The Essence of Existence

It's the third day of Chinese New Year and I've taken a break from my usual custom of starting work on this day. By taking things easy this year, I'm able to join a gathering of old friends for lunch. It is always good to catch up with your buddies and we had a good time reminiscing about our good times together.

Inevitably, we ended up talking about many mutual friends of ours which we'll never get to meet again as they have passed on, even though it is an inauspicious thing to do during the CNY season.  But I think it is good for us to reflect on the impermanence of our existence amidst the orgy of feasting and merry-making that's characteristic of this festive celebration.

Life has always been a quest for insight and understanding. The accumulation of wealth comes as a secondary side-effect. Money buys me books and other pleasurable experiences. But a lot of times, these insights also come free-of-charge. Every moment of our lives, if we choose to take notice, is a portal into the realm of wisdom.

For example now. I'm typing these lines and you are reading my words, trying to understand what I'm getting at. This act of comprehension on your part, if you think about it, is quite miraculous. All I'm doing is moving my fingers to construct together a pattern of black marks on a white background, and suddenly thoughts arise in your mind; thoughts which spark a cascade of other thoughts in your brain, evoking images, memories, agreements and objections. Sometimes they raise thoughts that could alter the course of your very own life.

Everything begins with a thought. A thought is the result of other thoughts and if we trace the chain of causation involved, we'll realise that we are actually embedded in a nexus of connections where it is impossible to isolate out every single thought or action as being arising out of the vacuum, without any influence from anything else.

Our lives intermingle like how waves in the ocean are the result of every other tiny perturbation in that large body of water, which is churned by the effects of gravitational forces as our Earth hurtles round the sun, with an entangled moon, rotating in embrace, in a kind of cosmic dance.

Every time friends gather, we renew and strengthen these bonds of entanglements and then we spin off again into the world to forge new entanglements, weaving together a rich tapestry of interactions, which we call life.  If we are able to rise above the fray, and view our lives from a cosmic perspective, we'll see that events often play out the way they do because there's a certain karmic inevitability in our lives.

Given that so much of our lives are beyond our control, how should we live? Do we even have free will to begin with? Whether free will exists or not, we cannot act any other way. Thoughts will arise in your mind, but who created that? Did you on your own accord, free from the influence of your network of family, friends and circumstance, decided independently on a particular thought or decision?

You can never tell. All you can do is to live authentically, as if you have free will. Exert your existence and let the forces of the universe play themselves out. In the end you'll realise that the essence of existence is not you, but the entangled whole itself.

Training to be a Thermostat

I'm writing another blog post to make up for the one I missed last weekend.  I managed to pay most of my annual bills over the weekend--things like house assessments and quit rents. It's a good thing that you can do that online nowadays but navigating these local government sites can be a frustrating experience sometimes.

The developments in the world of AI is so exciting these days. Soon AI agents will be out there doing most of these mundane tasks for us. I also foresee a future where AI will be generating most of the content we consume. We will all keep AI pets and AI friends and many will prefer the companionship of their very own sex robots.

This is the world we are heading towards. Are we ready for it? It almost feels like we're being pushed into the future at a pace where we feel we're not very prepared for. Can our legislation keep up with these new paradigm shifts. Will robots have legal rights? Do robots have consciousness?

Consciousness is a subject that is hotly debated among scientists and philosophers. To me it reduces to how you define what consciousness is. I personally do not like to ascribe anything magical to the concept of consciousness. We make it an unnecessarily difficult when we assume that for something to be 'conscious', it has to have a kind of 'feeling' like the kind that we humans experience, something given the fancy label of qualia by philosophers.

For example, the qualia of 'blueness' when we see the sky, is different from the qualia of redness, when we see blood. A robot doesn't experience qualia, because all it does is detect wavelength and intensity of light. But here, we are being unfair to the robot, or at least the robots that we currently have now. For starters, they do not have a nervous system, a blood circulation system and endocrine system, which are essential systems of the human body for maintaining life. 

When we see the colour red, it evokes a certain response that triggers the secretion of hormones, changes in our heart-rate, the effect which are detected and fed back as biochemical reactions to the brain via the nervous system. Our lifetime of memories are also involved when the qualia is experienced. The smell of a certain perfume could recall memories of a loved one. if all these equivalent richness and complexities are built into our robots, I would say they too would experience their very own qualia.

Consciousness lies in a continuum. There's no step transition where, when certain configurations of matter are put in place, voila--you have consciousness.  There's also nothing magical called a 'soul' that needs to inhabit the system for it to be conscious. 

To me a thermostat is also conscious in its own way, even though it is just a one-dimensional consciousness of the room temperature. It doesn't have the whole nine-yards of experiential information that comes from our hormonal secretions, blood pressure, heart-rate and neuronal impulses. A thermostat doesn't sweat. Obviously its qualia of 30 degrees Celcius is different from ours. It also doesn't have a brain to compare and complain about all the discomforts that such a sweltering hotness brings. 

In a way, thermostats are more 'enlightened' than us. It sees temperature as just temperature, which simply necessitates a set of actions--adjusting the heating of the room. We on the other hand, complain and feel discomfort, whenever the temperature of the room is not to our liking. 

This is how pain arises--the non-acceptance of our current state of affairs. Instead of treating experience simply as data to be ignored or acted upon, we build the entire edifice of ego around it. The practice of mindfulness is to train our minds to be more thermostat-like. That is, seeing things as they are, without adding anything to them. To be aware, pure and simple. That is consciousness in its essence.