The AI Paradox: How Computers Will Make Us More Human

By Deepak Chopra, MD


Various scientific fields over the course of history have hoped to master nature for the benefit of humankind. At the top of the heap right now is artificial intelligence (AI), which has allied itself with the technology of robotics. Between them AI and robotics are having a sizable impact on the work force as more and more jobs get automated. Advocates of AI are both supremely optimistic and nervous. Both relate to the possibility of a super-intelligent machine that would far surpass human intelligence.

 

If you are an optimist, this so-called Singularity, as the hypothetical machine is called, would become self-improving. Its software would become free of human constraints, and in a “runaway reaction,” it would keep improving its knowledge and the technology that knowledge creates. The result would be a revolution in human civilization—or its demise. The worriers are nervous that the Singularity could initiate global war on its own, or perhaps turn on us as its inferior and deal us some other kind of fatal blow, for the good of life on Earth.

 

But these scenarios depend upon an unanswered question: are machines intelligent to begin with? Computers are essentially logic machines that process digital information. But in a recent paper entitled “The Emperor of Strong AI Has No Clothes,” physicist Robert K. Logan in Toronto and Adriana Braga in Rio de Janeiro argue that the dream of a super intelligence has limits that its adherents choose to ignore. (“Strong” AI foresees a machine that is at least as smart and capable as the human mind.)  the point that Logan and Braga make is fundamental: human intelligence is far from machine-like, and in addition, our illogical minds are our strength, not a weakness.

 

The things the Singularity will never get right amount to a long list, to quote the two researchers: “… curiosity, imagination, intuition, emotions, passion, desires, pleasure, aesthetics, joy, purpose, objectives, goals, telos, values, morality, experience, wisdom, judgment, and even humor.” A clever programmer can figure out how to get a computer to answer human questions like “How is your mother feeling?”, “What does chocolate taste like?”, and “Don’t you just love fresh snow?” But having no actual mind, much less a human mind, the machine will be faking it to come up with answers.

 

I wrote a book with Rudy Tanzi of Harvard Medical School, Super Brain, that touches upon the whole issue of how the brain isn’t the same as the mind.  Our position runs counter to AI theorists but also neuroscientists, whose entire field is based on the simple equation Brain = Mind.  It’s quite strange to believe that everything on the Logan-Braga list could be performed by any machine, including the brain, which neuroscience views as essentially a thinking machine made of cells. The confusion over this point relates to something even stranger about human life: we don’t understand our mind.

 

It seems simple enough that even a grade-schooler wouldn’t mistake the brain for the mind. If you ask a third-grader “What do you want for Christmas?” he would never answer “I haven’t made up my brain yet.”  If one child falls in love with music while another falls in love with soccer, it’s clear that their brains didn’t make those choices. One obvious fault with computers is that they never pay attention to things they like. They have no attention in the human sense of “paying attention.” Being machines, computers are either switched on or off, while we humans occupy a spectrum of attention from total denial to daydreaming, being distracted, focusing in like a laser beam, and growing bored.

 

But if AI operates on the false assumption that machines can be intelligent, there’s an unseen cause for enormous optimism that comes from an unexpected direction. Let’s jump ahead to the day when robotics have taken over every job that a machine could perform and super-computers handle information far beyond the capacity of the human mind. The big question, it seems to me, is what people would decide to do next? Hordes of humanity, starting in the developed countries, would face a kind of perpetual mental vacation. This could lead to a lotus-eater’s life of dullness, perpetual distraction, and pointless pleasure-seeking.

 

But there’s another path. To the Logan-Braga list of what distinguishes human intelligence, I’d add “transcendence.” This is actually our unique gift. Given any situation, we are not bound by circumstances imposed on us but can look with fresh eyes, the eyes of self-awareness. To be self-aware is to transcend physical boundaries, including those imposed by a conditioned brain. It’s sadly true that many people live like biological robots, following the conditioning, or mental software, that turn them into non-thinkers. To be ruled by your mental software diminishes the mind’s potential to wake up, to be renewed, to see the world through fresh eyes, and to discover your true self.

 

The human potential movement has been active for several decades, and yet progress has been slowed for countless people by the practical demands of going to work, earning a living, and carrying out every day’s mundane duties and demands. If AI takes over those things, the obstacles to human potential would be radically lessened. This could amount to a leap in the evolution of consciousness. Such a leap is non-technological, or to put it another way, our future evolution depends on developing a technology of consciousness.

 

The riddle that has remained unsolved for centuries, “What is the mind?”, might become fascinating and compelling to people in their everyday lives. After all, it’s a question no less intriguing than “What is God?” Humanity has spent millennia pondering that question, and at the same time a much smaller band of sages, saints, artists, and savants has been confronting the intimate issues of the world “in here.” It would be ironic if the flaw in strong AI made us more human rather than less. Yet that could very well turn out to be what happens.

 

Deepak Chopra MD, FACP, founder of The Chopra Foundation and co-founder of The Chopra Center for Wellbeing and Jiyo.com, is a world-renowned pioneer in integrative medicine and personal transformation, and is Board Certified in Internal Medicine, Endocrinology and Metabolism.  He is a Fellow of the American College of Physicians, member of the American Association of Clinical Endocrinologists and Clinical Professor at UCSD School of Medicine. Chopra is the author of more than 85 books translated into over 43 languages, including numerous New York Times bestsellers along with You Are the Universe (February 2017, Harmony) co-written with leading physicist, Menas Kafatos.  Other recent  books  include Super Genes co-authored with Rudolph E. Tanzi, Ph.D. and  Quantum Healing (Revised and Updated): Exploring the Frontiers of Mind/Body wellnessMedicine. www.deepakchopra.com 

 

Does the Human Mind Need a Fresh Start?

By Deepak Chopra, MD

Most people would agree, even without a degree in psychology, that many if not most problems are created by the mind.  It’s impossible to be human without the functioning of the higher brain (the cerebral cortex), which is proportionately larger in Homo sapiens, and evolved with unusual swiftness into the state where it can process mathematics, philosophy, art and science. But we are trapped by the mind at the same time, as witness centuries of war on a vast scale down to daily episodes of domestic abuse in the home, or take a clinical view at the countless people suffering from depression, anxiety, and other forms of mental distress.

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Unveiling Reality: The Mystery of “Who Am I?”

By Deepak Chopra, MD

At a public lecture, a psychology professor was reported to say, “Until you are fifty, you won’t know who you are.” This seems overly optimistic, because much more than maturity is involved in discovering who we are; in fact, much more than psychology is involved. To answer, “Who am I?” requires us to take a stand about reality itself, in every possible aspect.

 

 

 

In high school and college English classes it’s popular to assign an essay on the theme of appearance versus reality, which can be applied to any piece of literature. As applied to Hamlet, for example, almost the whole play is about figuring out what is real and what is illusory. Is the ghost of Hamlet’s father real, and if so, is he telling the truth about his murder?  The new king, Claudius, who has married Hamlet’s mother, appears friendly and caring about his stepson’s welfare at the beginning, but this sham is uncovered as guilt and revenge take their course. There are more tangles of appearance versus reality around every corner, such as the critical question of whether Hamlet is mad or sane.

 

In everyday life, we keep up appearances through an elaborate complex of veils, disguises, unconscious defenses, and psychological ruses. Most of these involve the word “self.” Burying our true self is a project we spend huge amounts of time and effort on. In early childhood, for example, your parents nurtured and protected you. But at a certain point rifts appeared. Every child learns that their father and mother are not all-powerful. They can’t protect you from bullies on the school bus. Another rift is centered on desire. Children want things their parents don’t necessarily want, and when desires clash, then what? It comes as a traumatic shock when a couple decides to divorce, because no matter how it is papered over, they are acting to make themselves happier first—or to escape misery—rather than doing what makes their children happier or less miserable. (Of course there are examples where divorce is better for the whole family, but disruption and trauma are still an issue.)

 

At such critical points, and there are many more both large and small, each of us is thrown back on the self, which becomes our first and last refuge. We learn—or fail to learn—to be self-reliant, self-protective, self-confident, self-motivated, and self-aware. This project of relating to yourself is how you answer the question “Who am I?” You are the end product of building a self and presenting it to the world. No one looks in the mirror and sees a real person. What is seen is the self, and it isn’t a simple image, either, but a dynamic system of relationships inside our minds.

 

This constructed self has a very limited reality, because no matter how hard we work at self-improvement, there’s a fatal flaw built into the self system. The construct is essentially artificial, and therefore it is separate from us. No one completely merges with the social self they present in public. No one fully accepts the psychological self they must live with beneath the surface.

 

The proof of this is quite simple. People say things like “I hate myself right now” or “You need to learn to love yourself.” It’s like talking about someone else, a stranger or a sibling or even a pet. Like them, our self-creation stands apart. We look at it, judge it, hate it one day and love it the next, and so on. In short, the reality of who we are is veiled from us, and we don’t know what lies behind the curtain. For most people, facing reality is a scary proposition; they vastly prefer to be buffered by the ego-self they have learned to accept. Going back to the childhood example, when you learned that your parents were not all-powerful protectors, it was impossible to remain neutral to this shocking fact. You were forced to confront the whole issue of how to stand on your own and protect yourself.

 

Yet despite all the forces that urge us psychologically to remain inside our constructed ego-self, the world’s wisdom traditions, in which I include all religions and spirituality, revolve around the possibility of getting real. Something inside us, even if deeply buried, feels trapped in the ego-self. Unfortunately for the forces of conformity and conventionality, there has always been a motley crew of artists, sages, saints, madmen, rebels, poets, and lovers who have released themselves from what William Blake called our “mind-forged manacles.” These escapees are at once scary and inspiring. We venerate and persecute them in equal measure. A figure like Jesus, for example, personifies ultimate inspiration and ultimate suffering at the same time.

 

But let’s say that fear doesn’t win out and you undertake to unveil reality. Immediately an obstacle arises. To get at who you really are, you have to go through the self you created so assiduously over the years, and unlike a pair of rose-colored glasses, which you can simply take off, you can’t remove the filters imposed by the ego-self. You have come to believe those filters are you. The self system clouds everything you perceive or think about.

 

The only way to unveil reality is to find a strategy that doesn’t implicate the self, which means that you must exclude everything the mind does all the time, which is to entertain a constant stream of sensations, images, feelings and thoughts. The mind has been trained to conform to the jerry-built self, and so has the brain. In our efforts to shape reality to suit our wishes, desires, fears, and needs, the mind has become hopelessly divided, with certain impulses being under control (more or less), while other impulses roam free, refusing to submit to us (ask anyone suffering from anxiety, depression, obsessive compulsions, paranoia, grief, helplessness, and so on).

 

Being yourself means getting rid of your separate self first. It sounds almost laughable. The situation is exactly like saying that if you want to be totally protected, you must drop all your defenses. The whole project seems counterintuitive and more than a little suspicious. The ancient Greek dictum of “Know thyself” could be a folly or simply impossible. But there’s no getting around the fact that reality, to be real, must be unfiltered. Only by walking the path of self-liberation is it possible to discover, once and for all, what is real and what is illusion. This path follows definite principles, however, that provide a guide to anyone who wants to get real. These principles will be discussed in the next post.

(To be cont.)

Originally Published by  The San Francisco Chronicle

Deepak Chopra MD, FACP, founder of The Chopra Foundation and co-founder of The Chopra Center for Wellbeing and Jiyo.com, is a world-renowned pioneer in integrative medicine and personal transformation, and is Board Certified in Internal Medicine, Endocrinology and Metabolism.  He is a Fellow of the American College of Physicians, member of the American Association of Clinical Endocrinologists and Clinical Professor at UCSD School of Medicine. Chopra is the author of more than 85 books translated into over 43 languages, including numerous New York Times bestsellers along with You Are the Universe (February 2017, Harmony) co-written with leading physicist, Menas Kafatos.  Other recent  books  include Super Genes co-authored with Rudolph E. Tanzi, Ph.D. and  Quantum Healing (Revised and Updated): Exploring the Frontiers of Mind/Body Medicine. www.deepakchopra.com 

 

The Faith-Based Science of Neil deGrasse Tyson—It Needs Correcting

 

By Deepak Chopra, MD

Peacekeepers entering war zones frequently find that both sides are angry and intransigent, to the point that even mentioning peace causes tempers to flare. This has been the situation with the debate—now worn out to the point of exhaustion—between science and religion. There are ways to bring peace, but they are stymied by militant partisans.

 

The astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson broke out from his warm persona as our national science explainer in 2014 when he stated, in line with previous opinions, that philosophy was useless, telling an interviewer, “My concern here is that the philosophers believe they are actually asking deep questions about nature. And to the scientist it’s, what are you doing? Why are you concerning yourself with the meaning of meaning?”

 

The reason that more people got upset over his remarks goes beyond the small and dwindling coterie of professional philosophers. DeGrasse Tyson was arguing in broad terms that science is the only avenue to truth and that inner inquiry was an obstruction to uncovering the secrets of reality. He believes, science requires no acts of faith and therefore is the only reliable guide to knowledge.

 

Millions of people would agree—after all, modern civilization was built upon the foundation of science and technology. But deGrasse Tyson doesn’t realize that his brand of simplistic materialism runs exactly counter to the insights of quantum physics beginning a century ago, when the reliable structure of space, time, matter, and energy was completely undermined. This is no longer the stale, exhausted war between science and religion or between science and philosophy. The nature of reality, unknown to so-called naïve realists, has become increasingly mysterious.

 

DeGrasse Tyson places himself in the camp of naïve realism, the belief that what the senses report is fact, that raw data, once systematized and explained, establishes the physical universe as the basis of everything real. That is actually an act of faith. The great pioneering physicist Max Planck, who coined the term “quantum,” insisted that “mind is the matrix of matter.” He elaborated on the point speaking to a London reporter in 1931: “I regard consciousness as fundamental. I regard matter as derivative from consciousness. We cannot get behind consciousness. Everything that we talk about, everything that we regard as existing, postulates consciousness.”

 

The fact that the observer affects what he observes, links mind and matter, although precisely how is still debated. DeGrasse Tyson recently dragged my name into his combative attitude, labeling me as a suspicious character who threw around big words to disguise my own ignorance. But having written several books on the nature of consciousness, I feel like a peacekeeper rather than a combatant.  One role DeGrasse Tyson has adopted is a kind of “There’s nothing to see here, folks. Just move on.” He represents the happy face of a unified scientific community marching hand-in-hand toward the ultimate explanation of everything.

 

The problem with such an attitude is its combination of willful ignorance and outdated science. The salient points are these:

  1. Physicists find themselves more baffled than ever about the nature of the universe, thanks to the discovery of dark matter and energy, which contradicts many previously held assumptions.
  2. The holy grail of science, the sought-after Theory of everything, is farther than ever from being achieved. This has led to a deep rift and much doubt among theorists—see Stephen Hawking’s book, The Grand Design, co-authored with Leonard Mlodinow. In explaining their M-Theory, they use the phrase “model-based reality.”
  3. The traditional way for dealing with consciousness has been for science to ignore it, be suspicious of the entire subjective realm, and ridicule anyone who brought up the subject. This attitude, encapsulated in the phrase, “Shut up and calculate,” is a mask for ignorance about the nature of the mind. Like it or not, science is a mode of explanation that rests upon experience, just as other modes of explanation do.
  4. Without understanding consciousness, science as pure physicalism may be reaching a dead end. Once you arrive at the quantum vacuum state, the void from which time, space, matter, and energy emerged, there is no more data to harvest. Across an uncrossable horizon lies the “nothing that gave rise to everything.” A new mode of explanation based on consciousness offers a way past this barrier. But about this deGrasse Tyson knows nothing.
  5. Pride in being a know-nothing is gradually fading among far-seeing scientists. In an influential Scientific American article in 2014, the prominent British physicist George Ellis knocked the scientific attack on philosophy. Ellis’s central point was that the assumptions behind science are metaphysical to begin with, yet practitioners of science remain woefully ignorant of this fact. Both opposing camps, the one that derives creation from material forces and the one that derives creation from an invisible transcendent agent of mind, are making philosophical statements, not proven statements of fact.

 

Taken altogether, these points, which are well known in and out of science, are not quackery or suspicious anti-science attitudes promulgated by exponents of woo woo.  I can shrug off unfair denigration, but deGrasse Tyson needs to get past his faith-based view of science. Instead of disparaging better thinkers than himself, he should join the peacekeeping mission that might, at long last, repair a division that needs healing, not misplaced antagonisms.

 

Deepak Chopra MD, FACP, founder of The Chopra Foundation and co-founder of The Chopra Center for Wellbeing and Jiyo.com, is a world-renowned pioneer in integrative medicine and personal transformation, and is Board Certified in Internal Medicine, Endocrinology and Metabolism.  He is a Fellow of the American College of Physicians, member of the American Association of Clinical Endocrinologists and Clinical Professor at UCSD School of Medicine. Chopra is the author of more than 85 books translated into over 43 languages, including numerous New York Times bestsellers along with You Are the Universe (February 2017, Harmony) co-written with leading physicist, Menas Kafatos.  Other recent  books  include Super Genes co-authored with Rudolph E. Tanzi, Ph.D. and  Quantum Healing (Revised and Updated): Exploring the Frontiers of Mind/Body Medicine. www.deepakchopra.com 

 

Artificial Intelligence Is Already Here—It’s Us

Deepak Chopra, MD


As news keeps pouring out about the latest advances in artificial intelligence (AI), people don’t know how much to welcome the technology or fear it. There are warnings from top-level scientists about a future in which super computers become so advanced that they leap into autonomy. Freed to make their own decisions, AI could lead to machines that create catastrophes like starting a war. On a more mundane level, robotics has steadily replaced humans in many jobs. Some experts declare that few jobs performed by a human being could not eventually be duplicated with a machine more cheaply and efficiently.

 

Yet in the midst of this worrisome situation, which also holds vast promise, the irony is that the direst perils of AI are already here, in the form of our own human intelligence. We feel intuitively that we have natural intelligence, not the artificial kind. After all, nobody built us from mechanical parts; we lead emotional lives; we are capable of insight and self-reflection. Despite these things, however, the human mind is deeply artificial in many ways, and the negative connotations of the word “artificial”—fake, lifeless, illusory, mechanical, arbitrary—apply to everyday life.

 

At one level, when we fall into self-defeating habits that we can’t break out of, we are exhibiting robotic behavior. When we give in to primitive responses like aggression, fear, and hostility, we relate to our lower brains like biological robots. And when we create totally arbitrary value systems like competing religions and political ideologies, we follow pre-programmed mental software without thinking for ourselves. The ability of human intelligence to create new constructs is a two-edged sword. For every advance in science and technology, there are the destructive results of war, environmental depredation, and other attacks on nature, including from within. Nothing is more deeply troubling than human nature, which can run out of control more fatally than any robot or super computer.

 

These examples illustrate the artificiality of human intelligence, because there is nothing natural about them; all are mind-created. This raises the question of why we permit ourselves to lead pre-programmed, robotic lives according to second-hand opinions, outworn beliefs, fixed conditioning, and mechanical responses. AI in the field of technology is simply about how to build a better logic machine; AI in the human sense is about discovering what “natural intelligence” might be.  In a world imperiled by every form of human folly, discord, and self-created woe, no issue is more urgent.

 

As complex as the situation is—and I’ve only offered the barest sketch of it—the answer isn’t complex. We need to know ourselves in a new way. If you try for a fresh start by throwing out all the artificial, arbitrary constructs that burden us, what’s left is the most basic aspect of life: experience. Strange as it sounds, none of us really understands how experience works, because we are too entangled in it to find the right viewpoint, a viewpoint uncolored by the restless mind.

 

Here are a few bare facts about experience. First, it is evanescent; experiences rise and fall, appearing and disappearing. Second, we have no idea how or why this occurs. The next thought is totally unpredictable (except when it’s robotic) and therefore out of our control. Third, to keep life from disintegrating into total discontinuity, we set up a simulation of reality that enables us to survive and thrive. This simulation, as the brain evolved over millions of years, we call the human world, which is based on the five senses, everyday perceptions, interpretation of perceptions, and the stories based on interpretations that everyone agrees upon.

 

Agreed upon or not, our simulation of reality is totally arbitrary, and at bottom is a gigantic feedback loop. We believe what we see; we see what we believe. (So powerful is this feedback loop that it generates the appearance of time, space, matter, and energy—but that’s a longer, more complex story to unravel.)

 

To escape the feedback loop would be the fresh start that is the goal of the world’s wisdom traditions. You can’t escape by using mental activity, any more than a hamster can get to a new place by running faster in its wheel. As surely as computer will never employ AI to become human, we cannot use our mental programming to free ourselves from mental programming. The whole project is self-contradictory. If the simulation of reality has trapped us, where does reality begin? Logically, it must begin in something that’s constant in the face of evanescence, permanent in the face of change, and unaffected by the mind and its crippling ability to trap itself.

 

The constant we need to find is actually right under our noses. As experience appears and disappears, one thing remains untouched and unchanged: awareness itself. You can’t predict or control your next thought, but one thing is certain. You will be aware of it. A thought is a spark of awareness taking shape before it vanishes. The same is true of bigger mental events, too, like memory, theories, models, philosophies, religions, technologies, and history. We try to anchor ourselves to these bigger events, but inevitably they shift, rise and fall, and give way to something equally insecure.

 

By trying to anchor life on what is impermanent, we ignore the other alternative, anchoring life on what is permanent. If we had made that choice instead, there would be no fear, insecurity, conflict, and confusion. Resting on the foundation of consciousness means not buying into impermanence, and impermanence is by definition the source of all illusions, because every illusion is the child of the one great illusion that life is impermanent, threatened by the specter of death. In reality, life is consciousness itself, and therefore it isn’t the opposite of death.

 

Dying is the aspect of evanescence we fear the most (here today, gone tomorrow). Yet every night when we go to sleep, experience vanishes while awareness remains. What we call waking up is just the return of mental activity in terms of sensations, images, feelings, and thoughts. During sleep, however, the brain and central nervous system are constantly active; every cell is surviving and thriving; nothing is unconscious in the slightest. It is only the rise and fall of experience that ceases when we fall asleep, not the underlying consciousness that makes experience possible.

 

Here one can see the most artificial thing about human intelligence: our false belief that we are our thoughts. If that were true, impermanence would be the only reality. Fortunately, beliefs can be unmade as well as made. There has never been total allegiance to the belief that we are our thoughts. The entire tradition of spirit, soul, God, and enlightenment is a form of dissent against the domination of the mind and the futile attempt to perfect a mind-created reality. Even if our minds could make us perfectly happy, returning to the Eden of innocent childhood, we would still be in the grip of illusion. The only way to be a free human being is to identify with consciousness; that’s the only fresh start available to us.  Beyond all impermanence is awareness, the ground state of existence and the hope of a completely natural life.


Deepak Chopra MD, FACP, founder of The Chopra Foundation and co-founder of The Chopra Center for Wellbeing and Jiyo.com, is a world-renowned pioneer in integrative medicine and personal transformation, and is Board Certified in Internal Medicine, Endocrinology and Metabolism.  He is a Fellow of the American College of Physicians, member of the American Association of Clinical Endocrinologists and Clinical Professor at UCSD School of Medicine. Chopra is the author of more than 85 books translated into over 43 languages, including numerous New York Times bestsellers along with You Are the Universe (February 2017, Harmony) co-written with leading physicist, Menas Kafatos.  Other recent  books  include Super Genes co-authored with Rudolph E. Tanzi, Ph.D. and  Quantum Healing (Revised and Updated): Exploring the Frontiers of Mind/Body Medicine. www.deepakchopra.com