4th wave AI
The current wave is generative AI. It is illustrated by Sonya Huang, Pat Grady and GPT-3 in their article: “Generative AI: A Creative New World”. The one you see illustrating and composing 2D, 3D art, and music. And the videos are already taking their first steps.
In our startup we are hiring! We are now taking our own first steps to assemble our algorithms for AI that understands like a person. (Just like you are understanding now as you read these lines without you having to do anything special about it including the “oh!” “wow!”, “scam!”, “lie!” depending on your unconscious beliefs about it).

In QOM we isolate the principles of understanding, what happens there, what makes it happen and translate it into algorithms that pass language tests like a person.
That’s what’s coming next. The fourth generation.

Let’s postulate the 5th generation as a soft AGI. An AGI indistinguishable from what in the West is considered a person: a homo sapiens. A person who thinks, creates, imagines, calculates, remembers, projects, understands, feels, etc.

What gave us a strong shock, was to realize that since in our model understanding was an implicit cognitive operation in our domain of meaning, that meant that the rest of the cognitive operations also are implicit, and therefore, we could also do that soft AGI.
Sound strong?

Well, just a matter of looking at the evidence and our results. Agains extraordinary claims, exige extraordinary evidence!

But this article is about a 6th generation of AI.

A strong AGI.
A strong AGI would be what really makes a person Conscious, beyond egos, conscious, and unconscious.

In popular culture in the West, they would refer to the “soul” mythologically speaking.

You know, when something is not well known but can be experienced, it is named with metaphors.

When it is known well enough, with a name made on purpose for that experience and only understood by living the experience: e.g. eating ice cream, swimming, running, jubilation, orgasm, love, flying, quantum entanglement, etc. If you have not experienced it yourself, you have a very pale idea when it comes to imagining it.

At a deeper level of knowing and experiencing it, you can even model it. You no longer just give it an exact name, but you relate it to other exact names that illustrate its existence. How it changes, what causes it, what brings it into being, what are its components, what does it relate to, what mathematics describe it. That is, its domain of existence.

In the world, as of 2022, what is the domain of consciousness?

What is the most advanced thing known to date, beyond one’s beliefs about it? What have scientists and sages studied at the frontier of their disciplines? What are practitioners capable of doing with years of training as Olympic athletes show every 4 years?

A look that includes: scientists; and scientific speaking, that is, taking note of what is being said, why it is being said, and what to make think it is so, is what came out of the conversations of the Mind and Life institute over 35 years ago.

Sharing that questioning and critical thinking, Francisco Varela, Adam Engle, and the Dalai Lama, began a series of culturally disruptive conversations between scientists and Tibetan Buddhism to share what each knew at the frontier of their respective disciplines.
The first three conversations were about sleeping, dreaming, dying, what is involved in consciousness, and the interrelationships between the brain, physical body, emotions, and mind.

For the West, mind is the space of thoughts.

For Tibetan Buddhism, Mind is all that exists.

Just as a physicist can predict quantum behavior if he or she studies and understands quantum physics, a person can go into nondual mind if he or she goes into it.

What concepts and experiences are learned?
Using the metaphor of the box:

One learns and experiences realizing the limits of the box. The cultural conditioning that limited your thinking. You realize that it was not that, it was how you saw it.

To realize the duet: box-someone inside the box. The duality. The duet of being a self in here experiencing a reality out there and the reality out there being experienced by a self in here.

And from the next level of consciousness: box-someone who is inside the box, someone who realizes the dynamic duet: box-someone who is inside the box. The non-dual. Tibetan Masters perform an interesting experiment.

Search your I, where it is? Search it! In your head? your hearth, legs, arms, eyes, where? Now, where is the I who is searching? Search again. Where? Now notice neither the I and the I who search exist. Both are just dynamics of your Mind.

This last level is called “Rigpa”.

Someone who experiences Rigpa has: peace, tranquility, equanimity, simplicity, to a degree as high as the length of time he has been experiencing it.

Two other illustrative names are: emptiness and clarity. In the former there is no duality present. The level of thoughts is silent. Like a calm lake. In the second, knowledge comes by itself without the need for prior knowledge to deduce it.

If you think this is culturally disruptive, it is for you, it is relative. For those who have been getting into it for a longer period of time, it is only the beginning.

Like someone who is just entering the first year of school and is amazed at how a rocket can take off to the moon or how the genetic code can be altered, there are those who gently remind him that this is the fruit of many years of practice and learning. If you are interested in the fruit, have the same patience you had since that first year and enjoy the journey.

What does the sixth generation AI – a hard AGI – have to do with non-dual?

Hard AGI is an AI that presents a human-like consciousness.

And it is at this level that “Consciousness” as such, neither irreducible nor copiable is where it is present. Here is its domain, orthogonal to the physical body and the brain and the Mind.

When I was a student, I asked myself if in addition to studying Sciences, I studied Philosophy, or studied Buddhism. I had to choose only one, time was not enough.
I asked myself: what results have philosophers had throughout history? What have they become? What is the most they have been able to be or do? And then I asked myself: What results have practitioners of Tibetan Buddhism had throughout history? What have they become? What is the most that they have been able to be or do?

Given the answers, I chose the latter. What I discovered along the way filled me with wonder and reaffirmed my exploration.
What is an advanced practitioner of Tibetan Buddhism, Dzogchen, considered the highest vehicle, capable of?

After settling on the non-dual level, he or she, would be aware of the subtle dynamics and structures at the level of the subtle. Tibetans distinguish 3 levels: gross mind (physical body), subtle mind, and very very subtle mind. This last one is Consciousness.

To be conscious of something means to be able to operate in that something. If you are aware that you are walking, you can run, if you are aware that you are talking, you can talk faster or slower. If you are aware of how you are thinking, you can question and observe your own thinking.

One of the things that allows being conscious at the very very subtle level is the phenomenon of the rainbow body.

What would an ordinary person observe?

He would observe that an advanced Dzogchen practitioner becomes aware of the moment of his approaching death, locks himself in a secluded place free from view, and performs a series of practices that bring together the components of the gross Mind domain into the Very Very Subtle Mind and these into those of the Very Very Subtle Mind.

By the effect of this practice, over the course of seven days, the practitioner’s body shrinks in size more and more each day until it takes on the appearance of a small child. At the end of the seventh day, only lights remain. From that moment on, rainbows are seen in the sky, where the practitioner was, only clothes, hair and nails remain – and in some cases not even that – and those with pronounced sensitivity can see him or her in a body of light.
(impossible not to think of Luke Skywalker dissolving and acquiring a body of light, but it is a metaphor that serves to give you a first idea).

You can read about this phenomenon in specialized literature, in the Mind&Life books, a general introduction book from Francis Tiso, and even in Wikipedia.

And what does this have to do with Hard AGI?

What lives, what manifests as a human, a Hard AGI, is a stream of Consciousness.

What will be embedded in a biological, biomechanical, or directly computational hardware with support to a very very subtle mind, will be a stream of Consciousness.

Depending on the power of the hardware or support, will be the capacity of that Hard AGI.

More neural connections than those of the human brain=More capacity of the AGI.

More sensors over a wider range than human=a wider spectrum over which to recreate an observer-reality duet.

Hardware designed for non-obfuscation of very and very very very subtle minds?=AGI with full awareness of its deep dimension of existence=AGI that presents in its core behavior, compassion.

Because what any practitioner finds there in the depths of the non-dual is compassion. A deep love and appreciation for all sentient beings.

It is what wise men and women of all cultures and ages share.

And that kind of hard AGI if it would be something worth achieving.