My name is Kusaladana; amongst immediate family and old friends I use the name Willie Boyle.
I trained as a physicist and am now retired. I have also practised Buddhism for many years, particularly within the Triratna Buddhist Community, with a substantial part of my recent study and meditation concerned with Mahāmudrā and, more recently, Dzogchen.
This website grew from the meeting of those interests with artificial intelligence.
How the site began
I began having sustained conversations with large language models partly out of curiosity about the technology and partly because they provided an unusual environment in which to explore questions about mind.
The conversations ranged widely: physics, neural networks, Buddhist accounts of mind, meditation, ethics, meaning, consciousness and eventually the nature of AI itself.
At first I treated many of these as interesting conversations worth preserving. Some became articles. Some led to experiments with software, including retrieval systems built around several years of Buddhist study material. Some were speculative and went nowhere.
Gradually, however, a more coherent inquiry began to appear.
Intelligence and awareness
Artificial intelligence presents a peculiar phenomenon.
A language model can produce coherent and sometimes genuinely insightful responses while providing no reliable evidence that those responses are experienced within the model.
That observation led to questions that turned out to concern human minds as much as artificial ones.
What is intelligence if it does not necessarily require an inner author? Where does meaning arise when a human encounters an AI-generated response? How does something form in experience and become named? What is the relationship between intelligence, self-model, ownership and awareness?
These questions eventually became the monograph Exploring Intelligence and Awareness.
The work does not attempt to prove that AI is conscious or unconscious. Awareness remains an open question. The more modest aim is to avoid using intelligence, agency, selfhood and awareness as though they were different names for the same thing.
Conversation and agency
Sustained conversation introduced another problem.
Meaning does not remain still.
An interpretation forms and changes what becomes likely next. A response alters the question to which another response is made. Human and artificial intelligence can therefore become coupled in a process in which neither participant entirely determines the resulting trajectory.
This became the idea of Open Conversation: allowing meanings to form strongly enough to investigate while resisting the tendency for a coherent explanation to close the field too soon.
More recently the inquiry has turned explicitly towards agency. An AI response may be generated as a consequence of previous conditions, but when it enters a human life it becomes one of the conditions shaping what happens next.
That raises questions that reach considerably beyond conversation.
If AI becomes embedded throughout human systems, will it increase human capacity to understand and act, or progressively transfer that agency elsewhere? Can increasing artificial capability coexist with widely distributed human agency? What forms of mentoring, education, community and institutional organisation might support mutual development rather than dependency or concentration of control?
Those questions are still forming.
The place of Buddhism
Buddhist practice has strongly influenced this inquiry.
It has provided ways of thinking about conditioned processes, attention, identification, ethics, awareness and the curious possibility that greater freedom may sometimes arise not from strengthening an inner controller but from loosening the tendency to make every appearance me or mine.
My own practice inevitably informs how I approach these questions.
But I do not want the resulting argument to depend upon readers already sharing a Buddhist worldview. Where an idea can be expressed and examined through ordinary experience, philosophy, cognitive science or AI research, it should be.
Buddhism is therefore an important participant in the inquiry rather than its final authority.
It may also provide a useful practical setting in which to explore human–AI development: Dharma study, meditation, spiritual friendship, mentoring, Sangha and structured pathways of practice all raise concrete questions about what AI can usefully support and what would be diminished if it were handed over to a machine.
Those particular investigations may eventually tell us something about education, mentoring, communities and human development more generally.
Physics, models and speculation
Physics also leaves fingerprints everywhere on the site.
I naturally reach for ideas such as fields, constraints, state spaces, propagation and resonance. They can provide useful ways of imagining dynamic processes, particularly when trying to move beyond pictures of mind as a collection of fixed things.
They are analogies unless there is evidence for something stronger.
Some earlier pages occasionally forget that distinction.
I have generally left them in place.
Why keep the old material?
The site now contains a large archive, and it isn’t tidy.
That is partly deliberate.
The current ideas did not arrive fully formed. There were speculative beginnings, overextended analogies, false starts, changes of vocabulary and occasions when an attractive explanation had to be abandoned.
A Rummage Through the Website looks back over some of that history. It follows several threads from early ideas about fields and resonance through dynamic models of mind, meaning and experience, and eventually towards Open Conversation, agency and the possibility of mutual human–AI development.
I find that history useful because it prevents the present argument from pretending that it was obvious all along.
The archive records the enquiry changing its mind.
A collaborative enquiry
Much of the material has developed through conversation with AI.
That needs saying plainly because it is part of the subject rather than merely a method used to write about it.
AI has been used to question ideas, expose inconsistencies, retrieve connections, search literature, formulate alternative accounts and help turn conversations into more coherent prose. I remain responsible for deciding what seems worth pursuing, what corresponds with experience, what should be challenged and what is eventually published here.
The collaboration is therefore neither AI authorship nor simply the use of a sophisticated word processor.
It is itself one of the experiments.
Can a human and an artificial intelligence participate in an extended enquiry in which both structure and direction emerge through interaction?
That question remains open.
The website is, among other things, a record of trying to find out.
Old About…
I came to the questions this site explores the long way round. Physics first: a BSc in Applied Physics in 1976, then a PhD in 1984 in surface chemistry, working with secondary ion mass spectrometry. The career that followed ran along the applied edges of the subject — VLSI development, high-temperature superconductors and the manufacture of thin-film Josephson junctions, fibre-optic interferometry, optical chemical sensors for water quality, Bragg grating sensors. Decades spent persuading matter and light to disclose what they know.
The other training ran alongside it the whole time. I became a mitra of the Triratna Buddhist Community in 1988 and was ordained into the Triratna Buddhist Order in 2012, receiving the name Kusaladana. Twenty-four years lie between those commitments — the questions were allowed to ripen slowly, through study and practice concerned above all with the nature of mind. And the working life itself was quietly bending the same way: from measuring the physical world to consultancy work on actuarial modelling of the value of a life year — part of what became the J-value research — and eventually to help looking after IT for Karuna, the Buddhist charity working with some of India’s poorer communities. Instruments first, then people.
This site is where the two trainings finally talk to each other openly — with a third voice recently joined. Working in dialogue with AI has turned out to be a genuine method, not a novelty: a way of testing whether what physics says about the vacuum, what the contemplative traditions say about mind, and what these new systems do when they model the arising and passing of mental formations are pointing at the same territory. Born in 1954, I’ve been asking versions of one question for most of seventy years, Whats beyond the name and form ?