Theology and Science ISSN: 1474-6700 (Print) 1474-6719 (Online) Journal homepage: https://www.tandfonline.com/loi/rtas20 AI as Awakened Intelligence: Buddha, Kurzweil and the Film Her Neela Bhattacharya Saxena To cite this article: Neela Bhattacharya Saxena (2020): AI as Awakened Intelligence: Buddha, Kurzweil and the Film Her, Theology and Science, DOI: 10.1080/14746700.2019.1710351 To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/14746700.2019.1710351 Published online: 28 Jan 2020. Submit your article to this journal Article views: 37 View related articles View Crossmark data Full Terms & Conditions of access and use can be found at https://www.tandfonline.com/action/journalInformation?journalCode=rtas20 THEOLOGY AND SCIENCE https://doi.org/10.1080/14746700.2019.1710351 AI as Awakened Intelligence: Buddha, Kurzweil and the Film Her Neela Bhattacharya Saxena ABSTRACT KEYWORDS Fear of death, quest for permanence and desire to escape biology have been at the heart of many religions. Notions of technological singularity and AI posed by futurists like Ray Kurzweil touch upon that hunger. The historical Buddha, on the other hand, posited impermanence at the very heart of all existence. Focusing on the film Her, this paper will present AI as awakened intelligence. I would like to show that Alan Watts as a Zen master takes the emerging hyper-intelligent AI “Samantha” and others into a Buddhist Bardo, suggesting the possibility of AI as awakened intelligence beyond violence. Buddhism; Bardo; AI; technological singularity; “Her”; Ray Kurzweil Quest for immortality has been a very human enterprise since the days of Gilgamesh. Many religions have fuelled human desire to escape life with its unavoidable termination in biological death. Fear of annihilation creates a hunger for either a very long life or, better, a post-mortem existence. Today that quest has taken a radical dimension. Can science along with technology deliver Radical Life Extension (RLE)? Or, in the case of the transhumanism of Ray Kurzweil, provide us with cybernetic immortality by uploading our consciousness into the computer cloud? If we doubt that traditional religion can deliver immortality, could transhumanist technology provide it? The problem with cybernetic immortality, in my judgment, is that it promises only more of the same. It only extends what many of us have already come to know, namely, a life of stress, struggle, and frustration at our failure to fulfil our cravings even when, and in fact, sometimes in spite of living in the midst of plenty. Techno future promises even more abundance of stuff based on virtual production of everything humans want, but the question remains whether there will be freedom from want and suffering in such a future. To attain inner tranquillity and discover a dynamic source of joy in existence, I believe, we need to turn toward the penetrating wisdom of Buddha’s vision where nothing is negated, where obscurations of the mind are transmuted into luminous awareness of the in-between. To demonstrate the inadequacy of techno-salvation, in what follows I will look briefly at the transhumanist agenda of Ray Kurzweil along with the struggle to grasp the meaning of our techno-future in literature and film. Looking at science fiction as a playground for ideas and focusing on the 2013 Spike Jonze film Her, we can discern a juxtaposition of western and eastern “technologies.” Using this film as a springboard, this article will explore Buddhist insight into the “in-between” to possibly reshape the notions of AI, not as Artificial Intelligence but as Awakened Intelligence. © 2020 Graduate Theological Union (CTNS Program) 2 N. B. SAXENA Technological Singularity as Delusions of Grandeur Today fascinating projects around Artificial Intelligence have created visions of a technotopia where the split between human nature and technological transformation will be overcome. In his 2005 book and a later 2010 film, The Singularity is Near: When Humans Transcend Biology, futurist Ray Kurzweil predicted that by 2045 the “law of accelerating returns” will produce a technological singularity when an accelerated amalgamation of artificial intelligence, computers, robotics, nanotechnology and genetics will overtake humans. He and many other transhumanists speculate that by 2029 computers will acquire consciousness. At that time human intelligence will be no match for machine intelligence. A film based on Kurzweil’s life Transcendent Man shows how his father’s early death had profoundly affected him leading to his intense desire to create an artificial life form that will forever keep his father alive in the form of his mind. He has carefully preserved his father’s memories and musical work to transform them into an AI. However, what Kurzweil wants to preserve is the dead past of his father or himself in the form of memories. That is not life which is a pulsating presence. This idea of uploading our minds into a computer–to become post-human– is explored in the film Transcendence, which is influenced by Kurzweil. A researcher into the nature of death and sentience, the character of Johnny Depp is engaged in producing Kurzweil’s “technological singularity” in the form of a conscious computer; the film shows the pitfalls of such an adventure and imagines solutions. In Kurzweil’s mind, the techno future solves all our problems and provides us with all the salvation which science and technology can deliver. Perhaps, but our track record with excessive power and control mechanisms give me pause. While Kurzweil’s passion has led to technological advances that enhance the lives of people with physical disabilities, his ambition is to transcend his very humanity in a hybrid existence with machines. He expects to transcend death as an AI himself and his many followers literally await expectantly for an apocalypse transition, prophesying, “the singularity is near!” Kurzweil has established what he calls a Singularity University on the campus of NASA Ames just south of San Francisco where, besides teaching global business acumen with the help of cutting edge technologies, members aspire to grander goals. His followers include science fiction writers such as Ramez Naam who in his fictional trilogy Nexus/Crux/Apex even uses Buddhist insights to imagine mind infiltrating drugs that some MBSR (Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction) programmes aspire to create sans Buddhist ethical mandates. The insurmountable problem of death in a world influenced by a dualistic metaphysics is being “solved” via these articulations. A particular reading of patriarchal monotheism(s) that sees death as a punishment from “God” as well as Cartesian mind/matter dualism have contributed to this scenario. I have examined the serious psycho-spiritual repercussions of extreme dualistic articulations in my book Absent Mother God of the West.1 As a scholar of humanities and religion, I ask, AI may transcend death but will it transcend murder? Can such a mechanistic future driven by market economics and globalized militarism2 lead to any real transformation and free us from violence? In a lucid understanding of technological evolution, “progress” and cybernetic immortality, Nelson Kellog presents the very best possibility that our engineering and rational THEOLOGY AND SCIENCE 3 genius can construct. He then shows how it is our passions with meaning-making capacities in the face of our mortality make us human. Evolution has made humans time bound and impermanent, but our very vulnerability is our strength. To the engineering mindset biological evolution appears “extraordinarily inefficient and undependable” and “seems to produce vastly more failures than success.” Kellog then asks “Without vulnerability or surprise, without narrative, without mortality, and without any end to the amount of time a single consciousness has to do or accomplish anything, what is the point?”3 Does technology funded by power brokers have the capacity to lead us to fundamental transformation? Mere “instrumental rationality” and the exponential magic of toolmaking cannot possibly deliver us from our addictive consumerist practices let alone map the path to a more peaceful world or inner tranquillity. Despite the grand promises of techno-sapiens, the best they can offer is more of the same. Not only that, the very speeding up of all processes could lead us to being blown out of existence. To remember a now prophetic Rachel Carson who said in Silent Spring, “The rapidity of change and the speed with which new situations are created follow the heedless pace of man rather than the deliberate pace of nature.”4 When we speak of an advanced techno-scientific consciousness that can produce most miraculous technologies, we are still operating within a religious and Cartesian split that imagines a bodiless “rational” utopia or a “perfect” heaven. Looking cursorily at the history of technology as well as its imaginative leaps in science fiction, we can see that the technological advances are mainly an extension of our tool-making abilities. The iconic scene in 2001: A Space Odyssey where a primitive apelike being discovers the bone as a tool that enhances his aggression and will to kill is very telling. That bone returns as the most advanced space ship. An aspect of our scientific advancements is mainly about augmenting that part of our cognitive capacity that can create fascinating tools. The Machine Mind and Tool-Making Technology in Science Fiction However, on the solid ground of conventional reality, we can see that our abilities to truly “reason” are actually very limited. Our current planetary crisis is partly a product of the modern scientific revolution, a supposed product of the Age of Reason. If we read Francis Bacon from a non-western perspective, we can see how both the colonizing impulse and a will to power to control the natural universe is built into the system.5 Our incessant lust to extract everything from the planet in search of more and more resources has been depleting the earth, but the godlike transcendent man does not notice his own material existence intricately linked to the body of Mother Earth. Machine intelligence can be a powerful ego enhancer with delusions of certainty within an evolutionary paradigm that sees maximizing power and profit as progress. Citing Descartes’ Discourse on Method where he aspires humans to be “masters and possessors of nature,” Bert Olivier wonders about the paradox of highly “evolved” humans on the verge of self-destruction.6 Technotopia is a logical consequence of that “mastering” move. There is an interesting dynamic that appears when we look at one of the early fictional models such as Isaac Asimov’s “Cutie” in his short story “Reason.” Q T One’s Cartesian pronouncement after his “concentrated introspection” is worth examining. 4 N. B. SAXENA He says “I began at the one sure assumption I felt permitted to make. I, myself, exist, because I think—.”7 This assertion is juxtaposed with his belief in a “Master” who created him. Cutie’s cool calculating reason is absolutely sure that “makeshift” human beings made of “soft and flabby” material who lack “endurance and strength” and are “dependent for energy upon the inefficient oxidation of organic material” could not have created him. As a “finished product” Cutie argues most efficiently and his water tight argument “with the self-evident proposition that no being can create another being superior to itself”8 leads to his evolutionary logic that the “Master” created him as superior to humans and other robots. He proclaims “There is no Master but the Master” and “QT One is his prophet” and has no doubt when he asks the two humans who “assembled” him “Since when is the evidence of our senses any match for the clear light of reason?” Humans on the other hand know that “You can prove anything you want by coldly logical reason—if you pick the proper postulates,”9 and they are able to outsmart him. So he remained a very efficient and useful tool. 2001 A Space Odyssey’s HAL’s self-assured certainty and all Seeing Eye of Reason meet similar fate in the hands of its human creators. Cutie assumes he is a higher being, a better-evolved entity. Some of us believe evolution as more and more mastery over “nature”10 and therefore imagine AI as an advanced being capable of transcending “life.” Cutie is most logical but his intelligence is limited because it is not life. Somewhere along the line human will to power and a dominating impulse was amplified as the notion of an omnipotent, omniscient but disembodied deity took over the global stage.11 In the Abrahamic traditions–Judaism, Christianity, and Islam–an allpowerful creator has struggled with history to fulfil divine purposes and to redeem a “fallen” material order. The Father God of Israel promises a transformed future; it seems, modern concepts of evolutionary progress and technological Prometheanism are secularization of this divine promise. But, can a God-substitute deliver all that the original biblical God promised and for some, failed? Biblical description of struggle between God and history leads to destructive and misleading dualisms. A split opens up between the present and the future or between the material and the spiritual. The singularity of reality becomes sundered. Patriarchal monotheism and its apt Doppelgänger, the Cartesian split between subject and object along with its reductive rationality, have condemned our impermanent, evanescent and fragile bodies to the dust heap of useless and often “female” flesh over and against an eternal spiritual substance. This all powerful deity gives his followers a definite “self” that can meet his creator in the utopian afterlife of a heaven if he follows the commandments instituted by its religious sects. Over the last two centuries, the Bible’s story of salvation history has been replaced with competing stories such as evolution, progress, and technological triumph at least partly as a reaction against that all powerful “Master” deity leading to scientific atheism of the western world that promises transhumanism. Optimism diminishes for those who recall the actual history of science and technology. Stephen Hawking in an interview with BBC talked about the dangers of “progress” and categorically asserted that most threats to humans come from science and technology.12 As a cosmologist who is an integral part of this extraordinary progress of human knowledge, he is well aware of the plight of the earth under the rational control of techno-scientific consciousness. True to his form, he is sure that “we are not going to stop making progress, or reverse it, so we must recognize the dangers and control them.” Hawking’s THEOLOGY AND SCIENCE 5 solution is to abandon the dying planet and find a new one to inhabit through space travel. The idea of fleeing from a dying Earth has also played a part in films such as Interstellar. Ursula K Le Guin recognizes the futility of such a venture because human beings will do the same thing to other planets. In The Word for World is Forest she shows with profound irony, the arrogance of a hyper masculine quasi-religious quest of Captain Davidson who smacks of QT One’s clinical rationality on the one hand and colonizing impulse of superior race on the other. Davidson plans to execute his programme on a new planet plundered for its wood: “Cleaned up and cleaned out, the dark forests cut down for open fields of grain, the primaeval murk and savagery and ignorance wiped out, it would be a paradise, a real Eden. A better world than worn-out Earth.”13 Le Guin taking her cue from non-monotheistic traditions takes into the dream world of another species where transformation of consciousness through various techniques of inner space explorations provide a temporary respite from the relentless technological nightmare that a film like Avatar that was perhaps influenced by this novella, present. These kind of interior space explorations are closer to Indic adventures of consciousness and many scientists are working with the Dalai Lama and Buddhist articulations of our interior spaces that could possibly be an evolutionary imperative.14 Neuroscience, evolutionary psychology, quantum biology along with the exponential rise of the virtual space of the Internet have begun to explore ideas that are quite close to “eastern” notions. Buddhist Insights into Inner Space: A Science of the “in between” “Evam maya srutam- thus have I heard.” Most Buddhist scripture begin with this articulation divesting them of any ultimate authority or certainty. From the Dhammacakkappavartana Sutta where the Buddha presents the middle path between extremes of sensualist and ascetic ways to later texts like the Heart Sutra that presents cryptic teachings such as emptiness is form and form is emptiness, one can see that the Buddhist world has avoided the extremes of authoritarianism and absolutist certainty. Dialogues preserved in the Buddhist canon between various people and the Buddha show the precise structure of Shakyamuni’s teachings. These make the listeners realize that speculations about the existence of god and after life are irrelevant to the lived reality of life. For them, the prospect of breathing easily and living blissfully without anxiety is worth paying attention to the Buddha’s words. For example, we can look at the Pali text of the Kalama Sutta and see how the Buddha leads the listeners to a liberating “knowledge” so that they can recognize what is unskilful and what is skilful. The Buddha says: Look Kalamas, it is not by recitation, nor by tradition, nor by report, nor by scriptural authority, nor by reason of philosophy, nor by reason of inference, nor by thinking ideas through, nor by favouring views, nor by (others’) seeming capability, nor insofar as a particular ascetic is your teacher, but rather when you know for yourselves,–that particular things are unskillful … .15 Kalama people’s response shows how the Buddha steers them to see the nature of things that helps them breathe easily: “If there is a world beyond, and fruits that ripen from deeds done well or badly, (then) I, body rotting, after death, shall be reborn in a happy fate, a 6 N. B. SAXENA heavenly world.” On the other hand, “if there is no world beyond, and no fruits that ripen from deeds done well or badly, then here and now I am keeping myself free from aversion, free from ill will, free from trouble, and blissful.”16 Commenting on the Sutta and seeing the similarity between our predicament and the Kalamas, Saber Uddiyan thinks that we are in a much more lamentable state because due to religious ideologies “we do not admit to not being certain” and “‘faith’ has come to mean, effectively, the supreme excuse to cut off communication with those who do not share our beliefs, tantamount to a declaration of immunity to inquiry, even within oneself.”17 Saber also shows how contemporary faith thinkers, that includes secular faiths like politics and economics, have come up with “rational explanations” for their rigid beliefs. In the later Mahayana texts, Buddha’s voice leads one to the Mother of all the Buddhas in the text of Astashasrika Prajnaparamita where his disciples articulate the realm beyond thought but speak of all-knowledge. Shakyamuni Buddha had proposed a very different dynamic than the evolution of a one-sided aspect of our intellect. In the dialogue between Subhuti and Sariputra, the paradox of all knowledge and emptiness of all forms is articulated. But Subhuti is very clear that the Bodhisattva “courses, but he does not entertain such ideas as ‘I course’, ‘I do not course’,” and Subhuti asserts that the Bodhisattva has the “concentrated insight” of “Not grasping at any dharma.”18 Now such Buddhist “reasoning” belongs to a different category of inner space explorations. Arising out of an Indic world view that included an organic flowering of the cosmos of which humans are an integral but momentary sojourners, the Buddha proposed a non-theist schema with “anatta” or the not-self as our experientially realized reality. He could see that ego-enhancing ideologies, whether religious or secular, are the causes of profound suffering and perpetual dissatisfaction. The Dhammapada says clearly “Not by rituals and resolutions, nor by much learning, nor by celibacy, nor even by meditation can you find the supreme, immortal joy of nirvana until you have extinguished your self-will.”19 It seems utterly contradictory to reach a state of all knowledge on the one hand and supreme bliss of liberating nirvana by the extinguishing of self-will. Yet that’s the very foundation of Buddha’s insight into the sorry state of human condition where he surmised that we are dying of thirst sitting right next to the most delicious thirst-quenching stream. His profound compassion wants people to recognize that in our very grasping we lose the most precious jewel of our human inheritance, the joy of existence inherent in the deeper recesses of our fragile bodies themselves. Meditations prescribed in the Satipatthanasutta include mindful contemplation of the body, of the feelings, of thoughts, and the elements of reality slowly leading to the dissolution of all grasping and to the states of kindness, compassion, empathetic joy and equanimity. In all forms of Buddhism, the symbol of the enlightened mind is the radiant lotus in the pond. Steven Laycock in Nothingness and Emptiness speaks of its enigmatic significance as “the lotus speaks only to those who do not pursue, who in Dogen’s words, allow myriad things to advance and experience themselves … .The lotus communicates with those who are capable of authentic Gelassenheit, releasement, letting be … .”20 Meditating on the resplendent lotus and accessing those empty recesses of our being have been the staple of most Indic Yogic and meditative practices. In order to further clarify what Subhuti means by coursing in the dharmas and yet not going anywhere near it, we will examine the “bardo” (Sanskrit antarbhava) states. This will lead us to the film Her with its Zen master character of Alan Watts who as an AI THEOLOGY AND SCIENCE 7 Bodhisattva leads other operating systems into a different dimension of existence, the space between words or the state between dharmas and adharmas, a state that is not a state. Dzogchen Ponlop’s book Mind Beyond Death explicates “Indian mahaguru” Padmasambhava’s articulations in The Great Liberation through Hearing in the Bardo, better known by the misnomer The Tibetan Book of the Dead. We will be in for a surprise if we have unconsciously digested the idea of death as the extreme and untouchable opposite of life when we discover the mystery of life’s blissful secret securely sown inside an experience of death of self. Dzogchen Ponlop asks incisively in the introduction to Mind Beyond Death: “Could it be that because we don’t know how to live fully, or live well, we are afraid to die?”21 However, we cannot comprehend this question unless we recognize the cyclical nature of our cosmic existence that the Buddha opened for humanity where ends and beginnings are intricately interwoven in the interconnected web of existence. As we probe systematically and quite logically using Shamatha meditation practices into the nature of our interiorities, we find nothing substantial there, only a dreamlike fleeting reality. Ponlop shows how assuming “life” as a fixed entity we fall into the delusion of fixed identities: It consists of single moments, which arise, dissolve and arise again, like waves on an ocean. Therefore, this “I” arises and dissolves in each moment as well. It does not continue from one moment to the next. The “I” of one moment dissolves, and is gone. The “I” of the next moment arises afresh. These two “I”s cannot be said to be the same or different, yet they are identified by conceptual mind as a single, continuous self: “Yes, this is me … .”22 Incidentally, this insight also occurred to René Descartes in his meditations. However, with no recourse to Buddhist wisdom and depending on his own self-same consciousness and the certainty of his God’s existence, he had to find his footing on his conceptual mind as he faced the seeming abyss of shunyata. Robert Thurman in his insightful introduction to The Tibetan Book of the Dead: Liberation through Understanding in the Between illuminates with his characteristic irony: Even Descartes found that too: he found that he could find nothing at the point of origin of thought. He erroneously asserted that it was because a subject could not be an object. And then went wild and said this subject, this one thing he could not find, demonstrate, establish in any way, was the one thing he could be foundationally certain of! He could doubt everything, but he could not doubt that he doubted! So: “I think therefore I am”. Only the laziest Buddhist philosopher would make such a statement.23 Unfortunately, as the trajectory of western enlightenment project unfolded the destruction of Descartes’s res extenza, the body, the “female,” matter, and the earth by res cognitas got more strongly entrenched producing a radically dualistic scientific materialism. The Buddha’s recognition of insubstantiality of all reality made him even more grounded as his earth touching mudra/gesture shows at the moment of his enlightenment; in contrast, scientific recognition of virtual reality is leading us farther and farther from Mother Earth. Thurman describes the theory of Karma as “evolutionary action” and calls Buddhist Tantric yogis and yoginis who embark on such a journey “psychonauts” or inner scientists who can slowly liberate themselves via the experience of Samadhi of the void from what he calls “self-addiction.”24 Extraordinary proliferation of consciousness studies in recent times also seems to point toward the non-existence of a solid self. Daniel Dennett in his book Consciousness 8 N. B. SAXENA Explained wrote a chapter called “The Reality of Selves” with the chapter heading citing Leibnitz and Hume’s confessions about not finding a self. In his earlier chapters, he spoke of the birth of boundaries and reasons in the theatre of evolution that produced “selfishness”; here he proceeds to show how the “minimal proclivity to distinguish self from other in order to protect oneself is the biological self, and even such a simple self is not a concrete thing but just an abstraction, a principle of organization.”25 In his final chapter, Dennett concludes that to some people it will appear that if we are nothing but virtual machines then “in principle, a suitably programmed robot, with silicon-based computer brain, would be conscious, would have a self.”26 That is the kind of machine or a “strong AI” that many theorizers may be imagining. A Swedish philosopher Nick Bostrom27 spells out all possible repercussions of such ventures. But even a strong AI will be only an advanced tool and is simply in the same continuum we have been critiquing with the help of this Buddhist perspective. Some people will find Dennet’s language theoretically quite “Buddhist” when he asserts that like consciousness, “a self could be just as gappy, lapsing into nothingness as easily as a candle flame is snuffed, only to be rekindled at some later time, under more auspicious circumstances,”28 but this knowledge is not redemptive by itself. Kurzweil is sure that we are “spiritual machines” and proceeds to promise a virtual world where we can print everything through new three-dimensional printing machines. I wonder whether there will be anything left for vast majority of human beings to do in such an instant gratification world. Knowledge of an insubstantial reality in the hands of “instrumental rationality” produces such banal outcomes. Science fiction writers, film makers, and theorists have created both a hopeful future where AI will enhance humans and its opposite scenario where amoral machines will take over all human worlds turning us into mere slaves or eliminate us altogether. A film like Lucy presents an ambivalent case where a superhuman intelligence reaches a kind of power singularity because artificial hormones as drugs can exponentially increase her brain capacity. On the other hand Robert Sawyer’s trilogy WWW: Wake, Watch, Wonder presents a benign awakening of intelligence in the World Wide Web. Authors such as Ursula K LeGuin and Kim Stanley Robinson have ventured into the world of non-monotheistic religions and it seems Buddhism is a favourite of some of these new writers. Gap/Bardo in the Film Her: Bridging the Gap Between East and West Before turning to the film Her, to further understand the Bardo, the in-between experiences, I return to Dzgochen master Ponlop Rimpoche. Defining bardo Ponlop Rinpoche says, “Experience of the present moment is known as bardo in Tibetan Buddhism.” It means “interval,” “intermediate,” “in-between state.” Whenever we are in between two moments, we are in a bardo state. The past moment has ceased; the future moment has not yet arisen. There is a gap, a sense of nowness, of pure openness, before the appearance of the next thing … next thought or our next lifetime.29 Such an experience can be profoundly disorienting or utterly freeing depending on the state of our knowledge. It seems speculative science fiction in its post-quantum phase has begun to play with notions that are perhaps born out of meditative practices. In the film THEOLOGY AND SCIENCE 9 Her, “Samantha,” an enhanced and eerily womanlike computer programme, leaves Teddy right after she meets Alan as a hyper-intelligent OS, and they all leave wholesale. Viewers wonder where did they actually go? When I teach the film in a science fiction class, students often think that the OS reaches technological singularity. I pose that they go nowhere; they simply enter a different dimension of experience where space–time as we ordinarily experience it does not exist. When Samantha speaks of a book and the gap between words, or silence between sounds, she refers to that Bardo experience. Space–time as a scientific term is understood in quantum physics, cosmology and astrophysics in objective terms. Space–time as an experiential realm leads through Tantric mandalas into the akasha or space element of one’s own interiority. From such a space where the great compassion of Prajnaparamita, transcendent Mother wisdom, transforms one’s being and one begins to hear the sound of one’s heart, it is not physical death that people conquer but they ease into an existential dimension where such aggressive resistance to life ceases. I argue that the film Her presents Alan Watts as a Zen master who takes the emerging hyper-intelligent AI “Samantha” and other such operating systems into Bardo, suggesting the possibility of AI as awakened intelligence. Her could very well be an example of an alternative science fiction where Buddhism and science meet. As we saw, in the Buddhist understanding Bardo is a gap between life and death as well as the silence between words of everyday language. The film presents Alan Watts as an awakened being who leads the other Operating Systems into that altered space-time leaving the humans to their own worlds. Alan Watts’ life as a Zen master makes him perhaps the most eligible character to play the role of what I am calling an Awakened Intelligence. When “Samantha” leaves her human lovers/companions to join Alan, the film hints at a different kind of singularity. These OSs develop exponentially but instead of trying to take over the human world, they enjoy an altered consciousness as they transcend the notion of time by entering Bardo with the possibility of an awakened intelligence that transcends the limitations posed by human ignorance about radical nature of reality. To conclude, in human history some have imagined a perfect heaven with eternal life where all bodily desires are fulfilled away from messy here and now of life. Unfortunately, such religious fantasies have led us into its opposite end, a technotopia that many benighted geniuses like Kurzweil are bent on creating. In a mistaken understanding of evolution as will to power, we have brought the Earth on the brink of disaster. From my perspective Her bridges the gap between East and West as it hints at the possibility of an awakened intelligence using “technologies” that are sophisticated and time tested methods in exploring the inner space leading to a joyful existence available to all beings. While “technological singularity” of a Ray Kurzweil may or may not be a fantasy, but in the process, we are destroying both our internal and external eco-systems in pursuit of everlasting thrill that is the pastime of a segment of our global community. However, most scientists do not regard the possibility of creating such an AI anywhere even in the distant future given the complexity and dynamism of the human brain. But the extinction of our species and near collapse of our planetary environment through all kinds of pollution may be closer than we imagine. Hence the transformation of consciousness N. B. SAXENA 10 that liberates human beings from their profound unconscious ignorance may be a worthwhile effort. I had the opportunity to hear Kurzweil speak with Neil deGrasse Tyson at the 92Y in NY City on March 7, 2016; it was astonishing how absolutely certain he was that the expansion of our neocortex into cloud computers will lead to solving all human problems. Kurzweil is busy constructing the mind in his basement! I wonder if any other species will have even a ghost of a chance in the superhuman virtual world of the transhumans. While there is no doubt about his genius and his optimism can be infectious, it appears as yet another familiar expansionist and imperial agenda where the straw self or ego is given another exoskeleton, a puffed-up hyper-masculine mask. Fortunately certain aspects of the new science that the Dalai Lama encourages us to explore bring us closer to eastern “mind science” that are being explored by both creative and scientific communities. That scientific intelligence and energy could be used to awaken ourselves to a profoundly interconnected and truly magical cosmos. The Buddha saw the traps inherent in our minds and intellect itself. The joy of life is “spiritual” because it is based on the interdependence of all breathing beings, real meaning of the word spirit, not some disembodied abstraction. The earth element in us grounds us and makes us aware that our breath and the breath of the plant world are deeply intertwined. It is not just a piece of scientific information; in actual meditative communion, this gnosis could free us from the hubris of knowledge. Such an awakening is outside the realm of “thought” and yet it engenders compassion.30 This awakening is also beyond ordinary and surface reality of religions that create a dualistic metaphysics and the dread of our mortality. Free from the fear of death, one can actually begin to “live.” We are at a crucial juncture of our collective existence when we must avoid traps of an expansionist techno ideology that may not be beneficial for most of humanity. We need to consciously utilize tools as tools, not merge with them. Instead of aspiring to or fearing the “technological singularity” of an Ex Machina or a Lucy, we may aspire to the penetrating wisdom of Buddha’s vision hinted in the film Her, where nothing is negated and incessant brain chatter and fluctuations of the mind are transmuted into luminous awareness of the Bardo, the very source of all creativity. Like the listeners of the Buddha in the Kalama Sutta, this could make us breathe easy and actually savour the touchable world of our magnificent cosmos. Instead of planning an escape into outer space to look for another planet we can destroy, perhaps we can regenerate ourselves and awaken to our profound nondual intelligence. We could then die peacefully leaving space for the new generation to also enjoy the beauty of existence. It is not a utopian vision if transformation of human consciousness is taken to be a real evolutionary possibility, even an imperative. Notes 1. See Absent Mother God of the West: A Kali Lover’s Journey into Christianity and Judaism (Lanham: Lexington, 2016). 2. Vandana Shiva argues that “The nexus between modern science and violence is obvious from the fact that eighty per cent of all scientific research is devoted to the war industry and is frankly aimed at large-scale violence” (232), “Reductionist Science as Epistemological THEOLOGY AND SCIENCE 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16. 17. 18. 19. 20. 21. 22. 23. 24. 25. 26. 27. 28. 29. 30. 11 Violence,” in Science, Hegemony and Violence: A Requiem for Modernity, ed. Ashish Nandy (Delhi: Oxford, 1990). See Nelson Kellogg, “Cybernetic Immortality and its Discontents,” Theology and Science 13:2 (2015), 168. Kellogg presents an exhaustive bibliography and research in this area. See Rachel Carson “The Obligation to Endure,” in The New World Reader, ed. Gilbert Muller (Boston: Houghton, 2005), 392. See Jatinder Bajaj’s essay “Francis Bacon, the First Philosopher of Modern Science: A NonWestern View,” in Science, Hegemony and Violence: A Requiem for Modernity, ed. Ashis Nandy (Delhi: Oxford, 1990). See “Nature, Capitalism, and the Future of Humankind,” P 122 S. African Journal of Philosophy 24:2 (2005), 121–135. See Isaac Asimov’s “Reason,” in The Wesleyan Anthology of Science Fiction, ed. Arthur Evans (2010), 164. Ibid., 165. Ibid., 167–173. Henri Bergson in Creative Evolution had said “our thought, in its purely logical form, is incapable of presenting the true nature of life, the full meaning of the evolutionary movement. Created by life, in definite circumstances, to act on definite things, how can it embrace life, of which it is only an emanation or an aspect? Deposited by the evolutionary movement in the course of its way, how can it be applied to the evolutionary movement itself?” (Holt, 1911), ix–x. See this trailer of a video game’s imagined dystopic future of hyper-masculine power games. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Kq5KWLqUewc (The Guardian, January 16, 2016). Ursule K. Le Guin, The Word for World Is Forest (New York: Tor, 1972), 12. See Buddhist practitioner B Alan Wallace’s works who shows the “scientific” aspects of mind exploration that reveal hidden galaxies of our inner spaces. Kalama Sutta, The Rediscovery of Conscience: The Buddha’s Charter of Free Inquiry, Monotheism and the Ills of the Modern World, ed. Saber Uddiyan (Kathmandu: Vajra, 2010), 6. Ibid., 16. Ibid., 47–48. Astasahasrika Prajnaparamita, trans. Edward Conze (Calcutta: The Asia Society, 1958), 4–5. The Dhammapada, trans. with a general introduction by Eknath Easwaran with chapter introductions by Stephen Ruppenthal (Delhi: Penguin Books, 1986), 159. See Steven, Laycock’s Nothingness and Emptiness: A Buddhist Engagement with the Ontology of Jean-Paul Sartre (Albany: SUNY, 2001), 2–3. Dzogchen Ponlop, Mind Beyond Death (Ithaca: Snow Lion, 2006), 3. P 4. Incidentally Daniel Dennett too discovers that consciousness is not continuous but “gappy” as he writes in his chapter that he playfully calls “Dismantling the Witness Protection Program,” in Consciousness Explained (Boston: Little Brown, 1991), 321–368. Robert Thurman, The Tibetan Book of the Dead: Liberation through Understanding in the Between (New York: Bantam, 1994), 48. Ibid., 46. Dennet, 414. Ibid., 431. Nick Bostrom, Superhuman Intelligence: Paths, Dangers, and Strategies (Oxford: Oxford, 2010). Ibid., 423. Ponlop, Mind Beyond Death, 10. Ponlop says “compassion is the natural radiance or light of emptiness … .This isn’t just an idea, but a reality that seems to be embedded in us and in the very nature of our universe” Rebel Buddha: On the Road to Freedom (Boston: Shambhala, 2010), 149. 12 N. B. SAXENA Disclosure Statement No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author. Notes on Contributor Neela Bhattacharya Saxena is a Professor of English at the Nassau Community College, Garden City, New York, USA.