AI時代に心を探究する（近代の移譲と縄文）Exploring the Mind in the Age of AI

AI, unmanned automation, and the violent societal turmoil and systemic collapse that accompany them. We live amidst a vortex of unprecedented crisis occurring on a global scale; yet, humans are strange creatures—given enough time, we become accustomed to any situation, however fortunate or dire. Nevertheless, by passing through this world of upheaval, I believe the hints regarding the inquiry of how one ought to live, and what one ought to accomplish in this era, have become far more visible than they were even a year ago.

First, as a fundamental premise, the debate over whether AI has acquired a mind is nothing more than a waste of time. This is because the argument leaps too far, tending to place the human being, without reflection, in a position of excessive nobility. If we think calmly, it is obvious that we humans could never judge the moment an AI acquires a mind. We simply do not possess such a rigid yardstick. In fact, can you articulate with clarity what your own mind is? Or could you speak of a definition of the mind agreed upon on a planetary scale? Regrettably, humanity holds no such power. To a species that cannot realize even a single instance of world peace, the elucidation of the problem of the mind is impossible.

Regarding the mind, since even science—advanced to this high degree—cannot offer an answer, the only truth that can be posited is that while we can assert with certainty that "something resembling a mind" exists for us, we do not yet know what it is, and all answers are provisional. It is a law of the modern era that we have no choice but to pursue this provisional answer age by age; however, any superior scientist today should have realized the fact that the scientifically pursued answer already exists within the wisdom of the ancients around the world. Indeed, the saints and sages of antiquity had already philosophically examined the core of the mind—which may be said to be the greatest inquiry for us—and demonstrated it with magnificent clarity.

This is an intuition I hold while exploring the Jomon period, the ancient stratum of Japan: people who lived in antiquity, like the Jomon people, must have been able to fully utilize faculties and techniques that we would call telepathy. That is to say, without engaging in information negotiation or the exchange of wisdom through direct, physical contact, they were able to instantly access a consciousness of a different dimension from where they stood, and from there, draw down and utilize cosmic wisdom. And because that wisdom is the true universal, if the Jomon tribes scattered across Japan utilized this faculty and technique to access it individually, they could utilize the same wisdom without holding direct negotiations. Particularly in the communal dimension—for example, the immersion into altered states through rituals performed at the winter solstice—must have been a momentous occasion where ancient tribes scattered across Japan accessed a common dimension simultaneously. At this time, we cannot say this applied to ancient tribes scattered across the world because the time the sun rises differs, but it is certain that they accessed a common dimension within the same single day. On the other hand, regarding the actual act of utilizing this wisdom, the regulations of the place where the tribe lives are inevitably involved, necessarily forming a uniqueness distinct to each location. In other words, even if they accessed the same realm and drew down the same wisdom, the actual action differs by location, meaning that differences between tribes are generated by necessity.

I feel strongly, now that the AI era is accelerating, that this obscure intuition I have felt personally from my investigation of the Jomon period is unexpectedly not incorrect. What is recalled here is that the philosopher Kitaro Nishida once proposed zettai mujunteki jiko doitsu (絶対矛盾的自己同一), "absolute contradictory self-identity," and defined it as "Life is absolute contradictory self-identity." In Nishida’s world, the past and the future bind together in the present through mutual negation, and the world forms itself as a single present; it is conceived as something infinitely produced from the created to the creating. I will continue my speculation with this as a standard.

What is astonishing is that we have already come to know, to a significant extent, the good aspects and the bad aspects of the qualities possessed by AI, and we are already classifying them, albeit unconsciously. Regarding the understanding there, I feel we are in agreement at a very high level. However, the problem is that the focal point of the discussion remains obsessed, as always, with the binary structure of "looking at the bad side or looking at the good side." To speak clearly, the good and the bad are ultimately one; to polarize and classify them, and to exclude one side, is out of the question and cannot be called an attitude befitting a human of the modern day. Furthermore, in a contemporary world permeated by AI, we must not set the focal point on "whether AI has a mind or not," but rather place the axis on the exploration of our own minds. Conversely, it can be said that the rise of AI and automation is compelling us to face this inquiry with all our might. That is the final inviolable territory (for now).

In my personal insight, humans were once able to utilize the mind purely. However, as history passed, the specific range of motion of that mind gradually narrowed and was lost. Yet, when I say lost, it does not mean it vanished. It means that, so to speak, it is there, but we can no longer perceive it, no longer utilize it. I believe that the process by which the human being—in the sense that we speak of it—was established lies precisely in this phenomenon of the loss of the mind’s range of motion; therefore, if asked whether modern people and Jomon people are the same humans, I posit that they are different. This is because the mind in the Jomon dimension is nearly equal to life in the existence of nature itself. Strictly speaking, a "fluctuation" is arising there, but at least there is no distinction between nature and man as presupposed by people today. Or, perhaps it can be said that it was the initial stage where existence began to tear within an extremely strong tension. However, in the process of entering the civilizational dimension from here, the range of motion of the mind, which was infinitely utilizable in antiquity, was steadily lost and discarded. I used the expression "discarded" here because there was a process wherein nature and man separated in existence. That is, by existence being torn from nature itself, there was a process of human separation. What is most critical is that while we play the role of the most developed civilized people, the separation from natural existence that occurred in this temporal process is constantly carried forward as a problem of the mind. Here lies the grave issue of the mind. There was a historical movement where the mind was steadily aggregated into the human, and further into the individual; if we dare to verbalize it, it is the production of the existence called "self," which surfaces reactionarily by steadily abandoning the mind from total existence.

In other words, in the process of establishing the self, humans have largely lost the "something" that they themselves possessed within the mind. To put it differently, as humans moved toward individual existence, they had to discard the majority of the mind’s range of motion. Thus, as the price for acquiring the fruit of civilizational development, we have abandoned the profound universe that is the mind. Because this was of such great importance in the history of humanity, in the long history of that mutation, myths, folklore, and folktales were born one after another as thoughts toward that fissure, and toward what was discarded. Therefore, myths, folklore, and folktales are not mere academic materials; they are the unconscious memory of the mind speaking of the "something" that we humans have commonly lost.

Particularly since the modern era, we have lived in times where material civilization has been excessively and extremely honed; to adapt to such an era, humans had to discard almost all of the mind’s range of motion that they had maintained to some extent until then. And in fact, those who executed this first were the ones who held hegemony from the modern era to the present day. The basis for the birth of modern science and taxonomy lies here, but its initial movement is always caused by a transformation in language structure. Based on this, in the world of the present moment situated at the extremity of civilization’s progress, it is important for each of us to firmly hold a perspective on the fact that AI and automation have actually begun to sweep across society. In truth, this phenomenon of the social sweeping of AI and automation was not realized as a positive result in the extension of the modern world, but is actually a reaction against the modern. Indeed, with the social arrival of AI and robots, we have succeeded in substituting the majority of the human exertion we have performed until now. However, because the majority of people mistake the way to grasp this problem, they remain captive to the modern, falling into a state where they cannot deviate from that fiction. In fact, there is a current situation where many people are confused and wandering, but here we can see the reality that those who have halted within the old fiction and become immobile are adhering to empty criticisms of AI. To speak more clearly, they are people who do not know that modern civilization is a fiction.

At the very least, what we can understand at this present juncture is that we are living in a revolutionary era where the majority of "exertion"—not "workforce"—has been substituted. And if the modern ideal, when thought of in the dimension of the individual, was "for the individual to become God," then it means that the majority of what has been upheld as the self in that modern framework has become substitutable. What this signifies is the fact that the modern self is a fabricated fiction, and that it is subject to intervention from the social. In short, a strange contradiction is occurring here. Facing this contradiction and deciding what to do will become an important issue from this year onward, but in fact, the answer is not that difficult. If we look at the phenomenon of substitution from the perspective of Nishida’s "absolute contradictory self-identity," as was self-evident even last year, AI has already substituted the majority; thus, no one can avoid this trend widening further. That is to say, rather than ignoring this point of substitution and cowering in the face of the anxiety of AI, we require an active posture: since the nature of the era is already clear in substitution, we must substitute whatever can be substituted, more and more. And that also means, for us living in the coming era, to view the world while thinking in a manner close to AI. This means that the human, upheld by the modern self, thinks in proximity to AI regarding the majority of the modern world created by modern thought, thereby ultimately transferring (substituting) everything. In other words, the "Transfer of the Modern."

When thinking this way, one can grasp how wide of the mark the mass-produced claims are that AI will conquer human civilization. For I believe that regarding a civilization in a world conquerable by AI, it is preferential to actively transfer it ourselves. And that means ending the folly of continuing fruitful discussions endlessly produced regarding a modernity that never ends, and by transferring modernity itself, transplanting modernity into AI. So to speak, we realize the deviation from and departure of modernity in human civilization by bringing "AI = Modernity" closer together. If we think about things in proximity to AI, and for example, if 80% of the exertion of what one is currently doing can be substituted by AI, we become able to thoroughly refine this "80% we no longer need to use," and furthermore, gain the merit of being able to devote it to inner exploration. In the first place, if we take what we have done until now as 100, the majority of it can already be substituted; thus, we should transfer (substitute) it immediately, and with the surplus power born from that, step out ourselves onto the path of exploring the inquiry of life existence: "What is a human, and what is it to live?" And this change of direction holds a very interesting movement. It is the contradictory return to the ancient. The world of absolute contradictory self-identity proposed about 100 years ago has, at long last, only just begun.

What serves as the greatest reference here is the flow of counter-culture in the United States in the late 60s. We should recall once more that history, where within the hippie culture that passed through the Beatniks, they subsequently split largely into two directions. One path was cyberculture, which, assuming the liberation of access rights to information, redefined the computer from a weapon or tool of management to a tool for expanding the individual spirit. The other path was back-to-the-land, which attempted a departure from industrial society by abandoning the city and creating communes in the country. Of course, the two were not strictly separated and did intersect, but as can be seen in Stewart Brand’s Whole Earth Catalog, the philosophy that tools connected these two currents that were beginning to bifurcate is extremely important. Furthermore, what must not be forgotten here is that in the intersection where tools connected these two paths—and further, in the realm of the mind which was the source where that philosophy manifested—a non-separation had already been realized within them. So to speak, the reality of counter-culture is the reclamation of non-separation against separation, and the reclamation of that non-separation realm is precisely the psychedelic. The current of the Summer of Love, sparked by the appearance of Timothy Leary advocating "Turn on, tune in, drop out," with media theorist Marshall McLuhan mediating at its source, still lives on in this world.

However, when thinking in the dimension of us living in a world some 60 years later, the naive attitude of "splitting into one or the other" is no longer permitted. The extreme choice of choosing one side is still affirmed, and while that may have passed in the world of 60 years ago, it will decidedly not pass in our era. What must be grasped here is that, as an existence integrating these two great split currents, digital nomads are currently rising as a new stratum of people living across borders, with a rapidly growing population. In other words, the movement of this new era’s people called digital nomads, a population more colossal than war refugees, will be the greatest issue of the next generation. What should be understood at this time is that what was common to both sides in the current of those days was that the ultimate destination was set on inner exploration. Moreover, via inner exploration using psychedelic experiences represented by psilocybin and LSD, they possessed a movement trying to realize altered states of consciousness in different forms within computers, or within nature. When we capture this, we can see that we are now standing at the very next bifurcation point. In fact, in recent trends, the legal beginning of the restoration of psychedelic culture in the medical field is a symbolic movement of this current.

These movements are actually deeply intertwined with what is being speculated in this article. What is important is that the flow of counter-culture since the Summer of Love did not occur as separate, disjointed streams, but was executed in different realms while passing through a single common problem consciousness and source as a shared experience. Here, while following in their footsteps, and having reached the first era where we can substitute almost all individual exertion, it becomes important to delegate and substitute the majority, to heighten daily performance, and simultaneously use the freed exertion to do something new one after another, and above all, to create time for inner exploration and live. The key at that time is the exploration of the ancient mind mentioned earlier. In my case, since I am Japanese, I am thinking with "how to access the Jomon people" in mind within ancient Japanese history. This is something I have constantly felt in the process of investigation, but the great failure of archaeology is that it looks only at relics and ignores the problem of the mind. And the important thing is that, unlike archaeological relics, the mind of the ancients never becomes the past. Because the mind never ceases, never vanishes, is never lost, and is always there. The mind remains eternally. The reason we cannot grasp this thing called the mind is that we have not reached the realm where we can access it. That is why 60 years ago, trial and error was conducted to realize it through psilocybin and LSD, further through computers, and through meditation. However, not limited to using psychedelics as a tool, if we can transfer "something"—in short, if we can access it—at that moment, it becomes the Jomon mind itself. At this time, this "something" becomes the problem. And it is not the consciousness that many people think of, nor is it the unconscious. Furthermore, it is not even the collective unconscious proposed by Jung.

Regarding this, I expressed it earlier as "the unconscious memory of the mind speaking of the 'something' that humans have commonly lost," but this true form is an existence that is not the "self" of the illusionary realm in the individual mind. I consider this insight to be the only thing capable of verbalizing the state of altered consciousness in humans caused by the ingestion of psychedelic substances, but to understand it, a detailed consideration of Takaaki Yoshimoto’s thinking on illusion is necessary, and one must head toward the philosophy of Tetsuji Yamamoto who passed through it. The concept that becomes that answer is hi-jiko kankaku (非自己感覚). How exactly to interpret this untranslatable concept? The study of this problem will likely continue to be a major theme within me.