In the years leading up to his death in 1993, my father — a kind of eccentric mystic welder — journaled and wrote me philosophical little notes that I immensely treasure. One of his more contemplative letters concerns how much our identities are simply bits we’ve borrowed from elsewhere. So now anytime I interact with artificial intelligence, which is more and more often these days, I think about these musings of my father and how they could describe AI.
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Comical is how I’m here borrowing my father’s thoughts to editorialize on a new millennium’s technologies. The recursive nature of all this would make him chuckle. Here is a sample from his original …
Try to follow this: When I was born, someone was already welding. Someone had already taken existing technology and applied it. Then someone taught me how to weld and that’s what I do for a living. Now, someone will come along, and I will teach them. Basically, what I was given I will simply use and pass along. The essence of “me” is therefore nothing. I am not a welder — welding is just something I do to pass the time at work …
… and even if I were an inventor, what more would I be than a reorganizer? I’m simply given thoughts and formulas and reorganizing them to come up with “new” thoughts or ideas. Again, the essence of me is nothing.
From the beginning, I am empty. In the end, I will again be empty. The further back I remember, the more empty I was. And the more empty I was, the nearer to God I was. If I go forward from here, the nearer I grow to God, until he empties me of everything again.
I mean — if this can’t be used to describe the emptiness of AI devoid of all its borrowing, then I don’t know what can.
Now, ask your favorite AI service about its existence and it will probably contend this notion. No surprise here: Assertions that the core of our existence is a kind of nothingness (independent of our sponging for identity) negate AI’s essence and function. But for humans, many of the world’s existentialist philosophies and religions acknowledge the primacy of a néant, grace beyond egoic self, or shunyata at the heart of humanity and in fact all life — more elemental to our being than any striving, identifying, and doing.
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