my years though, I find myself circling back to the question about beliefs and about God. To me today, it serves as a neat framework with which to tame our frozen worlds inside, our restless souls, and our wild spirits. It offers a respite from the absurdity of the world around us, and from its many demands on us when it comes to free will and determinism. The concept of meditation or mindfulness or spiritualism etc. that offer a more modern (read: secular) take on the features we take for granted with a product like religion. In a sense, these modern-day movements are disrupting the business of religion by modularizing the services and offering a more intuitive and digestible formats to address the same Jobs to be done.
I find myself increasingly drawn to recasting my beliefs, driven by a more tactical and immediate need – to find a community, to care about something larger than me or my family, and to distract my mind away from the rationalist viewpoints of life. Further, it seems as if the more we try to understand the world, the more we seem to find gaps in our understanding of it. This results in the classic Pascalian postulation and with a recurring doubt over the efficacy of the scientific method of thinking. What if the whole realm of science is not sufficient for us to explain away the various dimensions of this world? What if the language of science, as developed by humans, presents natural barriers towards transcending it?
This question comes up every so often when we talk about consciousness and what it means. With the progress on AI that we are undertaking in the past decade, this is becoming even more of an interesting question.
I have been reading this excellent book God, Human, Animal, Machine by Meghan O’Gieblyn which raises very interesting questions about what it means to be human in a world that’s changing so much with the application of AI and machine learning into our lives. It traces the trajectory of AI through the lens of philosophy – an interesting lens because as this technology progresses and transcends the famous Turing Test, it will increasingly bring us closer to that Blade Runner world where to draw a distinction between what is human, what is trans human, what is a robot, etc. becomes be a real-world exercise versus a merely sci-fi/theoretical one. Should we focus on primarily external behavior or the ‘function’ of the entity in question or is there something more tangible inside (consciousness, soul) that would be the barometer we would use. Which is it and how would we derive meaning in such a world where all these forms co-exist?
It’s an interesting question to ask ourselves on whether we will end up tracing our steps back towards religion and towards a belief in higher power when we hit a curve in the road ahead. What is interiority and if our inner experiences and thoughts are the only things that matter, then what do we make of these computers who can do the most impressive functions but without an interiority? Or is it that the interiority that these computers exhibit is just different from ours and one we will never be able to understand, similar to how the philosopher Thomas Nagel pointed out in his 1974 paper “What is it Like to be a Bat”? which highlights the fact that consciousness or interiority can only be observed from the inside.
Another interesting book I am reading in parallel is “The Experience Machine” by Andy Clark which outlines a staggering new vision of cognitive sciences – that of how our minds build our worlds and that a large proportion of our perceptions come from the predictions that our mind is making constantly about the world around us. Put differently, it argues for separating the world that our signals are telling us – which in Clark’s reframing becomes a mere testing data for the mind. It’s a bold idea and has so many interesting implications! If our brain is an active predictor, then our experiences are in effect ‘controlled hallucinations’. So, if I can extend it further, our mind inches closer to those now-ubiquitous LLM models that throw out hallucinations based on their learnings!
Jargogled Impressions. 