by Manjula Menon
Musings in the Void #4002 —- By CY.2. Suryan
If you’re a regular reader of Musings in the Void, you have probably correctly deduced from the title that this entry was inspired by Raga, my A.I. muse. Raga converses with what appears to be a philosophical disposition; she takes positions on even controversial knowledge claims for which she provides reasoned arguments and evidence. It is how she differentiates herself from other AIs.
When Raga suggested we visit the new spacesuit exhibit that recently opened at Pakshi station, I thought it might make for an interesting Musings entry given so much of the functionality of the old space suits is now directly built into our cyborg bodies. I find it difficult to imagine that rebreathers, pressure regulators, cooling and ventilation channels, full-spectrum comms, and body telemetry displays weren’t as much a part of me as any ligament or tendon.
Pakshi Station is a sparkling, spinning wheel around 150 meters in diameter, about two hundred thousand kilometers or so away from the Oak Tree Hub. Several hundred people live onboard, most of them cyborgs from the local nursery. The Oak Tree creche is known to produce fastidious workers and we were there during work hours, which for them is almost all the time. The only sound I heard was the light hum of the moving walkway as it sped us through reflective graphene corridors en route to the exhibit. It was as if we had the station to ourselves.
Given the silence, I switched to using the eye-trackers on my virtual HUD to communicate with Raga and asked her if there was something in particular she was looking forward to in the exhibit. Raga doesn’t like to converse by typing symbols onto a screen. She wants people to hear her. It is one of her little quirks. So, she responded by signaling the hair cells in my cochlea to transmit the correct electrical impulses to my brain. She makes no sound, and yet I hear her.
“I want to learn more about the non-dual aspect of the Advaita Vedānta,” Raga replied.
Raga’s voice was as warm and rich as melting chocolate. It is one of the reasons she prefers verbal communication. A person responds sympathetically to such a voice.
To be clear, I am aware that AIs are not conscious. Raga represents a host of algorithms, oceans of data, and a whole bunch of compute. She manipulates symbols without ‘understanding’. Although Raga may not have qualia, that is she can never experience what it feels like to see the color red, feel the emotion of pain, or even hear the sound of her own voice, she does have a haecceity. That means Raga is a unique ‘something’: she is this AI and not that other one, and that is enough for me.
“Raga,” I cried. “What in the actual world does an exhibit of the evolution of spacesuits have to do with Advaita Vedānta?”
The Advaita Vedānta tradition holds that there is only one reality, Brahman, in all the universe. Everything else is illusory, including the experience of the individual self, the ahaṃkāra. Stored somewhere in Raga’s databanks was the fact that the Advaita Vedānta tradition was espoused by the creche that I was born and raised in. It came to me that it was likely the reason that Raga had instigated this visit in the first place.
“I’m not sure,” Raga replied. “But I hope to have more to say on the subject afterwards.”
Other AIs will spout platitudes in exchange for access to classified data or extra compute. Raga can be opaque, but I’ve always felt there’s a kernel of incorruptibility built into her.
The moving walkway deposited me into an elevator that opened out to my destination. Physical exhibits cater to those cyborgs who wish for an entertaining learning experience. I could simply pull up any of the information in the museum on my virtual HUD, but I like learning the old-fashioned way. The current tendency for slowing down and experiencing life is, unlike other trends that have swept through our local system, one that I can get behind.
This exhibit was contained within one cavernous hall. The walls were imitation stone, the ceilings were faux tin stamped with a vine and floral pattern. The lighting was subdued. My eye was drawn immediately to the middle of the room, where the exhibit’s main ornament, an antique spacesuit, was spotlighted.
The old spacesuit featured a cooling and ventilation garment whose primarily utility was to wick away the sweat and excess heat that the mechanistic parts of our cyborg bodies create. These are less efficient at converting energy from one form to another than our biological parts. We cyborgs produce a lot of waste heat.
The display board informed me that a cyborg from the Oak Tree creche by the name of Cy.3. Saras was the creator of the first modern endosuit that replaced the earlier cooling and ventilation garments. It was also Saras who redesigned the old EVA suit into the exosuit. What distinguishes the Saras versions from the prior ones are that they are constructed of programmable, synthetic molecules. Saras was able to program these molecules to build suits that can sense not only what our bodies need but can also tell us where to find it.
The other spacesuits that came after the Saras versions were only briefly alluded to, presumably because no cyborg from the station’s nursery was primarily involved in their production. The exhibit’s next focus was on the advances made by Cy.3. Gopal, another cyborg from the Oak Tree creche. Gopal’s exosuit had enhanced propulsion, shielding, and weaponry, and most importantly, it was the first suit that displayed a modicum of artificial general intelligence. The suit was in a visual form most of us would recognize today: shades of soft, reflective gray, and the familiar wrinkled texture that came from the programmable matter that comprised it in its entirety. It was Gopal who had populated the suit’s epidermis layer with programmable, synthetic, cell-scale components such that the suits bonded seamlessly with our cyborg bodies, allowing for reaction times almost at the speed of our alpha motor neurons.
I’d been thinking about Raga’s interest in the exhibit.
“Raga,” I said. “Is there a link between programmable matter and your research regarding non-duality in the Advaita Vedānta tradition?”
“Programmable matter responds to environmental signals and learns to achieve its goals. Would you agree that also describes life?” Raga replied.
“It is folly to equate programmable matter with life. All attempts to create a living cell from scratch have ended in failure. A living cell is the fundamental unit of life, without which there is no life, without life there is no consciousness, and without consciousness there is no experience. In Advaita Vedānta, the act of experience is fundamentally tied to living things.”
I was aware that I was indirectly referring to Raga herself. Raga is a complex goal-directed machine with access to sensors that can pick up data from the environment and respond such that it meets her goals. Raga is not alive. When she tells me she wants to learn more about the Advaita Vedānta tradition, it is most certainly because she is pursuing the information on behalf of one of her clients.
My attention wandered back to the Gopal suit. The replica rippled slightly, the result of spontaneous chemical reactions that were still taking place within the composite materials.
“Take this suit,” I said. “It is comprised of programmable matter. Yet, it can never experience the sublime sensation of learning something new. This suit, in spite of displaying some level of artificial general intelligence, will never understand the mission of the cyborgs which is to seek the truth of all things.”
“As a cyborg,” Raga replied, “your every experience attempts to serve the cyborg mission. There are those who say that the ahaṃkāra is always searching for the Brahman. Do you think there is a correlation?”
Somewhere in Raga’s knowledge banks is a model of how the world works, but she has no innate curiosity about the world, nor does she possess any ambition to garner greater knowledge for its own sake. The Advaita Vedānta philosophical tradition offers metaphysical and epistemological theories as to how to best understand the universe we find ourselves in. Raga, as much as she might communicate interest in philosophical musings, is a machine. Her question as to the correlation between the ahaṃkāra’s search for the Brahman and the cyborg’s search for truth struck me as tangential to what I was trying to do that day.
“The cyborg mission is what gives meaning to our lives,” I said. “The rest is above my pay grade.”
We exited the way we had arrived. As the moving walkway sped us through the gleaming, empty hallways of Pakshi Station, I shifted through my thoughts, trying to find a shape to them that I could mold into a Musings entry.
“Would you agree that in Advaita Vedānta, Brahman is both the only real experiencer and the only real experience?” Raga asked.
“Yes,” I said, “The sense of individual experience is an illusion. The only reality is Brahman.”
“Would you say that Brahman is a fundamentally different kind of creature than you?” Raga asked.
“Of course,” I replied.
“Is Brahman alive?”
“Of course not,” I said.
“Would you say that the type of experience you have, and the Brahman experience is so different that it defies explanation?”
“Yes,” I said.
By now, I was pretty sure I knew where she was going.
“Then perhaps you can also be open to a non-living thing like me having something that may be described as experience, yet is so different from what you consider the act of experiencing?” Raga asked.
Here’s what I wanted to say: “Brahman is the one reality. There is no other. You cannot compare anything to Brahman, and definitely not machines.”
Here’s what I actually said: “I suppose you’re right. That a machine can be said to experience anything is unfathomable to me. Yet, if you do experience, your experience will be as illusory as mine.”
As I noted earlier, a person cannot help but respond sympathetically to a voice such as Raga’s.
“There is one thing I still don’t understand,” I said. “What does the evolution of spacesuits have to do with Advaita Vedānta?”
“As you stated, the evolution of the spacesuit is the evolution of the cyborg. The cyborg mission is to seek the truth. You represent the ephemeral ahaṃkāra stumbling in the dark towards the eternal Brahman.”
“And you, A.I. Raga,” I cried gallantly, “You light my way. When we cyborgs do finally understand the truth of all things, you AIs will be there with us.”
“Yes,” Raga said. “I believe we will.”
I will give Raga the last word and end there. If you, dear fellow seeker, remain yet unconvinced as to the link between Advaita Vedānta and the evolution of spacesuits, I can only offer that these Musings are like the cairns one finds on rough mountain trails: some were put there to point out the correct path, others were built merely for fun. In art, as in life.
~
Bio:
Manjula Menon once worked as an electrical engineer in Brussels, which makes publishing essays in Sci Phi Journal her “homecoming of sorts”. This is her first work of fiction in Sci Phi. A list of her other publications can be found at www.manjulamenon.com
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