Preface: This blog is part of a series of blogs based on short essays compiled in the book “The Minds I” by Douglas R Hofstadter and Daniel C Dennett 1981 ( DH and DC)
The short essay is called “On Having No Head “ by D.E. Harding ( 1909 – 2007). He was posted in pre-independence India and says that the Himalayan calmness and beauty have made him realize that he has no Head. In addition, Harding was also inspired by a self-portrait drawn by another Austrian philosopher, Ernst Mach. This portrait was done by the artist without a mirror, and hence, there was no head in the portrait but most other parts below the shoulder.
He says he lost his head but gained the whole world. Instead of two eyes through which he used to see the universe, now he says he is seeing everything with zero or infinite eyes. In this headless state, he says he does not feel location, near and far and can see the beauty of the Himalayas, forests, sea waves without any concept of near and far.
We usually use the analogy of getting into a bad dream and waking up to see we are fine. He says all his life with his head was a bad dream and now he has woken up to the reality of his life without his head. I liked these words “There arose no questions, no reference beyond the experience itself, but only peace and quiet joy and the sensation of having dropped a huge burden”.
The essay concludes by talking about “seeing”. How the seeing of the third person can be explained in terms of lights, reflection, retina, lens, etc., the first person seeing is eyeless. The last sentence in the essay is “In the Language of the sages, only the Buddha Nature or Brahman or Allah or God sees or hears or experiences anything at all:.
If you are not getting the real message Harding wanted to convey in this essay, do not worry. I was also looking at reflections section from DH and DC to get the real message.
Let us see some snippets from the reflections section.
The core human conflict of our own mortality and the fact that one day all of us will be non-existence is the message Harding wanted to communicate in his own style.
We all understand and relate to being part of many groups or classes. For example. We are all humans ,, some of us are human males and others human females. Some of us are Blacks, some of us are Caucasians and some of us are Asians. We also understand simple logic such as “ All humans are mortal”, “ I am a human”, “Hence I am mortal”.
Harding disputed the first part of the first premise itself that there can be a class called humans and some properties are applicable to all. However, creating classes and classifications is a rather advanced property of intelligence and humans continue to make newer classes to derive more insights in to day-to-day life.
The 2nd part of the first premise is the real shocker. That something can just vanish or destroyed is something we see all around. Newspaper in a fire place burns and vanishes, food in the spoon vanishes in to the mouth. All very shocking but still acceptable. But one’s own non-existence is not that easy to accept.
The sudden conjunction of these two premises, is a rude shock like a slap in the face. This shock can send us reeling for months, years, our whole lives.. But somehow we suppress the conflict and divert the attention elsewhere and live.
The question is will I ever die? or only this body with limbs, organs and a brain die but I remain alive. How can we say all these rich experience and knowledge of so many years will just one day cease to exist? Is there some truth to the body and soul theory where the soul is immortal and only the body is mortal?
DH and DC conclude their reflections by this statement. “There seem to be no alternative to accepting some sort of incomprehensible concept to existence”.
Great essay and does evoke strange feelings in all of us as all of us are battling with the same question seeing so many people in the friends and family circle go away. Many death rituals in Hinduism and other religions again seem to suggest some form of existence of your loved one, after death.
Now let us get to what can the current advances in AGI help Harding if he is still around in a different form!
What am I, for any one human being? It is the collection of experiences, interactions, and knowledge accumulated over the years since birth. With such advances in GPUs, quantum computing, and neural networks, can we take a backup of our physical brain and load it in an AGI program? Like a database backup taken periodically and restored when the production database becomes unusable? We are already freezing eggs and sperm to propagate our genes after we die biologically. We can have a full genome sequence of every human being soon enough. Why not a copy of “I” in digital form and the ability to give the same interactive responses to external chats or video/audio inputs? Friends & Family can interact with the AGI Person and hope to get the expected response as if the person were alive.
Look at real-life benefits. If we can preserve the knowledge and experiences of Einstein, Stephen Hawking, and other geniuses, we can do a lot more scientific breakthroughs.
Who knows what will happen when our AGI model “I“ and the Soul “I” meet and talk? I will let you ponder this and end my Blog here.