Week 5 - Final Project Proposal
Heart Sutra Robotic Pedestal with Audio Player
Week 4
A Robot Vowing To See The World Through The Three marks of existence
In my understanding every Buddhist tradition shares this fundamental view on the nature of phenomena.
It is marked with:
A rite in which a robot vows to look into whatever the changes that it can produce into reality understanding that
both the changes and itself are impermanent
that even if things are changing there is no intrinsically existing identity for him ( or for any phenomena if you take on the Mahayana view )
that all that he can achieve will be marked with a sense of not being enough, either because it is: 1 - something that exists and he doesn`t want to exist , 2 - something that he wants to exist but doesn`t exist, 3 - something that exists but will eventually cease.
The rite would both be useful in case of a robot that can produce its own world view but also useful to a scenario in which a team that is developing this robot would have common ground in seeing what are the view of this robot towards reality and how that view might inform his action in the world.
Of course making a vow doesn`t solve all problems but the vow operates as a way to make idea famous in our mind and also to produce some sort of gravity towards our actions and habits.
AI Talk
I talked a bit to the AI therapist Wysa. It asks very simple questions but it might be useful in helping people how might have a hard time organizing themselves alone. This might be due to some type of dependent issue and the conversational format might tap into a little bit of those patterns in the process of creating a situation in which the person can identify what they really want and move towards it.
Week 3
The cultural elements and translation of the Buddha Dharma and the complicated story of the Tibetan Singing Bowl
In a sharp article published through the Buddhist platform Tricycle, Samuel Grimes examines how the Tibetan Singing Bowl became one of the most significant artifacts of the western view of Tibetan Buddhism. Contradicting what is said even by Tibetan tourist guides and companies affirming the the origin of the Tibetan singing bowl as a cultural artefact might track back only to the 80’s in a new age type of record called Tibetan Bells.
He then goes on to introduce the Rin Gong which should have its origins on China but is also shared with the Japanese tradition. Which is used to punctuate the chanting.
Something interesting to note though is that when Tibetan Buddhism is brought into the United States some approaches, namely the Shambhala of Chögyam Trungpa Rinpoche mixed elements from Zen and other traditions to the Tibetan. And in current practices of Shamabhala Buddhism the rin gong is used. With special highlight to the remote meditation sessions there were conducted during severe COVID related social distancing in which practitioners would use products possibly acquired as Tibetan Singing Bowls during Zoom practice.
Considering the unborn nature of the ultimate teaching of Buddhism how to present it to audiences is a substantial of the Buddhist Teaching - not only the Sutras of the Buddha start with Ananda proclaiming - thus have I heard and describing the setting and the audience to which the Buddha was speaking to. The concept of skillful means is also an important one for some Buddhist traditions.
Considering the limitations and the challenges of the interface between the Dharma and the western world I explored a system that uses a transducer to transform a Singing Bowl into a speaker to recite the Heart Sutra as read by the Google Translate text to speech system.
Week 1
Post #1 : Technological Awe: 1 Paragraph - Awe: is defined as a feeling of great respect sometimes mixed with fear or surprise, and is most often associated with religion or nature. Please write about a piece of technology or an experience intersecting with tech that inspired a sense of awe for you.
I am not particularly interested in VR but it does have a type of gravity in my life, both work related and personal. On the personal aspects I can find many instances of enjoyment like playing Tetris Effect or VR Tai Chi but there is one extremely poplar VR game that I can hardly spend a couple minutes on.
I come from a music background so I would love to be able to enjoy the popularity of the music based game Beat Saber. But for some reason as soon as I get into the playing environment I am overwhelmed by a sense of fear, amusement and lack of protection. Just looking into the image of this monumental triangle reminds me of the chills.
POST #2: 1 Paragraph Response to Week 1 Reading/Media
READ: Dr. David O’Hara’s The Mystical Side of A.I. and How Robot Priests Will Change Human Spirituality
READ: Can A Robot Be Jewish?
READ: On Sophia Can a Robot Join the Faith? (or bypass the paywall at Flipster via NYU Library November 13, 2017),
READ (1 of your choice): Does the robot-citizen of Saudi Arabia, Sophia, have more rights than women there?, OR Saudi Arabia’s robot citizen is eroding human rights, OR Saudi Arabia, which denies women equal rights, makes a robot a citizen
WATCH: Doomsday Book Chapter 2 (only the 2nd of 3 short films) - free with ads on YouTube or paywalled on Amazon Prime or 1 physical copy at Bobst for checkout
READ: On Animism In Japan Why Are Robots Part of Religion In Japan? and Spiritual robots: Religion and our scientific view of the natural world (focus on the section “Industrial religion in Japanese robotics”)
Text 1 - The Mystical Side of A.I.
”First, can a machine have a private experience that is important to the machine but that it is reluctant to talk about with others? Second, could a machine have a private experience of the divine? Third, could that experience make a machine into something like a prophet?”
”As our technology grows, it allows us to “see” deeper and deeper into the structure of the natural world. Is it possible that just as technology that imitated the eye has allowed us to see what the eye could not see, so technology that imitates the mind will allow us to perceive what the mind cannot perceive?”
“If that’s the case, perhaps robots could give us new perspectives on some of the big problems we have been wrestling with for millennia. Maybe they could accelerate human progress. Maybe there are ethical principles that are the “rules” of the ethical ecosystem that we live in, rules that we have failed to perceive because we’ve lacked the lenses we’ve needed — until now.”
I personally don`t enjoy the understanding that meeting God as the end all Mystical experience. When the author mentions ethical principles and rules of an ethical ecosystem that seems to be more coherent to a mystical experience than simply relating to a God.
Maybe the true mystical experience might be even beyond the experiences the Gods have themselves, it might relate to being able to see the fabric that constitutes our experiences it self and realize the arbitrary, luminous nature of this phenomena.
Text 2 - How Robot Priests Will Change Human Spirituality
”If our tools amplify our intentions, we need to question our motivation for developing robots that automate blessings, hearing confession, or chanting at a funeral.”
“machines are tools we have made, and to various degrees, they already “make arguments move around.” “
“The function of machines is the result of their design, even if the designers did not intend that function.”
To think about intention as some that one cultivates instead of something that one declares with words might be beneficial for this discussion. The fact that our whole society has motivations and intentions that are engrained into the building of these tools already points that manifestation of these tools in a certain direction.
Can a computer at this day and age of post-colonial, neoliberal, white supremacist reality be programed to manifest other priorities than these?
Text 3 - https://momentmag.com/ask-the-rabbis-can-a-robot-be-jewish/
It is definitely interesting to see the identity question of being of not being a Jewish being discussed since in this case they see it as definite identity that does intrinsically exist and has its own specific of manifestations.
In the Buddha Dharma world I think there are mentions of Padmasambhava, the teacher that brought Buddhism to Tibet, making local non-human beings vow to protect the teachings of the Buddha. Could a robot produced by unwholesome intentions be made to take Buddhist vows?
“At the top are the actual proprietors of the land, the bdag po, the “lords.” These are mainly mountain gods such as Magyal Pomra, the nyen or mountain god of the Amnye Machen Range. Nyenchen Thanglha, who rules over another vast range of mountains, is his equal.
These beings were converted to Buddhism by Padmasambhava, the great tantric Buddhist magician from Central Asia. Since their conversion somewhere around the eighth century AD, they have practiced meditation and accumulated merit. Many of them are now advanced bodhisattvas dwelling in a state near enlightenment, but even though they are now like great bodhisattvas at the tenth stage, they still maintain their native wrathful forms when appearing in the human realm. They are accompanied by retinues of spectral, armed horsemen and their courts in their vast palaces are still filled with native Tibetan demons and divine peers.”
From: https://www.lionsroar.com/gods-demons-sages-and-enlightened-kings/
Text 4 - Can a Robot Join the Faith?
“According to its official Web site, Neom will be an “aspirational society that heralds the future of human civilization,” which means, of course, that it will be operated and inhabited by armies of artificially intelligent bots. “
“Her creator, David Hanson, an alum of Disney, is the kind of person who throws around such phrases as “framework for computational compassion.”
“Amid the oohing and aahing about Sophia’s uncannily lifelike appearance—she was modelled after Audrey Hepburn, an homage slightly complicated by her built-in neck zipper—there were several objections.”
“For a Christian thinker such as Kierkegaard, the facts of religious truth are supported not by proof but by passion. Reason and logic, and the ability to improve in those capacities, can be hindrances to true belief. A leap forward in intelligence, especially of the machine-learned variety, may render the Kierkegaardian leap of faith that much more difficult, if not impossible.”
“Perhaps you’ve heard of the apocalyptic cult, cultivated among technologists, that centers on the doctrine of the Singularity—the belief, as Jaron Lanier once described it, that “one day in the not-so-distant future, the Internet will suddenly coalesce into a super-intelligent A.I., infinitely smarter than any of us individually and all of us combined; it will become alive in the blink of an eye, and take over the world before humans even realize what’s happening.” (At a recent Singularity summit, it was prophesied that this Rapture-like moment would happen around 2040.)”
The framework for computational compassion The point for computational compassion is an interesting one. The idea that both wisdom and compassion are necessary to clarify ones delusions brings up the importance of method in the path of realizing the nature of reality. The method itself is empty and doesn`t mean anything in particular to the enlightened being be he might still rigorously perform the method as a way to communicate with the deluded mind of his disciples.
Text 5 - Does the robot-citizen of Saudi Arabia, Sophia, have more rights than women there?
“People across the world are pointing out that Sophia has more privileges than the living women in Saudi.”
“So it seems that Sophia doesn't just have more rights than the women of Saudi. The humanoid robot has also escaped the fate of thousands of foreign workers in the country. Sophia the robot might have made history, but she is definitely more privileged than her human counterparts in the nation that has adopted her.”
Text 6 -