I do not fully understand that aim to have a machine do our thinking. Liking life, it just does not seem worthy to look into. We already meet life in a very mechanical way. Having given this a lot of thought and digesting time, it keeps on leading me to agree with Jiddu Krishnamurti:
“If a machine can take over everything you can do, and do it better, then what is a human being. What are you?”
Krishnamurti asked this question in 1980. He was 85, yet he understood that one day machines might perform many parts of the mind we call human.
Having read a lot of Krishnamurti, it is not about technology, but about a deeper truth, a bigger perspective, an overall viewpoint so to say.
Our Mind
The brain records everything. It stores memories, thoughts, beliefs, and emotional reactions. Then thought uses this stored material to meet each moment. Thought remembers, compares, reacts, and plans. It works inside what is already known. It is always old.
So we live today through yesterday. Even our dreams of the future use the same recorded material. This is why he said that thought has no real intelligence in it. It is helpful for skills and daily needs, yet it cannot see something fresh. It repeats.
AI Is Always the Past
From this perspective, AI is a perfect mirror of the mind. It can summarize and combine ideas, coming from what has been collected. Even though it feels creative, it works with the past.
A mirror reflects history. It predicts you by extending your patterns forward. Anything new inside you that has no data trail stays invisible. The mirror cannot see your change.
“Krishnamurti asked if a person can use knowledge when needed, but not live through memory in a psychological way. He described a mind that lets everything end at night, “as if dying at the end of the day.” The next morning, it wakes with no heavy center. It does not meet the world through the past. It meets it directly.”
This thought is very attractive to me because it is eliminating what is keeping us stuck in old patterns, stories or even trauma. It brings that different kind of intelligence I am trying to invite into my day every morning. It feels light. It has freshness. It discovers itself while living. It is sponteneous. It is generative. The sense of self is not fixed. It is something changing all the time. It is presence.
This is the one quality no machine can imitate.
A mind that is ever new.
The real future begins where memory does not lead.
LINKS
https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s00146-024-02057-0
