How do you meet Life?

Revolution in Mind: the New AI

Photo by Maggie Alexander

Often when the night is dry and dark I will go out and stand in the lane. The light pollution from nearby towns is far away on the horizon, and on cloudless nights when there is no moon, the stars shine with a divine power. A full moon, however, will flood the surroundings with an extraordinary ethereal light and moon shadows create shapes from beyond this world. Owls call from the woods to be answered from way across the fields. On some nights there is such silence and stillness that you feel you cease to exist.

It is a good way to end the day.

One night recently I lay in bed wide awake, which is very unusual for me. As an old man, I do have to take the occasional reluctant excursion to make myself more comfortable, but last night was different. My body held a curious tension, and my brain seemed to have a clarity that was quite different to being kept from sleep. That day we had driven to and from a town in Hampshire where we were to meet an old friend to explore together the possibility of returning to live there after several years here in Dorset.

We sat together in a coffee shop which used to be a bank. After sharing health-related tales that appear to have become the regular introduction to any meeting with our friends, our conversation turned to discussing how we were going to find somewhere to rent. Our friend is very knowledgeable and at ease with all matters pertaining to finding somewhere to live, and, to make things even better, she enjoys the challenge that inevitably occurs in trying to find a home at a time of considerable uncertainty and insecurity.

After we had spent a fruitful time talking over all these things and had visited a letting agent down the road, we parted with the semblance of a plan. I like any plan when faced with practical matters. I feel confident when I’m talking to someone who can create a picture for me to refer to, something I can recognise in a clear line of progression. What we should do and when. Her obvious confidence opened in me a vision of the future, albeit in a small overpriced two-bedroomed flat in the middle of the town and filled me with a confidence that with her kind help we would find somewhere to live.

I lay in bed consumed by the prospect of a change that would dramatically alter our lives. We have moved many times and with us have carried all manner of items that have accrued over time with our family of six. I was deeply touched by our friend’s offer of help. There in the dark, listening to the wind, allowing the clarity of my mind to by overtaken by the fog of sleep and my body to relax, I felt a surge of understanding of what life was to bring. Then I slept.

Later on in the week I was talking to another close friend who lives in Spain. We also go back a long way. Over twenty years ago I taught his daughter when she was seven years old, with about fifteen other children in a barn surrounded by woods. We talked about many things and inevitably the state of the world came up, precipitated by the shared observation of the desperate challenges facing many people.

We talked about technology as the ‘saviour’ of humankind, and we strayed into the territory of AI.

‘You know,’ he said,’ given the growing power of AI what is the point of schooling now? What if in the educational context we change the meaning of the acronym AI, from Artificial Intelligence to Awakening Intelligence? What then would schooling mean?’

I felt my whole being light up – yes, that’s it.

‘Do you mind if I explore this in my writing?’ I asked, not wanting to go away and steal his
words.

‘Go ahead,’ he replied, ‘it’s yours!

It is what I have been doing in a way for a long time, but we both liked the dramatic
juxtaposition of meaning using the same caps: AI

This friend and I met in the late 1980s at Brockwood Park, the Education Centre founded by J Krishnamurti in 1969. Krishnamurti talked and wrote about Awakening Intelligence.

A year ago, I wrote a Substack post about the major influences in my thinking, namely Jiddu Krishnamurti and Rabindranath Tagore. This is how I ended it –

‘The words of others have their place, of that there is no doubt, but there is an inevitable limitation in their interpretation and the explanations that distort their meaning.’

The working title of the book I have been writing for some time has now become: ‘Revolution in Mind: The New AI’.

Why do I consider the phrase Awakening Intelligence so significant?

It feels to me that it encapsulates the essence of the process of learning, of the exploration of our relationship with life. It is an unfolding as opposed to a gathering, a movement, not a path towards any fixed point but a drift, an opening up of a connection to the world.

The phrase also suggests that intelligence is dormant, it already exists. It cannot be acquired.

What does intelligence imply?

I would suggest that intelligence has nothing to do with cleverness. To behave intelligently it would seem to me requires sensitivity, consideration, and the freedom to observe, and listen without leaping to conclusions. You can be very clever and be totally self-centred, greedy and destructive.

My eldest son wrote this to me the other day in response to the draft copy of this piece.

‘AI regurgitates what already exists, it is bordered by what has been and in a way is a metaphor for how we can get trapped in an echo or loop and how it can take something unexpected to awaken us from it.’

It seems to me that you and I could do well to unearth the potential of human relationships that are founded upon affection, care and consideration, and find out what kind of world that might create.

Later I will go out into the dark and listen to the night.