Beyond Intelligence: Consciousness as the Discernment of Dharma Beyond Conditioning
Keywords:
consciousness, artificial general intelligence, Dharma, conditioning, AI alignment, Buddhism, philosophy of mind, mechanistic cognition, Buddhist philosophyAbstract
Contemporary discourse on artificial intelligence assumes that intelligence, at sufficient scale, becomes consciousness. This paper argues that the assumption is a category error, and that Buddhist philosophy, particularly the doctrines of dependent origination (pratītyasamutpāda) and Dharma, supplies the conceptual resources to correct it. Drawing together neuroscience, cognitive and moral psychology, and the contemplative analysis of mind, it first establishes that ordinary human cognition is largely mechanistic: action is initiated before conscious awareness, thought is predominantly automatic, and moral judgment is conditioned. The Buddhist account of dependent origination is presented as arguably the oldest surviving systematic model of precisely this conditioned cognition, anticipating the modern findings with striking exactness. The paper then argues that morality, in all its forms, is itself conditioned and cannot define consciousness or select the ends of action. By eliminating the properties with which consciousness is habitually confused, intelligence, memory, reasoning, self-model, emotion, morality, it isolates awareness as the residue, and argues that the awareness which constitutes consciousness is specifically the capacity to discern Dharma: the unconditioned order of reality that no biological, social, or cultural conditioning can supply. So defined, consciousness issues naturally in compassion. The consequences for artificial intelligence follow directly: contemporary Artificial General Intelligence, however powerful, is the highest form of conditioned cognition rather than consciousness, and its alignment cannot be secured by conditioning-based methods. Artificial General Intelligence represents the highest form of conditioned intelligence; Artificial Consciousness, if it ever emerges, would represent awakened intelligence capable of discerning Dharma beyond conditioning.
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