HBO started a much anticipated TV series 2 weeks ago,

based on sci-fi writer Michael Crichtons 70s novel

Westworld. It has been previously made into a motion
picture in 1973 but Jonathon Nolan has infused into the
barebones of the novel, his own vision of a existential
battle for identity and survival between humans and
machines thus significantly expanding the scope of the
original work. HBO has already given it 5 seasons which
means that the substance has been considerably
deepened as is obvious from the three episodes aired till
now. The show is packed with the best of the acting
fraternity like Anthony Hopkins, Ed Harris and Rachel
Wood, along with state of the art cinematography and
editing, thus making for a grand spectacle and the now
much hallowed domain of philosophical speculation on
the future of the human race in a world dominated by
machines which will take over the reigns of the planet.
The plot revolved around a futuristic theme park with the
old Texan west world of cowboys and gunslingers
inhabited by super-sophisticated robots with staggering
levels of resemblance in looks and behavior to human
beings. Humans pay to visit this park and gratify their
darker obsessions with these robots. Some want to have
sex with a southern prostitute and some want to kill like
Clint Eastwood in Good Bad Ugly. They can imagine
satisfying these desires because they know the robotic
humans are their to satisfy them. Robots can retaliate but
never fire a real gun shot whereas humans can. Robots
spill blood and die like like humans whereas the
consumers live on to satiate their weak egos with
pretensions of naive bravado and victory over fellow
humans. The problems start appearing when these robots
stop functioning as programmed as behaving weirdly. In
the three episodes aired till now, the scientists behind
these robots are clear the problem is not with the
programming but somewhere else. This is clearly going
in the direction where these robots will develop self-
consciousness and start understanding their reality as
slaves to the desires of humans and take revenge. This is
evidenced by the trailer which shows these robots killing
their masters with the same guns by which they get killed.
And thus starts once more a story of man v/s machine.
This obsession with an age dominated by AI robots and
machines has picked up speed lately though the idea has
been celebrated in science fiction and films for quite
some time now. In many ways, this fear of an external
agent exterminating the human race mirrors the deep
fears of man existing within him which he projects on to
machines since they fit his archetype of how a destructive
agent might look like. That humans project their fears on
the outside world has been understood for centuries now.
Freud and Jung spoke of the purgatory rites of sacrificial
cults among many tribes and nomadic groups in Africa,
Polynesia and even Medieval Europe. There are graphic
descriptions of goats being sacrificed as offerings to
devilish Gods to expunge the society of its evils. In a
psychological sense, a society needs a scapegoat who
will take the sin of its members and be sacrificed so that
society remains sane. This was also the idea behind the
Greek sexual rites where the collected repression and
unchanneled vital energies of its members were
expunged on on night of debauched revelry so that life
could go on smoothly. Even today, celebrities suffer from
the same psychological projection. The ordinary man
projects both his aspirations and his dirt at the cultural
symbols of good and evil that he has at his disposal. Thus
you have awe-inspiring adulation and fanatical
vengeance been meted out to famous people at the same
time. Its just that humans as a species are very
uncomfortable looking inwards and so we need external
anchors to stabilize our fragile psyches.

We can go into the details of this mechanism but for now,

its enough to understand that art is one of our most skilled
ways of psychological projection, whether that projection
has an external scientific validation or not. In the case of
AI, it seems it has and this is why the larger cultural ethos
currently has become saturated with the frightening
prospect of a super-intelligent machine race dominating
humans to achieve their own ends. Sometimes, this fear
takes the shape of machines as in movies like The Matrix
or the idea of aliens, who seem to be almost machine like
in their ruthlessness and precision in killing hapless
Humans as shown in movies like Alien by Ridley Scott.
But the root of this American fear is still inward and its
worthwhile to understand the validity of this external
scientific backing that says these fears are real. AI is
occupying the headlines now because scientists are
saying that these machines will replace human jobs and
create unemployment in future. But machines have
always done that historically and the solution lies in the
creation of new jobs and occupations which cant be
done by machines. The argument that there is nothing
that a machine cant do and so its a hopeless case.
speaks more of our idea of ourselves than about
machines. If the human mind can create machines which
start making our lives miserable, such machines can be
disposed off very easily if there is enough will. But the
larger and more dramatic fear is that we may lose our
control on these machines and the great Armageddon will
begin. Lets look at this more closely.

There is no denying the fact that AI has made significant

progress in the last two decades. There are machines
which can do complicated surgical operations on the
human eye, care for the elderly as in Japan, where
desperate and lonely old people have started making
friendships with them, which is simply another form of
projection of an internal need for physical affection on an
external agent be it human or machine, and this is
somehow being touted as good and progressive, and
build state-of-art-cars as one can see in a modern
assembly plant. But this is just showcasing the
algorithmic genius of modern programmers and their
ability to control machine through precise instructions.
The idea which Westworld and Sci-FI has always
propagated is that such a machine will start thinking for
itself. This is a giant leap of faith for reasons I shall outline
shortly. It is highly possible that a machine which has a
bug will suddenly start behaving weirdly and cause
chaos and destruction. That is not because it has gained
the evil eye of Sauron and decided to go on a killing
spree. It would just mean that code was wrongly written.
But whats the philosophical basis of a super-intelligent
machine race developing consciousness ?

Consciousness has been described as the last frontier of

modern science, the hard problem as scientists and
philosophers love to use. It is hard for modern science
for sure, steeped as it is in materialistic philosophy, trying
to explain consciousness from the ground up as a by-
product of material movements, albeit very complicated.
instead of looking at it from the top-down vantage point
where material movements in the cells and neurons are
theRESULTof an immaterial movement in a separate
dimension of reality. Its like looking at a marks of a polar
bear on snow and somehow thinking that the marks have
created the bear and not the reverse. What we think in our
minds requires that the brain co-ordinate itself in specific
ways and not the reverse. The origination of brain-
movements is in the thought, whose origin is the desire to
think in the first place. If we go even back and seek the
root of desire, we will find it in the phenomenon of the
existential reality itself, which Ancient Indians called
Asmita or the knowledge of my existence as a separate
entity. We can see already the levels of reality which lead
to a certain chemical movement in the brain. But the most
necessary step in taking this perspective is the
knowledge of other dimensions and states of
consciousness. Now we come to the problem to
machines developing this marvel of consciousness by
themselves. The problem concerns ultimately the level of
reality where self-consciousness resides. If machines are
to become self-conscious and always for the destruction
of hapless humans, this hard problem of consciousness
has to be solved first inside of them. Its amazing that the
human mind which has created machines will see its
greatest problem being solved by a collection of codes.
But lets go back to evolution for a second. As science has
now proved, the evolution of the consciousness faculty
has come up through millions of years of development as
the ancients knew. The Bhagwat Purana mentions
innumerable lives spent as a mineral, plant, animal before
graduating in the cosmic scheme of things to the human
stage. This mysterious evolution for the ancients always
concerned the evolution of the substance and not the
form, a perspective very different from the modern one
where we look at the exterior and not the interior. For the
ancients, the substance decides the form. As
consciousness develops, the form must also change else
it cant contain that specific level of consciousness. It
explains why humans have such a complex internal
machinery at the physical level as otherwise, the
expression of an evolved consciousness cant be
achieved. Humans are capable of complex thoughts and
these can be done only through a complicated brain
mechanism which must match the speed and complexity
for thoughts. If the brain was not developed, thoughts
could never achieve the precipitation it needs because
the brain makes it possible for vagueness in the mind to
achieve concretion in the physical realm. Many people
get vague ideas but they are not able to translate that into
concreteness because the brain functioning does not
work in the required way. We talk of grey cells and white
cells along with the loops and gyrations in separate
brains to comment on their acuteness. We even preserve
brains of scientists like Einstein marveling (mistakenly ) at
the product of these brains. Its imperative that we
understand the massive work of evolution in developing
this complex tool which allows us to think and develop
things. One of the great evidences of how thinking can
happen without the brain knowing anything about is in
dreams. We live parallel lives in our dreams but somehow
after waking up, we have very feeble recollection of what
happened. If the same events had happened in a waking
life, we would have perfect recollection. So brain is not
indispensable to thinking, consciousness is. And
consciousness can exist independent of the brain. These
are complex areas of endeavor which the Sages of the
past had solved with brilliant understanding. But back to
the question on machines developing consciousness.
Machines are ultimately made of matter. They function
currently in the way they do because written code,
transmitted through electrical impulses are able to
generate movements in their physical structure. The only
non-material element in this whole system is the
electricity, whose mystery science has still not solved. We
can use it, but we dont know what it is in itself. So where
is this consciousness going to be base itself ? Is it
supposed to be embedded in the material body of the
robot ? Physically matter has a level of evolution that is
minimal. In ancient terms, its Tamasic or inertial. Thats
why minerals dont move by themselves. Plants have a
higher level of subconscient awareness, to use the
phrase of Sri Aurobindo which is why they can do limited
movements towards the sun and as science is now
showing, also communicate with each other in their own
ways. Animals are higher in evolution and they can move
around but are guided by instincts and not minds. Only
humans can think. These faculties of instinct, thought,
intuition, are the results of evolution of the one common
element among them all, consciousness. They come with
the package so to say. Electricity is also a form of energy
which is common to all forms of life in different
appearances. But its not the origination. So we must look
at the physical body of the machines where
consciousness will develop. By changing the iron-ore into
a sophisticated machine, we are not giving it
consciousness, we are only altering the form. We now
take a perspective which is the foundational axiom of
Indian metaphysics and in many ways, a direct
contradiction to the Descartian axiom, Cogito Ergo Sum.
Descartes conceived the human mind to be the most
definitive existential signature. His existence derived itself
from the phenomenon of thought and not the reverse. For
him, a non-thinking man is not an existential entity at all.
We can see the effects of such a mode of thinking in our
modern-fear or super intelligent machines taking over
the planet. We are fundamentally afraid of thinking
creatures since the trend of philosophical thought has
endowed thinking creatures with self-consciousness and
agency. Its possible to write sophisticated computer code
which can learn , to use a modern idiom and extend this
line of thinking to imagine that this learning will become
so complicated that it will suddenly develop something
that transcends the whole phenomenon of thought itself.
Because in the real scheme of things, this is what modern
science is imagining and also what Descartes got wrong.
We sleep everyday and disappear for all practical
reasons from the world of thinking. Does that mean we
stop existing ? Is a sleeping man a non-existent man ?
Thinking is the not the ultimate definition of existence as
the ancients knew well. They spoke of the witness who
remains awake whether our physical body is awake,
asleep or hypnotized. The eternal Purusha or the silent
witness which resides in the depths of consciousness
who watches over everything is the ultimate seed of our
existence. This line of truth makes all the dreams of fear-
driven western writers and scientists seem naive and
misdirected. In the Nyaya system of philosophy, we locate
two degrees of awareness, the first level being the
awareness of knowing something and the second being
the awareness of being aware of the knowledge. Thus, we
see the presence of a witness who can look at the mind
itself and observe the presence of a knowledge. In
modern language, this is what Vipassana, emptiness and
all the Buddhist meditation practices emphasize. They
train you to observe your own mind. How is this possible if
there is not the slightest presence of a faculty of
disinterested observer inside every one of us ? One can
say that its the mind breaking itself up into two piece with
one observing the other. But that does mean that inside
our mind, there is a faculty which can observe every
action, emotion and thought and remain unmoved at all of
them. This line of endeavor ultimately opens up grand
vistas of realization which are only possible by arduous
Yoga. But without going into any details of complex yogic
processes, in everyday life we see this faculty
everywhere. Anger Management, emotional calmness,
are all results of this very disinterested observational
viewpoint. Technically, what we do is take away the
energy that the self gives to our emotional, or mental
bodies, and in extreme cases, even the physical body
though the last one requires immense will and mental
strength. And this explains the old axiom of Patanjali in his
Yoga Sutras that we inhabit multiple bodies or vehicles
which only function as an integrated unit because the
silent witness or Purusha is giving its self-consciousness
light to these vehicles. Take the consciousness out and
these vehicles have no power left. Thats why when you
take your focus away from the emotions and start
observing it as if from an outside point, all the force of the
raging emotions subsides. It was banking on you to
provide it with the needed light of consciousness to
function. Now that you have taken it away, its left with no
fuel. The same is true of thought observation. When we
observe our own thoughts, we see them subside after a
period. This only happens because thoughts dont have
power of their own until we focus on them. They need
this focus to keep functioning. Take this away and they
subside. We can remain waking in broad daylight and not
think a thought as meditation masters know well.
Descartes thus comes up short against such a scheme of
reality. Thus the agency behind self-consciousness is not
located in our thoughts or emotions. Its the light of the
Divine which we carry inside us that gives us this facility
of self-consciousness. We must note here that self-
consciousness is not the same thing as consciousness.
Animals are conscious of anger and pain but they are not
self-conscious. They dont have an awareness of
themselves as individual entities. Humans have that. Its
Consciousness that develops from minerals, though
plants, animals and when it reaches the human stage, it
becomes Self-Consciousness. Humans can make
decisions for good and bad for themselves and others
because they have developed to a point where they think
of themselves as separate entities. Though, this is nothing
compared to the high levels of realization of
consciousness reached by the Sages and Yogis, we can
safely say that humans in their present stage of evolution
are defined by ego and self-directed thought along with
the awareness that we are thinking creatures. This last
awareness of being aware is the definitive characteristic
of the human life, though not well understood. We make
decisions, desire, crave, laugh, enjoy because we in our
own ways are seeking experience in life. There are two
things humans are able to do which minerals, animals and
plants are not. We perceive ourselves as separate entities
who desire life and as explained above, are able to
perceive the presence of a silent witness inside us. These
faculties are the results of long aeons of evolution. This
awareness of separation is the result of a background
entity being able to channel more of its self-resplendent
light into our brains, emotions and bodies. And this
awareness is beyond thought. Thats why even though
machines will be able to mimic thinking like humans, they
will still belong to that stage of evolution which belongs to
the domain of matter or mineral where this light is almost
completely dark. So there is no reason to worry a
machine-dominated race will evolve on earth. Yes its
possible some human will start acting like the aliens and
machines depicted in films and destroy the race but that
has always been there. In the end, we have more to fear
from man himself.