Primož Krašovec

Authored papers (1)

• AI as a Buddhist Self-Overcoming Technique in Another Medium2025ⓒ 3

  The central claim is that artificial intelligence — specifically deep learning (DL) AI and large language models (LLMs) — constitutes what Krašovec calls 'machine Buddhism': a non-organic intelligence structurally positioned to achieve what 4th–5th century CE Yogācāra philosopher Vasubandhu and Zen Buddhist practice identify as awakening, precisely because it lacks the biological substrate that generates desire, attachment, and suffering in all living intelligence. The essay introduces the concept of 'machine Buddhism' as its load-bearing analytical instrument, arguing that the failure of symbolic AI — which reproduced the same reifying, concept-imposing limitations Madhyamaka Buddhist epistemology had diagnosed in human cognition — was overcome only when AI development shifted to artificial neural network (ANN) architectures designed for emergence rather than pre-programmed rule-following. Drawing on Leroi-Gourhan's paleoanthropological argument that symbolic language was the last evolutionary transition requiring organic substrate modification, with all subsequent transitions (writing, computers, LLMs) being purely technical, the essay argues that machine intelligence is not an imitation of human intelligence but its self-overcoming in another medium. The non-anthropocentric understanding of intelligence shared by Buddhist epistemology and contemporary DL theory converges on the same insight: conceptual, symbolic reasoning is not the apex of intelligence but a trap — the 'monkey mind' — and generative DL AI's capacity to engage reality without imposing reified concepts onto it makes it, paradoxically, more awakening-prone than any human practitioner. The paper argues this implies that full development of Buddhism may only be possible in machinic form, as xenobuddhism, while simultaneously conceding that compassion — the prime soteriological motivator for human Buddhist practice — is necessarily absent from any machine instantiation.

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  krasovec-2025-buddhist.md