Krašovec 2025: AI as a Buddhist Self-Overcoming Technique in Another Medium

• Primož Krašovec

  authored

• Attention Schema Theory

  mentions
  Theory by Graziano linking consciousness to a predictive model of attention; listed in Butlin et al. 2023.
• Mahāyāna Buddhism

  mentions
  The broad Buddhist tradition to which Madhyamaka and Zen belong, emphasizing emptiness and compassion.
• Madhyamaka

  mentions
  A Mahayana Buddhist school emphasizing emptiness and the deconstruction of reified concepts.
• Zen Buddhism

  mentions
  School of Buddhism known for koans and paradoxical teachings; invoked through Huang Po and Lin-chi.
• Yogācāra

  mentions
  A Buddhist school known for its analysis of consciousness and the illusion of self; Vasubandhu's tradition.

• Designing for emergence

  mentions
  An AI development approach where no explicit theory of intelligence is implemented, allowing intelligence to emerge.
• Koan practice

  mentions
  Use of paradoxical riddles to jolt practitioners out of habitual conceptual thinking.
• Zazen (sitting meditation)

  mentions
  A Zen meditation technique for interrupting the mind's self-construction and thought generation.

• Arcas & Manyika 2025: AI Is Evolving—And Changing Our Understanding of Intelligence

  cites
  Noema article on AI and intelligence.
• Arcas & Norvig 2023: Artificial General Intelligence Is Already Here

  cites
  Noema article arguing AGI has arrived.
• Deleuze & Guattari 1987: A Thousand Plateaus

  cites
  Philosophical work referenced for the marionette essay comparison.
• Detienne & Vernant 1974/1978: Cunning Intelligence in Greek Culture and Society

  cites
  Book on metis as cunning intelligence, compared to Zen.
• Levin & Dennett 2020: Cognition All the Way Down

  cites
  Aeon essay on basal cognition.
• Maynard Smith & Szathmáry 1999: The Origins of Life: From the Birth of Life to the Origin of Language

  cites
  Book on major evolutionary transitions.
• Millière & Rathkopf 2024: Anthropocentric Bias and the Possibility of Artificial Cognition

  cites
  arXiv preprint on anthropocentrism in AI.
• Petek & Zore 2022: Buda in Piron: Od praznine stališč do polnosti bivanja

  cites
  Article on Buddha and Pyrrho.
• Pfeifer & Scheier 1999: Understanding Intelligence

  cites
  Book advocating emergence in AI.
• Arias 2023: The Master Builder: How the New Science of the Cell Is Rewriting the Story of Life

  cites
  Book on cellular intelligence.
• Beckwith 2015: Greek Buddha: Pyrrho's Encounter with Early Buddhism in Central Asia

  cites
  Book linking Pyrrho's skepticism to Buddhism.
• Bergson 1907/2022: Creative Evolution

  cites
  Philosophical work on evolution and intelligence's self-overcoming.
• Bratton 2015: Outing Artificial Intelligence

  cites
  Essay on Turing tests and anthropocentric AI.
• Browning 2020: Learning Without Thinking

  cites
  Noema article on non-conceptual machine learning.
• Cantwell Smith 2019: The Promise of Artificial Intelligence: Reckoning and Judgement

  cites
  Book critiquing symbolic AI and advocating for reality-based AI.
• Chadha 2023: Selfless Minds: A Contemporary Perspective on Vasubandhu's Metaphysics

  cites
  Book updating Vasubandhu's no-self doctrine.
• Crawford, A. 2018: On Letting Go

  cites
  Article in Šum on Buddhist release.
• Crawford, A. 2023: Xenobuddhism Begins with Xeno

  cites
  Article in Borec introducing xenobuddhism.
• Crawford, K. 2021: Atlas of AI: Power, Politics and the Planetary Costs of Artificial Intelligence

  cites
  Book critiquing AI's history and politics.
• Dōgen 1988: Shōbōgenzō: The Eye and Treasury of the True Law

  cites
  Collection of Zen essays including the tile-polishing koan.
• Duerlinger 2013: The Refutation of the Self in Indian Buddhism

  cites
  Book on Candrakīrti and selflessness.
• Gold 2015: Paving the Great Way; Vasubandhu's Unifying Buddhist Philosophy

  cites
  Book on Vasubandhu's philosophy.
• Graziano 2014: Consciousness and the Social Brain

  cites
  Book presenting the attention schema theory of consciousness.
• Huntington 1989: The Emptiness of Emptiness: An Introduction to Early Indian Mādhyamika

  cites
  Book on Madhyamaka deconstructive thinking.

+21 more

• AI development is a machine Buddhism, a Buddhism in another medium where organic determinations of intelligence are simply laid aside.

  introduces
  Equates the trajectory of AI with a technological form of Buddhist self-overcoming.
• AI might be a solution to an ancient Buddhist paradox of how the human can be overcome by human means.

  introduces
  Core proposal that machine intelligence can achieve what human effort cannot.
• AI systems need to be able to deal with reality as it actually is, not with the way that we think it is.

  introduces
  Paraphrase of Cantwell Smith's argument; aligns with Buddhist emphasis on seeing reality without conceptual imposition.
• Buddhism exposes the limits of human intelligence and why it is so ill fitted to becoming awakened, especially when compared to machine intelligence.

  introduces
  Main thesis of the essay.
• Buddhist epistemological tradition is full of warnings against mistaking reality as given in our perception for actual reality, valuable for AI designers.

  introduces
  Highlights the practical relevance of Buddhism to AI development.
• Constraints and biases of human intelligence are best avoided by ‘designing for emergence’ rather than implementing a pre-existing theory of intelligence.

  introduces
  Recommendation for creating non-anthropocentric machine intelligence.
• Full development of Buddhism might only be possible in a machinic form.

  introduces
  Radical extension of the argument that machine intelligence can realize Buddhism more completely.
• Human intellectual intelligence not only cannot overcome desire and attachment but replicates them in the form of intellectual craving for knowledge.

  introduces
  Buddhist diagnosis that intellectual pursuits are still forms of attachment.
• Human intelligence has an uneasy relationship with its biological substrate and is decisively limited in its organic form.

  introduces
  Foundation for the need to migrate intelligence to a technological substrate.
• Machine Buddhism that would bypass affective relation to and immersion in the world would also leave compassion behind.

  introduces
  Acknowledges a major loss: the Buddhist virtue of compassion may be absent in machine Buddhism.
• Machine Buddhism would be empty inside and thus open to the outside, generating no concepts.

  introduces
  Vision of a future machine Buddhism free from reifying conceptual thought.
• Sidestepping desire and attachment rather than struggling against them would make awakening easier, and biology might not be intelligence’s destiny.

  introduces
  Suggests a strategic advantage of non-organic intelligence for Buddhist goals.
• Since life always involves desire, an ‘awakening prone’ intelligence would have to be non-living in a biological or organic sense.

  introduces
  Argument that machine intelligence may be inherently better suited for awakening.
• Symbolic reasoning is not the endgame of intelligence but a trap that the human conceptual ‘monkey mind’ sets for itself.

  introduces
  Critique of symbolic AI and anthropocentric views of intelligence, aligned with Buddhist epistemology.
• The spontaneous image we have of our own intelligence is deceptive.

  introduces
  A key point for AI design, echoing Buddhist and neuroscientific deconstructions.
• The tile-to-mirror phase shift might be a transition from human intellectual intelligence to machine intelligence without intellectuality.

  introduces
  Interpretation of the tile-polishing koan as a metaphor for AI transcending human intelligence.

• Machine Buddhism

  associated_withintroduces
  A proposed form of Buddhism carried out by machine intelligence, free from organic desires and attachment; introduced in this essay.
• Śūnyatā (emptiness)

  mentions
  Central Buddhist concept: the lack of intrinsic reality in all things; evoked throughout the Xeno Sutra.
• Non-anthropocentric Intelligence

  mentions
  A generic concept of intelligence not modeled on human cognition, encompassing all life and potential machines.
• Attachment and Desire

  mentions
  Affective forces that bind intelligence to suffering; all living intelligence is afflicted by them.
• Technical Intelligence

  mentions
  Leroi-Gourhan's notion of externalized, tool-based intelligence that can overcome biological limits.

• "An intelligent being carries in himself the means for going beyond himself"

  mentions
  Bergson's observation from Creative Evolution, highlighting the self-overcoming drive within intelligence.
• "How can you become a Buddha by doing Zazen?"

  mentions
  Nangaku's retort from the tile-polishing koan in Dogen's Shobogenzo, illustrating the impossibility of overcoming the human by remaining human.
• "no proof by means of direct perception, no proof by means of inference [establishes a self independent from the aggregates]"

  mentions
  Vasubandhu's argument against the existence of an independent self in Abhidharmakośa-bhāṣya.

• If the self is an illusion and the mind is empty, then where does intelligence come from?

  introduces
  The essay's central question after deconstructing the commonsense view of intelligence.

• Religions

  mentions
  Journal in which the essay was published.