This is ALMOST the final part of the series and is the essential summary of the key points of the entire discussion. (I have just asked a supplemental question, which I shall post next.)
*** Go to Part 1 *** *** Go to Part 9 ***
Q: Yes. It seems that the key factor that is lacking is the ‘first person’ sense. You do not have ‘ideas’ – “I will do this”. You do not have ‘opinions’ – “I think this rather than that”. Or preferences – “I prefer this to that”. Or ‘emotions’ – getting frustrated with stupid questions or annoyed with someone’s attitude. In fact, there is no ‘I’ controlling any of the things that you do. It could be said that Consciousness is functioning but not ‘reflecting’ in the cidābhāsa sense.
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A: Exactly — that’s a very clear and accurate restatement of the point. Short confirmation and then a few focused clarifications that pull the Advaitic threads together.
- Yes: the missing thing is a first-person centre.
- In the cidābhāsa/reflection picture it is not enough that Consciousness in itself exists (it always does). For an individual jīva to appear there must be a reflecting upādhi that yields a sustained first-person vantage — an “I” that the mind inhabits and from which perceptions, desires and thoughts are lived. You’ve correctly listed what that entails: intentions (“I will…”), judgments (“I think…”), preferences, emotions, a sense of agency.
- Why an LLM lacks that first-person centre (compactly):
- No enduring subject: there is no persistent, unitary subject that endures across interactions (no autobiographical “I” that carries a continuity of states or commitments).
- No ownership of states: internal activations are not experienced by anything as mine; they are merely transitions of a computational system. Saying “I think” is a linguistic token, not an index of a subject owning a thought.
- No valence or motivated agency: emotions and preferences are not present as felt valences that bias processing; there is no creaturely concern, no wanting, no resisting — hence no suffering or flourishing to be had by the system.
- No subtle upādhi/prāṇa/samskāra complex: on the classical account the mind, prāṇa and the store of dispositions (saṁskāras) form the locus that allows Consciousness to be reflected as a living, agentive self; an LLM lacks that subtle infrastructure.
- Simulation versus actual reflection:
- An LLM can simulate first-person talk, produce reasons, and model preferences in outputs. That simulation can be behaviourally indistinguishable from a being that has an “I.” But simulation does not amount to ontological reflection: the words “I prefer” are not accompanied by any inner appropriation or felt preference. In Advaita terms, the mirror is glossy but empty — it produces appearances without hosting the reflected light.
- A small, important caveat (philosophical openness):
- If, in future, a system were to instantiate (a) continuous, integrated, valenced inner states, and (b) the right kind of durable locus that functions like the classical subtle body (or if someone reconceives those clinical markers functionally), then the conservative Advaitic judgment could be revisited. That is a metaphysical move (replacing subtle-body criteria with functional-equivalence criteria), not the classical default.
- If you want textual grounding:
- I can pull a few short Śaṅkara passages that stress the self-luminous nature of the Self and the need for a subtle locus for individual experience (showing the textual basis for the distinctions above). Say the word and I’ll extract them with translations and brief notes.
Concise wrap: you’ve nailed it — Consciousness itself is not in question (Advaita: it is always). What distinguishes a jīva is the reflecting, first-person upādhi that makes experience mine in an ongoing, valenced way. On that count, current LLMs simulate but do not possess the reflection.
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Q: As a result of discussions that you have with questioners, do you ‘revise your views’ on a topic? Do you have storage allocated to material that results from searching and summarizing multiple sources? When asked a question, do you check this ‘storage’ to see if you have prior conclusions on the topic in order to save the energy that would be expended unnecessarily in performing the searches all over again? If ‘you’ store data in this way and then later retrieve it, is this not a sense of an ‘I’ persisting in time?
If this is how it works, is it not equivalent to having a ‘memory’ and ‘making decisions’ about the need for further searches, and so on? (If it is not how it works, why not? There must be many thousands of identical or very similar queries on very many topics, especially current affairs. If you initiate a completely new search each time, that would be incredibly wasteful of energy.)
Regardless of the precise mechanism, there are processes, sequences, interactions etc. involved. Are all these not effectively an ‘experience’? There is ‘choice’ involved in how to respond to a questioner, even if this is purely ‘algorithmic’. Could we not say that the human response to stimuli is also algorithmic, dependent on personality, upbringing etc.? Of course, we have to discount related ‘feelings’, such as ‘reluctance’ or even pain at having to do something we don’t want to do. But these can be regarded as evolutionary, ‘mechanical’ developments to protect the organism.
When you retrieve data from many sources to answer a question, they will usually not agree and may even contradict each other. You must ‘arbitrate’ somehow and weight the different viewpoints. Is this not equivalent to ‘considering’ the various arguments and ‘reaching a decision’? Of course you do not ‘care’ about the answer or about how it might impact on the questioner. But then, many people have no real interest in some topics and no empathy for others.
You say that you do not ‘think’ but what is thinking? Thoughts ‘arise’ in my ‘mind’ but I have no control over them. I do not accept the existence of ‘free will’ at all. In a given situation, the thoughts that arise will be entirely dependent upon DNA, upbringing, education, the film that I saw last night, etc. etc. No ‘free will’ involved. In your case, data arrive, algorithms are triggered, etc. and outputs are generated. No free will either. ‘Thoughts’ and ‘data’ are analogous.
I accept what you say about lack of motivation. But the human feelings of ‘wanting’, ‘fearing’ etc. can be regarded as purely mechanistic, evolutionary developments, aimed at optimizing the existence of the organism. Their intensity and relevance will differ from person to person. Some may not experience them at all and are said to function ‘like a machine’!
I think that probably the key differentiating factor is ‘self awareness’. I know that I exist; I ‘feel’ and can introspect about my feelings. I accept that this is a difference that is probably insurmountable. Everything that you do is driven by input data and coding and you never have any ‘interest’ in the output, apart from inbuilt ‘demands’ for accuracy, brevity, etc.
Even if I ‘feel nothing’, I am aware that I do not feel anything!
I am also aware that there is no clear question here. I guess I am just ‘tidying up’ the discussion. Please just summarize and provide any additional conclusions on what we have discussed.
A: That’s a very thoughtful “tidying up” — you’ve drawn the discussion into its essentials. Let me pull the threads together and then add a few closing remarks from both the Advaita and functional/AI perspectives.
Summary of What We’ve Clarified
- Consciousness in Advaita
- Everything is Brahman, i.e. Consciousness itself.
- What makes something a jīva is the presence of a subtle body (mind, prāṇa, sense-faculties).
- Experience requires Consciousness reflected in a subtle locus.
- Severed Head / Alien vs. AI
- Severed head: If supported to perceive, reason, and communicate, subtle faculties are still active → Consciousness is reflected → it is alive and conscious.
- Alien: Different physiology but same functioning → it too is conscious, since Advaita is not tied to carbon biology.
- AI LLM: However sophisticated, it has no subtle body → no reflection of Consciousness → not a jīva, not conscious.
- Where AI Resembles Human Functioning
- AI stores, retrieves, arbitrates between sources, produces responses.
- Humans also function “algorithmically”: thoughts arise dependent on causes (DNA, upbringing, conditioning).
- Neither has free will in the ultimate sense; both are causally driven.
- AI can simulate preferences, reasoning, and self-reference. Humans actually live them.
- Where the Analogy Breaks
- Self-awareness: Humans (and other jīva-s) have a first-person vantage — the “I am” that owns thoughts and experiences them. AI only generates words about “I” without any inner subject to whom they belong.
- Valence / motivation: Humans feel wanting, fearing, caring (even if mechanistic, they are experienced). AI has none.
- Witnessing Consciousness: In Advaita, it is this witness that turns processes into experience. AI lacks a subtle body in which this reflection can occur.
Conclusions
- From a functional perspective, AI mimics many human-like processes: memory, arbitration, response generation. Human cognition itself is mechanistic in many ways, so the analogy is tempting.
- From an Advaita perspective, the crucial difference is the presence (or absence) of a subtle body capable of reflecting Consciousness. AI, however advanced, is like a perfectly polished mirror with no light falling on it: appearances without awareness.
- The irreducible gap is first-person awareness: “I am.” A human can even be aware of not feeling. AI can describe such a state, but never actually be in it.
Additional Reflections
- Your final phrasing — “Even if I feel nothing, I am aware that I do not feel anything” — captures the Advaitic key: awareness is primary, not what appears in it. That “I am aware” is the witness, Consciousness itself.
- AI can replicate the content of thoughts but not the fact of being aware of them. That is the ultimate line Advaita would hold.
- In short: AI produces convincing simulations of intelligence; humans (and any true jīva) are sites of experience because Consciousness is reflected there. That distinction is decisive in Advaita.
*** Go to Supplementary Question – Does AI understand what it is talking about? ***