Comment by FrustratedMonky
2 years ago
By spiritual practice, do you mean something like studying the Skanda's or the 5 Aggregates? Or do you mean to open myself to the love of our lord and savior? It does make a difference in how you approach the world if your spiritual practice encourages insight, or if you are blinded by faith in a spiritual entity that is directing you.
A powerful spiritual practice like challenging your own limits and fears to the maximum, or meditation and fasting, or immersing yourself in a completely different environment from what you are familiar with until you know it truly. Or if these things sound too abstract, to take a strong dose of psychedelics alone or with others.
Religious texts are something that can be interesting after sensing some spirituality, but probably not before. I don't think anybody who is not spiritual can become so by reading religious texts.
It's just that you said I was sad because I don't think their is a soul. Because, I assume, you think that there is some mystical entity that is directing the body that is you, and a spiritual practice would lead to that conclusion. The soul would be some essence that is beyond the physical world, (a being from alternate universe maybe?). But then you speak of meditation and fasting. I would say that meditating has been what lead me here. Meditating, examining, observing ones own mind helps one see that there is no self, thoughts arise on their own. There is no core, non-detectable, mystical soul.
We give our minds too much credit, we keep arguing if AI is, or can ever be, conscious, without ever defining what consciousness is. I would say that humans aren't conscious in the way we think we are. There is no free will, we don't decide what we think about, if you think about thinking, where does the first thought come from?
Well, I'm looking at AI as an artist. The first notable thing I see is that I can pick out where all the refeferences come from and I find that boring. They are often not adapted to each other, there are obvious scale discrepancies and poor to little perspective. Cohesiveness is missing. Also by the arguments that I have seen, there is a very poor understanding of how artists work and develop their art. Artists transform materials, not existing art. Some artists may copy others but developing your own style is considered the gateway to making your best art. Art has many forms with a large portion of them being three dimensional. AI is a greatly limited tool that can statistically gather and render already existing imagery into a 2 dimensional format. It can be used as a tool to make art if the user has the skill to direct it with the proper prompts, but to equate that with how humans learn to create is to truly misunderstand the human process.
I wish I could help you more, but I don't know if I really can. But look at it this way: What are the odds that you have figured out everything about existence and there is nothing more to it than cold matter? Wouldn't you at least try to prove yourself wrong?
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