It’s true that an untrained mind may be a forever vulnerable system which exploits can hijack. I’ve personally suffered from many of these sorts of exploits–whether driven by my own reactive patterns, or algorhythimic systems–for most of my adult life, then a few years ago I discovered meditation.
Noted Western Buddhist teacher Ken McLeod defines this exact phenomenon as ‘mind-killing’:
Mind-killing is the use of your own patterns of emotional reaction to lead you to do what another person, a system, or even your own patterns of reaction want you to do.
Meditation practice works a lot like how you describe the AI problem above:
When you have access to both perception and action, you’re looking at an AI problem. You can start establishing an optimization loop for human behavior, in which you observe the current state of your targets and keep tuning what information you feed them, until you start observing the opinions and behaviors you wanted to see. A large subset of the field of AI — in particular “reinforcement learning” — is about developing algorithms to solve such optimization problems as efficiently as possible, to close the loop and achieve full control of the target at hand — in this case, us. By moving our lives to the digital realm, we become vulnerable to that which rules it — AI algorithms.
When we practice developing our capacity for mindfulness and concentration it is the individual’s attention–not AI algorithms–that is calibrated to become aware of increasing nuance while parsing experience. As a meditation practice matures, the individual’s capacity for attention increases, as attention increases, so does the individual’s functional agency. The more stable attention becomes, the more of the spectrum of experience become noticeable. The greater the awareness of their complete experience and individual has, the more opportunities appear to choose to think, speak and act out of their own intentions, motivated by their personal values, and the less they trundle through life, hijacked, ideologically possessed, mind-killed–basically on autopiolot.
I dispute the highlighted claim based on my experience: this kind of change dosen’t happen over night, nor has it been easy or comfortable, but it is certainly possible. If you are interested in more detail, I’ve shared a number of personal stories about how this process has helped me take responsibility for experience itself and transform my life over at Practice comes first.
Thank you for this very important piece François, I appreciate the clarity and cogency of your arguments.
