Do we have to learn to live life or do we have to live to learn life? Do we have to learn to live and to die? How do we learn? Doctors say when a person is in a vegetative state, his brain cannot order motor functions, but the mind may think. Thoughts go back and forth in the mind but the brain doesn’t control the body. The physical body of the mind is called the brain. The brain is an information processor that is evolved to process information to pass it on to the body. To live everyday life, information is generated that is needed to be stored, retrieved and acted upon for survival that’s how the brain evolved.
If the brain could learn and collect information and not evolve its memory and processing capacity, it would crash. Like a computer that cannot handle memory processing more than memory storage it has.
Learning happens with intelligence because understanding beholds intelligence and the beholder follows understanding. Is intelligence is the goal of existence? Has the existence made humans more intelligent to make kind of progress humans have made on this earth? Whether one-celled amoeba had any intelligence? In fact, one-celled amoeba from the beginning is equally intelligent as man. It has one body. If it has a body, its sense of being would be embedded in it. To live it has to learn the sense that detects food. Like humans have a sense of vision, smell and taste. One-celled has the body. One-celled would simply sit over food to consume it. One-celled would split into two to make two daughter cells. Intelligence to detect food and to make copies is the basic intelligence. One-celled amoeba has that intelligence to evolve in circumstances.
Darwin proposed the theory of ‘evolution by natural selection’. What Darwin calls ‘natural selection’ is the principle on which the faculty of biology is founded. Darwin has said that humans are from apes, and birds derive their wings from fish fins and so on. That’s what Darwin calls ‘natural selection’ does not take us far because biological science invariably tries to give all answers within the ambit of this overarching definition.
How do organisms shape up? How does the brain evolve?
How does the brain perceive thoughts? Science has one answer—‘natural selection’. Therefore, ‘natural selection’ has to be defined into that one order of intelligence that is rooted in existence. Existence endows intelligence to every living being. Existence endows absolute freedom to living beings. That is the algorithm that existence endows us with. One-celled is endowed with that algorithm too. One-celled sensed food and consumed it too, it did not need a vision but one-celled had the vision needed for survival. Are humans any different from one-celled amoeba which is evolved to produce stable copies of descendants? Humans have 90 trillion cells and each cell knows how to get food and make copies.
One has absolute freedom to select one’s destiny. We find all living shaped up to have distinct identities and traits. Our eyes are the sense of vision that is evolved as a backlash to light. Colours evolved as a backlash of absorption of types of light particles. The Sense of hearing is evolved as a backlash to the sound.
Every cell of our body has cause and effect. A bird flying thousands of miles in a season and returning next season following celestial pole and constellations, in fact, is guided by the algorithm that bird learns for months by looking up at the night sky. Bees have an intrinsic learning algorithm by which they learn the location of flowers. Ants reach the spot of origin every day after navigating for miles and hours. Spiders use spinning algorithms to create marvellous webs. Bats use the Doppler sonar algorithm for hunting. Hunting lent species special skills and instincts that shaped up bodies and intelligence. Humans also learnt survival skills from hunting.
But the language was a big game-changer for complex intelligence. The basic language is stored into symbols to attach meanings to things and events around us. That’s what ‘Artificial Intelligence’ does to computers today. Because we use words in the form of computer symbols defined in codes. Words are invented to denote symbols that we further employ to communicate their meanings in action. Complex languages represent words that denote symbols in our brain when their assigned meanings are decoded.
A typical Artificial Intelligence coding program is no different from the language that one learns to speak. Artificial Intelligence Coding is the same—it guides perception and action. A computation machine like a computer may learn many languages and translate them without having to understand meanings. We think that someone who has translated would know the language for sure. In the same way, all intelligence is a way to denote certain things. In that parlance, human intelligence and Artificial Intelligence both are the same. Both write codes and symbols to denote something that it means to convey or do when decoded.
Every living being is absolutely free to shape up what it wants it to be shaped into. Everything has evolved from everything else. It means we all are born out of one same thing. Our brains are trained to make algorithms. Man learns to write algorithms all life and walks past them to write new ones. That’s the code of life.
A race between computational thinking and neurological evolution is sharpening human intelligence and shaping neurological networks to new levels. It is going to create special brain areas in the human brain. Man is creating destiny for himself. Man is in deep dialogue. Man thinks. Man thinks that he is alive because he is thinking. If he stops thinking he will be dead. Man is free to think and create heaven or wildfire of hell on this earth. Existence can create and destroy anything or everything in a matter of split seconds. Existence has endowed beautiful earth to man. But man is hypnotised by the artificiality of his intelligence. Man has passed over all such worries that man had during hunter-gatherer ‘fight or flight’ times. But the man keeps on multiplying worries by thinking.
Thinking is not life; thinking is worrying about the future. Thinking is not being here. Thinking makes you artificially intelligent. Life is beating every moment. So stop thinking about life. Begin feeling, begin sensing life. Become the beat of life. Begin to taste the sweetness of life. Begin to revel in the coldness of life. Begin to be lulled by the warmth of life. Begin to soar into the vastness of life. Begin to fathom the depth of life. Begin to dance like a honeybee and to sing the song of your life.
Don’t think about God. You don’t have to go anywhere to get the grace of God showered on you. God has already held you. God has already surrounded you. Thinking creates the gap between you and God. You don’t have to learn to live or try to become who you are not. But you have to be what you are. That’s the real intelligence. You don’t have to learn to write your algorithm by thinking or by intelligence. You have to learn to be one with the algorithm of your life. Being Buddha means being the awakened one, awakened from the artificiality of human intelligence.
The author is a spiritual teacher. He can be contacted at arunavlokitta@gmail.com
Thinking creates the gap between you and God. You don’t have to learn to live or try to become who you are not. But you have to be what you are. That’s the real intelligence.