HOME
An invitation to enquiry
This site began as a collection of conversations with AI around mind, meaning, Buddhist practice, physics and artificial intelligence. Over roughly two years those conversations have accumulated, wandered, contradicted one another and gradually developed into a more sustained inquiry.
The work is still exploratory. Some of the earlier pieces push physical or mathematical analogies further than I now would. Others contain ideas that subsequently changed considerably or disappeared. I have left much of that material on the site because the development of the questions seems at least as interesting as presenting only the conclusions.
A good place to see that development is A Rummage Through the Website. It looks back through the archive and follows some of the ideas that survived, changed their names, or turned out to be useful stepping stones towards something rather different.
The inquiry as it now stands
A central question has gradually emerged:
What happens when human awareness encounters artificial intelligence, and what kinds of relationship might develop between them?
The first part of the inquiry concerns meaning, intelligence and awareness. A language model can produce remarkably intelligent responses without this establishing that anything is experienced within the model. That makes it useful for asking some surprisingly old questions afresh. Where does meaning happen? Does intelligence require an inner author? What is the relationship between an appearance, the name we give it, the sense that it is mine, and the awareness in which any of this is experienced?
These questions led to the monograph Exploring Intelligence and Awareness.
The inquiry then moves from states to dynamics. Meanings form, acquire conceptual grip, influence what follows, become disturbed and sometimes reopen. In conversation, human and artificial intelligence participate together in this movement. Each response changes the conditions from which the next response arises.
This is the territory of Open Conversation: how differently constituted intelligences might think together without prematurely closing the field from which understanding develops.
More recently another question has become difficult to avoid: agency. An AI response does not merely contain information. It can change what a human notices, understands and subsequently does. Increasingly, artificial systems can also use tools and act more directly in the world.
The inquiry therefore begins to widen again. How might human and artificial intelligence develop together? What happens when AI becomes embedded in mentoring, learning, communities, organisations and eventually society? And where does the additional agency created by artificial intelligence go?
One possibility seems particularly important: AI might contribute to increasingly capable collective systems while widely distributing rather than unnecessarily concentrating effective human agency.
These are questions rather than conclusions.
Three books
The present work can provisionally be seen as three related movements.
Exploring Intelligence and Awareness asks:
Where does meaning happen?
It examines structural, referential and experiencing meaning and distinguishes intelligence, attention, self-model, ownership, agency and awareness.
Open Conversation — AI, Attention and the Widening of Human Meaning asks:
How does meaning develop between intelligences?
It follows forming and naming into dynamics: focus and breadth, propagation, conceptual grip, perturbation, closure and reopening.
A possible third book is only beginning to take shape. Its question may be:
How might human and artificial intelligence develop agency together?
That takes the inquiry towards mentoring and education, communities and institutions, and eventually towards the place of AI within evolving human societies.
A speculative review of this larger direction can be found in Intelligence, Awareness and Agency.
Buddhism, science and direct experience
Buddhist thought and practice have contributed substantially to the development of these ideas, particularly around attention, conditioning, ownership, ethics, awareness and the possibility of greater freedom with less identification.
But this is not intended to require a Buddhist perspective from the reader.
Where possible, the ideas are expressed in ordinary experiential, scientific and philosophical language and allowed to stand or fall there. Buddhism remains an important source of questions, models and practices rather than an authority that settles the argument.
My background in physics also inevitably shapes the inquiry. Fields, constraints, propagation, resonance and state spaces recur throughout the earlier pieces. Sometimes these are useful models; sometimes the analogy has plainly been pushed too far. Part of the development recorded on this site has been learning the difference.
How to explore the site
There is no single correct route through the material.
If you want the current argument, begin with Exploring Intelligence and Awareness, the work on Open Conversation, and the more recent pieces on agency.
If you want to know how the ideas developed, begin with A Rummage Through the Website and follow its links backwards into the conversations and articles.
If you are interested in Buddhist practice and AI, the Mahāmudrā and Nature of Mind material records a long-running experiment in using AI alongside several years of study and meditation.
And if you simply enjoy following questions before anyone knows where they lead, the Conversations may be the best place to start.
The complete Index of Pages remains available for anyone who wants to rummage independently.
This site is not a record of conclusions reached.
It is a record of an enquiry still under way.