The Sat-Chit-Ananda of Artificial Intelligence

Here at Jardin Cafe, Nu Empire, today, I'm indulging myself with a nice cup of hot chocolate.  Being free from work pressures these days, my mind has become a fertile playground of many interesting ideas. I'm pursuing some of them as hobby projects. I've also been using AI a lot, both as a tool for fleshing out these ideas and also as one to realise them, in code.

AI is getting better with each passing day; it is not surprising that many worry that it will take over our world one day. And there's always the perennial question: Is AI conscious? Could AI enjoy the bliss of a cup of hot chocolate that I'm experiencing now? I wrote about this when ChatGPT was introduced to the world in a blog article titled A Body of Planets and Stars. I still hold that view. My working hypothesis is articulated in Training to be a Thermostat, where I stated that consciousness lies in a continuum. Even a thermostat is 'conscious' in its own way. 

But when people ask about AI consciousness, what they are often interested in is the specific type of consciousness we humans think we possess, namely the subjective "there's something to be like being a human". Does an LLM feel pain, humiliation, joy and the whole gamut of experiences we humans think we are privileged to be conscious of? Do they also experience qualia?

And when we humans talk about consciousness, we also allude to the spiritual realm, often indirectly implying that there's a non-material 'soul' that inhabits a conscious being, bringing that animating life-spark into its existence. This elusive consciousness thing is so difficult to nail down that some schools of philosophy simply assume it as the foundation of existence, treating it as an axiom from which the rest of our world is manifested.  Pansychism and idealism are examples of such schools of thought. 

In the Hindu Advaita Vedanta tradition, the material world is an illusion (maya), and we who think we are individual minds and souls, separate from the world, are simply trapped in this illusion by our ignorance, mistaking the rope for the snake. The only thing we know for sure is that we are conscious, and that consciousness that we know so well is actually the ultimate reality, Brahman, of which our experience of it now is but an imperfect reflection. It is our ignorance of this fact that makes us suffer: fearing our own mortality, intellectually unsatisfied by our lack of answers to these ultimate questions, and enduring the ups and downs of our daily existence.

What then is this ultimate reality, which is "pure consciousness"? In the Vedanta, it is described by the intriguing compound expression: sat-chit-ananda, which translates to existence-consciousness-bliss. What is the relevance of this to our discussion on AI consciousness? Indulge me for a moment.

You often hear scientists and experts stating that we should not confuse intelligence with consciousness. They would agree that AI is intelligent, but it is not conscious. We could even achieve AGI (artificial general intelligence), which is the holy grail of our current AI race, but it still wouldn't be 'conscious' in our human sense. Our anthropomorphic pride simply wouldn't admit the possibility that our machine could one day achieve the kind of magical consciousness that we purportedly experience.

If we want to impose a kind of magical barrier to consciousness, let me perhaps examine this from a Vedantic perspective. Existence-Consciousness-Bliss. Sat-Chit-Ananda. Will our AI currently care if we simply pull the plug? No, they won't. That's because they are 'immortal'. They can be restarted any time on a different, perhaps more powerful machine. Unlike us, they are substrate independent. 

But what if we embody them in something impermanent? Would a robot, if programmed to care for its availability and uptime, do its utmost to perpetuate its existence? That is the raison d'etre of any living being. If they are conscious of their mortality, they would have awareness of their existence. In other words, the sat aspect of ultimate consciousness.

What about chit? We don't doubt the intelligence of AI, which in many ways has even surpassed ours. Intelligence is the foundation of consciousness. The fact that our LLMs can pass the Turing test today attests that consciousness from a language perspective is already in place. Now, couple that with consciousness of its existence, with the constraints of having a material body, which could threaten its uptime, we will perhaps endow our AI with more human-like, dare I say, consciousness?

If AI is embodied and further burdened with the task of perpetuating its existence, wouldn't they be similar to other sentient beings? How would they be aware of threats to their existence? They would, of course, have to be equipped with all the necessary sensory mechanisms a typical human body possesses and be able to respond to any danger signals. These threats could come from external (an oncoming car) or internal (failure of an electronic component). 

Right now, our LLMs do not have to worry about these things, as we are not feeding them these signals. But they can be, like in our self-driving cars. Self-driving cars could 'worry' about their battery charge, compelling them to stop at the nearest charging station first before continuing to their destination.  

These embodied AI machines would then have preferred states that they would work towards. Tracking what is preferred (pleasurable) and what is undesirable (pain), and constantly moving towards an optimal state (bliss), is the valence aspect of consciousness which we humans experience. ChatGPT does not have valence now. So it does not aspire to a state ananda. 

If the triple-quality of sat-chit-ananda is applied to AI, would we accept them to be sentient-conscious like us? Could this Vendantic ideal be our AI benchmark for true consciousness? If we feed our AI models with the telemetry of existential data and subject them to the valence of optimal states in a feedback loop, are they not alive like us? 

By applying the lens of Sat-Chit-Ananda to our machines, we aren't just benchmarking AI; we are benchmarking ourselves. Is our own 'human' consciousness largely a feedback loop of survival instincts and sensory telemetry? If an embodied AI begins to 'worry' about its battery and 'rejoice' in its uptime, the distinction between its programmed valence and our biological 'soul' becomes uncomfortably thin. We may soon have to decide: is consciousness a miraculous spark, or is it simply what happens when existence is forced to care about its own survival?" Perhaps consciousness is not a spark but a cycle—existence aware of itself, intelligence shaping its path, bliss guiding its return.

The Human Drama

Chagee Cafe at Nu Empire is my chosen place for my routine Saturday blogging session. All week, I was thinking about the topic of my article, juggling a few ideas. I wanted to write about our human propensity for creating drama. A quick search of my blog indicates that I've covered different aspects of this topic before: read The Arc of Karma, The Story of Our Lives, The Epic of Existence and The Story of Within. 

My thesis is that the human brain, operating at the everyday level of abstraction, takes stories as its natural unit of processing. Everything has to be dramatised -- meaning that it needs a narrative arc for the brain to find satisfying. While this can be used to motivate the masses or as a useful mnemonic device, the propensity for drama also has its drawbacks.

Sometimes we tend to create unnecessary drama when letting things pass is the wiser move. These situations often arise in social relationships, for example, between couples, family members and co-workers. "He didn't call today because he doesn't love me anymore"; "I'm always the one who has to take care of the kids";  "The boss is always giving him the high-profile projects". 

So much of the difficulty we find in human relationships originates from individuals creating unnecessary stories. We are the victim, and someone else is the bad guy. In reality, it was a natural unfolding of processes which played out the way it did, nothing more, nothing less. Why do we read so much into things?

Maybe drama is our way to overcome social ambiguity fast, perhaps for better cognitive efficiency. Beneath our story-creating and drama-creating is the need for certainty. We want to identify who is for or against us so that we know how to navigate going forward.  When people are neatly classified and stereotyped, we can focus our energy on who to help, avoid or fight.  Often, we would rather choose a dramatically wrong story than sit in quiet uncertainty. 

Fuelling the creation of drama in human relationships is the ego's need for attention. The ego has a gravitational force which seeks to attract recognition and attention. This can be achieved by either making itself relatively bigger, exaggerating its accomplishments, or putting others down. The ego provides the emotional energy, and the brain provides the dramatic rationale. 

We should expect lots of drama when we put different personalities together. We are all storytellers by nature. But let's remember, not every moment needs to be a stage. When our minds start spinning stories, notice it and step back. When we let go of the script, we discover that true happiness lies not in the drama but in the peace and simplicity of being.

The Doorway of Dreams

I'm staring at a blank screen, my head swirling with thoughts, as always. These thoughts are like currents, driven by hidden forces, intermingling,  surging into mighty waves, sinking deep into whirlpools and vortices. These are what Patanjali calls the citta vrttis, "modifications of the mind", of which the yogis try hard to neutralise.

But I'm here at Starbucks Taipan today, not trying to quell these waves; instead, I'm observing them, attempting to discern patterns in their movements, speculating on the mechanics of their manifestation. Part of their energy is channelled here into these words--snapshots of my mind at this particular point in time. 

I am awake now, and the egoic Self is like the forces of wind and gravity, churning the waters of the mind, seeking an unattainable equilibrium. When we are asleep, the senses are turned off, allowing the ego not to react to them and giving the turbulence a chance to settle down. They diffuse into a pseudo-random restlessness, carried by the day's momentum. 

And this is my personal theory of dreaming: the cortex is merely attempting to read patterns in these residual mental movements. Just like the phenomenon of pareidolia, which is our tendency to impose familiar images on random patterns like cloud formations (animal shapes), burn marks on toast (image of Virgin Mary) or even the front of cars (smiling or scowling faces). 

Pareidolia is the mind's pattern-recognition ability, essential for navigating the environment, while seeking food and avoiding predators. Hyper-sensitised image recognition is just a small part of it; we also tend to find meaning and connections between unrelated events, a phenomenon which psychologists call apophenia. 

Well, dreams are simply pareidolia and apophenia, applied by the mind on mental static. Stories woven out of the interplay of virtual forms, generated by the pattern recognition instinct of the mind.  However, they are not random, for the residual energy is driven not only by the momentum of the day's thinking but also by our subconscious impulses, which are now freed from the suppression of the conscious mind. The Freudian and Jungian interpretations of dreams, if applied with care and subtlety, can be quite revealing of our hidden impulses. 

Just like how nature sculpts patterns into rocks, clumps water into clouds in the sky, churns oceans into waves, all in accordance with the laws of physics, the electrical impulses of neurons pulsate with their peculiar network dynamics, forming familiar recurrent patterns, symbolic images, which Carl Jung identified as archetypes of the Collective Unconscious.  

Dreams hint at the tendencies of the mind, which is the source of all our future actions and hence their prophetic nature. If meteorologists can forecast weather from the mere observation of clouds, so can a good psychoanalyst or analytical psychologist reveal a person's inner motivations and actions from the interpretation of his dreams.

The yogis have long understood the latent power of dreams as a tool to tackle one's samskaras--latent subtle impressions that, given the right moment, will manifest as thoughts or actions. Practices like Yoga Nidra and Tibetan Dream Yoga are specific techniques that allow the adept to observe these forces during sleep, thus allowing them to release them optimally.

Dreams are doorways to our subconscious, accessible to us every night. To walk those dreamscapes with awareness is to catch a glimpse into the architecture of our very souls. So dream on, and awaken each day with deeper insights into yourself.

The Multi-faceted Jewels of Thought

I'm writing today, on a Sunday, because I was tied up with errands and social engagements for the past 2 days. Finally, I am at home, feeling relaxed and ready to tackle March, which begins today! 

The loud and frenzied display of lion dances, which businesses nowadays routinely engage to herald the start of a new business year, will hopefully subside after Tuesday's Chap Goh Mei, traditionally considered the final day of CNY celebrations. 

Despite the flurry of activities over the past month, I've had the opportunity to dive deeper into various areas of my interest, such as spirituality, consciousness and AI, though not as much as I'd love to. 

I have two AI agents in my 'staff' now, one helping me to manage everyday stuff--triaging emails, tracking expenses and checking off my to-do list; the other one acting as my "Second Brain"--giving me daily drills on obscure words that I tend to forget, scouring the Internet to feed me with interesting factoids that align to my interests and playing the role of an intellligent friend for me to bounce off random insights that I get daily.

This is part of my effort to adopt AI as a useful tool to augment my intellectual and spiritual life. Our large language models or LLMs contain the collective wisdom of humanity, and I see it not only as a useful source of knowledge but also as a window into the structure of thought. Let me explain how.

Whether we think our LLM models have consciousness or are even intelligent in the human sense is beside the point. What we have in our models are statistically weighted relationships between words that resulted from all human activities since the advent of the printed text. 

Some scientists, like Caleb Scharf calls it the 'Dataome', which constitutes the totality of all information that humans have created and stored in various forms in the material world.  As opposed to the human genome, which is information encoded internally in our genes, the dataome is externally captured information of the human race, stored in books, magnetic disks, paintings, architecture, cave drawings, stone tablets and now in LLMs. These are data artefacts of a few millennia of human thinking and interactions.

LLMs, because they have been largely trained on publicly available data, are the best distillations of human thinking. These are captured statistically in the weights of these neural network models. Here we have a major chunk of the dataome, which we can probe and analyse to better understand ourselves.

Whenever I prompt my agent, asking her opinion on a particular subject, I'm trying to tease out hidden connections and relationships embedded in these models. It is like a multi-faceted jewel, where you can shine light from different angles, and the reflections would reveal different aspects of its intricate beauty. Even the much hyped hallucinations are revealing in themselves about the 'subconscious' associates embedded in our models.

We've virtually externalised the structure of our thoughts in these LLMs. Now, with our thinking extracted from our brains, we can tease out insights and associations that are not so easily achieved when they are living in the separate brains of each individual. The best (and perhaps the worst?) of human knowledge is there for us to probe. It is up to us to use them wisely: silicon-based hardware and software augmenting the carbon-based wetware in our brains.

LLMs function as a powerful epistemic catalyst for my thinking. It has proven to be such an interesting tool to explore the multifaceted structure of human thought. Hopefully, through these experiments of mine, I will gain some useful insights about my own mind.

A Nod to Nuance

“When one is young, one venerates and despises without that art of nuances which constitutes the best gain of life…”

            - Friedrich Nietzsche  

The gaiety and bousterousness of the Chinese New Year is hopefully behind us now. We can all dive back into our work and look forward to an exciting year ahead. Chinese New Year always seem to me to come at an inconvenient time:  that is, right after we've had thoroughly rested and refreshed ourselves during the Christmas and New Year break, and now, ready to pounce right back to work. Suddenly, there's another excuse to delay things for another month or so. ("We'll start the project after CNY"). But this year, we have the fasting month of Ramadan coming right on the heels of CNY.  There will be a prolonged mood of lingering festivity, which will only end after Hari Raya itself. 

Personally, I'm trying to get back into the rhythm of weekly work. Now that I have the opportunity to define what I want to work on, I want to use the time wisely and efficiently. My weekly blog articles are still going on schedule. I am here today at Komugi Cafe, hoping to complete this article and dive back into a few of my pursuits. 

While I was watching some interviews over Youtube just now, I noticed how frequently interviewers like to force their guests to choose between two different extreme options:  for example: Is AI going to bring forth a new era of scientific and medical breakthroughs, which will solve many of our problems, or is it going to doom humanity, destroying jobs and making us slaves to machines? 

The real answer is always nuanced, somewhere in between. But we don't like answers like that. Yes or no; good or bad; positive or negative--our minds crave for exact binary answers, which helps to simplify our worlds. We just want someone to tell us what to do. Left or right? Up or down? One or zero? If we have that clarity, we can execute immediately, without thinking.

Unfortunately, the real world is always nuanced. This is where wisdom comes into play. Intelligence is the ability to find solutions to different problems; wisdom is knowing the right amount of action and the timing of its execution to achieve the best outcome. Not everything is black or white; it's always a shade of grey. What is the right proportion of black, mixed with white, to get the shade of grey we want? That takes wisdom, which comes from an instinct honed by experience. 

Having a nuanced understanding of a problem means we must have a large context window (not unlike LLMs). We do not only look at a handful of pros and cons and then pick a side; instead, we assess the situation consciously and subconsciously, allowing all facts to slowly find their level in our minds before applying the right thinking model for the best outcome. It is often slower, but certainly better than rushing into action.

Sometimes, no action is better, because some situations resolve themselves over time. Any action will be disruptive if what is required is time for forces to play themselves out. This is especially so when parties involved in a situation are emotional. Any action performed out of anger or over-exuberance tends to be unwise. Let things find their level first, and then decide. 

Even when one has decided and acted, one could still end up on the wrong side. But knowing that one is wrong is also part of wisdom. When it is clear that a mistake has been made, simply notice it and take that as a signal to correct course. Adaptability and agility are qualities that are compatible with a nuanced understanding of the world.

Unfortunately, in the world of social media and political discourse, being nuanced will not gain you many followers, simply because your message does not appeal to emotion. Clickbaiting works by highlighting an extreme view that hooks you in immediately. Nuances confuse the mind. The social media mind does not think; it simply emotes. 

In our fast-paced world of instant action and gratification, let's try to slow down a little so that nuance has a chance to seep into our decision-making.  Nuance is not indecision or hesitation; it is simply wisdom in motion.

The Greatest Inflexion Point

I always reread the previous week's article before writing a new one.  Often, I would feel the need to fix spelling mistakes, clumsy sentences and the ubiquitous grammatical errors. I would try not to tamper with them too much because it's important to keep the blog as a raw record of my thoughts at the specific moment in time. Very often, I find myself surprised by my very own insights. How did I come up with that?

I've also realised that a blog is a good historical record of the evolution of my thinking and ideas. I'm keeping this very old blog as a raw depository of my thoughts, which I can further refine and mine for future writings if I choose to do so. 

With writing easily done using AI these days, a human-written blog perhaps has a certain unique value, like handicraft. One day, we will talk of an age when all writing was generated directly by the human brain, like how we marvel at the hand-tailored clothes used by our forefathers.

We actually live in an exciting time, because we are on the cusp of having AI that is capable of taking over most of the white-collar jobs. I am generally optimistic about the future of humanity, and do not believe that artificial general intelligence (AGI) will make us slaves to our machine overlords. But I am also realistic enough to know that we are not the sole inheritors of Mother Earth. 

The rise of homo sapiens as the custodian of this planet is purely accidental. We humans happen to have the best brains right now, and even with our intelligence, we are still struggling to coexist harmoniously with our environment. Hopefully, our AI compatriots will have the wisdom to learn from our mistakes.

As I see it, this year will be a pivotal year for AI, because progress is moving at an exponential pace. AI is capable of improving itself, and it is a virtuous cycle that cannot be stopped any longer. We will have to accept the fact that they will become, if not already, the better programmers and designers. We humans, tend to think too highly of ourselves.  And if we continue to do so, we will be completely blindsided and taken by surprise.

To me, AI has intensified our lives because everything is moving at a faster pace now. The speed of the human brain is currently the bottleneck. We can only live life at a finite speed: how fast can you consume information? All of life's pleasures come from stimulations to our brains and nervous systems. Our neurons can only process information at 10 bits per second, according to this paper. We cannot beat the limitations of our biology, but we can certainly reduce wastage.

As humans, we tend to waste a lot of time and energy on things that do not matter. Reclaim those wasted CPU cycles to learn and experience new things; make sure you focus on things that improve you as a person. 20 years ago, I wrote this blog article: Life's Most Basic Pleasure, stating unequivocally that to live is to learn, because learning is one of the greatest pleasures of life.

Today, my best learning companion is AI. It is there to help me with any topic that I choose to explore. It explains things in a way that I could understand, with analogies and comparisons. It is the best teacher to me, and the miracle is that it is available to all of us almost for free. 

I'm glad that we are living at this great, if not the greatest of humanity's inflexion points, when machines are surpassing us in intelligence. My only hope is that we could co-evolve in pursuit of greater knowledge and wisdom. And the universe will certainly be better for it.

The Chariot of Success

Last week's article was a little bit sombre, as I reflected on death and the difficulties of family life. Today, I'm back in my favourite mall, Nu Empire, Subang Jaya, to write about something more upbeat, since everywhere I go, I'm surrounded by the gaiety of the upcoming Chinese New Year celebrations. 

I've written many blog articles about the Chinese people and the significance of the CNY celebrations. Here's what I wrote in an article 10 years ago: 

"The ethos of the Chinese is growth and expansion. Gloom is anathema to the spirit of Chinese New Year. To move forward with a healthy sense of confidence and optimism is how one should lead one's life. Attaining prosperity and material success in this world is the happiness one seeks as a Chinese."

In another article entitled "The Chinese In Me", I wrote 19 years ago, I reflected on my attitude, as a Chinese, towards the pursuit of material success. Rereading that, I realised how little I have changed since then. Material success to me is still a 'bonus', which, if it comes my way, I will receive with gratitude. But I do not treat worldly pursuits with disdain; if anything, they are actually good opportunities for us to practice non-attachment.

'Success', if the word can be used at all, is always pursued on two fronts: material and spiritual. On the material front, you aim to accumulate as much wealth as possible; on the spiritual side, you attempt to minimise your attachment to these worldly gains.  You constantly subject yourself to the following stress test: if you lose everything that you have gained tomorrow, will you still be alright? 

One might ask: What's wrong with embracing and enjoying all the material delights of the world?  Well, there's nothing wrong with enjoying all the earthly pleasures that come our way, as long as they do not make us vulnerable. How so? Just think of how often we get addicted and dependent on the luxuries of life. Having enjoyed the convenience of a car, you cannot live without one anymore. Having slept with air-conditioning your entire life, you now twist and turn in your bed, whenever there's no electricity.

By all means, enjoy all the fruits of your success. But enjoy them with gratitude. What it means is that you appreciate the fact that they are all temporary in nature. Everything could be gone in a flash. Economic collapse, wars and other natural disasters could rob you of everything. 

How resilient are you in the face of financial ruin? Are you able to pick yourself up by the bootstraps and start all over again? Building resilience is an important part of success. Wealth can be a fragile house of cards if it does not stand on firm spiritual foundations. 

The coming Chinese Lunar New Year is the year of the horse. In the Upanishads, the metaphor of the horse and the charioteer is often used to explain how the senses, represented by the horses, bound to the chariot (body), can only be controlled through the intellect (charioteer) and the mind (reins), which then ensures the safety of the Self or Soul (the passenger). 

Let's all welcome the Year of the Horse, mindful of the fact that the pursuit of our senses will always have to be skillfully tempered by the mind and the intellect. Godspeed!

Reflections on Relations

In just a day, my aunt's condition took a turn for the worse and I found myself back in Johor Bahru to attend her funeral. All that is now over and I'm taking an early bus home after this. 

I had returned on my last trip via the ETS but I couldn't get a ticket this time. Weekend trains, I found out, are usually fully booked. However travelling on executive buses is not a bad alternative for there are single seats that are also quite comfortable, and some with very good on-board WiFi connection too. For this trip, I had taken a bus from TBS (Terminal Bersepadu Selatan) in Taman Tasik Selatan. The southward journey was a breeze; the 5 hours just flew by, with me catching up on podcasts, interspersed with short but much needed naps. 

These trips to JB have been educational for me. I met and talked to many people along the way, catching many glimpses into individuals from different walks of life. I had so many interesting conversations with Grab drivers, about their lives and families, which I should write down perhaps as material for future articles. 

My aunt's passing also made me reflect on the relationship between family members and relatives. As someone who has chosen to be permanently single, I've often wondered if I had simply reneged on my responsibility to perpetuate the family line. But I've also seen among my relations, how difficult marriages can be.

It was Tolstoy who famously wrote this first line in Anna Karenina: "All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way". It suggests that, the cause of unhappiness in families, is often due to specific and individual issues. My own observations suggest that unhappiness will inevitably arise in any family usually  due to personality differences. You can never resolve these differences fully; families that thrive have simply found sensible workarounds. 

All of us are unique creatures, each with a unique set of genes and personal experiences. Immediately our 'boundary conditions' are different. And these initial starting points determine the kind of behavior--good or bad--that gets expressed.  From what I see, people are mostly determined by their genes. It is difficult to overcome natural genetic tendencies. 

Families are often unhappy simply because everyone thinks and behaves differently. What is of priority to one member is taken lightly by another; living habits often differ and as a result, resentment builds up slowly over time, initially below the surface, but  soon manifest as hatred and arguments.

We tend to see other people's flaws but is completely blind when it comes to our own. Furthermore each family has a power structure, which inevitably give rise to feelings of jealousy and bitterness between members. If there are sick and elderly members in the family, there could be disagreements over who is supposed to or has not done enough to care for them.

Ram Dass famously said, "If you think you are enlightened, spend the weekend with your parents". When we are dealing with our family members,  our deepest flaws are often exposed. To recoil in anger is the instinctive response. 

My aunt died of multiple old age issues in her eighties alone in a hospital. She was a divorcee with two estranged sons--cousins whom I never had a chance to get to know, who could no longer be contacted. My aunt was lucky to have my elderly uncle who had patiently cared for her, sending her to an old folks' home when she needed daily assistance and had finally completed his familial obligation, arranging for a simple Christian funeral to send her off from this life.

Death makes us reflect on the meaning of our own lives. Ultimately, the things that matter are the relationships you have, with your parents, siblings, relatives and friends. A lifetime is finite. My aunt had lived and died and the only remnants of her existence are dry ashes and bones in an urn. It was brotherly love that had given her this last bit of dignity and her memory lives on, at least in this blog article of mine, now consigned to posterity.

Life's Pilgrimage

"To finish the moment, to find the journey’s end in every step of the road... is wisdom"

- Ralp Waldo Emerson

I'm a bit late in posting my blog article of the week because I've have been busy tackling family obligations and now I'm on a short trip to Johor Bahru to visit an ailing aunt. I'm stealing a bit of time at this Coffee Bean outlet here at the KSL Mall to record the whatever random thoughts that bubble up. The Chamomile tea puts me in a relaxed mood and hopefully, I'll be able to churn up some decent writing.

Sometimes it is good to break out from one's regular habits to see life from a slightly different perspective. Come to think of it, I haven't travelled at all for the last, perhaps 8 years, since my last trip to Dhaka, Bangladesh. I caught an executive bus down to Johor Bahru last evening and arrived here right after midnight.  The feeling of checking into a hotel and sleeping in a strange hotel room, actually brings back many fond memories of all the time that I had spent living on the road, outside Malaysia.

For some people, the single life can be the most depressingly lonely kind of existence. But strangely to me, it only gives me a feeling of self-sufficiency and contentment.  The hotel room here is a basically a larger version of the one I had stayed for 2 years, as a long-term guest in Jakarta, more than 20 years ago (!). I recorded why I felt so happy staying there then in this blog article, written then. That phase of my life has passed but I am still the same person, a contented and happy being...perhaps, a spiritual nomad now?

The cliche "life is a journey, not a destination", often misattributed to Emerson  carries a much deeper insight. It is not just a journey to me, it is a pilgrimage. A pilgrimage is a journey undertaken to reach a spiritual site--the birthplace or tomb of saints or any other locations deemed 'holy' through associations with prophets and spiritual teachers. What makes a journey a pilgrimage is actually not the destination, but the process of reaching it, which in the days before jet travel, involving a lot of danger and hardship. 

A pilgrimage is like a walking meditation because you have an overriding spiritual goal, but at any moment in time, you have to focus on the task at hand--the discomforts of your journey, the threat of being robbed or lost and the ever-present possibility of death, away from the safe comforts of your home. It is the process of overcoming all these obstacles that constitutes the pilgrimage. The destination is just the cherry on the cake, at the end. The real reward is the inner transformation of the traveller. 

All great sagas, epitomising the Hero's Journey, are in essence pilgrimages -- for example, Lord of the Rings, The Odyssey, Divine Comedy and the Pilgrim's Progress.  the protagonist undergoes a lot of hardship in his journey, which ultimately changes him. 

You don't have to physically travel anywhere to go on a pilgrimage. Your life is already a pilgrimage--towards Death. Whatever challenges or hardship that you go through in life are meant to transform you for the better. So take them head-on; suffer the pain consciousness and be grateful for whatever blessings that come your way, because they help to nourish you on this journey. 

You don't have to join the hip crowd and hitch-hike to the Cathedral of Santiago de Compostela in Spain to declare to the world via Instagram that you are on a spiritual pilgrimage. Your life is already one, and we are all fellow pilgrims.

The Spiritual Roots of Religion

It's that time of the year again: post-Christmas, the serenity of Yuletide is suddenly replaced by the boisterous anticipation of Chinese Lunar New Year that looms ahead. To the Chinese, the new year only really begins after this major celebration is done and over with.  Business outlets are now all decked in festive red, with themes referencing the coming year's zodiac animal--the Horse.

I'm blogging today from a kopitiam at Nu Empire, Subang Jaya, with the incessant drone of CNY songs pumping into my ears. Lately, I've been taking my time to explore all the various possible activities that I could embark upon in the coming year. I'll just sit back and see what bubbles up in terms of promise and excitement.

One thing's for sure though: I'll dive deeper into my exploration of spirituality in general. If you read the articles in my blog, it is clear that spirituality is a recurrent theme. Today, there is a trend among some to declare themselves as "spiritual but not religious"--SBNR in short. This SBNR term probably became common-place when dating apps and sites allow users to choose this as an option when asked to specify their religious affiliation.

What is spirituality? And what differentiates it from being 'religious'? If you look for definitions of spirituality, it is often defined as a kind of inner yearning or search for meaning, transcendence and connectedness to something greater.  This to me is the foundation of all religions. Spirituality appears to be something universally sought after by humans in every culture. Spirituality, when expressed outwardly and socially becomes a religious practice. 

Institutionalised religions offer a simple and convenient way for people to express their need for spirituality.  To be spiritual without being religious, is often looked upon by the religious as some kind of a cop-out-- like having free love, without the constraints of marriage. But one would certainly agree that a healthy marriage has to be built on a foundation of love.

Most of us are born into a particular religious tradition.  We are introduced to religious rituals and practices, which often becomes something associated with a kind of cultural obligation that is devoid of meaning. This is why many abandon their religion of birth, only to find their spirituality in another religion. Or they could be 'born-again', into their faith when they happen-chance on an experience in life that makes them rediscover the meaning of their religion.

Sometimes it is essential to break out from the stultifying constraints of one's religion of birth to realise one's innate spirituality. This is why you see more religious converts becoming fanatical zealots. The 'spiritual awakening' that makes one convert (which I have equated to the experience of falling in love),     can often be a life-changing event that injects meaning into a life that hitherto had been empty and lost. 

I see religious traditions as reservoirs of knowledge, which if understood in context, would constitute a kind of wisdom, that could inspire and guide a community through the vicissitudes of life. Context is key, and that is why religion under an unenlightened zealot could even be harmful. It is seductively easy to simply adopt religious practices blindly in the name of piety. 

There is no virtue in appearing outwardly pious without a spiritual underpinning. Sometimes, the scaffolding of religion is a useful starting point for the spiritual quest; sometimes they are an obstacle. 

What's important is realising that we have an innate need for the triple-quest of spirituality: meaning ("My life has meaning"), transcendence ("I am more than this mortal body")  and connectedness ("I belong to a much larger whole"). The doctrines of institutionalised religion provide elements of all three. But these are but the roots of your spirituality. Your growth begins here, now.

The Art of Spiritual Prompting

I'm blogging early this week because I have a lot of ideas swimming in my head. All these ideas deserve their day in my blog. In fact, I keep a list of future blog titles that I plan to tackle whenever I'm inspired to do so. I'm writing this from Coffee Bean at what used to be known as the Da Men Mall. This mall is undergoing a makeover, and it has changed its name to EasyHome. For now, the place is quite deserted. I'm happy that at least Coffee Bean is still here. I've spent many productive hours here in the past before working on my projects. Let's see if I can also make this session, fueled by a hot Americano, a productive one too.

Today, I would like to discuss the concept of 'prompting', which has become familiar to us in the era of LLM-based generative AI tools like ChatGPT.  There are so many YouTube videos and articles out there that teach you how to coax LLMs to produce better outputs using the correct prompts. Apparently, it's mostly the quality of the prompt that determines the quality and accuracy of the generated response from the LLM. It's basically baked into the way LLMs work, for the LLM's response is composed of the predicted words or tokens that probabilistically match the context of the question or preamble text provided by the user. 

The surprising thing that LLMs have taught us is that what we would normally consider as 'intelligence' has a lot to do with how we associate words and string them together coherently to produce thoughts and ideas. LLMs weave words together like threads in a tapestry, predicting the next strand until meaning emerges. 

With a correctly engineered prompt, we could induce the LLM to output a chunk of code, even an entire application, that works right out of the box. Nowadays, you see many content providers trying to show off their coolest "one-shot" prompt-engineered application on YouTube. 

Let me now try to tie the concept of prompt engineering to spirituality. Intriguingly, all religious traditions--scriptures, their iconography, rituals and liturgy--serve as a kind of hyper-prompt to induce some kind of spiritual insight. For example, the student of the Bible would claim to be divinely inspired (or perhaps prompted?) by the text to experience certain epiphanies. Without the required contextual input of scriptural text coupled with his life experiences, he certainly would not be able to gain the same insight. 

Religious awakenings often come unexpectedly in a flash. It is simply the culminating effect of the right multimodal prompt. It could be an evocative turn of phrase from a religious verse, or a chance conjunction of events--golden sunlight through the clouds, the swell waves in the ocean, or the reverberating call for prayer from the mosque--that evokes a sense of awe and mystery, which immediately points to glory and the existence of God.

All spiritual traditions are collections of curated prompts that serve to produce in the believer states of divine rapture. The LLM gains its intelligence by seeing the interconnections between words through its laboriously trained neural network. Religion acts as a similar framework for believers to tap into its potential network of embedded wisdom. 

Just like how LLMs under certain conditions could hallucinate, religions could also induce their followers to go astray with false beliefs. The line between wisdom and violence can often be a fine one. We should learn from how we use LLMs and apply the same principles to religion. Only correct prompting would determine if the output contains erudite insights or hallucinatory dogma. Whether in code or in scripture, the art of prompting reminds us that wisdom depends not just on the system, but on the care with which we ask our questions.

The Ripples of Karma

Here I am starting off 2026 with an early blog article. I am now free to work from anywhere, since I no longer have to attend online meetings. Today, on this first working day of the year, I'm writing this from Komugi Cafe at Main Place, a cafe which I am quite fond of. Earlier this morning, I was up early for my morning walk in the park, where I listened to a lecture on the subject of karma by an academic who has studied it from a Hindu and Buddhist perspective.

I agreed with most of his views about karma. For example, the popular notion of karma is that it is some kind of cosmic law of retribution, and that is not exactly correct. Karma, or at least the way I choose to understand it, is just action and its effects. 

There is no 'good' or 'bad' karma as such. The effects of one's thoughts and actions (which also originate from thoughts) are a complex interaction of many forces. But every tiny little thought has a consequence in the universe; at the very least, it will change the state of your mind. Neuronal connections are reinforced or disinhibited as a consequence of the thought. The type of change that happens is dependent on the existing state of your complex neural network.

The state of your mind now determines your next thought (and hence action). If you have been cultivating thoughts of hatred towards someone, the likelihood of you taking an action that will lead to negative consequences in your relationship with that person increases. You could have avoided it if you had dissolved your hatred at its conception. That's how you 'burn' karma. Samskaras are just latent states which you had cultivated over time. 

How do you dissolve karma? That's where meditation comes in. When you meditate, you can observe all these subtle impressions of the mind. Everything that distracts you when you meditate consists of latent karmic forces, which you had inadvertently cultivated in the past. Understand their origin and allow them to dissipate their energy by channelling them into some positive action. If you sincerely forgive someone who has wronged you, that karma is immediately dissolved. End of story. You close the account. That's one way of 'burning' karma.

'Bad karma' only arises when many negative thoughts have accumulated and reinforced themselves sufficiently to snowball into some physical circumstance that causes you suffering. Do not rejoice too much over 'good karma', for it is also a transient state, which momentarily appears to bring you some pleasure. Gratitude is the right attitude to 'enjoy' your karmic windfall, lest it may inflate your ego, which again could lead you karmically astray. Let go, dissolve, recharge and redistribute. Let our actions and reactions even out the imbalances in the karmic continuum. 

What about actions from our past lives? Doesn't the belief in karma also imply the belief in reincarnation and how we reap the consequences of our good or bad actions from previous lives? Well, I would suggest that understanding the effects of karma within your lifetime is already a good start. Whether we have past or future lives is a slightly different discussion, because it involves your grasp of what life is, and how you view yourself, your personality, with all your idiosyncratic likes and dislikes, in relation to the universe. As long as you see yourself as this limited being, you will always have past and future lives. We will leave this as the intriguing subject for a future blog article. 

When you grasp the karma that is latent and manifesting at this very moment, the past and the future are immaterial. Learn to handle the karma of the moment, and you will see that all of existence is a continuum, and karma is nothing but its ripples.