What Buddhist Epistemology Teaches Us about The Future of AI

For Part Two in our Continual Learning mini-series, Dr. Nadav Amir of The University of Ottowa joins me and guest co-host Dr. Adam Safron of Tufts University for a trialogue on the fundamental role of goals in intelligence.

Nadav draws on behavioral neuroscience, Buddhist philosopher Dharmakirti, control and information theory, and John Vervaeke’s work on “relevance realization” to formally articulate what many wisdom traditions have argued for millennia: what you take to be “reality” — your world and self — is a function of goal-based representations, state descriptions and reward functions create each other, and “what is” and “what do I care about” are two sides of the same thing.

You can’t separate what you want from what you experience and what you are capable of. But this means that if you change your goals your reality will shift, and your sense of self with it. The opposite is also true: change the way you organize the the ineffable structure of reality into a conceptual framework, and you’ll care about very different things. Thanks to the pace of change we’re living through this kind of transformative experience now, so it’s a good time to ask:

If selves are a kind of falsification, why do we have them in the first place?

Does AI need goals of its own in order to be truly intelligent?

And perhaps the deepest question we ask in this episode:

How if at all can we develop better frameworks for deciding what we want our intelligent machines to become — and who we want to become alongside them?

Thanks to the Survival and Flourishing Fund for their support of this mini-series. If you’d like more of this kind of work in the world:✨ Support my research, writing, and podcast with a tax-deductible donation✨ Become a founding member to access my online courses, including Jurassic Worlding and How To Live In The Future✨ Hire me for public speaking or advisory work with your organization✨ Browse and buy the books we mention on the show at Bookshop.org✨ Stream and download my tunes at artist-owned music co-op Subvert.fm✨ Continual Learning theme song: “Substrate Dynamics” by Neon Chameleon✨ Learn more about how we’re applying these ideas at Atlas Research Group, my team building sovereign infrastructure for collective intelligence

Chapters

0:00:00 Teaser

0:01:48 Intro

0:05:42 Who is Nadav Amir?